Which still makes me question: why 39 shots when the victim (allegedly) shot only once?
I once saw a platoon of soldiers fire ~600 rounds on a crowd of protesters who threw an egg. The first guy to fire thought it was a grenade. The rest followed suit. Luckily it was a training exercise... but in real life shit goes sideways all the time, too. If you think you're any better, you couldn't be more wrong. If you had been there manning the perimeter, you would have fired right along with the rest.
We train hard to reduce the chances of shit like this happening in a real scenario, but no amount of training can completely eliminate it. And when you have millions of cops engaging daily in violent interactions... it's a miracle that these kinds of fiascoes happen as rarely as they do. The only reason people find it exceptional is because youtoube is full of videos of cops behaving badly, and you can watch 50 of them in an afternoon. If you actually had to view them in proportion to normal, everyday interactions, you'd be sitting there all year. People just don't understand large numbers and selection bias.
More likely: the killing of the granny was indeed an honest mistake, and then they tried to cover up their mistake by making her look like a criminal by planting drugs and the gun, in an attempt to justify their actions.
Yes, that's quite possible, if unlikely. Thanks for being one of the fee reasonable commenters.
Firing 39 shots sounds totally excessive - the hit rate is also pretty bad indeed. That indeed leaves some 33 stray bullets, no telling where they ended up.
They ended up inside the house. The hit rate is actually quite good. Take it from me. On the range I get every round in the bullseye. In a kinetic situation I'm lucky if I get 1 out of 4 on target. And I'm a guy who has better training than the police.
Civvies seem to expect every cop to be trained to special-forces standards. That expectation is... unrealistic, to say the least.
So you trust the cops word, even after a criminal conviction for their actions?
No, I weigh the evidence based on the most likely scenario. Never met a cop who would blow away grandma for no reason. If you can introduce me to some, I may change my mind.
The "evidence" shows that the police executed an illegal raid
Come again? I think these kinds of statements are why the [citation needed] tag was invented.
And the cops hit their target 10% of the time. If they weren't fired and in jail, they could have used more time on the range, anyway.
Spoken like someone who's never been in a firefight. 10% is actually well above what I would expect.
This probably happens in real life. I got slammed against a brick wall when I was 23 or so by a cop for... blah blah blah...
I've seen lots of friends get slammed into a brick wall (or concrete floors) by the cops. Without fail it happened because they were drunk and belligerent and begging for a beating. If the cops hadn't gotten them first, some other guy at the bar would have fucked them up and left them far worse off than just a few bruises and having to go to court. Yet, again without fail, they all claim they were the innocent victims of police brutality.
There are certainly cases where police misbehave, and they should be held accountable for that. But the cases where idiots convince themselves that they were innocent victims of police brutality are far, FAR more common. You'll forgive me if I lump you into the latter category based on the odds.
There's definitely plenty of room for questioning police actions, but when you find yourself suggesting that they executed a grandmother in cold blood and then made it appear that she fired first... you've probably gone a bit past the point of "reasonable questioning" and strayed into "fuck the pigs" land.
Is there so little happening in the world right now that the best "story" you can come up with is a guy with obvious mental issues claiming police made him post Facebook comments?
Depends on your needs. In Canada I tend to go with Koodo mobile; pay $15 for the month as a base charge, then buy however much data or voice I'll need. I conserve my data usage so 1 gig of 4G data can cost me for 4-5 months. And both data and voice with them are "Canada wide", so no roaming or long distance charges, plus they never expire. I had my phone with them for a full year, and on average it's cost me about $25 / month, total.
In the US, on the other hand, I tend to shell out the $60 per month so I can have unlimited data and calling. Unfortunately you're right about Canada not really having any decent offerings for "unlimited use".
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think Chat-R offers a nano sim, so if you have an iPhone 5/5S/5C or an HTC One M* you're SOL as well,
You can walk into any cellphone repair shop and have them punch your existing sim to a nano.
The next time someone asks "What good is Perl anymore?" or "Who actually uses Perl?" or "Why use Perl?" you can point them to this article. Perl is perfect for this type of quick development.
Kinda. But he could just as easily have written it as a VB Script. More easily, actually, since he was working on windows and ended up having to write Excel VBA for it later anyway.
I received a CO's commendation for writing a website. Felt rather silly. But I had to write the damn thing in classic ASP so I guess you could say the award was hard-earned.
The word "slave" originates from the Slavic people and the centuries of oppression and humiliation which we suffered through. I demand that you all stop using it immediately. Also I want reparations.
I can tell you I wouldn't switch. I seriously doubt they would either.
Depends... if I make a switch to black, do I get reborn with a 12 inch dick?
The woman thing sounds tempting too... I'm kinda tired of having to pay for my own drinks and meals. I think in your hypothetical scenario I'd like to be reborn as a black woman with a 12 inch dick.
Colonial Mars expands to other planets with the Utopian political system essentially consisting of a Technocracy [wikipedia.org]. Greed and religion are outlawed punishable by death. No person is in charge. Robots are programmed to rule.
The same reason you shouldn't put next week's gas money into fusion energy research. Some problems are more immediate than others. We definitely do need to put more money into geo-engineering research but in the short term he have to cut fossil carbon use, or its going to hurt us in a way that will make it harder to do that geo-engineering research.
Except there is no "short term" here. Anything we do to reduce CO2 levels isn't going to make a measurable difference any time soon. It's going to take decades - at the very least - before we see any meaningful effect. More likely we'll never see any effect from it at all, given the pace at which India and China are making up for our reductions. So no matter how you look at it, it makes far more sense to look for other ways to control climate.
Launching sulphur into the atmosphere or other plans of reducing sunlight (I've also heard of using large clouds of particles in space) are just a band-aid that only addresses one aspect of CO2's effects. It does nothing about ocean acidification for starters, and will have many side-effects that reducing atmospheric CO2 wouldn't.
And reducing CO2 is just a bandaid solution because it doesn't address the natural cycles of warming and cooling. I would rather have a "bandaid" which covers many contingencies than one which covers only one specific hole.
Right now we sequester, if the planet starts to get too cold later we can burn the sequestered carbon to raise the temperature again.
That might make sense if you could sequester it in a "burnable" form. We can't do that without consuming more energy than we produced in the fist place. For that plan to be at all feasible we would have to develop a way to produce essentially limitless extremely cheap energy, at which point sequestration becomes somewhat of a moot issue anyway.
It's also a crappy way of going about it - the response curve to carbon is just too slow. I don't think anyone wants to live through 40 years of cooling, hoping that the trend will reverse before the temperature drops low enough for crop failures to cause mass starvation.
Lastly, think about the scale of what you're proposing. Sequester all the carbon which our entire species has produced over the last 100 years, then burn it all again as quickly as possible if an ice-age comes along. Do you have any idea how massive of an undertaking just the first part would be? You may as well scrap all other industry - this project will keep us all employed for decades to come. Better find lots of money trees to fund it all.
First, you say he knowingly planted Mansanto seed, then you say he found some seeds that were Roundup resistant. Which is it?
Both, obviously. Why the false dichotomy?
Because surreptitiously finding Roundup resistant seed is quite a far cry from knowingly harvesting and planting Mansanto seed.
Well sure, you could make the argument that he was an idiot, and the only farmer around who didn't realize that only Monsanto seeds were roundup resistant. That would be a bit like claiming that you found a really cool plant growing in your back yard, discovered that it was really fun to smoke, and then sold it to all of your friends... but "I swear, officer, I didn't know it was Marijuana".
Unfortunately, Percy's defence was even stupider than that. He didn't bother trying to play innocent; instead he just said "Screw you Monsanto - I found your seeds on my land, so they're mine to do with as I please".
You're right, but we have no means of cheating CO2 levels now and there is very unlikely to be in the future, so what can we do but reduce atmospheric CO2 to geo-engineer ourselves the climate we want?
There have been some interesting suggestions, involving things such as releasing sulphur (or something similar, I don't remember exactly) into the upper atmosphere to reflect more sunlight before it reaches us. I've read of a few different approaches, all of which are mostly theoretical at this point.
I'm not saying there are any sure-fire ways to stop global warming without reducing CO2 output. And I'm all for reducing it wherever practical. What I'm saying is that we need to put more effort (read "money") into researching Geo-engineering. Some of our current ideas will likely turn out to be wrong. Maybe all of them will. But failing is a big part of the scientific process, and we won't learn anything unless we try. Instead of spending billions buying carbon credits, why not put billions into Geo-engineering research?
Poor people are fact because they CANT eat properly. I suggest you look at the price of real unprocessed meat and veggies as well as hole grain breads.
You're making a very simple - and very common mistake; "eating healthy" has absolutely nothing to do with weight control. Sure a "whole wheat" bread may give you more nutrients than bleached white Wonderbread, but nutrients don't cause either weight gain or weight loss.
As far as weight loss/gain is concerned, eating 1,500 calories worth of "processed" food is the same as eating 1,500 calories of your home-made tree-hugging fully-organic vaccine-free health-juice.
This is a far cry from claiming it's never happened, which they simply can't do, because it has [wordpress.com]. And they won.
No, they haven't. If you were at all familiar with the Schmeiser case you would know that he intentionally planted Monsanto seed. He never even denied it - not in court anyway. In interviews he tries to twist the story to hide the pertinent details, and his supports outright lie about what happened, but the court proceedings tell the real story - he found some plants which were resistant to Roundup, he kept their seeds, and he intentionally planted a crop which was Roundup resistant.
So tell me again how that's a far cry from claiming it never happened?
"Global warming" is not a binary condition, it will only be as bad as we allow it to be.
That's nonsense. Sure, if we're willing to make huge sacrifices, AND if we can convince the rest of the world to do the same, we could drastically reduce our output of greenhouse gasses. Even that is a pipe-dream, but ok, it's technically doable.
What we can't do is regulate solar output and the natural variations in the earths climate. Not by just limiting our pollution, anyway. So even if we miraculously stop the current cycle of warming, we'll be screwed as soon as mamma nature decides to turn up (or down) the heat.
That's why the real solution we need to be looking at is Geo-engineering. We need a reliable means of modifying our climate so we can deal with ANY change that we don't like. After all, natural global warming isn't any better than man-made global warming.
F-35 has crap combat range and Canada has a large airspace to cover. That seems like a pretty good reason to me.
The F-35 has a significantly greater combat range than our current fighters, so we can pretty much dismiss that argument right away. But combat range is a shit indicator anyway if what you care about is covering our own airspace. What we need is intercept capability, not combat radius. We need to get there quickly, blow the invader away, and head home - possibly meeting an air-to-air refueller along the way. And the F-35 is MUCH better at that because of supercruise.
With the F-18 you either go subsonic in order to have greater range, or you fire up the afterburners to get there fast, but only over short distances or you'll run out of fuel way too soon. With the F-35 that equation becomes much more balanced because you can go supersonic with a much lower fuel cost. You also have the advantage of being able to fire from farther away, but that's a lesser consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
Which still makes me question: why 39 shots when the victim (allegedly) shot only once?
I once saw a platoon of soldiers fire ~600 rounds on a crowd of protesters who threw an egg. The first guy to fire thought it was a grenade. The rest followed suit. Luckily it was a training exercise ... but in real life shit goes sideways all the time, too. If you think you're any better, you couldn't be more wrong. If you had been there manning the perimeter, you would have fired right along with the rest.
We train hard to reduce the chances of shit like this happening in a real scenario, but no amount of training can completely eliminate it. And when you have millions of cops engaging daily in violent interactions ... it's a miracle that these kinds of fiascoes happen as rarely as they do. The only reason people find it exceptional is because youtoube is full of videos of cops behaving badly, and you can watch 50 of them in an afternoon. If you actually had to view them in proportion to normal, everyday interactions, you'd be sitting there all year. People just don't understand large numbers and selection bias.
More likely: the killing of the granny was indeed an honest mistake, and then they tried to cover up their mistake by making her look like a criminal by planting drugs and the gun, in an attempt to justify their actions.
Yes, that's quite possible, if unlikely. Thanks for being one of the fee reasonable commenters.
Firing 39 shots sounds totally excessive - the hit rate is also pretty bad indeed. That indeed leaves some 33 stray bullets, no telling where they ended up.
They ended up inside the house. The hit rate is actually quite good. Take it from me. On the range I get every round in the bullseye. In a kinetic situation I'm lucky if I get 1 out of 4 on target. And I'm a guy who has better training than the police.
Civvies seem to expect every cop to be trained to special-forces standards. That expectation is ... unrealistic, to say the least.
So you trust the cops word, even after a criminal conviction for their actions?
No, I weigh the evidence based on the most likely scenario. Never met a cop who would blow away grandma for no reason. If you can introduce me to some, I may change my mind.
The "evidence" shows that the police executed an illegal raid
Come again? I think these kinds of statements are why the [citation needed] tag was invented.
And the cops hit their target 10% of the time. If they weren't fired and in jail, they could have used more time on the range, anyway.
Spoken like someone who's never been in a firefight. 10% is actually well above what I would expect.
This probably happens in real life. I got slammed against a brick wall when I was 23 or so by a cop for ... blah blah blah ...
I've seen lots of friends get slammed into a brick wall (or concrete floors) by the cops. Without fail it happened because they were drunk and belligerent and begging for a beating. If the cops hadn't gotten them first, some other guy at the bar would have fucked them up and left them far worse off than just a few bruises and having to go to court. Yet, again without fail, they all claim they were the innocent victims of police brutality.
There are certainly cases where police misbehave, and they should be held accountable for that. But the cases where idiots convince themselves that they were innocent victims of police brutality are far, FAR more common. You'll forgive me if I lump you into the latter category based on the odds.
There's definitely plenty of room for questioning police actions, but when you find yourself suggesting that they executed a grandmother in cold blood and then made it appear that she fired first ... you've probably gone a bit past the point of "reasonable questioning" and strayed into "fuck the pigs" land.
Is there so little happening in the world right now that the best "story" you can come up with is a guy with obvious mental issues claiming police made him post Facebook comments?
Let's say we can the NSA and China and Russia get those 'advantages.' Will that affect average citizens in a meaningful way? Probably not.
They might the whole internet.
Not believing in a deity means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without the help of a deity.
Not believing in unicorns means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without unicorns.
Prepaid service in Canada sucks ass.
Depends on your needs. In Canada I tend to go with Koodo mobile; pay $15 for the month as a base charge, then buy however much data or voice I'll need. I conserve my data usage so 1 gig of 4G data can cost me for 4-5 months. And both data and voice with them are "Canada wide", so no roaming or long distance charges, plus they never expire. I had my phone with them for a full year, and on average it's cost me about $25 / month, total.
In the US, on the other hand, I tend to shell out the $60 per month so I can have unlimited data and calling. Unfortunately you're right about Canada not really having any decent offerings for "unlimited use".
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think Chat-R offers a nano sim, so if you have an iPhone 5/5S/5C or an HTC One M* you're SOL as well,
You can walk into any cellphone repair shop and have them punch your existing sim to a nano.
The next time someone asks "What good is Perl anymore?" or "Who actually uses Perl?" or "Why use Perl?" you can point them to this article. Perl is perfect for this type of quick development.
Kinda. But he could just as easily have written it as a VB Script. More easily, actually, since he was working on windows and ended up having to write Excel VBA for it later anyway.
Profit bad. Trolling good!
I received a CO's commendation for writing a website. Felt rather silly. But I had to write the damn thing in classic ASP so I guess you could say the award was hard-earned.
So then, the courts said you can be sued for planting seeds you find on your own property. And Schmeiser's the idiot?
Yes. Did you have any more stupid questions?
Mainly because their Hard Drives are based on LEG.
Seriously, can you imagine the features a Russian CPU will have? "Survives drop fro orbit! Can count to Potato!"
The word "slave" originates from the Slavic people and the centuries of oppression and humiliation which we suffered through. I demand that you all stop using it immediately. Also I want reparations.
I can tell you I wouldn't switch. I seriously doubt they would either.
Depends ... if I make a switch to black, do I get reborn with a 12 inch dick?
The woman thing sounds tempting too ... I'm kinda tired of having to pay for my own drinks and meals. I think in your hypothetical scenario I'd like to be reborn as a black woman with a 12 inch dick.
Colonial Mars expands to other planets with the Utopian political system essentially consisting of a Technocracy [wikipedia.org]. Greed and religion are outlawed punishable by death. No person is in charge. Robots are programmed to rule.
So ... Mars becomes the USSR?
Talk about the Red Planet ....
The same reason you shouldn't put next week's gas money into fusion energy research. Some problems are more immediate than others. We definitely do need to put more money into geo-engineering research but in the short term he have to cut fossil carbon use, or its going to hurt us in a way that will make it harder to do that geo-engineering research.
Except there is no "short term" here. Anything we do to reduce CO2 levels isn't going to make a measurable difference any time soon. It's going to take decades - at the very least - before we see any meaningful effect. More likely we'll never see any effect from it at all, given the pace at which India and China are making up for our reductions. So no matter how you look at it, it makes far more sense to look for other ways to control climate.
Launching sulphur into the atmosphere or other plans of reducing sunlight (I've also heard of using large clouds of particles in space) are just a band-aid that only addresses one aspect of CO2's effects. It does nothing about ocean acidification for starters, and will have many side-effects that reducing atmospheric CO2 wouldn't.
And reducing CO2 is just a bandaid solution because it doesn't address the natural cycles of warming and cooling. I would rather have a "bandaid" which covers many contingencies than one which covers only one specific hole.
Right now we sequester, if the planet starts to get too cold later we can burn the sequestered carbon to raise the temperature again.
That might make sense if you could sequester it in a "burnable" form. We can't do that without consuming more energy than we produced in the fist place. For that plan to be at all feasible we would have to develop a way to produce essentially limitless extremely cheap energy, at which point sequestration becomes somewhat of a moot issue anyway.
It's also a crappy way of going about it - the response curve to carbon is just too slow. I don't think anyone wants to live through 40 years of cooling, hoping that the trend will reverse before the temperature drops low enough for crop failures to cause mass starvation.
Lastly, think about the scale of what you're proposing. Sequester all the carbon which our entire species has produced over the last 100 years, then burn it all again as quickly as possible if an ice-age comes along. Do you have any idea how massive of an undertaking just the first part would be? You may as well scrap all other industry - this project will keep us all employed for decades to come. Better find lots of money trees to fund it all.
First, you say he knowingly planted Mansanto seed, then you say he found some seeds that were Roundup resistant. Which is it?
Both, obviously. Why the false dichotomy?
Because surreptitiously finding Roundup resistant seed is quite a far cry from knowingly harvesting and planting Mansanto seed.
Well sure, you could make the argument that he was an idiot, and the only farmer around who didn't realize that only Monsanto seeds were roundup resistant. That would be a bit like claiming that you found a really cool plant growing in your back yard, discovered that it was really fun to smoke, and then sold it to all of your friends ... but "I swear, officer, I didn't know it was Marijuana".
Unfortunately, Percy's defence was even stupider than that. He didn't bother trying to play innocent; instead he just said "Screw you Monsanto - I found your seeds on my land, so they're mine to do with as I please".
The courts disagreed.
You're right, but we have no means of cheating CO2 levels now and there is very unlikely to be in the future, so what can we do but reduce atmospheric CO2 to geo-engineer ourselves the climate we want?
There have been some interesting suggestions, involving things such as releasing sulphur (or something similar, I don't remember exactly) into the upper atmosphere to reflect more sunlight before it reaches us. I've read of a few different approaches, all of which are mostly theoretical at this point.
I'm not saying there are any sure-fire ways to stop global warming without reducing CO2 output. And I'm all for reducing it wherever practical. What I'm saying is that we need to put more effort (read "money") into researching Geo-engineering. Some of our current ideas will likely turn out to be wrong. Maybe all of them will. But failing is a big part of the scientific process, and we won't learn anything unless we try. Instead of spending billions buying carbon credits, why not put billions into Geo-engineering research?
Poor people are fact because they CANT eat properly. I suggest you look at the price of real unprocessed meat and veggies as well as hole grain breads.
You're making a very simple - and very common mistake; "eating healthy" has absolutely nothing to do with weight control. Sure a "whole wheat" bread may give you more nutrients than bleached white Wonderbread, but nutrients don't cause either weight gain or weight loss.
As far as weight loss/gain is concerned, eating 1,500 calories worth of "processed" food is the same as eating 1,500 calories of your home-made tree-hugging fully-organic vaccine-free health-juice.
This is a far cry from claiming it's never happened, which they simply can't do, because it has [wordpress.com]. And they won.
No, they haven't. If you were at all familiar with the Schmeiser case you would know that he intentionally planted Monsanto seed. He never even denied it - not in court anyway. In interviews he tries to twist the story to hide the pertinent details, and his supports outright lie about what happened, but the court proceedings tell the real story - he found some plants which were resistant to Roundup, he kept their seeds, and he intentionally planted a crop which was Roundup resistant.
So tell me again how that's a far cry from claiming it never happened?
"Global warming" is not a binary condition, it will only be as bad as we allow it to be.
That's nonsense. Sure, if we're willing to make huge sacrifices, AND if we can convince the rest of the world to do the same, we could drastically reduce our output of greenhouse gasses. Even that is a pipe-dream, but ok, it's technically doable.
What we can't do is regulate solar output and the natural variations in the earths climate. Not by just limiting our pollution, anyway. So even if we miraculously stop the current cycle of warming, we'll be screwed as soon as mamma nature decides to turn up (or down) the heat.
That's why the real solution we need to be looking at is Geo-engineering. We need a reliable means of modifying our climate so we can deal with ANY change that we don't like. After all, natural global warming isn't any better than man-made global warming.
and this requires root, which is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. as soon as you root, the entire sandbox runtime model is out the window.
This particular baby is stillborn, so why do you want to hang on to it's corpse? It's much more rational (and much more fun) to make a new one.
F-35 has crap combat range and Canada has a large airspace to cover. That seems like a pretty good reason to me.
The F-35 has a significantly greater combat range than our current fighters, so we can pretty much dismiss that argument right away. But combat range is a shit indicator anyway if what you care about is covering our own airspace. What we need is intercept capability, not combat radius. We need to get there quickly, blow the invader away, and head home - possibly meeting an air-to-air refueller along the way. And the F-35 is MUCH better at that because of supercruise.
With the F-18 you either go subsonic in order to have greater range, or you fire up the afterburners to get there fast, but only over short distances or you'll run out of fuel way too soon. With the F-35 that equation becomes much more balanced because you can go supersonic with a much lower fuel cost. You also have the advantage of being able to fire from farther away, but that's a lesser consideration.