The only thing I haven't heard discussed before, that I think is a big part of this: in previous generations, Americans had a stronger shared culture. Yes it was mostly religious in nature, but it was something that nearly everyone agreed on and celebrated together. There was of course political division, but there was much less cultural divison than there is today. Among those who would like to keep the Ten Commandments etc. in public buildings, I've never heard them actually cite this aspect, but I think it's a major underlying reason for their desire.

I am against religious symbols in public buildings, by the way. I just find it useful to understand the motivations of people with whom I disagree. Personally I disagree with it for a different reason. I believe one's spirtuality or lack thereof is a deeply personal decision, something one must arrive at as an individual. I try to practice the teachings of Christ (among others), but I really find distasteful the shallow groupthink and lemming behavior I observe in any church I've been to.

In churches I've visited, I generally see a bunch of insecure people who need to be in a group of the like-minded in order to feel validated, repeating the same basic and unenlightening themes over and over again to feel like they belong somewhere. Once I understand a concept, I understand it, and I'm ready to move on to deeper subjects myself. I've never personally seen a church of courageous individuals with real, meaningful insight into the difficult struggles we all face in life, sharing hard-won wisdom for which they paid dearly. Nor have I seen anything resembling advanced philosophy and theology, an appreciation for the majesty and mystery of our very existence and the quest to find meaning and purpose in this life. It's just the same list of do's and don'ts, platitudes, and regurgitated ideas you would find in any other social club.

Government is shitty enough without adding (more of) this element to it.

It will also continue as long as there is no real penalty for getting caught. If a cop breaks the rules in this manner, the worst that happens is the case gets thrown out and the defendant goes free. Start throwing these cops in state penitentiaries for a year or two, making sure they go in the general population and get no special treatment, and you will see an immediate and drastic decline in this kind of abuse. And why shouldn't we do this? Cops who engage in this behavior are violating the very highest law of the land. That should carry a penalty.

The way I see it, when a cop breaks the law it's much worse than when an ordinary citizen breaks the law, because the cop is entrusted with special powers and has sworn to uphold the law. It follows that cops should be punished much more harshly when they break the law than a citizen who does the same thing. There is no other way you're going to return to being a free nation.

Talk to old people sometime about what cops used to be like. They were once genuine public servants. If you had a problem, you could find a cop and he'd help you. Average people didn't fear the police the way they do now. That's what we should return to.

Unless you manage to get beyond ego-consciousness and realize how interconnected and interdependent we all are. Then you realize that harming others without cause is really an indirect way of harming yourself, both in terms of consequences and in terms of what you become by so doing. Shallow minds miss this because they can see only immediate and obvious effects, and so they believe they ever "get away with" anything. A more mundane form of it is sometimes called enlightened self-interest.

The idea behind "love thy neighbor as thyself" is that you shouldn't have to be told to do it. Those who do it "because God/church/mama said so" are missing the point entirely. The funny thing is, you can only realize how interconnected we are as an individual. It's why the numerous efforts to make it into a doctrine have achieved so little. "The Creator will punish me if I'm bad" is a shallow and childish form of pseudo-morality for people who have to be threatened with punishment before they will behave a certain way. Lawrence Kohlberg lists it as the very most primitive form of moral development.

Should have written, "the LATTER is much, much better". Heh.

As the saying goes, "it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be falsely prosecuted". In a slightly different wording this is sometimes called Blackstone's Formulation or Blackstone's Ratio. As that Wiki page explains, this is a much older concept and it's closely tied to the entire notion of a presumption of innocence.

The requirement that cops go through proper procedures, including obtaining warrants, exists to protect you and me. There is no perfect system. There will be errors. The only decision to be made is whether we try to err on the side of imprisoning the innocent, or on the side of acquitting the guilty. The former is much, much better.

If you want a real solution to most of these cases, we need to wake up and realize that nothing confined to consenting adults should ever be a crime. If you're paying attention you will notice two things: these cases are almost entirely drug cases, and that drug prohibition is failing to make drugs scarce. You simply can't tell people how to live. The financial and social costs of trying are far too high, greatly in excess of any good achieved by trying. The US has the highest proportional prison population of any industrialized nation in the world, and the vast majority of those prisoners are there because of drug charges.

Speaking of prisons, when they find a way to keep illegal drugs out of prisons, then and only then can we have a reasonable discussion about keeping them out of general society. Until then, we should recognize that the laws and rulings coming out of prohibition are a threat to the liberty of everyone. The only reason this case was remarkable, the only reason it made a headline, is because this time the court rightly favored following the Constitution over prosecuting a drug criminal. That isn't the way it usually goes. Usually they perform various mental gymnastics to justify the actions of cops, like when using a dog to search your car (using its nose as a substitute for the officer's hands and eyes) is somehow not a search and doesn't require a warrant.

Indeed, if you want to do some target practice to achieve proficiency with your weapons, a friend who lives out in the cut is the best way to do it. It beats the hell out of paying shooting-range fees, you can use whatever you want for targets, and you can also practice at longer distances than anything an indoor facility could offer.

It's simple enough. This was a local police department in a small rural area, so they were held to the rules. If they were a national agency with an effectively unlimited budget, ties to major military-industrial corporations, and loads of political clout, the courts would have performed some mental gymnatics and invented a bullshit reason why that inconvenient Fourth Amendment doesn't really apply. Currently "anti-terrorism" is popular.

Because the Constitution is a document describing what powers the government has and how these powers may be used. It's like a default-deny firewall: the government has no powers whatsoever, except these enumerated powers. The Constitution is emphatically not a document describing what rights a person (citizen or not) has and when they will be honored.

The document was written based on the idea of "natural rights". You have certain rights simply because you are a human being; the government either recognizes that or it becomes dysfunctional and fails to fulfill its major purpose, which is to protect your natural rights. The Founders (mostly Deists) explained it in terms of us having been "endowed by our Creator" with such rights. You could also remove the Creator-concept entirely and argue that such a system simply works better and does the greatest good for all involved, and thus is inherently superior to systems that reject the concept of natural rights.

You don't have rights merely because the government deigned to let you have them, or decided that depriving you of them wasn't worth the trouble. A system where that's the foundational principle has lost even the pretense of human dignity. That kind of system wouldn't even have to bother with the incremental "hey we have an excuse that sells (protect the children! stop the terrorists!)" encroachment of liberty that we're seeing now. It could just go straight into open tyranny without having all those little baby steps for naive people to ignore.

You may wish to brush up on a little American history, specifically why the Tenth Amendment was written. It affirms that the federal government has only those powers which are delegated to it, with the rest being reserved by the states and the people. I'm all for deporting this guy, by the way. We should either enforce our immigration laws (like Mexico and every other sovereign nation) or repeal them, but if we're going to arrest this man, there's a process that must (and should) be followed.

Presumably the whitebox device would include as core components all of the FCC-approved hardware necessary to use said frequencies. Upgrading the GPU, the amount of RAM, or the battery shouldn't have anything to do with this.

When you build your own PC from separate components, you don't have to worry about whether it can be powered by 60hz AC. The power supplies sold in this country are built to handle the electric supply found in this country and come with all of the UL (etc.) approvals.

The idea is that open source and the freedoms that come with it facilitate and ensure that you can continue to do cool and interesting things, often things the original designers didn't think of. It's certainly easier to be creative when you have the full specifications, source code, and documentation. It's easier to share your creativity with others when you can legally redistribute your derived works without violating someone else's copyright.

Obsession with anything is not good; on that I agree. However I haven't seen that in this thread. To cry "obsession" merely because someone points out a controversy isn't helpful (and ironically raises the question of whether you have an obsession with the perceived obsessions of others). All I saw was someone stating that they wish to avoid certain Broadcom hardware because it does not provide the degree of open source access that he or she desired. That people have their own criteria and express a desire to choose products that best suit their own needs is a good thing. Your own priorities being different is not surprising and doesn't indicate fault with anyone else.

Which still sounds odd to me. I'm running Gentoo on my main desktop (Mint on my laptop) and have never installed systemd. I've decided to stick with OpenRC. GIMP works fine here and I do have dbus installed.

It seems this dbus dependency is not an unsolvable problem.

It's that proprietary nature that makes this a concern at all. If it weren't proprietary then it wouldn't matter if Adobe themselves decided to release it for a particular platform. The community would produce a version that would run on just about any widely-used system.

Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).

Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.

Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?

Fire an editor or two, starting with the consistently worst-performing, and Dice will have rediscovered a time-tested method by which employers have dealt with employees who don't even try to perform their jobs competently.

As it stands now, they have little or no incentive to produce quality. If they had a sense of shame, embarassment, or pride in their work then that would at least be an improvement.