Well put. An armed raid is the best way to escalate violence and increase the chances of someone getting killed. Why the police agitate for that escapes me. Actually, it doesn't: the police want to create the conditions in which they can kill people with impunity. Murdering a suspect after he's in custody is a crime. Killing him in his home because you "thought he was reaching for a gun" is just a mistake.:-/
For the IRS specfically, I was thinking of groups like the self-styled "sovereign citizens", who have basically the same attitude about wanting to create opportunities to kill police officers. Serving an arrest warrant on a member of a group like that is a situation in which I consider an armed raid to be justifiable.
I have a question for the police chiefs around the country. When an officer conducting a raid "accidentally" shoots an unarmed person, why are there no consequences for that incident? It would seem to me, someone who will accidentally pull the trigger during a raid is exactly the kind of person who should not be trusted to participate in raids.
SWAT teams are generally operated by municipal police. Depending on the size of your city, a grass-roots organization may indeed be able to steer policy. In a larger city, you'd need an alliance. You could probably get poverty, minority, and civil rights groups on your side.
American history is full of examples where citizens have stood up to injustice and won. Starting with our war of independence itself. The lesson of that history is that victory requires the weight of public opinion.
Bear in mind that the US press prints only the most extreme incidents. Most police officers in the US never fire their weapons in the line of duty for their entire careers.
Armed raids by tax collectors, I can believe. If someone refuses to pay taxes long enough, it's reasonable to arrest him. If that individual is also known to be stockpiling arms, as happens in the US from time to time, then I can see how an armed raid is justifiable. That doesn't mean it's routine procedure. I think the point of TFA is that we don't want armed raids to *become* routine procedure.
Violent crime in the US is occurring at the lowest rate in my lifetime and still declining rapidly. There are some, I'm sure, who would say that SWAT teams are a contributing factor to that. I'm skeptical of that claim. I would argue instead that declining violent crime rates make SWAT teams irrelevant. The wasted money alone is reason enough to quit using them; the number of extra-judicial "accidental" killings is a stronger reason.
I've lived in the Boston metro area for over 15 years, and the only incident I've seen or heard about that justified use of a SWAT team was the apprehension of the marathon bombing suspects. Frankly, something that we need that rarely, we would be better off without. Let the governor call out the National Guard when the threat to public safety is enough to justify military force.
Sometimes, someone gets faced with an ethical dilemma and doesn't immediately know what the right thing to do is. In those circumstances, it's understandable that the first thing he does is not necessarily the best thing he could have done.
TFA was about a House hearing, and 100% of the House of Representatives comes up for election every two years. It's the Senate where you have to keep track.
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
If it's true that members of Congress are angry, that's favorable news! Maybe they can be persuaded to get off their butts and do something about this.
It is a valid question though, how do you prove a secret program actually stops?
Sufficiently extreme measures could do that. For example, I believe the President has the authority to declassify entire programs with the stroke of a pen. Likewise, the President could order a criminal investigation of the program's managers. I'm not saying this will happen. I'm saying that if some hypothetical President wanted to clean house, he/she could come down on the NSA like a ton of bricks.
Unfortunately, the last two Presidents have felt the benefits of this secret program outweigh the violence it does to the fundamental principles of the Republic. How they came to that conclusion is a secret.
What's surprising about the fact that when ICANN started approving top-level domains that allow Unicode characters, that the first four were from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? The only surprise to me is that two are Russian and one is Chinese, instead of the other way around.
To be fair, I don't think anyone who was president from 1976-1980 could have been re-elected. Those were hard years for the US: high inflation, unemployment, the OPEC oil embargo, the bitter and recent memory of Vietnam, and the Iranian hostage crisis. That's just off the top of my head. No one could have solved all those problems at once, and it's easier to blame the President than to propose a solution.
Surveillance is not the problem per se. The problem is when people (read, government officials) can actually make use of the data without oversight.
If they needed a search warrant to do a database search of the video archives, then I would be fine with that. I would also want to see reasonable limitations on data retention by law enforcement agencies -- not to exceed the statue of limitations for felony crimes.
As others have said, the surveillance genie is out of the bottle. I believe it's time to talk instead about putting law enforcement agencies on a very short leash with regard to how they can use information systems. They will whine and moan that it "makes it harder to to catch criminals." It is really time to push back and say, "making your job easy is less of a priority than preventing crooked cops from abusing the public trust."
Turnabout would be to publish a Web service showing the real-time locations of all DOJ employees' cell phones. After all, according to them, that information is not private.
Research is not just academic: there is a lot of research going on in biotech, pharmaeceuticals, defense, aerospace, and government. There are also think tanks and the like, which probably crunch a lot of numbers. In most cases, research laboratories and institutes are anchored near major universities.
I would suggest you relocate to a geographic area where a lot of research gets done. Boston, DC, and the
Research Triangle spring to mind, but that's because I live on the East Coast. Los Angeles County has Caltech and UCLA so that is probably a safe bet on the West Coast. I'm sure there are others. Any state capital will have its public health, environmental, and similar agencies located there.
Try a location-specific search of the job listings for one of these areas (with loose technical criteria and strict geographic criteria) and you'll get a good idea of what jobs are out there and what skills they're looking for.
What about all the other genes that also matter ? Like those that make some conform (follow laws) and others not ?
I agree with your sentiments, and I would add: I missed the part where science had disproved the existence of free will. I have a very strong opinion in the nature vs. nurture debate, myself. The modern values of equality and freedom are predicated on the assumption that our choices matter.
Yeah, I think we could get a lot further by, for example, teaching ethics in school than by trying to predict behavior.
Teaching ethics could have broader benefits. Not only could it help kids learn to control their violent impulses before they are old enough to be dangerous, it could also help the next generation of scientists realize that screening people for potential behavior (instead of past, actual behavior) *is* prejudice.
P.S. Contrary to what one might presume from my sig, I am advocating teaching ethics from a humanist/non-religious POV.
You're reading too much into my remarks. If you make your decision of what weapon to carry, when, and where based on personal experience and observations, you're not the sort of person I was complaining about.
Let's add that the US media run the most shocking, bizarre, or outrage-causing stories they can find, regardless of the actual importance of the events. Since our population is over 300 million, you can manage to find a couple of those stories every day if you have thousands of reporters scouring the country. Then they harp on those stories for weeks. This gives the impression that everyone in the USA is some kind of freak.
What disturbs me is the number of people here who believe it -- who carry a gun because they actually believe they'll get attacked, or who think they'll get sued if someone spills hot coffee.
So perhaps stupid lawsuits like this occur (rarely) in other countries as well, but the media don't deem them newsworthy so you don't hear about them.
I have bad news for you about that "treason" term you throw around so casually. If you read the _whole_ Constitution instead of just the fashionable parts, you'll find that treason has a very specific definition in Article 3, Section 3. While I agree that the NSA programs are illegal, "the people" {{which ones?}} at NSA didn't meet the definition of treason. Not even close.
Has it crossed your mind that Senator Inhofe might be the lesser of two evils? (I can't believe I am defending Google and a bible-thumper at the same time!)
Actually, samzenpus spun it as a supply shortage, too. The headline is backward. If the number of EEs in the workforce is shrinking while unemployment in the field is 6.5% (as TFA said), it's the labor *market* (demand) that is in decline, not the labor pool (supply).
The smartphone, and the pad device are precisely the same thing - just other points on the spectrum, not a whole different genus of computer.
I disagree. So-called "mobile devices" have locked down operating systems to the point where the end user does not control what is running on the machine. They have dumbed-down user interfaces that often hide the contents of the file system from the user (Android devices may vary), and lack adequately sized keyboards and displays for most professional work.
My definition of a computer is not "a device that plays streaming video." My definition is more along the lines of "a device that provides data-processing tools to help the user solve original problems." So if, on a given device, I can't write a script to sort the lines of an ASCII file (perhaps after installing a Python interpreter or similar), I wouldn't call that device a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
If what she means is getting the entire (future) population off the planet, Randall of xkcd explained why that ain't gonna happen.
The uncomfortable truth is that, while colonizing the Solar System may be plausible, evacuating Earth is not. This planet is not, in fact, disposable.
Well put. An armed raid is the best way to escalate violence and increase the chances of someone getting killed. Why the police agitate for that escapes me. Actually, it doesn't: the police want to create the conditions in which they can kill people with impunity. Murdering a suspect after he's in custody is a crime. Killing him in his home because you "thought he was reaching for a gun" is just a mistake. :-/
For the IRS specfically, I was thinking of groups like the self-styled "sovereign citizens", who have basically the same attitude about wanting to create opportunities to kill police officers. Serving an arrest warrant on a member of a group like that is a situation in which I consider an armed raid to be justifiable.
I have a question for the police chiefs around the country. When an officer conducting a raid "accidentally" shoots an unarmed person, why are there no consequences for that incident? It would seem to me, someone who will accidentally pull the trigger during a raid is exactly the kind of person who should not be trusted to participate in raids.
SWAT teams are generally operated by municipal police. Depending on the size of your city, a grass-roots organization may indeed be able to steer policy. In a larger city, you'd need an alliance. You could probably get poverty, minority, and civil rights groups on your side.
American history is full of examples where citizens have stood up to injustice and won. Starting with our war of independence itself. The lesson of that history is that victory requires the weight of public opinion.
Bear in mind that the US press prints only the most extreme incidents. Most police officers in the US never fire their weapons in the line of duty for their entire careers.
Armed raids by tax collectors, I can believe. If someone refuses to pay taxes long enough, it's reasonable to arrest him. If that individual is also known to be stockpiling arms, as happens in the US from time to time, then I can see how an armed raid is justifiable. That doesn't mean it's routine procedure. I think the point of TFA is that we don't want armed raids to *become* routine procedure.
Violent crime in the US is occurring at the lowest rate in my lifetime and still declining rapidly. There are some, I'm sure, who would say that SWAT teams are a contributing factor to that. I'm skeptical of that claim. I would argue instead that declining violent crime rates make SWAT teams irrelevant. The wasted money alone is reason enough to quit using them; the number of extra-judicial "accidental" killings is a stronger reason.
I've lived in the Boston metro area for over 15 years, and the only incident I've seen or heard about that justified use of a SWAT team was the apprehension of the marathon bombing suspects. Frankly, something that we need that rarely, we would be better off without. Let the governor call out the National Guard when the threat to public safety is enough to justify military force.
Sometimes, someone gets faced with an ethical dilemma and doesn't immediately know what the right thing to do is. In those circumstances, it's understandable that the first thing he does is not necessarily the best thing he could have done.
TFA was about a House hearing, and 100% of the House of Representatives comes up for election every two years. It's the Senate where you have to keep track.
If it's true that members of Congress are angry, that's favorable news! Maybe they can be persuaded to get off their butts and do something about this.
Sufficiently extreme measures could do that. For example, I believe the President has the authority to declassify entire programs with the stroke of a pen. Likewise, the President could order a criminal investigation of the program's managers. I'm not saying this will happen. I'm saying that if some hypothetical President wanted to clean house, he/she could come down on the NSA like a ton of bricks.
Unfortunately, the last two Presidents have felt the benefits of this secret program outweigh the violence it does to the fundamental principles of the Republic. How they came to that conclusion is a secret.
What's surprising about the fact that when ICANN started approving top-level domains that allow Unicode characters, that the first four were from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? The only surprise to me is that two are Russian and one is Chinese, instead of the other way around.
To be fair, I don't think anyone who was president from 1976-1980 could have been re-elected. Those were hard years for the US: high inflation, unemployment, the OPEC oil embargo, the bitter and recent memory of Vietnam, and the Iranian hostage crisis. That's just off the top of my head. No one could have solved all those problems at once, and it's easier to blame the President than to propose a solution.
Surveillance is not the problem per se. The problem is when people (read, government officials) can actually make use of the data without oversight.
If they needed a search warrant to do a database search of the video archives, then I would be fine with that. I would also want to see reasonable limitations on data retention by law enforcement agencies -- not to exceed the statue of limitations for felony crimes.
As others have said, the surveillance genie is out of the bottle. I believe it's time to talk instead about putting law enforcement agencies on a very short leash with regard to how they can use information systems. They will whine and moan that it "makes it harder to to catch criminals." It is really time to push back and say, "making your job easy is less of a priority than preventing crooked cops from abusing the public trust."
Turnabout would be to publish a Web service showing the real-time locations of all DOJ employees' cell phones. After all, according to them, that information is not private.
Research is not just academic: there is a lot of research going on in biotech, pharmaeceuticals, defense, aerospace, and government. There are also think tanks and the like, which probably crunch a lot of numbers. In most cases, research laboratories and institutes are anchored near major universities.
I would suggest you relocate to a geographic area where a lot of research gets done. Boston, DC, and the Research Triangle spring to mind, but that's because I live on the East Coast. Los Angeles County has Caltech and UCLA so that is probably a safe bet on the West Coast. I'm sure there are others. Any state capital will have its public health, environmental, and similar agencies located there.
Try a location-specific search of the job listings for one of these areas (with loose technical criteria and strict geographic criteria) and you'll get a good idea of what jobs are out there and what skills they're looking for.
I agree with your sentiments, and I would add: I missed the part where science had disproved the existence of free will. I have a very strong opinion in the nature vs. nurture debate, myself. The modern values of equality and freedom are predicated on the assumption that our choices matter.
Yeah, I think we could get a lot further by, for example, teaching ethics in school than by trying to predict behavior.
Teaching ethics could have broader benefits. Not only could it help kids learn to control their violent impulses before they are old enough to be dangerous, it could also help the next generation of scientists realize that screening people for potential behavior (instead of past, actual behavior) *is* prejudice.
P.S. Contrary to what one might presume from my sig, I am advocating teaching ethics from a humanist/non-religious POV.
It's not inevitable if medical records stay private.
You're reading too much into my remarks. If you make your decision of what weapon to carry, when, and where based on personal experience and observations, you're not the sort of person I was complaining about.
Let's add that the US media run the most shocking, bizarre, or outrage-causing stories they can find, regardless of the actual importance of the events. Since our population is over 300 million, you can manage to find a couple of those stories every day if you have thousands of reporters scouring the country. Then they harp on those stories for weeks. This gives the impression that everyone in the USA is some kind of freak.
What disturbs me is the number of people here who believe it -- who carry a gun because they actually believe they'll get attacked, or who think they'll get sued if someone spills hot coffee.
So perhaps stupid lawsuits like this occur (rarely) in other countries as well, but the media don't deem them newsworthy so you don't hear about them.
I have bad news for you about that "treason" term you throw around so casually. If you read the _whole_ Constitution instead of just the fashionable parts, you'll find that treason has a very specific definition in Article 3, Section 3. While I agree that the NSA programs are illegal, "the people" {{which ones?}} at NSA didn't meet the definition of treason. Not even close.
Has it crossed your mind that Senator Inhofe might be the lesser of two evils? (I can't believe I am defending Google and a bible-thumper at the same time!)
Here's another: http://xkcd.com/54/ OK, the science isn't relevant but the conclusion sure is.
Actually, samzenpus spun it as a supply shortage, too. The headline is backward. If the number of EEs in the workforce is shrinking while unemployment in the field is 6.5% (as TFA said), it's the labor *market* (demand) that is in decline, not the labor pool (supply).
I disagree. So-called "mobile devices" have locked down operating systems to the point where the end user does not control what is running on the machine. They have dumbed-down user interfaces that often hide the contents of the file system from the user (Android devices may vary), and lack adequately sized keyboards and displays for most professional work.
My definition of a computer is not "a device that plays streaming video." My definition is more along the lines of "a device that provides data-processing tools to help the user solve original problems." So if, on a given device, I can't write a script to sort the lines of an ASCII file (perhaps after installing a Python interpreter or similar), I wouldn't call that device a PC.