"Except in paying them for the service you agree to the terms of service, which in turn gives Blizzard the right to terminate service should the terms be violated." And my point is that if a customer does not have the choice to get the 'product' from another source (because other people are artificially restricted from providing the 'product') then Blizzard should not be allowed to present 'terms of service' in order to get the product.
"Players do have the right to terminate their service with Blizzard and seek it elsewhere. However, Blizzard is the only one who offers WoW service. You have the right to choose, but you can either choose Blizzard or no service." If no-one else offers WoW service because Blizzard's lawyers jump on anyone else who starts offering WoW service, how are people free to seek service elsewhere? 'Blizzard's rules or no Wow' is not a choice as to who's rules you play WoW under.
"Multiple services would likely not deter jerks either. In fact, it would possibly only encourage them. "Company X does Y with WoW, why doesn't Blizzard?" If there was a service that allowed botting or other "jerkish" activities, there would inevitably be players moving to Blizzard's service and repeating these behaviors." And I'd have no problem with Blizzard coming down on them like a ton of Bricks. Blizzard has every right to set the rules for their community Provided that people have the choice to go elsewhere for the same or similar service (playing a different MMOG is not 'same or similar'). You can live in the United States if you agree to the rules, or you can live in Canada. In both cases you get to do the same activity ('live') but in a slightly different way ('drive an SUV, eat MacDonald every day & use the bathroom' or 'cut down trees, eat ma lunch & go to the lava-tory'). Also, in this example, although the Canadians may not let you in, the United States (a) won't stop you leaving and (b) won't try to stop Canada existing.
I think every schoolchild in the world would be eternally grateful if Shakespeare had only written two or three plays.
[After getting an autograph, Blackadder floors Shakespeare with a right cross.] Blackadder: That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next 400 years. Do you have any idea how much suffering you're going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night's Dream? Years wearing stupid tights in school plays saying things like "What ho, my Lord!" and "Oh, here comes Othello talking total crap as usual...". Oh, and...
[Blackadder kicks Shakespeare's shin.] Blackadder: That is for Ken Branagh's endless, uncut, four-hour version of Hamlet!
Shakespeare: Who's Ken Branagh?
Blackadder: I'll tell him you said that. And I think he'll be very hurt.
electricity costs $1million. You pay the people who run the electricity company $100,000 (which is more than they would see from profit in their bonus/dividend/paypacket from you spending $1million on the electricity). You can now magically buy the electricity for $500,000. Total cost: $600,000; Total saving: $400,000. Everyone else collectively pays $500,000 between them to balance the books and keep the Christmas Bonus as fat as last year. Company board is up $100,000 in bribe money, you're up $400,000 in savings, everyone else is down $500,000 to make up for it.
You and the board are (hopefully) laughing all the way to the jail, er, bank.
Someone who has paid for WoW has a 'right' to play it without Blizzard trying to coerce them into playing only by Blizzard's rules. Indeed Blizzard should have the right to set the rules in their game world as long as users have the right to terminate their playing in Blizzard's world without terminating playing WoW altogether. Currently Blizzard has nothing to discourage them from being jerks with their rules because people who still wish to play WoW in some fashion do not have a choice to leave.
no, but most parks aren't private property. The point is that you have the option to take part in someone's event or to do the same activity elsewhere. If you don't like the rules of an athletics meet you can go run elsewhere. If you don't like the rules of your local laser quest you can set up your own (you can't call it laser quest, but the actual game will be identical). If you don't like the rules for Blizzard's WoW servers you can't set up your own. You can play another MMO but that's not doing the same activity (everquest != WoW).
I have no statistics to back up "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW" being seen as unfair. But I see it as unfair, unreasonable and downright outrageous, and that should be good enough for slashdot.
"play WoW or never play a (mmo) computer game again" is equivalent to "submit to drugs testing for this cross-country race, or never take part in any track & field events ever again". Obviously unfair, agreed. But wouldn't "submit to drugs testing for this cross-country race or never be allowed to run more than 500m in one stint anywhere ever again" (the equivalent of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW") look just a tad unreasonable. The Football Association may ban people from playing in FA sponsored events, it may not ban people from kicking a ball.
important to note the difference from the sport example. Drug tests are an invasion of privacy. Athletes may refuse drug tests. Sports governing bodies may refuse entry to a competition. This does not prevent the athlete from taking part in the sport. Cross-country runners who won't submit to a drugs test can still run around a park with a stopwatch. On the other hand, there is only one place to play WoW - Blizzard's servers and since Blizzard refuses to let other people run servers (AFAIK - I don't actually play WoW) they've got no business being arbitrary with regards to what people are allowed to do on them. (Unilaterally making rules, but enforcing them evenly is still arbitrary). Don't try to deliberately make yourself the only source for doing X activity if you want to make the rules about how it's done. You don't have the choice of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or go elsewhere" you have the choice of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW" - I think this strikes most people as unfair.
right, but the only reason that this is getting into a federal court is that the federal government directly gives funds to the SFPD for anti terrorist purposes, and now claims that it owns 5% of the police cruiser, so can become involved in the case.
Any reasonable person can see that this is not a federal matter, that it should be 'tried' (it's at grand jury stage) in a California court and that California's shield law should therefore apply.
and if people just refuse to buy the product, they'll but legislation that gives them a hefty subsidy to 'protect a core intellectual property industry'. Meaning we all pay, but now don't get a product either. Ah corruption - can't beat it (literally).
maybe he weighed up the the chance of getting punished under the applicable law (the computer misuse act 1990) and decided that it was worth the risk (the highest penalty proscribed anywhere in the act is 5 years). What's happened here is that laws which he (rightly) assumed did not apply to him are now being applied to him for political ends and that he's being extradited under new extradition laws which didn't exist at the time. It wouldn't be possible to retroactively prosecute him, but seems to be possible to retroactively apply a lower standard before deciding to extradite.
I'm not aware of a cliche which says "do the crime in your country, get sold out into doing more time under stricter laws in a foreign country" It's an absolutely apalling shame on Britain that rather than standing up for our citizens when foreign governments want to victimise them under unjust laws (which are being questionably applied) we instead deliberately sell them out.
no, my point was that when your defence counsel asks you a question, the answer to which would not be self-incriminating, you have to answer.
"So, Mr. Smith, have you had any contact from the NSA during the last year?"
"Yes I have"
"And what did they contact you with regards to?"
"They wanted me to set up 100,000 wiretaps for them"
"Did this concern you in any way?"
"Yes, but I was told that I had no choice but to comply"
"No choice? by what means did they remove your choice as to wether to comply?"
"A national security letter"
[defence attorney subpeonas national security letter from defendant]
The only way to cut this line of questioning off would have been for 'Mr Smith' to have denied having ever been contacted by the NSA, which would be perjury.
I would be very surprised if you could be prosecuted for a necessary action taken to comply with a court order. (The court order in this case being, 'answer the question'). Mostly because it would be the same courts who would have to convict you. On the other hand, it wouldn't stop you being disappeared to gitmo.
I'd agree, I cycle a bike everyday and wouldn't put a dynamo on it. See, the difference with a dynamo on your bike is that you're not tapping energy that would otherwise be wasted, you're sapping the energy that should be going towards moving you between A & B. Sticking a dynamo on an excercise bike may not be such a bad idea, but slowing yourself down to squeeze a few joules into your phone is just silly.
well, if they feel constrained to hand out morally indefensible penalties under the guise of 'statutory damages' and don't feel that they should be speaking out about it, they should be resigning. "I was just doing my job" hasn't been a valid excuse since 1946.
lack of spare parts - knowing how the engine works can't make up for the absence of sufficiently advanced manufacturing technology to actually make new parts for it. But you can bet that if someone got the spare parts to the Iranian engineers, they could fix the planes with them. Heck, it's believed that when they did still have a few F14s flying it was because they cannibalised parts out of other F14s and I'm not hearing anyone suggesting that the expertise to make cannibalised aircraft came about through anything other than the Iranians learning how the aircraft work themselves.
Unless you built all the original stuff yourself, it's unlikely that you can make new bits even if you have official blueprints (see Saturn V rocket).
Conclusion: Knowing how something works is not the same as being able to manufacture it yourself. Also, there probably are a few blackbox bits in aircraft, like the exact makeup of various alloys.
my project at uni uses; the Hot Potato Stepping Algorithm Utilising Contiguous Expansion. What's the point of inventing something if you can't manufacture a funny acronym to name it with? Interestingly enough, if you have a hot potato, you may like to put some HPSAUCE on it.
On a completely unrelated note, I'm constantly impressed that missions intended to do one thing (land on a comet) get hijacked to snap a few photos of this or that completely unrelated bit of the solar system whilst they're passing by on their way. Did cassini take some photos of Venus? It snapped lots of photos of Saturns moons. One of the voyagers took a photo of earth from just past Jupiter. Hubble gets used to photograph mars. IIRC they've shoe-horned one mars probe into grabbing data from a lander it wasn't designed to grab data from when it's own mother-probe broke. Considering that weight is so limited on these things, it's quite impressive that they manage to get them to do so many extra little bits.
so your argument is that we should reconsider allowing students the right to say insulting and hurtful things as free speech because they choose to exercise that more than any other section of society? ("you can only have rights so long as you don't use them").
If they're using the school internet then the school can regulate it with school rules, you don't need laws for that (other than to make the school rules legal, but that doesn't raise the severity of the issue as making the action criminally illegal would). If they're using their own internet then the school can keep it's nose out of it. If it is illegal that's a learning experience for bullies - mollycoddling them into thinking that anything they do, ever, will only be a breach of the school rules does not discourage them from doing it. On the other hand if it's not illegal then it's a learning experience for the 'victim' that nanny school rules won't always be there to protect them.
if death threats are illegal anyway, you don't need new laws. If death threats aren't illegal anyway, why should they suddenly become illegal for the specific case of them being propagated through the internet?
agreed - the President's kids don't necessarily support their parent's policies and shouldn't be forced to go and risk their lives to support them. That's a greater violation of their human rights than a draft ("yeah, we're drafting you & you as a bargaining chip against your parent"). Heck, it's no better than kidnapping the leader of a country's kids and holding them to ransom until national policy changes and, for added fun, every day you throw 5 dice and if you get 5 sixes, they get killed.
no, I want to bring a taser to deal with a man wielding a big sword or an air rifle. With nothing between baton and gun, when the police find someone carrying a sword, they almost always end of having to shoot them and have managed to kill the swordsman in the process several times (which isn't strictly necessary since, to stop someone with a sword, you need only shoot their shins, stopping them advancing on you). With a taser you don't have to shoot the man with a sword - you stun him from 12 feet away and then take the sword, and nobody uses particularly lethal force.
Can you tell the difference between a violent person and a nonviolent person? I can't.
Yeah, the one in a position to and attempting to hit me is the violent one, the one lying on the floor refusing to move is the nonviolent one.
Cops are using the threat of taser as a means of getting people to cooperate WITHOUT resorting to physical force that could harm both the officer and the individual.
COULD harm the individual as opposed to using the taser which WILL harm the individual but greater shields the officer from the minor risk of injury posed by 6 burly men trying to move one student. An inherent risk in taking the job of police officer is that you might get hurt doing your job, so I don't see a tradeoff which means that the public (who didn't sign up to be police officers) get hurt more so the police get hurt less as a fair one.
I don't get it. I read that all the way through and what you referenced isn't in there (indeed, it seems to have been written about 2 years ago, before this incident), so I'll just have to address your points as if it's you making them
From what I can put together the student was in the library after hours without ID. In order to be lawfully in the library after a certain time a student must be able to produce ID. A University library is allowed to lawfully restrict access by employing reasonable rules and regulations. I think it is pretty reasonable to limit library access to students with ID after 11pm.
I don't - why would keeping people who, (not possesing a university ID card,) may or may not be students out during off-peak hours make sense?
The student apparently wanted to protest this policy and chose to do so by violating it.
A quite well established method of demonstrating the stupidity of a bad policy.
When asked for ID he refused to produced it and refused to leave the library.
When told to by who? when a minor busy-body tells you to do something, is it unreasonable to consider whether that person is overstepping their authority? (for instance, if I tell you to run out of your house singing 'tie me kangeroo down sport' right now, should you immediately comply just incase it is actually within my authority to tell you to do that?)
At that time he probably was considered to be tresspassing under applicable state law. The student cop called the real cops who showed up to arrest him for violating that law. But, when the real cops showed up he then decided he should leave because he didn't want to be arrested.
Possibly, possibly not, but since when the real police arrived he went to leave, the opportunity to resolve the situation sensibly was available (he's out of the library, point made, nobody arrested, everybody's happy), instead, the police chose to unnecessarily escalate the situation.
He got up from his seat, ignored the officer's orders to stop, and attempted to leave the library.
So he complied with the initial instructions, albeit late
Because he had already committed a crime (and their was probable cause he did), the police had every right to arrest and detain him. I guess your average UCLA student isn't educated enough to know that you can't break the law and then make everything OK by simply leaving (it's as silly as saying "sorry for robbing your bank - her is the cash back and we will call it even.")
They may have had every right to arrest him, they didn't have every right to assault him in the process, which is the point at issue. There is a difference between 'breaking the law and making everything ok by leaving' and 'being told to leave and, when you've esta
The taser exists to subdue dangerous of violent people who the police officer is unable to deal with without weapons. It does not exist for 6 officers to use it as a tool to coerce someone who is lying on the floor into standing up.
I'm not sure what the case is with stuff that comes with an invoice, but in the UK you can already keep anything sent to you unsolicited (as in stuff addressed to you, yuo can't keep your neighbour's mis-delivered amazon order) without being told that you'll be charged for it. If it comes with an invoice, you probably can't keep it, but it should only cost you the time to write "return to sender" on the package and drop it back in a post box to send it back.
It's like trying to demand a letter or the value of the paper & ink back, only the letter is worth more.
Slashdot Mirror
They won't - it'll be The World Organization for Human Rights China that does that.
ah, Prof. Schrödinger, welcome to Slashdot.
I believe you've hit the nail on the head for me
"Except in paying them for the service you agree to the terms of service, which in turn gives Blizzard the right to terminate service should the terms be violated."
And my point is that if a customer does not have the choice to get the 'product' from another source (because other people are artificially restricted from providing the 'product') then Blizzard should not be allowed to present 'terms of service' in order to get the product.
"Players do have the right to terminate their service with Blizzard and seek it elsewhere. However, Blizzard is the only one who offers WoW service. You have the right to choose, but you can either choose Blizzard or no service."
If no-one else offers WoW service because Blizzard's lawyers jump on anyone else who starts offering WoW service, how are people free to seek service elsewhere? 'Blizzard's rules or no Wow' is not a choice as to who's rules you play WoW under.
"Multiple services would likely not deter jerks either. In fact, it would possibly only encourage them. "Company X does Y with WoW, why doesn't Blizzard?" If there was a service that allowed botting or other "jerkish" activities, there would inevitably be players moving to Blizzard's service and repeating these behaviors."
And I'd have no problem with Blizzard coming down on them like a ton of Bricks. Blizzard has every right to set the rules for their community Provided that people have the choice to go elsewhere for the same or similar service (playing a different MMOG is not 'same or similar'). You can live in the United States if you agree to the rules, or you can live in Canada. In both cases you get to do the same activity ('live') but in a slightly different way ('drive an SUV, eat MacDonald every day & use the bathroom' or 'cut down trees, eat ma lunch & go to the lava-tory'). Also, in this example, although the Canadians may not let you in, the United States (a) won't stop you leaving and (b) won't try to stop Canada existing.
I think every schoolchild in the world would be eternally grateful if Shakespeare had only written two or three plays.
[After getting an autograph, Blackadder floors Shakespeare with a right cross.]
Blackadder: That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next 400 years. Do you have any idea how much suffering you're going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night's Dream? Years wearing stupid tights in school plays saying things like "What ho, my Lord!" and "Oh, here comes Othello talking total crap as usual...". Oh, and...
[Blackadder kicks Shakespeare's shin.]
Blackadder: That is for Ken Branagh's endless, uncut, four-hour version of Hamlet!
Shakespeare: Who's Ken Branagh?
Blackadder: I'll tell him you said that. And I think he'll be very hurt.
-Blackadder Back & Forth
it's a bribe - it'll be going straight to the Cayman Islands and won't be declared on tax - let's not complicate my example here.
electricity costs $1million. You pay the people who run the electricity company $100,000 (which is more than they would see from profit in their bonus/dividend/paypacket from you spending $1million on the electricity). You can now magically buy the electricity for $500,000. Total cost: $600,000; Total saving: $400,000. Everyone else collectively pays $500,000 between them to balance the books and keep the Christmas Bonus as fat as last year. Company board is up $100,000 in bribe money, you're up $400,000 in savings, everyone else is down $500,000 to make up for it.
You and the board are (hopefully) laughing all the way to the jail, er, bank.
Someone who has paid for WoW has a 'right' to play it without Blizzard trying to coerce them into playing only by Blizzard's rules. Indeed Blizzard should have the right to set the rules in their game world as long as users have the right to terminate their playing in Blizzard's world without terminating playing WoW altogether. Currently Blizzard has nothing to discourage them from being jerks with their rules because people who still wish to play WoW in some fashion do not have a choice to leave.
no, but most parks aren't private property. The point is that you have the option to take part in someone's event or to do the same activity elsewhere. If you don't like the rules of an athletics meet you can go run elsewhere. If you don't like the rules of your local laser quest you can set up your own (you can't call it laser quest, but the actual game will be identical). If you don't like the rules for Blizzard's WoW servers you can't set up your own. You can play another MMO but that's not doing the same activity (everquest != WoW).
I have no statistics to back up "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW" being seen as unfair. But I see it as unfair, unreasonable and downright outrageous, and that should be good enough for slashdot.
"play WoW or never play a (mmo) computer game again" is equivalent to "submit to drugs testing for this cross-country race, or never take part in any track & field events ever again". Obviously unfair, agreed. But wouldn't "submit to drugs testing for this cross-country race or never be allowed to run more than 500m in one stint anywhere ever again" (the equivalent of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW") look just a tad unreasonable. The Football Association may ban people from playing in FA sponsored events, it may not ban people from kicking a ball.
important to note the difference from the sport example. Drug tests are an invasion of privacy. Athletes may refuse drug tests. Sports governing bodies may refuse entry to a competition. This does not prevent the athlete from taking part in the sport. Cross-country runners who won't submit to a drugs test can still run around a park with a stopwatch.
On the other hand, there is only one place to play WoW - Blizzard's servers and since Blizzard refuses to let other people run servers (AFAIK - I don't actually play WoW) they've got no business being arbitrary with regards to what people are allowed to do on them. (Unilaterally making rules, but enforcing them evenly is still arbitrary).
Don't try to deliberately make yourself the only source for doing X activity if you want to make the rules about how it's done. You don't have the choice of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or go elsewhere" you have the choice of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW" - I think this strikes most people as unfair.
right, but the only reason that this is getting into a federal court is that the federal government directly gives funds to the SFPD for anti terrorist purposes, and now claims that it owns 5% of the police cruiser, so can become involved in the case.
Any reasonable person can see that this is not a federal matter, that it should be 'tried' (it's at grand jury stage) in a California court and that California's shield law should therefore apply.
and if people just refuse to buy the product, they'll but legislation that gives them a hefty subsidy to 'protect a core intellectual property industry'. Meaning we all pay, but now don't get a product either. Ah corruption - can't beat it (literally).
maybe he weighed up the the chance of getting punished under the applicable law (the computer misuse act 1990) and decided that it was worth the risk (the highest penalty proscribed anywhere in the act is 5 years).
What's happened here is that laws which he (rightly) assumed did not apply to him are now being applied to him for political ends and that he's being extradited under new extradition laws which didn't exist at the time. It wouldn't be possible to retroactively prosecute him, but seems to be possible to retroactively apply a lower standard before deciding to extradite.
I'm not aware of a cliche which says "do the crime in your country, get sold out into doing more time under stricter laws in a foreign country"
It's an absolutely apalling shame on Britain that rather than standing up for our citizens when foreign governments want to victimise them under unjust laws (which are being questionably applied) we instead deliberately sell them out.
no, my point was that when your defence counsel asks you a question, the answer to which would not be self-incriminating, you have to answer.
"So, Mr. Smith, have you had any contact from the NSA during the last year?"
"Yes I have"
"And what did they contact you with regards to?"
"They wanted me to set up 100,000 wiretaps for them"
"Did this concern you in any way?"
"Yes, but I was told that I had no choice but to comply"
"No choice? by what means did they remove your choice as to wether to comply?"
"A national security letter"
[defence attorney subpeonas national security letter from defendant]
The only way to cut this line of questioning off would have been for 'Mr Smith' to have denied having ever been contacted by the NSA, which would be perjury.
I would be very surprised if you could be prosecuted for a necessary action taken to comply with a court order. (The court order in this case being, 'answer the question'). Mostly because it would be the same courts who would have to convict you. On the other hand, it wouldn't stop you being disappeared to gitmo.
I'd agree, I cycle a bike everyday and wouldn't put a dynamo on it. See, the difference with a dynamo on your bike is that you're not tapping energy that would otherwise be wasted, you're sapping the energy that should be going towards moving you between A & B. Sticking a dynamo on an excercise bike may not be such a bad idea, but slowing yourself down to squeeze a few joules into your phone is just silly.
well, if they feel constrained to hand out morally indefensible penalties under the guise of 'statutory damages' and don't feel that they should be speaking out about it, they should be resigning. "I was just doing my job" hasn't been a valid excuse since 1946.
lack of spare parts - knowing how the engine works can't make up for the absence of sufficiently advanced manufacturing technology to actually make new parts for it. But you can bet that if someone got the spare parts to the Iranian engineers, they could fix the planes with them. Heck, it's believed that when they did still have a few F14s flying it was because they cannibalised parts out of other F14s and I'm not hearing anyone suggesting that the expertise to make cannibalised aircraft came about through anything other than the Iranians learning how the aircraft work themselves.
Unless you built all the original stuff yourself, it's unlikely that you can make new bits even if you have official blueprints (see Saturn V rocket).
Conclusion: Knowing how something works is not the same as being able to manufacture it yourself. Also, there probably are a few blackbox bits in aircraft, like the exact makeup of various alloys.
my project at uni uses; the Hot Potato Stepping Algorithm Utilising Contiguous Expansion. What's the point of inventing something if you can't manufacture a funny acronym to name it with? Interestingly enough, if you have a hot potato, you may like to put some HPSAUCE on it.
On a completely unrelated note, I'm constantly impressed that missions intended to do one thing (land on a comet) get hijacked to snap a few photos of this or that completely unrelated bit of the solar system whilst they're passing by on their way. Did cassini take some photos of Venus? It snapped lots of photos of Saturns moons. One of the voyagers took a photo of earth from just past Jupiter. Hubble gets used to photograph mars. IIRC they've shoe-horned one mars probe into grabbing data from a lander it wasn't designed to grab data from when it's own mother-probe broke. Considering that weight is so limited on these things, it's quite impressive that they manage to get them to do so many extra little bits.
so your argument is that we should reconsider allowing students the right to say insulting and hurtful things as free speech because they choose to exercise that more than any other section of society? ("you can only have rights so long as you don't use them").
If they're using the school internet then the school can regulate it with school rules, you don't need laws for that (other than to make the school rules legal, but that doesn't raise the severity of the issue as making the action criminally illegal would). If they're using their own internet then the school can keep it's nose out of it. If it is illegal that's a learning experience for bullies - mollycoddling them into thinking that anything they do, ever, will only be a breach of the school rules does not discourage them from doing it. On the other hand if it's not illegal then it's a learning experience for the 'victim' that nanny school rules won't always be there to protect them.
if death threats are illegal anyway, you don't need new laws. If death threats aren't illegal anyway, why should they suddenly become illegal for the specific case of them being propagated through the internet?
agreed - the President's kids don't necessarily support their parent's policies and shouldn't be forced to go and risk their lives to support them. That's a greater violation of their human rights than a draft ("yeah, we're drafting you & you as a bargaining chip against your parent"). Heck, it's no better than kidnapping the leader of a country's kids and holding them to ransom until national policy changes and, for added fun, every day you throw 5 dice and if you get 5 sixes, they get killed.
no, I want to bring a taser to deal with a man wielding a big sword or an air rifle. With nothing between baton and gun, when the police find someone carrying a sword, they almost always end of having to shoot them and have managed to kill the swordsman in the process several times (which isn't strictly necessary since, to stop someone with a sword, you need only shoot their shins, stopping them advancing on you). With a taser you don't have to shoot the man with a sword - you stun him from 12 feet away and then take the sword, and nobody uses particularly lethal force.
Yeah, the one in a position to and attempting to hit me is the violent one, the one lying on the floor refusing to move is the nonviolent one.
COULD harm the individual as opposed to using the taser which WILL harm the individual but greater shields the officer from the minor risk of injury posed by 6 burly men trying to move one student. An inherent risk in taking the job of police officer is that you might get hurt doing your job, so I don't see a tradeoff which means that the public (who didn't sign up to be police officers) get hurt more so the police get hurt less as a fair one.
I don't get it. I read that all the way through and what you referenced isn't in there (indeed, it seems to have been written about 2 years ago, before this incident), so I'll just have to address your points as if it's you making them
I don't - why would keeping people who, (not possesing a university ID card,) may or may not be students out during off-peak hours make sense?
A quite well established method of demonstrating the stupidity of a bad policy.
When told to by who? when a minor busy-body tells you to do something, is it unreasonable to consider whether that person is overstepping their authority? (for instance, if I tell you to run out of your house singing 'tie me kangeroo down sport' right now, should you immediately comply just incase it is actually within my authority to tell you to do that?)
Possibly, possibly not, but since when the real police arrived he went to leave, the opportunity to resolve the situation sensibly was available (he's out of the library, point made, nobody arrested, everybody's happy), instead, the police chose to unnecessarily escalate the situation.
So he complied with the initial instructions, albeit late
They may have had every right to arrest him, they didn't have every right to assault him in the process, which is the point at issue. There is a difference between 'breaking the law and making everything ok by leaving' and 'being told to leave and, when you've esta
The taser exists to subdue dangerous of violent people who the police officer is unable to deal with without weapons. It does not exist for 6 officers to use it as a tool to coerce someone who is lying on the floor into standing up.
I'm not sure what the case is with stuff that comes with an invoice, but in the UK you can already keep anything sent to you unsolicited (as in stuff addressed to you, yuo can't keep your neighbour's mis-delivered amazon order) without being told that you'll be charged for it. If it comes with an invoice, you probably can't keep it, but it should only cost you the time to write "return to sender" on the package and drop it back in a post box to send it back.
It's like trying to demand a letter or the value of the paper & ink back, only the letter is worth more.