Cross country in an MRAP? That's an amusing mental image.

You're not going to win a high-speed chase driving an MRAP. As officers don't receive training in how to properly operate them, they're actually more likely to injure themselves by rolling one over than to ever have a legitimate law enforcement use for one.

MRAPs are expensive, they chew up roads, and they roll over at the drop of a hat. They are useful for one thing: protecting the occupants from explosive devices.

I actually have never heard of a case of someone throwing pipe bombs at police in pursuit. I would be quite interested in reading more about the incident.

Pretty much the only case one would have been useful was the LA bank robbery. That single incident, never repeated, has been used to justify some of the most breathtaking overreach by law enforcement ever documented.

I didn't look closely at the data so all of them could be wrong, but a number of posts here reference the transfer of M60s, which are machine guns.

No shit. The pictures from Ferguson make anyone with the slightest modicum of weapons training cringe. A cop pointing a firearm anywhere other than at the ground unless actually making a high-risk search or arrest (or at the range, or other such circumstances for the pedant mouth-breathers) should be grounds for immediate dismissal, along with a lifetime ban from law enforcement employment.

The "Us vs. Them" mentality is certainly going to make policing less safe as they start crossing lines with the wrong people. Riots like Ferguson are the perfect cover to start taking long-range shots with very high caliber weapons at police, with zero fear of being discovered. Places that focus on community policing rarely have to worry about police being targeted. Why? Because they act like decent human beings, and there isn't a culture of egotistical men-children who think stroking automatic weapons purchased with money they stole from someone using civil asset forfeiture makes them God's gift to whoever the fuck they think they should be God's gift to.

The number of cops killed in the line of duty is a rounding error when it comes to dangerous professions. They're not heroes. They don't "deserve" special status. They joined up, they agreed to the pay and the risk. People dislike the police because the police clearly believe they are above the law. The explosion of personal video recording devices is just now making it clear how out-of-control they are.

Indeed. People also seem to gloss over the fact that the statement "the right of the people" is an absolute, independent clause. It stands on its own, regardless of any prefatory or explanatory clauses that might depend on it. All other independent clauses relating to grants of power to the government have been read and ruled that way. They are not subsumed or limited by any prefatory statement regarding the reason for their inclusion. If the 2nd Amendment is to be so limited, then so should every power in the Articles where a prefatory statement or dependent clause is attached.

Also, "the right of the people" should be read the same way in every other Amendment. If that happened, peoples' heads would explode.

More like management not speccing it, or allowing it if it's brought up.

Being allowed to put that default functionality into an appliance is not within the purview of the programmers. That would absolutely have to be okayed by people higher on the food chain. Most companies won't do things like that because it increases support calls by users who want to just plug something into the wall and have it work.

There have been a number of leaks of classified documents because of stupid behavior by people who should know better.

In many cases, it is absolutely the best way to get stupid behavior stopped.

Cue all of the "Oh noes! Can't blame the victim!" Yes, you can. Stupid behavior with perfectly predictable negative results should, indeed, be blamed squarely on the victim. Fuck people who say it shouldn't.

ICMP messages are routinely filtered out by routers.

It means that targeted malware can be controlled without any telltale backdoor data transmissions.

No, not a problem in general, but not all malware infections are of the long-distance, anonymous hacker sort.

I agree, though I wanted to point out that early highrise steel workers rarely used safety lines. It's one of the reasons that construction firms went out of their way to hire Mohegans, as for some reason they didn't get the vertigo that's common amongst most of the rest of the human race. Actually, they still fill the ranks of steelworkers to this day.