And if you think that fighting terrorism shouldn't be a number one priority, than what should it be?
Educating people like you (yes, I'm being facetious). Did you even look at the link I provided, or do you believe that IEEE is too biased of a source? No where did I even begin to give you any "blame America" lines, mainly because I don't blame America. Read the article I linked to and try to understand that the federal government does have a role to play in mitigating the effects of natural disasters. The good news is that this task can simultaneously mitigate the effects of terrorist attacks.
Also, you seem to be contradicting yourself on the "threat from within". Take you blood pressure medicine and then try to be constructively critical instead of merely critical. You say we need to act unified. Do you think someone knows the right way to act to solve this problem, or do you just maybe believe that there's some room for debate? Somehow, I suspect that you think Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Yes, I'm putting words in your mouth - just like you seem to enjoy putting false words into mine.
Hey, I followed up mine with a description of how I could do it. At least you owe me a description of how you could prove a tampered vote and still maintain anonymity (presuming the person isn't caught in the act). Come on, I double-dog dare you.
Well, the simplest way is a redundant paper trail. One machine allows the voter to cast their ballot, and it prints out a copy of the ballot that is human and machine readable (it's machine readable only by choosing a font that is very easy for OCR to read). That user than deposits the ballot in a locked ballot box. The ballots in the locked ballot box are counted by a separate machine in the presence of one or more representatives from all interested parties. If desired, any person present can count the ballots themselves (in the presence of others) and force a recount if they disagree with the total counts.
As with your solution, it's not perfect, in that assumes that there isn't collusion amongst the "interested parties" or that there's not some prestidigitator present who won't sneak in ballots during the count. However, I'll point out that even your non-anonymous solution wouldn't perfectly prevent tampering if someone had enough power. Presumably the executing source code has some sort of tamper-proof mechanism in place that might allow some sort of self-deleting virus to show everyone the very candidate they voted for, and yet have different totals from the actual totals. Any mechanism that might defeat the first machine in the description I gave above can be used to defeat the last machine in the description you gave.
I do not intend this to be a slam against you personally, but I get frustrated with the "I can't think of it, so it must be impossible" attitude that people have.
OK, I'll give you that. I get frustrated with it, too. Except when I'm right, of course.;)
Try this: Everyone is issued a hash with their name on it. The only place to verify a vote is a central system with every vote loaded on it with a matching hash. ID must be checked to match the name on the recipt. The recipt is loaded externally to the machine, so that no one can gain authorization with one and slip in someone else's. Then the verified person walks into the booth and can view/change/verify/whatever their vote. They exit and their original recipt is ejected from the machine, checked again to make sure they didn't try a swap, and they are sent on their way.
I agree in that one that you would have to trust the verifiers and the government (though I can think of some that would remove the necessity of trusting the government). And that's just one dumb man's quick solution. I'm sure if I thought about it more, I could come up with better ways to do it, and I just solved one of your two concerns. Smarter people than me might be able to fix that part.
You've identified the problem with your scheme. You have to trust the government. In many countries, they are the ones doing the intimidation. However, I'll grant you that your system is better than the one I imagined in that you've at least reduced the exposure to buying/intimidation. I'd probably even find it acceptable.
And with voter anonymity, vote fraud is never detectable.
I don't know about you, but I get frustrated with the "I can't think of it, so it must be impossible" attitude that people have.":D
IIRC, the government is actually spending our money to make us less safe WRT natural disasters. I.e., they're spending money actively encouraging people to move back to NO. Along the lines of "an ounce of prevention", I think money well spent would be on how *to* prevent (or at least mitigate) these disasters. Things like educating people as to where building a house is *not* a wise choice to make - whether due to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc.
You were referring to choices made that might have led to them being victims. I was thinking more of hypothetical "post" choices. (As in "how would they want us to respond to this disaster"?)
I suspect that you're thinking of the victims of disasters who choose to rebuild in places that have an increased chance of being hit by those same disasters again. I don't remember (if I ever knew) what the breakdown of deaths by natural disasters is, but IIRC, hurricanes actually come in fairly low relative to other disasters. I remember someone else on/. trying to figure out just where they should live where they'd be safe from natural disasters. Where would you live that you'd be safe?
You still need to store the XML somehow. This is obviously where the flat file format makes sense. Actually, it would be just as funny if someone was actually storing XML in MySql or PostgreSQL. Come to think of it, I bet someone does.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or neither. However, I'll assume that this was meant as a mild form of disagreement. I.e., that you think that terrorism deserves more resources because of its source and the choices of its victims.
Are natural disasters harder to deal with than the Hydra that is terrorism? Or, to put it another way, would $1 spent to mitigate the effects of natural disasters prevent more or fewer deaths/casualties than $1 spent to mitigate the effects of terrorism? I can't say I honestly know (assuming the $1 was spent wisely in both cases - which is probably not the true in either case), but I do believe that it's not clear that focusing so heavily on terrorism is the better bang for the buck.
Additionally, do you (or anyone else) think that the victims of natural disasters wouldn't want steps taken to mitigate those natural disasters? I suspect you'd find a more unified front from those victims than from the victims of, say, 9/11.
Also, I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not advocating turning a blind eye to terrorism or any other such foolishness. In fact, I wish we were doing more to look at the source of terrorism than constantly acting retroactively.
How many Americans died from terrorist attacks in 2001?
How many Americans died from natural disasters in 2001?
Where did the government spend more money keeping us safe?
If you want some help answering these questions, see this article.
I'm not trying to lessen the seriousness of 9/11. It was a very serious attack that demanded our attention. However, there are lots of other serious issues that also demand our attention.
Oh, and you can have a non-anonymous system that won't allow for vote buying, but I'll leave that to those of you frothing at the mouth about vote buying to come up with a solution to that (I have plenty of ideas, but I've found the ideas from those that oppose something to be much more interesting).
I've thought about it, and every system I come up with either allows for vote-buying/voter-intimidation or de fact anonymity. Here's the closest solution I've come up with:
You have a shared secret with the government and that secret is used to to access who you voted for.
You can set up to have a bogus "secret" show that you voted for someone else.
Problems with that:
Keeping the shared secret a secret.
Trusting those in the government not to be the ones buying votes/intimidating.
Note: I'm not thinking of any given party or politician here - just the ideal of a voting system that is free from buying/intimidation. Without anonymity, that is impossible.
I'm not arguing that it's not "reasonable to make all the copies you want as long as they are not distributed." I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily constitute "Fair Use" and might not be legal. (Legal actions and reasonable actions unfortunately don't always correlate.) My understanding is that this is still undetermined territory on a national scale. I.e., a court decision one day will very likely determine whether this constitutes "Fair Use" or not. It probably will determine that it is "Fair Use", but it's not a done deal, AFAIK. If you know of a case that has settled it, by all means educate me - IANAL.
I believe that copying for backup purposes, has been found to be fair use, as with time shifting, and likely space shifting. His arguement was that he wanted to get a backup copy from a source other than directly from his original.
And I believe that you're wrong, at least on a national level in the US. I don't think it's been decided either way, which is what this lawyer was getting at. Of course, IANAL. I wish that the lawyer himself would answer this question definitively. The question being whether the question of fair use applying to backups et al. has been answered definitively in the courts. And, of course, if it has been decided definitively, in which direction has it been decided. (I would guess that if it had been decided definitively, it would be decided in the way you suggest.)
Well, IANAL either, but I feel qualified enough to say "I don't know.":D
However, my understanding is that this has only been established in Russia and a few other countries. Perhaps it has been established here in a few district courts or what-not, but I'm fairly certain not nation-wide.
I don't think that [phrase] means what you think it does. In US copyright law Fair Use refers partly to how much of a given work you can use. Here's a quote:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
And another:
Noncommercial use is invariably fair. Not true, though a judge may take the profit motive or lack thereof into account.
The point is, that "Fair Use" has a lot to do with how much of a copyrighted work you can copy and for what purposes. It does not give you carte blanche to copy an entire work if it's only for your benefit. Russia, I believe, does have such rules, but not the U.S.
Despite the well-known issues with the halting problem, this can actually be done trivially for a program of maximum size n if you have a machine of state size 2^n (for a binary language) and a lot of patience.
Um, that's only true if the machine the program is being run on is limited to n binary states. So, for a true Turing machine, I think that actually calculating the Kolmogorov complexity is not even theoretically possible, unless the "language" specification stipulates a maximum amount of memory to use (perhaps relative to the size of the string being examined). In my opinion, this is not an unreasonable expansion of the definition, however. E.g., if it requires 2 Gigs of RAM and/or hard drive space to compress a 10,000 bit number down to a 1,000 bit program, I'm not sure if it's fair to say that the complexity is only 1,000 bits.
Truly random data definitely has a chance of being compressible. For example, there's a 1 in 2^50 chance that a random, fair Bernoulli process will generate the string/1{50}/. If I use a biased Bernoulli process, say with p=0.999, I can generate such a string with much better odds. Specifically, there's more than a 95% chance that I'd generate that string, and there's even a 37% chance that I'd generate/1{1000}/, for a string of size 1,000.
I read the piece on Kolmogorov complexity, and although it's theoretically a well-defined measure (given a particular programming language or other form of interpretation), in practice it's doubly exponentially difficult to calculate. I'd have to generate every possible program of size less than n (where n is the actual Kolmogrov complexity) in order to verify that n is in fact the Kolmogrov complexity. Worse yet, for those programs that don't halt (and are of size less than n), I'll have to know that they don't halt. (Despite the well-known issues with the halting problem, this can actually be done trivially for a program of maximum size n if you have a machine of state size 2^n (for a binary language) and a lot of patience.)
Although I could argue that a lack of compressibility might be special.;) Still, regardless of definitions, it would be interesting to find such a prime, or to postulate about their existence. Is there a postulate that such a prime must exist? Is it possible that all primes have a certain level of "compressibility"?
Yeah, it's not easy for the police to find the right balance between keeping the peace and not applying force inappropriately. In this particular case, however, there was not wide-spread rioting and since the police officer was close enough to club me, he was also close enough to see that I was complying with the request to disperse and that I wasn't causing any problems. In a situation where there's significant rioting finding the proper balance is much, much trickier.
However, my point was mainly meant as a rebuttal to the comment:
So why aren't you stopping the destructive people in your midst, to show that you're actually committed to peaceful speech and non-aggressive demonstration of your point of view?
That kind of thinking is just wrong. You can't blame me for not being able to stop other people from rioting just because I happen to be nearby and "commited to peaceful speech and non-aggresive demonstration". Of course, perhaps I misunderstood his point. Maybe he's just saying something along the line of "hey, your non-aggressive techniques aren't stopping the rioting, so acknowledge that the police need to use a little aggression to stop the rioting". I know that Gandhi et al. wouldn't agree with this, but my pragmatic side says that there's some logic to it. Well, not so much "aggression" as "non-harmful force", or at least "non-fatal force". (I really prefer "non-harmful force" if such a thing can exist.)
I used to have a job where police officers helped keep me safe. They're regular people and make mistakes like the rest of us. The fact that they have more power means that the less savory police officers can make really bad mistakes. My guess is that your profession has a selection bias for meeting these types of police officers. However, I imagine that if you took an accurate statistical sampling you'll find that the majority of police officers are decent, hard-working individuals.
Anyone who tells you that they can't spot the Starbucks-smashers or the car-burners about to go to town in the middle of their glowing, rosy, smiling Rainbows And Unicorns Society Of Gentle People demonstration is outright lying.
Is there a magic "profile" that allows you to spot the "Starbucks-smashers" or "car-burners" in the middle of a "glowing, rosy, smiling Rainbows And Unicorns Society Of Gentle People demonstration"?
You've never been to a demonstration if:
You think you'll spot them by their baseball bat. (They won't have one.)
You think that people within the crowd can somehow control each other.
You use phrases like "Rainbows and Unicorns Society".
...
The list could go on, but I'm not the best one to do it, as there are far wittier people on/. than I. If one of those wish to continue this list (using the accent of Jeff Foxworthy, of course), have at it!
I don't know if you finished reading the comment you replied to, where he ended with:
But when you get a few thousand people together, the people at one end of the crowd have no idea that the people at the other end of the block have rocks.
His point is that those examples he gave are just as ridiculous as the one you gave in the first place.
I've been in this situation. There was a peaceful anti-KKK protest in Atlanta many years back when I was an undergrad at GT (early 90's or late 80's), and I was there with more than a thousand others. Everything was going fine. Then, a few people started throwing rocks at the KKK marchers, several of which hit the police - either intentionally or unintentionally. (The KKK march was naturally the impetus for the anti-KKK protest.) Now, I was not in a position to stop "the destructive people in [my] midst", but I would have if I could have. The police then ordered us to disperse. Now, of course, with over a thousand people, no crowd can disperse quickly. I can't speak for everyone else, but I know that I was attempting to leave. Nevertheless, the police got impatient and started pushing. At this point, I got a club to the back from a police officer - not hard enough to do any real damage, but hard enough to leave a small bruise.
My point is that you shouldn't judge all protesters at a given protest for the acts of the few - or even the acts of the many. If I was there legally (and I was), then what other people did at the rally does not justify using force on me - as long as I'm continuing to act legally (and I was). Now, granted, the club incident was no big deal, and to the best of my knowledge no one else got treated much worse. The point is that even if you're doing everything right, you can find yourself in an unsavory situation.
(I also want to point out that calling police officers "pigs" (as the GP post did) is never useful. And, in most cases, it is highly inaccurate. Most police officers are decent, hard-working people and should be shown the respect they deserve.)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you could call it Scholarpedia?
Grolars or pizzlies - that's what you'd need to watch out for!
Educating people like you (yes, I'm being facetious). Did you even look at the link I provided, or do you believe that IEEE is too biased of a source? No where did I even begin to give you any "blame America" lines, mainly because I don't blame America. Read the article I linked to and try to understand that the federal government does have a role to play in mitigating the effects of natural disasters. The good news is that this task can simultaneously mitigate the effects of terrorist attacks.
Also, you seem to be contradicting yourself on the "threat from within". Take you blood pressure medicine and then try to be constructively critical instead of merely critical. You say we need to act unified. Do you think someone knows the right way to act to solve this problem, or do you just maybe believe that there's some room for debate? Somehow, I suspect that you think Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Yes, I'm putting words in your mouth - just like you seem to enjoy putting false words into mine.
Well, the simplest way is a redundant paper trail. One machine allows the voter to cast their ballot, and it prints out a copy of the ballot that is human and machine readable (it's machine readable only by choosing a font that is very easy for OCR to read). That user than deposits the ballot in a locked ballot box. The ballots in the locked ballot box are counted by a separate machine in the presence of one or more representatives from all interested parties. If desired, any person present can count the ballots themselves (in the presence of others) and force a recount if they disagree with the total counts.
As with your solution, it's not perfect, in that assumes that there isn't collusion amongst the "interested parties" or that there's not some prestidigitator present who won't sneak in ballots during the count. However, I'll point out that even your non-anonymous solution wouldn't perfectly prevent tampering if someone had enough power. Presumably the executing source code has some sort of tamper-proof mechanism in place that might allow some sort of self-deleting virus to show everyone the very candidate they voted for, and yet have different totals from the actual totals. Any mechanism that might defeat the first machine in the description I gave above can be used to defeat the last machine in the description you gave.
OK, I'll give you that. I get frustrated with it, too. Except when I'm right, of course. ;)
You've identified the problem with your scheme. You have to trust the government. In many countries, they are the ones doing the intimidation. However, I'll grant you that your system is better than the one I imagined in that you've at least reduced the exposure to buying/intimidation. I'd probably even find it acceptable.
I don't know about you, but I get frustrated with the "I can't think of it, so it must be impossible" attitude that people have." :D
IIRC, the government is actually spending our money to make us less safe WRT natural disasters. I.e., they're spending money actively encouraging people to move back to NO. Along the lines of "an ounce of prevention", I think money well spent would be on how *to* prevent (or at least mitigate) these disasters. Things like educating people as to where building a house is *not* a wise choice to make - whether due to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc.
You were referring to choices made that might have led to them being victims. I was thinking more of hypothetical "post" choices. (As in "how would they want us to respond to this disaster"?)
I suspect that you're thinking of the victims of disasters who choose to rebuild in places that have an increased chance of being hit by those same disasters again. I don't remember (if I ever knew) what the breakdown of deaths by natural disasters is, but IIRC, hurricanes actually come in fairly low relative to other disasters. I remember someone else on /. trying to figure out just where they should live where they'd be safe from natural disasters. Where would you live that you'd be safe?
You still need to store the XML somehow. This is obviously where the flat file format makes sense. Actually, it would be just as funny if someone was actually storing XML in MySql or PostgreSQL. Come to think of it, I bet someone does.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or neither. However, I'll assume that this was meant as a mild form of disagreement. I.e., that you think that terrorism deserves more resources because of its source and the choices of its victims.
Are natural disasters harder to deal with than the Hydra that is terrorism? Or, to put it another way, would $1 spent to mitigate the effects of natural disasters prevent more or fewer deaths/casualties than $1 spent to mitigate the effects of terrorism? I can't say I honestly know (assuming the $1 was spent wisely in both cases - which is probably not the true in either case), but I do believe that it's not clear that focusing so heavily on terrorism is the better bang for the buck.
Additionally, do you (or anyone else) think that the victims of natural disasters wouldn't want steps taken to mitigate those natural disasters? I suspect you'd find a more unified front from those victims than from the victims of, say, 9/11.
Also, I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not advocating turning a blind eye to terrorism or any other such foolishness. In fact, I wish we were doing more to look at the source of terrorism than constantly acting retroactively.
- How many Americans died from terrorist attacks in 2001?
- How many Americans died from natural disasters in 2001?
- Where did the government spend more money keeping us safe?
If you want some help answering these questions, see this article.I'm not trying to lessen the seriousness of 9/11. It was a very serious attack that demanded our attention. However, there are lots of other serious issues that also demand our attention.
- You have a shared secret with the government and that secret is used to to access who you voted for.
- You can set up to have a bogus "secret" show that you voted for someone else.
Problems with that:- Keeping the shared secret a secret.
- Trusting those in the government not to be the ones buying votes/intimidating.
Note: I'm not thinking of any given party or politician here - just the ideal of a voting system that is free from buying/intimidation. Without anonymity, that is impossible.I'm not arguing that it's not "reasonable to make all the copies you want as long as they are not distributed." I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily constitute "Fair Use" and might not be legal. (Legal actions and reasonable actions unfortunately don't always correlate.) My understanding is that this is still undetermined territory on a national scale. I.e., a court decision one day will very likely determine whether this constitutes "Fair Use" or not. It probably will determine that it is "Fair Use", but it's not a done deal, AFAIK. If you know of a case that has settled it, by all means educate me - IANAL.
And I believe that you're wrong, at least on a national level in the US. I don't think it's been decided either way, which is what this lawyer was getting at. Of course, IANAL. I wish that the lawyer himself would answer this question definitively. The question being whether the question of fair use applying to backups et al. has been answered definitively in the courts. And, of course, if it has been decided definitively, in which direction has it been decided. (I would guess that if it had been decided definitively, it would be decided in the way you suggest.)
Well, IANAL either, but I feel qualified enough to say "I don't know." :D
However, my understanding is that this has only been established in Russia and a few other countries. Perhaps it has been established here in a few district courts or what-not, but I'm fairly certain not nation-wide.
The point is, that "Fair Use" has a lot to do with how much of a copyrighted work you can copy and for what purposes. It does not give you carte blanche to copy an entire work if it's only for your benefit. Russia, I believe, does have such rules, but not the U.S.
Um, that's only true if the machine the program is being run on is limited to n binary states. So, for a true Turing machine, I think that actually calculating the Kolmogorov complexity is not even theoretically possible, unless the "language" specification stipulates a maximum amount of memory to use (perhaps relative to the size of the string being examined). In my opinion, this is not an unreasonable expansion of the definition, however. E.g., if it requires 2 Gigs of RAM and/or hard drive space to compress a 10,000 bit number down to a 1,000 bit program, I'm not sure if it's fair to say that the complexity is only 1,000 bits.
That might be arbitrary enough to qualify as non-special since it will only be "special" for a limited time.
Truly random data definitely has a chance of being compressible. For example, there's a 1 in 2^50 chance that a random, fair Bernoulli process will generate the string /1{50}/. If I use a biased Bernoulli process, say with p=0.999, I can generate such a string with much better odds. Specifically, there's more than a 95% chance that I'd generate that string, and there's even a 37% chance that I'd generate /1{1000}/, for a string of size 1,000.
I read the piece on Kolmogorov complexity, and although it's theoretically a well-defined measure (given a particular programming language or other form of interpretation), in practice it's doubly exponentially difficult to calculate. I'd have to generate every possible program of size less than n (where n is the actual Kolmogrov complexity) in order to verify that n is in fact the Kolmogrov complexity. Worse yet, for those programs that don't halt (and are of size less than n), I'll have to know that they don't halt. (Despite the well-known issues with the halting problem, this can actually be done trivially for a program of maximum size n if you have a machine of state size 2^n (for a binary language) and a lot of patience.)
Although I could argue that a lack of compressibility might be special. ;) Still, regardless of definitions, it would be interesting to find such a prime, or to postulate about their existence. Is there a postulate that such a prime must exist? Is it possible that all primes have a certain level of "compressibility"?
How do you define a prime number that's not of a special form? Wouldn't such a definition make the prime of a special form?
Yeah, it's not easy for the police to find the right balance between keeping the peace and not applying force inappropriately. In this particular case, however, there was not wide-spread rioting and since the police officer was close enough to club me, he was also close enough to see that I was complying with the request to disperse and that I wasn't causing any problems. In a situation where there's significant rioting finding the proper balance is much, much trickier.
However, my point was mainly meant as a rebuttal to the comment:
That kind of thinking is just wrong. You can't blame me for not being able to stop other people from rioting just because I happen to be nearby and "commited to peaceful speech and non-aggresive demonstration". Of course, perhaps I misunderstood his point. Maybe he's just saying something along the line of "hey, your non-aggressive techniques aren't stopping the rioting, so acknowledge that the police need to use a little aggression to stop the rioting". I know that Gandhi et al. wouldn't agree with this, but my pragmatic side says that there's some logic to it. Well, not so much "aggression" as "non-harmful force", or at least "non-fatal force". (I really prefer "non-harmful force" if such a thing can exist.)I used to have a job where police officers helped keep me safe. They're regular people and make mistakes like the rest of us. The fact that they have more power means that the less savory police officers can make really bad mistakes. My guess is that your profession has a selection bias for meeting these types of police officers. However, I imagine that if you took an accurate statistical sampling you'll find that the majority of police officers are decent, hard-working individuals.
Is there a magic "profile" that allows you to spot the "Starbucks-smashers" or "car-burners" in the middle of a "glowing, rosy, smiling Rainbows And Unicorns Society Of Gentle People demonstration"?
You've never been to a demonstration if:- You think you'll spot them by their baseball bat. (They won't have one.)
- You think that people within the crowd can somehow control each other.
- You use phrases like "Rainbows and Unicorns Society".
- ...
The list could go on, but I'm not the best one to do it, as there are far wittier people onI don't know if you finished reading the comment you replied to, where he ended with:
His point is that those examples he gave are just as ridiculous as the one you gave in the first place.
I've been in this situation. There was a peaceful anti-KKK protest in Atlanta many years back when I was an undergrad at GT (early 90's or late 80's), and I was there with more than a thousand others. Everything was going fine. Then, a few people started throwing rocks at the KKK marchers, several of which hit the police - either intentionally or unintentionally. (The KKK march was naturally the impetus for the anti-KKK protest.) Now, I was not in a position to stop "the destructive people in [my] midst", but I would have if I could have. The police then ordered us to disperse. Now, of course, with over a thousand people, no crowd can disperse quickly. I can't speak for everyone else, but I know that I was attempting to leave. Nevertheless, the police got impatient and started pushing. At this point, I got a club to the back from a police officer - not hard enough to do any real damage, but hard enough to leave a small bruise.
My point is that you shouldn't judge all protesters at a given protest for the acts of the few - or even the acts of the many. If I was there legally (and I was), then what other people did at the rally does not justify using force on me - as long as I'm continuing to act legally (and I was). Now, granted, the club incident was no big deal, and to the best of my knowledge no one else got treated much worse. The point is that even if you're doing everything right, you can find yourself in an unsavory situation.
(I also want to point out that calling police officers "pigs" (as the GP post did) is never useful. And, in most cases, it is highly inaccurate. Most police officers are decent, hard-working people and should be shown the respect they deserve.)