Sorry, any site selling things above the VAT threshold must display the VAT number. It also doesn't apply to auctions. (although I'm not entirely sure on eBay's position here, don't they claim not to be an auction to avoid some requirement?)
I don't know what the situation is in other countries but in the UK, at least, any site that sells things is obliged to display their trading address (and VAT registration number) publicly.
If I travel 1 meter in 1 second I travel at 1m/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1m/s^2. If I weigh 1kg, then this required a force of 1N. If this force 1N work over a distance of 1m, it does 1J of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1W. If this was provided by electricity, then that is for example 1V and 1A. 1A means 1C electrons pro 1s flows trough the conductor. Now you do that, using only imperial units.:-) How many hogheads *are* there to a fluid-oz anyway ?
If I travel 1 foot in 1 second I travel at 1 foot/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1 foot/s^2. If I weigh 1lb, then this required a force of 1 pound-force. If this force 1lbf works over a distance of 1', it does one foot-pound force (ftlbf) of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1 ftlbfs^-1.
I can't do any more from memory - we only used metric terms when discussing electricity, whereas we used imperial and metric with anything else, but I'm sure they exist. My point is that the 1:1:1 ratio isn't a feature of the metric system, it's a feature of measurement systems in general.
His point isn't that Ciber will keep testing, it's that the/. headline has a negative bias to it; it makes it sound like the Government banned an independent organisation from looking at the machines, which seems corrupt, when actually they were acting to try to increase the stringency of the testing.
Yes, both result in a copy of something being created. But in your NOT-gate example, you're providing the 'materials' and the method of assembly - NOT-gate it again. With bittorrent, one person supplies the plans (the.torrent) and a group of other people supply the raw materials (the file pieces). In my previous post I was just going for the funny, but imagine a different situation. On my fridge are a load of magnets with words on. They can be used to create copyrighted poems if I know, independently, how to do this. But it's no one's fault but mine if I do.
But bittorrent is if someone else gives them the sheet and you give them the letters to fill it in. I don't think anyone's going to find you guilty for selling alphabet soup in the knowledge that they might write something bad.
I can't speak about the American situation per se, but I can give some thoughts from a European perspective.
American conservativism has become, in the last 50 years, the dominant doctrine both economically and politically. Seven of the last ten American presidents have been Republicans, and the Republican party has controlled the Senate and House or Representatives in five of the last six Congresses (not including the 110th). Conservative theorists have long used the status of America to impose their values upon the rest of the world; witness, for example, the fact that all other currencies are floated against the dollar (causing the crisis of 1981-2 when soaring American interest rates effectively bankrupted Mexico), or the undermining of the WTO and IMF, both ideas propounded by liberal American Presidents, when their function did not coincide with American global interests (namely the ability of Wall Street to operate in any country it chooses free from risk - as long as the IMF is in hoc to the treasury, there's always someone to pick up the tab). The success of America's economy in the 1990s - which, as we are now seeing, is almost certainly unsustainable - was used by right-wing politicians the world over to convince the electorate of the virtues of removing all market regulation and opening up previous state monopolies, even where this lead to problems rather than improvements. (European telecoms companies, for example, which have since accumulated four times as much debt as they can afford to pay back).
The dearth of left-wing support in the US had similiar knock-on effects for Europe. America's abandoning of any universal health care plans, low minimum wage and low social floor caused a crisis in European politics, where traditionally these ideas were rejected out of hand as unfair and elitist - but with America's economic and political superiority continuing to burgeon it looked ever more promising.
The solution, for many (if not most) European left-wing parties was to move to the centre. By doing this, they forced the conservative parties further to the right, to the territory that the electorate still find distasteful. Left wing parties suddenly embraced deregulation, lowering taxes, privatisation and scaling-back of public services. This removed the incentive for moderates to vote for right-wing parties and allowed left-wing (now centrist) parties to win elections in the current global political climate.
With the re-awakening of left wing values in America (if the trend continues) I am hopeful that this will stop or even reverse in the coming cycles. Otherwise, we face the worrying prospect of a right-wing European Government - the use in most countries of a first-past-the-post system will favour the right if liberals start voting for left wing parties rather than the new centrists.
Jokes aside, this seems like a brilliant way for a gym to offset at least some of its operating electrical bill, but I can't recall ever reading about a single instance of this being put into practice. When I was a kid I bought a rig to power the lights on my bike via a simple friction mechanism off one of the wheels for about £10, so I doubt cost is an issue. Is anyone aware of this being done on a larger scale, or has the idea really just not occurred to anyone?
This is done in a number of gyms. The power produced by an average person on an exercise bike isn't enormous, though, and is used to power the display on the bike itself. There may be a tiny bit left over, but not enough to be any real use.
"some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters," the Air Force experiments concluded.
Because quite clearly the people you're using it on will get out of the way immediately. They won't be potentially injured or trapped. They won't be confused and run the wrong way. They won't be scared to come out of their hiding place because soldiers are sitting outside. No, they'll promptly step out of the beam and go straight to the doctor for a check-up. The article implies that the longest it was used on anyone was 5 seconds ("none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds"). Before we use it on people that potentially can't move away, I think we need to test the result of at least a minute's exposure.
Wet clothing might sound like a good defense, but tests showed that contact with damp cloth actually intensified the effects of the beam.
So anyone that makes the leap "I'm too hot, I'll use water" could suffer much worse burns.
I'm not too worried about the use of this device in conflicts in Iraq. I can see the potential for abuse, but when confronted with armed resistance responding with less-lethal force seems reasonable. I'm worried about uses for crowd control. Most unruly crowds are not violent and will disperse given time and instructions, at least to the point that any dangerous participants can be identified. Labelling this weapon as harmless, even in the long term, legitimizes its use against peaceful demonstrators - particularly given the assumption that if the police had to use a weapon they must have been dangerous and out of control.
It doesn't support proxy yet : https://develop.participatoryculture.org/democracy/ticket/1165 I realise that, and did actually mention it in my comment. But I have a memory of using a program on Windows - SocksCap I think - to transparently redirect networking calls through a proxy. I'm looking for something similiar for Linux. Something to send all DP's traffic through a proxy without it knowing.
Tried posting in the forum to no avail, but I thought Slashdot might have an idea somewhere in its collective mind!
Anyone know how I can get this to work from behind a proxy on Ubuntu 6.10? It has no proxy settings of its own and seems to ignore the system proxy. I'm looking for some way to redirect its traffic through the proxy.
No it couldn't, if there's a malicious program running on your blackberry it doesn't matter what happens to the email in transit, it will be copied/modified etc when it's on the compromised device. Imagine a conversation between two people on a secure line; if one of them's selling what you say to the criminals, it doesn't matter how secure the line is, you're sunk.
Over here in England you can't shoot people for breaking into your home - you're not even allowed to hurt them more than is absolutely necessary. A lot of people leave doors unlocked when they're in the garden, and those that don't frequently have doors that could be broken into in seconds. We rely mainly on two things to prevent robbery: trying to create a social climate where robbery isn't acceptable, and the threat of being caught by the police if you do break the law. It works pretty well; I've only ever been robbed once (in 20 years) and the 2 kids that did it were quickly caught and sentenced to community service and enforced social service intervention into their home life.
A teacher can shout at a pupil without losing control - it can be a very effective method of illustrating that what the student did was wrong, although clearly it should only be one weapon in their arsenal. Without seeing the video (is it still online? I couldn't find it) it's impossible to know whether the teacher lost control or was simply raising his voice. The article, though, is very clear that the students orchestrated the whole thing to damage the teacher's credibility:
According to the Portages-de-l'Outaouais school board, the incident took place a month ago, when one student provoked the teacher into yelling at her while a classmate secretly taped the confrontation.
We need those student cameras in place in case teachers start shit with the students (i.e., beatings, molestation, etc).
I'm not sure we do. At least in the UK, standard practice following a serious complaint from a student is to immediately suspend the teacher while it is investigated, and I can personally attest to the fact that a pupil's word is taken very highly - my secondary school headmaster was arrested on a single child's testimony, without any evidence (although some was later found). For this reason I'm not sure that filming teachers would make students any safer. It would, however, make teaching much more difficult - how many teachers would be willing to be stern with a student knowing it would probably be on the internet that evening for people to laugh at? How many would do the - potentially embarrassing - things that help students to understand the subject matter? I have a memory of my chemistry teacher charging around the room to demonstrate movement of particles in different materials - several students would have been perfectly happy to film that and put it on youtube, which could be embarrassing and stressful. While I agree student welfare must be paramount, we need to pay some heed to the wellbeing of undervalued professionals.
Regardless of whether the poster was a real cop or not - I have no idea - he does raise some interesting points. I agree that the student shouldn't have screamed or refused to leave. But once you've tasered someone they aren't going to get up immediately. The exact amount of time varies from a few seconds to 15+ minutes, but there's a real chance that he was unable to obey orders because of the police and so was tasered. Would this still be reasonable if they had handcuffed him and then tasered him for not raising his hands? And using a taser on someone for not standing up is an unreasonable amount of force when he's only surrounded by armed officers, let alone once he's handcuffed.
This guy is an 18-year veteran following policy.
Could you post proof that UCPD policy is to taser handcuffed suspects? I suspect that it isn't. And the '18 year veteran' has repeated complaints for excessive force against him in the past, and was the officer that shot dead a homeless man - coincidentally managing to escort him out of the room with CCTV beforehand - causing the adoption of tasers. (Source: Dailybruin)
How many times does a police officer have to ask someone to follow a lawful order before using force? 1,000?
There are lots of degrees of force, not all of them equal. Handcuffing and carrying him out would have been a use of force. So would beating him to death. I don't believe they chose the right level. And they didn't either - why else would they threaten the witnesses?
I've replied to this sort of comment with my own opinions in a couple of other places, so I'm not going to do that again here. But I found this quote from a police officer after seeing the video, and it seemed appropriate to post it as a reply to the idea of them having behaved 'professionally':
As a police officer, I have two things to say about this:
1) This kid sounds like an ass and I'm certain that there will be more than enough "He got what he deserved posts." I might even agree in the moral sense, but not in the ethical or legal sense, because....
2) This cop should never work in law enforcement again. This is inappropriate use of force by any professional standard. One post is not nearly enough to recount the things he did incorrectly, but I'll hit the high points;
General rules for any controlled encounter (one where you aren't in danger from the get go) include finding out what the issue is, telling the subject what he/she needs to do, and explaining what will happen if they do not. There is almost never a need to place your hands on anyone for any reason until you are ready to take them into custody unless you are suddenly attacked. This "officer" is grossly incompetent. Understand we deal with aggressive people that posture by yelling and swearing at us all the time - this should not disrupt the officer on bit. Keep. Your. Cool. So, screaming/swearing or not, this encounter should have been over with three sentences from the officer.
A) "Sir, per university rules and regs, I need you to show me your valid student ID or leave the library." B) "I need to to show me your valid student ID or leave the library right now, or I'll have to take you into custody for trespassing and disturbing the peace." C) "Sir, I am placing you under arrest." Then Mirandize him and be done with it. If he does anything but exactly what you tell him ("Sir, place your hands behind your back.") then....
Now and only now, if he/she resists (NOT if he simply fails to cooperate i.e. passive resistence), you may use force sufficient to subdue him to the point of having him cease to be a danger to the officer or bystanders. That's pretty simple stuff, folks. Basically, never be the first to use force, but when you do - do it quickly and overwhelmingly then STOP when he's restrained. You are a trained professional who owns the situation and NOT a street brawler.
From what I can tell, he never told the subject he was under arrest until after at least five taserings, some of which occurred while he was in cuffs and all but the first while he was on the ground unable to stand under his own power. This "officer" grabbed the guy's arm while he was leaving. Bad move, even if it seems like a little thing. Physical contact constitutes use of force, and any trained officer knows this is a big line to cross. I don't care if he didn't leave immediately - in that case place him calmly in custody early on and be done with it, no argument needed. You're the cop; you NEVER need to be in an argument. You aren't asking him what he wants to do, you're telling him. Never ever let a subject think they are in control. Arguing tells the subject they have some power.
What he did is inexcusable. If this power-tripping bully didn't have a badge what would you think of somebody tasering a defenseless person on the ground FIVE TIMES some while he was handcuffed and yelling at him to "get up." A badge doesn't free you from responsibility, it adds to to it exponentially.
This sadistic SOB gives all true professional LEOs a bad name and is part of the reason so many distrust cops. I've had training on most of the common less-than-lethal systems (lawyers don't let us call them non-lethal) including tasers, stun guns, pepper spray, rubber bullets and even conducted some training on the same. Unless this guy was issued a system with no training, he knows damn well the individual won't be getting up immediately after one tasing, let alone five. Frankly, I hope this guy answers fo
I didn't try to claim the video shows everything, it doesn't. I know he was handcuffed, I just believe that should have happened much earlier - and that once he was handcuffed he shouldn't have been tased.
According to all the sources, the officers were using the "drive stun" mode of the taser. Rather than using the famous barbs, this simply functions like any other stun gun, requiring the officer shocking him to bend down over him to use the weapon. As with all uses of stun guns, it causes extreme pain, and uses a mixture of pain and nerve disruption to subdue a resisting offender - although it is worth noting that this particular application focuses mostly on the pain aspect. Considering that there were at least three armed officers present and that the suspect was on the floor shouting not "nonsense" or incitement (this is an accusation made by the officers - it isn't born out by the video and is directly contradicted by the students), but rather screaming that he had been trying to leave and begging them not to hit him with it again. What possible reason could there be for tasing him three times before handcuffing him? What possible reason could there be for tasing a handcuffed person? And if the officers were so blameless, why did they threaten witnesses asking for their badge numbers?
Yet another hint - once the police have been called for trespassing, "cooperating" doesn't involve trying to run away when you're being questioned.
He didn't try to run away. He was trying to leave. And he was trying to leave not because the police were trying to question him, but because he had been told to leave. By all available accounts, he was on his way out when he was stopped by the police (I can't seem to find a police response). When accosted by the police he didn't try to run, he fell limply to the floor - hardly a perfect response, but not one that I would immediately associate with violent intent! If the police were trying to handcuff him, they could have asked him to put his hands flat on the floor. They could have overpowered him. They could have used their taser to subdue him and then handcuff him. Instead, they chose to tase him over and over again first. Why?
I don't claim to have a perfect response to the situation. But if I was a police officer, supported by two of my colleagues, I hope I would have behaved well enough to be comfortable giving out my badge number instead of threatening the student asking for it.
Except that he was on his way out when the campus police grabbed him. And they continued using force long after he was a threat, unless you count one handcuffed boy a threat to three police officers. This is like the guy that was handcuffed, put in the back of a cruiser, and then sprayed in the face with OC. The officer responsible, incidentally, was reinstated despite multiple witnesses testifying to a clear case of police brutality.
You should watch the video, it's pretty clear from that that he didn't deserve to be tased, or at least didn't deserve to be tased over and over again.
Background (not in the video): After 11 you have to have a Bruincard. He didn't have his and was told to leave by a CSO. When he didn't leave immediately, they called campus police.
From what you can see/hear, the first contact with the security comes when they grab his arm - according to other students, he was leaving, having been told by a CSO that he had to - and he tells them to "get off". At this point they tase him to the ground. When he's finished screaming in pain, you can't see what's happening, but it sounds like they've dragged him to the door. There are a couple of security guards there at this point. They tell him to get up. He doesn't, instead trying to explain that he was trying to leave, and begging them not to tase him again. It's been pointed out that due to the effects of the taser he may not physically have been able to stand at this stage. They tase him again. He still doesn't stand. They tase him again. After a while, they seem to realise that this isn't getting him on his feet. At this stage, several students have asked for their names and badge numbers. One of them was told he would be tased if he didn't shut up. The officer was holding a taser when he said this. The others were simply ignored.
Now that the student is no longer deemed to be a threat to the (at least) 3 armed police standing over him, he is handcuffed. Before being dragged out of the room, he is tased one last time.
I couldn't watch the whole video in one go, so I'm not sure where the fifth use of the taser comes in.
I'm disgusted by what I saw in the video. Seriously. The taser was their first resort against a student who was - according to the other students - cooperating. Even after using the taser to knock him down, they didn't search him for weapons, they didn't handcuff him. They just kept on tasering. Once the guy's already on the floor and surrounded, I don't understand why you would keep using weapons to hurt him.
According to the article, the taser is used by officers when there is "a potential for injury to the officer(s) or others" or a "potential risk of serious injury to the individual being controlled." He was on the floor, shouting that he was trying to leave. He was clearly no threat to anyone, least of all himself. And the officers obviously knew that they were in the wrong, since they threatened witnesses with violence to try to buy their silence.
To me it's obvious what should happen. Every one of these officers should be immediately fired while a criminal case is prepared for torturing a helpless young man. They should go to jail under federal anti-torture law, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years.
I can't see any feedback form, but as someone mentioned, they review what people search for, so you could just search for "images box is too far down".
I agree my method was ill conceived, particularly in light of similiarly named candidates, but I don't think that removing those people that don't know the slightest thing about their candidate would invalidate the result; if anything, it would make it more relevant. Ask yourself: if people know nothing about a candidate's opinions and record, or those of his opponent, what drives their vote? Almost certainly it is a combination of scare tactics and peer influence. Neither of these are things we want to take into account in an election. So why not remove them?
Slashdot Mirror
The main site is mirrored at Mirrordot and Coral Cache, and the pictures are at MD and CC.
Sorry, any site selling things above the VAT threshold must display the VAT number. It also doesn't apply to auctions. (although I'm not entirely sure on eBay's position here, don't they claim not to be an auction to avoid some requirement?)
I don't know what the situation is in other countries but in the UK, at least, any site that sells things is obliged to display their trading address (and VAT registration number) publicly.
I hope they do something better with it than the previous owners.
If I travel 1 meter in 1 second I travel at 1m/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1m/s^2. If I weigh 1kg, then this required a force of 1N. If this force 1N work over a distance of 1m, it does 1J of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1W. If this was provided by electricity, then that is for example 1V and 1A. 1A means 1C electrons pro 1s flows trough the conductor. Now you do that, using only imperial units. :-) How many hogheads *are* there to a fluid-oz anyway ?
If I travel 1 foot in 1 second I travel at 1 foot/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1 foot/s^2. If I weigh 1lb, then this required a force of 1 pound-force. If this force 1lbf works over a distance of 1', it does one foot-pound force (ftlbf) of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1 ftlbfs^-1.
I can't do any more from memory - we only used metric terms when discussing electricity, whereas we used imperial and metric with anything else, but I'm sure they exist. My point is that the 1:1:1 ratio isn't a feature of the metric system, it's a feature of measurement systems in general.
His point isn't that Ciber will keep testing, it's that the /. headline has a negative bias to it; it makes it sound like the Government banned an independent organisation from looking at the machines, which seems corrupt, when actually they were acting to try to increase the stringency of the testing.
Yes, both result in a copy of something being created. But in your NOT-gate example, you're providing the 'materials' and the method of assembly - NOT-gate it again. With bittorrent, one person supplies the plans (the .torrent) and a group of other people supply the raw materials (the file pieces). In my previous post I was just going for the funny, but imagine a different situation. On my fridge are a load of magnets with words on. They can be used to create copyrighted poems if I know, independently, how to do this. But it's no one's fault but mine if I do.
But bittorrent is if someone else gives them the sheet and you give them the letters to fill it in. I don't think anyone's going to find you guilty for selling alphabet soup in the knowledge that they might write something bad.
I can't speak about the American situation per se, but I can give some thoughts from a European perspective.
American conservativism has become, in the last 50 years, the dominant doctrine both economically and politically. Seven of the last ten American presidents have been Republicans, and the Republican party has controlled the Senate and House or Representatives in five of the last six Congresses (not including the 110th). Conservative theorists have long used the status of America to impose their values upon the rest of the world; witness, for example, the fact that all other currencies are floated against the dollar (causing the crisis of 1981-2 when soaring American interest rates effectively bankrupted Mexico), or the undermining of the WTO and IMF, both ideas propounded by liberal American Presidents, when their function did not coincide with American global interests (namely the ability of Wall Street to operate in any country it chooses free from risk - as long as the IMF is in hoc to the treasury, there's always someone to pick up the tab). The success of America's economy in the 1990s - which, as we are now seeing, is almost certainly unsustainable - was used by right-wing politicians the world over to convince the electorate of the virtues of removing all market regulation and opening up previous state monopolies, even where this lead to problems rather than improvements. (European telecoms companies, for example, which have since accumulated four times as much debt as they can afford to pay back).
The dearth of left-wing support in the US had similiar knock-on effects for Europe. America's abandoning of any universal health care plans, low minimum wage and low social floor caused a crisis in European politics, where traditionally these ideas were rejected out of hand as unfair and elitist - but with America's economic and political superiority continuing to burgeon it looked ever more promising.
The solution, for many (if not most) European left-wing parties was to move to the centre. By doing this, they forced the conservative parties further to the right, to the territory that the electorate still find distasteful. Left wing parties suddenly embraced deregulation, lowering taxes, privatisation and scaling-back of public services. This removed the incentive for moderates to vote for right-wing parties and allowed left-wing (now centrist) parties to win elections in the current global political climate.
With the re-awakening of left wing values in America (if the trend continues) I am hopeful that this will stop or even reverse in the coming cycles. Otherwise, we face the worrying prospect of a right-wing European Government - the use in most countries of a first-past-the-post system will favour the right if liberals start voting for left wing parties rather than the new centrists.
This is done in a number of gyms. The power produced by an average person on an exercise bike isn't enormous, though, and is used to power the display on the bike itself. There may be a tiny bit left over, but not enough to be any real use.
Because quite clearly the people you're using it on will get out of the way immediately. They won't be potentially injured or trapped. They won't be confused and run the wrong way. They won't be scared to come out of their hiding place because soldiers are sitting outside. No, they'll promptly step out of the beam and go straight to the doctor for a check-up. The article implies that the longest it was used on anyone was 5 seconds ("none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds"). Before we use it on people that potentially can't move away, I think we need to test the result of at least a minute's exposure.
So anyone that makes the leap "I'm too hot, I'll use water" could suffer much worse burns.
I'm not too worried about the use of this device in conflicts in Iraq. I can see the potential for abuse, but when confronted with armed resistance responding with less-lethal force seems reasonable. I'm worried about uses for crowd control. Most unruly crowds are not violent and will disperse given time and instructions, at least to the point that any dangerous participants can be identified. Labelling this weapon as harmless, even in the long term, legitimizes its use against peaceful demonstrators - particularly given the assumption that if the police had to use a weapon they must have been dangerous and out of control.
You shouldn't be flying unless you can see where you're going and/or know WTF you're doing
Personally, I prefer the pilot to be able to see and know what he's doing.
Or is that why there are two of them in the cockpit?
Tried posting in the forum to no avail, but I thought Slashdot might have an idea somewhere in its collective mind!
Anyone know how I can get this to work from behind a proxy on Ubuntu 6.10? It has no proxy settings of its own and seems to ignore the system proxy. I'm looking for some way to redirect its traffic through the proxy.
No it couldn't, if there's a malicious program running on your blackberry it doesn't matter what happens to the email in transit, it will be copied/modified etc when it's on the compromised device. Imagine a conversation between two people on a secure line; if one of them's selling what you say to the criminals, it doesn't matter how secure the line is, you're sunk.
Over here in England you can't shoot people for breaking into your home - you're not even allowed to hurt them more than is absolutely necessary. A lot of people leave doors unlocked when they're in the garden, and those that don't frequently have doors that could be broken into in seconds. We rely mainly on two things to prevent robbery: trying to create a social climate where robbery isn't acceptable, and the threat of being caught by the police if you do break the law. It works pretty well; I've only ever been robbed once (in 20 years) and the 2 kids that did it were quickly caught and sentenced to community service and enforced social service intervention into their home life.
A teacher can shout at a pupil without losing control - it can be a very effective method of illustrating that what the student did was wrong, although clearly it should only be one weapon in their arsenal. Without seeing the video (is it still online? I couldn't find it) it's impossible to know whether the teacher lost control or was simply raising his voice. The article, though, is very clear that the students orchestrated the whole thing to damage the teacher's credibility:
According to the Portages-de-l'Outaouais school board, the incident took place a month ago, when one student provoked the teacher into yelling at her while a classmate secretly taped the confrontation.
I'm not sure we do. At least in the UK, standard practice following a serious complaint from a student is to immediately suspend the teacher while it is investigated, and I can personally attest to the fact that a pupil's word is taken very highly - my secondary school headmaster was arrested on a single child's testimony, without any evidence (although some was later found). For this reason I'm not sure that filming teachers would make students any safer. It would, however, make teaching much more difficult - how many teachers would be willing to be stern with a student knowing it would probably be on the internet that evening for people to laugh at? How many would do the - potentially embarrassing - things that help students to understand the subject matter? I have a memory of my chemistry teacher charging around the room to demonstrate movement of particles in different materials - several students would have been perfectly happy to film that and put it on youtube, which could be embarrassing and stressful. While I agree student welfare must be paramount, we need to pay some heed to the wellbeing of undervalued professionals.
Regardless of whether the poster was a real cop or not - I have no idea - he does raise some interesting points. I agree that the student shouldn't have screamed or refused to leave. But once you've tasered someone they aren't going to get up immediately. The exact amount of time varies from a few seconds to 15+ minutes, but there's a real chance that he was unable to obey orders because of the police and so was tasered. Would this still be reasonable if they had handcuffed him and then tasered him for not raising his hands? And using a taser on someone for not standing up is an unreasonable amount of force when he's only surrounded by armed officers, let alone once he's handcuffed.
Could you post proof that UCPD policy is to taser handcuffed suspects? I suspect that it isn't. And the '18 year veteran' has repeated complaints for excessive force against him in the past, and was the officer that shot dead a homeless man - coincidentally managing to escort him out of the room with CCTV beforehand - causing the adoption of tasers. (Source: Dailybruin)
There are lots of degrees of force, not all of them equal. Handcuffing and carrying him out would have been a use of force. So would beating him to death. I don't believe they chose the right level. And they didn't either - why else would they threaten the witnesses?
I didn't try to claim the video shows everything, it doesn't. I know he was handcuffed, I just believe that should have happened much earlier - and that once he was handcuffed he shouldn't have been tased.
According to all the sources, the officers were using the "drive stun" mode of the taser. Rather than using the famous barbs, this simply functions like any other stun gun, requiring the officer shocking him to bend down over him to use the weapon. As with all uses of stun guns, it causes extreme pain, and uses a mixture of pain and nerve disruption to subdue a resisting offender - although it is worth noting that this particular application focuses mostly on the pain aspect. Considering that there were at least three armed officers present and that the suspect was on the floor shouting not "nonsense" or incitement (this is an accusation made by the officers - it isn't born out by the video and is directly contradicted by the students), but rather screaming that he had been trying to leave and begging them not to hit him with it again. What possible reason could there be for tasing him three times before handcuffing him? What possible reason could there be for tasing a handcuffed person? And if the officers were so blameless, why did they threaten witnesses asking for their badge numbers?
He didn't try to run away. He was trying to leave. And he was trying to leave not because the police were trying to question him, but because he had been told to leave. By all available accounts, he was on his way out when he was stopped by the police (I can't seem to find a police response). When accosted by the police he didn't try to run, he fell limply to the floor - hardly a perfect response, but not one that I would immediately associate with violent intent! If the police were trying to handcuff him, they could have asked him to put his hands flat on the floor. They could have overpowered him. They could have used their taser to subdue him and then handcuff him. Instead, they chose to tase him over and over again first. Why?
I don't claim to have a perfect response to the situation. But if I was a police officer, supported by two of my colleagues, I hope I would have behaved well enough to be comfortable giving out my badge number instead of threatening the student asking for it.
Except that he was on his way out when the campus police grabbed him. And they continued using force long after he was a threat, unless you count one handcuffed boy a threat to three police officers. This is like the guy that was handcuffed, put in the back of a cruiser, and then sprayed in the face with OC. The officer responsible, incidentally, was reinstated despite multiple witnesses testifying to a clear case of police brutality.
You should watch the video, it's pretty clear from that that he didn't deserve to be tased, or at least didn't deserve to be tased over and over again.
Background (not in the video): After 11 you have to have a Bruincard. He didn't have his and was told to leave by a CSO. When he didn't leave immediately, they called campus police.
From what you can see/hear, the first contact with the security comes when they grab his arm - according to other students, he was leaving, having been told by a CSO that he had to - and he tells them to "get off". At this point they tase him to the ground. When he's finished screaming in pain, you can't see what's happening, but it sounds like they've dragged him to the door. There are a couple of security guards there at this point. They tell him to get up. He doesn't, instead trying to explain that he was trying to leave, and begging them not to tase him again. It's been pointed out that due to the effects of the taser he may not physically have been able to stand at this stage. They tase him again. He still doesn't stand. They tase him again. After a while, they seem to realise that this isn't getting him on his feet. At this stage, several students have asked for their names and badge numbers. One of them was told he would be tased if he didn't shut up. The officer was holding a taser when he said this. The others were simply ignored.
Now that the student is no longer deemed to be a threat to the (at least) 3 armed police standing over him, he is handcuffed. Before being dragged out of the room, he is tased one last time.
I couldn't watch the whole video in one go, so I'm not sure where the fifth use of the taser comes in.
I'm disgusted by what I saw in the video. Seriously. The taser was their first resort against a student who was - according to the other students - cooperating. Even after using the taser to knock him down, they didn't search him for weapons, they didn't handcuff him. They just kept on tasering. Once the guy's already on the floor and surrounded, I don't understand why you would keep using weapons to hurt him.
According to the article, the taser is used by officers when there is "a potential for injury to the officer(s) or others" or a "potential risk of serious injury to the individual being controlled." He was on the floor, shouting that he was trying to leave. He was clearly no threat to anyone, least of all himself. And the officers obviously knew that they were in the wrong, since they threatened witnesses with violence to try to buy their silence.
To me it's obvious what should happen. Every one of these officers should be immediately fired while a criminal case is prepared for torturing a helpless young man. They should go to jail under federal anti-torture law, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years.
I can't see any feedback form, but as someone mentioned, they review what people search for, so you could just search for "images box is too far down".
News? On Slashdot? You must be new here!
I agree my method was ill conceived, particularly in light of similiarly named candidates, but I don't think that removing those people that don't know the slightest thing about their candidate would invalidate the result; if anything, it would make it more relevant. Ask yourself: if people know nothing about a candidate's opinions and record, or those of his opponent, what drives their vote? Almost certainly it is a combination of scare tactics and peer influence. Neither of these are things we want to take into account in an election. So why not remove them?