Speaking of clocks - the ring of a mechanical alarm clock (which some phones emulate now...).

The "mechanical" digital clocks which flipped down a little flap every minute with a distinct sound.

Lucky you - I got older and I hear that sound all the time! :)

The way I see it, an unqualified threat is a promise of action.

If the action promised is violence, and the threat is credible, then the recipient of the threat has been adequately notified that conflict is actually under way.

As the recipient has been assured that violence is immanent in some measure, preempting the other party's violence is reasonable, sensible and should be socially acceptable on every level.

Qualified threats are something else entirely, the question of coercion arises as does the authority of the individual making the threat with regard to the qualification. For instance you could say to me "if you raise your hand to my wife, I will beat you senseless." This is a qualified threat covering an issue where you have adequate authority to assert both the rule and the consequence. No violent response of mine could be justified.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that US law tends not to agree with me on these matters. The way I see things is pretty much laid out here.

You have failed to understand that no matter what your intent is when you make a remark to another person, it is up to them to evaluate the level of offense actually delivered by the remark.

You have also failed to take into account proportionality. Lightly scratching one's skin on rough tree bark causes pain. A gunshot to the knee causes pain. The former can be trivially ignored and dismissed without consequence or any particular reaction despite the fact that it was, technically speaking, "painful." The latter, not so much.

Then we have the whole issue of "consider the source." Let's take your post for example. I read it, immediately realized you had no idea of the limits to which you had been informed by the talk you went to, and consequently recognized your entire line of reasoning as facile and wrongheaded -- which in turn resulted in the classification of your "arrogant and deluded" remark as baseless nonsense. Which, as it turns out, does not offend me.

Cheers. :)

No, but I have built a fuel injection computer. I've burned out injectors by using them over their duty cycle and leaned out an engine to the point of failure. But sorry, no explosions.

The reason is that your definition is circular:

You have failed to demonstrate circularity. If you can, by all means, do.

That's fine as an operational definition of what a society *treats* as privacy

Er.... yes, that's what the article is primarily about. I gave you the pointer to the blogpost because as an operational definition, "privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference" doesn't describe the problem space. If you look up a woman's skirt without her permission, how is the interception of those particular photons "interfering" with her "affairs" in any meaningful way? It isn't. It can even be done entirely without her knowledge. But it is a clear invasion of privacy nonetheless. It's not interference that is at issue. It is the sundering of the expectation that an established (very well established in this case) boundary not be violated.

it does no good in telling us what those boundaries should be.

In defining what privacy is, I don't need to describe every set of boundaries, any more than in defining what law is, I must describe every law, or in defining what food is, I must describe every meal.

Even so, I provided several specific examples that were (and remain) topical, and worked through one in detail. I also pointed out that these boundaries can be highly individual and/or specific to a particular society, as well as codified in law, and I broke down why hardening isn't generally relevant to privacy.

It would be somewhat absurd for me to define your own boundaries for you -- how would I know what these are without you knowing first and then telling me? I could tell you mine, but that wouldn't be very likely to illuminate yours in any significant degree.

As far as legal and society-wide boundaries go, I pointed to several and I laid out exactly why they are what they are, how they obviously apply, and where errors arise in procedure that violates those boundaries. Can you not look at the cases of interest to you and do the same? Must I do your thinking for you?

I use Pandora continuously at work, and I have discovered new music through it.

Radio, on the other hand, even if you hear a piece of music that you like, the chance of actually being told the name of the artist is close to zero. So, there is no chance to really "discover" music.

I don't know about that, I think Carter handled a lot of things very poorly. Look at how badly he handled things that were exclusive to his administration, such as Iran-Contra.

Say your brother was a soldier who was killed in the line of duty. At the funeral some people turn up to scream abuse at you and call him a murderer.

Here in the US, soldiers fight to defend the constitution -- they swear an oath to do so -- and the constitution in turn forbids the federal and state governments from restricting speech:

1st amendment: Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech (and the 14th amendment applies this to state legislatures as well.)

I take that to mean that a fallen soldier's sacrifice for those principles would be devalued if my reaction to speech I disagreed with was to incite the government to use force to muzzle people of different opinions in any public venue.

If one wants to hold a ceremony where no one can speak unless the host permits it, they need to do so on the host's own private property. Hosting a ceremony or speech in public, by its very nature, exposes it to everyone, not just people who are like-minded. Holding a public ceremony and then complaining when someone shows up who disagrees... I see that as attempting to claim an entitlement that should never exist in the first place.

Or how about if he was gay and they stated chanting "faggot" over the words if[sic] the priest. Would you be okay with that?

Again, if the funeral is public, they can say whatever they want. If it is on private property -- which is where my gay sister's funeral was held, by the way, in a very conservative small eastern Pennsylvania town -- then exercising control of the event is up to the owner of the property.

Is there really no limit to what someone can say to you, in any possible context, that doesn't bother you?

No, of course there are things people could say short of injury, financial and/or reputation damage that would bother me. Some of them don't even have anything to do with me.

I just don't think that there's any principle important enough to justify government force and coercion in order to protect my sensibilities from someone who wants to say something that only reaches the level of bothersome or offensive to me.

So the upshot is that should someone's speech bother or offend me, I need to deal with it myself. In such cases, I have options. I can silently manage the stress; I can undertake countering speech of my own; I can remove myself from the venue; and in the case where I own the venue (home, property, website, etc.), I can control the offensive speech directly.

Is that clearer?

Because 99 percent of what happens in a cop's day is mind numbing, boring shit. All we need is the video of the incident. Maybe it should also come on when they call in a stop but to run that thing 24/7 is ridiculous.

So record a 30-minute loop all the time and if some kind of event happens, aoutmatically store the last 15 minutes and the following 15 minutes. The storage could be triggered by gunshot sound, tazer use, or manually, by the policaman. It's not difficult, dashcams for cars work like this (with automatic storage if certain levels of G-force are detected).

Well, then, that would also negate the AC's point.

It also had to land fully-loaded, because the military wanted to be able to bring stuff back from space.

I don't think the fuel is "extra"... I think it is safety margin fuel that would otherwise be wasted. Remember that this thing has to be able to make it to orbit even with the loss of an engine or two.

Neglecting the space shuttle, of course. And to be fair, even that threw away the fuel tank, which IIRC cost $50 million.

"Soon as" could be a long time. If it is long enough to drive a fracking company out of business, then it's long enough to drive an AE company out of business.