But you didn't respond to my suggestion that the video be retrievable only by court order. Don't you think that would mitigate a lot of the issues you mentioned?

a nuclear capable country

Said nukes being, amusingly, invented by a bunch of immigrants.

the Federal government's control reaches into the crooks and nannies it was never supposed to reach

"Supposed" by whom? Some long-dead people?

I do think there is some misalignment between laws as written vs. current practice. But you should realize that bringing them together would most certainly result in more changes to the law, than to how they are practiced. For example, Social Security may or may not be particularly Constitutional, but it will get written into the Constitution long before it will be repealed. Most people want it.

I would say, no thanks. And that employees in the performance of their duty are in a different situation than ordinary people going about their private business (even if in a public space). I can't think of any good reason not to make this distinction.

That said I also think that access to "Cop-Cams" should be by court-order only. I don't think the police should be able to selectively choose whatever video supports their case, nor feel that they are being needless monitored constantly.

I almost closed out my comment by saying that I was channeling you.

"Keep honking, I'm reloading"

It wasn't about the metaphysics, because of course, he's kind of right. Although if you listen to someone who is an actual philosophy professor with a background in metaphysics and epistemology they make pretty convincing arguments against this kind of thinking.

What bothered me was the kind of smarmy, know-it-all attitude he had.

Ironically (or not) the comment I made was based on a story I had heard told about the philosopher George Berkeley's "immaterialism". This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived.

He had arrived in the rain someplace and couldn't enter because a door or gate was locked and he pounded on the door to be let in. A competing philosopher whose name I don't remember was slow in opening it and let Berkeley continue to pound on the door in the rain.

Berkeley became angry at being left in the rain and became agitated. The philosopher with whom he disagreed with yelled out "George! Calm down! Just stop perceiving the door and you'll be able to walk right in."

On a theoretical level, you're correct. On a personal level, the nose thing is pretty convincing. Give it a go, you'll see what I mean.

At some instant you are reeling from a punch to the face, and you have an awareness (a memory) of having asked for it 5 seconds previously in a heated philosophical argument. The problem is you have no way of directly experiencing those previous events from 5 seconds ago. It could be that the universe is just a snapshot of this precise moment, which includes sensations of memory, the appearance of slashdot, and the fear of being punched in the face.

There is no disproving this. But it also doesn't matter, since if nothing else the present does contain the perception of continuity, which is all that drives our choices even if continuity does exist. If we somehow discovered that we're just a dream or computer simulation, what does that actually change? What previous theory of existence does it displace?

"The focus should always be on how to think rather than a list of facts." That has been the conventional wisdom for a few decades now, but a big problem is that you can't measure things like "critical thinking" in the abstract. Thus the movement towards standardized testing. Nobody says to himself, "we should study lists of facts instead of how to think!" but they do see other nations pulling ahead of the US in standardized tests, and panic. Next thing you know, music and PE classes disappear, end education tends to become rather narrow. And of course, dropping standards does not really transform the *average* classroom into a scene from Dead Poets Society with people standing on the desks and being inspired.

C'mon, to a Yuropeen, Ohio and California are exactly the same thing, but Scotland and England are totally different.

Now this is better commentary than that which you've been putting out of late.

Unfortunately, isn't this laziness vs. strongman similar to the ignorance vs. evil-genius dichotomy pushed forth under Bush II by his opponents?

Another day, another overblown headline. Quoting from the article, the questionable phrase is: "; focus on academic and scientific knowledge rather than scientific processes; "

This is wide open to interpretation. Obviously it would be insane not to teach the scientific process. I think there are some who feel education has strayed too far from mastering basic facts into abstraction, such as "new math" instead of mastering times tables.

Anyway this is just one guy's brain fart and not a law. I am kind of curious what he meant by it though.

But he was right of course. There is no way to prove ground truth, such as the continuity of existence - it's just assumptions. Some people never grasp that, most others tire of thinking about it and move on. But not because they solved or proved anything.

Butting into somebody else's conversation just to blurt out that you don't understand it is silly.

I was riding the bus home from the University about 20 years ago and this guy in front of me was going on and on to this girl sitting next to him, sprouting some Philosophy 101 nonsense about how "How do I know you're real, and not just a figment of my imagination?"

After about 15 minutes of this I couldn't take it anymore and I looked at the girl and said "Go ahead and punch this guy in the nose, and then ask him whether he still wonders whether you're a figment of your imagination."

Ha ha, you have a 16-drive array in your RV? Just when I thought people on slashdot weren't cool any more.