In the US, we fight hard to make sure citizens can't carry weapons . . . but would never *ever* consider also taking weapons away from the police. The ultimate goal is a very one-sided balance of power and protection.
No... the guy got in a PHYSICAL altercation with the police and then there was an "officer involved shooting". There is no indication in the reporting I have seen about an "officer down" situation.
I don't see how this is acting properly. These guys were out there shooting members of the public. They were not directly a danger to the public at large and since they clearly had stopped the guys and knew who they were (on probation, etc), it's not like they would lose them forever. Call in a chopper. Head to their home. Do a little detective work to track them down. We already know the "give chase" option sure as fuck didn't save any lives. In fact, it took one.
When I saw this story, my first response was that I (mistakenly, apparently) recalled that California and a number of other states had issued a policy (or even a law) to forbid police chases where it is not a life and death issue (kidnapping, etc) as they had been determined to simply cause seriously dangerous situations like this (and that they could usually just as well track them by a helicopter, anyway).
The days of significant performance improvement from one year to the next seem to have long since passed. I no longer factor the CPU into my upgrades (well, I don't upgrade - I just build new rigs). Now, it's all about the GPU. When NVIDIA or ATI come out with the next big cards that I just have to get my hands on, that's when it is time to build a new rig and that's when it is time to just get whatever the best CPU out at the time is.
I can't remember the last time when the CPU performance over my current CPU performance was ever a factor in my decision that it was time to build a new rig or in what to put in it.
It's nice that they have something to offer in mobile devices, but I think geeks are primarily interested in the CPU itself as a thing they can use rather than how it might perform later this year in a mass produced device that someone else is going to build that they may or may not eventually buy for themselves. I kind of miss the "this is for the guy at home" marketed CPUs.
I don't buy the "consoles are killing PCs" argument for one second (also, people have spent the last two years claiming that tablets and phones are killing consoles, so there you go).
Steam *alone* has something like 40 or 50 million users and between 2.5 and 6 million concurrent users playing a game at any one moment.
We don't even need to talk about the depth and breadth of games available on PC that simply don't exist on other platforms. Just with the user numbers alone -- and only the Steam ones, here -- compare those to consoles and you simply can not argue that PC games are dying. I think that a lot of factions (including publishers, themselves) are doing every fucking thing they can to invalidate, complicate, and ultimately kill PC gaming and that has been the case for a few years . . . but it isn't changing the fact that it's pretty fucking vibrant and charging forward.
The 40 or 50 some-odd million Steam gamers and the often 6 million concurrent online Steam gamers would beg to differ with you and, anecdotally, the new people I hear every day saying that they're building a PC gaming rig for the first time in their life is surprising and seems to be growing. There are a ton of gamers out there and they have always been a heavy push for the PC market. They aren't going anywhere. They continue to be just as important and just as numerous, even in a world full of consoles and tablets and cell phones.
Also, most people who would ONLY use a phone or a tablet are not people who would have bought a desktop, anyway. They MIGHT have otherwise had a low power laptop... MAYBE... but they were never going to be users going out and building/buying meaningful desktop systems. These aren't losses from one platform fleeing to another.
Couldn't have said it better, myself. A year after Ivy Bridge and a big null for most non-corporate purchasers of Haswell. At ten percent or less annual improvement, it's going to take you many years (or some phenomenal fundamental change in architecture that revolutionizes everything) to make a new CPU compelling.
What an ignorant statement. We are a union of states. I don't know where the hell you hail from, but the concept is that states determine their own laws and govern themselves. I don't know where people have this ass-backward concept that somehow it all comes from the top-down and the Federal government legislates and controls everything.
Additionally, this has NOTHING to do with "violence the schools have been facing for the last twenty years". The violence has not changed dramatically (especially of the kind you're likely referencing). This is purely a fear-based personal-data grab. Having a child's iris data on record in no way prevents him from committing a crime or being the victim of a crime. All it does is *commit* a crime against his or her humanity by treating them like a criminal and entering them into a life-long database without having actually committed any crime to justify it.
That so many people have the mindset you've shared is actually kind of terrifying. How the hell can people exercise and defend their rights when they don't even understand them?
Meanwhile, down the hall, students were studying the Bill of Rights.
This clearly indicates how out of touch your expectations of the public school system are. Even in the early 90s, I never dealt with the Bill of Rights or the Constitution as a whole in school. Not even in civics class. The only time we ever discussed it was in third grade, when we each had to remember one paragraph of the pre-amble in class and repeat it. One paragraph.. of the preamble...
I don't get how that is justification for imposing upon the rights of every single stupid. So what - you have to field an annoying call from a fretting parent once a day. Tough shit.
This isn't about the safety of the kids anymore than tricking parents into submitting biometric data at the local mall for the last thirty years has been. It's about when they're adults and all their personal data has been catalogued for reference before they were even old enough to object.
That said, how dumb are these children? Even in fifth grade, I was keenly aware of things like this and my right to object, call a parent, leave school - whatever it took. Children are typically not as stupid as we make them out to be, so I am baffled that they didn't bat an eye (hah!) at this.
Didn't we just have an article this last week about how doctors and nurses are biased *against* obese people for being lazy and yadda yadda yadda?
And then these pompous fucks can't even wash their god damn hands after taking a shit?
I'll tell you, I know I have a surgery (or more) coming in my future and the stories of anesthesia problems (very low, I know) and doctors/nurses leaving foreign objects inside your body or working on (or removing!) the wrong part of your body or not washing and infecting patients or not sanitizing hospital facilities enough and causing people to get dangerous post-op infections . . . fucking terrifies me.
Actually, it's a good improvement, in concept. All it's really doing is allowing the separation of email content based on a few primary categories so you don't have your primary view filled with promotional stuff (that you may want, because you did subscribe to it) or with social bullshit. Unfortunately, I've been using this feature for months, while it has been in Google Labs and it is . . . fairly inaccurate. I'm often having to go through both and babysit the two or three categories, because things that I consider quite important show up as promotional and so on. It pulls that stuff out of my inbox stream and puts it into seaprate folders that I have to remember to go check (and I never do, but I guess I might do it more often if it is a big tab at the top of my screen always in my face).
When you're getting dozens of emails from social networks (hello, LinkedIN - thans for the constant spam even though I've tried to mitigate it through your settings!) and mailing lists and companies you've done business with and so on every day . . . it's useful to have all the stuff you just don't really need to get to in the near future and that isn't between actual individual people sort of shuffled off to the background.
Still . . . it's a pretty minor improvement, really. Underwhelming.
WoW is still the biggest MMO several times over, even a decade later. Because of every game's attempt to mimic WoW in every aspect possible, the genre has made almost no progress in the last decade. They're all just re-skins of WoW and because of that, few are successful. However, because developers feel only a WoW type MMO can be successful, they're not willing to take steps to make bold new MMO games that are not just re-skins of WoW.
So, a decade later, the MMO genre is gasping. Clones of clones of clones. People aren't tired of MMOs as a concept, but are tired of their execution. Unless Blizzard has something amazing up their sleeve, they're just going to wind up releasing yet another WoW (though in space or whatever). They'll just be appealing to the existing WoW addicts they already have who are somehow so brain-numbed that they'll sit and play the same thing for a decade, even after they've gone through all the content a dozen times.
Though perhaps not directly, Blizzard has spoiled the genre and the audience. Their game sucked the air out of the room, making it difficult for others in the business who can only be bothered to poorly mimic them. And now everything is drying up.
I won't be surprised if it is completely canceled. Or, at least, postponed long beyond 2016, ultimately.
Instead of imposing upon the freedom of speech or putting the burdon on the phone company or the texting service or the social network service when kids are mean to each other, it makes a fuck of a lot more sense to hold the adults accountable. Where were the parents of the harassed child and why didn't they do anything? Why didn't her teachers? Why not other school administrators and staff? Why not the parents of the children doing the harassing? This doesn't all occur in a vacuum. Adults just don't give a shit. They look the other way. Then, when awful stuff happens, they seek to dismiss their own accountability for what happened by saying "there shoulda' been a law, damn it!".
That isn't correct, going into the future. We are inching ever closer to making "mean" language a crime: Bullying.
Instead of holding adults -- parents of the teased, the teasers, the teachers, the administrators and so on -- accountable for things and not letting awful behavior slide in schools and alienating and harming the children therein (school can be a hideous place for children and the adults often just look the other way, meaning you are basically sending your kids to Lord of the Flies camp five days a week) . . . we hold "Facebook" accountable for ever letting someone post mean things on there or videos of someone making a fool of themselves. Or we make it an actual crime to tease someone, if that person ultimately does something to themselves.
It is exceedingly easy to drive us to the point where this is going to happen (it already is happening), because we all have sympathy for the little girl who harms or kills herself (over and over again with each story, of course) because she was teased and harassed by other children. Once you have our sympathy, it's easy to say "well, god damn it, something should be done about this!" without paying much sense to the more abstract concept of, you know, people's rights and common sense.
People are biased against people who make them do more work for a living. IT people hate people in the office that cause more IT issues. People in fast food hate a certain type of customer. People in sales hate a certain type of person. People in the medical profession would rather have super healthy people that don't require them to do any actual work. This all seems pretty obvious and not a surprise.
The problem is that bias could easily lead to a lack of interest and attention in treating your patient. Since not all individuals are the same, that means fucking over those who truly want and try to do something about their health (even if it is a losing fight or an ongoing difficult one). You are doing them a massive disservice by assuming the worst about them. If a medical professional isn't going to treat everyone with the same enthusiasm for helping them, then you might as well just turn them away at the door and maybe send them off with a card for Kevorikian, if the attitude is that they might as well be dead (and without proper medical supervision as they try to make healthy changes, that's certainly a possibility).
Also, the study is kind of dumb. What's next "doctors take a greater interest in extremely wealthy patients or smoking hot chicks with fantastic racks". Well, fucking duh.
IT professionals have a bias against those who do silly things and make their work life harder, too.
NEWSFLASH: People who do something for a living have a bias against people who make them have to do more work and put in more effort in their job. Ideally, a doctor would prefer someone in peak health who only has to come in for a very basic checkup every year. I, for one, am fucking shocked. *gasp*
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, we fight hard to make sure citizens can't carry weapons . . . but would never *ever* consider also taking weapons away from the police. The ultimate goal is a very one-sided balance of power and protection.
No... the guy got in a PHYSICAL altercation with the police and then there was an "officer involved shooting". There is no indication in the reporting I have seen about an "officer down" situation.
I don't see how this is acting properly. These guys were out there shooting members of the public. They were not directly a danger to the public at large and since they clearly had stopped the guys and knew who they were (on probation, etc), it's not like they would lose them forever. Call in a chopper. Head to their home. Do a little detective work to track them down. We already know the "give chase" option sure as fuck didn't save any lives. In fact, it took one.
It has everything to do with your chances of being shot or not every time you encounter a cop ready to draw their gun.
Then chasing after than at high speeds is sure to mitigate the fight or flight response...
In all fairness, a black child with a candy bar is enough to warrant a shooting by police.
It's a good thing the police gave chase, to make sure nobody else got killed.
When I saw this story, my first response was that I (mistakenly, apparently) recalled that California and a number of other states had issued a policy (or even a law) to forbid police chases where it is not a life and death issue (kidnapping, etc) as they had been determined to simply cause seriously dangerous situations like this (and that they could usually just as well track them by a helicopter, anyway).
The days of significant performance improvement from one year to the next seem to have long since passed. I no longer factor the CPU into my upgrades (well, I don't upgrade - I just build new rigs). Now, it's all about the GPU. When NVIDIA or ATI come out with the next big cards that I just have to get my hands on, that's when it is time to build a new rig and that's when it is time to just get whatever the best CPU out at the time is.
I can't remember the last time when the CPU performance over my current CPU performance was ever a factor in my decision that it was time to build a new rig or in what to put in it.
It's nice that they have something to offer in mobile devices, but I think geeks are primarily interested in the CPU itself as a thing they can use rather than how it might perform later this year in a mass produced device that someone else is going to build that they may or may not eventually buy for themselves. I kind of miss the "this is for the guy at home" marketed CPUs.
I don't buy the "consoles are killing PCs" argument for one second (also, people have spent the last two years claiming that tablets and phones are killing consoles, so there you go).
Steam *alone* has something like 40 or 50 million users and between 2.5 and 6 million concurrent users playing a game at any one moment.
We don't even need to talk about the depth and breadth of games available on PC that simply don't exist on other platforms. Just with the user numbers alone -- and only the Steam ones, here -- compare those to consoles and you simply can not argue that PC games are dying. I think that a lot of factions (including publishers, themselves) are doing every fucking thing they can to invalidate, complicate, and ultimately kill PC gaming and that has been the case for a few years . . . but it isn't changing the fact that it's pretty fucking vibrant and charging forward.
The 40 or 50 some-odd million Steam gamers and the often 6 million concurrent online Steam gamers would beg to differ with you and, anecdotally, the new people I hear every day saying that they're building a PC gaming rig for the first time in their life is surprising and seems to be growing. There are a ton of gamers out there and they have always been a heavy push for the PC market. They aren't going anywhere. They continue to be just as important and just as numerous, even in a world full of consoles and tablets and cell phones.
Also, most people who would ONLY use a phone or a tablet are not people who would have bought a desktop, anyway. They MIGHT have otherwise had a low power laptop... MAYBE... but they were never going to be users going out and building/buying meaningful desktop systems. These aren't losses from one platform fleeing to another.
Couldn't have said it better, myself. A year after Ivy Bridge and a big null for most non-corporate purchasers of Haswell. At ten percent or less annual improvement, it's going to take you many years (or some phenomenal fundamental change in architecture that revolutionizes everything) to make a new CPU compelling.
What an ignorant statement. We are a union of states. I don't know where the hell you hail from, but the concept is that states determine their own laws and govern themselves. I don't know where people have this ass-backward concept that somehow it all comes from the top-down and the Federal government legislates and controls everything.
Additionally, this has NOTHING to do with "violence the schools have been facing for the last twenty years". The violence has not changed dramatically (especially of the kind you're likely referencing). This is purely a fear-based personal-data grab. Having a child's iris data on record in no way prevents him from committing a crime or being the victim of a crime. All it does is *commit* a crime against his or her humanity by treating them like a criminal and entering them into a life-long database without having actually committed any crime to justify it.
That so many people have the mindset you've shared is actually kind of terrifying. How the hell can people exercise and defend their rights when they don't even understand them?
Meanwhile, down the hall, students were studying the Bill of Rights.
This clearly indicates how out of touch your expectations of the public school system are. Even in the early 90s, I never dealt with the Bill of Rights or the Constitution as a whole in school. Not even in civics class. The only time we ever discussed it was in third grade, when we each had to remember one paragraph of the pre-amble in class and repeat it. One paragraph.. of the preamble...
I don't get how that is justification for imposing upon the rights of every single stupid. So what - you have to field an annoying call from a fretting parent once a day. Tough shit.
This isn't about the safety of the kids anymore than tricking parents into submitting biometric data at the local mall for the last thirty years has been. It's about when they're adults and all their personal data has been catalogued for reference before they were even old enough to object.
That said, how dumb are these children? Even in fifth grade, I was keenly aware of things like this and my right to object, call a parent, leave school - whatever it took. Children are typically not as stupid as we make them out to be, so I am baffled that they didn't bat an eye (hah!) at this.
Didn't we just have an article this last week about how doctors and nurses are biased *against* obese people for being lazy and yadda yadda yadda?
And then these pompous fucks can't even wash their god damn hands after taking a shit?
I'll tell you, I know I have a surgery (or more) coming in my future and the stories of anesthesia problems (very low, I know) and doctors/nurses leaving foreign objects inside your body or working on (or removing!) the wrong part of your body or not washing and infecting patients or not sanitizing hospital facilities enough and causing people to get dangerous post-op infections . . . fucking terrifies me.
Actually, it's a good improvement, in concept. All it's really doing is allowing the separation of email content based on a few primary categories so you don't have your primary view filled with promotional stuff (that you may want, because you did subscribe to it) or with social bullshit. Unfortunately, I've been using this feature for months, while it has been in Google Labs and it is . . . fairly inaccurate. I'm often having to go through both and babysit the two or three categories, because things that I consider quite important show up as promotional and so on. It pulls that stuff out of my inbox stream and puts it into seaprate folders that I have to remember to go check (and I never do, but I guess I might do it more often if it is a big tab at the top of my screen always in my face).
When you're getting dozens of emails from social networks (hello, LinkedIN - thans for the constant spam even though I've tried to mitigate it through your settings!) and mailing lists and companies you've done business with and so on every day . . . it's useful to have all the stuff you just don't really need to get to in the near future and that isn't between actual individual people sort of shuffled off to the background.
Still . . . it's a pretty minor improvement, really. Underwhelming.
WoW is still the biggest MMO several times over, even a decade later. Because of every game's attempt to mimic WoW in every aspect possible, the genre has made almost no progress in the last decade. They're all just re-skins of WoW and because of that, few are successful. However, because developers feel only a WoW type MMO can be successful, they're not willing to take steps to make bold new MMO games that are not just re-skins of WoW.
So, a decade later, the MMO genre is gasping. Clones of clones of clones. People aren't tired of MMOs as a concept, but are tired of their execution. Unless Blizzard has something amazing up their sleeve, they're just going to wind up releasing yet another WoW (though in space or whatever). They'll just be appealing to the existing WoW addicts they already have who are somehow so brain-numbed that they'll sit and play the same thing for a decade, even after they've gone through all the content a dozen times.
Though perhaps not directly, Blizzard has spoiled the genre and the audience. Their game sucked the air out of the room, making it difficult for others in the business who can only be bothered to poorly mimic them. And now everything is drying up.
I won't be surprised if it is completely canceled. Or, at least, postponed long beyond 2016, ultimately.
Instead of imposing upon the freedom of speech or putting the burdon on the phone company or the texting service or the social network service when kids are mean to each other, it makes a fuck of a lot more sense to hold the adults accountable. Where were the parents of the harassed child and why didn't they do anything? Why didn't her teachers? Why not other school administrators and staff? Why not the parents of the children doing the harassing? This doesn't all occur in a vacuum. Adults just don't give a shit. They look the other way. Then, when awful stuff happens, they seek to dismiss their own accountability for what happened by saying "there shoulda' been a law, damn it!".
That isn't correct, going into the future. We are inching ever closer to making "mean" language a crime: Bullying.
Instead of holding adults -- parents of the teased, the teasers, the teachers, the administrators and so on -- accountable for things and not letting awful behavior slide in schools and alienating and harming the children therein (school can be a hideous place for children and the adults often just look the other way, meaning you are basically sending your kids to Lord of the Flies camp five days a week) . . . we hold "Facebook" accountable for ever letting someone post mean things on there or videos of someone making a fool of themselves. Or we make it an actual crime to tease someone, if that person ultimately does something to themselves.
It is exceedingly easy to drive us to the point where this is going to happen (it already is happening), because we all have sympathy for the little girl who harms or kills herself (over and over again with each story, of course) because she was teased and harassed by other children. Once you have our sympathy, it's easy to say "well, god damn it, something should be done about this!" without paying much sense to the more abstract concept of, you know, people's rights and common sense.
People are biased against people who make them do more work for a living. IT people hate people in the office that cause more IT issues. People in fast food hate a certain type of customer. People in sales hate a certain type of person. People in the medical profession would rather have super healthy people that don't require them to do any actual work. This all seems pretty obvious and not a surprise.
The problem is that bias could easily lead to a lack of interest and attention in treating your patient. Since not all individuals are the same, that means fucking over those who truly want and try to do something about their health (even if it is a losing fight or an ongoing difficult one). You are doing them a massive disservice by assuming the worst about them. If a medical professional isn't going to treat everyone with the same enthusiasm for helping them, then you might as well just turn them away at the door and maybe send them off with a card for Kevorikian, if the attitude is that they might as well be dead (and without proper medical supervision as they try to make healthy changes, that's certainly a possibility).
Also, the study is kind of dumb. What's next "doctors take a greater interest in extremely wealthy patients or smoking hot chicks with fantastic racks". Well, fucking duh.
The poster didn't say "lots of sex". They said "sex addiction".
Those are entirely different things.
IT professionals have a bias against those who do silly things and make their work life harder, too.
NEWSFLASH: People who do something for a living have a bias against people who make them have to do more work and put in more effort in their job. Ideally, a doctor would prefer someone in peak health who only has to come in for a very basic checkup every year. I, for one, am fucking shocked. *gasp*