You just red-lined my non-sequiturometer and renewed my faith in Slashdot at the same time.

You must be new here -- Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa)
Yeah, no shit -- Michael Cooney (coondoggie)

In the first place, I think "The LAPD notionally works for the people" is closer to the truth. Judged by their behavior over the last 50 years, they should be classified as a 'street gang'.

Secondly, if the public doesn't have access to the data they're collecting, then we don't know what they're collecting. It sounds like a tautology, but the difference is very real. All we have is their word on what data they are and are not collecting, or when that changes (increases). Without access to that data, we are forced to take them at their word. Which is probably OK, because we all know that "cops never, ever, ever lie".

Much as I despise posts that start with "this", I have to agree. Until Microsoft loses their fascination with whizzo shit like displaying (i.e. running) unexamined/foreign stuff as "previews" and confusing that with "interoperability", the problem will persist. They've never gotten it through their heads that all this "seamless" wonderfullness that looks so great as 2-minute demos in developer conference rollout keynotes cause unending grief for decades to come. Sometimes other companies fall prey to this kind of thinking (Firefox toolbars), but they learned it all at the feet of the masters, with Outlook previews and Word macros, and Explorer running code from .bmp files when you visit the directory... And then, of course there's IE, the crack whore of the industry, who'll have unprotected sex with ANYTHING.

And, like Disney, for example, 30 years after the founder dies, the corporation he left will be an example of soulless tincture of evil. Watching and waiting for this to happen to Apple next.

Indeed. There are principal investigators who have spent their whole 30-year careers on a single project.

So you're saying that it's NASA engineers' job to write the specs and certifications and come up with the checklists and training and contingency and mission plans, and it's up to outside contractors to actually build the shit? So, like it's always been and designed to be then.

rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock

Duh!

Upcoming Slashdot maintenance STOP Aug 15 5 to 6 PM Eastern STOP beta.slashdot.org still useless during that time STOP

What is needed is more knife-control laws, or, as they're known in this country, "knife-safety" laws. It is self-evident that if the government were to take away everyone's knives, these kinds of incidents would cease.

What do you have to hide, citizen?

script-kitty

I want you to go to your room and think about what you've done.



Best. Pun. Evar. On. Slashdot.

'cat' doesn't care what the input is, it just spits it to standard out. :)

In my experience, $CAT prefers to spit to errout, especially if I've crossed her...

I can haz internetz?

I'm sorry, birds are the showiest class on the planet. Any theory about how they went from ~160Kg to ~1Kg in (only) 50 million years needs to have a healthy dose of sexual arms race to be plausible.