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Comment Too newsy (Score 4, Funny) 138

I find this piece of advertisement to be too article-shaped.

The tone is way to sober and objective. If you read carefully you'll find that some of the data are actually facts! I refuse to accept this kind of newsy look-at-me-writing-articles crap in Slashdot.

If we start accepting this kind of posts, soon we'll end up having news for nerds. Or even stuff that matters, god forbid.

Comment Justice (Score 4, Funny) 68

The fact that we need a court to decide that "embedding a copyrighted YouTube video in your site is not copyright infringement." is already a failure of the system as a whole.

Next we'll have the court deciding that "Mentioning the fact that you saw a video on YouTube is not copyright infringement as long as you specify you don't know whether the video was copyrighted or otherwise."

(I now wonder if this post is copyright infringement. After all, I'm replying an article about a court ruling about people who embedded in their web pages videos from Youtube which were copyrighted! ... OMG I don't want to die in prison!)

Comment Re:die by taser or gas? (Score 0) 152

The concern for the criminals during the time of the crime is misplaced.

What about my concern on who decides they are criminals? What if I don't trust the police to make such judgement?

Condemning them isn't necessary - they're in the act of committing a crime.

A crime which sentence is to be decided by judges. Otherwise we might as well replace cops with snipers.

The relevant question then becomes how much force to apply, as any form of force also places the hostages at a risk. The single relevant question thus is, what is the lower risk to the hostages? The best bet is to look at historical outcomes in comparable situations. This is complex. It depends on the number of hostage takers and hostages, the site, time, the background of the hostage taker, etcetera.

That said, negotiation helps with an ill-prepared bank robber turning hostage taker. 10 hostage takers and 500 hostages indicates a lot of preparation, and strongly points at a lack of negotiation options.

I fully agree on the question, but not on the answer. I simply do not wish the police to have the right to decide how many hostages it's ok to kill in a hostage situation. And giving them the weapons to apply the result of that decision is too close to implying they have the right to take it.

I think everyone reasonable agrees that the decision in such a situation is an extremely hard one. For me, that's precisely the reason to place the burden of making that decision far from the people we use to protect us from common criminals. Because those people are the most biased on precisely the taking of that kind of decisions.

Comment Re:die by taser or gas? (Score 4, Insightful) 152

Also, if you can save 400 of 500 in a hostage situation and catch all the 10+ terrorists. Go for it. The terrorists would kill them anyway and if they escape, they can continue their business.

"if you can save 400 of 500 in a hostage situation " - Is this the best way to save them? Is this the way to save the most of them?
"catch all the 10+ terrorists" - Who judged them? Who decided they are terrorists?
"The terrorists would kill them anyway" - Are you a Oracle? Do the police employ oracles or futurologists?
"if they escape, they can continue their business" - Are you sure?

So, your scenario is:
1 - The official "police judge" condemns the terrorists with his judging powers that don't require lawyers, juries nor all that hassle.
2 - The official "police oracles" see the future to know how many innocents would the terrorists kill.
3 - Based on the police judge's decision and the police oracle's prediction, the best possible result "killing just a few of the innocents to capture the guilty" is selected and applied with the new weapon.

Comment To compete in price (Score 4, Interesting) 96

To compete in price against anyone you only need money. With enough money, you can set a price of $0.

The main question is "will they be able to recover the cost of that competence once they get the contracts?" and it's way too soon to know the answer to that.

It's like judging the acquisition of online "businesses". Nobody can prove the price was or wasn't right until the buyer makes that back as profit or doesn't.

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