Why was he given a police caution ? He did nothing illegal, nothing that police had previously been asked to be told about, so why a caution ? Yes what he did accidentally caused some disruption; but this was not intended.
They probably mixed up the Simple Caution (that is a form of mild wrist slapping) with the warning, also called a caution, that the Police give you before talking to you about anything in which you could by any stretch of the imagination be considered a suspect or witness. The equivalent of the Miranda Rights in the US.
"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned anything which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
When I was in the (UK) cops we were trained to dish this out to anybody we spoke to even semi-formally. If nothing comes of your conversation then no problem; if you fail to caution somebody prior to speaking to them, and then their testimony becomes a big deal, the lack of a caution at the start can be a case-breaker. So you basically say it to everybody to be safe. But it is NOT something that is recorded (other than in your pocket notebook) or otherwise appears on anybody's record.
Having personally watched a CSI (or SOCO as we called them then) collect samples at a crime scene, I can categorically tell you that at least in the UK, it is standard practice to collect controls as well as specimens.
For example, there is blood around a broken window: the CSI will collect samples of the blood and also swabs from the other side of the room, and from the wall outside. This allows them to exclude various bits of contamination that aren't related to the crime but are present at the crime scene.
Don't let me get in the way of your assumptions though.
I absolutely agree with the sentiment, especially drawing attention to Dame Stella Rimington's breath-of-fresh-air comments. However, I would clarify your first point: Britain's senior police officers (the Chief Constables of their respective forces, who together make up ACPO), are appointed by the Home Secretary, "Wacky" Jacqui Smith.
As such, they owe their positions to falling in line with the Party (capital P pun somewhat intended). The rank and file police officers I know just roll their eyes at stuff like this and carry on as normal -- much like the government's frankly despicable reclassification of cannabis as a class B drug, contrary to a heap of scientific advice.
Mod parent up -- I didn't know about iplayer-dl; that's a great idea, although it's a shame simple downloading is not officially supported.
Of course, the other problem this outlines is the piss-poor performance of Flash on non-Windows architectures. I can't even watch a 5 min episode of Zero Punctuation without the bottom of my MBP searing my nuts off.
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes
If you can get Flash to work, you can view the iPlayer content: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. I do it all the time using Camino on OS X. To be honest I find this preferable to a P2P model anyway, although obviously the usual dire warnings about it overloading the intertubes as more people catch on apply.
Agree with you 100% about it being advert-free, too. I'm Canadian by birth and every time I go over to visit family, watching TV is like an exercise in self-control. I swear to Science the ratio of adverts:content is 1:1.
I have it on good authority (from my father who recently retired as the Environmental director of a plastics company), that "biodegradable" plastic bags as used by Tesco (the UK's largest supermarket chain), are actually what is known chemically as "oxodegradable" -- that is, they degrade in the presence of heat and oxygen.
So, you need heat and oxygen to degrade the bags. Now, guess what you don't find much of:
a) on the cold rainy streets of the UK, where these bags might be lying around if not properly disposed of, or
b) in the anoxic depths of the bottom of landfill dumps, where they end up if "properly" disposed of.
So it's all a bit of a greenwash apparently, and the only way to win is not to play -- and bring your own reusable bags.
Oh, of course not. What shit -- anyone "compliant" who doesn't meet a cop's standard of humanity will be met with taunting or other abuse designed to escalate the situation to one where the cop can call "resisting", then all bets are off. They can afford to pick a fight with anyone at any time and come out "clean".
You don't know what you're fucking talking about, and I find you offensive. Maybe this happened to you, or somebody you know, and it's gotten you irked. But I guarantee that I know more cops than you do, and *never* -- not once -- has this happened in my personal experience as an ex-police officer.
I'm not suggesting that it doesn't happen in the whole wide world, but using words like "anyone" and stating definitively that the defacto method for police of dealing with people is to trick them into resisting arrest, is ignorant and frankly tin-foilish.
As a rule (and I mean that -- rule), you use the least force necessary. If they are being arrested, you want to get them into the van/car and off to the station quickly and cleanly, and with the least paperwork. Resisting arrest entails additional paperwork, and if there's one thing cops hate, it's that.
So shut your stupid fear-inciting mouth, and start commenting on "facts" that you actually know something about.
He probably meant plate boundary. The San Andreas fault represents the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, and movement along plate boundaries is both more common and of a usually higher magnitude than inner-plate fault movements.
It's a game of playing the statistics and risk, like anything else.
There is no question WW/III would have happened if the United States hadn't taken over nearly all the military operations in Europe.
"No question"? Really? [citation needed].
Perhaps you're thinking about the Morgenthau Plan, which was a primarily economic effort (which only lasted a few years) to "industrially disarm" Germany.
To the best of my knowledge, the primary reason for the stationing of US troops in Europe was to expand the US sphere of influence here (yes, I'm European) as a bulwark against the Soviets -- with whom relations were already beginning to deteriorate at the close of the war.
And no, I can't be bothered to dig up references for that, which I suppose makes me a hypocrite but hey, technically I should be working!:)
Stealing: I take the CD, the owner no longer has the CD. Copying: I copy the data, now we both have the data. I don't know about the US, but in the UK you're absolutely right. IANAL, but I was a police officer, and here in the UK the legal definition of theft is
To dishonestly appropriate with the intention to permanently deprive Clearly there is no intention (or indeed possibility) of permanent deprivation, and the applicability of "appropriation" in this context is suspect too.
This bandying around of the word theft and the annoying faux-hip "CoPyRiGhT is StEaLiNg!!!11!!" things you get at the beginning of DVDs make me bristle every time.
Nobody is saying that oil itself is evil (yet), but rather, that the tactics employed by oil companies are designed to stall the use of new energy source for as long as possible. Evil is a human emotion. Do you really think corporations have human feelings? Bottom lines are what matters.
There's another, less Machiavellian reason: it's good business sense from a strategic point of view. The supermajors are beginning to try and turn themselves around to become "energy companies" instead of "oil companies". See BP's partly-successful greenwashing attempts such as changing their tagline to "Beyond Petroleum".
The writing is on the wall, and they see it. Patents such as these, as well as stalling alternative energy adoption (I don't deny that it's attractive to them, but I don't really believe that they sat around in board meetings and decided upon it as a strategy), also attempt to ensure cashflow once the wells dry up.
For disclosure's sake, I do work in the oil industry (in the UK, which is in its twilight years for production), but I'm neither an apologist nor against it on principle; it just pays the bills -- for now.
Full disclosure: IUTBAPO (I Used To Be a Police Officer) in the UK. Yeah yeah, on Slashdot that's flamebait and I'll never speak of it again, but I have some valid points to make in response to JCR's post.
Cameras of the sort used all over the country are run by central control/operations rooms which are manned by civilians employed by the local councils (not cops). They have police radios in the control rooms though so we can speak to them, although they are under no obligation to do as we ask (although in practise, they usually do). There are two points which you may find interesting which I don't think have been mentioned yet:
1) Normally, the cameras record only one frame every few seconds (presumably so as to not max out their storage on account of the vast number of cameras, heh). Operators cycle through and view them as they see fit depending on the time of day, and if it looks like something's going down, either they or the police can request that a particular camera "go to realtime" recording, so as to capture events at normal speed. However if something such as a mugging happens when the cameras are "idle", if it happens very very quickly it is possible that it won't be recorded at all.
2) This is the bit that is in response to the parent -- In the event that we (the police) are investigating an incident, we could submit a CCTV request to the control centre, which is a piece of paperwork containing things such as a location, a short description of what (allegedly) happened, and a time bracket. Operators would then go through the recordings manually to try and find it, and if we were lucky it would have been caught on camera, whereupon they would send us a DVD or (more usually) a VCR tape of the relevant parts of the recording. At no time did we, the police, have direct access to the CCTV system, either in a day-to-day sense or in access to the archives.
I think this is an important point, because it means that the gatekeepers are civilians who are more directly accountable to the elected council representatives, and thus, the people. Of course the usual semi-FUD about cops becoming maniacal power-crazed demons can be half applied to them too, but it makes me think of something I read on/. recently about sysadmins delving through employees emails/files/etc. A semi-prevailing opinion was that while yes, we the admins have the access perms to do it, the cold hard truth is that 99.9% of the time people are boring. What makes you think watching a bunch of people wandering aimlessly around their Saturday shopping is any different?
From TFA:
Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Does anyone else remember a time before the web was about making money via ad clickthroughs? I will -- and do -- happily part with a large proportion of my disposable income online, but it is rarely, if ever, on sites that I discovered via advertising.
If you have something that's worth paying for, then (many; not all -- see RIAA) people will pay for it! Advertising may be appropriate on some sites, like Slashdot, but I'm increasingly getting pissed off with AdWords banners appearing every-damn-where. No amount of clever "content-relevant" algorithmically derived adverts can make up for the fact that they don't belong on someone's crappy backwater blog.
Webcomics are a good example of the way it should be done. I read http://xkcd.com/ and http://questionablecontent.net/ daily; I've supported them (in a very real, more financially impacting way) by buying several tens of dollars worth of t-shirts.
Subscriptions, merchandise, who cares. Just please, stop it with the irrelevant ads already!
Slashdot Mirror
Why was he given a police caution ? He did nothing illegal, nothing that police had previously been asked to be told about, so why a caution ? Yes what he did accidentally caused some disruption; but this was not intended.
They probably mixed up the Simple Caution (that is a form of mild wrist slapping) with the warning, also called a caution, that the Police give you before talking to you about anything in which you could by any stretch of the imagination be considered a suspect or witness. The equivalent of the Miranda Rights in the US.
"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned anything which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
When I was in the (UK) cops we were trained to dish this out to anybody we spoke to even semi-formally. If nothing comes of your conversation then no problem; if you fail to caution somebody prior to speaking to them, and then their testimony becomes a big deal, the lack of a caution at the start can be a case-breaker. So you basically say it to everybody to be safe. But it is NOT something that is recorded (other than in your pocket notebook) or otherwise appears on anybody's record.
Having personally watched a CSI (or SOCO as we called them then) collect samples at a crime scene, I can categorically tell you that at least in the UK, it is standard practice to collect controls as well as specimens.
For example, there is blood around a broken window: the CSI will collect samples of the blood and also swabs from the other side of the room, and from the wall outside. This allows them to exclude various bits of contamination that aren't related to the crime but are present at the crime scene.
Don't let me get in the way of your assumptions though.
I have a mobile broadband option for my Macbook:
JoikuSpot on my Nokia E71.
I absolutely agree with the sentiment, especially drawing attention to Dame Stella Rimington's breath-of-fresh-air comments. However, I would clarify your first point: Britain's senior police officers (the Chief Constables of their respective forces, who together make up ACPO), are appointed by the Home Secretary, "Wacky" Jacqui Smith.
As such, they owe their positions to falling in line with the Party (capital P pun somewhat intended). The rank and file police officers I know just roll their eyes at stuff like this and carry on as normal -- much like the government's frankly despicable reclassification of cannabis as a class B drug, contrary to a heap of scientific advice.
Yup, simply closing the tab also works in Camino 1.6.3 on Leopard.
Mod parent up -- I didn't know about iplayer-dl; that's a great idea, although it's a shame simple downloading is not officially supported.
Of course, the other problem this outlines is the piss-poor performance of Flash on non-Windows architectures. I can't even watch a 5 min episode of Zero Punctuation without the bottom of my MBP searing my nuts off.
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes
If you can get Flash to work, you can view the iPlayer content: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. I do it all the time using Camino on OS X. To be honest I find this preferable to a P2P model anyway, although obviously the usual dire warnings about it overloading the intertubes as more people catch on apply.
Agree with you 100% about it being advert-free, too. I'm Canadian by birth and every time I go over to visit family, watching TV is like an exercise in self-control. I swear to Science the ratio of adverts:content is 1:1.
I have it on good authority (from my father who recently retired as the Environmental director of a plastics company), that "biodegradable" plastic bags as used by Tesco (the UK's largest supermarket chain), are actually what is known chemically as "oxodegradable" -- that is, they degrade in the presence of heat and oxygen.
So, you need heat and oxygen to degrade the bags. Now, guess what you don't find much of:
a) on the cold rainy streets of the UK, where these bags might be lying around if not properly disposed of, or
b) in the anoxic depths of the bottom of landfill dumps, where they end up if "properly" disposed of.
So it's all a bit of a greenwash apparently, and the only way to win is not to play -- and bring your own reusable bags.
Oh, of course not. What shit -- anyone "compliant" who doesn't meet a cop's standard of humanity will be met with taunting or other abuse designed to escalate the situation to one where the cop can call "resisting", then all bets are off. They can afford to pick a fight with anyone at any time and come out "clean".
You don't know what you're fucking talking about, and I find you offensive. Maybe this happened to you, or somebody you know, and it's gotten you irked. But I guarantee that I know more cops than you do, and *never* -- not once -- has this happened in my personal experience as an ex-police officer.
I'm not suggesting that it doesn't happen in the whole wide world, but using words like "anyone" and stating definitively that the defacto method for police of dealing with people is to trick them into resisting arrest, is ignorant and frankly tin-foilish.
As a rule (and I mean that -- rule), you use the least force necessary. If they are being arrested, you want to get them into the van/car and off to the station quickly and cleanly, and with the least paperwork. Resisting arrest entails additional paperwork, and if there's one thing cops hate, it's that.
So shut your stupid fear-inciting mouth, and start commenting on "facts" that you actually know something about.
I don't really see the need for a dedicated "project" to make an entry in your access_log on startup.
For the people for whom "wget" and "startup script" mean nothing?
He probably meant plate boundary. The San Andreas fault represents the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, and movement along plate boundaries is both more common and of a usually higher magnitude than inner-plate fault movements.
It's a game of playing the statistics and risk, like anything else.
There is no question WW/III would have happened if the United States hadn't taken over nearly all the military operations in Europe.
"No question"? Really? [citation needed].
Perhaps you're thinking about the Morgenthau Plan, which was a primarily economic effort (which only lasted a few years) to "industrially disarm" Germany.
To the best of my knowledge, the primary reason for the stationing of US troops in Europe was to expand the US sphere of influence here (yes, I'm European) as a bulwark against the Soviets -- with whom relations were already beginning to deteriorate at the close of the war.
And no, I can't be bothered to dig up references for that, which I suppose makes me a hypocrite but hey, technically I should be working! :)
Copying: I copy the data, now we both have the data. I don't know about the US, but in the UK you're absolutely right. IANAL, but I was a police officer, and here in the UK the legal definition of theft is To dishonestly appropriate with the intention to permanently deprive Clearly there is no intention (or indeed possibility) of permanent deprivation, and the applicability of "appropriation" in this context is suspect too.
This bandying around of the word theft and the annoying faux-hip "CoPyRiGhT is StEaLiNg!!!11!!" things you get at the beginning of DVDs make me bristle every time.
I would say it's probably exactly the opposite, it's just that the bad cops get a disproportionate amount of media attention.
That said, my only real experience with the police is in the UK -- YMMV I suppose.
There's another, less Machiavellian reason: it's good business sense from a strategic point of view. The supermajors are beginning to try and turn themselves around to become "energy companies" instead of "oil companies". See BP's partly-successful greenwashing attempts such as changing their tagline to "Beyond Petroleum".
The writing is on the wall, and they see it. Patents such as these, as well as stalling alternative energy adoption (I don't deny that it's attractive to them, but I don't really believe that they sat around in board meetings and decided upon it as a strategy), also attempt to ensure cashflow once the wells dry up.
For disclosure's sake, I do work in the oil industry (in the UK, which is in its twilight years for production), but I'm neither an apologist nor against it on principle; it just pays the bills -- for now.
Full disclosure: IUTBAPO (I Used To Be a Police Officer) in the UK. Yeah yeah, on Slashdot that's flamebait and I'll never speak of it again, but I have some valid points to make in response to JCR's post.
/. recently about sysadmins delving through employees emails/files/etc. A semi-prevailing opinion was that while yes, we the admins have the access perms to do it, the cold hard truth is that 99.9% of the time people are boring. What makes you think watching a bunch of people wandering aimlessly around their Saturday shopping is any different?
Cameras of the sort used all over the country are run by central control/operations rooms which are manned by civilians employed by the local councils (not cops). They have police radios in the control rooms though so we can speak to them, although they are under no obligation to do as we ask (although in practise, they usually do). There are two points which you may find interesting which I don't think have been mentioned yet:
1) Normally, the cameras record only one frame every few seconds (presumably so as to not max out their storage on account of the vast number of cameras, heh). Operators cycle through and view them as they see fit depending on the time of day, and if it looks like something's going down, either they or the police can request that a particular camera "go to realtime" recording, so as to capture events at normal speed. However if something such as a mugging happens when the cameras are "idle", if it happens very very quickly it is possible that it won't be recorded at all.
2) This is the bit that is in response to the parent -- In the event that we (the police) are investigating an incident, we could submit a CCTV request to the control centre, which is a piece of paperwork containing things such as a location, a short description of what (allegedly) happened, and a time bracket. Operators would then go through the recordings manually to try and find it, and if we were lucky it would have been caught on camera, whereupon they would send us a DVD or (more usually) a VCR tape of the relevant parts of the recording. At no time did we, the police, have direct access to the CCTV system, either in a day-to-day sense or in access to the archives.
I think this is an important point, because it means that the gatekeepers are civilians who are more directly accountable to the elected council representatives, and thus, the people. Of course the usual semi-FUD about cops becoming maniacal power-crazed demons can be half applied to them too, but it makes me think of something I read on
If you have something that's worth paying for, then (many; not all -- see RIAA) people will pay for it! Advertising may be appropriate on some sites, like Slashdot, but I'm increasingly getting pissed off with AdWords banners appearing every-damn-where. No amount of clever "content-relevant" algorithmically derived adverts can make up for the fact that they don't belong on someone's crappy backwater blog.
Webcomics are a good example of the way it should be done. I read http://xkcd.com/ and http://questionablecontent.net/ daily; I've supported them (in a very real, more financially impacting way) by buying several tens of dollars worth of t-shirts.
Subscriptions, merchandise, who cares. Just please, stop it with the irrelevant ads already!