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Comment Re:Anecdotes for the win! (Score 2) 962

To an extent, but only to an extent, you are correct.

The problem is that when someone who feels they should be entitled relative to someone else also feels that the somone else is favored over them, you get a lot more vitriol. And a lot of men and boys feel that they should be entitled relative to women. And yes, this also happens along racial lines. And anonymity makes them feel safe in targeting the "unfairly" favored.

Please note that I do not intend ANY actual implication as to whether or not the targeted individual actually is favored in any sane sense of the term. I'm talking purely about perceptions. And I intentionally spoke in generalities. It could as easily describe relationships between customers and clerks as anything else, but for most people that relationship does not impact the attention that they devote to the world significantly.

Comment Re:De-salination? (Score 1) 110

Not directly. If you fed salt water into the system is would get blocked up with salt crystals. Indirectly, yes. The output is steam, and you could use that to heat the salt water to the point where it started rapidly evaporating. (You'd want to recycle the "working fluid" water, so you don't just bubble it through the salt water, but instead you use the salt water to cool the steam until it condenses and then feed it back into the heater.)

Comment Re:As the old song goes (Score 1) 150

The trouble is, this isn't the usual slippery slope. This started out as a reasonable legal procedure back when hard disks were small. The slippery slope was the storing more and more of personal history in digital forms. Originally allowing all digital media to searched was reasonable. Now it's quite a bit less so. Next year it will be worse.

(What was unreasonable before is that they would seize the hardware and keep it to punish the accused, often never getting around to actually filing a case.. The punishment was the loss of business records, etc. It was still abuse, but a different abuse.)

Comment Re:" and particularly describing" (Score 1) 150

That's a pretty big place to be called "particularly described".

OTOH, it looks as if they are only allowed to look for evidence of one particular kind of crime. That narrows it a bit, if the restriction can be believed. Unfortunately, a lot of instances of "independent construction" have come to light, which shed a lot of doubt on how well this kind of restriction is enforced. (True, this case doesn't involve the spooks, but the same processes can be used.)

Comment Re:Warrants are supposed to be narrow (Score 1) 150

Sort of. But they should be required to narrowly specify the information that they are looking for, and have evidence that would lead a reasonable person to conclude it is probably there. And they shouldn't be allowed to record anything that doesn't match the items described in the warrant.

And I quote: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu

Comment Re:lol (Score 1) 667

FWIW, my *GUESS* is that this wasn't planned. Somebody the other day said that this kind of rocket launcher can be set to automaticaly fire on anything passing overhead. That sounds to me quite plausible. So my guess is that somebody set it up on automatic, and took a break when they shouldn't have, or that they were assigned to do something else, so the left the launcher on automatic, or that it was lunch time, so..... etc.

As to WHO the negligent party was, it's plausibly the separtists, it's plausibly some Russian advisor who was detached to help them, it's plausibly anyone who had one of these launchers. It's the kind of stupid thing people do when they're confused and harried. It probably wasn't the Russian troops. This isn't the kind of thing people do when they're part of a standing chain of command.

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 1) 474

The point was "without warning". Drunks generally give plenty of warning that they are getting violent. This guy was just walking down the street.

OTOH, I'm relying on third-hand information about why. Apparently he had a reputation for taking "angle dust" and then becoming violent some time later without warning. Prehaps it was an idiosyncratic reaction, sort of like the "cat" or "dot" reactions to morphine. But I was told that it's the kind of thing one needs to expect from PCP users. Is this true? I sure don't know. But the "without warning" is ... rather hard to deal with.

OTOH, I guess that if it were easily available, those who liked it would kill themselves off fairly quickly. Presuming that the information that I got was correct.

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 1) 474

WRT point 2: This came to my attention in the context of someone who apparently became violent for no reason. Police were not imvolved.

FWIW, it's my understanding that PCP is a legal horse tranquilizer, and that it works well for horses. That being the case, I doubt that it's difficult to get even now. But I don't know, because I've never tried.

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