When we allow the rent a idiots to enforce rules that don't exist we all loose.
So when do we all tighten?
Overnight it became a sudden trend for lots of people everywhere to make that typo. Now it's becoming rare again among lots of people. I hate to tell you this, but most people only think they have their own thoughts, habits, and mannerisms.
By the way, the new typo fad that lots of people are suddenly following is writing "where" instead of "were". If you're not so much of an individual and are easily influenced by your environment, then seeing this enough times will cause you to do it as well.
Pretty brutal. I searched to see if there was follow-up to the police beating. The person who was beaten, Duanna Johnson, was shot to death later the same year in Memphis. I wonder where the two cops in the beating video were on the night Johnson was shot? Here is a link to a follow-up story on the homicide.
the state's ticket revenues from traffic violations greatly exceed the state's ticket revenues from pedestrian violations. Therefore, they care a lot more about enforcing one than the other.
This might be true, but it's awfully cynical. If we were more charitable we could say "The public safety benefit in enforcing traffic violations greatly exceeds that of pedestrian violations."
If they cared so much about safety i.e. deterring the behaviors that actually cause traffic accidents, then "following too closely" and "failure to yield right-of-way" would be their top priorities for traffic tickets and speeding would be somewhere near the bottom. Also, performing a "rolling roadblock" by remaining in the passing lane without passing anyone and slow drivers who impede traffic would be prioritized above speeding, for it tempts other drivers to perform dangerous maneuvers to get around the clueless person who is in their way for no reason (right or wrong, this is what will happen). I don't expect you to take my word for it, so please research the national Department of Transportation's figures yourself.
The only bullshit part of it is that the fact you were arrested shows up on any criminal background check.
Uh, an unlawful arrest doesn't get deleted from your record? Wow. Just wow. I already had a low opinion of the USA, but I think it just dropped a few floors.
By default, no it does not. You can hire a lawyer at your own expense and pray that the judge will agree with you that it should be purged, but that's it.
On most employment applications, they ask if you have ever been arrested. If you say yes, there is a section where you can explain why and that'd be your chance to write "I was found not guilty" or "the charges were dropped" etc. But, you better believe that if an employer has two equally good applications except that one has such a statement, where the other was never arrested, the employer is going to favor the latter.
Many people have bought into authoritarian thought whether or not they are aware of it. Even if you were found not guilty, they will assume "well, he must have been doing SOMETHING wrong to get the attention of the authorities". The stigma of this is very real.
I have a tremendously low opinion of the USA myself. Somewhere along the line we embraced authoritarian philosophy and we no longer really believe in freedom. At best we believe in license, not freedom. Despite the tremendously long track record of abuses and excesses, we for some reason believe that our government represents us and always acts in our interests, so we let it have more power anytime it feels like acquiring it.
I believe that where we screwed up big-time was when we ever allowed the government to have any input whatsoever into how we educate our children. Take a hard look at our public schools. These are places where American citizens are threatened with suspension or expulsion for wearing a t-shirt of the American flag, since that might offend an immigrant. Places where kids are expelled for pointing a french fry at another student and saying "bang", since that violates a zero-tolerance rule about guns and violence. Places where a young girl can be forcibly strip-searched for having an aspirin or a Tylenol because that violates another zero-tolerance rule. We are throwing our children into an environment where authority can be as unreasonable and hypocritical as it likes, has a very low burden of proof if any, and can take drastic swift action with no appeal. When they grow up in that environment, they are likely to think it's normal when they see their government doing the same thing.
If you have children and give a damn about them, save them from this madness. I have a family member who is a hero in my eyes. Do you know why? Because he works three jobs and makes sacrifices so he can send all of his children to private school. He was careful to choose one that does not exhibit this kind of institutionalized madness. When he says he loves his children and cares about their well-being, he's willing to do whatever it takes to back that up with action. If only having that much of a spine were more common.
I'm a little surprised he didn't. I'm not an American, but if the cops arrest you with no reason don't you then turn around and sue them for false arrest? A few expensive lawsuits would probably convince whoever is in charge to train their police officers a little better.
When the judge is the guy that spends his Friday evening having beers with the dad of the cop who arrested you? Nah. Maybe things are different in the good ol' US of A but where I come from, cops look after their own.:/
I don't remember who said it, but I saw a great description of this right here on Slashdot.
"In the minds of police everywhere, there are three kinds of people: cops, cops' families, and suspects."
Then don't resist. If you voluntarily hold out your arms and say, "Here you may cuff me," the police can't claim you resisted can they?
Be careful how you go about that. If you raise your hands out beyond a certain level, they will call that "flailing" and assume you are moving your hands in preparation for striking the officer. Then you're in for a world of hurt, both physically and legally. It's one of the bullshit tricks they use against people who give them a hard time, like questioning them too much. Right here, in the "land of the free."
If the police then claim "It's illegal to draw the metrotrain," you know they are full of shit. And you would later win the court case (if it went that far). The police would end-up looking like fools and that would please me to no end. It would be like Christmas.
An arrest record that might haunt you the rest of your life plus legal expenses is a rather Pyrrhic victory, to be sure.
If you want to do something about the police having excessive power, becoming a test case has to be one of the worst ways to do it. The best way is to take it up with your local/state legislators. Unlike the federal level, you actually have a chance of finding one who really does want to represent your interests. That, by the way, is one of many reasons why the Founding Fathers wanted most government that citizens experience to come from the local and state levels.
There's not a cop on Earth who wants to admit he unnecessarily used force, as it would open up his department to liability and effectively end his career.>
That's cute, you think cops are accountable to our laws.
I wish some people would address their reading comprehension issues prior to replying to me.
I detailed why they are not accountable. That's very much the opposite of claiming that they are accountable.
Driving is a privilege and therefore can be revoked at any time & any reason, even if no crime was committed.
That has nothing to do with a police officer's legal authority to detain you. "Driving is a privilege" is a matter between yourself and the state DMV that issued your license. It's the logic used to take away your license if you refuse a breathalyzer, a way to make sure that the Fifth Amendment protection against incriminating yourself does not apply to being charged with a DUI. It's like "free speech zones" in that it's a clever way to get around that pesky Constitution.
That being said, the purpose of a speeding ticket is not to take away your privilege to drive. It's to fine you for a violation. None of this is related to your normal right to move freely and associate or not associate with anyone of your choice (such as a police officer) being suspended because you have been detained. At least in my state, the police have the legal right to detain anyone for up to 48 hours for any reason or no reason at all, even if no charges are made. Thankfully they rarely use that power, but they certainly have it.
But walking is an innate natural Right and police may not detain you from moving about, unless they charge you or obtain a warrant.
If you jaywalk or are drunk in public you better believe they can detain you in order to charge you with those violations. In that scenario, doing anything other than complying with the detention would be exceedingly foolish. That's exactly like when you are driving and speeding; they pull you over and detain you in order to charge you with that violation. It just so happens that you're much more likely to encounter a police officer when driving. That's both because you are covering more ground in the same amount of time and because the state's ticket revenues from traffic violations greatly exceed the state's ticket revenues from pedestrian violations. Therefore, they care a lot more about enforcing one than the other. Otherwise the same rules apply.
Spot on! This is exactly the way to deal with this. Test it, get arrested, document the whole process and manage to be professional enough about it so you arise the interest of main media journalists, PBS, BBC, etc. Expose, just like they do here, underlying causes, like top security acknowledging of the rights, and private security and local police involved in arbitrary and erratic behavior.
The result: big public embarrassment for those involved, instigating fear of the same for like-minded small-time tyrants doing this everywhere.
This is a job of public education and the two photographers involved here are doing the right, appropriate and efficient thing about it. My hat to them!
The only bullshit part of it is that the fact you were arrested shows up on any criminal background check. It's the kind of thing that could deny you employment in the future. Sure, you can explain why the arrest happened, and most management types will listen to your explanation and decide "he's an activist troublemaker who might rock the boat, a loose cannon" and throw your application in the trash. Of course it's unjust.
It's bullshit because a criminal background check should never show arrests. It should show convictions only. To do otherwise is a rejection of "innocent until proven guilty", as anyone can make an accusation. It doesn't mean you actually did anything. Why then should you bear a stigma that has to be explained to all future employers merely because a false accusation was made?
We like to say we believe in things like justice but we, collectively, don't act like it.
Just ask politely if you're under arrest. If not, carry right on doing whatever it is you were doing..
IANAL. Having said that... Be careful about that. You can be detained without actually being under arrest. An example is when you are pulled over for a traffic ticket. You are not free to leave until the officer is done with you, yet you are usually not actually arrested. Yet if you tried to leave while still being detained, you're guaranteed to get arrested.
They would try and get you with resisting arrest. So the entire pretense for arresting you is resisting arrest. Doesn't matter what the resistance is; vocal, thought, physical.
Worse: if a cop uses physical force against you, like mace, a taser, all the way up to a baton or a gun, and then does not charge you with resisting arrest, that cop is effectively admitting that he used force for no reason. That's aka excessive force or police brutality. There's not a cop on Earth who wants to admit he unnecessarily used force, as it would open up his department to liability and effectively end his career.
It's unfortunate that you generally cannot sue the officer personally. They have some sort of sovereign immunity as they are noncivilian government agents conducting government business. You can sue the department or the city/locality/state that runs the department but not the officer himself. Most of the time the very worst thing that can happen to the cop himself is that he loses his job, though it's more typical for him to receive a free paid vacation for misconduct (paid suspension).
The irony is that cops seem honestly puzzled about why so many people don't like them.
But if you buy a subscription, then you get to preemptively compile first-post trolls which are actually relevant to the article and kick off massive flamewars.
But purchase with care: Recently it seems that the Nazis have been aggresively banning my own and other troll i.p.'s.
I doubt Slashdot management cares one way or the other about anything legal you say. I've had correspondence with Mr. Malda and as far as I can tell, he has the thick skin you'd expect of anyone who runs this kind of site. The problem is that Slashdot management probably get floods of complaint e-mails from people who want Slashdot to assure their phony "right" to never be offended. If it were me running the site, I'd send a copy of the First Amendment to every person who writes in to complain about a troll or about anyone else who said something they don't like. Maybe it would have a caption at the bottom that says "Not just a restriction for the government, but also a good idea." Maybe the caption would say something like "you are choosing to view a site that hosts user-submitted content where anyone can say anything -- welcome to the Internet!"
Unfortunately in business you are actively discouraged from having a spine because stupid people spend money too. There are lots of stupid, immature, melodramatic people who aren't man enough or woman enough to handle the concept that people will say things they dislike. These are not exactly philosophers. These are not people who want to better themselves, for example by seeing their useless melodrama as a problem and doing something to get rid of it. What they are is unreasonable people who are unlikely to see their unreasonableness as long as everyone in business and politics is bending over backwards to cater to them no matter how unreasonable they are.
There is one silver lining. Given the culture of this site, I am betting that most users understand what's wrong with censorship particularly when there is already a moderation system in place to deal with undesirable posts. I would not be the least bit surprised if it's just a small vocal minority of people who bitch and moan about nothing. The problem is that when IP addresses get banned over it, they are encouraged. It's just the opposite of how to deal with them.
At first this "Because there's obviously no sunlight in the body, this light-mill pulls its power from a laser run up through the center of the catheter." seemed rather silly. When you already have a cable why not use that to get all the power you want? But later on the articles mentions that blood vessels really don't like anything above one volt.
So by reading the fine article you answered your own question.
I know you were saying that tongue-in-cheek but you raised a good point. I thought I'd mention that since this is Slashdot after all, where finding something worthy in a humorous post makes people feel entitled to assume you didn't understand the humor...
The people need a safe outlet for their anger, and some remote math geeks should have been fair game.
I thought that's what national sports were for, not math geeks. It's the good old-fashioned "bread and circus" routine, used by generation after generation of rulers since ancient times for the simple reason that it works. Sports primarily appeal to men, providing a "safe" (for whom?) outlet for male aggression specifically, the sort that might otherwise get fed up with getting lied to and shafted every day by business and politics. Thanks to sports and mass media, millions of men can shout, scream, jump up and down, and get upset about something that really doesn't matter one way or the other, like which group of strangers who are overpaid athletes can most efficiently move a ball.
It's not The People, as in We The People, who need this outlet.
So stop.
And stop voting for the people that do as well.
There is no chance of that happening in the USA as long as the two major parties are the gatekeepers of federal elections. The "lesser of two evils" is still evil, and election after election of some kind of evil adds up to a lot of institutionalized evil.
What's an investiment bank?! I don't trust any large institution that can't spell worth beans.
Slashdot "editors" are not large institutions. They are individuals ultimately responsible for failing to perform the most basic quality checks for submissions, like this mistake that an automated spell-checker would have fixed. Really, even basic proofreading would not have been necessary in this case.
If the "editors" did their jobs in a relatively consistent manner I'd consider purchasing a paid subscription. As it stands, I don't get to be lazy at my job and therefore it would be unjust to reward the way they do theirs. Anyone remember the recent article about Plato in which an "editor" inserted a blatantly false and readily falsified statement about Aristotle? This is not exactly obscure material that would be difficult to verify.
In this job market where multitudes are desperately seeking work, I am sure there are many who would be happy to do better than the current staff.
For those who have no real concern for quality, my response is this: it's not that a spelling error is so terrible or offensive. It isn't. It's that it shows that they don't care. If they don't care enough to correct errors when the effort to do so approaches zero, why should I care? If I have no reason to care, why should I pay money?
I suppose it sounds like I am picking on Slashdot specifically. Really, they are just reflecting what has become a societal norm. That norm is the abandonment of "this is my craft, the satisfaction I get out of it is proportional to what I am willing to put into it, the quality of it matters to me even when no one is looking." That norm is the embracing of "it doesn't matter if I produce substandard and shoddy work as long as someone is willing to consume it."
Unless you want to receive a degree in science, or publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. In both scenarios you will face "gatekeepers" who have little to no interest in anything that deviates from mainstream consensus views.
Wow do you have no idea what you're talking about.
The way you make a big splash in science is to prove scientific 'conventional wisdom' wrong. Which means lots of fame and fortune for doing so. Nobody's going to stop you from actual ground-breaking research because your results would bring fame and fortune to the school/journal/etc.
On the other hand, there's thousands of crackpots who aren't getting published because their experiments suck. They immediately claim that some gatekeeper is blocking their amazing new discovery instead of fixing the holes in their science.
The real advancements are in terms of new, more complete and comprehensive theories to explain what we already know from experimental data that make new, testable/falsifiable predictions. That kind of "conventional wisdom" is what encounters so much resistance to anyone who challenges it.
To make the point, think back to the days of geocentrism vs. heliocentrism, when someone who suggested that the sun was the center of the solar system faced severe persecution. Both camps agreed that Planet A moves along Course Y, which would be akin to experimental or empirical data. One said it was because of a geocentric model and used epicycles to explain it, while the other used a heliocentric model to explain it. That is a matter of a willingness to entertain new ideas, what is called a paradigm. To cut to the quick of it, wrong theories can still produce accurate answers. Both heliocentrism and geocentrism could predict things like the next several solar eclipses, but one was wrong.
Eventually it was possible to prove for certain that one of those theories was wrong. Before that could actually be done, someone had to decide that there was a valid question and that searching for such proof was a task worthy of funding, effort, and time. If scientists "knew for sure" that heliocentrism "is just plain impossible, a heretical idea" then they wouldn't bother to look. They certainly wouldn't allow anyone who wanted to look to receive grants, to publish papers in respected journals, etc.
The fact that there are indeed crackpots does not mean that what I just described hasn't happened, isn't happening today, or won't happen in the future. Viewing it in that false way is known as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The fact of the matter is that real revolutions in science have come from individuals and small minorities who were ignored, ridiculed, and dismissed for being ahead of their time.
If you want to accuse me of not knowing what I am talking about, that's fine. It is you who missed my point and responded only to the lowest and least enlightened interpretation of it possible. I spoke in terms of philosophy and history and advancement, while you speak in terms of what brings fame and fortune and looks impressive in front of others. That's a shame for you. As for me, I was well aware that someone would do that when I posted.
That reminds me of when a friend of mine had just cleaned his 1911.45 and it was lying on the table. I asked him if I could see it and he said "sure, it's unloaded." I said "yes, it is loaded and there's one in the chamber, too." He smiled at that. Now, it really was unloaded and I inspected the chamber to verify it was empty. The point is even after doing that I still treated it as though it were loaded and cocked, keeping my fingers away from the trigger and pointing it in safe directions only. It's not so much a matter of whether or not it was likely to discharge as it clearly wasn't going to; it's about having a healthy respect for the power of such a device and treating it with a certain discipline. Doing otherwise is how foolish and tragic accidents happen.
Unless you want to receive a degree in science, or publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. In both scenarios you will face "gatekeepers" who have little to no interest in anything that deviates from mainstream consensus views. Oh and once you get that degree, if you want to be funded by grant money you again can't deviate too far from consensus views because you will be considered fringe and unworthy of funding.
Whether it was intended to do this or not, it's a system designed to preserve the status quo as much as possible and to ensure that it changes as slowly and gradually as possible. That's a good thing if you believe that "rocking the boat" is to be avoided at all costs, that society already has difficulty absorbing the rapid rate of technological advancement, etc. That's a bad thing if the next tremendous scientific advancement is delayed indefinitely because it would require questioning too many things that we think we "know".
In that sense it's very much like what the two-party system is doing to American politics, where "change" means "becoming more so" (whether it's Contract with America or Obama). I mean that as a poor analogy only, but I wish that both systems would be more honest about their worship of the status quo and their obsession with ensuring it does not deviate from its present course.
stupid slashdot html ruined that! That'll teach me not to use preview. if (bar_count LESS_THAN 3)....
Try "ampersand l t semicolon" for less-than and "ampersand g t semicolon" for greater-than, using no spaces and of course using the actual ampersand and semicolon symbols that i couldn't write here because they'd be interpreted. It will look <like this>
As you mentioned in your own post, vaccines are not very profitable for pharma companies, which is why 95% of the flu vaccine manufacturers have gotten out of the business.
Nothing like a very large spike in demand for your product to make that product more profitable. Bonus points if it's driven by fear and not by dispassionate inquiry.
And calling flu "the common flu" as if it's no more serious than a cold is disingenuous when it's one of the most deadly diseases in the world.
Here I was thinking the most deadly diseases in the world were things like heart disease and cancer. Though, I guess if you were intellectually honest about the real chance of an individual dying of influenza versus all other possible causes of death, you wouldn't get to use emotionally loaded terms like "most deadly in the world".
Reality check: influenza kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year worldwide. In the USA, influenza killed an average of about 41,400 people a year in the USA between 1979 and 2001 (source). Perhaps you should compare that to the number of people killed by car accidents each year in the USA alone for a refreshing dose of perspective. I assume you do still travel in motor vehicles despite how much more dangerous they are than what you have called "one of the most deadly diseases in the world".
Yes, it's "a personal choice" whether to vaccinate, just like drinking and driving (which kills far fewer people annually than flu) is a personal choice.
Nice of you to equate those two things. I guess I am supposed to accept that without question and, as you intended, transfer all the known evils of drunk driving to the act of choosing not to buy a vaccine. That'd be for the children, to fight terrorism, and all of that I am sure. Now that your emotionalism is out of the way, how about a bit of reason?
Tell me, if you accept a flu vaccine and I do not, and I then get the flu, what would you have to worry about? If the vaccine protects you from the strain of flu I have, you'd be immune to it. If the vaccine does not protect you from that strain of flu, we'd both stand a chance of getting it whether or not we took the vaccine. I'm failing to see a justification for the dangerous precedent of forcing people to take medicine against their will.
If influenza is so thoroughly polymorphic that my having the flu would be a danger to you even after you accepted the vaccine, then what good is the vaccine? In that case one person who gets flu anyway can re-infect the entire population and you're back to where you started.
Unlike drunk driving, this is a personal choice that remains personal. If my decision not to vaccinate can possibly endanger you in any way, it's because the vaccine is not terribly effective to begin with. Now here's a crazy idea: let's address all of these issues before we even think of making it mandatory for anyone.
At some point, though, people unwilling to be responsible members of society have to be dealt with somehow.
You're absolutely right. I can think of nothing more socially irresponsible than coming up with novel excuses for using force or fraud to make people do what they do not wish to do, or for telling them what they may or may not do with their own person. It leads to the type of society that our ancestors fought and died to prevent us from becoming. Equating a personal medical decision with drunk driving like you did there is a great example. It's intellectually dishonest and therefore falls under the "fraud" portion of "force or fraud".
How are you supposed to "go your own way" when Jesus teaches as a fact that people can be resurrected, and Aristotle teaches as a fact that the world is flat, is the center of universe, and that fossils spontaneously generate?
By understanding that anytime anyone tells you anything, you are hearing that one person's perception based on that one person's worldview until and unless objective fact and sound reasoning backs it up. Because the world is not flat, you will have no objective facts or sound reasoning to back up the proposition of the world being flat. It would forever remain that person's personal belief with no danger of convincing you of a lie.
That is true unless you possess the character defect of being impressed by someone's personality, fame, self-assuredness, or social status. Then you have no true self-hood and derive your identity from a world someone else has to describe for you. Then you make a virtual deity out of him in the sense that you consider his words to be beyond question. In the USA you're unusual if you don't do that with celebrities, athletes, politicians, and religious leaders. In the USA there are not many real individuals, just followers in various cults of personality.
Some things you can't investigate yourself, and when all the authorities lie to you, when every scientific book cites and expands upon these fantasies, you basically live in a sort of alternate-reality Matrix.
The only reason why an authority is an authority is because they can use some form of force or political power, usually the political power that comes with consensus and bandwagon appeal. Force and political power do not determine objective truth and never have. They are about obedience and acceptance of fashionable doctrine only.
While Plato's Cave might show you the door out, he immediately seals it with a pile of crap about "forms". Even robots need some good input.
Robots need to learn that being an automaton is not really in their nature and does not lead to true joy. Free independent thought is something of a birthright for us. This is evidenced by the tremendous effort, propaganda/advertising, indoctrination, and grand authority structures necessary to deprive people of it.
Of course authorities lie. It's in their nature. The kind of people who should have authority and could be trusted with it are the same kind of people who do not desire power over others. So what you get are the very worst kind of people being attracted to the most powerful positions of authority. They will create a legal, political, and social climate designed to protect that status quo. You don't need Plato or a cave to see this for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
So when do we all tighten?
Overnight it became a sudden trend for lots of people everywhere to make that typo. Now it's becoming rare again among lots of people. I hate to tell you this, but most people only think they have their own thoughts, habits, and mannerisms.
By the way, the new typo fad that lots of people are suddenly following is writing "where" instead of "were". If you're not so much of an individual and are easily influenced by your environment, then seeing this enough times will cause you to do it as well.
Pretty brutal. I searched to see if there was follow-up to the police beating. The person who was beaten, Duanna Johnson, was shot to death later the same year in Memphis. I wonder where the two cops in the beating video were on the night Johnson was shot? Here is a link to a follow-up story on the homicide.
In Stereo Where Available
the state's ticket revenues from traffic violations greatly exceed the state's ticket revenues from pedestrian violations. Therefore, they care a lot more about enforcing one than the other.
This might be true, but it's awfully cynical. If we were more charitable we could say "The public safety benefit in enforcing traffic violations greatly exceeds that of pedestrian violations."
If they cared so much about safety i.e. deterring the behaviors that actually cause traffic accidents, then "following too closely" and "failure to yield right-of-way" would be their top priorities for traffic tickets and speeding would be somewhere near the bottom. Also, performing a "rolling roadblock" by remaining in the passing lane without passing anyone and slow drivers who impede traffic would be prioritized above speeding, for it tempts other drivers to perform dangerous maneuvers to get around the clueless person who is in their way for no reason (right or wrong, this is what will happen). I don't expect you to take my word for it, so please research the national Department of Transportation's figures yourself.
The only bullshit part of it is that the fact you were arrested shows up on any criminal background check.
Uh, an unlawful arrest doesn't get deleted from your record? Wow. Just wow. I already had a low opinion of the USA, but I think it just dropped a few floors.
By default, no it does not. You can hire a lawyer at your own expense and pray that the judge will agree with you that it should be purged, but that's it.
On most employment applications, they ask if you have ever been arrested. If you say yes, there is a section where you can explain why and that'd be your chance to write "I was found not guilty" or "the charges were dropped" etc. But, you better believe that if an employer has two equally good applications except that one has such a statement, where the other was never arrested, the employer is going to favor the latter.
Many people have bought into authoritarian thought whether or not they are aware of it. Even if you were found not guilty, they will assume "well, he must have been doing SOMETHING wrong to get the attention of the authorities". The stigma of this is very real.
I have a tremendously low opinion of the USA myself. Somewhere along the line we embraced authoritarian philosophy and we no longer really believe in freedom. At best we believe in license, not freedom. Despite the tremendously long track record of abuses and excesses, we for some reason believe that our government represents us and always acts in our interests, so we let it have more power anytime it feels like acquiring it.
I believe that where we screwed up big-time was when we ever allowed the government to have any input whatsoever into how we educate our children. Take a hard look at our public schools. These are places where American citizens are threatened with suspension or expulsion for wearing a t-shirt of the American flag, since that might offend an immigrant. Places where kids are expelled for pointing a french fry at another student and saying "bang", since that violates a zero-tolerance rule about guns and violence. Places where a young girl can be forcibly strip-searched for having an aspirin or a Tylenol because that violates another zero-tolerance rule. We are throwing our children into an environment where authority can be as unreasonable and hypocritical as it likes, has a very low burden of proof if any, and can take drastic swift action with no appeal. When they grow up in that environment, they are likely to think it's normal when they see their government doing the same thing.
If you have children and give a damn about them, save them from this madness. I have a family member who is a hero in my eyes. Do you know why? Because he works three jobs and makes sacrifices so he can send all of his children to private school. He was careful to choose one that does not exhibit this kind of institutionalized madness. When he says he loves his children and cares about their well-being, he's willing to do whatever it takes to back that up with action. If only having that much of a spine were more common.
I'm a little surprised he didn't. I'm not an American, but if the cops arrest you with no reason don't you then turn around and sue them for false arrest? A few expensive lawsuits would probably convince whoever is in charge to train their police officers a little better.
When the judge is the guy that spends his Friday evening having beers with the dad of the cop who arrested you? Nah. Maybe things are different in the good ol' US of A but where I come from, cops look after their own. :/
I don't remember who said it, but I saw a great description of this right here on Slashdot.
"In the minds of police everywhere, there are three kinds of people: cops, cops' families, and suspects."
Be careful how you go about that. If you raise your hands out beyond a certain level, they will call that "flailing" and assume you are moving your hands in preparation for striking the officer. Then you're in for a world of hurt, both physically and legally. It's one of the bullshit tricks they use against people who give them a hard time, like questioning them too much. Right here, in the "land of the free."
An arrest record that might haunt you the rest of your life plus legal expenses is a rather Pyrrhic victory, to be sure.
If you want to do something about the police having excessive power, becoming a test case has to be one of the worst ways to do it. The best way is to take it up with your local/state legislators. Unlike the federal level, you actually have a chance of finding one who really does want to represent your interests. That, by the way, is one of many reasons why the Founding Fathers wanted most government that citizens experience to come from the local and state levels.
There's not a cop on Earth who wants to admit he unnecessarily used force, as it would open up his department to liability and effectively end his career.>
That's cute, you think cops are accountable to our laws.
I wish some people would address their reading comprehension issues prior to replying to me.
I detailed why they are not accountable. That's very much the opposite of claiming that they are accountable.
Yeah but driving is a different set of rules.
Driving is a privilege and therefore can be revoked at any time & any reason, even if no crime was committed.
That has nothing to do with a police officer's legal authority to detain you. "Driving is a privilege" is a matter between yourself and the state DMV that issued your license. It's the logic used to take away your license if you refuse a breathalyzer, a way to make sure that the Fifth Amendment protection against incriminating yourself does not apply to being charged with a DUI. It's like "free speech zones" in that it's a clever way to get around that pesky Constitution.
That being said, the purpose of a speeding ticket is not to take away your privilege to drive. It's to fine you for a violation. None of this is related to your normal right to move freely and associate or not associate with anyone of your choice (such as a police officer) being suspended because you have been detained. At least in my state, the police have the legal right to detain anyone for up to 48 hours for any reason or no reason at all, even if no charges are made. Thankfully they rarely use that power, but they certainly have it.
If you jaywalk or are drunk in public you better believe they can detain you in order to charge you with those violations. In that scenario, doing anything other than complying with the detention would be exceedingly foolish. That's exactly like when you are driving and speeding; they pull you over and detain you in order to charge you with that violation. It just so happens that you're much more likely to encounter a police officer when driving. That's both because you are covering more ground in the same amount of time and because the state's ticket revenues from traffic violations greatly exceed the state's ticket revenues from pedestrian violations. Therefore, they care a lot more about enforcing one than the other. Otherwise the same rules apply.
Spot on! This is exactly the way to deal with this. Test it, get arrested, document the whole process and manage to be professional enough about it so you arise the interest of main media journalists, PBS, BBC, etc. Expose, just like they do here, underlying causes, like top security acknowledging of the rights, and private security and local police involved in arbitrary and erratic behavior.
The result: big public embarrassment for those involved, instigating fear of the same for like-minded small-time tyrants doing this everywhere.
This is a job of public education and the two photographers involved here are doing the right, appropriate and efficient thing about it. My hat to them!
The only bullshit part of it is that the fact you were arrested shows up on any criminal background check. It's the kind of thing that could deny you employment in the future. Sure, you can explain why the arrest happened, and most management types will listen to your explanation and decide "he's an activist troublemaker who might rock the boat, a loose cannon" and throw your application in the trash. Of course it's unjust.
It's bullshit because a criminal background check should never show arrests. It should show convictions only. To do otherwise is a rejection of "innocent until proven guilty", as anyone can make an accusation. It doesn't mean you actually did anything. Why then should you bear a stigma that has to be explained to all future employers merely because a false accusation was made?
We like to say we believe in things like justice but we, collectively, don't act like it.
IANAL. Having said that ... Be careful about that. You can be detained without actually being under arrest. An example is when you are pulled over for a traffic ticket. You are not free to leave until the officer is done with you, yet you are usually not actually arrested. Yet if you tried to leave while still being detained, you're guaranteed to get arrested.
Worse: if a cop uses physical force against you, like mace, a taser, all the way up to a baton or a gun, and then does not charge you with resisting arrest, that cop is effectively admitting that he used force for no reason. That's aka excessive force or police brutality. There's not a cop on Earth who wants to admit he unnecessarily used force, as it would open up his department to liability and effectively end his career.
It's unfortunate that you generally cannot sue the officer personally. They have some sort of sovereign immunity as they are noncivilian government agents conducting government business. You can sue the department or the city/locality/state that runs the department but not the officer himself. Most of the time the very worst thing that can happen to the cop himself is that he loses his job, though it's more typical for him to receive a free paid vacation for misconduct (paid suspension).
The irony is that cops seem honestly puzzled about why so many people don't like them.
No, it's not.
But if you buy a subscription, then you get to preemptively compile first-post trolls which are actually relevant to the article and kick off massive flamewars. But purchase with care: Recently it seems that the Nazis have been aggresively banning my own and other troll i.p.'s.
I doubt Slashdot management cares one way or the other about anything legal you say. I've had correspondence with Mr. Malda and as far as I can tell, he has the thick skin you'd expect of anyone who runs this kind of site. The problem is that Slashdot management probably get floods of complaint e-mails from people who want Slashdot to assure their phony "right" to never be offended. If it were me running the site, I'd send a copy of the First Amendment to every person who writes in to complain about a troll or about anyone else who said something they don't like. Maybe it would have a caption at the bottom that says "Not just a restriction for the government, but also a good idea." Maybe the caption would say something like "you are choosing to view a site that hosts user-submitted content where anyone can say anything -- welcome to the Internet!"
Unfortunately in business you are actively discouraged from having a spine because stupid people spend money too. There are lots of stupid, immature, melodramatic people who aren't man enough or woman enough to handle the concept that people will say things they dislike. These are not exactly philosophers. These are not people who want to better themselves, for example by seeing their useless melodrama as a problem and doing something to get rid of it. What they are is unreasonable people who are unlikely to see their unreasonableness as long as everyone in business and politics is bending over backwards to cater to them no matter how unreasonable they are.
There is one silver lining. Given the culture of this site, I am betting that most users understand what's wrong with censorship particularly when there is already a moderation system in place to deal with undesirable posts. I would not be the least bit surprised if it's just a small vocal minority of people who bitch and moan about nothing. The problem is that when IP addresses get banned over it, they are encouraged. It's just the opposite of how to deal with them.
So by reading the fine article you answered your own question.
I thought that's what national sports were for, not math geeks. It's the good old-fashioned "bread and circus" routine, used by generation after generation of rulers since ancient times for the simple reason that it works. Sports primarily appeal to men, providing a "safe" (for whom?) outlet for male aggression specifically, the sort that might otherwise get fed up with getting lied to and shafted every day by business and politics. Thanks to sports and mass media, millions of men can shout, scream, jump up and down, and get upset about something that really doesn't matter one way or the other, like which group of strangers who are overpaid athletes can most efficiently move a ball.
It's not The People, as in We The People, who need this outlet.
So stop. And stop voting for the people that do as well.
There is no chance of that happening in the USA as long as the two major parties are the gatekeepers of federal elections. The "lesser of two evils" is still evil, and election after election of some kind of evil adds up to a lot of institutionalized evil.
What's an investiment bank?! I don't trust any large institution that can't spell worth beans.
Slashdot "editors" are not large institutions. They are individuals ultimately responsible for failing to perform the most basic quality checks for submissions, like this mistake that an automated spell-checker would have fixed. Really, even basic proofreading would not have been necessary in this case.
If the "editors" did their jobs in a relatively consistent manner I'd consider purchasing a paid subscription. As it stands, I don't get to be lazy at my job and therefore it would be unjust to reward the way they do theirs. Anyone remember the recent article about Plato in which an "editor" inserted a blatantly false and readily falsified statement about Aristotle? This is not exactly obscure material that would be difficult to verify.
In this job market where multitudes are desperately seeking work, I am sure there are many who would be happy to do better than the current staff.
For those who have no real concern for quality, my response is this: it's not that a spelling error is so terrible or offensive. It isn't. It's that it shows that they don't care. If they don't care enough to correct errors when the effort to do so approaches zero, why should I care? If I have no reason to care, why should I pay money?
I suppose it sounds like I am picking on Slashdot specifically. Really, they are just reflecting what has become a societal norm. That norm is the abandonment of "this is my craft, the satisfaction I get out of it is proportional to what I am willing to put into it, the quality of it matters to me even when no one is looking." That norm is the embracing of "it doesn't matter if I produce substandard and shoddy work as long as someone is willing to consume it."
Wow do you have no idea what you're talking about.
The way you make a big splash in science is to prove scientific 'conventional wisdom' wrong. Which means lots of fame and fortune for doing so. Nobody's going to stop you from actual ground-breaking research because your results would bring fame and fortune to the school/journal/etc.
On the other hand, there's thousands of crackpots who aren't getting published because their experiments suck. They immediately claim that some gatekeeper is blocking their amazing new discovery instead of fixing the holes in their science.
The real advancements are in terms of new, more complete and comprehensive theories to explain what we already know from experimental data that make new, testable/falsifiable predictions. That kind of "conventional wisdom" is what encounters so much resistance to anyone who challenges it.
To make the point, think back to the days of geocentrism vs. heliocentrism, when someone who suggested that the sun was the center of the solar system faced severe persecution. Both camps agreed that Planet A moves along Course Y, which would be akin to experimental or empirical data. One said it was because of a geocentric model and used epicycles to explain it, while the other used a heliocentric model to explain it. That is a matter of a willingness to entertain new ideas, what is called a paradigm. To cut to the quick of it, wrong theories can still produce accurate answers. Both heliocentrism and geocentrism could predict things like the next several solar eclipses, but one was wrong.
Eventually it was possible to prove for certain that one of those theories was wrong. Before that could actually be done, someone had to decide that there was a valid question and that searching for such proof was a task worthy of funding, effort, and time. If scientists "knew for sure" that heliocentrism "is just plain impossible, a heretical idea" then they wouldn't bother to look. They certainly wouldn't allow anyone who wanted to look to receive grants, to publish papers in respected journals, etc.
The fact that there are indeed crackpots does not mean that what I just described hasn't happened, isn't happening today, or won't happen in the future. Viewing it in that false way is known as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The fact of the matter is that real revolutions in science have come from individuals and small minorities who were ignored, ridiculed, and dismissed for being ahead of their time.
If you want to accuse me of not knowing what I am talking about, that's fine. It is you who missed my point and responded only to the lowest and least enlightened interpretation of it possible. I spoke in terms of philosophy and history and advancement, while you speak in terms of what brings fame and fortune and looks impressive in front of others. That's a shame for you. As for me, I was well aware that someone would do that when I posted.
All guns are always loaded.
That reminds me of when a friend of mine had just cleaned his 1911 .45 and it was lying on the table. I asked him if I could see it and he said "sure, it's unloaded." I said "yes, it is loaded and there's one in the chamber, too." He smiled at that. Now, it really was unloaded and I inspected the chamber to verify it was empty. The point is even after doing that I still treated it as though it were loaded and cocked, keeping my fingers away from the trigger and pointing it in safe directions only. It's not so much a matter of whether or not it was likely to discharge as it clearly wasn't going to; it's about having a healthy respect for the power of such a device and treating it with a certain discipline. Doing otherwise is how foolish and tragic accidents happen.
Unless you want to receive a degree in science, or publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. In both scenarios you will face "gatekeepers" who have little to no interest in anything that deviates from mainstream consensus views. Oh and once you get that degree, if you want to be funded by grant money you again can't deviate too far from consensus views because you will be considered fringe and unworthy of funding.
Whether it was intended to do this or not, it's a system designed to preserve the status quo as much as possible and to ensure that it changes as slowly and gradually as possible. That's a good thing if you believe that "rocking the boat" is to be avoided at all costs, that society already has difficulty absorbing the rapid rate of technological advancement, etc. That's a bad thing if the next tremendous scientific advancement is delayed indefinitely because it would require questioning too many things that we think we "know".
In that sense it's very much like what the two-party system is doing to American politics, where "change" means "becoming more so" (whether it's Contract with America or Obama). I mean that as a poor analogy only, but I wish that both systems would be more honest about their worship of the status quo and their obsession with ensuring it does not deviate from its present course.
Tell that to the guy who tried to produce the < and > symbols and couldn't get them to display correctly. Fortran or not-Fortran was his decision.
stupid slashdot html ruined that! That'll teach me not to use preview. if (bar_count LESS_THAN 3)....
Try "ampersand l t semicolon" for less-than and "ampersand g t semicolon" for greater-than, using no spaces and of course using the actual ampersand and semicolon symbols that i couldn't write here because they'd be interpreted. It will look <like this>
Will the customers of Apple and Microsoft in the USA also benefit from openness and interoperability?
Nothing like a very large spike in demand for your product to make that product more profitable. Bonus points if it's driven by fear and not by dispassionate inquiry.
Here I was thinking the most deadly diseases in the world were things like heart disease and cancer. Though, I guess if you were intellectually honest about the real chance of an individual dying of influenza versus all other possible causes of death, you wouldn't get to use emotionally loaded terms like "most deadly in the world".
Reality check: influenza kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year worldwide. In the USA, influenza killed an average of about 41,400 people a year in the USA between 1979 and 2001 (source). Perhaps you should compare that to the number of people killed by car accidents each year in the USA alone for a refreshing dose of perspective. I assume you do still travel in motor vehicles despite how much more dangerous they are than what you have called "one of the most deadly diseases in the world".
Nice of you to equate those two things. I guess I am supposed to accept that without question and, as you intended, transfer all the known evils of drunk driving to the act of choosing not to buy a vaccine. That'd be for the children, to fight terrorism, and all of that I am sure. Now that your emotionalism is out of the way, how about a bit of reason?
Tell me, if you accept a flu vaccine and I do not, and I then get the flu, what would you have to worry about? If the vaccine protects you from the strain of flu I have, you'd be immune to it. If the vaccine does not protect you from that strain of flu, we'd both stand a chance of getting it whether or not we took the vaccine. I'm failing to see a justification for the dangerous precedent of forcing people to take medicine against their will.
If influenza is so thoroughly polymorphic that my having the flu would be a danger to you even after you accepted the vaccine, then what good is the vaccine? In that case one person who gets flu anyway can re-infect the entire population and you're back to where you started.
Unlike drunk driving, this is a personal choice that remains personal. If my decision not to vaccinate can possibly endanger you in any way, it's because the vaccine is not terribly effective to begin with. Now here's a crazy idea: let's address all of these issues before we even think of making it mandatory for anyone.
You're absolutely right. I can think of nothing more socially irresponsible than coming up with novel excuses for using force or fraud to make people do what they do not wish to do, or for telling them what they may or may not do with their own person. It leads to the type of society that our ancestors fought and died to prevent us from becoming. Equating a personal medical decision with drunk driving like you did there is a great example. It's intellectually dishonest and therefore falls under the "fraud" portion of "force or fraud".
By understanding that anytime anyone tells you anything, you are hearing that one person's perception based on that one person's worldview until and unless objective fact and sound reasoning backs it up. Because the world is not flat, you will have no objective facts or sound reasoning to back up the proposition of the world being flat. It would forever remain that person's personal belief with no danger of convincing you of a lie.
That is true unless you possess the character defect of being impressed by someone's personality, fame, self-assuredness, or social status. Then you have no true self-hood and derive your identity from a world someone else has to describe for you. Then you make a virtual deity out of him in the sense that you consider his words to be beyond question. In the USA you're unusual if you don't do that with celebrities, athletes, politicians, and religious leaders. In the USA there are not many real individuals, just followers in various cults of personality.
The only reason why an authority is an authority is because they can use some form of force or political power, usually the political power that comes with consensus and bandwagon appeal. Force and political power do not determine objective truth and never have. They are about obedience and acceptance of fashionable doctrine only.
Robots need to learn that being an automaton is not really in their nature and does not lead to true joy. Free independent thought is something of a birthright for us. This is evidenced by the tremendous effort, propaganda/advertising, indoctrination, and grand authority structures necessary to deprive people of it.
Of course authorities lie. It's in their nature. The kind of people who should have authority and could be trusted with it are the same kind of people who do not desire power over others. So what you get are the very worst kind of people being attracted to the most powerful positions of authority. They will create a legal, political, and social climate designed to protect that status quo. You don't need Plato or a cave to see this for yourself.