From the video, it looked at first like the officers were not trying to arrest him at all. They just wanted to eject him from the hall and consider the matter dealt with.
Once they decided to cuff him, he managed to wriggle free twice. At that point, the disturbance was really getting out of hand, and it was getting down to nightsticks vs. taser. They chose taser, and genius boy Andrew Meyer was probably spared any lasting injury because of that choice.
but you have to also be tasered before you are authorized to use one, they knew full well what the taser does. That's a little bit of a misnomer. Most taser training does not involve taking an actual wet taser hit. They usually just tape the electrodes to the trainee, which winds up having them close together and administered in a controlled location.
In the field, the arrestee is taking a wet taser hit, and the electrodes will normally be farther apart, causing much greater discomfort. So while I agree that cops do have some idea of what a taser hit feels like, I wouldn't say they know "full well what a taser does".
Personally I found his questions interesting, and I think that there was no right for police to arrest him, I believe that Kerry should have answered his questions and defend himself in political way. Are you sure you watched the video? Kerry tried to answer his questions, and would have if this nut-job would have shut up long enough to give him the opportunity.
Your post implies that Kerry demanded that this kid be removed/silenced/tasered/etc. This is far from the truth. Watch the video again and you'll see.
he was arrested just because police and/or Kerry was not confortable with his questions, way to go! No, he was arrested because the police were not comfortable with his erratic and aggressive behavior. Can you blame them?
How did they manage police work before they had tasers? They used (and continue to use) other pain-compliance methods, many of which resulted in injuries (dislocated joints, severe bruises, etc.) and deaths (asphyxiation due to hog-tying, etc.). I wonder if Rodney King ever secretly wishes that police carried tasers back in the early 90s. Would have saved him one fractured skull, no?
As a parent, I am exposed to many parent/child conflicts. My unscientific observation is that when parents abuse their children, it tends to be when they do not feel that they have any other method to gain compliance from their children when compliance is required. Under pressure to gain control of whatever situation, they get angry and frustrated and their children pay the price. Parents who know how to achieve control without resorting to violence will typically do so. Very few people actually enjoy hitting their children ("This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you... yadda yadda yadda").
I draw a parallel to police use of force. If the cop knows that he can easily achieve control of a given situation using his taser, he is less likely to become angry and frustrated. Anger, frustration, and perceived threats to an officer lead to injured and/or killed arrestees.
Summary: I agree that we shouldn't have a posse of taser-happy cops electrocuting anyone who looks at them funny. But on the other hand, I think that those who long for the good 'ol days of billy clubs and beat-downs are not old enough to remember the good 'ol days of billy clubs and beat-downs.
Tasers can kill people. A 21 year old college student? Not likely, and anyhow the cops tried several times to escort him from the hall peacefully. The choice to make the officers use force was his own.
Given the choice between getting tasered and a classic police style beat-down, I'd choose the taser. I wonder if anyone ever asked Rodney King if he wished police carried tasers back in the early 90s. Would have saved him one fractured skull, no?
So, while they may no longer advertise it as unlimited, IMO they still should be required to say that there is a download limit and what it is. Oh, yes. I definitely agree. And furthermore, it really hacks me off when a restaurant advertises an all you can eat buffet, and they don't write on the ad that you can't bring 10 gallons worth of tupperware to fill up from the buffet line and bring home. It's so embarrassing when I show up and start filling my containers that they have the gall to kick me out. I mean, the ad clearly said "all you can eat", but they never specified a time period in which I had to eat the food.
I guess in life there are very few things that are truly unlimited.
All sarcasm aside, I think that if you look at it from Comcast's perspective, you'll see that they are not trying to be obtuse here, they are trying to be arbitrary. Because cable modem connections are shared loops, they have problems with heavy users, but only on their busy loops.
The way that Comcast wants to operate, is when they get 30 calls from your neighbors about problems with their digital services, they just want to cut your ass off. After all, you're only worth $30/month to them vs. all of your neighbors. On the other hand, if they set a hard limit, they'll have to actually enforce it, even on non-congested loops.
If they specify a number (for the sake of explanation, let's say 200GB/mo), this leads to two undesirable situations:
If you use 201GB, they have to cut you off, even if your usage isn't causing any problems. This is bad for revenue and bad publicity.
If you are causing congestion, and you only use 199GB, there is nothing Comcast can do about it
This is why Comcast doesn't want to commit to a number. While is stinks if you are a Comcast customer to not have any guidance on what constitutes acceptable usage, from Comcast's perspective, they'd rather maintain their ability to enforce their TOS arbitrarily.
The nice thing about interest in porn is that for most healthy kids, if they see it before they are ready for it, it elicits an "eww, gross!" and nothing more.
That being said, you are making a huge leap that what works for your kids will work for all other kids. As a parent, you should know that all kids are different, and shame on you for your holier than thou attitude.
Lastly, a 15 year old not being curious about sex could be a sign of developmental problems. That, or he's just smarter than you are and has you fooled. Stranger things have happened.:)
As a parent, your kids go from age 0, where there is absolutely nothing that they can do without your assistance, to age 18, where they are "full adults" and are 100% able to make adult decisions and accept the consequences thereof.
Ignoring for the moment that I know plenty of 18, 25, 30, and even 50 year olds who seem to have difficulties making adult decisions, imagine what it means to have a newborn. This "child", if you want to call it that, cannot do anything but eat, sleep, poop, and pee. And even those all require parental facilitation. It's an enormous continuum, between total dependence and total independence, and figuring out when and how to dole out freedoms and responsibilities CORRECTLY is a fickle art. The answer is different for every child, and the consequences of parental failure are very real.
Parental monitoring can be even more important. Kids' fearlessness is essential to their development of new skills like walking, swimming, biking, etc., but it can also get them into trouble. They don't know what can maim them and what cannot, and it is essential for parents to monitor the child and to say, "Yes, do that. It's ok." or "No, don't do that. You'll end up in the hospital or morgue."
The internet is just information, and I think you underestimate your childrens ability to accept it as such This is simply wrong. Children's brains wire up over time to the point that "information is just information" but it is not so from the beginning. Don't believe me? Show a 4 year old a violent movie and see if you can get him to go to bed. You can tell him over and over that the violence was pretend. Heck, you could bring the actual actors into the child's room to say that they are fine and it was just pretend, but the fact of the matter is, you are going to have a terrified, crying child in your bed for the next week or two.
Don't get me wrong, I recoil at the common wisdom here that says, "Put the computer in the living room". Kids communicate by IM now and they need to be able to communicate privately. When I was a kid, I didn't accept my parents listening in on my telephone conversations. Likewise, I do not monitor my kids' IM communications. That would be wrong.
But at the same time, free reign on the Internet is one of those freedoms that needs to be granted, but the foundation of responsibility must be taught first.
It's difficult for someone who has no children to appreciate what I am saying. You've never been totally responsible for the life and well being of other human beings, and it's impossible to imagine what that's like before doing it. I've explained it as best I can.
he began to realize that doing his homework and getting good grades in school was his ticket to bigger and better things. Heh heh. I see you bought into the college marketing material as well.
I'd love to hear how you managed to convince him of the "fact" that attending a $chool that has earned the respect of US News and World Report is a ticket to anything.
When I'm reading a resume, "UC Berkeley" and "UW Stout" look roughly equivalent to me. If I even make it that far, of course.
Oh, so s/\$(\w+)/$b[$i]{$1}/ge; isn't good enough? Well, I could eat my minestrone with a snow shovel as well, but don't you think that it would be more elegant to use a soup spoon?
It's pretty ballsy of Microsoft to turn on such draconian policy. Do they really think they can reliably differentiate licensed from unlicensed copies given the recent WGA debacle?
and anywhere else where Windows licenses are prohibitively expensive: Ubuntu will never disable your computer like this. At least, not intentionally.;)
I'll disable adblock plus as soon as advertisers agree to the following restrictions:
No pages where the ad content makes the page take longer than 2 seconds to load
No ads that make noise
No popups or popunders
No ads that aggravate my epilepsy
With all of the adblockers out there, have you noticed that nobody tries to block google's ads? They'd be easy to block, yet no one blocks them. The reason is that they are
relevant
don't irritate the user
Take the lesson, online advertisers. Take the lesson.
What's important in backup is that whatever system you use meets your needs. My needs are I want full automated snapshots of important filesystems taken at regular intervals (code,/etc, and the like), and I need offsite backups for important, but not necessarily often-changing files (credit card/bank statements as PDF, trade confirmations, my journal, papers from college, etc.) I stress "automated", because I would never remember to do backups on my own.
I use a free tool called rsnapshot to make automatic daily incremental snapshot backups of all machines in my house, plus all hosting accounts. The package conserves space by using hardlinks between snapshots for unchanged files. I keep 1 week of daily snapshots, 4 weeks of weekly snapshots, and 9 months of monthly snapshots.
The package uses rsync to be efficient over the network, and authenticates with remote servers using ssh certificate-based login.
It can backup from any host that supports ssh and and rsync, which means any BSD/*NIX, plus Windows if you install the proper tools (cygwin works well for this. Has an ssh daemon...er... sorry... service, etc.)
The backup server is an old Linux box with a 1.something TB RAID5. Every so often, I tar up and gpg up all the snapshots, burn 'em to DVDs, and leave them in the drawer at my office.
This way, I always have onsite backups that are never more than 24 hours old, and somewhat-regular offsite backups in case my house burns down.
The reason that I typed all of this in, is that your backup needs sound similar to my own. Hopefully I was able to help.
don't get out of the car to do field tests where they can tape you. Close, but not quite right. If a police officer orders you out of your car, that is a lawful order. Say "Yes, sir!" and get the fuck out of the car if you don't want to be tasered, handcuffed, thrown in the back of his cruiser, and charged with disobeying a lawful order.
On the other hand, you are not required to participate in any field sobriety test, and it is advisable to refuse. The FST is not a test at all, it is just him establishing probable cause and evidence gathering for your DUI charge. The cop asks you to do a bunch of awkward acrobatics so you look silly on video, and that is entered as evidence.
If you are asked to perform a field sobriety test, your best course of action is to say, "I want a lawyer," because you're gonna need one.
This can buy you time to process alcohol out of your system.... Or process the alcohol INTO your system.
If you have access to a brethalyzer and want to do a fun science fair project, eat a bunch of food and then slam X shots of tequila, which X being the number that you know will get you intoxicated, but not enough to puke up all that food you just ate.
Take brethalyzer readings at 15 minute intervals, and also attempt to perform basic motor function every 15 minutes. You'll find that your loss of motor control will happen at the rate you'd expect (fairly quickly), but your BAC reading will rise slowly. You'll find that you will be falling-down drunk well before your BAC rises above 0.08.
As you sober up over the next few hours, you'll find that you gradually regain your motor skills, but your BAC will continue to rise! This is because there is a lag between when the effects of alcohol hit your system and when they can be measured in your breath.
So, depending on the situation, creating more time between when you are actually observed driving and when you take a chemical test might work to your advantage, but it can just as easily work to your disadvantage.
Of course, the best course of action is the obvious: if you know you're drunk, call a cab.
Cops will charge you with all sorts of wild and crazy shit. This crazy shit doesn't stick in court but if you plead guilty it's game over. You do realize that being in a car with the ignition turned on while drunk is DWI, right? It doesn't matter if you're in the driver's seat, passenger seat, backseat, or trunk.
Many, many people have been convicted of DWI for waiting in their cars to sober up before driving, but making the mistake of turning on the radio.
This is why it's always vitally important to get a true blood test, and to preserve a sample for your attorney. At the risk of making you even more paranoid, I'm going to remind you that blood ferments over time. And the byproduct of fermentation is, as you are well aware, alcohol.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty amazing story. Also, had no idea the King was tasered, but I was able to confirm that as well.
Crazy stuff. Thanks for that.
From the video, it looked at first like the officers were not trying to arrest him at all. They just wanted to eject him from the hall and consider the matter dealt with.
Once they decided to cuff him, he managed to wriggle free twice. At that point, the disturbance was really getting out of hand, and it was getting down to nightsticks vs. taser. They chose taser, and genius boy Andrew Meyer was probably spared any lasting injury because of that choice.
Disobeying a lawful order, disturbing the peace, and trespassing, off the top of my head.
Without question there was probable cause for his arrest.
Alternation between compliance and noncompliance. As soon as they thought he had given up and would leave peacefully, he'd flip out anew.
Watch the video again. You'll see.
In the field, the arrestee is taking a wet taser hit, and the electrodes will normally be farther apart, causing much greater discomfort. So while I agree that cops do have some idea of what a taser hit feels like, I wouldn't say they know "full well what a taser does".
Your post implies that Kerry demanded that this kid be removed/silenced/tasered/etc. This is far from the truth. Watch the video again and you'll see. he was arrested just because police and/or Kerry was not confortable with his questions, way to go! No, he was arrested because the police were not comfortable with his erratic and aggressive behavior. Can you blame them?
As a parent, I am exposed to many parent/child conflicts. My unscientific observation is that when parents abuse their children, it tends to be when they do not feel that they have any other method to gain compliance from their children when compliance is required. Under pressure to gain control of whatever situation, they get angry and frustrated and their children pay the price. Parents who know how to achieve control without resorting to violence will typically do so. Very few people actually enjoy hitting their children ("This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you... yadda yadda yadda").
I draw a parallel to police use of force. If the cop knows that he can easily achieve control of a given situation using his taser, he is less likely to become angry and frustrated. Anger, frustration, and perceived threats to an officer lead to injured and/or killed arrestees.
Summary: I agree that we shouldn't have a posse of taser-happy cops electrocuting anyone who looks at them funny. But on the other hand, I think that those who long for the good 'ol days of billy clubs and beat-downs are not old enough to remember the good 'ol days of billy clubs and beat-downs.
Given the choice between getting tasered and a classic police style beat-down, I'd choose the taser. I wonder if anyone ever asked Rodney King if he wished police carried tasers back in the early 90s. Would have saved him one fractured skull, no?
Watch the video and see if that changes your mind at all.
I'll leave it at that.
I guess in life there are very few things that are truly unlimited.
All sarcasm aside, I think that if you look at it from Comcast's perspective, you'll see that they are not trying to be obtuse here, they are trying to be arbitrary. Because cable modem connections are shared loops, they have problems with heavy users, but only on their busy loops.
The way that Comcast wants to operate, is when they get 30 calls from your neighbors about problems with their digital services, they just want to cut your ass off. After all, you're only worth $30/month to them vs. all of your neighbors. On the other hand, if they set a hard limit, they'll have to actually enforce it, even on non-congested loops.
If they specify a number (for the sake of explanation, let's say 200GB/mo), this leads to two undesirable situations:
This is why Comcast doesn't want to commit to a number. While is stinks if you are a Comcast customer to not have any guidance on what constitutes acceptable usage, from Comcast's perspective, they'd rather maintain their ability to enforce their TOS arbitrarily.
I'll wait. But I won't be holding my breath.
The nice thing about interest in porn is that for most healthy kids, if they see it before they are ready for it, it elicits an "eww, gross!" and nothing more.
:)
That being said, you are making a huge leap that what works for your kids will work for all other kids. As a parent, you should know that all kids are different, and shame on you for your holier than thou attitude.
Lastly, a 15 year old not being curious about sex could be a sign of developmental problems. That, or he's just smarter than you are and has you fooled. Stranger things have happened.
Ignoring for the moment that I know plenty of 18, 25, 30, and even 50 year olds who seem to have difficulties making adult decisions, imagine what it means to have a newborn. This "child", if you want to call it that, cannot do anything but eat, sleep, poop, and pee. And even those all require parental facilitation. It's an enormous continuum, between total dependence and total independence, and figuring out when and how to dole out freedoms and responsibilities CORRECTLY is a fickle art. The answer is different for every child, and the consequences of parental failure are very real.
Parental monitoring can be even more important. Kids' fearlessness is essential to their development of new skills like walking, swimming, biking, etc., but it can also get them into trouble. They don't know what can maim them and what cannot, and it is essential for parents to monitor the child and to say, "Yes, do that. It's ok." or "No, don't do that. You'll end up in the hospital or morgue." The internet is just information, and I think you underestimate your childrens ability to accept it as such This is simply wrong. Children's brains wire up over time to the point that "information is just information" but it is not so from the beginning. Don't believe me? Show a 4 year old a violent movie and see if you can get him to go to bed. You can tell him over and over that the violence was pretend. Heck, you could bring the actual actors into the child's room to say that they are fine and it was just pretend, but the fact of the matter is, you are going to have a terrified, crying child in your bed for the next week or two.
Don't get me wrong, I recoil at the common wisdom here that says, "Put the computer in the living room". Kids communicate by IM now and they need to be able to communicate privately. When I was a kid, I didn't accept my parents listening in on my telephone conversations. Likewise, I do not monitor my kids' IM communications. That would be wrong.
But at the same time, free reign on the Internet is one of those freedoms that needs to be granted, but the foundation of responsibility must be taught first.
It's difficult for someone who has no children to appreciate what I am saying. You've never been totally responsible for the life and well being of other human beings, and it's impossible to imagine what that's like before doing it. I've explained it as best I can.
Heh heh. What was he scared she'd do online?
How's the bandwidth on that solution? Is he going to keep the telescreen tuned in on her while she's at college?
I'd love to hear how you managed to convince him of the "fact" that attending a $chool that has earned the respect of US News and World Report is a ticket to anything.
When I'm reading a resume, "UC Berkeley" and "UW Stout" look roughly equivalent to me. If I even make it that far, of course.
I RTFA, but it doesn't compare Mail Merge. Does Mail Merge have any improvement in OO.o? It used to be completely unusable.
It's pretty ballsy of Microsoft to turn on such draconian policy. Do they really think they can reliably differentiate licensed from unlicensed copies given the recent WGA debacle?
and anywhere else where Windows licenses are prohibitively expensive: Ubuntu will never disable your computer like this. At least, not intentionally. ;)
- No pages where the ad content makes the page take longer than 2 seconds to load
- No ads that make noise
- No popups or popunders
- No ads that aggravate my epilepsy
With all of the adblockers out there, have you noticed that nobody tries to block google's ads? They'd be easy to block, yet no one blocks them. The reason is that they are- relevant
- don't irritate the user
Take the lesson, online advertisers. Take the lesson.What's important in backup is that whatever system you use meets your needs. My needs are I want full automated snapshots of important filesystems taken at regular intervals (code, /etc, and the like), and I need offsite backups for important, but not necessarily often-changing files (credit card/bank statements as PDF, trade confirmations, my journal, papers from college, etc.) I stress "automated", because I would never remember to do backups on my own.
I use a free tool called rsnapshot to make automatic daily incremental snapshot backups of all machines in my house, plus all hosting accounts. The package conserves space by using hardlinks between snapshots for unchanged files. I keep 1 week of daily snapshots, 4 weeks of weekly snapshots, and 9 months of monthly snapshots.
The package uses rsync to be efficient over the network, and authenticates with remote servers using ssh certificate-based login.
It can backup from any host that supports ssh and and rsync, which means any BSD/*NIX, plus Windows if you install the proper tools (cygwin works well for this. Has an ssh daemon...er... sorry... service, etc.)
The backup server is an old Linux box with a 1.something TB RAID5. Every so often, I tar up and gpg up all the snapshots, burn 'em to DVDs, and leave them in the drawer at my office.
This way, I always have onsite backups that are never more than 24 hours old, and somewhat-regular offsite backups in case my house burns down.
The reason that I typed all of this in, is that your backup needs sound similar to my own. Hopefully I was able to help.
On the other hand, you are not required to participate in any field sobriety test, and it is advisable to refuse. The FST is not a test at all, it is just him establishing probable cause and evidence gathering for your DUI charge. The cop asks you to do a bunch of awkward acrobatics so you look silly on video, and that is entered as evidence.
If you are asked to perform a field sobriety test, your best course of action is to say, "I want a lawyer," because you're gonna need one.
If you have access to a brethalyzer and want to do a fun science fair project, eat a bunch of food and then slam X shots of tequila, which X being the number that you know will get you intoxicated, but not enough to puke up all that food you just ate.
Take brethalyzer readings at 15 minute intervals, and also attempt to perform basic motor function every 15 minutes. You'll find that your loss of motor control will happen at the rate you'd expect (fairly quickly), but your BAC reading will rise slowly. You'll find that you will be falling-down drunk well before your BAC rises above 0.08.
As you sober up over the next few hours, you'll find that you gradually regain your motor skills, but your BAC will continue to rise! This is because there is a lag between when the effects of alcohol hit your system and when they can be measured in your breath.
So, depending on the situation, creating more time between when you are actually observed driving and when you take a chemical test might work to your advantage, but it can just as easily work to your disadvantage.
Of course, the best course of action is the obvious: if you know you're drunk, call a cab.
Many, many people have been convicted of DWI for waiting in their cars to sober up before driving, but making the mistake of turning on the radio.
Welcome to the new MADD world.
Cheers!