Your attempt at level-headed argument is much appreciated. However there have been an increasing number of articles around here lately about police/security activity when confronted with hostile/threatening individuals, and there is absolutely no shortage of people who would rather villianize the police at any opportunity than fairly attribute blame to the part of the arrested.
You cannot reason with these people. I would have thought maybe you could before reading not just their initial messages, but also their responses when people pointed out how ridiculous their arguments were. They don't accept the truth even when it's shoved in their faces. It is like a religious conviction that cannot be shaken: cops are bad, their behavior should be perfect, and nobody who instigates police and escalates situations has any responsibility for their actions.
While I do appreciate your attempts to reason with these people, I recommend that you not bother. You cannot change their minds. They want to believe the police are bad because it gives them something to raise their ire, to be indignant about. And some people just really enjoy being indignant, and they're not going to let go of that, just because someone points out the flaws in their thinking.
Perhaps you should not speak in such absolutes as "police really don't give a diddly squat" and "paperwork will be filed but that's all that they'll do" if you are going to issue responses like that.
Can you perhaps explain your evidence for believing that it was happenstance? Do you think the cop just tripped over my wife's stolen car? It wasn't like he found out it was stolen in a routine traffic stop.
I believe that your assertion will be that if she had been the one to notice that it was stolen first, and called the cops to report it, that they wouldn't have put any extra effort forth to find it, and would have only found it out of the course of investigating bigger crimes. I don't believe you though. I'll be that the cops would have done *something*, such as keep the license plate number on a list that they could refer to whenever otherwise checking out a suspicious vehicle.
Before tasers? Probably one of two things would have happened:
1. It would have taken the cops alot longer to get him cuffed and out of there. Notice that he was up and out a few moments after being tasered. Without the taser they probably would have struggled for a while longer to get him cuffed, then struggled to get him to his feet and walking out. All the time they would have been allowing him to continue breaking the law by resisting arrest.
2. They would have gotten out the nightsticks and beat him silly.
Neither would have been better than what actually happened.
What the fuck? Did you even read the story or watch the video? THEY **DID** MOVE HIM OUTSIDE. He wasn't hurt, nobody was hurt. He was given a painful shock with a taser, but that's exactly what made him comply. They could have twisted his arm until he complied, or beat him with nightsticks, or picked him up and carried him out (and he probably would have flailed his arms and legs, causing danger to the officers and thus inviting even harsher physical force on their part), but why should they do any of these more dangerous things when the simple option of making the guy comply by causing him harmless pain worked so perfectly well?
You should have your web hosting for something worthwhile. This event is not it. I know that people just LOVE to get their ire up by fabricating police brutality claims and such, but seriously, go do something more useful with your web site. Please.
I cannot believe that people who otherwise sound intelligent are using arguments like yours to defend someone who was obviously wrong. Let's examine the sequence of events shall we?
1. Kid attends Kerry's public speaking function. No problem here.
2. Kid waits until he is allowed to address a question to the speaker. No problem here.
3. Kid doesn't ask question but makes statements. He is not following the informal rules of the event but nobody has a real problem with it.
4. Kid extends beyond his 40 second question period and is asked to wrap it up. Slight problem because he's already violated the rules of the event but this is not a problem the police need to or do get involved with. This is between the forum moderator and the kid.
5. Kid keeps talking. A minute or more has passed. He is allowed to ask his three questions, despite going over his time. Still nobody has a problem (despite the audience clearly getting sick of the guy), because he is supposedly done; he's stepped away from (or maybe been tugged away from, I can't tell) the microphone. Still no problem, if the kid walks away at this point the event continues and his "questions" get answered.
6. Kid physically forces his way back to the microphone and attempts to continue talking. Now there is a problem. This kid has initiated a confrontation with the event moderators and therefore with the police, who are there to enforce order in the proceedings. Nobody asked or made the kid do this; he was not goaded into it or given no way out. He had a clear way out of this - to walk away - and he refused. At this point he is disrupting the event, which is a problem. Yeah Kerry said he'd answer his question, but he didn't ask to allow the kid to stay at the microphone. I don't think you can read too much into the speaker saying "It's OK" - I think that only really reasonable interpretation is that he's just trying to calm the kid down, to let him know that his question will be answered, to get him to stop causing a problem. But the kid doesn't even seem to acknowledge what Kerry has said. And Kerry isn't in control of this function anyway and doesn't have authority to tell the police what to do.
7. Officers attempt to physically move him away from the microphone and out of the event. They escalate the physical confrontation pretty quickly because they assess that asking him to comply will have no effect. I think this is a reasonable assumption given his unwillingness to follow previous requests to complete his question and leave the microphone area. The kid is now causing real problems.
8. The kid resists the physical attempts of the police to remove him, and continues to resist. All he had to do was comply, to leave the area. The officers have every right to ask him to leave - he is "disturbing the peace" of the event. And they have every right to force him to comply. The kid continues to cause problems by, instead of just walking out and dealing with the police in a civilized manner, he physically resists them. Once he starts physically resisting them, he is clearly breaking a law - resisting arrest.
9. Police attempt for several minutes to subdue him and get him to follow their commands, and complete the arrest, but he continues to physically resist. Police eventually threaten to and then do use a taser to get him to comply. Guess what - it works. Seems like a perfectly reasonable choice to me; if it hadn't worked them I suppose one could question whether or not it was the right choice. But without physical harm to the kid, they get him to comply, complete the arrest, and escort him out. How can you argue that the taser was not appropriate here, when it filled its role perfectly?
I honestly think that the police acted *completely* appropriately in this situation. The kid was causing problems, and was removed with no harm to anyone. The taser caused him pain but this was the safest means of getting him to comply with the completely justified orders of the cops, and he brought it on himself.
Can you explain exactly how the police removing a person who is disturbing others is "illegal"?
The reason that the "21-year-old white kid" (nice subtle racism there by the way - you imply that if he wasn't white it would be less surprising that the cops wouldn't be able to control him) didn't obey the cops is because he knows that he is no real physical danger. It is precisely because cops can be so easily disrespected with only minor consequences (yeah whiners here and elsewhere will claim that he was brutalized but as far as I know he was not injured in any way) that people like this do it.
The reason that it took 3 or 4 cops is that it is very difficult to subdue someone without hurting him or yourself. If cops were allowed to do whatever was necessary to subdue the victim, the first thing they'd do is probably punch them in the nose. A hard enough hit would make most people drop and cover themselves from further abuse, pretty effective. Is this what you would advocate? Sounds like it, because this kind of overt violence is the only way that I can see a single cop having a good chance of subduing a victim who is intent on physically resisting - that or smacking them in the face with a baton, or shooting them.
Whether or not you agree with what the cops are doing, they have every right to arrest you and use force in doing so. If I was in a situation like that involving the cops I would definitely comply with any reasonable orders they would give. I can sue later if need be but physically confronting a cop is not good for anyone involved and is just stupidity.
If you resist arrest you are an absolute idiot whose only solace will be the supporting comments of similar idiots on public internet forums.
My wife's car was stolen when we lived in Yonkers. The police recovered it so quickly that she didn't even know it was gone; she got a phone call late one morning from the police saying, "We found your car", and her response was, "What are you talking about? It's parked downstairs on the street." Except it wasn't - it had been stolen during the night and recovered in the morning by the cops.
They found it in the Bronx on a lot where a bunch of other stolen cars were waiting to be stripped and shipped overseas or somesuch. The only damage to it was some scraping around the keyhole, and I think some chipped paint on the bumper. Insurance covered it, no big deal.
The cops told us that in the Bronx they don't even prosecute car theft as a felony, if they did they'd clog the courts up. They just gave the guy a slap on the wrists and let him go.
So sometimes the cops do recover stolen cars, just as a counterexample to your post.
Your gangster analogy is a bad one, on many levels:
1. Recording contracts are entered into willingly by both parties because they have mutual benefit. Gangsters provide no benefit to store owners, who do not willingly enter into business with them.
2. Recording artists have always had choices other than the music industry for publishing their music. Independent labels have existed for a long time and recording artists have self-published on many occasions. So there are, and have been, many options for artists who want to distribute their music that don't involve the traditional recording industry. Artists only sign contracts with big record companies because they want to take a shot at being much more successful; that kind of success only comes with the investment and marketing muscle that recording companies provide. Artists want something; recording companies can provide it; so they both agree to work together. Gangsters give store owners no "choice", and they make their threats against established business with lots to lose (i.e. the investment of time and money that went into building up the store).
3. Gansterism is illegal. Publishing records is not.
As to your point about Beethoven, Mozart, etc. I am no music historian but I doubt that they had the same mass appeal to hundreds of millions of people in their lifetimes as modern pop artists do. I have a vague inkling that those classical composers worked mostly on contract for kings and dukes and stuff. I can't think of too many ways in which classical composers, and modern music "stars" are similar, except that they have the greatest popularity in their fields of music.
I don't think that too many pop stars aspire to be known world-wide hundreds of years after their death. They want to be known NOW, which is why they enter into apparently lopsided contracts with record companies.
Wouldn't it make sense to sell any part that had at least one working core? Meaning that if in making quad-core chips, W% of them ended up only having one working core, X% had 2, Y% had 3, and Z% had four, wouldn't it make the most sense to sell all of these chips?
This implies that they have a way to use all four cores independently. Maybe they can't; maybe one core is "special", like the "master" core that has to be working for anything to work. Also this implies that the cores can detect that their sibling(s) aren't working and switch to a mode in which the sibling is not used at all.
Also, a question - when a core doesn't function properly, is it somehow disabled completely so that it doesn't use any power? Or maybe a core that isn't being fed any instructions doesn't use any power anyway?
Do music companies EXIST solely because of the artists or do the artists EXIST solely because of the music companies?
It's a serious question. I don't think popular music artists in their current form would exist without the music industry; it was the music industry that over the course of 50 years produced the concept of the superstar musician. At least it seems that way to me.
I don't think we could have the diversity of music available to us today if it wasn't for BOTH the artists AND the music industry. Maybe now that we have cheap means of distributing music (i.e. the internet) the music industry plays a less pivotal role. But for 50 years or more, there was no way for music to be created and widely disseminated to the degree that it was without the industry.
I personally don't care enough about music to take sides on these issues; if new music stopped being produced I would hardly notice. So I see it more of a situation in which the artists enter into contracts with record companies because it's the only way that they can have a shot at getting what they want. They are tying their fortunes to a much larger entity with more chances of making them a success than they would have had on their own, but with the sacrifice of a large percentage of the profits on their work should they end up being very successful.
These contracts are entered into freely by both parties and I really don't feel any pity for musicians who don't like the terms as much after their music has been promoted and distributed by the record companies, as they did before they became successful. It's very easy to see the record company making millions of dollars off of your combined work (remember that the artist and the record company are partners in the creation and distribution of the music, it isn't done solely by one party or the other) and get pissed off; but then you'd be forgetting that this is the record company's payoff for taking a chance on you as an artist. I am sure that record companies lose money on artists all the time. Obviously they make much more on the successful artists than they lose on the unsuccessful one, so there's no pity to be had for them.
Anyway I really have no pity for musicians when it comes to recording contracts, unless they were somehow deceived or cheated by the record company, which I am sure happens sometimes. Musicians who don't like industry terms should stay independent, plain and simple. Technology is giving these people greater and greater opportunities for garnering success outside of the industry every day, so the future looks pretty bright for them.
I had an email exchange yesterday with CmdrTaco in which I complained about the fluff stories that kdawson is pushing up with greater and greater frequency. CmdrTaco made some good points; people like news even if it is fluff and he gets loads of complaints if there aren't enough stories going up. Combine that with a slow news period (I guess this time of year there isn't much going on with European & U.S. university holidays (little research happening over the summer) and lots of people from industry going on vacation and the result is that the summer ends up with much lamer stories than the winter. Although, given that it's the end of summer now things should be picking up shortly.
I was really irritated by kdawson's constant post of useless stories until I got an explanation straight from the source about why this has to be. Now I am happy to ignore the stories I don't like; for some reason knowing there is a reason (maybe not a great reason, but a reason nonetheless) for this stuff makes it more palatable to me.
For what it's worth, I got some good replies from CmdrTaco that defended Slashdot's position very well. Apparently there are alot of people who get pissed off when there is not enough news being posted and write to ask for more. So I guess there is some pressure to just keep the articles coming, even if some (or many) of them are kind of weak, coming from the Slashdot readership itself.
He said that they try to maintain a good balance, and I guess that on average I have to say that they are doing a good job because I am still reading this site religiously after 9+ years...
Well, I've been browsing Slashdot almost daily for going on 10 years now. The more fluff stories there are, the more of my time is wasted skipping past them. I tend to read every editorial description of every story, and although it's not a whole lot of time, 10 seconds several times per day adds up eventually. And what's worse, the annoyance level of constantly reading the summary of news articles that are obviously completely worthless fluff, tends to rise over time out of proportion with the actual time wasted reading the summaries.
I read Slashdot as a way to keep up with "News for Nerds". I'm a nerd and I like interesting nerd news. The more lame stories I see posted to Slashdot, the less effective a resource it is for me to keep up with topics of geek interest.
I realize that many people have already given up on Slashdot as a good source of news articles of interest to geeks, and basically treat it as a site where funny comments are posted; for them it's more entertainment than a valuable news resource. But I guess I have a different focus, and over time I feel like Slashdot has tended more towards entertainment and less towards a good news resource. Witness the loss of some really good regular "columns", such as the ones where they used to collect questions from the Slashdot community to post to big names in the geek world. Those things were awesome and Slashdot doesn't even bother with them anymore.
My subscription is going to expire sometime pretty soon (I'm at like 9,800+ page views out of 10,000). What's amazing to me is how cheap Slashdot is. I think I put $100 into it back in 2001 or 2002, have read Slashdot almost daily, and often more than once per day, and I still haven't run out of page views (but I am close).
Anyway, I am somewhat unhappy about the poor editing but overall I still feel that the site is worth it. I really just wish that Slashdot would dump kdawson and zonk, I feel like eliminating those two sources of garbage would go such a long way towards improving Slashdot.
On the other hand, like I said before, I think that kdawson may just be fulfilling a specific mandate from the "management" at Slashdot, which is to ensure that articles keep being posted when none others are showing up. In which case, even if kdawson was canned they would just find someone else to do the same thing, making the problem more endemic in Slashdot as a whole and less with a particular editor.
I also unchecked kdawson for a little while but then I got worried that I was going to miss something good. It's not that kdawson never posts something interesting. It's just that his signal-to-noise ratio is too low, and definitely the worst of any slashdot editors. That is what is so frustrating; if every story he posted was worthless I could easily just eliminate him from my view of slashdot. But because he sometimes posts good stuff, I have to wade through all of his crap so as not to miss anything good.
There is nothing that anyone can do about kdawson and his lame non-story posts. I wrote to CmdrTaco personally about this yesterday and the response I received was basically that kdawson is doing a good job, especially given that we're in a slow news period. So basically, this is just how Slashdot is supposed to work and the people who run it see no problem.
I get the feeling that kdawson's mandate from the Slashdot team is to keep the stories coming; he's the guy that has to step in and post useless stories on days when there isn't much news just to keep articles coming so that Slashdot can keep the page clicks up. Must not be a fun job, sifting through hundreds of completely lame articles just to filter it down to the least crappy ones, that we then get to enjoy.
I can't think of any other way to explain the fact that his (kdawson's) stories are mostly fluff.
I don't think the death of those other animals you spoke about would be particularly slashdot-worthy either. But I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on these points.
Yes you are right, I did attack kdawson, the guy/gal annoys me terribly. I went so far as to write an email to CmdrTaco complaining about kdawson's editorial quality, I find it that bad.
Can you please point out the ad hominem attack in my post? As far as I know I didn't attack you personally at any time.
The other guy said it best - this story is not interesting because it's not about the research or about cognitive science or anything useful at all. It's about a parrot dying. It's very tangentially related to an interesting subject, and you'd have to be pretty damn interested in the particular research of one particular researcher to even care about this. I'm not saying that there isn't *somebody* out there who cares that this parrot died. I'm just saying that it doesn't even come close to the threshold of being interesting to enough people to be worth posting on Slashdot.
Perhaps Slashdot should post a news article every time a cognitive science department at a university gets a new grant? It's probably more practically useful knowledge for the people who would be interested in this dead parrot, although no more interesting for the rest of us.
I think what you are proposing is called a "false dilemma". The assertion is that this news story is garbage that shouldn't have made it to slashdot headlines (which I agree with; I mean if you really cared about this story you'd already be subscribed to alt.fan.parrots or maybe alt.pet.obituaries and wouldn't need slashdot to tell you about this). You are suggesting that the only way for one to see this story as worthless is if you have too narrow a focus and only care about iPhones, CPUs, and videogames. And yet there is a third option, that is in fact the correct one:
The majority of slashdot readers think iPhones, CPUs, and videogames are very geek-newsworthy, but also have lots of other interests and appreciate a wide variety of stories about science & technology subjects. Most of them, I am guessing, don't give a shit about one particular researcher's one particular pet subject having died. Doesn't make their interests narrow.
Obviously, what is and isn't interesting news is highly subjective. But I'll bet if you took a poll, most people would put this in the "roll your eyes and move on" category. Hell I only read the comments of this article to see how many people flamed kdawson (deservedly so) for posting it. I was surprised to find people defending him but I guess I shouldn't have been. There is always a contrary position out there somewhere.
I think it's telling that this story was posted by kdawson. Do you think that one of the more respected editors would have pushed this crap out?
I agree. I'd say 1/3 of headlines I see on Slashdot are flamebait or fluff, and 1/2 of those come from kdawson. Just now I went into my preferences pages and removed kdawson but then after a few minutes I undid it. Why?
Because I don't want to miss the 1/3 of stories that he posts that are worth reading. I am worried about missing something, because even though kdawson is the worst editor slashdot has ever had (although it's a close race with zonk), every once in a while even he/she/it posts something worthwhile.
Is there some way to filter just the ridiculously lame stories that kdawson posts? Is there a slashdot tag that is something like "kdawson-at-it-again" or something, so I can filter just the 50% of crap out?
Thanks for the pointer, since you said that it was possible to get the date/time like that I did a more exhaustive search of the user preferences. Turns out it's a setting in the "homepage" section, not the "comments" section, and I didn't find it before. Now I'm golden. Thanks again!
Thank you for that - actually it turns out that it's a preference in the "homepage" preferences section. I've gone looking for it in the past, in the "comments" preferences section, where I thought it would logically be, but having not found it there, gave up.
Slashdot Mirror
Your attempt at level-headed argument is much appreciated. However there have been an increasing number of articles around here lately about police/security activity when confronted with hostile/threatening individuals, and there is absolutely no shortage of people who would rather villianize the police at any opportunity than fairly attribute blame to the part of the arrested.
You cannot reason with these people. I would have thought maybe you could before reading not just their initial messages, but also their responses when people pointed out how ridiculous their arguments were. They don't accept the truth even when it's shoved in their faces. It is like a religious conviction that cannot be shaken: cops are bad, their behavior should be perfect, and nobody who instigates police and escalates situations has any responsibility for their actions.
While I do appreciate your attempts to reason with these people, I recommend that you not bother. You cannot change their minds. They want to believe the police are bad because it gives them something to raise their ire, to be indignant about. And some people just really enjoy being indignant, and they're not going to let go of that, just because someone points out the flaws in their thinking.
Perhaps you should not speak in such absolutes as "police really don't give a diddly squat" and "paperwork will be filed but that's all that they'll do" if you are going to issue responses like that.
Can you perhaps explain your evidence for believing that it was happenstance? Do you think the cop just tripped over my wife's stolen car? It wasn't like he found out it was stolen in a routine traffic stop.
I believe that your assertion will be that if she had been the one to notice that it was stolen first, and called the cops to report it, that they wouldn't have put any extra effort forth to find it, and would have only found it out of the course of investigating bigger crimes. I don't believe you though. I'll be that the cops would have done *something*, such as keep the license plate number on a list that they could refer to whenever otherwise checking out a suspicious vehicle.
If you do not agree with the reason for your arrest, you are free to fight it in court.
You are not free to fight the cops who are arresting you.
Did I really have to explain that to you? Can you please not waste our time any more by asking questions the answer to which are painfully obvious?
Before tasers? Probably one of two things would have happened:
1. It would have taken the cops alot longer to get him cuffed and out of there. Notice that he was up and out a few moments after being tasered. Without the taser they probably would have struggled for a while longer to get him cuffed, then struggled to get him to his feet and walking out. All the time they would have been allowing him to continue breaking the law by resisting arrest.
2. They would have gotten out the nightsticks and beat him silly.
Neither would have been better than what actually happened.
You are a moron.
* You can be asked to stop talking because you are violating the rules of the event.
* You can be asked to leave the event because you won't stop talking.
* You can be accused of disturbing the peace if you won't leave when asked, and continue to shout.
* You can be arrested if you are disturbing the peace.
* You can be tasered if you physically resist that arrest.
What the fuck? Did you even read the story or watch the video? THEY **DID** MOVE HIM OUTSIDE. He wasn't hurt, nobody was hurt. He was given a painful shock with a taser, but that's exactly what made him comply. They could have twisted his arm until he complied, or beat him with nightsticks, or picked him up and carried him out (and he probably would have flailed his arms and legs, causing danger to the officers and thus inviting even harsher physical force on their part), but why should they do any of these more dangerous things when the simple option of making the guy comply by causing him harmless pain worked so perfectly well?
You should have your web hosting for something worthwhile. This event is not it. I know that people just LOVE to get their ire up by fabricating police brutality claims and such, but seriously, go do something more useful with your web site. Please.
I cannot believe that people who otherwise sound intelligent are using arguments like yours to defend someone who was obviously wrong. Let's examine the sequence of events shall we?
1. Kid attends Kerry's public speaking function. No problem here.
2. Kid waits until he is allowed to address a question to the speaker. No problem here.
3. Kid doesn't ask question but makes statements. He is not following the informal rules of the event but nobody has a real problem with it.
4. Kid extends beyond his 40 second question period and is asked to wrap it up. Slight problem because he's already violated the rules of the event but this is not a problem the police need to or do get involved with. This is between the forum moderator and the kid.
5. Kid keeps talking. A minute or more has passed. He is allowed to ask his three questions, despite going over his time. Still nobody has a problem (despite the audience clearly getting sick of the guy), because he is supposedly done; he's stepped away from (or maybe been tugged away from, I can't tell) the microphone. Still no problem, if the kid walks away at this point the event continues and his "questions" get answered.
6. Kid physically forces his way back to the microphone and attempts to continue talking. Now there is a problem. This kid has initiated a confrontation with the event moderators and therefore with the police, who are there to enforce order in the proceedings. Nobody asked or made the kid do this; he was not goaded into it or given no way out. He had a clear way out of this - to walk away - and he refused. At this point he is disrupting the event, which is a problem. Yeah Kerry said he'd answer his question, but he didn't ask to allow the kid to stay at the microphone. I don't think you can read too much into the speaker saying "It's OK" - I think that only really reasonable interpretation is that he's just trying to calm the kid down, to let him know that his question will be answered, to get him to stop causing a problem. But the kid doesn't even seem to acknowledge what Kerry has said. And Kerry isn't in control of this function anyway and doesn't have authority to tell the police what to do.
7. Officers attempt to physically move him away from the microphone and out of the event. They escalate the physical confrontation pretty quickly because they assess that asking him to comply will have no effect. I think this is a reasonable assumption given his unwillingness to follow previous requests to complete his question and leave the microphone area. The kid is now causing real problems.
8. The kid resists the physical attempts of the police to remove him, and continues to resist. All he had to do was comply, to leave the area. The officers have every right to ask him to leave - he is "disturbing the peace" of the event. And they have every right to force him to comply. The kid continues to cause problems by, instead of just walking out and dealing with the police in a civilized manner, he physically resists them. Once he starts physically resisting them, he is clearly breaking a law - resisting arrest.
9. Police attempt for several minutes to subdue him and get him to follow their commands, and complete the arrest, but he continues to physically resist. Police eventually threaten to and then do use a taser to get him to comply. Guess what - it works. Seems like a perfectly reasonable choice to me; if it hadn't worked them I suppose one could question whether or not it was the right choice. But without physical harm to the kid, they get him to comply, complete the arrest, and escort him out. How can you argue that the taser was not appropriate here, when it filled its role perfectly?
I honestly think that the police acted *completely* appropriately in this situation. The kid was causing problems, and was removed with no harm to anyone. The taser caused him pain but this was the safest means of getting him to comply with the completely justified orders of the cops, and he brought it on himself.
Can you explain exactly how the police removing a person who is disturbing others is "illegal"?
The reason that the "21-year-old white kid" (nice subtle racism there by the way - you imply that if he wasn't white it would be less surprising that the cops wouldn't be able to control him) didn't obey the cops is because he knows that he is no real physical danger. It is precisely because cops can be so easily disrespected with only minor consequences (yeah whiners here and elsewhere will claim that he was brutalized but as far as I know he was not injured in any way) that people like this do it.
The reason that it took 3 or 4 cops is that it is very difficult to subdue someone without hurting him or yourself. If cops were allowed to do whatever was necessary to subdue the victim, the first thing they'd do is probably punch them in the nose. A hard enough hit would make most people drop and cover themselves from further abuse, pretty effective. Is this what you would advocate? Sounds like it, because this kind of overt violence is the only way that I can see a single cop having a good chance of subduing a victim who is intent on physically resisting - that or smacking them in the face with a baton, or shooting them.
Whether or not you agree with what the cops are doing, they have every right to arrest you and use force in doing so. If I was in a situation like that involving the cops I would definitely comply with any reasonable orders they would give. I can sue later if need be but physically confronting a cop is not good for anyone involved and is just stupidity.
If you resist arrest you are an absolute idiot whose only solace will be the supporting comments of similar idiots on public internet forums.
My wife's car was stolen when we lived in Yonkers. The police recovered it so quickly that she didn't even know it was gone; she got a phone call late one morning from the police saying, "We found your car", and her response was, "What are you talking about? It's parked downstairs on the street." Except it wasn't - it had been stolen during the night and recovered in the morning by the cops.
They found it in the Bronx on a lot where a bunch of other stolen cars were waiting to be stripped and shipped overseas or somesuch. The only damage to it was some scraping around the keyhole, and I think some chipped paint on the bumper. Insurance covered it, no big deal.
The cops told us that in the Bronx they don't even prosecute car theft as a felony, if they did they'd clog the courts up. They just gave the guy a slap on the wrists and let him go.
So sometimes the cops do recover stolen cars, just as a counterexample to your post.
Great post. I can't believe that my lame post got modded 4 but your informative one is still at 2.
Your gangster analogy is a bad one, on many levels:
1. Recording contracts are entered into willingly by both parties because they have mutual benefit. Gangsters provide no benefit to store owners, who do not willingly enter into business with them.
2. Recording artists have always had choices other than the music industry for publishing their music. Independent labels have existed for a long time and recording artists have self-published on many occasions. So there are, and have been, many options for artists who want to distribute their music that don't involve the traditional recording industry. Artists only sign contracts with big record companies because they want to take a shot at being much more successful; that kind of success only comes with the investment and marketing muscle that recording companies provide. Artists want something; recording companies can provide it; so they both agree to work together. Gangsters give store owners no "choice", and they make their threats against established business with lots to lose (i.e. the investment of time and money that went into building up the store).
3. Gansterism is illegal. Publishing records is not.
As to your point about Beethoven, Mozart, etc. I am no music historian but I doubt that they had the same mass appeal to hundreds of millions of people in their lifetimes as modern pop artists do. I have a vague inkling that those classical composers worked mostly on contract for kings and dukes and stuff. I can't think of too many ways in which classical composers, and modern music "stars" are similar, except that they have the greatest popularity in their fields of music.
I don't think that too many pop stars aspire to be known world-wide hundreds of years after their death. They want to be known NOW, which is why they enter into apparently lopsided contracts with record companies.
Wouldn't it make sense to sell any part that had at least one working core? Meaning that if in making quad-core chips, W% of them ended up only having one working core, X% had 2, Y% had 3, and Z% had four, wouldn't it make the most sense to sell all of these chips?
This implies that they have a way to use all four cores independently. Maybe they can't; maybe one core is "special", like the "master" core that has to be working for anything to work. Also this implies that the cores can detect that their sibling(s) aren't working and switch to a mode in which the sibling is not used at all.
Also, a question - when a core doesn't function properly, is it somehow disabled completely so that it doesn't use any power? Or maybe a core that isn't being fed any instructions doesn't use any power anyway?
Do music companies EXIST solely because of the artists or do the artists EXIST solely because of the music companies?
It's a serious question. I don't think popular music artists in their current form would exist without the music industry; it was the music industry that over the course of 50 years produced the concept of the superstar musician. At least it seems that way to me.
I don't think we could have the diversity of music available to us today if it wasn't for BOTH the artists AND the music industry. Maybe now that we have cheap means of distributing music (i.e. the internet) the music industry plays a less pivotal role. But for 50 years or more, there was no way for music to be created and widely disseminated to the degree that it was without the industry.
I personally don't care enough about music to take sides on these issues; if new music stopped being produced I would hardly notice. So I see it more of a situation in which the artists enter into contracts with record companies because it's the only way that they can have a shot at getting what they want. They are tying their fortunes to a much larger entity with more chances of making them a success than they would have had on their own, but with the sacrifice of a large percentage of the profits on their work should they end up being very successful.
These contracts are entered into freely by both parties and I really don't feel any pity for musicians who don't like the terms as much after their music has been promoted and distributed by the record companies, as they did before they became successful. It's very easy to see the record company making millions of dollars off of your combined work (remember that the artist and the record company are partners in the creation and distribution of the music, it isn't done solely by one party or the other) and get pissed off; but then you'd be forgetting that this is the record company's payoff for taking a chance on you as an artist. I am sure that record companies lose money on artists all the time. Obviously they make much more on the successful artists than they lose on the unsuccessful one, so there's no pity to be had for them.
Anyway I really have no pity for musicians when it comes to recording contracts, unless they were somehow deceived or cheated by the record company, which I am sure happens sometimes. Musicians who don't like industry terms should stay independent, plain and simple. Technology is giving these people greater and greater opportunities for garnering success outside of the industry every day, so the future looks pretty bright for them.
I had an email exchange yesterday with CmdrTaco in which I complained about the fluff stories that kdawson is pushing up with greater and greater frequency. CmdrTaco made some good points; people like news even if it is fluff and he gets loads of complaints if there aren't enough stories going up. Combine that with a slow news period (I guess this time of year there isn't much going on with European & U.S. university holidays (little research happening over the summer) and lots of people from industry going on vacation and the result is that the summer ends up with much lamer stories than the winter. Although, given that it's the end of summer now things should be picking up shortly.
I was really irritated by kdawson's constant post of useless stories until I got an explanation straight from the source about why this has to be. Now I am happy to ignore the stories I don't like; for some reason knowing there is a reason (maybe not a great reason, but a reason nonetheless) for this stuff makes it more palatable to me.
For what it's worth, I got some good replies from CmdrTaco that defended Slashdot's position very well. Apparently there are alot of people who get pissed off when there is not enough news being posted and write to ask for more. So I guess there is some pressure to just keep the articles coming, even if some (or many) of them are kind of weak, coming from the Slashdot readership itself.
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He said that they try to maintain a good balance, and I guess that on average I have to say that they are doing a good job because I am still reading this site religiously after 9+ years
Well, I've been browsing Slashdot almost daily for going on 10 years now. The more fluff stories there are, the more of my time is wasted skipping past them. I tend to read every editorial description of every story, and although it's not a whole lot of time, 10 seconds several times per day adds up eventually. And what's worse, the annoyance level of constantly reading the summary of news articles that are obviously completely worthless fluff, tends to rise over time out of proportion with the actual time wasted reading the summaries.
I read Slashdot as a way to keep up with "News for Nerds". I'm a nerd and I like interesting nerd news. The more lame stories I see posted to Slashdot, the less effective a resource it is for me to keep up with topics of geek interest.
I realize that many people have already given up on Slashdot as a good source of news articles of interest to geeks, and basically treat it as a site where funny comments are posted; for them it's more entertainment than a valuable news resource. But I guess I have a different focus, and over time I feel like Slashdot has tended more towards entertainment and less towards a good news resource. Witness the loss of some really good regular "columns", such as the ones where they used to collect questions from the Slashdot community to post to big names in the geek world. Those things were awesome and Slashdot doesn't even bother with them anymore.
My subscription is going to expire sometime pretty soon (I'm at like 9,800+ page views out of 10,000). What's amazing to me is how cheap Slashdot is. I think I put $100 into it back in 2001 or 2002, have read Slashdot almost daily, and often more than once per day, and I still haven't run out of page views (but I am close).
Anyway, I am somewhat unhappy about the poor editing but overall I still feel that the site is worth it. I really just wish that Slashdot would dump kdawson and zonk, I feel like eliminating those two sources of garbage would go such a long way towards improving Slashdot.
On the other hand, like I said before, I think that kdawson may just be fulfilling a specific mandate from the "management" at Slashdot, which is to ensure that articles keep being posted when none others are showing up. In which case, even if kdawson was canned they would just find someone else to do the same thing, making the problem more endemic in Slashdot as a whole and less with a particular editor.
Actually I did uncheck Jon Katz back in the day.
I also unchecked kdawson for a little while but then I got worried that I was going to miss something good. It's not that kdawson never posts something interesting. It's just that his signal-to-noise ratio is too low, and definitely the worst of any slashdot editors. That is what is so frustrating; if every story he posted was worthless I could easily just eliminate him from my view of slashdot. But because he sometimes posts good stuff, I have to wade through all of his crap so as not to miss anything good.
There is nothing that anyone can do about kdawson and his lame non-story posts. I wrote to CmdrTaco personally about this yesterday and the response I received was basically that kdawson is doing a good job, especially given that we're in a slow news period. So basically, this is just how Slashdot is supposed to work and the people who run it see no problem.
I get the feeling that kdawson's mandate from the Slashdot team is to keep the stories coming; he's the guy that has to step in and post useless stories on days when there isn't much news just to keep articles coming so that Slashdot can keep the page clicks up. Must not be a fun job, sifting through hundreds of completely lame articles just to filter it down to the least crappy ones, that we then get to enjoy.
I can't think of any other way to explain the fact that his (kdawson's) stories are mostly fluff.
I don't think the death of those other animals you spoke about would be particularly slashdot-worthy either. But I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on these points.
Yes you are right, I did attack kdawson, the guy/gal annoys me terribly. I went so far as to write an email to CmdrTaco complaining about kdawson's editorial quality, I find it that bad.
Can you please point out the ad hominem attack in my post? As far as I know I didn't attack you personally at any time.
The other guy said it best - this story is not interesting because it's not about the research or about cognitive science or anything useful at all. It's about a parrot dying. It's very tangentially related to an interesting subject, and you'd have to be pretty damn interested in the particular research of one particular researcher to even care about this. I'm not saying that there isn't *somebody* out there who cares that this parrot died. I'm just saying that it doesn't even come close to the threshold of being interesting to enough people to be worth posting on Slashdot.
Perhaps Slashdot should post a news article every time a cognitive science department at a university gets a new grant? It's probably more practically useful knowledge for the people who would be interested in this dead parrot, although no more interesting for the rest of us.
I think what you are proposing is called a "false dilemma". The assertion is that this news story is garbage that shouldn't have made it to slashdot headlines (which I agree with; I mean if you really cared about this story you'd already be subscribed to alt.fan.parrots or maybe alt.pet.obituaries and wouldn't need slashdot to tell you about this). You are suggesting that the only way for one to see this story as worthless is if you have too narrow a focus and only care about iPhones, CPUs, and videogames. And yet there is a third option, that is in fact the correct one:
The majority of slashdot readers think iPhones, CPUs, and videogames are very geek-newsworthy, but also have lots of other interests and appreciate a wide variety of stories about science & technology subjects. Most of them, I am guessing, don't give a shit about one particular researcher's one particular pet subject having died. Doesn't make their interests narrow.
Obviously, what is and isn't interesting news is highly subjective. But I'll bet if you took a poll, most people would put this in the "roll your eyes and move on" category. Hell I only read the comments of this article to see how many people flamed kdawson (deservedly so) for posting it. I was surprised to find people defending him but I guess I shouldn't have been. There is always a contrary position out there somewhere.
I think it's telling that this story was posted by kdawson. Do you think that one of the more respected editors would have pushed this crap out?
I agree. I'd say 1/3 of headlines I see on Slashdot are flamebait or fluff, and 1/2 of those come from kdawson. Just now I went into my preferences pages and removed kdawson but then after a few minutes I undid it. Why?
Because I don't want to miss the 1/3 of stories that he posts that are worth reading. I am worried about missing something, because even though kdawson is the worst editor slashdot has ever had (although it's a close race with zonk), every once in a while even he/she/it posts something worthwhile.
Is there some way to filter just the ridiculously lame stories that kdawson posts? Is there a slashdot tag that is something like "kdawson-at-it-again" or something, so I can filter just the 50% of crap out?
Thanks for the pointer, since you said that it was possible to get the date/time like that I did a more exhaustive search of the user preferences. Turns out it's a setting in the "homepage" section, not the "comments" section, and I didn't find it before. Now I'm golden. Thanks again!
Thank you for that - actually it turns out that it's a preference in the "homepage" preferences section. I've gone looking for it in the past, in the "comments" preferences section, where I thought it would logically be, but having not found it there, gave up.