um... no. Around a third of people believe God (with a capital G) is real. About 85% of humans have some sort of religious belief, but most of these are not Christians.

Furthermore, religion does cause harm. It conditions people to blindly accept the instruction of others as divine will. This leads to all sorts of manipulation of the masses. It is used (and abused) by politicians and power mongers to get people to do what they are told to do. Rather than people thinking for themselves and doing what they know is right.

I for one would like to see people think before they act and take responsibility (in this life) for the good and bad things they do. It's lazy and irresponsible to blame ones behaviour on ones imaginary friend whether that behaviour is good or bad.

I totally agree with your above comment regarding the "large direct consequence", I will also say that plenty of evidence exists to suggest that some police deserve to be in prison as they are criminals. I also think we have similar feelings when confronted with evidence of crime being committed by the police. I would add to this though; All the negative press about the police whether accurate or exaggerated, real or imagined amplifies and encourages negative feelings in the public mind. While I think it is right that we the public should get to hear about this sort of news, I think that the media tries to turn everything they report into as big a story as they can in order to make money out of us rather than to report cold hard (often boring) facts. The negative image does not benefit the public, or the police.

I think it's fair to say that in order to remedy the situation the police need to be utterly transparent about what they do and what they get wrong. But equally, I think they need to be allowed to do this by the media without being damned as an organization when an individual has done something unforgivable

I suspect this would work for about a week... then most people would probably stop paying attention to the big shiny spike, maybe even hang a hat on it or something.

well... I suppose something has to pop the airbag otherwise how would the passenger get out? :)

Indeed, that is exactly what I said. Police brutality is wrong and criminal and should be treated as such. I was very clear about that. I ALSO think however that it is incorrect to judge ALL police on the actions of a few criminal individuals.

Sorry, you are quite right... finger trouble. My bad.

Allow me to be equally simple. One guy's experience, however wrong and traumatic for him, is not statistically relevant, or in any way representative of an entire data set.

I do not ignore, nor do I endorse the police brutality. You seem to have missed that fact however so I'll say again, it is wrong, criminal, and should be dealt with as such.

This is entirely separate from the "trial by media" of the entire US police force. The majority of the 1.1 million police are CLEARLY not behaving this way and not doing the terrible things that have happened to the man in your example. Yes bad cops exist, yes they should be dealt with appropriately. Are all cops bad? NO.

You yourself used the phrase "A staggering number have killed multiple times". Really? "A staggering number" how many is that? Why did you choose those particular emotionally charged words? Why not actually quote the number of serial killer cops on the force instead? You also used the phrase "We have a pretty big problem..." how big? in relation to what? You highlight my point beautifully, humans prejudge the shit out of everything, you're doing it about cops, some cops are doing it about black people (and others I might add). Take a moment and ask yourself, what is the cause of the problem and what should I do to solve it. You may not find the answer or even provide a solution, but maybe just maybe you'll stop being part of the problem. Prejudice in all of it's guises has negative repercussions.

The media in the US does seem to be pointing out a problem with some police officers. I imagine that the police force is likely to contain similar levels of unstable individuals as the public at large does. In other words, some bad/brutal/improper behaviour is inevitable and needs to be dealt with appropriately when it occurs.

Sweeping brutality under the carpet or trying to cover it up is indeed wrong (possibly criminal in itself) and should be robustly discouraged. However the culture of secrecy is by in large a direct consequence of trying to avoid the inevitable, derogatory, riot-inciting media frenzy that follows.

This sort of behaviour is often the result of fear on the police's part. Fear in itself is not an excuse, however if someone is afraid for their own safety they will be more likely to not-take-chances with someone they perceive to be a threat. You can't tell just by looking at someone if they are a respected peace-loving graduate or a gun-toting looney but humans (yes all humans) are hard-wired to pre-judge situations biased by prior experience whether or not that "experience" is grounded in fact (what they have seen happen) or fantasy (what they were told happens). If cops go to work "believing" that they are going to be shot by a black guy then then their fear is rational (to them at least).

In short, I think most cops in the US (like most people everywhere) are doing a job and doing it reasonably well. That is not "news" however and as such your media won't be telling you that any time soon. I've been lead to believe that a disproportionate number of "criminals" in the US are from non-white communities (if the stats quoted in the media are correct). If most criminals in a police jurisdiction are from a single ethnic background then it is human nature to pattern-match others of this ethnicity and associate them with potential criminal behaviour. While this is totally incorrect in individual cases, it is no more than ALL HUMANS do. You only have to read the rest of this page to find fine examples of irrational prejudice exhibiting general hatred of "all police".

labelling an entire group like "all police are scum" or "all black people are criminals" is equally incorrect and unhelpful to us all. A better use of our time would be to ask; is the ratio of financial disadvantage proportional to the crime rate when compared along race lines? If so, then the policing problem is not "black" or "white"... it's "green"... i.e. sort of the poverty and the crime related problems will fix themselves?

That looks an awful lot like a dangerous generalization.

I don't live in the US and I've never met a US police officer. Also, I do not support or defend police brutality in any way, it is crime and should be treated as such, however looking at the numbers of police officers in the US (around 1.1 million personal allowed to conduct arrests) you'd think that if they were ALL "scum" as you put it that you'd have a significantly higher rate of incidences of police brutality and deaths in police custody.

According to the ARD (Arrest-Related Deaths) Bureau of Justice stats; between 2003 and 2009 police in the US killed a total of 2,931 people they were attempting to arrest, of which 75% were being arrested for violent crimes. This sounds like a big number (about 419 people per year), but if viewed in terms of the number of violent crimes committed in the US (116,440,350,000 in 2013 for instance, taken from the FBI violent crime statistics of 367.9 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013) you realise just how tiny a drop in the ocean this number is.

More people die in traffic accidents over the Easter weekend DRIVING to the coast in South Africa between Johannesburg and Durban than are killed by the cops in the US in a year

Incidentally, around 143 US police are killed each year in the line of duty. Considering 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and 26,819 people were injured. I think it's a safe assumption that being a cop in the US is a dangerous job that brings you into contact with a violent criminals. Clearly violent criminals exist, they shoot at each other, the public in general and the police, some of them are going to be stupid enough to try to shoot their way out of an arrest and get shot in return. Clearly not all of the people killed by the police fall into this category, but I don't think we should judge ALL police on the fact that a tiny minority of their 1.1 million staff are brutal, but we should judge them instead on how they deal with those individuals and what they do to weed them out of their ranks.

So while the media may tell millions of us every day about how savage the police are in order to get us to buy their papers and tune-in to their news programs, I don't believe the hype is proportional to the size or nature of the problem. But hey, even-handed and rational news never sold any news papers or advertising spots, so I guess the chances of us ever seeing it are really slim.

Incidentally, how many cops have you had interactions with and why are they scum in your opinion?

Nobody made any promises regarding Linux. As per the quote in the summary...

The validity of a price is ultimately decided by the purchaser. High prices are only high because someone is prepared (how ever reluctantly) to pay them. If your market genuinely does not have the money to pay the price being asked then the price must fall if the seller wants to actually sell. If you don't pay salaries that are "expected" by the people you want to employ then they tend to overlook your organization in favour of those organisations that do.

Of course exceptions exist, but they ARE exceptions. The only way this sort of thing is controlled is with price-fixing that favours the sellers (read employers get together and decide to limit the maximum salary they're prepared to pay as a group dare I say cartel). Not a very capitalist way of working, but hey I call 'em like I see 'em. I ask... is it fair to limit anybodies salary artificially? What happens if your job is next in line for the salary-cartel treatment?

If people are able to command high salaries for the work they do they good luck to them. If organizations are stupid enough to pay ridiculous salaries to their CEO that leaves them out of pocket then they need to either FAIL fast to make way for a better replacement or get better at what they do by learning from their mistakes.

AKI is typically not diagnosed in the ER. It is diagnosed by comparing serum creatinine changes over a number of days. I suspect this is why it gets missed; because doctors don't get to see the stream of data in time, they only get to see the latest observation and results scrawled in had written notes that often get lost, misplaced or shuffled lower into the patients notes than the doctor has time to look. I think (having skimmed the article) that this software simply looks for the pattern in the results over the last couple of days and lets a doctor know.

The software in the NHS is already provided by the private sector, already all outsourced and this was not done for any political reasons any more than the NHS buys bandages from private companies or drugs from private companies or bed sheets from private companies etc. Would you have doctors weaving their own bed sheets? perhaps smelting iron and making steel to make scalpels?

I was working in healthcare IT when the national program for IT (NPFit) was burning handfuls of cash by the minute for no good reason and this was an excellent example of why government should stay out of this sort of initiative, the people in the NHS did not call for NPFit, it was thrust upon them by government (incidentally a Labour government). The NHS wanted to spend their budgets on the systems that worked that they were buying from (wait for it) private companies, but were unable to do so because of the insane levels of government bureaucracy that forced them to provision everything through 1 of five large government backed LSPs who had been handed regional monopolies over healthcare IT often without the first clue of what was needed to deliver it on the ground.

I for one would rather local healthcare organizations looked after their budgets and commissioned what was needed from private companies that have a clue about what healthcare software needs due to their many long years of involvement in healthcare provision. Where individual hospitals get it right they can then share the knowledge with their colleagues around the country, rather than the "it's ok if we fail as long as we're all failing equally" mentality associated with the delivery of public services.

It is ridiculous to assume that anything be it product or service cannot or should not be considered for out sourcing, after all, why the hell not?

I use LTS 14.04 on my desktop. As a software and hardware developer I want a stable and productive environment that isn't changing all the time. I value things "not going wrong" more than I value having the latest version of something. I also use Gnome as it happens, but I'm running flashback so I have what is basically a Gnome 2 experience on my Ubuntu installation.

I don't like or want Unity, I find it to be a jarringly odd place to work (and I've tried on more than one occasion to use it for weeks at a time and always eventually removed it in favour of something else that stays out of my way). I was once a long time KDE user but I jumped off that band wagon when they broke it in the move to KDE 4 and I've never gone back.

Last time I looked... Ubuntu was the most popular Linux on AWS, not sure about OpenStack, but I got the impression it was doing well there as well. I think it's a bit harsh to say "It's not like anyone uses woobuntu in serious environments."