You might want to look at some house after the police have searched it, if you don't think they are still extremely disruptive. They are generally worse if they don't find what they hoped to find. Wantonly destructive is not always an overstatement.

You have a lot more faith in the integrity of the government than I do.

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.)

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.)

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

The problem is that one agent of it under reckless evil can undo the work of 100 agents working selflessly for good. And that's assuming the "good" agents don't collude to protect the bad apple.

OTOH, this judge thought it quite reasonable to search an entier hard drive. And said it was established predecent. Yuck! That's NOT a narrow search.

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.

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.

I don't experiment with drugs myself because I am leery of addiction. Getting off tobacco was a difficult process the second time, whereas the first time I just stopped without problem. I don't think I want to experiment with anything else that's addictive.

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.

This. Samuel L. Mother Fucking Jackson is always the winner.

Now tell me about MS wanting more H1B workers.

Why should companies that get special treatment from the government pretend that they are operating in a free market? Because fools will believe them.

I beg to differ. Financial crimes are a lot more profitable. It's just that the people who comit them have friends in the government.

That's not clear. It's true that tobacco is reputedly the hardest drug to quit, but that is not synonmous with the highest social cost. And Freud (an informed witness) though that cocaine was more destructive than either alcohol or tobacco.

But that' doesn't mean that making them illegal doesn't have a much higher social cost than having them be legal.