I think you may be confusing buggy whips with buddy whips.

In any case, as a software developer I can't see the appeal for a buggy anything. You'd think they'd have worked out the problems and released Whip 2.0 rather than creating a whole industry around a poor product. No wonder they went out of business...

If I did my math right, this 8k display has more ppi than my main 24" display. This really changes my conception of what my workspace will look like in 3 years. A 55" display "wall" would be worth a substantial investment. I would save a couple grand for something that dramatic.

most of the "hate" posts are his sockpuppet accounts, trying to raise his profile and name recognition. Clever marketing - go follow his amazon referral links now.

LCARS 3.0 was a disaster.

Sure. My point is we've always had a certain number of bad cops. I think that the war on drugs and badly conceived "broken windows" policies have magnified their impact to the point where its intolerable in many places to the point where these individuals are threatening social order.

On the other hand, I believe that some day historians will look back at the advent of widespread cellphone video cameras as the greatest development in American civil liberties since the Voting Rights Movement.

People use that word, not because of what it means, but because of how something makes them feel. The word "treason" actually has a specific meaning. you can't bandy it around because you don't like something, or even because an act happened to aid the enemy. The perpetrator's intent is critical -- and it's not enough for that intent to be wildly misguided. If the perpetrator's intent was to support and defend the Constitution, or to prevent war crimes, it makes no difference whether you think that intent was misguided. It's his opinion that matters to the charge of treason, not yours.

What it has in common is that the government isn't infallible. It should have to prove its case before it anally rapes anyone.

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.

But our body is our own. Period. We cannot cross this line. If someone conscientiously objects to a treatment, it is their natural right to decline it.

Fair enough.

So, how would you like to phrase the new law... ? "No medical procedures on any individual that has not reached the age of majority or is not otherwise able to give legal consent"?

That's the reductio ad absurdum way of saying that the line has already been crossed. Society inflicts medical treatments on people (mostly children) whether they like it or not, and it's done in the name of "their best interests". Now, whether it's the parents/guardians or the government making the decisions and whether those decisions are "best" for any given person is a whole other issue, but to suggest that it's instead an issue of control over an individuals own body is, in the context of childhood vaccines, pure nonsense.

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.

Google is leaving russia due to data security and intrusive legislation that harms the internet, but sees no problem maintaining an office in the United States

Well, there's a substantial practical difference between closing a branch office of 50 employees and shutting down your corporate HQ and main data center.

But, more importantly, the consequences of calling out the US government for bad behaviour is tame compared to how Putin handles corporate dissent.

Escape into space is one thing, but also far enough outside of Earth's orbital position that its gravity wouldn't keep the water in an intercept orbit for eventual return? I'm not able to find anything with my naive google searches.