Comment Good move (Score 1) 173
What happened to him is totally unfair.
Yes. It is totally unfair, but nevertheless it seems quite fashionable.
Massachusetts SWAT Teams Claim They're Private Corporations, Immune To Oversight 534
New submitter thermowax sends a report on how Massachusetts SWAT teams are dodging open records requests by claiming to be corporations. From the article:
As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. ... Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it's here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they're private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they're immune from open records requests. Let's be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they've incorporated, they're immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state's residents aren't permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they're used for, what sort of training they get or who they're primarily used against.
Comment They hired Arnold Schwarzenegger? (Score 1, Funny) 138
"You have just been erased."
Comment Re:Pigs at the trough (Score 1) 48
They don't. They operate at different levels, so they may be listening to an extra "backup" data flow. I rather think they use each other. It is too convenient for "intelligence" agencies not to tap into the already existing camera and audio feed from another spy.
Comment Re:Long story short (Score 1) 109
The EPA can continue to undermine the someone's finance in pursuit of fairy tales.
There, fixed that for you. By the way, that is a good thing for an actual economy, as it is stopped from drowning, draught, etc. Some of these fairy tales are already fairly convincing.
Comment Re:No Evidence (Score 1) 215
Any connection to "climate change" was purely speculative on the part of the article writer
Indeed. It was probably the mortgage bubble that was responsible for this.
Comment Re:Requisite (Score 1) 29
Well, you may laugh about that, but in the past that is exactly what happened, and we try to cover it up now in scientific circles.
It took a religious liberation to stop people to adhere to ancient texts that could only be interpreted by priests. People started looking for the Creator by investigating the creation. This religiously motivated search has added tremendously to science. For example, the Frederik Ruysch collection in the KunstKammer in St Petersburg is from that period.
Alas, we like to think that science is "neutral", just observing and deducing. Any other motives are left out of the educational system. So we learn that Newton saw an apple falling and wrote his laws. And then deduce Kepler's laws from them. It actually was the other way around: Kepler thought that the creation had to be "harmonic" and therefore brilliantly simple. So planet movements could not be governed by more than second order formulas. That (and being brilliant in measurement of position of celestial bodies) led him to discover his laws, from which Newton derived his.
Now I am not in favour or against religion, but I am very much against rewriting history. Especially in science. Some problems are much easier solved with one school of thought than with another. For example, Pythogoras' theorem is easily solved with greek math, and very hard with arabic math. Even schools of thought that you might considered "flawed" can accidentally yield insightful results. Suppressing any school of thought in science is a crime to science itself, and making even making science into a form of religion (with believers in "neutrality").
Comment Re:Age of the earth (Score 1) 98
At least, thanks to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, we know that Earth is a Vega. Or has that theory been busted as well?
Comment New film title (Score 1) 104
Ah. We have a new film title: The Resuscitator.
Comment Finally! (Score 1) 59
Finally a "slime mold" can be made by putting slime into a mold.
Comment No bullshit at all (Score 1) 153
You say it yourself: your crime is forgotten in real life. Only if one knows where to look and take a lot of trouble, it could be found again. Not so with Google. Heck, I could just type in the name of a village and find the article describing a domestic murder from 20 years ago. That is way different. Information can hurt. Even information that is not true.
EU Court Backs 'Right To Be Forgotten' 153
NapalmV sends this news from the BBC: "The European Union Court of Justice said links to 'irrelevant' and outdated data should be erased on request. The case was brought by a Spanish man who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google's search results infringed his privacy. Google said the ruling was 'disappointing.'" The EU Justice Commissioner said, "Companies can no longer hide behind their servers being based in California or anywhere else in the world. ... The data belongs to the individual, not to the company. And unless there is a good reason to retain this data, an individual should be empowered — by law — to request erasure of this data." According to the ruling (PDF), if a search provider declines to remove the data, the user can escalate the situation to a judicial authority to make sure the user's rights are being respected.
Comment Excellent! (Score 2) 197
So if the NSA now knows of backdoors, it must inform the military so they can be patched, who will then be forced to publish the fixes. Right?
Comment Re:Is SQL really such a bad thing? (Score 1) 52
Is SQL really such a bad thing?
Off course not, but you must combine it with XML, and XSLT. What purpose does it serve to only write a program in SQL at run-time, and have it interpreted at run-time if you do not let the database server wrap the results in a human-hostile text format at run-time and parse it at run-time with the client? Especially if all the object-oriented techniques now make it possible to have enough separation to request the person details at index locations 3, 17 and 173?
If you program blind-panic-style, I can imagine that you fire a zillion overly complicated queries at a server. But if your code is even halfway organized, ISAM-style requests (sorry the buzzword is "NOSQL" these days) work faster, are easier to understand and maintain, and support optimizations like caching out of the box.
Comment Re:why cows? (Score 1) 291
And in a hurricane, both fly equally well, but the chickens are better at landing.
