I don't necessarily agree with it. My point is this guy invited the abuse. Different behavior on his part would have meant different behavior by the police; they didn't use the taser because of what he said or who he was, they used it because when they tried to remove him (which they were apparently instructed to do) he actively resisted to the point of them not being able to cuff him without a fight.
Could they have pinned him and forced both arms behind his back, cuffed him, and carried him out? Certainly. Could they have done serious physical harm to him in the process, or been harmed themselves? Yes. Did they view the taser as the safest way to deal with the situation? Apparently. Were they right? I don't know. I wasn't there.
We're so quick to scream brutality and abuse of power whenever cops do stuff like this, we need to take a step back and consider their motivations. They weren't looking to torture they guy...they just wanted to get him out of the room.
Tell that to the civil rights movement. They brought about change by passive resistance: the cops simply had to do all the work. Even when assaulted by police, they stuck to their guns and did not resist. What did it get them? The sympathy of a nation.
Tasing someone who quietly refuses to stand up is brutality. Tasing someone who is actively resisting being handcuffed is...questionable. One could easily argue that it's not necessary the vast majority of times it's done...but cops are trained to anticipate the worst. Using a taser allows them to stand off and issue orders without having to wrestle with the offender and not risk their lives. Yes it's used too much, but I'm not entirely convinced this particular instance qualifies as brutality. They had a potentially volatile situation and may have done too much to prevent it getting worse.
He should have know as soon as they shut off the mic and pulled him away from the microphone that his free speech rights where being violated.
Not at that point they weren't. Free speech doesn't mean freedom to hijack someone else's audience or freedom to use their sound equipment. He was perfectly free to stand outside that building (assuming it's public property that he stands on) and say what he wanted to say.
There's a right way and a wrong way to protest and resist police in a scenario like this.
He did it the wrong way and gave the police an excuse to use this level of force. Without being able to see exactly what happened, I can't say whether this would qualify as brutality or not...but there was clearly a struggle, and when you fight back you make it easy for the cops to say they believed they would be in danger if they were to wrestle you into restraints.
This guy created the scenario. He's the one who set things up so that the cops would have any justification at all to use a taser.
He asked his questions. He was told to leave. He resisted. When they tried to physically remove him, he resisted more. The cops decided to use the taser (presumably) because his behavior left them unsure of whether he was dangerous or not. And let's not forget that it is clearly heard in that horribly-shot video that they warn him a number of times that he would be tased.
He said what he wanted to say and Kerry was answering the question...why did he resist? Why not just walk out when told to leave? Because he's an attention whore and WANTED this to happen.
So If I use another (non-firefox) browser that does add-blocking that's OK is it?
and If I use firefox but don't block adverts why can't I see the website?
Frankly, I don't care who hits my sites and whether they block ads or not. My point is that it's well within the rights of site owners to block anyone they want. The reason Firefox is being singled out is because it's the biggest non-IE browser on the market, and adblock is so ubiquitous among Firefox installations.
This is a proactive (and desperate) attempt at keeping adblock-type programs from going mainstream and seriously impacting ad revenue by making it inconvenient to use them.
As I said, the better way to deal with the "problem" is to work with developers of Firefox and Adblock and establish a whitelist of ad sites that don't break a certain set of rules so that they can be allowed by default and must be blocked manually.
Firefox is not the problem, a broken advertising model is the problem
I'll agree with that, to a point. Just off the top of my head, a stop-gap solution to this would be a server-side include that simply makes the ad a part of the page...it makes it significantly harder to filter out instead of simply pointing to an ad site somewhere else.
In the end, site operators are going to have to learn the same lessons television is learning: people learn to recognize and ignore ads in their traditional setting (right-side blindness, anyone?).
the only thing an advert is doing is letting me know their product exists (and almost always I already know that) Adverts seem to have the opposite of the desired effect on me, If I see something actively being advertised I avoid buying it since it will be overpriced rubbish....
I can't see their ads right now (they're killed at our content filter at work), but hardocp.com does a good job of having ads users might want to click. The ads are well-placed, unobtrusive, and relevant. I've seen newegg.com advertisements there that list a specific product and its price, usually a good deal. That's a great example of good advertising: relevant to the site, informative, of interest, and easy enough to ignore if it doesn't interest you.
Forgot to put this as part of acceptable ads: does not use a global tracking cookie or any other means of tracking a user who has simply seen an ad that was on a random site somewhere.
That's the question they need to be asking themselves. We felt the need to use software like adblock because bandwidth-intensive and site-obscuring ads began to dominate the scene. They became so desperate for our attention that they resorted to noisy flash animations that actively get between web users and the sites they want to view. Of COURSE we're going to try to block ads after that...it's like having a commercial playing DURING the big game.
Site owners have every right to deny Firefox users access to their sites on the basis of lost ad revenue. It's their server, it's their bandwidth, and it's their choice. But I'd suggest a better solution: establish a list of sites that do not host those ads that are a part of the problem, and work with the adblock staff to not block them by default.
Acceptable ads: banners, sidebars, and inserts that always stay within their defined borders, do not flash or otherwise use animation to overtly draw attention to themselves, do not use rollovers for more than highlighting, and do not play audio without being clicked. Basically an image or set of images that won't chew up large amounts of bandwidth and won't interfere with the operation of the site.
It's about student productivity. It's a lot easier to ban IM/e-mail/social networking outright than try to enforce "now you can, now you can't" policies. Given access to sites like Myspace, a lot of kids would never get anything done without a teacher hovering over them constantly.
It's also about network security. Giving a thousand high school students unfettered internet access is just asking for trouble, no matter how hard you try to protect your network.
It's not necessarily hypocritical. IIRC the bill blocks the sale of these video games to minors. I can't say for certain, but I'd wager that Arnold would sign a similar bill blocking R-rated movies from being sold to minors as well. Just because you are involved in the production of violent media doesn't mean you can't oppose the sale of that media to kids.
I think his decision *was* largely political and not a matter of conscience, but that doesn't make him a hypocrite. Just a politician.
Facebook and Myspace allow you to share content with unregistered users. They also allow you to restrict it so that only your friends can see it. This is a good thing.
I think the only thing networking sites could do to be more "open" is to become interoperable: Allow Facebook users to add MySpace users as friends. Of course, that sounds like it would be a royal PITA and would require a whole new standard be developed, but hey...open is good, right?
There's nothing wrong with things as they are today. If you want to make your information public, get a blog. If you want to share something with just a few friends, use whatever networking site they use.
A theater manager shouldn't be expected to make legal decisions like that. Most wouldn't even want to; a "wrong" decision could cost them.
This girl was caught with a camcorder in a theater. She offered up a very plausible story, but then pirates could come prepared with such stories. You're asking the theater manager to make a snap decision whether to believe her or not. What if he let her go and she was caught a week later in the same theater recording a full movie? Do you think his bosses are going to want him around after turning a pirate loose?
I think the manager made the only decision he could make once it was reported: call the cops and let corporate/the law sort it out. Get people who make the law their profession to decide what to do next.
What I found most interesting was their attempt at justifying rampant piracy by talking about how poor people are, then showing us game after popular game where people PURCHASE game items using their CELL PHONES.
Oh, those poor Koreans. They can't afford new games after spending all their money on cell phones and 'net cafe binges and game items. I guess piracy is okay then.
That's okay. Pirate away. Just don't whine when the genres you like go away in favor of stuff that people actually buy.
The only ones that really bug me are the "hardcore" gamers.... who play either madden, counterstrike, Wow, star craft... or any game exclusively.
Anyone who claims to be a hardcore gamer and only plays one game...well, isn't.
Then there are the ones who spend more time bitching about what game is better or how all the new games suck, then they actually spend enjoying the games they hold so highly.
Personally, I prefer to bitch about how certain famous games *cough*StarCraft*cough* are overrated and not the best offering in the genre, regardless of popularity. But I limit my bitching to 10 minutes a day, then go and spend a few hours on Company of Heroes or SupCom.
When ever someone say "I'm a hardcore gamer", I have the urge to kick them in the teeth.
I say that on a regular basis. I mean it to indicate that I am the kind of gamer that is seriously competitive and devote a large portion of my free time to it. "Hardcore" as in far more into games than "casual" gamers.
EA makes the Command & Conquer games since they bought Westwood.
Well, not so much "makes them" as "ruins the oldest RTS franchise in gaming by releasing crap products and dropping any level of support--including patches--while the game is stolen broken and wrought with bugs and exploits."
Great. So those of us who are able to drive and talk safely should suffer with the rest of you?
It's really not that hard to drive safely while using a cell phone. Dial by touch, and only when traffic conditions permit a split-second distraction; heavy, high-speed traffic means you should probably wait. And just talk, there's no need to get animated the way a lot of drivers do. If things get difficult in traffic, get off the phone or just stop the conversation for a minute. Be attentive AND FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DON'T BLOCK YOUR OWN VISION WITH YOUR ARM.
Or get a $30 bluetooth headset and use voice recognition. It works for me:
1) Tap earpiece 2) Say "digit dial" 3) say number 4) Say "yes" 5) talk
Lay off the youtube videos. We've all heard Loose Change's arguments before.
And if you think I'm defending the administration by calling them a bunch of inept bureaucrats and yes men, I'd hate to know what it takes for you to consider something criticism.
Did the president pick the joint chiefs and the top-level CIA people? (serious question, I don't know off the top of my head).
Not everyone who has the president's ear is appointed by him. He showed some bad judgment prior to the invasion and obviously some of his appointees were poor picks given our post-9/11 hindsight. My point is that there wasn't a crystal-clear picture either way prior to invasion, and Bush's vision was even more filtered because those he most trusted were unwilling or unable to tell him the whole story.
Iraq was big stupid mess from day one, no doubt about that. But let's not try to paint the whole administration as malicious warmongering tyrants when in all reality they're just inept shoot-from-the-hip bureaucrats.
The sad thing is, I really don't believe we'd have been much better with either of our presidential alternatives: I think Gore would have found a completely different way to bungle things after 9/11 and make someone miserable (probably us) and Kerry would probably have really fouled up the occupation...yes, even more than Bush.
It also bears pointing out that we *did* find evidence that suggested a number scientists were pretending to be running a weapons program and pocketing the cash. That would indicate that Saddam was seeking some level of WMD capabilities and was being conned out of his money. It would also create a substantial paper trail and conversations that would be interpreted to mean Iraq had a weapons program.
There was a lot of bad information in the days before the invasion. The problem was compounded by the fact that the intelligence community seemed to be largely composed of yes men who were looking to tell the president what he wanted to hear. I honestly believe the president simply didn't have all the facts at hand because he was so keen on invading Iraq and none of his advisors wanted to tell him it was a bad idea.
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I don't necessarily agree with it. My point is this guy invited the abuse. Different behavior on his part would have meant different behavior by the police; they didn't use the taser because of what he said or who he was, they used it because when they tried to remove him (which they were apparently instructed to do) he actively resisted to the point of them not being able to cuff him without a fight.
Could they have pinned him and forced both arms behind his back, cuffed him, and carried him out? Certainly. Could they have done serious physical harm to him in the process, or been harmed themselves? Yes. Did they view the taser as the safest way to deal with the situation? Apparently. Were they right? I don't know. I wasn't there.
We're so quick to scream brutality and abuse of power whenever cops do stuff like this, we need to take a step back and consider their motivations. They weren't looking to torture they guy...they just wanted to get him out of the room.
Tell that to the civil rights movement. They brought about change by passive resistance: the cops simply had to do all the work. Even when assaulted by police, they stuck to their guns and did not resist. What did it get them? The sympathy of a nation.
Tasing someone who quietly refuses to stand up is brutality. Tasing someone who is actively resisting being handcuffed is...questionable. One could easily argue that it's not necessary the vast majority of times it's done...but cops are trained to anticipate the worst. Using a taser allows them to stand off and issue orders without having to wrestle with the offender and not risk their lives. Yes it's used too much, but I'm not entirely convinced this particular instance qualifies as brutality. They had a potentially volatile situation and may have done too much to prevent it getting worse.
Not at that point they weren't. Free speech doesn't mean freedom to hijack someone else's audience or freedom to use their sound equipment. He was perfectly free to stand outside that building (assuming it's public property that he stands on) and say what he wanted to say.
There's a right way and a wrong way to protest and resist police in a scenario like this.
He did it the wrong way and gave the police an excuse to use this level of force. Without being able to see exactly what happened, I can't say whether this would qualify as brutality or not...but there was clearly a struggle, and when you fight back you make it easy for the cops to say they believed they would be in danger if they were to wrestle you into restraints.
This guy created the scenario. He's the one who set things up so that the cops would have any justification at all to use a taser.
He asked his questions. He was told to leave. He resisted. When they tried to physically remove him, he resisted more. The cops decided to use the taser (presumably) because his behavior left them unsure of whether he was dangerous or not. And let's not forget that it is clearly heard in that horribly-shot video that they warn him a number of times that he would be tased.
He said what he wanted to say and Kerry was answering the question...why did he resist? Why not just walk out when told to leave? Because he's an attention whore and WANTED this to happen.
Frankly, I don't care who hits my sites and whether they block ads or not. My point is that it's well within the rights of site owners to block anyone they want. The reason Firefox is being singled out is because it's the biggest non-IE browser on the market, and adblock is so ubiquitous among Firefox installations.
This is a proactive (and desperate) attempt at keeping adblock-type programs from going mainstream and seriously impacting ad revenue by making it inconvenient to use them.
As I said, the better way to deal with the "problem" is to work with developers of Firefox and Adblock and establish a whitelist of ad sites that don't break a certain set of rules so that they can be allowed by default and must be blocked manually.
I'll agree with that, to a point. Just off the top of my head, a stop-gap solution to this would be a server-side include that simply makes the ad a part of the page...it makes it significantly harder to filter out instead of simply pointing to an ad site somewhere else.
In the end, site operators are going to have to learn the same lessons television is learning: people learn to recognize and ignore ads in their traditional setting (right-side blindness, anyone?).
I can't see their ads right now (they're killed at our content filter at work), but hardocp.com does a good job of having ads users might want to click. The ads are well-placed, unobtrusive, and relevant. I've seen newegg.com advertisements there that list a specific product and its price, usually a good deal. That's a great example of good advertising: relevant to the site, informative, of interest, and easy enough to ignore if it doesn't interest you.
Forgot to put this as part of acceptable ads: does not use a global tracking cookie or any other means of tracking a user who has simply seen an ad that was on a random site somewhere.
That's the question they need to be asking themselves. We felt the need to use software like adblock because bandwidth-intensive and site-obscuring ads began to dominate the scene. They became so desperate for our attention that they resorted to noisy flash animations that actively get between web users and the sites they want to view. Of COURSE we're going to try to block ads after that...it's like having a commercial playing DURING the big game.
Site owners have every right to deny Firefox users access to their sites on the basis of lost ad revenue. It's their server, it's their bandwidth, and it's their choice. But I'd suggest a better solution: establish a list of sites that do not host those ads that are a part of the problem, and work with the adblock staff to not block them by default.
Acceptable ads: banners, sidebars, and inserts that always stay within their defined borders, do not flash or otherwise use animation to overtly draw attention to themselves, do not use rollovers for more than highlighting, and do not play audio without being clicked. Basically an image or set of images that won't chew up large amounts of bandwidth and won't interfere with the operation of the site.
So now games have five difficulty levels:
Easy
Normal
Hard
Impossible (but not really)
So hard you can't actually play it, we'll just TELL you it's hard.
Sort of like Brockian Ultra Cricket when you think about it.
It's about student productivity. It's a lot easier to ban IM/e-mail/social networking outright than try to enforce "now you can, now you can't" policies. Given access to sites like Myspace, a lot of kids would never get anything done without a teacher hovering over them constantly.
It's also about network security. Giving a thousand high school students unfettered internet access is just asking for trouble, no matter how hard you try to protect your network.
it's just that the BMI is a pretty useless measure of someone's health.
Agreed. My BMI is 57, and I feel just fine thank you very much.
Now help a brotha out...I can't reach the remote and I can't get up off the couch. Could you change it to channel 114 and pass the Doritos?
It's not necessarily hypocritical. IIRC the bill blocks the sale of these video games to minors. I can't say for certain, but I'd wager that Arnold would sign a similar bill blocking R-rated movies from being sold to minors as well. Just because you are involved in the production of violent media doesn't mean you can't oppose the sale of that media to kids.
I think his decision *was* largely political and not a matter of conscience, but that doesn't make him a hypocrite. Just a politician.
Which is why I said "that sounds like it would be a royal PITA"
Facebook and Myspace allow you to share content with unregistered users. They also allow you to restrict it so that only your friends can see it. This is a good thing.
I think the only thing networking sites could do to be more "open" is to become interoperable: Allow Facebook users to add MySpace users as friends. Of course, that sounds like it would be a royal PITA and would require a whole new standard be developed, but hey...open is good, right?
There's nothing wrong with things as they are today. If you want to make your information public, get a blog. If you want to share something with just a few friends, use whatever networking site they use.
A theater manager shouldn't be expected to make legal decisions like that. Most wouldn't even want to; a "wrong" decision could cost them.
This girl was caught with a camcorder in a theater. She offered up a very plausible story, but then pirates could come prepared with such stories. You're asking the theater manager to make a snap decision whether to believe her or not. What if he let her go and she was caught a week later in the same theater recording a full movie? Do you think his bosses are going to want him around after turning a pirate loose?
I think the manager made the only decision he could make once it was reported: call the cops and let corporate/the law sort it out. Get people who make the law their profession to decide what to do next.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
I don't have a notice warning people that breaking into my house is criminal, either.
What I found most interesting was their attempt at justifying rampant piracy by talking about how poor people are, then showing us game after popular game where people PURCHASE game items using their CELL PHONES. Oh, those poor Koreans. They can't afford new games after spending all their money on cell phones and 'net cafe binges and game items. I guess piracy is okay then. That's okay. Pirate away. Just don't whine when the genres you like go away in favor of stuff that people actually buy.
Anyone who claims to be a hardcore gamer and only plays one game...well, isn't.
Personally, I prefer to bitch about how certain famous games *cough*StarCraft*cough* are overrated and not the best offering in the genre, regardless of popularity. But I limit my bitching to 10 minutes a day, then go and spend a few hours on Company of Heroes or SupCom.
I say that on a regular basis. I mean it to indicate that I am the kind of gamer that is seriously competitive and devote a large portion of my free time to it. "Hardcore" as in far more into games than "casual" gamers.
EA makes the Command & Conquer games since they bought Westwood.
Well, not so much "makes them" as "ruins the oldest RTS franchise in gaming by releasing crap products and dropping any level of support--including patches--while the game is stolen broken and wrought with bugs and exploits."
Who is this gentle stranger with pecs like melons and knees of fringe?
Didn't read the post I replied to, did ya? I'd put "electric shock" in the "suffer" category.
I guess you'd file it under "slightly inconvenient tingling sensation that doesn't cause discomfort at all"?
Oh...and..YUPPIE??? Die.
Great. So those of us who are able to drive and talk safely should suffer with the rest of you?
It's really not that hard to drive safely while using a cell phone. Dial by touch, and only when traffic conditions permit a split-second distraction; heavy, high-speed traffic means you should probably wait. And just talk, there's no need to get animated the way a lot of drivers do. If things get difficult in traffic, get off the phone or just stop the conversation for a minute. Be attentive AND FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DON'T BLOCK YOUR OWN VISION WITH YOUR ARM.
Or get a $30 bluetooth headset and use voice recognition. It works for me:
1) Tap earpiece
2) Say "digit dial"
3) say number
4) Say "yes"
5) talk
Lay off the youtube videos. We've all heard Loose Change's arguments before.
And if you think I'm defending the administration by calling them a bunch of inept bureaucrats and yes men, I'd hate to know what it takes for you to consider something criticism.
Did the president pick the joint chiefs and the top-level CIA people? (serious question, I don't know off the top of my head).
Not everyone who has the president's ear is appointed by him. He showed some bad judgment prior to the invasion and obviously some of his appointees were poor picks given our post-9/11 hindsight. My point is that there wasn't a crystal-clear picture either way prior to invasion, and Bush's vision was even more filtered because those he most trusted were unwilling or unable to tell him the whole story.
Iraq was big stupid mess from day one, no doubt about that. But let's not try to paint the whole administration as malicious warmongering tyrants when in all reality they're just inept shoot-from-the-hip bureaucrats.
The sad thing is, I really don't believe we'd have been much better with either of our presidential alternatives: I think Gore would have found a completely different way to bungle things after 9/11 and make someone miserable (probably us) and Kerry would probably have really fouled up the occupation...yes, even more than Bush.
It also bears pointing out that we *did* find evidence that suggested a number scientists were pretending to be running a weapons program and pocketing the cash. That would indicate that Saddam was seeking some level of WMD capabilities and was being conned out of his money. It would also create a substantial paper trail and conversations that would be interpreted to mean Iraq had a weapons program.
There was a lot of bad information in the days before the invasion. The problem was compounded by the fact that the intelligence community seemed to be largely composed of yes men who were looking to tell the president what he wanted to hear. I honestly believe the president simply didn't have all the facts at hand because he was so keen on invading Iraq and none of his advisors wanted to tell him it was a bad idea.