Yes, it has always worked that way, an arrest is not a conviction, it's an unproven claim. Body/car cams on cops may weed out some of the bad apples but here in Oz the cops are on the whole are decent people doing a dirty job and it should be noted that the vast majority of the body cam videos show citizens behaving badly and cops behaving with self-restraint and caution.

Having said that, when the cop's political masters start outfitting police stations like they do a military base and promote the regular use of guerilla tactics such as "no knocks" and swat teams in a residential setting, you are a fair way down the road to a police state, which is an entirely different thing to a police force. As the Stanford prison experiments so vividly demonstrated humans very rapidly descend into a violent master/slave relationship if the environment they find themselves in meets certain criteria (eg: Abu Ghraib, Nazi Germany).

It's a very deep seated behaviour in humans, we all have a ruthless dictator and a cowering slave with us just waiting for the right environmental triggers to emerge. Religious people have called it "good" and "evil" for millennia but incorrectly blamed it on angels and demons (as opposed to the naturally evolved behaviour of our species). Other than being aware we are all susceptible we can't do much to avoid such behaviour in ourselves, but we can set up political and social systems that discourage such environments from forming in the first place. The fact the US still embraces the death penalty and has such a high number of prisoners compared to the rest of the planet, is IMO a 'canary in the coal mine' for the emergence of a police state, statistically speaking the canary is dangling from its perch by one leg.

Croudsouecing! What a great deal. Quick, give me a link where I can send all my money without even watching the video. I want to make this guy rich.

I admire Volokh's legal analyses and reluctantly have to agree unless there is a clause prohibiting contracts to holders of outstanding warrants. I still maintain that for Keef, it was about circumventing the warrant for money and not at all a free speech issue.

They're not restricting him from showing up and speaking. By all means he should. They're preventing the use of a venue against the terms of the signed contract. They don't rent spaces to people with active warrants. It was obviously not a free speech issue with him either, but a method to work around a warrant keeping him away from a paycheck.

Well it failed, so nothing. Duh.

No, it succeeded very well for the guy who collected all of the money.

So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.

What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?

The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.

From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.

But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.

These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.

If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.

In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.

What *content* was disallowed?

So you're not really familiar with the concept of investment risk ...

You're obviously deluded about the concept of investment. Please enlighten us on what the investors who funded Ouya through Kickstarter got when the owner cash out and sold it to Razer.

So someone got incredibly rich from a Kickstarter campaign and a lot of contributors got screwed. We refuse to learn from that. Lets put that in the past (and mod down anyone who mentions it) and move on to funding the next person who wants to make a lot of money off of us. Maybe we can even finance another Hollywood movie in return for another broken promise.

On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.

But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.

Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.

I just hope that the person who modded me down buys Nvidia products. That will be revenge enough.

I'm guessing the vast majority of ad benefits come from impressions rather than clicks.

I don't think I've ever clicked on a movie ad, but I'm sure a lot of my movie choices come from movie ads.

Same thing for other products, the ads annoy you, but when you go to buy something the one you've seen the ad for suddenly looks a whole lot more credible and familiar.

I think you've got it backwards.

In Canada the parties are far stronger than they are in the US and the individual MPs are almost irrelevant as they're simply expected to vote with their party, yet we seem to have a lot less of this kind of corruption and I don't think it's a coincidence.

Look at the emails, the guy was so compliant partly because he was relying on the MPAA for fund-raising, he's a state level politician dealing with the representative of the US media industry, of course he was playing ball. Just like if he was some individual legislator with a big group threatening to flood his district with money for his opponent, it's really easy for powerful interests to manipulate the government by picking off individual legislators.

If you make the parties stronger then the interests have to deal with the party instead of the legislator, and the parties are strong enough (and often incentivized) to tell the powerful interests to screw off.

Last year I bought the Nvidia Note 7 tablet based on the promise (from what I thought was a trustworthy company) that Android 5 would be released for it "real soon". That promised slipped to February 2015. When February 2015 came and went and there was still no Android 5 update available, Nvidia simply stopped responding to people who were asking about their promised update. They seem quite glad to screw the customer. I've bought a number of Nvidia products in the past for myself and friends, but I'll never buy another.

If there are nine people in a room but someone wants to draw a lot of attention to himself he can point to the shortest person and call them a dwarf person and so claim that there are really only eight people in the room.