In an ideal world I would be inclined to agree with you and the previous poster. Unfortunately, I think that these kind of people are actually a required member of society. This guy technically did nothing illegal and I don't think that the cops did anything too wrong either, except that they kept trying to tell him that he legally DID have to do something when he did not.

If people like this agitator did not put together very obvious video tapes like this, then anybody who accidentally ends up in a similar situation wouldn't know their own rights. Nobody who accidentally ends up in a similar situation has a video camera handy, and anyone else trying to tell these stories without video evidence basically has the "screenshot or it didn't happen" ban into the world of anecdotal.

The worst thing that it could be said he did here was waste the time of two police officers. Not a big expense to pay for providing an informative video. I'm not encouraging everyone to do this, but I do have respect for people who do this. And aside from the commentary I love the fact that he was calm and non-confrontational with the officers in all verbal interaction.

s/pakistan/us/g ... hmm, sounds reasonable
s/pakistan/england/g ..... wow it seems you can apply this backwards straw man to anybody

This whole thread is basically a lot of [citation needed] bigotry and idiocy. Every country and every group of people has problems. In general, individual people are good and won't actually hurt anyone. Any sufficiently large group of people that thinks another person or group is an "outsider" are more likely to do violence. Its basically Herd Behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior) and there is a lot of research done into Crowd Psychology.

I'm sorry, but you all just jumped into your own herds.

There are a number of factors to overcome when making singularity porn:

1. once you put it in, it's a real bitch to take it back out
2. nobody has ever successfully pulled out in time
3. they start at sucking and never manage to make it to the sex part
4. Ebony has a trademark on the term "black hole"
5. it's kind of a tease to watch because as much as they constantly approach the "event horizon", they never quite reach it

I'll second that. But also "modern medicine" implies western modern medicine. Eastern medical practices still have quite different approaches to many degrees, and I think a lot could be learned from understanding that approach as well, seeing as it starts with a whole different set of base assumptions.

Yea I became a huge fan of the V5 pens from Pilot. I've never felt so comfortable writing with a widely available pen before.

I like to call this the Wal-Mart approach to hacking. Don't go big... go wide. A ton of small targets have a greater ROI than a select few large products, and also have much less risk involved. And as anyone can see from Wal-Mart's value... it works!

What I find scary is that there isn't a single mention of the fact that if you use these free web-based systems... you are posting your internal company data onto somebody else's servers! Whether you believe in the security of outlook / exchange / insert-other-option-here or not, this should at least be a factor in the decision. If not for purely personal reasons, then often times for legal reasons.

Okay, I have to put a bite in on the Anti-Microsoft plug. I'm sorry, but as much as microsoft products suck, most everything else sucks more for consumer software. Microsoft provides integration between their products, they are supported and fixed. Very few products in other realms come close to that.

Apple's products are better to some degree because they provide reliability through simplicty, but nobody has ANYTHING as good as the office suite that works with the rest of their stack.

OOo? It feels like I'm back in the '90's every time I use it! Seriously, Microsoft Office '95 feels more polished than that! And crashed less too when I was running it on Windows 3.1. Sure I can submit a bug report on Open Office, but it doesn't change the fact that the stuff is still behind the times comparatively.

I agree on the rest of your post, so I'm trying not to be aggressive here, I just get aggravated when everyone just puts Microsoft out there as the big bad evil source of everything sucky. I agree that in the server market, I prefer Linux products and open technologies, but the real money is almost always in mass-market areas and that's where Microsoft does an insanely good job.

I still firmly believe that a better product could dislodge Microsoft, but that product has not shown up yet and it's because of naivete. Software isn't just about the pretty code. It's about usability testing, support services, marketing, integration, distribution, training. I'm sure there are more parts to that, but I'm only a developer, I don't have to manage that part of it most of the time. As far as customers are concerned, those are all equally as important as the product itself and rightfully so. If more groups got their s*** together and developed a full platform for the product like that, it could do well!

A market has begun to develop around professional support for these products. How do I find professional support for Open Office? I look at this: http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.ods - a long, UGLY and hard to play with spreadsheet file! They won't even put up a webpage so i can select my area and they tell me a consultant? This is abominable!

Okay, lunch break is about over, no more time to rant :(

I think Facebook is going to go another route. By maintaining control of the data itself, Facebook is essentially creating a monopoly of the best targeted advertising data ever. Their policies are such that they can broker this data and sell it to the highest bidder. Or display ads to the highest bidder like they do right now. They make a good amount of money straight off of the advertisement bids and I'm sure they have much bigger schemes for reselling the data again. The more they keep their own shtick together the more valuable that particular data becomes and the higher rates they can charge for it. Google makes insane money off of their directed advertising and Facebook has them beat in quality of targeting by far. When it comes down to it, in the long run Facebook will have the deepest pockets all by itself.

I think we are finally beginning to see some of the endings to the technology euphoria that have developed over the past 20 years. As technology and the internet improved and people discovered all of these extra amazing ways to make different processes more efficient, it's becoming more and more obvious that certain processes simply should not be efficient. This includes government ability to collect data as well as corporate ability to do the same. When it's harder to do, it's fine because it doesn't have as strong of an effect and the mere difficult limits its use. The easier it gets the more often it will be abused or over-used because it's possible.

Essentially, just because we can build this network, doesn't mean we should. I'm giving a big nod of the head to the EU over this one.

How in the world can he stand 45 degree angle to somebody else ... if nobody else is around?

::

I call bullshit. How would you like it if a middle-eastern government tricked an American woman into going to their country because she slept with a couple of their citizens while the citizens were visiting the U.S.? Under their laws, this would be a very serious offense, perhaps punishable with death. If she got there and they executed her or stoned her, then it would be within their laws.

You speak of "criminals" as if it is some absolute that applies everywhere. The law is far more complex than that and is based extensively on what people in a particular area believe. So if somebody did this to a U.S. citizen, I would be royally pissed and want the U.S. to protect its citizens and get them back!

I'm not so sure that I agree with all statements, and the concept only truly works when everyone has the time and desire to become fully informed about each decision. Anything less than that and we just have a large group of people thinking that they are making a choice when they have only been presented with one option.

As for your definition of oppression, you have that completely backwards as the oppression is an action of one being on an another. One cannot oppress his or herself. Anarchy may LEAD to oppression when one person or group begins forcing another to do something against their will, but Anarchy in its purist form is the exact opposite of oppression. I think a more appropriate word for your definition would be detrimental or damaging. Law enforcement uses a monopoly of force to oppress certain targets, since Oppression is "using power to empower and/or privilege a group at the expense of disempowering, marginalizing, silencing, and subordinating another". Arresting someone is directly oppression. It may be helpful to society to do so, and anarchy would then be detrimental to society and humanity.