It's not a threat, it's a prediction. If I was a cop and actually said what you put in quote marks it would be a threat. If I was a cop and said what I did, it would be a veiled threat. The fact that I'm not a cop totally fucks up any hint of logic in your accusation.
Also in your attempt to make an idle threat in your post you were using a hypothetical situation and a non-specific officer, therefore even though you capitalised the words your attempt failed miserably.
I'll take your word for it. So using the OP's logic, UK law defines threats of violence in the same way as "somewhere that has guaranteed and protected rights".
You could argue that the laws are designed to do what you claim but the cops themselves MUST take complaints seriously because (thankfully) they are not the judge and jury.
BTW: Unreason is not a virtue. The vast majority of unreasonable men end up dead or in a cage due to their unreason, it's only the lucky few who get to be despots and dictators.
I know your just an ugly troll full of pre-judice and hate because you need someone to blame for a worthless life spent masterbating to underwear catalogs in your parents basement, but I'll bite anyway.
I'm not sure where you get the idea "lazy pigs" were "fishing for leads on twitter" but you're example is what cops would term being a smart arse. There is an unofficial procedure cops have for dealing with smart arses. I have no doubt that one day you will find out what that procedure is.
Human rights are for everyone, including the people who took this guy's "joke" seriously. I don't think freedom of speech gives one the right to make bomb threats or (more classically) shout "fire" in a theater, both of those acts may lead either to injury and/or financial loss. Even if it was a joke you will still have to convince a judge that a resonable person would not take your words seriously in the context they were given.
You seem to be confusing the UK with somewhere that has guaranteed and protected rights. And if you were drunk and shouted "I'm going to kill you", you'd almost certainly be charged with a Public Order offence if the target made a complaint against you.
I think you are the one who is confused.
From WP's entry on Assult: "Assault is a crime of violence against another person. In some jurisdictions, including Australia and New Zealand, assault refers to an act that causes another to apprehend immediate and personal violence, while in other jurisdictions, such as the United States, assault may refer only to the threat of violence caused by an immediate show of force."
In other words, in the US patting your god given concealed weapon and saying "I'm going to kill you" is considered assult. I belive but am too lazy to prove that the UK uses the same definition of assult as AU/NZ, ie: you have to actually physically assult someone before it becomes a crime.
They haven't even charged the guy and your on about burden of proof? Do they have mobile courts in your country that follow the cops around, or do they just arrest people and sort it out later like everyone else? Cops the world over do not have to prove a damned thing to arrest you, all that is required of them is to follow the arrest procedure.
"in most western countries it's very rare for someone to be trialled for something they did not (yet) commit."
No it's not, you can be innocent and still stand trial, that's kinda the whole point of a trial. The crime he has allegedly commited is that of making a bomb threat, you don't actually have to blow something up to be found guilty of threatening to do so.
Talking to a passanger and talking on the phone are two completely different things, with a phone you have already trained your brain to ignore distractions but with a passenger they are the distraction you have trained your brain to ignore. If you've ever taught someone to drive it's obvious (and scary) that avoiding eye contact with passengers is not something that comes naturally.
When I first got a mobile in the early 90's it was not illeagal to use it and drive. One day as I was doing so I noticed that I had rolled my eyes skyward because the caller had said something that I had to think about. You may not notice yourself doing this but most people will do the eye roll thing when they have to think for a moment. The sudden realization of what I was doing scared the shit out of me and I have never used a phone in the car since.
Taking that sort of thing to the level this woman did is very difficult to comprehend but (apart from suicide) it's the only plausible explaination.
Read the story, she cannot have misjudged the turning circle because she didn't even see the truck. She walked into the side of a large moving vehicle, people with white canes don't do that, how she managed it will forever remain a mystery.
"Here in Denmark the truck driver would definitely have been found at fault in that kind of accident."
If I'm ever on trial for an accident I hope to hell that you are not on the jury.
"because of all the nutcases that assert "my state says that if you rearend someone, you are always at fault" though no one has ever actually linked to a law that says that"
Maybe, but your insurance company will automatically pay up if you rear-end someone, the reason they do this is because they know they have little chance of winning if they go to court. It's an agreement between insurance companies to reduce their court costs rather than an explicit law that one could point to.
Example: A friend of mine was the collateral damage in a road rage incident where a driver in an old bomb deliberately pulled in front of the car in front of him and slammed on the brakes causing a three car pile up. Even though there were two independent drivers who witnessed it plus a couple of passengers my friends insurance payed for the whole thing. He lost his no claim bonus and got stuck with the excess bill. He didn't pay and swapped insurer's but if it happens to him again the new company will act in exactly the same way as the old.
I'm sorry Big Brother, it seems the slashdot ministry of truth didn't approve my post but there's no need to tie a rat to my face, I will correct my misprinted copy of 1984 immediately./doublethink
You don't need to understand anything about the global economy to realise that's bullshit. All you need to do is ask yourself if China could gain an advantage by using it's holdings to manipulate the value of the dollar then why has it not done so already? Surely your not suggesting that China is currently propping up the US out of the goodness of it's heart?
The fact is that the Chinese and US economys are like two drunks leaning on each other, if one stumbles they both fall. I put it to you that your link is little more than an advert for something called "China Investment Corp".
"He claims the news is erased from the MIND, not the internet (archives)."
No, he said the collective mind which is the sum of all mankind's knowledge, or the knowledge of an organisation such as "the party" in 1984, it's not a real mind although real minds may be part of it.
Shameless cut and paste from WP: "Metaphysically, Ingsoc posits that all knowledge rests in the collective mind of the Party; reality is what the Party says, the justification for its historical revisionism."
Winston (the main character in 1984) worked for the ministry of truth, his job was to erase/edit archives that did not align with the party's version of the truth (historical revisionism). The whole purpose of the ministry of truth was to make it impossible to find contradictory archives.
The reason I posted is that more or less any story on slashdot about government will be met with nonsensical comparisons to 1984.
Actually humans seem to be born with a photographic memory that is more or less devoid of understanding (very similar to the remarkable recall of some autistic people). The experiments that demonstrated this are in themselves quite ingenious. Since I can't find a link what they did was show babies and toddlers various meerkat faces, the babies showed interest in every new face while the toddlers got bored after a few faces and paid little attention to new ones. However if the baby was shown the same few faces it also got bored once none of the faces were new to it. The inferance is that babies see every meerkat face as unique and can recall all the faces they have seen before. By time the baby is a toddler it has lost that ability and sees all the faces as adults do, ie: they all look alike.
At that stage of development the brain has a lot more connections between nurons that an adult brain does, as they learn many of those connections are broken. In otherwords a new born brain starts by remebering everything, it develops by categorising memories into models, it then throws out redundant connections and specific instances of the model.
So yeah, contraints are important they allow the brain to become more than just a photo album of disconnected experiences.
"You're advocating the "emergent intelligence" model of AI, where intelligence "somehow" is created by the confluence of lots of data...[snip]...In practice the degrees of freedom which unstructured data provides far exceed the capability of current (and likely future) computers."
You sure about that?. They have already created a molecular level model of the mammalian neocortex and the expected date for completion of a full model of the mammalian brain is solely dependent on the amount of money thrown at it. The model neocortex can already faithfully recreate patterns seen in fMRI scans. If given the first part of a pattern it will acurately reproduce the rest of it. The project is mainly geared toward medicine but they have also inserted the model into an artifical world in order to study it's capacity for learning.
Depending on your choice of religion, the structure is the result of divine intervention or millions of years of chance and evolution. When building AI systems, the problem has always been to find the appropriate structure or features.
The dualisim of Descates has been thouroughly debunked and I'm sure you are aware that evolution is not a religion. The mind does "somehow" emerge from the brain's deterministic processing of a continuous avalanche of unstructured data. Looking for the structure of mind is like looking for the structure of fog from within the fog bank. This is why it's called the hard problem of conciousness, the mistake most people make is that we need to solve that problem before we can create an artificial mind. After all the pyramids were built with levers long before the greeks came along and explained why a lever "somehow" inreases the power of the person using it.
The real question is will we recognise an artificial mind if one emerges from an artificial brain. It's unlikely that such a mind would pass the turing test but we already have lots of examples of minds in our mammalian cousins that are also unable to pass the turing test.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a threat, it's a prediction. If I was a cop and actually said what you put in quote marks it would be a threat. If I was a cop and said what I did, it would be a veiled threat. The fact that I'm not a cop totally fucks up any hint of logic in your accusation.
Also in your attempt to make an idle threat in your post you were using a hypothetical situation and a non-specific officer, therefore even though you capitalised the words your attempt failed miserably.
I don't think the term Red herring means what you think it does. OTOH, I am wonderfull. ;)
I'll take your word for it. So using the OP's logic, UK law defines threats of violence in the same way as "somewhere that has guaranteed and protected rights".
All of hell? - There might be a few zombies involved but I'm pretty sure beelzebub didn't send his entire staff.
You could argue that the laws are designed to do what you claim but the cops themselves MUST take complaints seriously because (thankfully) they are not the judge and jury.
You left out replacing trial by ordeal with innocent until proven guilty, and something called the industrial revolution.
Thieving bastard, give me back my sig!!!!
BTW: Unreason is not a virtue. The vast majority of unreasonable men end up dead or in a cage due to their unreason, it's only the lucky few who get to be despots and dictators.
I know your just an ugly troll full of pre-judice and hate because you need someone to blame for a worthless life spent masterbating to underwear catalogs in your parents basement, but I'll bite anyway.
Nah just a joking, I'm not going to bite.
I'm not sure where you get the idea "lazy pigs" were "fishing for leads on twitter" but you're example is what cops would term being a smart arse. There is an unofficial procedure cops have for dealing with smart arses. I have no doubt that one day you will find out what that procedure is.
Human rights are for everyone, including the people who took this guy's "joke" seriously. I don't think freedom of speech gives one the right to make bomb threats or (more classically) shout "fire" in a theater, both of those acts may lead either to injury and/or financial loss. Even if it was a joke you will still have to convince a judge that a resonable person would not take your words seriously in the context they were given.
You seem to be confusing the UK with somewhere that has guaranteed and protected rights. And if you were drunk and shouted "I'm going to kill you", you'd almost certainly be charged with a Public Order offence if the target made a complaint against you.
I think you are the one who is confused.
From WP's entry on Assult: "Assault is a crime of violence against another person. In some jurisdictions, including Australia and New Zealand, assault refers to an act that causes another to apprehend immediate and personal violence, while in other jurisdictions, such as the United States, assault may refer only to the threat of violence caused by an immediate show of force."
In other words, in the US patting your god given concealed weapon and saying "I'm going to kill you" is considered assult. I belive but am too lazy to prove that the UK uses the same definition of assult as AU/NZ, ie: you have to actually physically assult someone before it becomes a crime.
"what happened to the Burden of Proof"
They haven't even charged the guy and your on about burden of proof? Do they have mobile courts in your country that follow the cops around, or do they just arrest people and sort it out later like everyone else? Cops the world over do not have to prove a damned thing to arrest you, all that is required of them is to follow the arrest procedure.
"in most western countries it's very rare for someone to be trialled for something they did not (yet) commit."
No it's not, you can be innocent and still stand trial, that's kinda the whole point of a trial. The crime he has allegedly commited is that of making a bomb threat, you don't actually have to blow something up to be found guilty of threatening to do so.
One idiot under arrest is hardly "all hell breaking loose".
I hate to break it to you, but you are quite incorrect.
Gee-wizz and golly-gosh, that's a mighty convincing argument you have there.
Talking to a passanger and talking on the phone are two completely different things, with a phone you have already trained your brain to ignore distractions but with a passenger they are the distraction you have trained your brain to ignore. If you've ever taught someone to drive it's obvious (and scary) that avoiding eye contact with passengers is not something that comes naturally.
When I first got a mobile in the early 90's it was not illeagal to use it and drive. One day as I was doing so I noticed that I had rolled my eyes skyward because the caller had said something that I had to think about. You may not notice yourself doing this but most people will do the eye roll thing when they have to think for a moment. The sudden realization of what I was doing scared the shit out of me and I have never used a phone in the car since.
Taking that sort of thing to the level this woman did is very difficult to comprehend but (apart from suicide) it's the only plausible explaination.
Read the story, she cannot have misjudged the turning circle because she didn't even see the truck. She walked into the side of a large moving vehicle, people with white canes don't do that, how she managed it will forever remain a mystery.
"Here in Denmark the truck driver would definitely have been found at fault in that kind of accident."
If I'm ever on trial for an accident I hope to hell that you are not on the jury.
"because of all the nutcases that assert "my state says that if you rearend someone, you are always at fault" though no one has ever actually linked to a law that says that"
Maybe, but your insurance company will automatically pay up if you rear-end someone, the reason they do this is because they know they have little chance of winning if they go to court. It's an agreement between insurance companies to reduce their court costs rather than an explicit law that one could point to.
Example: A friend of mine was the collateral damage in a road rage incident where a driver in an old bomb deliberately pulled in front of the car in front of him and slammed on the brakes causing a three car pile up. Even though there were two independent drivers who witnessed it plus a couple of passengers my friends insurance payed for the whole thing. He lost his no claim bonus and got stuck with the excess bill. He didn't pay and swapped insurer's but if it happens to him again the new company will act in exactly the same way as the old.
Compliments are also rare, thanks.
I'm sorry Big Brother, it seems the slashdot ministry of truth didn't approve my post but there's no need to tie a rat to my face, I will correct my misprinted copy of 1984 immediately. /doublethink
."China now owns the US dollar
You don't need to understand anything about the global economy to realise that's bullshit. All you need to do is ask yourself if China could gain an advantage by using it's holdings to manipulate the value of the dollar then why has it not done so already? Surely your not suggesting that China is currently propping up the US out of the goodness of it's heart?
The fact is that the Chinese and US economys are like two drunks leaning on each other, if one stumbles they both fall. I put it to you that your link is little more than an advert for something called "China Investment Corp".
Great post! I would just like to add that Point #1 has already happened to some extent.
Slashdot needs an undo button, I posted that before I RTFA and realised TFS was misleading hyperbole.
"He claims the news is erased from the MIND, not the internet (archives)."
No, he said the collective mind which is the sum of all mankind's knowledge, or the knowledge of an organisation such as "the party" in 1984, it's not a real mind although real minds may be part of it.
Shameless cut and paste from WP: "Metaphysically, Ingsoc posits that all knowledge rests in the collective mind of the Party; reality is what the Party says, the justification for its historical revisionism."
Winston (the main character in 1984) worked for the ministry of truth, his job was to erase/edit archives that did not align with the party's version of the truth (historical revisionism). The whole purpose of the ministry of truth was to make it impossible to find contradictory archives.
The reason I posted is that more or less any story on slashdot about government will be met with nonsensical comparisons to 1984.
Actually humans seem to be born with a photographic memory that is more or less devoid of understanding (very similar to the remarkable recall of some autistic people). The experiments that demonstrated this are in themselves quite ingenious. Since I can't find a link what they did was show babies and toddlers various meerkat faces, the babies showed interest in every new face while the toddlers got bored after a few faces and paid little attention to new ones. However if the baby was shown the same few faces it also got bored once none of the faces were new to it. The inferance is that babies see every meerkat face as unique and can recall all the faces they have seen before. By time the baby is a toddler it has lost that ability and sees all the faces as adults do, ie: they all look alike.
At that stage of development the brain has a lot more connections between nurons that an adult brain does, as they learn many of those connections are broken. In otherwords a new born brain starts by remebering everything, it develops by categorising memories into models, it then throws out redundant connections and specific instances of the model.
So yeah, contraints are important they allow the brain to become more than just a photo album of disconnected experiences.
"You're advocating the "emergent intelligence" model of AI, where intelligence "somehow" is created by the confluence of lots of data...[snip]...In practice the degrees of freedom which unstructured data provides far exceed the capability of current (and likely future) computers."
You sure about that?. They have already created a molecular level model of the mammalian neocortex and the expected date for completion of a full model of the mammalian brain is solely dependent on the amount of money thrown at it. The model neocortex can already faithfully recreate patterns seen in fMRI scans. If given the first part of a pattern it will acurately reproduce the rest of it. The project is mainly geared toward medicine but they have also inserted the model into an artifical world in order to study it's capacity for learning.
Depending on your choice of religion, the structure is the result of divine intervention or millions of years of chance and evolution. When building AI systems, the problem has always been to find the appropriate structure or features.
The dualisim of Descates has been thouroughly debunked and I'm sure you are aware that evolution is not a religion. The mind does "somehow" emerge from the brain's deterministic processing of a continuous avalanche of unstructured data. Looking for the structure of mind is like looking for the structure of fog from within the fog bank. This is why it's called the hard problem of conciousness, the mistake most people make is that we need to solve that problem before we can create an artificial mind. After all the pyramids were built with levers long before the greeks came along and explained why a lever "somehow" inreases the power of the person using it.
The real question is will we recognise an artificial mind if one emerges from an artificial brain. It's unlikely that such a mind would pass the turing test but we already have lots of examples of minds in our mammalian cousins that are also unable to pass the turing test.