Right, because all the mafia does is traffic in drugs and prostitution. [/sarcasm] I was also talking about other contraband - weapon smuggling and such.
Guns are legal. Why should a legal item need to be smuggled?
While I agree that we should all have the right to bear arms, I don't think criminals convicted of violent crimes should necessarily have that right - and illegal weapon smuggling gives them those weapons.
So does burglarizing the home of someone who legally owns that weapon. Criminals don't go to Mexico to smuggle weapons to use in holdups, they can get them here. They only need to smuggle weapons that the government has said nobody can posess, despite the 2nd amendment. There's no reason whatever to smuggle weapons unless the weapons are (illegally) outlawed.
While you might consider drug use to be a victimless crime, I do not - both the person taking drugs and that person's family usually suffer.
Freedom is the right to fuck your life up any damned way you choose. Alcoholics and their families suffer, too, but they legalized alcohol because the laws against it were as counterproductive as the laws against the other drugs are today. If you're against drug prohibition then you MUST be for outlawing alcohol and tobacco, the two most destructive drugs there are.
Prostitution? The families of men who use them suffer.
My marriage broke up because of my ex-wife's infidelity. You don't think my children and I suffered? The three of us were prescribed antidepressant drugs for our suffering! There was no prostitution involved (but there damned sure is now). Why is it legal for me to have sex with your wife so long as I don't pay her? It's not the prostitution that ruins lives and breaks up families, it's the adultery. Adultery DOES have a victim: the adulteror's spouse. But adultery is legal, at least in Illinois. It's grounds for divorce, but it doesn't affect the divorce settlement in any way.
Since I'm divorced, how does it hurt anyone if I hire a hooker? She gets needed cash and I get laid. If I have sex with your wife, you and your family are harmed, but no law is broken.
Gambling? If I lose all my money, if I take out a second mortgage on my house and gamble it away, where will my wife and kids live when the debt comes due?
I live alone. I'm no gambler but if I were, why should I be deprived of it because YOU are too weak and stupid to control yourself?
I actually am in danger of losing my house, but it's froem being stupidly kind hearted and loaning money to people who don't pay it back, then borrowing from places with interest that was illegally high just a couple of decades ago. Why are those places legal? Why is it legal fro the downtrodden I stupidly help to ask me for money? Why is it legal for me to stupidly give it away? My drug is empathy - I get an emotional high from helping people, and its bringing me to ruin. I can't see how that's different from drugs or gambling, yet it's perfectly legal.
If goverment is going to protect me for my own weakness, then it first should give me health care, particularly MENTAL health care. But government can't even protect me from you, how could it possibly protect me from myself? As to gambling, well, here in Illinois I can go to a horsetrack and gamble, I can go to a riverboat and gamble, why is it illegal to sit down in my back yard and play poker with my buds? Why is it illegal for me to bet on sports? Government already said gambling is ok - but only under their rules. It's a damned hypocritical law!
We are better off with them illegal. Sorry if I'm too conservative for your tastes.
Liberty is conservative. You should apologize for being a liberal, not a conservative.
but there's some pretty good evidence out there that I'm right. No, I'm not going to provide any here
That's because there is none. The Flying Spagetti Monster is real, I'll leave it to your google skills to to prove my point for me.
If the criminal is violent, then an armed and uniformed policeman can arrest her. Even felons have the right to peacefully assemble.
What crime other than a victimless crime would need secret police? You have a victim and his testamony, and/or evidence of a crime.
The police aren't there to prevent crime, they're there to solve crimes and arrest the alleged criminals. It's then up to a judge/jury to determine if the allegations are true.
Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
No, Springfield, Illinois. Wear a gun in a holster around here and you won't live long. The guy mentioned in that journal was alledgedly threatening cops with a steak knife. Maybe he's one of slashdot's poor spellers and thought they were cows?
But guns themselves are not that scary, its only people with guns for certain reasons that are scary.
Like I said, I grew up hunting and was taught firearm safety. Too many people don't know that the most dangerous thing in the world is a stupid person with a gun, and he's even more dangerous if the gun's not loaded. IINM more people die from thinking their guns are unloaded than from intentional murder.
sometimes having them inside of large criminal organizations seems ethical, and useful.
If the laws themselves were just there would be no "large criminal organizations" (except maybe Sony, Microsoft, the RIAA...). The Mafia would have never gotten a toehold in the US had it not been for alcohol prohibition. Legalize victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, gambling) and you've pretty much shut down organized crime.
In my house at least. I'd say that whatever year KDE came out was the true "year of the Linux desktop". Why should I care what OS everyone else is using?
I was in the service before you were born, young man. I served from 1971 to 1975. Nixon resigned the day I returned to the US from being stationed in Thailand.
Here is an account of that trip (I was there from August 1973 to August 1974) and here is another.
Sadly, I see you didn't get the "funny" mod you were shooting for. Better luck next time!
I thought they were glass, perhaps not. You're actually older than me and it was about 1970 when I tried contacts. So if yours were plastic in 1959 mine certainly were as well.
You say your vision was 20/400. Is that primarily myopia?
Yes.
If so, what's your refractive correction?
I have no idea, but the lens I wear in my right eye is a 6.
As for cataract surgery: had one done when I was 60, which got me to a trivial -0.75 diopter correction
Mine corrected my vision to 20/16 at distance and 20/12 closeup, but I got the new tech that can focus. A little arithmetic says you're 6 years older than me, so you got yours done about the same time I did.
(waiting for the other one to get bad enough so that insurance will cover it).
Me too. Right now I'm waiting for the blood in my good eye (the one with the IOL) to clear up, my retina bled a few weeks ago where it tore the year before last. Dr. Odin says if it keeps doing that he'll have to perform a vitrectomy.
This was the closest thing to no surgery I can imagine (less than ten minutes in the operating room). I'll take that over a root canal any day.
Root canals are a whole lot easier than they were in the early seventies, but I'd still take cataract surgery over it. Except fo rthe eyedrops it was entirely painless.
Spending money unnecessarily is incredibly foolish. If you spend a thousand dollars on a new computer when the old one works fine and serves its purpose, that's a thousand dollars you can't spend on a true investment, say, advertising.
Like they say, a fool and his money are soon parted.
People like this man should not breed and be removed from the gene pool to ensure the survival of our species.
You don't understand evolution very well, do you? My friend Linda's not the sharpest knife in the drawer but she's had fourteen kids and so far only one of then has died. I only have two (that I know of) and they're both thriving, but Linda beats me in the evolution game 13-2.
It's not about intelligence, it's about procreation. You only have to stay alive long anough to breed. Didn't TFA say the guy was 56? If he hasn't bred yet he's not likely to, and if he has then killing him won't change anything.
So by your own logic you should put a bullet in your own head to ensure the survival of the species. You're probably still a virgin, considering your apparent personality.
BTW, most mental retardation isn't hereditary but is usually caused by brain injury. But go ahead and kill yourself anyway and rid the species of the "hatefulness" gene.
He's a piker. I met a man in a bar (where else?) who had been married twelve times, and he was under 40. Apparently he has a hard time getting along with women?
Obvious, perhaps, but inaccurate. Some of us adopt some tech early and some tech late, depending on the tech. If there's a tool that's shown to be better in some way (smoother, faster, more comfortable) we'll adopt it. Some tech goes backwards. For instance, why would anyone trade a car stereo with a big fat volume knob for one with teeny buttons? Thankfully the volume knob has made a comeback, as has the flat shoelace.
Some tech is just too damned expensive new. I'd like an iPhone but they're just too damned pricey. Some tech comes from companies I'd rather spit dead rats than buy from - Sony and ATT come to mind.
Some tech is obviously not ready for use yet - any Mixrosoft x.0 release, for instance. I'll bet there aren't many early Windows adopters here, because everyone knows you don't buy a new Windows until at LEAST the SP1 service pack comes out fixing its most glaring errors.
Finally, there's a reason they call it "bleeding edge technology".
-mcgrew
PS Now get off my lawn you damned kids and no, you can't have your burlout back.
According to this link (first one up on google) you're right, but notice that it differentiates from different types of construction. Steelworkers, roofers, and electrical linemen (my dad was one) are all construction workers and occupy three spots in the list.
1 Logging workers 92.4 85 2 Aircraft pilots 92.4 109 3 Fishers and fishing workers 86.4 38 4 Structural iron and steel workers 47.0 31 5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors 43.2 35 6 Farmers and ranchers 37.5 307 7 Roofers 34.9 94 8 Electrical power line installers/repairers 30.0 36 9 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers 27.6 905 10 Taxi drivers and chauffeurs 24.2 67
As you said, "police officer" doesn't even make the top ten.
What if it was just some guy with a concealed weapons permit that wanted lunch?
Why should anyone have to get permission to bear arms when it is supposed to be your 2nd amendment right? Besides, we don't have concealed carry in Illinois, although they're trying to pass it.
Or maybe it was an off-duty police officer. Last I checked, off-duty cops carry their weapons.
I'm not sure why I'm responding since it's pretty obvious you only scanned the text, at most. "All on-duty police officers should be in uniform, with their badge displayed proudly, not hiding their real identity in shame like some Nazi brown shirt. And when they take off the uniform, they should take off the gun and become an ordinary citizen like anybody else." A soldier isn't allowed to carry his gun while out of uniform and off-duty, why should a cop?
It's the same with concealed weapons - if they outlaw concealed weapons, only outlaws will have concealed weapons, and the crime rate will increase, since armed criminals could be much more certain that no one would or could resist them.
I'll agree with you there.
Without undercover cops it'd be hard to infiltrate illegal smuggling operations, gangs, and so on, in order to obtain actual solid evidence
You also missed the part where I said victimless crimes shouldn't be crimes at all. Without drug, gambling, and prostitution laws there's no need for the secret police.
You make a mistake if you believe that "undercover" == "Secret Police"
They're police and their identities as police offiucers is secret. Doublespeak is a term from "1984" as well.
Detectives and other officers often wear normal clothes as they go about their duties
IMO they shouldn't. The detectives should wear uniforms just like the traffic cop does. If we were to legalize activities that have no victims, the police wouldn't have to hide their identities, both police and civilians would be safer, and the police would get a lot more respect. If what my grandparents tole me about alcohol prohibition was any indication, the police were considered a joke by most everybody then, and maybe it's just because I'm a geezer but I think lack of respect fo rth epolice is a bad thing.
I think someone who posted at slashdot is dead, shot by the police last Saturday night. I'm not 100% sure he was a slashdotter, but I have a gut feeling he was. I never met the fellow myself, but his death is somewhat involved in this journal.
Elsewhere in the journal I threaten an ex-marine (general discharge) with calling 911. "I fight like an old man". The dead man's blog is linked, and he mentions Star Wars in it so It's a good bet there is one less slashdot poster than there was last week, thanks to the Springfield Police Department.
This journal too as it has the guy I threatened being arrested for attempted murder and serving fifteen days in the county jail for it (plea bargain). And of course a third journal Police State: In USSA, cops hassle YOU!
No, but the Internet is a little skewed, don't you think?
No, I think it gives a little power to the still powerless citizen. And besides, that's no reason to restrict free speech. If someone is slandered, that's actionable in a civil court. Honest opinions, however, aren't slander. And even if it is skewed, so what?
Cops have a sucky enough job as it is
Nobody made a single one of them join the force, and unlike the military they can resign any time they want.
I just think of pulling someone over at 3 AM and wondering, every single time, if you're going to walk up to that window and get shot.
Construction work is the most dangerous job and is far more dangerous than being a cop. If you're a cop who's afraid of being shot you're in the wrong line of work.
Being a policeman is not a good job if you want to be popular.
Well, I think you said it yourself. Last I saw they weren't drafting people to become police officers. If you don't like heights, don't become a window washer. If you don't want to wear a tie, don't go into management.
The ONLY valid reasons I can come up with why anyone would want this site down are the exposing of undercover officers (not good for anyone, especially the undercover cops, except the criminals they're infiltrating)
I disagree VEHEMENTLY. I don't think Secret Police belong in any country that claims to be a free society. IMO every police agent should be in uniform with his or her badge prominently displayed. Rather than bring a slashdotting to my site, I'll reproduce a blog posting from September 2005 here in its entirety.
A few weeks ago while I was eating lunch at Top Cat's on Stevenson, I saw something that unnerved me a little bit. Four middle aged men wearing suits were sitting at a nearby table. One of them wore a pistol in a holster, as if he were a character in a TV western, only without the hat.
Nobody seemed to notice or mind. Of course, I noticed and I minded, but there would have been no way for anybody to notice that I noticed, either. My assumption was that these were cops; they looked like cops.
But I had a nagging worry. What if they weren't cops? What if they were here to rob and kill the restaraunt's workers and patrons?
What if they were cops and another Secret Policeman from another jurisdiction (say, the county or state) mistook them for thugs and bullets started flying?
I didn't even finish my beer that day. As soon as my lunch was done I was out of there. I'm uncomfortable around firearms, having been taught firearm safety and hunting at a young age. I mean, shit happens, you know?
The Secret Police are more commonly referred to in the mainstream media as "undercover agents" or "undercover police," and their sole function is to enforce laws that should never been passed, such as alcohol prohibition in the 1920s or anti-prostitution laws today. Laws that nobody is going to call the police for because nobody is victimized by those crimes that should not be criminal.
"The prostitute is the pimp's victim," the authoritarian anti-freedom busybodies whine. If so, why does this victim wind up in jail? These laws make little sense to me.
Besides, if prostitution were legal I could get laid. But that is beside this post's point. And trying to stick to the point I'm not going to mince words and use euphamisms like "undercover" but call them what they really are: the Secret Police, not at all unlike Soviet Russia's Secret Police or Hitler's Facist Secret Police, or the Secret Police in Communist China.
They're not "undercover agents" dammit, they're Secret Police. 1984 may have been a little late, but Orwell was wrong about one thing- when the city council voted to put the spy cameras on 5th street last week (sorry, I can't find a link) they neglected to vote for any money for the "Big Brother is watching!" posters.
Cameras everywhere and Secret Police. Our freedom has been gone for quite some time now. The 9-11 terrorists only speeded up a process that was already underway.
But back to the Secret Police.
Today I heard on the news that what I feared at Top Cat's happened at the Citrus Bowl yesterday. At the inevitable tailgate party, the Secret Police were (of course) sneakily wandering through the crowd pretending to be football fans when a drunken brawl broke out.
A Secret Policeman intervened, and while trying to break up the fight, drew his weapon and fired into the air. Another cop saw this, assumed logically and rationally that this was an armed drunken brawler and shot him dead, in the back.
He died slowly, coughing up blood. The news reports I saw didn't say whether the cop killer was a uniformed police officer or another Secret Policeman.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because all the mafia does is traffic in drugs and prostitution. [/sarcasm] I was also talking about other contraband - weapon smuggling and such.
Guns are legal. Why should a legal item need to be smuggled?
While I agree that we should all have the right to bear arms, I don't think criminals convicted of violent crimes should necessarily have that right - and illegal weapon smuggling gives them those weapons.
So does burglarizing the home of someone who legally owns that weapon. Criminals don't go to Mexico to smuggle weapons to use in holdups, they can get them here. They only need to smuggle weapons that the government has said nobody can posess, despite the 2nd amendment. There's no reason whatever to smuggle weapons unless the weapons are (illegally) outlawed.
While you might consider drug use to be a victimless crime, I do not - both the person taking drugs and that person's family usually suffer.
Freedom is the right to fuck your life up any damned way you choose. Alcoholics and their families suffer, too, but they legalized alcohol because the laws against it were as counterproductive as the laws against the other drugs are today. If you're against drug prohibition then you MUST be for outlawing alcohol and tobacco, the two most destructive drugs there are.
Prostitution? The families of men who use them suffer.
My marriage broke up because of my ex-wife's infidelity. You don't think my children and I suffered? The three of us were prescribed antidepressant drugs for our suffering! There was no prostitution involved (but there damned sure is now). Why is it legal for me to have sex with your wife so long as I don't pay her? It's not the prostitution that ruins lives and breaks up families, it's the adultery. Adultery DOES have a victim: the adulteror's spouse. But adultery is legal, at least in Illinois. It's grounds for divorce, but it doesn't affect the divorce settlement in any way.
Since I'm divorced, how does it hurt anyone if I hire a hooker? She gets needed cash and I get laid. If I have sex with your wife, you and your family are harmed, but no law is broken.
Gambling? If I lose all my money, if I take out a second mortgage on my house and gamble it away, where will my wife and kids live when the debt comes due?
I live alone. I'm no gambler but if I were, why should I be deprived of it because YOU are too weak and stupid to control yourself?
I actually am in danger of losing my house, but it's froem being stupidly kind hearted and loaning money to people who don't pay it back, then borrowing from places with interest that was illegally high just a couple of decades ago. Why are those places legal? Why is it legal fro the downtrodden I stupidly help to ask me for money? Why is it legal for me to stupidly give it away? My drug is empathy - I get an emotional high from helping people, and its bringing me to ruin. I can't see how that's different from drugs or gambling, yet it's perfectly legal.
If goverment is going to protect me for my own weakness, then it first should give me health care, particularly MENTAL health care. But government can't even protect me from you, how could it possibly protect me from myself? As to gambling, well, here in Illinois I can go to a horsetrack and gamble, I can go to a riverboat and gamble, why is it illegal to sit down in my back yard and play poker with my buds? Why is it illegal for me to bet on sports? Government already said gambling is ok - but only under their rules. It's a damned hypocritical law!
We are better off with them illegal. Sorry if I'm too conservative for your tastes.
Liberty is conservative. You should apologize for being a liberal, not a conservative.
but there's some pretty good evidence out there that I'm right. No, I'm not going to provide any here
That's because there is none. The Flying Spagetti Monster is real, I'll leave it to your google skills to to prove my point for me.
If the criminal is violent, then an armed and uniformed policeman can arrest her. Even felons have the right to peacefully assemble.
What crime other than a victimless crime would need secret police? You have a victim and his testamony, and/or evidence of a crime.
The police aren't there to prevent crime, they're there to solve crimes and arrest the alleged criminals. It's then up to a judge/jury to determine if the allegations are true.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
There are no concealed carry permits in Illinois. And it wasn't concealed, it was in a holster.
If there's an armed man in the room, I want him to be ME.
Your not from the southwest, I take it?
No, Springfield, Illinois. Wear a gun in a holster around here and you won't live long. The guy mentioned in that journal was alledgedly threatening cops with a steak knife. Maybe he's one of slashdot's poor spellers and thought they were cows?
But guns themselves are not that scary, its only people with guns for certain reasons that are scary.
Like I said, I grew up hunting and was taught firearm safety. Too many people don't know that the most dangerous thing in the world is a stupid person with a gun, and he's even more dangerous if the gun's not loaded. IINM more people die from thinking their guns are unloaded than from intentional murder.
sometimes having them inside of large criminal organizations seems ethical, and useful.
If the laws themselves were just there would be no "large criminal organizations" (except maybe Sony, Microsoft, the RIAA...). The Mafia would have never gotten a toehold in the US had it not been for alcohol prohibition. Legalize victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, gambling) and you've pretty much shut down organized crime.
In my house at least. I'd say that whatever year KDE came out was the true "year of the Linux desktop". Why should I care what OS everyone else is using?
'We'd like to have a place where developers can come and work on making Linux more effectively interoperate with Microsoft products
Yeah, and people in hell would like a glass of ice water and some air conditioning too.
I was in the service before you were born, young man. I served from 1971 to 1975. Nixon resigned the day I returned to the US from being stationed in Thailand.
Here is an account of that trip (I was there from August 1973 to August 1974) and here is another.
Sadly, I see you didn't get the "funny" mod you were shooting for. Better luck next time!
I thought they were glass, perhaps not. You're actually older than me and it was about 1970 when I tried contacts. So if yours were plastic in 1959 mine certainly were as well.
You say your vision was 20/400. Is that primarily myopia?
Yes.
If so, what's your refractive correction?
I have no idea, but the lens I wear in my right eye is a 6.
As for cataract surgery: had one done when I was 60, which got me to a trivial -0.75 diopter correction
Mine corrected my vision to 20/16 at distance and 20/12 closeup, but I got the new tech that can focus. A little arithmetic says you're 6 years older than me, so you got yours done about the same time I did.
(waiting for the other one to get bad enough so that insurance will cover it).
Me too. Right now I'm waiting for the blood in my good eye (the one with the IOL) to clear up, my retina bled a few weeks ago where it tore the year before last. Dr. Odin says if it keeps doing that he'll have to perform a vitrectomy.
This was the closest thing to no surgery I can imagine (less than ten minutes in the operating room). I'll take that over a root canal any day.
Root canals are a whole lot easier than they were in the early seventies, but I'd still take cataract surgery over it. Except fo rthe eyedrops it was entirely painless.
It's like they are afraid to spend money.
Spending money unnecessarily is incredibly foolish. If you spend a thousand dollars on a new computer when the old one works fine and serves its purpose, that's a thousand dollars you can't spend on a true investment, say, advertising.
Like they say, a fool and his money are soon parted.
People like this man should not breed and be removed from the gene pool to ensure the survival of our species.
You don't understand evolution very well, do you? My friend Linda's not the sharpest knife in the drawer but she's had fourteen kids and so far only one of then has died. I only have two (that I know of) and they're both thriving, but Linda beats me in the evolution game 13-2.
It's not about intelligence, it's about procreation. You only have to stay alive long anough to breed. Didn't TFA say the guy was 56? If he hasn't bred yet he's not likely to, and if he has then killing him won't change anything.
So by your own logic you should put a bullet in your own head to ensure the survival of the species. You're probably still a virgin, considering your apparent personality.
BTW, most mental retardation isn't hereditary but is usually caused by brain injury. But go ahead and kill yourself anyway and rid the species of the "hatefulness" gene.
He's a piker. I met a man in a bar (where else?) who had been married twelve times, and he was under 40. Apparently he has a hard time getting along with women?
Obvious, perhaps, but inaccurate. Some of us adopt some tech early and some tech late, depending on the tech. If there's a tool that's shown to be better in some way (smoother, faster, more comfortable) we'll adopt it. Some tech goes backwards. For instance, why would anyone trade a car stereo with a big fat volume knob for one with teeny buttons? Thankfully the volume knob has made a comeback, as has the flat shoelace.
Some tech is just too damned expensive new. I'd like an iPhone but they're just too damned pricey. Some tech comes from companies I'd rather spit dead rats than buy from - Sony and ATT come to mind.
Some tech is obviously not ready for use yet - any Mixrosoft x.0 release, for instance. I'll bet there aren't many early Windows adopters here, because everyone knows you don't buy a new Windows until at LEAST the SP1 service pack comes out fixing its most glaring errors.
Finally, there's a reason they call it "bleeding edge technology".
-mcgrew
PS Now get off my lawn you damned kids and no, you can't have your burlout back.
OOPS! Sorry, wrong story. Please mod my original comment offtopic, thx
This might allow some intelligent discussion about the actual topic, rather than a flamefest about whether or not patents should exists.
Since INL I have no idea WTF the link is saying. So I'll just STFU for now.
-mcgrew
LOL, they probably were secret police. Or drug dealers.
According to this link (first one up on google) you're right, but notice that it differentiates from different types of construction. Steelworkers, roofers, and electrical linemen (my dad was one) are all construction workers and occupy three spots in the list.
1 Logging workers 92.4 85
2 Aircraft pilots 92.4 109
3 Fishers and fishing workers 86.4 38
4 Structural iron and steel workers 47.0 31
5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors 43.2 35
6 Farmers and ranchers 37.5 307
7 Roofers 34.9 94
8 Electrical power line installers/repairers 30.0 36
9 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers 27.6 905
10 Taxi drivers and chauffeurs 24.2 67
As you said, "police officer" doesn't even make the top ten.
What if it was just some guy with a concealed weapons permit that wanted lunch?
Why should anyone have to get permission to bear arms when it is supposed to be your 2nd amendment right? Besides, we don't have concealed carry in Illinois, although they're trying to pass it.
Or maybe it was an off-duty police officer. Last I checked, off-duty cops carry their weapons.
I'm not sure why I'm responding since it's pretty obvious you only scanned the text, at most. "All on-duty police officers should be in uniform, with their badge displayed proudly, not hiding their real identity in shame like some Nazi brown shirt. And when they take off the uniform, they should take off the gun and become an ordinary citizen like anybody else." A soldier isn't allowed to carry his gun while out of uniform and off-duty, why should a cop?
It's the same with concealed weapons - if they outlaw concealed weapons, only outlaws will have concealed weapons, and the crime rate will increase, since armed criminals could be much more certain that no one would or could resist them.
I'll agree with you there.
Without undercover cops it'd be hard to infiltrate illegal smuggling operations, gangs, and so on, in order to obtain actual solid evidence
You also missed the part where I said victimless crimes shouldn't be crimes at all. Without drug, gambling, and prostitution laws there's no need for the secret police.
You make a mistake if you believe that "undercover" == "Secret Police"
They're police and their identities as police offiucers is secret. Doublespeak is a term from "1984" as well.
Detectives and other officers often wear normal clothes as they go about their duties
IMO they shouldn't. The detectives should wear uniforms just like the traffic cop does. If we were to legalize activities that have no victims, the police wouldn't have to hide their identities, both police and civilians would be safer, and the police would get a lot more respect. If what my grandparents tole me about alcohol prohibition was any indication, the police were considered a joke by most everybody then, and maybe it's just because I'm a geezer but I think lack of respect fo rth epolice is a bad thing.
I don't really think we want policemen who are petarded.
You mean Picarded?
This journal too as it has the guy I threatened being arrested for attempted murder and serving fifteen days in the county jail for it (plea bargain). And of course a third journal Police State: In USSA, cops hassle YOU!
-mcgrew
Well sure, if all my MP3s were CD quality it would likely be full, let alone of I'd put my whole VHS and DVD library on it, even in compressed format.
But you're right, there certainly is a market for computers with sub-200gb drives. Especially laptops.
The implant affected my life in a completely positive way. The posting is an attempt at affecting others' lives in a positive way.
At my age nothing I can do or refrain from doing can affect even half my life, as it is certainly more than half over by now.
No, but the Internet is a little skewed, don't you think?
No, I think it gives a little power to the still powerless citizen. And besides, that's no reason to restrict free speech. If someone is slandered, that's actionable in a civil court. Honest opinions, however, aren't slander. And even if it is skewed, so what?
Cops have a sucky enough job as it is
Nobody made a single one of them join the force, and unlike the military they can resign any time they want.
I just think of pulling someone over at 3 AM and wondering, every single time, if you're going to walk up to that window and get shot.
Construction work is the most dangerous job and is far more dangerous than being a cop. If you're a cop who's afraid of being shot you're in the wrong line of work.
Being a policeman is not a good job if you want to be popular.
Well, I think you said it yourself. Last I saw they weren't drafting people to become police officers. If you don't like heights, don't become a window washer. If you don't want to wear a tie, don't go into management.
I disagree VEHEMENTLY. I don't think Secret Police belong in any country that claims to be a free society. IMO every police agent should be in uniform with his or her badge prominently displayed. Rather than bring a slashdotting to my site, I'll reproduce a blog posting from September 2005 here in its entirety.
Thank you for posting that!