illegal for recreational use... I could be wrong At the federal level, it is considered illegal for all uses. It's classified in the same bracket as heroin.
True. Regardless of any feelings on the morality of marijuana use or whether it should be legalized, its Schedule I status, putting it on the same level as crack and amphetamines, is simple stupidity. It has well documented uses, is quite safe, and is no where near as addictive as any number of illegal drugs, and may be less so than alcohol. It does have potential for abuse and that is a different question.
The concern is, presumably, that admitting it has uses, given that it is relatively safe (particularly as compared to commonly prescribed opiates), it will become widely used medically. This is a political issue though and a stupid one. It has nothing to do with medical facts and a lot to do with fiber production.
The debate over whether marijuana should be recreationally legal, whether its use commonly endangers others (say, driving under the influence), and what any penalties should be is heavily clouded by this problem. It also makes the whole drug problem harder because it makes the entire drug classification system look partisan and useless, which, to some extent, it is exactly that. It results in a loss of respect for the system.
One should realize that the Tea Act, against which the colonists ultimately protested, actually *lowered* the price of British Tea. The rest of all these supposedly unjust taxes had been completely or nearly repealed by that time. Wikilink: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act/
As another reply points out, yes, but done in an anti-competitive manner.
Another serious dividing issue is that the British taxes were not high compared to existing Colonial (local) taxes, but they were (much) more effectively collected and always paid in hard coin. Since there was a general shortage of specie (gold and silver coin), especially in the Colonies, this was capable of devastating farms and businesses. Local taxes could often be paid in kind or in service, and, since the dividing line between the person of the local official and their position was not always clear, were often negotiable (can be read "corruption"). Even in the case of tax evasion, local officials sometimes had little recourse since the locals were the law enforcement in the back country (remember the "services in lieu of taxes part"?). The British government tended to get more ornery, and, when you needed to get documents or particular goods, you had to pay in coin at time of procurement.
All these issues created a large mess, and perhaps a bigger one than the governors expected.
You gave them the right by being born here and not immediately decided to go found your own country somewhere else.:)
You gave them that right by electing them.
People born here never have a chance to accept or reject the rules allowing them to be elected short of abandoning home, family, and property.
Obviously, power must be transferred to the government in some form in order to protect the rights of individuals against the tyranny of mob and of the majority against the tyranny of specific individuals (as well as to respond to specific circumstances affecting the whole of the citizenry). It's the whole "Government derives its power from the just consent of the governed" thing. However, that does not mean that any particular form is ideal, or that parents may ethically commit their children and children's children to that particular form. This was one of the major arguments used during the "Enlightenment" against monarchy.
Practically, we have little choice to do just that in the majority of cases. The best we can do is provisions for our children to change the government they have been given. Missouri, for instance, must have a constitutional convention on a regular basis as required by law. Also practically, however, one of the changes that can be made is for a minority to legally or practically make it impossible for citizens to make those changes and thus deprive them from making the ethical choice of how they are governed. Lastly, of course, we don't have any real means (other than our feet) of choosing a different government than our neighbors.
The bottom line is that the whole "we elected them" idea is nice and all, but there are many practical obstacles to electing a government of your choice, and the argument flatly fails against someone who voted against those currently in power. Our current party system where both major parties are strongly tied to corporate interests and independents are locked out of many political mechanisms is a good example. Another is the fact that much of the current problem involves a run-away executive and many appointed officials. There are perhaps ways within the system to fix these problems (and I hope to see people use them in the next few years), but just saying "your fault," is a cop out.
"Myanmar is another name for Burma, a country in Asia. We still call it Burma here in the US because our government refuses to recognize them as Myanmar."
Also because it is the traditional name of the country and people know it by that name. Burmese political refugees that I have known refer to their country as 'Burma' and themselves as 'Burmese'. Places can have more than one name; it's OK. It's like the whole Britain vs. England vs. United Kingdom thing: popular usage confuses them, but it's OK and no one gets upset.
5. Trampling: This typically causes the highest number of casualties when force is used on crowds. When the rear of a large group of people are pushing forward and the front suddenly panics, breaks, and runs, people in the middle have a real bad day. People being run down, shoved, elbowed, or struck down by others fleeing, possibly into lamp posts, cars, or other obstacles, or people tripping, falling, injuring themselves or being trampled by others behind them are a serious possibility with this device. Hell, we have this happen at surplus sales in America; an area-use pain weapon would unleash real mayhem.
The problem is, if this is true, and the loading crew cannot tell whether the the missile is live or not from the outside, how would they have found out so quickly at Barksdale that they had several extra firecrackers with no waybill? One would imagine that they would not notice until they actually go to decommission the missiles. (Unless one of the ground crew is clever enough to realize that a real missile weighs more... ?)
As you say, the screwup was obviously more than just pulling the missiles from the wrong stack and the load crew is likely not at fault, but I am also curious as to how exactly it was discovered, and, perhaps more to the point, whether other incidents may have gone undiscovered.
A good bit of what you say is true, but there are some significant details:
Active sonar has a short detection range. The enemy sub on the other hand can hear your sonar from quite a distance, revealing your formation and its weaknesses. Also, sonar works best when moving slowly (so you can hear over your own noise), not compatible with actually trying to get somewhere. This generally results in trying to randomize the use of active sonar, sprint and crawl patterns and so forth to try to balance these negatives.
One of the biggest threats to subs is aircraft and, specifically, sonobuoys. Many ASW aircraft can cover a fair area by laying a search pattern and they cannot be attacked by the sub. The sub, on the other hand, can hear the aircraft moving and the buoys being placed and can sometimes figure a way through. Aircraft, however, burn fuel quickly, and dropping buoys all over expends supplies quickly. At some point, the formation commander has to balance the sub threat and force protection against supply expenditures.
Ocean warfare is not neat, at all. Weather and odd local features, including characteristics of the thermal inversion layer, sediment, and the topography (and depth) of the bottom can give the enemy sub many tricks to play, including good places to hide and just let a formation run over it. Bad weather can nullify ASW aircraft and make sub-to-surface attacks much more successful.
In exercises, attack subs have demonstrated that they can be a potent threat to a carrier battle group. When you look at specific areas like diesel subs with specially tuned sonars operating in shallow silty water like the Med, the contest can get interesting. In places like the stretch between Taiwan and China, where subs can operate under cover of friendly aircraft and the support of a developing blue-water navy (e.g., China's work toward deploying Udaloy class destroyers), the risk of capital ship loss may creep toward the point where the American public would find it unacceptable.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but ISO approval of standards is supposed to be governed by TECHNICAL considerations. By this logic, a vote on whether OOXML is approved by fasttrack should be based on the TECHNICAL merits of the proposal, not on how popular Micorosft Corp. is.
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie. Indeed, and I will go one further: the fact that there is so much controversy over the proposal should immediately tank it, regardless of who 'wins'. Standards are based on CONSENSUS, not mob rule. Given the evident controversy, the proposal clearly is not ready for standardization, let alone by a 'fast-track' process. If at some point, the political controversy dies down, ECMA-376 matures, and the industry shows some sings of consensus, let the proposal be resubmitted. But if there is a *hint* of impropriety in the process, tank it. It is better to have fewer better standards than more mediocre ones. There is no rush (to anyone but MS) to put an ISO imprimatur on ECMA-376. ISO typically sees its mandate as standardizing best-practice, not invention. ECMA-376 does not exist in the marketplace and has no history behind it. The arguments are largely mooted by an insistence that the proposal be allowed to mature (and the politics to settle) before being standardized. Given that ISO has an existing standard in this domain, it is hard to see how anyone is (legitimately) hurt by delay.
That is nothing short of disgusting. It's not just the salaries now, either. The Red Cross has become much more media and money centered. I have relatives in the Salvation Army, for instance, and the SA gets on-site first and gets working while the Red Cross sits in front of the cameras. No one knows the SA is there, and that is true for a number of smaller relief organizations.
Just after 9-11, there was a guy in TN who owned a refrigerated truck. This was when the Red Cross was still saying they were "desperate" for blood in New York City. He made arrangements to get a truckload of blood in Tennessee, meet up with a private plane, and get it into New York. The Red Cross told him to donate money instead.
Basically, though, they tend to use their exclusive legal status and sit on their laurels. I don't donate to the Red Cross anymore. There are too many better charities that are not paying their execs a fortune, that do real work, and appreciate donations of more than money.
[snip] 2. People patent things not to make them, but to charge others for using them. (Patent Trolls). [snip] The real problem here is not that they do not move into production (as you say, not having capital is a darn good reason not to), but they never really invented anything in the first place. This is different from "obviousness".
The reason behind patent disclosures was to provide a detailed enough technical description that the invention can actually be made relying on the disclosure. The inventor thereby adds measurably to the sum of knowledge and, when the patent expires, others benefit from it. In the past, there was a much greater emphasis on this, to the extent that people actually sent scale models to the patent office of their inventions.
Today, especially in the IT-related fields, the patent description is so vague as to be completely useless to the public at large, the entire purpose of the system. The patents are vague because the inventor never actually made anything, never had the capability to make anything, and probably never had the intention. They just describe something that someone else might want to eventually do, slap it on a piece of paper and add a filing fee. They could never mass produce their "invention" even if they wanted to, because they never figured out if it actually works or how to make it work. Someone else comes along and actually puts research and energy into *solving a problem* that is almost similar to the earlier patent, and the patent trolls come out of the woodwork.
If I file a patent claiming a "method for faster than light travel involving creation of a stable wormhole with focussed graviton beams". I should darn well have to demonstrate that it works and that it works from *my submitted description* before the patent is granted. As I recall, there actually is an FTL patent in the system, however.
[snip] Now they do say that the attacker DNS returns more then one A record for each request. But they are ignoring the fact that the serial number of the zone would have to change for a refresh to not get cached. And even if they did create a new zone record for each visit, with the target's IP (seems unlikely), all the servers back to the client would need to respect it. Again, my ISP Qwest, has a bad habit of ignoring the TTL in my zone files. [snip] Worse than that, they are assuming that the OS itself is not caching the result. I sometimes have to manually flush my cache (OS X) when playing with DNS records. OS X can't be the only system that caches lookups.
Having been a male in IT at all levels, I have seen some shocking examples of harassment/discrimination. It happens. Not everyday, but it is most certainly there. On one of my first jobs where I lead a small team, there was a female tech in a neighboring group. She was well educated, intelligent, outgoing, and skilled. In meetings, she would be asked to get coffee or make copies. Her co-workers would be assigned technical tasks, she would be asked to design a coffee mug. She ended up mostly doing document work and I stole her when I could to work on my project, but essentially her life was a living hell. Finally she left, and as I heard, ended up making substantially more elsewhere.
I have overheard snipes that made *me* want to kill, let alone the target.
Expecting women to run errands and be domestic servants is a recurring theme. Vocal comments on appearance is another. Fashion is a double-edged sword. People suggest here that women can dress conservatively and they won't get ogled; In some shops they won't go anywhere either. Women are expected to be attractive and social. If they dress 'tight' they are unfriendly and not team players. Again, it depends on the shop and the management. On the other hand, as a manager, I have had trouble with how to handle a female subordinate who is not dressed appropriately. This can be troublesome with either gender, but with women the terrain seems strewn with land mines: at what point do they take it as a personal comment? I once had a programmer who wore skirts slit to her armpits. I ended up having another exec, a woman, approach her.
As a male in IT and having worked in both all-male and mixed environments (obviously not in all female environments), the effect of having a woman on the team on many guys' mouths is refreshing. I prefer to work in a more professional environment; sure there are times to kick back, too, but at least cut the locker room humor the rest of the time. Having women on a team means things are more professional, you get different feedback and ideas, and, I think, in the end, more gets done.
As for holding your tongue in meetings, I think if more people held their tongue until they had an important idea, meetings might go more smoothly (sessions specifically for brainstorming excepted). You shouldn't withhold a question or idea for fear of looking stupid (asking "dumb" questions often wards off disaster), but you should listen as much or more than you speak.
One thing that women sometimes misunderstand is that men and women (generally) make decisions different ways. Men often vet an idea by attacking it, picking at it, kicking the tires, and trying to find what is wrong with it. This does not mean they will not accept the idea in the end. Women (generally) discuss ideas and focus (more) on the positive points of alternatives. When a man attacks their idea, they often feel personally attacked. I would bewilder my ex when, for an important decision, I thoroughly dismembered one of her ideas, then solidly agreed to it: different ways of thinking.
Women also (tend to) learn new skills differently. When a guy says "Come on, this is easy." they generally mean, "this is within your reach, with a little more work, you'll have it". What a woman often hears is "This is simple. Why don't you get it?" Communication problems like this can blow all out of proportion.
There is a book called "The Iron Rose" which is a woman's guide to sword fighting (my wife fights and I used to) which really goes into a lot of these details and how women get along in male-dominated circles. It's well worth reading as a guy as well.
How do you tell when a Hotmail account represents a foreign suspect? All email can be reasonably be suspected to have at least one endpoint with a foreign national and there is no way to tell without extensive investigation. This really does give them an open ended surveillance ability with minimal oversight where they can claim an honest mistake any time they cross the line.
I didn't realize it was impossible to archive the programs used to read the files as well. I'll make sure to go home and destroy my old copies of Office 4.0, Office 97, and Office 2000. Thanks for the heads up! Do you have a copy of WordStar too? How many versions? Government documents are meant to last for decades, potentially centuries. I have been in places that have large numbers of old WordStar documents, of various formats, and documents from even more obscure, long dead, and undocumented formats. I have had to try to convert them. How long are you going to keep these programs around? How long are you going to keep the environments they run on? What if, for some reason, an old environment just refuses to work on your new VM which has to emulate the long dead x86 instruction set 40 years from now?
How many people, organizations should have to do this? Isn't it a bit more efficient to just have a documented format? Just how much work is needed to describe the average letter or legal document? Why does it take a 6000 page (and yet still incomplete) spec? Personally, I don't understand why 90% of what the government produces isn't or can't be plain text, or at worst, no more complex than what the Mac Text Editor produces. But ODF is loads better than MS' format-of-the-month, and that is all OOXML is: an XML dump of their bloated, spaghettified format-of-the-month.
If you accept both standards, as MA has done, that means that everyone, government orgs, companies, citizens, have to support *both* to read all of the documents. How does that help anyone?
The fact is that the USA can produce far less new soldiers per annum per capita than almost any other nation on earth. [snip] So, yes, the USA desperately needs mass production of fighting robots if it is to cope with a ground war. The downside is that our manufacturing capacity, especially of high-tech gadgets, has also dropped sharply. Very shortly, we may be able to field neither soldiers, nor robots. Our DoD is already uncomfortably dependent on foreign manufacturing. What happens when those countries use our manufacturing (or credit) dependency as a leash?
Due to loss of equipment, infrastructure, and expertise, I have read middle of the road estimates of 20-30 years to get our manufacturing capacity back to competitive levels (if we actually try), so this is not a short term problem. A country of MBAs does not a military make.
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
I agree that armies are not appropriate for 'peace-keeping'. When I was in the business, folks called it OOTW (Operations Other Than War) and dreaded it. There are no clear goals, no battle lines, and the rules change every day.
The problem with treating it like a typical occupation or 'total war,' is that you have to figure out who you are actually fighting. When we occupied Germany, things were simple: any German with a gun was resisting. When the French decided to weigh in on our Revolutionary war (what McCain wants to compare it to), similarly simple: only two sides (although things got interesting with guerillas and Torreys). You don't have that here.
If you follow McCain's logic that we are the French, who's side are we on? The insurgents (obviously not)? The Shia? The Sunni? The Kurds? Al Qaeda? The organized crime syndicates? Who do we shoot? We cannot simply declare everyone with a gun an enemy. Why not? Because every civilian in Bagdad has a legitimate need for a gun: to protect themselves from the other five sides, plus the corrupt police. We don't have the manpower to protect them 100% of the time or to disarm everyone at once. The average dad with an AK47 would be committing suicide and sacrificing his family to disarm. Men, women, and children are combatants. Children can and do deliver bombs (I have family that died that way). The only way that soldiers waging conventional war could stop the problem is to systematically shoot every man, woman, and child, block by block. Do you have the stomach for that?
So instead, we use soldiers, trained and armed to kill or be killed, in a situation for which they are manifestly unsuited. They are foreign invaders. They know little of the local language and culture. They have little or no police training. The Iraqi police and military liaisons who should be helping are unreliable. A significant fraction of the people they are trying to protect are hell bent on killing each other. Our soldiers use military tactics: fire support, artillery, etc., in populated areas. They don't bother identifying people before killing them (Wedding at Falujah, recent "friendly fire" helicopter attack on an Iraqi militia unit, etc.). They gun down families in their homes because a terrified father has a gun. They use 500 pound bombs or rockets to flush out individual insurgents in a row of block houses. And none of this is unusual: it's what soldiers are trained to do.
The thing is, there is no reason we should not have seen this going in (and many people did). Hussein's iron-fisted regime was the only thing holding the country together. Perhaps we would not have thought it would be this bad, but it should have been predicted and on the table. We had essentially four options: 1) accept the fact that we would have to brutally massacre most of the Iraqi civilians 2) Train and deploy a whole lot of Arabic speaking Military and perhaps civilian trained Police with the military as backup (and accept high casualties among Americans and Iraqis), 3) Fence the area in, let them go at it, and see who survives, 4) possibly combined with #2, reinstate the draft, arm and equip enough police and soldiers that we could realistically declare, enforce, and maintain total martial law, pre-cutting their food and giving them sp
Police officers are generally believed and cops stick up for each other.
They are, and they do, because, generally speaking, they are trustworthy.
Yes, as I've said as well. But this creates a dangerous presumption which a citizen cannot correct when it matters. Given that, often, the only witnesses present are the police and the accused, and the only evidence is the police's word that a law was broken, this is hard to correct while still having the law operate. The law depends on the fact that officers of the law *are* generally trustworthy. Cameras, on cars and so forth can help to add an 'impartial' witness for the protection of both sides, but the authorities know where these cameras are, how they operate, and control access to the footage, so this does not always help the citizen in the rare case of serious abuse. Bad cops, for instance, can manipulate the scene to block their own action from the camera's view while the accused's response is recorded. In some cases, cameras which might shine light on these situations mysteriously malfunction. Again, not common, but you do not need many instances to be a serious problem.
Thus far you've offered some scenarios of abuse, which undeniably occur.
Your argument seems to be that the net damage caused by the status quo is less than the potential damage that could be caused if the fractional number of bad cops had better tools available.
That's a fair summary, but I would phrase it more as it is much easier for the fractional number of bad cops to get away with abuses, possibly exponentially more.
I guess I'd opt for a compromise of giving the cops the tools, but with more public oversight and harsher penalties for screwing up.
Yes. Although this is *never* part of the suggested law, not with NSLs, PATRIOT, Warrant-less Wiretaps, increased surveillance, combined databases, or the case under discussion, and even existing methods of oversight are being sidestepped. The best we get is "Oh, we won't use it *that* way." In this particular case, the specific problem is that they are saving data on the movements of people who have committed no crime, indefinitely. This is more the problem than the surveillance itself. The data is of little legitimate use to law enforcement but has a very high abuse potential with no suggested retention/deletion policies, access tracking, or in any likelihood, VV&A (Verification, Validation, and Accreditation) to make sure that the data is accurate and not tampered with. There has to be a push for serious oversight, but the first step is questioning and curtailing the irrational increase in powers.
The greater danger, to me, is the white collar crime stemming from people who aren't cops at all tapping into various tools.
I am not sure whether this is what you are referring to, but I am very concerned about the perpetual inability of government to protect its data. Even if we assumed, for the sake of argument, that this data will never be abused by law enforcement itself, of what use could it be to a criminal who gains access (read or write) to the database? A criminal or criminal organization would have to make a large investment to gather similar data, but here, government does it for them. I came across an article about virus researchers who traced the cache of data the virus was storing in Russia. A number of law enforcement database logins were present in that cache. The recent Homeland Security IS security audits don't make me feel safe either.
As for corps gathering large databases on citizens themselves, which may also be what you are getting at, yes, this is also a problem. The EU seems to be very proactive on consumer protection/privacy laws, but the whole credit reporting/background check system is badly in need of overhaul as it is rife with errors and abuse. Gathering data is one worry. The citizen not having access to and not being able to correct erroneous data which
Well, I originally read about this in dead tree form, but a quick search actually found a recent article which is surprisingly on topic. Apologies: she was a nurse, not a lawyer. The earlier articles had more detail as I recall, but you have to subscribe to the News Leader to read them online. As I recall, two more cars showed up shortly after the original stop and they claimed that she fought. They did not have cameras on the cars at the time.
Maybe there is more to the story. Maybe she did resist more. The interesting fact is that we have absolutely no way of knowing, and if she did not, she can't prove it, and the judge said, essentially, that it did not even matter. So what do you do? Yes, these cases are rare, but remember that she was afraid in the first place because she was investigating an instance of brutality and, very potentially, the response was simply more brutality, which, if true, was gotten away with clean. Even if not 100% accurate, her side is perfectly plausible and is just as much of a problem from a citizen's rights perspective. Just the passive resistance to her work by the police (posting the copies of her license in the station) are chilling enough.
In some areas, you can get away with pulling into a public place rather than pulling over immediately. In many places, they treat that as evasion and obviously there is no quick reference atlas to figure out which is which.
If the corruption is as bad as you say, and there are systematic abuses underway, then why are not the people taking action against them? We have an internet. Start putting the badge numbers of the bad cops on line, and put pressure on the mayor to clean up the police.
[snip] Well, in small towns, corruption is hard to fight because it is the only game in town. In many cases, there is a single family, maybe two, that controls most of the positions of authority and owns a majority of land/business.
Elsewhere, ironically, it is hard to fight because it is not that common. Police officers are generally believed and cops stick up for each other. People, when pulled over, generally comply (what else are they going to do?). This allows a small number to do much damage. Sometimes, cops may be generally good folks but are tempted by the power they wield, like the example I often use of a cop using their badge to make life hell for their ex's new boyfriend. When they actually have to drive around and work at it, it is less tempting and easier for them to get taught. When all they need are a few database queries and a phone call or two... Similarly, when a guy with a fake uniform and a badge needs to jump through more hoops, they can't do as much damage. When they can waltz into a bank with a letter they just typed up at home and ask for someone's records and the bank can't say anything, how will they be caught?
According to what I read, in many areas, people know who the bad cops are. What can they do? People who complain too loudly have the habit of being harassed, arrested, or ticketed, especially for crimes that allow a lot of police discretion. A politician can say they are going to "clean up," but what they do in office is something different, and the mass of voters have short memories. Some places are better than others and civil suits sometimes make headway. At least if the police activity is visible, though, you are right: the people have a chance of making them accountable. The more police activity happens invisibly, on the other end of a computer terminal, the less even that advantage exists. In a sense, this visibility protects the majority of cops who are just doing their jobs.
If Abu Ghraib was condoned then why did the people involved get punished for it? P.R.: They discovered that people, not just in the US, but in Iraq and abroad, reacted more strongly than they thought they would. Someone needed to be sacrificed. The "people involved" (giving the orders) weren't necessarily the ones punished. There is also the possibility that the lower echelons may have gone farther with the orders than the higher ups intended (they certainly did with the pictures) and this may have made the PR disaster worse. The officers set the pace, though, and the enlisted followed. If the enlisted overstepped their orders, it was because they were ordered to cross the line and were not given limits or supervised as to where to stop. Inhumanity breeds inhumanity.
What is the 'reasonable' ratio of rotten cop incidents vs. rotten citizen incidents?
I suppose I favor fewer rotten citizens, but then my life is probably more boring than yours. You can shoot a burglar. You cannot shoot a cop, even a corrupt one, even one acting illegally. They are licensed by society to use deadly force and are backed up by still more force.
We have had several incidents near here where people disguised as cops pulled over and raped women. We also had an incident where a lawyer (woman) who had been filing complaints against a local department was followed and pulled over by three cars on a dark road. She tried to lock the door and call for help. They broke the window, dragged her out through it and beat her severely. She was charged and convicted of resisting arrest. The judge did not agree with the situation, tore into the police, but, in the end, said he had no choice under the law to not sentence her.
I would rather deal with a few more criminals and know that I can, at least potentially, do something about it, then have to deal with a corrupt officer who has the full backing of the state, especially if I cannot tell if the person is a real cop, especially if I cannot resist even when they are clearly acting outside the law. The number of bad cops may be very few, and I have personally met quite a few good ones, but the bad ones are more dangerous than any criminal.
The law must restrict what the police can do in order to curtail the abuses that *will* occur. In the current case, a bad cop can stalk their ex-girlfriend (or her new boyfriend) from the comfort of his own office. Why give him that power?
Talking about this case? Know if they got it back? That's the one, and no, I haven't been able to find anything further. I am curious as to why the DEA got jurisdiction as opposed to ATF, Secret Service (Treasury Dept), etc. Why assume a drug connection as opposed to anything else? It seems like it should be held by a generic agency like the FBI until they find out more.
I was with my dad at one point when he was getting cash at a bank (from the counter). He stepped away to let the next person up to the window and counted the money, the went back to the teller. "Excuse me, Miss. I think you counted this wrong." "Well, I'm sorry, Sir, you stepped away from the window and the transaction is over. That's our policy." "Fine. You gave me an extra twenty lady." She went white. You know she probably had to balance the till out of her pocket. We walked away.
As other people have noted. Banks (usually) will screw you no matter who the mistake is caused by. People owe little moral obligation to the bank (or any large company) these days. It is a matter of the moral obligation you owe to yourself and what you can live with.
In this particular case, I can easily see that anyone returning to the malfunctioning machine, specifically to take advantage, is acting as a criminal. As for the initial windfall? How much time and effort does it take to correct and what is your compensation? I have called the bank on my cell phone before when an ATM was malfunctioning in some way. If it is easy to get through, I report the problem. If they make it a hassle, I don't. Why am I obligated to fight their (arguably deliberate) poor customer service to correct their error, especially if it is small? The larger the error and the better their service, the more I feel obligated. They serve *me* remember? When I make a mistake with *my* customers, I eat it. If the mistake is large and needs to be corrected, they get something for their trouble. That is how business is supposed to work.
The banks are providing a service that the customers pay for by the way of bank fees. In return, the customers are essentially "leasing" their money to the bank so the bank can do stuff with it, and the bank pays for this by way of interest.
No-one is FORCING you to use a particular bank. If you don't like your bank's service, take your money somewhere else. If you don't like banks in general, put your money in a safety deposit box or something. Unfortunately, living bank-less is not only rather difficult in many ways, but also potentially dangerous. Yes, you can get paychecks cashed at some stores and pay many of your bills with cash, but not all. Some companies will simply not accept cash, even at a local office. Money-orders will get you farther, but cashing third party checks is a real pain if you don't have a local bank of the correct denomination. Now, how do you buy a car? A house?
The dangerous part comes in when you realize that every list the government prints to tell people what to watch for regarding "terrorists" and other criminal masterminds includes people that pay cash, especially for large bills. Why is this guy trying to stay off the radar? Where does he get all this cash? Is he laundering money? Why does he have $20,000 in a safe deposit box? Buried in his back yard?
There was an article recently about a pair of truck drivers arrested because the cab of their truck contained a large amount of cash. Not cash and drugs. Not cash and guns. Just cash. The cash was a priori considered evidence of criminal activity and was ceased. Now, I am not saying that criminal activity is *not* likely, but the assumption is interesting isn't it?
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a Schedule I drug according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified marijuana as having high potential for abuse, no medical use, and not safe to use under medical supervision. Which any scientific study will tell is a load of steaming bullshit
True. Regardless of any feelings on the morality of marijuana use or whether it should be legalized, its Schedule I status, putting it on the same level as crack and amphetamines, is simple stupidity. It has well documented uses, is quite safe, and is no where near as addictive as any number of illegal drugs, and may be less so than alcohol. It does have potential for abuse and that is a different question.
The concern is, presumably, that admitting it has uses, given that it is relatively safe (particularly as compared to commonly prescribed opiates), it will become widely used medically. This is a political issue though and a stupid one. It has nothing to do with medical facts and a lot to do with fiber production.
The debate over whether marijuana should be recreationally legal, whether its use commonly endangers others (say, driving under the influence), and what any penalties should be is heavily clouded by this problem. It also makes the whole drug problem harder because it makes the entire drug classification system look partisan and useless, which, to some extent, it is exactly that. It results in a loss of respect for the system.
As another reply points out, yes, but done in an anti-competitive manner.
Another serious dividing issue is that the British taxes were not high compared to existing Colonial (local) taxes, but they were (much) more effectively collected and always paid in hard coin. Since there was a general shortage of specie (gold and silver coin), especially in the Colonies, this was capable of devastating farms and businesses. Local taxes could often be paid in kind or in service, and, since the dividing line between the person of the local official and their position was not always clear, were often negotiable (can be read "corruption"). Even in the case of tax evasion, local officials sometimes had little recourse since the locals were the law enforcement in the back country (remember the "services in lieu of taxes part"?). The British government tended to get more ornery, and, when you needed to get documents or particular goods, you had to pay in coin at time of procurement.
All these issues created a large mess, and perhaps a bigger one than the governors expected.
People born here never have a chance to accept or reject the rules allowing them to be elected short of abandoning home, family, and property.
Obviously, power must be transferred to the government in some form in order to protect the rights of individuals against the tyranny of mob and of the majority against the tyranny of specific individuals (as well as to respond to specific circumstances affecting the whole of the citizenry). It's the whole "Government derives its power from the just consent of the governed" thing. However, that does not mean that any particular form is ideal, or that parents may ethically commit their children and children's children to that particular form. This was one of the major arguments used during the "Enlightenment" against monarchy.
Practically, we have little choice to do just that in the majority of cases. The best we can do is provisions for our children to change the government they have been given. Missouri, for instance, must have a constitutional convention on a regular basis as required by law. Also practically, however, one of the changes that can be made is for a minority to legally or practically make it impossible for citizens to make those changes and thus deprive them from making the ethical choice of how they are governed. Lastly, of course, we don't have any real means (other than our feet) of choosing a different government than our neighbors.
The bottom line is that the whole "we elected them" idea is nice and all, but there are many practical obstacles to electing a government of your choice, and the argument flatly fails against someone who voted against those currently in power. Our current party system where both major parties are strongly tied to corporate interests and independents are locked out of many political mechanisms is a good example. Another is the fact that much of the current problem involves a run-away executive and many appointed officials. There are perhaps ways within the system to fix these problems (and I hope to see people use them in the next few years), but just saying "your fault," is a cop out.
"Myanmar is another name for Burma, a country in Asia. We still call it Burma here in the US because our government refuses to recognize them as Myanmar."
Also because it is the traditional name of the country and people know it by that name. Burmese political refugees that I have known refer to their country as 'Burma' and themselves as 'Burmese'. Places can have more than one name; it's OK. It's like the whole Britain vs. England vs. United Kingdom thing: popular usage confuses them, but it's OK and no one gets upset.
5. Trampling: This typically causes the highest number of casualties when force is used on crowds. When the rear of a large group of people are pushing forward and the front suddenly panics, breaks, and runs, people in the middle have a real bad day. People being run down, shoved, elbowed, or struck down by others fleeing, possibly into lamp posts, cars, or other obstacles, or people tripping, falling, injuring themselves or being trampled by others behind them are a serious possibility with this device. Hell, we have this happen at surplus sales in America; an area-use pain weapon would unleash real mayhem.
The problem is, if this is true, and the loading crew cannot tell whether the the missile is live or not from the outside, how would they have found out so quickly at Barksdale that they had several extra firecrackers with no waybill? One would imagine that they would not notice until they actually go to decommission the missiles. (Unless one of the ground crew is clever enough to realize that a real missile weighs more... ?)
As you say, the screwup was obviously more than just pulling the missiles from the wrong stack and the load crew is likely not at fault, but I am also curious as to how exactly it was discovered, and, perhaps more to the point, whether other incidents may have gone undiscovered.
A good bit of what you say is true, but there are some significant details:
Active sonar has a short detection range. The enemy sub on the other hand can hear your sonar from quite a distance, revealing your formation and its weaknesses. Also, sonar works best when moving slowly (so you can hear over your own noise), not compatible with actually trying to get somewhere. This generally results in trying to randomize the use of active sonar, sprint and crawl patterns and so forth to try to balance these negatives.
One of the biggest threats to subs is aircraft and, specifically, sonobuoys. Many ASW aircraft can cover a fair area by laying a search pattern and they cannot be attacked by the sub. The sub, on the other hand, can hear the aircraft moving and the buoys being placed and can sometimes figure a way through. Aircraft, however, burn fuel quickly, and dropping buoys all over expends supplies quickly. At some point, the formation commander has to balance the sub threat and force protection against supply expenditures.
Ocean warfare is not neat, at all. Weather and odd local features, including characteristics of the thermal inversion layer, sediment, and the topography (and depth) of the bottom can give the enemy sub many tricks to play, including good places to hide and just let a formation run over it. Bad weather can nullify ASW aircraft and make sub-to-surface attacks much more successful.
In exercises, attack subs have demonstrated that they can be a potent threat to a carrier battle group. When you look at specific areas like diesel subs with specially tuned sonars operating in shallow silty water like the Med, the contest can get interesting. In places like the stretch between Taiwan and China, where subs can operate under cover of friendly aircraft and the support of a developing blue-water navy (e.g., China's work toward deploying Udaloy class destroyers), the risk of capital ship loss may creep toward the point where the American public would find it unacceptable.
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie. Indeed, and I will go one further: the fact that there is so much controversy over the proposal should immediately tank it, regardless of who 'wins'. Standards are based on CONSENSUS, not mob rule. Given the evident controversy, the proposal clearly is not ready for standardization, let alone by a 'fast-track' process. If at some point, the political controversy dies down, ECMA-376 matures, and the industry shows some sings of consensus, let the proposal be resubmitted. But if there is a *hint* of impropriety in the process, tank it. It is better to have fewer better standards than more mediocre ones. There is no rush (to anyone but MS) to put an ISO imprimatur on ECMA-376. ISO typically sees its mandate as standardizing best-practice, not invention. ECMA-376 does not exist in the marketplace and has no history behind it. The arguments are largely mooted by an insistence that the proposal be allowed to mature (and the politics to settle) before being standardized. Given that ISO has an existing standard in this domain, it is hard to see how anyone is (legitimately) hurt by delay.
That is nothing short of disgusting. It's not just the salaries now, either. The Red Cross has become much more media and money centered. I have relatives in the Salvation Army, for instance, and the SA gets on-site first and gets working while the Red Cross sits in front of the cameras. No one knows the SA is there, and that is true for a number of smaller relief organizations.
Just after 9-11, there was a guy in TN who owned a refrigerated truck. This was when the Red Cross was still saying they were "desperate" for blood in New York City. He made arrangements to get a truckload of blood in Tennessee, meet up with a private plane, and get it into New York. The Red Cross told him to donate money instead.
Basically, though, they tend to use their exclusive legal status and sit on their laurels. I don't donate to the Red Cross anymore. There are too many better charities that are not paying their execs a fortune, that do real work, and appreciate donations of more than money.
2. People patent things not to make them, but to charge others for using them. (Patent Trolls).
[snip] The real problem here is not that they do not move into production (as you say, not having capital is a darn good reason not to), but they never really invented anything in the first place. This is different from "obviousness".
The reason behind patent disclosures was to provide a detailed enough technical description that the invention can actually be made relying on the disclosure. The inventor thereby adds measurably to the sum of knowledge and, when the patent expires, others benefit from it. In the past, there was a much greater emphasis on this, to the extent that people actually sent scale models to the patent office of their inventions.
Today, especially in the IT-related fields, the patent description is so vague as to be completely useless to the public at large, the entire purpose of the system. The patents are vague because the inventor never actually made anything, never had the capability to make anything, and probably never had the intention. They just describe something that someone else might want to eventually do, slap it on a piece of paper and add a filing fee. They could never mass produce their "invention" even if they wanted to, because they never figured out if it actually works or how to make it work. Someone else comes along and actually puts research and energy into *solving a problem* that is almost similar to the earlier patent, and the patent trolls come out of the woodwork.
If I file a patent claiming a "method for faster than light travel involving creation of a stable wormhole with focussed graviton beams". I should darn well have to demonstrate that it works and that it works from *my submitted description* before the patent is granted. As I recall, there actually is an FTL patent in the system, however.
Now they do say that the attacker DNS returns more then one A record for each request. But they are ignoring the fact that the serial number of the zone would have to change for a refresh to not get cached. And even if they did create a new zone record for each visit, with the target's IP (seems unlikely), all the servers back to the client would need to respect it. Again, my ISP Qwest, has a bad habit of ignoring the TTL in my zone files.
[snip] Worse than that, they are assuming that the OS itself is not caching the result. I sometimes have to manually flush my cache (OS X) when playing with DNS records. OS X can't be the only system that caches lookups.
Having been a male in IT at all levels, I have seen some shocking examples of harassment/discrimination. It happens. Not everyday, but it is most certainly there. On one of my first jobs where I lead a small team, there was a female tech in a neighboring group. She was well educated, intelligent, outgoing, and skilled. In meetings, she would be asked to get coffee or make copies. Her co-workers would be assigned technical tasks, she would be asked to design a coffee mug. She ended up mostly doing document work and I stole her when I could to work on my project, but essentially her life was a living hell. Finally she left, and as I heard, ended up making substantially more elsewhere.
I have overheard snipes that made *me* want to kill, let alone the target.
Expecting women to run errands and be domestic servants is a recurring theme. Vocal comments on appearance is another. Fashion is a double-edged sword. People suggest here that women can dress conservatively and they won't get ogled; In some shops they won't go anywhere either. Women are expected to be attractive and social. If they dress 'tight' they are unfriendly and not team players. Again, it depends on the shop and the management. On the other hand, as a manager, I have had trouble with how to handle a female subordinate who is not dressed appropriately. This can be troublesome with either gender, but with women the terrain seems strewn with land mines: at what point do they take it as a personal comment? I once had a programmer who wore skirts slit to her armpits. I ended up having another exec, a woman, approach her.
As a male in IT and having worked in both all-male and mixed environments (obviously not in all female environments), the effect of having a woman on the team on many guys' mouths is refreshing. I prefer to work in a more professional environment; sure there are times to kick back, too, but at least cut the locker room humor the rest of the time. Having women on a team means things are more professional, you get different feedback and ideas, and, I think, in the end, more gets done.
As for holding your tongue in meetings, I think if more people held their tongue until they had an important idea, meetings might go more smoothly (sessions specifically for brainstorming excepted). You shouldn't withhold a question or idea for fear of looking stupid (asking "dumb" questions often wards off disaster), but you should listen as much or more than you speak.
One thing that women sometimes misunderstand is that men and women (generally) make decisions different ways. Men often vet an idea by attacking it, picking at it, kicking the tires, and trying to find what is wrong with it. This does not mean they will not accept the idea in the end. Women (generally) discuss ideas and focus (more) on the positive points of alternatives. When a man attacks their idea, they often feel personally attacked. I would bewilder my ex when, for an important decision, I thoroughly dismembered one of her ideas, then solidly agreed to it: different ways of thinking.
Women also (tend to) learn new skills differently. When a guy says "Come on, this is easy." they generally mean, "this is within your reach, with a little more work, you'll have it". What a woman often hears is "This is simple. Why don't you get it?" Communication problems like this can blow all out of proportion.
There is a book called "The Iron Rose" which is a woman's guide to sword fighting (my wife fights and I used to) which really goes into a lot of these details and how women get along in male-dominated circles. It's well worth reading as a guy as well.
How do you tell when a Hotmail account represents a foreign suspect? All email can be reasonably be suspected to have at least one endpoint with a foreign national and there is no way to tell without extensive investigation. This really does give them an open ended surveillance ability with minimal oversight where they can claim an honest mistake any time they cross the line.
How many people, organizations should have to do this? Isn't it a bit more efficient to just have a documented format? Just how much work is needed to describe the average letter or legal document? Why does it take a 6000 page (and yet still incomplete) spec? Personally, I don't understand why 90% of what the government produces isn't or can't be plain text, or at worst, no more complex than what the Mac Text Editor produces. But ODF is loads better than MS' format-of-the-month, and that is all OOXML is: an XML dump of their bloated, spaghettified format-of-the-month.
If you accept both standards, as MA has done, that means that everyone, government orgs, companies, citizens, have to support *both* to read all of the documents. How does that help anyone?
[snip]
So, yes, the USA desperately needs mass production of fighting robots if it is to cope with a ground war. The downside is that our manufacturing capacity, especially of high-tech gadgets, has also dropped sharply. Very shortly, we may be able to field neither soldiers, nor robots. Our DoD is already uncomfortably dependent on foreign manufacturing. What happens when those countries use our manufacturing (or credit) dependency as a leash?
Due to loss of equipment, infrastructure, and expertise, I have read middle of the road estimates of 20-30 years to get our manufacturing capacity back to competitive levels (if we actually try), so this is not a short term problem. A country of MBAs does not a military make.
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
I agree that armies are not appropriate for 'peace-keeping'. When I was in the business, folks called it OOTW (Operations Other Than War) and dreaded it. There are no clear goals, no battle lines, and the rules change every day.
The problem with treating it like a typical occupation or 'total war,' is that you have to figure out who you are actually fighting. When we occupied Germany, things were simple: any German with a gun was resisting. When the French decided to weigh in on our Revolutionary war (what McCain wants to compare it to), similarly simple: only two sides (although things got interesting with guerillas and Torreys). You don't have that here.
If you follow McCain's logic that we are the French, who's side are we on? The insurgents (obviously not)? The Shia? The Sunni? The Kurds? Al Qaeda? The organized crime syndicates? Who do we shoot? We cannot simply declare everyone with a gun an enemy. Why not? Because every civilian in Bagdad has a legitimate need for a gun: to protect themselves from the other five sides, plus the corrupt police. We don't have the manpower to protect them 100% of the time or to disarm everyone at once. The average dad with an AK47 would be committing suicide and sacrificing his family to disarm. Men, women, and children are combatants. Children can and do deliver bombs (I have family that died that way). The only way that soldiers waging conventional war could stop the problem is to systematically shoot every man, woman, and child, block by block. Do you have the stomach for that?
So instead, we use soldiers, trained and armed to kill or be killed, in a situation for which they are manifestly unsuited. They are foreign invaders. They know little of the local language and culture. They have little or no police training. The Iraqi police and military liaisons who should be helping are unreliable. A significant fraction of the people they are trying to protect are hell bent on killing each other. Our soldiers use military tactics: fire support, artillery, etc., in populated areas. They don't bother identifying people before killing them (Wedding at Falujah, recent "friendly fire" helicopter attack on an Iraqi militia unit, etc.). They gun down families in their homes because a terrified father has a gun. They use 500 pound bombs or rockets to flush out individual insurgents in a row of block houses. And none of this is unusual: it's what soldiers are trained to do.
The thing is, there is no reason we should not have seen this going in (and many people did). Hussein's iron-fisted regime was the only thing holding the country together. Perhaps we would not have thought it would be this bad, but it should have been predicted and on the table. We had essentially four options: 1) accept the fact that we would have to brutally massacre most of the Iraqi civilians 2) Train and deploy a whole lot of Arabic speaking Military and perhaps civilian trained Police with the military as backup (and accept high casualties among Americans and Iraqis), 3) Fence the area in, let them go at it, and see who survives, 4) possibly combined with #2, reinstate the draft, arm and equip enough police and soldiers that we could realistically declare, enforce, and maintain total martial law, pre-cutting their food and giving them sp
They are, and they do, because, generally speaking, they are trustworthy.
Yes, as I've said as well. But this creates a dangerous presumption which a citizen cannot correct when it matters. Given that, often, the only witnesses present are the police and the accused, and the only evidence is the police's word that a law was broken, this is hard to correct while still having the law operate. The law depends on the fact that officers of the law *are* generally trustworthy. Cameras, on cars and so forth can help to add an 'impartial' witness for the protection of both sides, but the authorities know where these cameras are, how they operate, and control access to the footage, so this does not always help the citizen in the rare case of serious abuse. Bad cops, for instance, can manipulate the scene to block their own action from the camera's view while the accused's response is recorded. In some cases, cameras which might shine light on these situations mysteriously malfunction. Again, not common, but you do not need many instances to be a serious problem.
Thus far you've offered some scenarios of abuse, which undeniably occur.
Your argument seems to be that the net damage caused by the status quo is less than the potential damage that could be caused if the fractional number of bad cops had better tools available.
That's a fair summary, but I would phrase it more as it is much easier for the fractional number of bad cops to get away with abuses, possibly exponentially more.
I guess I'd opt for a compromise of giving the cops the tools, but with more public oversight and harsher penalties for screwing up.
Yes. Although this is *never* part of the suggested law, not with NSLs, PATRIOT, Warrant-less Wiretaps, increased surveillance, combined databases, or the case under discussion, and even existing methods of oversight are being sidestepped. The best we get is "Oh, we won't use it *that* way." In this particular case, the specific problem is that they are saving data on the movements of people who have committed no crime, indefinitely. This is more the problem than the surveillance itself. The data is of little legitimate use to law enforcement but has a very high abuse potential with no suggested retention/deletion policies, access tracking, or in any likelihood, VV&A (Verification, Validation, and Accreditation) to make sure that the data is accurate and not tampered with. There has to be a push for serious oversight, but the first step is questioning and curtailing the irrational increase in powers.
The greater danger, to me, is the white collar crime stemming from people who aren't cops at all tapping into various tools.
I am not sure whether this is what you are referring to, but I am very concerned about the perpetual inability of government to protect its data. Even if we assumed, for the sake of argument, that this data will never be abused by law enforcement itself, of what use could it be to a criminal who gains access (read or write) to the database? A criminal or criminal organization would have to make a large investment to gather similar data, but here, government does it for them. I came across an article about virus researchers who traced the cache of data the virus was storing in Russia. A number of law enforcement database logins were present in that cache. The recent Homeland Security IS security audits don't make me feel safe either.
As for corps gathering large databases on citizens themselves, which may also be what you are getting at, yes, this is also a problem. The EU seems to be very proactive on consumer protection/privacy laws, but the whole credit reporting/background check system is badly in need of overhaul as it is rife with errors and abuse. Gathering data is one worry. The citizen not having access to and not being able to correct erroneous data which
Well, I originally read about this in dead tree form, but a quick search actually found a recent article which is surprisingly on topic. Apologies: she was a nurse, not a lawyer. The earlier articles had more detail as I recall, but you have to subscribe to the News Leader to read them online. As I recall, two more cars showed up shortly after the original stop and they claimed that she fought. They did not have cameras on the cars at the time.
Maybe there is more to the story. Maybe she did resist more. The interesting fact is that we have absolutely no way of knowing, and if she did not, she can't prove it, and the judge said, essentially, that it did not even matter. So what do you do? Yes, these cases are rare, but remember that she was afraid in the first place because she was investigating an instance of brutality and, very potentially, the response was simply more brutality, which, if true, was gotten away with clean. Even if not 100% accurate, her side is perfectly plausible and is just as much of a problem from a citizen's rights perspective. Just the passive resistance to her work by the police (posting the copies of her license in the station) are chilling enough.
In some areas, you can get away with pulling into a public place rather than pulling over immediately. In many places, they treat that as evasion and obviously there is no quick reference atlas to figure out which is which.
[snip]
If the corruption is as bad as you say, and there are systematic abuses underway, then why are not the people taking action against them? We have an internet. Start putting the badge numbers of the bad cops on line, and put pressure on the mayor to clean up the police.
[snip] Well, in small towns, corruption is hard to fight because it is the only game in town. In many cases, there is a single family, maybe two, that controls most of the positions of authority and owns a majority of land/business.
Elsewhere, ironically, it is hard to fight because it is not that common. Police officers are generally believed and cops stick up for each other. People, when pulled over, generally comply (what else are they going to do?). This allows a small number to do much damage. Sometimes, cops may be generally good folks but are tempted by the power they wield, like the example I often use of a cop using their badge to make life hell for their ex's new boyfriend. When they actually have to drive around and work at it, it is less tempting and easier for them to get taught. When all they need are a few database queries and a phone call or two
According to what I read, in many areas, people know who the bad cops are. What can they do? People who complain too loudly have the habit of being harassed, arrested, or ticketed, especially for crimes that allow a lot of police discretion. A politician can say they are going to "clean up," but what they do in office is something different, and the mass of voters have short memories. Some places are better than others and civil suits sometimes make headway. At least if the police activity is visible, though, you are right: the people have a chance of making them accountable. The more police activity happens invisibly, on the other end of a computer terminal, the less even that advantage exists. In a sense, this visibility protects the majority of cops who are just doing their jobs.
I suppose I favor fewer rotten citizens, but then my life is probably more boring than yours. You can shoot a burglar. You cannot shoot a cop, even a corrupt one, even one acting illegally. They are licensed by society to use deadly force and are backed up by still more force.
We have had several incidents near here where people disguised as cops pulled over and raped women. We also had an incident where a lawyer (woman) who had been filing complaints against a local department was followed and pulled over by three cars on a dark road. She tried to lock the door and call for help. They broke the window, dragged her out through it and beat her severely. She was charged and convicted of resisting arrest. The judge did not agree with the situation, tore into the police, but, in the end, said he had no choice under the law to not sentence her.
I would rather deal with a few more criminals and know that I can, at least potentially, do something about it, then have to deal with a corrupt officer who has the full backing of the state, especially if I cannot tell if the person is a real cop, especially if I cannot resist even when they are clearly acting outside the law. The number of bad cops may be very few, and I have personally met quite a few good ones, but the bad ones are more dangerous than any criminal.
The law must restrict what the police can do in order to curtail the abuses that *will* occur. In the current case, a bad cop can stalk their ex-girlfriend (or her new boyfriend) from the comfort of his own office. Why give him that power?
I was with my dad at one point when he was getting cash at a bank (from the counter). He stepped away to let the next person up to the window and counted the money, the went back to the teller. "Excuse me, Miss. I think you counted this wrong." "Well, I'm sorry, Sir, you stepped away from the window and the transaction is over. That's our policy." "Fine. You gave me an extra twenty lady." She went white. You know she probably had to balance the till out of her pocket. We walked away.
As other people have noted. Banks (usually) will screw you no matter who the mistake is caused by. People owe little moral obligation to the bank (or any large company) these days. It is a matter of the moral obligation you owe to yourself and what you can live with.
In this particular case, I can easily see that anyone returning to the malfunctioning machine, specifically to take advantage, is acting as a criminal. As for the initial windfall? How much time and effort does it take to correct and what is your compensation? I have called the bank on my cell phone before when an ATM was malfunctioning in some way. If it is easy to get through, I report the problem. If they make it a hassle, I don't. Why am I obligated to fight their (arguably deliberate) poor customer service to correct their error, especially if it is small? The larger the error and the better their service, the more I feel obligated. They serve *me* remember? When I make a mistake with *my* customers, I eat it. If the mistake is large and needs to be corrected, they get something for their trouble. That is how business is supposed to work.
No-one is FORCING you to use a particular bank. If you don't like your bank's service, take your money somewhere else. If you don't like banks in general, put your money in a safety deposit box or something. Unfortunately, living bank-less is not only rather difficult in many ways, but also potentially dangerous. Yes, you can get paychecks cashed at some stores and pay many of your bills with cash, but not all. Some companies will simply not accept cash, even at a local office. Money-orders will get you farther, but cashing third party checks is a real pain if you don't have a local bank of the correct denomination. Now, how do you buy a car? A house?
The dangerous part comes in when you realize that every list the government prints to tell people what to watch for regarding "terrorists" and other criminal masterminds includes people that pay cash, especially for large bills. Why is this guy trying to stay off the radar? Where does he get all this cash? Is he laundering money? Why does he have $20,000 in a safe deposit box? Buried in his back yard?
There was an article recently about a pair of truck drivers arrested because the cab of their truck contained a large amount of cash. Not cash and drugs. Not cash and guns. Just cash. The cash was a priori considered evidence of criminal activity and was ceased. Now, I am not saying that criminal activity is *not* likely, but the assumption is interesting isn't it?