Definitely people know about the *specifics* of each incident more than they used to. They always knew it happened, but there was a lot of wiggle room and conflicting accounts.

I grew up in an urban neighborhood back in the 60s, before cell phone cameras or even portable videotapes. Cops in my neighborhood had a reputation for roughing guys up and planting evidence. To be fair a lot of the guys they planted evidence on were guilty as sin, but still. My brother ran with a bad crowd, and to this day when he hears about a police beating he still automatically assumes they must have had it coming, which I personally think is naivete posing as experience.

Progress is funny; it's two steps forward if you're lucky, then one step back. We simply took it for granted that the darker your skin the more you got beat up by the cops. It didn't even occur to us that racial parity in rough treatment was something that was even possible, much less desirable. But a lot of darker skinned guys never had any trouble, because we didn't have "stop and frisk". The idea of the cop as an establisher of social conformity hadn't been dreamed up yet. Cops were supposed to fight crime, not create a genteel atmosphere.

I think cops pulled their gun less frequently back then. That's because they worked in pairs and had night sticks. So has there been net progress? You be the judge. I do think the war on drugs has turned a lot of people who used to just be unfortunate into criminals, so cops necessarily have a much bigger bootprint than they used to.

Despite their dirty reputation, I don't think most of the cops in our neighborhood were rough, or corrupt. The cops I knew personally were OK, some of them unsung heroes even. I think there was a combination of a boys will be boys attitude and an us-vs-them climate that empowered a small minority of sociopathic cops to set the tone of community/police relations. And that, apparently, hasn't changed much.

Oh, that's fair. You take a guy who's given thirty years of dedicated, exemplary service and you "hit him where he lives", because of some other guy.

You know, there's a certain mentality, I'd even call it a faith, that harsh measures have to work,because they're harsh. "Look at how much misery we're causing! It must be doing some good." I'd like to say that's a joke, but after years of watching the war on drugs, the the war on Terror, it's a real, enduring feature of the American mindset: harshness as an easy substitute for rational thought.

Why "hit everyone where they live", when you can simply make erasure of audio or visual recordings by a cop of someone else's video a federal felony? A tough measure? Sure. By I don't expect it to work *because* it's tough. I expect it to work because any officer who erased someone else's personal data without a court order would lose his job and be ineligible to work as a cop anywhere else, ever again.

I was pointing this out to a niece who married a police officer the other day. About 3% of the population are sociopaths. That means that if police have just their fair share of sociopaths, a department like Baltimore would have 120 individuals on the payroll with a marked tendency toward criminal and anti-social behavior.

The problem with your idea is that you can fire all 4000 people in the department, but it doesn't help because you're drawing from the same candidate pool that produced the problem in the first place.

What you have to do is focus on eliminating sociopaths from your payroll and from the hiring pool. Any officer found destroying evidence should be fired. Do stuff like that consistently and assiduously and the problem will alleviate itself over time.

What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?

Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.

As Terry Pratchett's "Patrician" is fond of saying, freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Nor does it mean freedom from responsibility.

Saying you have to make your own arrangements for schooling doesn't seem so oppressive to me, so long as the arrangements aren't made in a punitive spirit. Lots of parents do make their own arrangements because of philosophical differences with state-run schooling. Pious parents send their kids to religious schools. Conservative parents send their kids to military schools. Liberal parents send their kids to alternative, unstructured schools.

Schools should make reasonable efforts to accommodate the philosophical preferences of parents, but there simply isn't any way to square this circle. Most parents want their kids going to a school where everyone is vaccinated. If you want something different there's no way to accommodate that preference, unless there's enough of you to set up a parallel program. I have a relative who did just that -- started an alternative school; not for anti-vaxxers, but for anti-regimentation parents who want the kids to go to a school where they do whatever the hell they want all day and where no attention whatsoever is paid to ed-reform mandated standardized tests. And the school works because of the high degree of involvement of the parents, many of whom are high status professionals like doctors and university professors. You *can* have whatever you want for your kid, but you've got to put the effort in to make it work.

I think this is the deeper reasoning behind most such moves all over the world. We've seen a lot of motion in this direction after Snowden's revelations, but I think it's less about worry that the US government may have too much access to countries' citizens' data than it is about the insight that if the data is within their borders then they can get it. Oh, I suspect that lawmakers in many countries who are citing the former rationale really mean what they say... but that they're being advised and encouraged by their own governments' bureacracies and security services for the latter rationale.

True. I suspect it won't happen, though, because the most influential publishers are also the ones who will be least harmed. And, if you believe other commenters with more knowledge of Spanish politics, the ones who will be propped up by government funding should they be hurt too much.

Publishers cannot relent. The law doesn't allow them to require payment for snippets (like the German law did), it requires them to require payment. Which is why Google is shutting Google News down entirely in Spain... since all Spanish publisher are required to get paid, and Google isn't going to pay them, there will be no Spanish content for the Spanish Google News, making it useless.

Particularly for a service which doesn't generate any revenue.

Nothing. The Institute apparently thinks he's a scumbag and doesn't want to be associated with him, which is their right.

Looking at the lecture, it doesn't seem to be all that special by MIT standards. Everyone there takes at least two semesters of physics, and Physics 8.01, which almost everyone takes in their first semester on campus, is probably the largest course taught. There's a long tradition of lecture showmanship in 8.01, with varying degrees of success. A friend of mine once saw Henry Kendall almost knock himself out with a bowling ball pendulum. He was explaining how the pendulum would only return at most to the point it was released from, but because he was talking he didn't notice that instead of just releasing the pendulum, he'd given it a little push, which was supposed to be the *next* demo. Kendall had to dive out of the way at the last second.

Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.

I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.

Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.

Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".

The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.

When you hear "drone" you probably are picturing civilian quad copters. While some military drones are that small, others are substantial aircraft. The Air Force's Global Hawk weighs over ten tons and requires a runway 3700 feet long to take off.

Obviously some military drones can be hand launched, but the MQ-1Cs mentioned in the article weigh 2200 lbs fully loaded and requires a minimum runway of 2000 feet.

We didn't let our son play video games at home until he was in second grade -- of course it's nearly impossible to avoid them at other people's houses without moving to a remote village without electricity. Consequently gaming became an obsession with him. When we visited relatives he'd spend all his time talking with his older cousins about games pretty much from the time he could talk. In kindergarten he started taking books out of the library on beating video games. By the time he was in first grade he was the neighborhood gaming consultant: kids would ask their moms to invite him over because they were stuck. But he couldn't play games at home.

Finally I realized that forbidding games was just making him more obsessed (it's a family trait he gets from both parents). We bought a console and it was the best Christmas EVER. He quickly settled down to a pattern where he gets a new game, plays it relentlessly for a few days until he figures out all the interesting ways to beat it, then sets it aside. Now he's a teenager, and gaming is just another thing he does. It's *important* to him, but if you average out his playing time it adds up to maybe four hours a week. The time he plays the most is when his older sister comes back from college. They'll play through a stack of old games, like it's their way of reconnecting.

People worry too much about parenting issues like this. You have to be prepared to be tough if an actual problem arises, but most of the time you're better off relaxing and seeing what happens. Think of it as "agile parenting". You don't have to foresee everything, you just have to be on top of what actually happens.

Well, some kids actually like that -- maybe not talking over the coach, but the practice and camp and such. I had one of each, one who hated organized activities and another who liked them.

And we *did* force both our kids to stick with some things they didn't want to do. In some case it was about commitment -- you asked to join the soccer team, you can't quit just because the team is losing. In other cases it was parental judgment about what's best -- I know you don't like swim lessons but you're going to stick with them until you can swim a hundred yards. And some times it's because kids have to learn to at least make the effort to follow through on their plans. You wanted piano lessons, we bought and moved the piano, so you have to stick with those lessons for at least a year before you switch instruments.