"Other than bragging about my uber-cool great grandfather, I am also trying to make a point... I think that people who have lean toward technical things don't get future shock... I think that people who learn the basics to get by become people who use current (to their generation) technology like an appliace, and new technology scares them. I think the same will be true in the next generation... Those in the technical industries will be "cool... I want one of those" and the people in other fields will look at the gadgets and go "What is this? How does it work? I think I broke it.""
That's not future-shock - that's just a crap system design.
Forty years ago computers were huge things the size of a room, broke al lthe time and took dozens of skilled operators to keep them running.
These days the "average" computer (remember: including embedded devices/phones/appliances/cars, etc) is small, almost a commodity item, runs reliably for pretty much its whole life and requires one or even nobody to administrate it.
Forty years ago large-scale internetworked computerised systems didn't exist. Today they're where "computers" were in the 60s. Technology improves with time - this isn't a symptom of future-shock.
In addition I've worked in offices without a single computer in them, and their (entirely paper-based) processes were ten times stupider and more frustrating than even the most recalcitrant computer system I've used. Stupidity of design != Future Shock.
"I can cope with everything else, but I'll be damned before I'll accept that my only contact with friends and family may some day be a messaging service. In fact, it's not even about the society's ability to cope with technology, it's about the human being's ability to cope with the insertion of a bit of silicon between him and his fellow humans. That, I cannot deal with."
Randomised paranoia about possible future shock != Future shock, either.;-)
"In an age where we have to go to school longer and longer to acquire the skills for the technical and academic jobs, you honestly think that the ages are getting younger and younger?"
Right. And before the 1990s and the dot-com boom, how many under-25s were self-made millionaires?
I don't recall many pubescent Industrialists and Railroad Barons in the 1880s.
And how many bright people drop out of college to pursue their own agenda? Look up the figures - in many western countries (including the USA) highschools and colleges are haemmorhaging students.
Just because those who still subscribe to the traditional system of education->university->job->success have to study for longer, that doesn't negate the fact that increasing numbers of kids are simply short-circuiting the whole process.
"Oh, wait, these kids grow up with computers. I forgot. What a technical wonder it is to run Windows. I often have to teach my kids how to do certain things on the computer that goes beyond surfing a web page. And these are teenagers."
Congratulations - your kids are signally uninterested in technology. In the hypothetical future society we're talking about they will either be paupers or housepets.
But seriously - sure, millions of kids don't know how to do anything but swap MP3s, pirate games and post to their LiveJournals. But you know what? My parents wouldn't even know what "a LiveJournal" was, and my Granny doesn't even understand that it's possible to have "records on her computer", let alone how to rip MP3s, download and install LimeWire or Azureus and start sharing them with people all over the world... but half the kids I know do.
My point is that while a single carefully-chosen adult is almost better than a kid at a given technological subject, kids internalise and mass-adopt tedhnology with a speed that makes the average adult blink in confusion.
In non-technical (ie, 99.9% of the population) families, is it normally the kids or the parents who:
1. Spend more time on-line? 2. Know how to use all the functions on their mobile phone/camera/video/MP3 player/calendar/watch/gaming device? 3. Get called in to set the VCR time when the power goes? 4. Have a blog (inc. MySpace, LiveJournal, etc, etc, etc)?
When adults as a group adopt new technology as quickly as kids do, then I'll believe you've got a point.
And just to clarify, since you obviously didn't get it the first time around: I was exaggerating for comic effect when I was talking about "pre-pubescent teens" - obviously we're talking about 18-early 20s here, since this is the widely-recognised "sweet spot" between your youthful increased ability to learn and worldly-wise experience (which only comes with age).
"But it's true - the older generation might be a little lost when it comes to myspace or whatever the next fad is."
Right, but when the fad is the internet, digital media and mass-participation, it's a big deal.
Crowdsourcing, the rise of the internet and the increasing "digitalisation" of our culture means that even now governments are worrying about providing laptops to every child and getting internet access for all - if it's considered by them to be on par with the other things they try to ensure for all (you know - clean water, food, air, shelter and health) then doesn't that suggest your characterising the lot as "myspace and the latest fad" might be a teensy weensy bit dismissive?
"BTWo, it's not a matter of "keeping up", it's a matter of ignoring/blocking more and more irrevelant information in your life. The signal to noise ratio is growing ever higher. I can spend time keeping up with the news, but 99% of that is a waste of time, especially since I'm not a politician. So it is with/., u
To be honest, I think it'll ground out at about 18. IIRC this is roughly the age at which your brain is operating most efficiently - up to then it's mostly growing and refining, and from 18-or-so owards it's mostly slow degeneration.
I agree that abstract thought is the key quality required to function in this future society. However, I doubt you'll find anyone with a better natural aptitude for abstract thought that a kid raised in such a society - exposure to information overload will have shaped their ability to deal with it from their first weeks or months of life.
Don't forget, in our experiment the pace of progress is always increasing, so by the time someone's reached their 30s and gained their PhD, they'll already be 15 years behind the best and brightest of the new generation (witness how many under-20s made a mint in the dot-com boom).
The problem is that people generally aren't taught task decomposition, optimisation, logic or similar disciplines. Don't get me wrong - these things are hard to learn, but once you've internalised them they're invaluable for spotting bottlenecks, solutions that won't scale and metasolutions (solutions to whole classes of similar problem, rather than a solution that exactly fits the present requirement, but which is useless in two weeks when the requirements change).
Partly this is because people (especially in the business world) are taught to prioritise speed-to-market over correctness. If Solution X solves 80% of the problem but takes two weeks to do, and Solution Y solves 110% of the problem (solves the entire requirement, and is flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen changes) but takes three weeks to implement, it'll be solution X every time.
The theory seems to be "Implement solution X, get it working, then revisit it and turn it into solution Y later when we have time", and it's a very beguiling theory.
The problems are that:
1. Often Solution X and Solution Y are at least partly mutually exclusive - you can't turn X into Y without rewriting the whole thing or redesigning the whole process and retraining everybody.
2. There is never time. Ever. Because the corollary of the above theory is "if it's working right now, for exactly what we need, then changing it is a waste of time".
3. Quite often, that 20% that Solution X doesn't do doesn't get corrected, either. And then the missing 20% functionality causes a problem later that requires its own whole Solution X or Y. Since Solution Y is to rewrite the whole thing, once again Solution X is chosen which consists of a quick patch which fixes 80% of the missing 20%... repeat ad nauseum.
This leads to a cycle where systems and processes are put in place with insufficient forethought or understanding, on the assumption they'll be improved later. However, once they're in and working, "fixing something which works" is seen as a waste of time, so kludges pile upon kludges until eventually either the whole system falls to its knees or someone, somewhere has to bite the bullet and sign off on re-writing the whole thing.
I'm no great believer in US "Freedom" (which seems to be distinct from the "freedom" that everyone else in the world understands, and which seems these days to be increasingly what everyone else calls "restriction"), but the fact that this is a satire piece rather negates your argument.
In addition, the fact that you apparently didn't realise this after the first paragraph or so rather negates your credibility as a thinker.
Of course, you can get to the top of one market-sector by illegally leveraging your existing monopoly in another.
Like using, say, an operating systems monopoly to also claw your way to the top with spreadsheets, word processors, general office productivity software, web browsers, media players, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Indeed. I don't mean to trivilaise what may become a serious problem as society gets ever-more-complex at an ever-increasing rate, but this article basically boils down to:
1. Technology has now reached the point where it's increasing faster than I can keep up. 2. I now need technology to make up for deficiencies in my intellectual processes, as well as my work processes.
Happily, many kids today don't seem to have nearly as much problem as their parents/grandparents do with futureshock/infomation overload - having been raised in an age of rich media, near-ubiquitous networking and information-overload as a daily part of their lives, kids these days seem perfectly happy to keep up.
I don't see this as a huge problem for society, so much as for the older segment of it.
Of course, as development accelerates the age before which one can stay relevant is likely to drop, with interesting consequences - either we develop some kind of mental process-prosthesis to enable adults to continue interacting usefully with society, or we learn to live with the important decision makers of technology being pre-pubescent teens.
If I call the police asking them to remove someone from my home, and when the police arrive that person refuses, do the police have the right to execute him on the spot?
No, because even when discharging their duties the way they do it matters.
The request from the library to the police does not trump the police's legal restrictions on the use of inappropriate force.
It does - some European cultures (noticeably Mediterranean) do seem to respect personal space less highly than the UK/US does.
Unfortunately, some USians (and UKians) can also tend to act as if their personal space extended well into other peoples'. Of course, this is just a difference in cultural expectations, but in an office environment I know whether I'm more likely to be interrupted by someone talking overly-loudly or by someone rushing up to give me a hug.;-)
Close. What I'm saying is "closed doors offer a more substantial layer of protection from assholes".
Walls and doors cut down on the unintentional noise of people around you, and a closed or locked door offers a strong social proscription against interruption. Hell, in the worst case you can just not answer the door and pretend you were out when they (briefly) knocked.
In open-plan offices some people end up being assholes without even intending it. Offices effectively raise the barrier to entry for assholedom.
Point me to anyone who thinks that fingerprinting convicted criminals is wrong.
Point me to anyone who thinks fingerprinting anyone charged with a crime is wrong, as long as those records are destroyed when they're acquitted.
However, the police (certainly here in the UK) are now fingerprinting and DNA-sampling innocent people who aren't even suspected of a crime, then retaining those fingerprints and samples "just in case they ever do something". That's a violation of privacy, a violation of the assumption of innocence, a violation of data protection legislation and ethically fucking wrong by any measure.
Again, these aren't people suspected of a crime - some of these samples are from widely-publicised rapes and murders in small towns, where the entire population volunteers to be tested to be eliminated from the enquiry and help to catch the perpetrator... on the understanding these samples would be destroyed when they were shown to be innocent. Guess what - they were, the samples weren't, the Police refused to honour their obligations and the Home Office backed the Police.
"We are not talking about silencing political speech here. Canada is not China, period."
You're exactly right in every respect, but you forgot one word: yet.
Even if you trust the present incumbent implicitly, in four years you've got someone totally different. In thirty years you can go from a stable government to a civil war, or a totalitarian fascist state.
Given this unavoidable risk, why gamble at all if it isn't necessary? You can't ever "win" at this gamble - only draw level (for the time being) or lose in a big, big way.
"We have had laws against hate crimes and child porn for quite awhile now, and there are specific exceptions allowed in our constitution such that there can be no hiding behind the banner of free speech for these things. They are, unequivocably, criminal acts."
Indeed. However, by putting an unnecessary and powerful system into place to fight crime, you also open it to abuse should anyone redefine what "crime" means. Kind of like how the PATRIOT act was only ever to fight terrorism, and people were shocked and horrified at the idea that anyone would abuse such hallowed powers... and then five years later it's being used as a matter of course to harrass peaceful demonstrators, evict dissenters from political rallies and mass-spy on regular american citizens.
If a law enables something, somebody, sooner or later will use it for that purpose. Against human ingenuity, the corrupting nature of power and the entire weight of human history "honest injun" doesn't count for shit.
We have the process of law. We have checks and balances for a reason - reasonable, competent people understand this, and can work within those restrictions.
Anyone who wants to increase their power or gut those restrictions is either pathetically misguided, more interested in accruing power than doing their job, or simply incompetent.
"If any sites of note are wrongly blocked, you will hear about it very quickly. Again, we are not China, and news travels fast. The potential for abuse here is small."
Riiight. And do you know why "news travels fast"? Because there's no way to prevent its spread. Like, say, a national censorship system. Oh, wait...
Why did places like North Korea and China lead the way in national internet censorship projects? Why do places like Sweden and Holland not feel the need? Do you see any connection there?
I don't imply that setting up a national censorship system will lead to a totalitarian police-state overnight.
In return, don't imply that the guy you vote for will remain in power for ever and always be reasonable, don't imply that increasing the power of governments doesn't make it more tempting to misuse, and don't imply that there's no connection at all between the freedom of communication of a country, and the freedom of communication of a country.
Plus, the aim here is to block off information. Either the systen's good at it or it's bad at it. If it's good at it it's useful, but the potential for abuse is great. If it's bad at it then there's little potential for abuse... but there's also no point in wasting time and money setting it up. You can't have it both ways.
Of course, I could also troll briefly about whether restricting child porn is even a good idea, or whether it provides a release-mechanism preventing abuse, but that's both a more open question and off-topic.
When I'm surfing through a school/company I'm using their systems, and their machines for free. If they want to block something, I have no right to complain.
When I'm surfing at home, on my computer, through my telephone line, I'm paying for everything. If anyone thinks they're censoring that connection they can fuck right off.
If they want to go after the purveyors of questionable websites using the existing laws, then fair play to them.
If they want to set up a general, overly-broad, excessively-powerful system designed to block out literally "anything objectionable" automatically and on a massive scale, then they can either:
1. Hold a national referendum every day or two to define precisely what is "objectionable", and set the filter accordingly, 2. Allow everyone to register their own "objectionable" criteria and only block those sites on a per-person basis, or 3. Fuck right off.
Censorship is bad, even when it's necessary. Centralised, automated censorship is really, really bad, and has never been shown to be necessary. End of story.
Even if you trust the present administration 100% on every subject (and who really, honestly trusts politicians, especially these days?), once you set up a system so powerful you aren't just trusting them, you're also implicitly trusting every single administration that ever comes after them.
Skirting Godwin's Law for a minute, even if you trusted the German government of 1900, would you trust the german administration of 1939?
Transferring this kind of power to governments is a one-way street - no government ever sat back, looked about and said "Y'know, we've got far too much information on people, and too much damn power. Let's shred some files, drop some database tables and uninstall a few cameras, eh? Just for shits and giggles".
Transferring this kind of power to a government is handing them a loaded pistol pointed at your head. Sure, you might trust the guy you handed it to, but it's going to get passed on every four years, so in four years time you have no idea whose finger is going to be on the trigger, and it only gets worse as time goes on.
Transferring this kind of power to governments should not be equated with handing a gun to a good and trusted friend. It's more like handing a gun to a complete stranger - why would you do it unless it was absolutely, clearly essential for your immediate survival?
I'm a non-USian who has worked in several open-plan offices and hated it.
Is it made impossible to concentrate simply by virtue of the fact the office is open-plan? No.
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate? Yes.
Does it make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration? Yes.
Does it mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office? Yes.
Does it mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity? Yes.
(n.b. Bad managers are notoriously bad for underestimating the loss of productivity when they break your concentration for something trivial. I've had a manager complaining about my productivity who used to shout down the length of the room to ask my e-mail address, when I'd worked for him for two years, my address was in his Outlook address book and even when he had it written down in his desk drawer. And once you drop the eggs it can take half an hour or more to get back up to speed again. In a busy, noisy department with 50 people in it, you can easily go entire months without achieving flow state even once.)
Also, although of course there's a heft amount of deviation, national character might have something to do with it, too. The Swedish and Dutch people I've met tend to be very considerate and quiet, while the Americans (as a nation) to tend more to the loud, less considerate "get-things-done-even-if-I-have-to-shout-while-I-d o-it" stereotype.
To be clear, I would have no problem with a Unicode DNS system if I could see a simple way around the identical glyphs/different letters problem that didn't involve making phishing almost impossible to spot or avoid.
Alas: 1. The very nature of the problem seems intractable (how to make two things which look identical look different, without making either one look different) 2. Computers are already almost entirely latin-1-based - on the command-line/at a low level even if not always in the GUI layer 3. Thanks in part to this state of affairs most languages already have widely-known rules or guidelines for rendering words in non-Latin alphabets into the Latin-1 character set - ask any foreign person you know if they have much problem communicating with their countrymen using only normal (western) qwerty keyboards - all of my foreign friends seem adept enough at it even they've never highlighted it as a problem.
This wasn't intended as a racist "fuck 'em for not inventing the computer" rant, but as a genuine hands-thrown-in-the-air regrettably-there's-no-viable-solution-I-can-see and is-this-really-a-problem statement of opinion.
And incidentally, I already spell honour, colour and aluminium "correctly" (and nice little bit of cultural chauvenism there too). I also buy beer by the pint and understand the meaning of the word "irony". I meant "we" as in "the English-speaking (or even Roman-alphabet-using) western world", not as in "American".
"Have you suddenly found that your local municipality's laws have changed?"
What, like the fact I can't protest (even peacefully) where I like, my freedom of speech is restricted, I can be detained indefinitely on the mere suspicion of terrorism, my calls can be traffic-analysed or intercepted without a warrant, even a retroactive one, my library and ISP records can be taken by law enforcement and it's illegal for me to even be notified, etc, etc, etc?
No, no, none of that here.
"Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?"
No. But it's happening a lot more, and I haven't seen a huge upswing in firings or imprisonments for abuse of power, either.
Fuck it - the fucking president's leading the way and you don't see a trend?
"In a "police state," this is policy, not a much-yelled-about, firing/arresting event."
Again, no policies about this, nosireebob. And certainly no secret detention camps, warrantless domestic surveillance or directives to place peaceful anti-war protesters on terrorist watch-lists...
"Your question is no different than asking whether or not, since some airline pilot was caught heading to work under the influence, we're in a "drunk pilot state." There are also badly broken people in other professional roles... I'm sure you've heard some stories. Does that mean we're in a "rapist dentist state?""
It depends - is the current administration leading the way by example, and positively encouraging the circumvention of anti-dentist anti-rapist rules and procedures?
"What we are in is a "hyper extrapolation state," where the incorrect actions of 1/100,000,000 people is discussed here as if congress had just passed some new statute about how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID."
No, what we have here are ever-increasing indicators of a society-wide trend away from essential civil liberties towards the illusion of a little temporary safety.
There's quite a famous quote about it you might perhaps have seen somewhere before.
"These guys weren't trained right, and should have better known how to handle someone making a stink about carrying the ID needed to use the facility. They blew it, and they get to lose their jobs. In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation."
Nobody ever achieved a police state in one night.
You need years and years of gutting of due process, removal of checks and balances, a complient media, relaxation on proscriptions against domestic surveillance and torture, a removal of the assumption of innocence... oh, wait-
"Empathy for somebody screaming obscenities and is not complying. In addition, if they're like our university police, they're sworn officers and probably have an agreement to back up the local jurisdictions right outside the campus. I don't know what that neighborhood is like, but I'm sure it's not all college kids. Try having empathy while arresting a gang banger. I'd imagine it's hard to turn it off: it's "us" and "them"."
This is the only, single and sole excuse they could possibly offer, and it's a pathetically weak one.
"Well, yer honour, I know he looked like a scrawny college student with a big mouth, but he might have had a gun, or been a terrorist suicide bomber strapped up with home-made explosives or something."
The chances are negligible either way, but had the officers had a single reason to suspect he was violent, some physical confrontation might have been acceptable.
Alas, all the guy did was shout after they tried to evict him (bonus points: for not carrying identification papers - Godwin beckons...). They then tased him to the ground, and proceeded to shock him another four times while he was restrained and prone on the floor, because having been floored and hit five times with a device designed to stop you getting up he didn't get up fast enough.
Sure, he was a mouthy little twat, and if they had a single reason to suspect he was dangerous they should have shocked him... once. Shocking a nonviolent protester five times, mostly while he's already restrained, because he's not obeying an instruction you've just made it more difficult for him to obey is completely unjustified, no matter what they thought.
"They are. This idiot did not comply with the officer's request. Why were the police called to the area in the first place? Seems as though somebody has a problem with legitimate authority and playing by the rules."
RTFA. They were campus police doing an irregular, random ID check. There was no prior "incident" that they were called to deal with - they just ran into single, unarmed student who didn't see why he should have to present his identification papers to be present in his own university library.
"Again.. the kid was in the wrong and did not comply.. full stop. In this country he can sue. If he's arrested for something serious he'll have his day in court. Try that in Cuba, asshole."
Great - the police abused their authority and tortured the kid in front of a room full of witnesses... essentially for refusing to obey their every instruction instantly. Lawsuit nothing - this is a matter of criminal abuse of power, use of excessive and unreasonable force and arguably an incident of torture by the police. That's a criminal matter, not a civil one.
Since when have the cops always been in the right? Even if their original request was lawful and reasonable, their use of excessive force is at least an unprovoked assault. Sure, a cop may ask me where I'm going late at night, but if I refuse to tell him he doesn't have the right to club me to the ground and work me over with a nighstick - apart from nightsticks leaving bruises, how is this incident any different?
"I'd have just dragged him out of the area and then left him on the floor cuffed till he decided to get up. Then I'd arrest him for everything that might be even remotely applicable."
Then you would be in the right, and acting lawfully, correctly and with appropriate restraint. If you would have quietly removed him from the scene once he was restrained, why are you jumping to defend four or five cops who tased him to the floor and then hit him four more times while he was already prone and restrained?
"Torture? More like pain compliance."
Please explain the difference.
"Pain Compliance"... or "using pain to make someone do what you want"... which is torture. Stop inventing new euphamisms for it and just man up and admit you're (at least selectively
At the risk of sounding like a cultural chauvenist... because we invented the damn internet, and we speak English, and use the Latin-1 character set.
If individual countries want to implement their own DNS-equivalents in their national character set them more power to'em, I say. However, they'll also have to deal with upgrading every DNS-capable application on every machine in the country, then find a solution to the massive problem of phishing they've just caused by introducing two identical-looking (but numerically different) characters... and then find a way to enable other nationalities to type and use those URLs without necessarily having the characters on their keyboards or character-sets on their machines.
Indeed - it's the stem cells! They're in it with the gays and the terrorists!
But the thing to remember is that there's really only a small hard-core of stem cells hiding in a huge mass of normal cells, with no real popular support. So what we should do is go in all guns blazing and take out as many of the healthy cells as we can in the cross-fire, then occupy the entire body and sell off its natural resources (dental fillings?) to Halliburton for no-bid contracts.
Furthermore, during our occupation we should beat the stem cells by fragmenting them into lots of small, decentralised groups, encouraging them to co-opt (or "radicalise") lots of previously healthy cells... so they'll seed lots of new tumours all over the body that we can wade into all guns blazing, killing healthy cells and spreading stem cells even further throughout the body, so that- Ahem.
Mission Accomplished!
(FWIW that was supposed to be "Funny", not "FlameBait"... ah fuck it- Karma to burn:-)
"They're also human, and as such experience the same emotion, anger and confusion that other humans experience. You would think that your USAF experience would have included some study of the "fog of war" or effects of high stress situations on rational thought."
Please do not confuse one small mouthy student in a university campus library with a battlefield situation where you and all your unit may very well lose your lives. That is just stupid.
Or can someone cut me up on the road, and when I pull them from their car and beat them senseless with a half-brick can I claim PTSD or battle fatigue? And that's an even fairer case, because at least thet's one-on-one and I stood some chance of being hurt when the guy cut me up.
This is four- or five-on-one, and the officers are in no physical danger whatsoever.
"Wouldn't it be interesting if the cops/soldiers in question were convinced that they too were dealing with criminals, and that those criminals "should be treated even more harshly than we treat serial killers, pedophiles, and other such scum.""
Well, in that case they should arrest the guy, bring him to trial, convict him and send him to prison for as long as they can.
They should on no account abuse their position of power to torture a smaller, single, unarmed, nonviolent student.
And one could make an argument that society and democracy is actually more at risk from cops and law enforcement abusing their power than it is from any number of paedophiles and serial killers.
"Would you, as a human, abuse your power if you had the ability to "reach out and touch" these partcular soldiers and police who obviously disgust you? I think you would, based on your pre-trial/pre-conviction suggestion of severe punishment.... Can't say I haven't thought those thoughts though..."
Yes, I would. I'd reach out and touch them to ensure they had a fucking good prosecution through the courts, and hopefully some jail-time.
Oh, sorry - were you hoping I'd want to lynch them? No, because that would be wrong... and I still have a functioning sense of ethics and morals even after the "fog of war" I just got from my co-worker using colourful language near me.
Plenty of people RTFA, but as adults with a functioning sense of ethics we also know what's wrong with the police demanding a citizen's papers, then tasing them to the ground, then tazing them four more times, when they non-violently object to being evicted from their own campus library.
And even if the guy had/strong? been a sexual predator, how does that prevent four or five large police officers from quietly subduing one small student with an arm-lock or handcuffs?
Slashdot Mirror
"Other than bragging about my uber-cool great grandfather, I am also trying to make a point... I think that people who have lean toward technical things don't get future shock... I think that people who learn the basics to get by become people who use current (to their generation) technology like an appliace, and new technology scares them. I think the same will be true in the next generation... Those in the technical industries will be "cool... I want one of those" and the people in other fields will look at the gadgets and go "What is this? How does it work? I think I broke it.""
;-)
Mr Neophile, meet Mr Neophobe.
That's not future-shock - that's just a crap system design.
;-)
Forty years ago computers were huge things the size of a room, broke al lthe time and took dozens of skilled operators to keep them running.
These days the "average" computer (remember: including embedded devices/phones/appliances/cars, etc) is small, almost a commodity item, runs reliably for pretty much its whole life and requires one or even nobody to administrate it.
Forty years ago large-scale internetworked computerised systems didn't exist. Today they're where "computers" were in the 60s. Technology improves with time - this isn't a symptom of future-shock.
In addition I've worked in offices without a single computer in them, and their (entirely paper-based) processes were ten times stupider and more frustrating than even the most recalcitrant computer system I've used. Stupidity of design != Future Shock.
"I can cope with everything else, but I'll be damned before I'll accept that my only contact with friends and family may some day be a messaging service. In fact, it's not even about the society's ability to cope with technology, it's about the human being's ability to cope with the insertion of a bit of silicon between him and his fellow humans. That, I cannot deal with."
Randomised paranoia about possible future shock != Future shock, either.
"In an age where we have to go to school longer and longer to acquire the skills for the technical and academic jobs, you honestly think that the ages are getting younger and younger?"
/., u
Right. And before the 1990s and the dot-com boom, how many under-25s were self-made millionaires?
I don't recall many pubescent Industrialists and Railroad Barons in the 1880s.
And how many bright people drop out of college to pursue their own agenda? Look up the figures - in many western countries (including the USA) highschools and colleges are haemmorhaging students.
Just because those who still subscribe to the traditional system of education->university->job->success have to study for longer, that doesn't negate the fact that increasing numbers of kids are simply short-circuiting the whole process.
"Oh, wait, these kids grow up with computers. I forgot. What a technical wonder it is to run Windows. I often have to teach my kids how to do certain things on the computer that goes beyond surfing a web page. And these are teenagers."
Congratulations - your kids are signally uninterested in technology. In the hypothetical future society we're talking about they will either be paupers or housepets.
But seriously - sure, millions of kids don't know how to do anything but swap MP3s, pirate games and post to their LiveJournals. But you know what? My parents wouldn't even know what "a LiveJournal" was, and my Granny doesn't even understand that it's possible to have "records on her computer", let alone how to rip MP3s, download and install LimeWire or Azureus and start sharing them with people all over the world... but half the kids I know do.
My point is that while a single carefully-chosen adult is almost better than a kid at a given technological subject, kids internalise and mass-adopt tedhnology with a speed that makes the average adult blink in confusion.
In non-technical (ie, 99.9% of the population) families, is it normally the kids or the parents who:
1. Spend more time on-line?
2. Know how to use all the functions on their mobile phone/camera/video/MP3 player/calendar/watch/gaming device?
3. Get called in to set the VCR time when the power goes?
4. Have a blog (inc. MySpace, LiveJournal, etc, etc, etc)?
Or, how about a really, really good example of the two groups' relative facilities with new technology?
When adults as a group adopt new technology as quickly as kids do, then I'll believe you've got a point.
And just to clarify, since you obviously didn't get it the first time around: I was exaggerating for comic effect when I was talking about "pre-pubescent teens" - obviously we're talking about 18-early 20s here, since this is the widely-recognised "sweet spot" between your youthful increased ability to learn and worldly-wise experience (which only comes with age).
"But it's true - the older generation might be a little lost when it comes to myspace or whatever the next fad is."
Right, but when the fad is the internet, digital media and mass-participation, it's a big deal.
Crowdsourcing, the rise of the internet and the increasing "digitalisation" of our culture means that even now governments are worrying about providing laptops to every child and getting internet access for all - if it's considered by them to be on par with the other things they try to ensure for all (you know - clean water, food, air, shelter and health) then doesn't that suggest your characterising the lot as "myspace and the latest fad" might be a teensy weensy bit dismissive?
"BTWo, it's not a matter of "keeping up", it's a matter of ignoring/blocking more and more irrevelant information in your life. The signal to noise ratio is growing ever higher. I can spend time keeping up with the news, but 99% of that is a waste of time, especially since I'm not a politician. So it is with
To be honest, I think it'll ground out at about 18. IIRC this is roughly the age at which your brain is operating most efficiently - up to then it's mostly growing and refining, and from 18-or-so owards it's mostly slow degeneration.
I agree that abstract thought is the key quality required to function in this future society. However, I doubt you'll find anyone with a better natural aptitude for abstract thought that a kid raised in such a society - exposure to information overload will have shaped their ability to deal with it from their first weeks or months of life.
Don't forget, in our experiment the pace of progress is always increasing, so by the time someone's reached their 30s and gained their PhD, they'll already be 15 years behind the best and brightest of the new generation (witness how many under-20s made a mint in the dot-com boom).
The problem is that people generally aren't taught task decomposition, optimisation, logic or similar disciplines. Don't get me wrong - these things are hard to learn, but once you've internalised them they're invaluable for spotting bottlenecks, solutions that won't scale and metasolutions (solutions to whole classes of similar problem, rather than a solution that exactly fits the present requirement, but which is useless in two weeks when the requirements change).
Partly this is because people (especially in the business world) are taught to prioritise speed-to-market over correctness. If Solution X solves 80% of the problem but takes two weeks to do, and Solution Y solves 110% of the problem (solves the entire requirement, and is flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen changes) but takes three weeks to implement, it'll be solution X every time.
The theory seems to be "Implement solution X, get it working, then revisit it and turn it into solution Y later when we have time", and it's a very beguiling theory.
The problems are that:
1. Often Solution X and Solution Y are at least partly mutually exclusive - you can't turn X into Y without rewriting the whole thing or redesigning the whole process and retraining everybody.
2. There is never time. Ever. Because the corollary of the above theory is "if it's working right now, for exactly what we need, then changing it is a waste of time".
3. Quite often, that 20% that Solution X doesn't do doesn't get corrected, either. And then the missing 20% functionality causes a problem later that requires its own whole Solution X or Y. Since Solution Y is to rewrite the whole thing, once again Solution X is chosen which consists of a quick patch which fixes 80% of the missing 20%... repeat ad nauseum.
This leads to a cycle where systems and processes are put in place with insufficient forethought or understanding, on the assumption they'll be improved later. However, once they're in and working, "fixing something which works" is seen as a waste of time, so kludges pile upon kludges until eventually either the whole system falls to its knees or someone, somewhere has to bite the bullet and sign off on re-writing the whole thing.
I'm no great believer in US "Freedom" (which seems to be distinct from the "freedom" that everyone else in the world understands, and which seems these days to be increasingly what everyone else calls "restriction"), but the fact that this is a satire piece rather negates your argument.
In addition, the fact that you apparently didn't realise this after the first paragraph or so rather negates your credibility as a thinker.
Of course, you can get to the top of one market-sector by illegally leveraging your existing monopoly in another.
Like using, say, an operating systems monopoly to also claw your way to the top with spreadsheets, word processors, general office productivity software, web browsers, media players, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Indeed. I don't mean to trivilaise what may become a serious problem as society gets ever-more-complex at an ever-increasing rate, but this article basically boils down to:
1. Technology has now reached the point where it's increasing faster than I can keep up.
2. I now need technology to make up for deficiencies in my intellectual processes, as well as my work processes.
Happily, many kids today don't seem to have nearly as much problem as their parents/grandparents do with futureshock/infomation overload - having been raised in an age of rich media, near-ubiquitous networking and information-overload as a daily part of their lives, kids these days seem perfectly happy to keep up.
I don't see this as a huge problem for society, so much as for the older segment of it.
Of course, as development accelerates the age before which one can stay relevant is likely to drop, with interesting consequences - either we develop some kind of mental process-prosthesis to enable adults to continue interacting usefully with society, or we learn to live with the important decision makers of technology being pre-pubescent teens.
And that's why I won't be visiting the US any time soon.
Shame, because I'd quite like to do it someday.
If I call the police asking them to remove someone from my home, and when the police arrive that person refuses, do the police have the right to execute him on the spot?
No, because even when discharging their duties the way they do it matters.
The request from the library to the police does not trump the police's legal restrictions on the use of inappropriate force.
That's a fucking stupid argument.
It does - some European cultures (noticeably Mediterranean) do seem to respect personal space less highly than the UK/US does.
;-)
Unfortunately, some USians (and UKians) can also tend to act as if their personal space extended well into other peoples'. Of course, this is just a difference in cultural expectations, but in an office environment I know whether I'm more likely to be interrupted by someone talking overly-loudly or by someone rushing up to give me a hug.
Close. What I'm saying is "closed doors offer a more substantial layer of protection from assholes".
Walls and doors cut down on the unintentional noise of people around you, and a closed or locked door offers a strong social proscription against interruption. Hell, in the worst case you can just not answer the door and pretend you were out when they (briefly) knocked.
In open-plan offices some people end up being assholes without even intending it. Offices effectively raise the barrier to entry for assholedom.
Hey - don't blame Great Britain. If Blair wasn't so hell-bent on humping Bush's leg all day we'd still have some basic freedoms, too.
;-p
Before worrying about the splinter in your brother's eye, first remove the plank in your own.
You do the crime, you accept the consequences.
Point me to anyone who thinks that fingerprinting convicted criminals is wrong.
Point me to anyone who thinks fingerprinting anyone charged with a crime is wrong, as long as those records are destroyed when they're acquitted.
However, the police (certainly here in the UK) are now fingerprinting and DNA-sampling innocent people who aren't even suspected of a crime, then retaining those fingerprints and samples "just in case they ever do something". That's a violation of privacy, a violation of the assumption of innocence, a violation of data protection legislation and ethically fucking wrong by any measure.
Again, these aren't people suspected of a crime - some of these samples are from widely-publicised rapes and murders in small towns, where the entire population volunteers to be tested to be eliminated from the enquiry and help to catch the perpetrator... on the understanding these samples would be destroyed when they were shown to be innocent. Guess what - they were, the samples weren't, the Police refused to honour their obligations and the Home Office backed the Police.
What was your point again?
"We are not talking about silencing political speech here. Canada is not China, period."
You're exactly right in every respect, but you forgot one word: yet.
Even if you trust the present incumbent implicitly, in four years you've got someone totally different. In thirty years you can go from a stable government to a civil war, or a totalitarian fascist state.
Given this unavoidable risk, why gamble at all if it isn't necessary? You can't ever "win" at this gamble - only draw level (for the time being) or lose in a big, big way.
"We have had laws against hate crimes and child porn for quite awhile now, and there are specific exceptions allowed in our constitution such that there can be no hiding behind the banner of free speech for these things. They are, unequivocably, criminal acts."
Indeed. However, by putting an unnecessary and powerful system into place to fight crime, you also open it to abuse should anyone redefine what "crime" means. Kind of like how the PATRIOT act was only ever to fight terrorism, and people were shocked and horrified at the idea that anyone would abuse such hallowed powers... and then five years later it's being used as a matter of course to harrass peaceful demonstrators, evict dissenters from political rallies and mass-spy on regular american citizens.
If a law enables something, somebody, sooner or later will use it for that purpose. Against human ingenuity, the corrupting nature of power and the entire weight of human history "honest injun" doesn't count for shit.
We have the process of law. We have checks and balances for a reason - reasonable, competent people understand this, and can work within those restrictions.
Anyone who wants to increase their power or gut those restrictions is either pathetically misguided, more interested in accruing power than doing their job, or simply incompetent.
"If any sites of note are wrongly blocked, you will hear about it very quickly. Again, we are not China, and news travels fast. The potential for abuse here is small."
Riiight. And do you know why "news travels fast"? Because there's no way to prevent its spread. Like, say, a national censorship system. Oh, wait...
Why did places like North Korea and China lead the way in national internet censorship projects? Why do places like Sweden and Holland not feel the need? Do you see any connection there?
I don't imply that setting up a national censorship system will lead to a totalitarian police-state overnight.
In return, don't imply that the guy you vote for will remain in power for ever and always be reasonable, don't imply that increasing the power of governments doesn't make it more tempting to misuse, and don't imply that there's no connection at all between the freedom of communication of a country, and the freedom of communication of a country.
Plus, the aim here is to block off information. Either the systen's good at it or it's bad at it. If it's good at it it's useful, but the potential for abuse is great. If it's bad at it then there's little potential for abuse... but there's also no point in wasting time and money setting it up. You can't have it both ways.
Of course, I could also troll briefly about whether restricting child porn is even a good idea, or whether it provides a release-mechanism preventing abuse, but that's both a more open question and off-topic.
When I'm surfing through a school/company I'm using their systems, and their machines for free. If they want to block something, I have no right to complain.
When I'm surfing at home, on my computer, through my telephone line, I'm paying for everything. If anyone thinks they're censoring that connection they can fuck right off.
If they want to go after the purveyors of questionable websites using the existing laws, then fair play to them.
If they want to set up a general, overly-broad, excessively-powerful system designed to block out literally "anything objectionable" automatically and on a massive scale, then they can either:
1. Hold a national referendum every day or two to define precisely what is "objectionable", and set the filter accordingly,
2. Allow everyone to register their own "objectionable" criteria and only block those sites on a per-person basis, or
3. Fuck right off.
Censorship is bad, even when it's necessary. Centralised, automated censorship is really, really bad, and has never been shown to be necessary. End of story.
Even if you trust the present administration 100% on every subject (and who really, honestly trusts politicians, especially these days?), once you set up a system so powerful you aren't just trusting them, you're also implicitly trusting every single administration that ever comes after them.
Skirting Godwin's Law for a minute, even if you trusted the German government of 1900, would you trust the german administration of 1939?
Transferring this kind of power to governments is a one-way street - no government ever sat back, looked about and said "Y'know, we've got far too much information on people, and too much damn power. Let's shred some files, drop some database tables and uninstall a few cameras, eh? Just for shits and giggles".
Transferring this kind of power to a government is handing them a loaded pistol pointed at your head. Sure, you might trust the guy you handed it to, but it's going to get passed on every four years, so in four years time you have no idea whose finger is going to be on the trigger, and it only gets worse as time goes on.
Transferring this kind of power to governments should not be equated with handing a gun to a good and trusted friend. It's more like handing a gun to a complete stranger - why would you do it unless it was absolutely, clearly essential for your immediate survival?
I'm a non-USian who has worked in several open-plan offices and hated it.
d o-it" stereotype.
Is it made impossible to concentrate simply by virtue of the fact the office is open-plan? No.
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate? Yes.
Does it make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration? Yes.
Does it mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office? Yes.
Does it mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity? Yes.
(n.b. Bad managers are notoriously bad for underestimating the loss of productivity when they break your concentration for something trivial. I've had a manager complaining about my productivity who used to shout down the length of the room to ask my e-mail address, when I'd worked for him for two years, my address was in his Outlook address book and even when he had it written down in his desk drawer. And once you drop the eggs it can take half an hour or more to get back up to speed again. In a busy, noisy department with 50 people in it, you can easily go entire months without achieving flow state even once.)
Also, although of course there's a heft amount of deviation, national character might have something to do with it, too. The Swedish and Dutch people I've met tend to be very considerate and quiet, while the Americans (as a nation) to tend more to the loud, less considerate "get-things-done-even-if-I-have-to-shout-while-I-
To be clear, I would have no problem with a Unicode DNS system if I could see a simple way around the identical glyphs/different letters problem that didn't involve making phishing almost impossible to spot or avoid.
Alas:
1. The very nature of the problem seems intractable (how to make two things which look identical look different, without making either one look different)
2. Computers are already almost entirely latin-1-based - on the command-line/at a low level even if not always in the GUI layer
3. Thanks in part to this state of affairs most languages already have widely-known rules or guidelines for rendering words in non-Latin alphabets into the Latin-1 character set - ask any foreign person you know if they have much problem communicating with their countrymen using only normal (western) qwerty keyboards - all of my foreign friends seem adept enough at it even they've never highlighted it as a problem.
This wasn't intended as a racist "fuck 'em for not inventing the computer" rant, but as a genuine hands-thrown-in-the-air regrettably-there's-no-viable-solution-I-can-see and is-this-really-a-problem statement of opinion.
And incidentally, I already spell honour, colour and aluminium "correctly" (and nice little bit of cultural chauvenism there too). I also buy beer by the pint and understand the meaning of the word "irony". I meant "we" as in "the English-speaking (or even Roman-alphabet-using) western world", not as in "American".
Now who feels stupid, eh?
"Have you suddenly found that your local municipality's laws have changed?"
What, like the fact I can't protest (even peacefully) where I like, my freedom of speech is restricted, I can be detained indefinitely on the mere suspicion of terrorism, my calls can be traffic-analysed or intercepted without a warrant, even a retroactive one, my library and ISP records can be taken by law enforcement and it's illegal for me to even be notified, etc, etc, etc?
No, no, none of that here.
"Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?"
No. But it's happening a lot more, and I haven't seen a huge upswing in firings or imprisonments for abuse of power, either.
Fuck it - the fucking president's leading the way and you don't see a trend?
"In a "police state," this is policy, not a much-yelled-about, firing/arresting event."
Again, no policies about this, nosireebob. And certainly no secret detention camps, warrantless domestic surveillance or directives to place peaceful anti-war protesters on terrorist watch-lists...
"Your question is no different than asking whether or not, since some airline pilot was caught heading to work under the influence, we're in a "drunk pilot state." There are also badly broken people in other professional roles... I'm sure you've heard some stories. Does that mean we're in a "rapist dentist state?""
It depends - is the current administration leading the way by example, and positively encouraging the circumvention of anti-dentist anti-rapist rules and procedures?
"What we are in is a "hyper extrapolation state," where the incorrect actions of 1/100,000,000 people is discussed here as if congress had just passed some new statute about how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID."
No, what we have here are ever-increasing indicators of a society-wide trend away from essential civil liberties towards the illusion of a little temporary safety.
There's quite a famous quote about it you might perhaps have seen somewhere before.
"These guys weren't trained right, and should have better known how to handle someone making a stink about carrying the ID needed to use the facility. They blew it, and they get to lose their jobs. In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation."
Nobody ever achieved a police state in one night.
You need years and years of gutting of due process, removal of checks and balances, a complient media, relaxation on proscriptions against domestic surveillance and torture, a removal of the assumption of innocence... oh, wait-
"Empathy for somebody screaming obscenities and is not complying. In addition, if they're like our university police, they're sworn officers and probably have an agreement to back up the local jurisdictions right outside the campus. I don't know what that neighborhood is like, but I'm sure it's not all college kids. Try having empathy while arresting a gang banger. I'd imagine it's hard to turn it off: it's "us" and "them"."
This is the only, single and sole excuse they could possibly offer, and it's a pathetically weak one.
"Well, yer honour, I know he looked like a scrawny college student with a big mouth, but he might have had a gun, or been a terrorist suicide bomber strapped up with home-made explosives or something."
The chances are negligible either way, but had the officers had a single reason to suspect he was violent, some physical confrontation might have been acceptable.
Alas, all the guy did was shout after they tried to evict him (bonus points: for not carrying identification papers - Godwin beckons...). They then tased him to the ground, and proceeded to shock him another four times while he was restrained and prone on the floor, because having been floored and hit five times with a device designed to stop you getting up he didn't get up fast enough.
Sure, he was a mouthy little twat, and if they had a single reason to suspect he was dangerous they should have shocked him... once. Shocking a nonviolent protester five times, mostly while he's already restrained, because he's not obeying an instruction you've just made it more difficult for him to obey is completely unjustified, no matter what they thought.
"They are. This idiot did not comply with the officer's request. Why were the police called to the area in the first place? Seems as though somebody has a problem with legitimate authority and playing by the rules."
RTFA. They were campus police doing an irregular, random ID check. There was no prior "incident" that they were called to deal with - they just ran into single, unarmed student who didn't see why he should have to present his identification papers to be present in his own university library.
"Again.. the kid was in the wrong and did not comply.. full stop. In this country he can sue. If he's arrested for something serious he'll have his day in court. Try that in Cuba, asshole."
Great - the police abused their authority and tortured the kid in front of a room full of witnesses... essentially for refusing to obey their every instruction instantly. Lawsuit nothing - this is a matter of criminal abuse of power, use of excessive and unreasonable force and arguably an incident of torture by the police. That's a criminal matter, not a civil one.
Since when have the cops always been in the right? Even if their original request was lawful and reasonable, their use of excessive force is at least an unprovoked assault. Sure, a cop may ask me where I'm going late at night, but if I refuse to tell him he doesn't have the right to club me to the ground and work me over with a nighstick - apart from nightsticks leaving bruises, how is this incident any different?
"I'd have just dragged him out of the area and then left him on the floor cuffed till he decided to get up. Then I'd arrest him for everything that might be even remotely applicable."
Then you would be in the right, and acting lawfully, correctly and with appropriate restraint. If you would have quietly removed him from the scene once he was restrained, why are you jumping to defend four or five cops who tased him to the floor and then hit him four more times while he was already prone and restrained?
"Torture? More like pain compliance."
Please explain the difference.
"Pain Compliance"... or "using pain to make someone do what you want"... which is torture. Stop inventing new euphamisms for it and just man up and admit you're (at least selectively
At the risk of sounding like a cultural chauvenist... because we invented the damn internet, and we speak English, and use the Latin-1 character set.
If individual countries want to implement their own DNS-equivalents in their national character set them more power to'em, I say. However, they'll also have to deal with upgrading every DNS-capable application on every machine in the country, then find a solution to the massive problem of phishing they've just caused by introducing two identical-looking (but numerically different) characters... and then find a way to enable other nationalities to type and use those URLs without necessarily having the characters on their keyboards or character-sets on their machines.
I honestly don't see a way around this.
Indeed - it's the stem cells! They're in it with the gays and the terrorists!
:-)
But the thing to remember is that there's really only a small hard-core of stem cells hiding in a huge mass of normal cells, with no real popular support. So what we should do is go in all guns blazing and take out as many of the healthy cells as we can in the cross-fire, then occupy the entire body and sell off its natural resources (dental fillings?) to Halliburton for no-bid contracts.
Furthermore, during our occupation we should beat the stem cells by fragmenting them into lots of small, decentralised groups, encouraging them to co-opt (or "radicalise") lots of previously healthy cells... so they'll seed lots of new tumours all over the body that we can wade into all guns blazing, killing healthy cells and spreading stem cells even further throughout the body, so that- Ahem.
Mission Accomplished!
(FWIW that was supposed to be "Funny", not "FlameBait"... ah fuck it- Karma to burn
"They're also human, and as such experience the same emotion, anger and confusion that other humans experience. You would think that your USAF experience would have included some study of the "fog of war" or effects of high stress situations on rational thought."
Please do not confuse one small mouthy student in a university campus library with a battlefield situation where you and all your unit may very well lose your lives. That is just stupid.
Or can someone cut me up on the road, and when I pull them from their car and beat them senseless with a half-brick can I claim PTSD or battle fatigue? And that's an even fairer case, because at least thet's one-on-one and I stood some chance of being hurt when the guy cut me up.
This is four- or five-on-one, and the officers are in no physical danger whatsoever.
"Wouldn't it be interesting if the cops/soldiers in question were convinced that they too were dealing with criminals, and that those criminals "should be treated even more harshly than we treat serial killers, pedophiles, and other such scum.""
Well, in that case they should arrest the guy, bring him to trial, convict him and send him to prison for as long as they can.
They should on no account abuse their position of power to torture a smaller, single, unarmed, nonviolent student.
And one could make an argument that society and democracy is actually more at risk from cops and law enforcement abusing their power than it is from any number of paedophiles and serial killers.
"Would you, as a human, abuse your power if you had the ability to "reach out and touch" these partcular soldiers and police who obviously disgust you? I think you would, based on your pre-trial/pre-conviction suggestion of severe punishment.... Can't say I haven't thought those thoughts though..."
Yes, I would. I'd reach out and touch them to ensure they had a fucking good prosecution through the courts, and hopefully some jail-time.
Oh, sorry - were you hoping I'd want to lynch them? No, because that would be wrong... and I still have a functioning sense of ethics and morals even after the "fog of war" I just got from my co-worker using colourful language near me.
>> those cops... The people who do such things to prisoners...
> all cops
Nice straw-man there. Make him all by yourself?
You RTFA - bully for you. Have a cookie.
Plenty of people RTFA, but as adults with a functioning sense of ethics we also know what's wrong with the police demanding a citizen's papers, then tasing them to the ground, then tazing them four more times, when they non-violently object to being evicted from their own campus library.
And even if the guy had/strong? been a sexual predator, how does that prevent four or five large police officers from quietly subduing one small student with an arm-lock or handcuffs?