This is more or less completely not the way standardized testing works.

Standardized testing works by using current test questions and possible test questions for the future and mixing them together, scoring some and not scoring others, and relies on being able to re-use questions. That re-use is how you normalize the difficulty of exams. You agree not to discuss the questions.

The seriousness of discussing them goes up as the professionalism required goes up. Talking about Bar exam questions can be a *massive* deal. Talking about LSAT questions can be a big deal. Talking about SAT questions can be an issue that affects your college admissions prospects.

As a practical matter, a very small bit of discussion is normal, mostly just with people who took the test right after it. Good testing authorities only care if you cross the line--like describing a test question to an unfiltered audience or in an online forum or test prep book, for example. Posting a question to twitter is not okay. Posting comments that reveal something about the particular test is technically not okay, but you have to actually look at the circumstances and make a judgment call. (A lot depends on whether everyone has finished the particular test yet, for example.)

That being said, there is *also* a financial incentive for testing companies to go after people who are too egregious. Test companies license old tests and sell them as prep materials.

I disagree. Someone who has experience as an officer may have better knowledge and be more sensitive to anti-officer bias. They should not be able to spin the media toward anti-victim-bias, and the way their media people victimize victims of police shootings is criminal, but I have no problem with certain reasonable edits to an article that is going to attract a lot of people who have already prejudged the incident.

Put another way, everyone on one side of the issue edits the articles, so why shouldn't the people on the other side be able to?

Yes, DiSKiLLeR, why don't we take death more seriously?

That being said, if these are actually part of someone's job, they should really be making press releases or blog entries where relevant and letting the community update wikipedia; or they should be disclosing who they are when relevant. (E.g. trying to remove the Sean Bell shooting incident--plenty of stories become non-stories over time, but someone with an incentive to remove the story probably shouldn't be able to do so without disclosing their relationship to the subject matter.)

Wikipedia does not qualify as evidence--it would not be admissible as evidence of a crime. Don't cry wolf on that because when police really do tamper with evidence, it's a *LOT* more serious than making updates to Wikipedia.

I have no problem with wikipedia edits for tone or the like originating from NYPD officers, if there are errors or non-neutrality problems in the phrasing of the article, although they should be doing it in off-duty time. I do have trouble with edits that do not cite to their sources, because wikipedia is not supposed to be breaking new stories unless there's been coverage somewhere. At the very least cops should cite to a blog before editing.

First, don't resort to name-calling. "Special Snowflakes" is name calling.

Set up a leadership structure. Stick to it. If it involves elections, include a nominating committee that decides who can run for leadership roles.

This is how it's done in grownup circles. The failure to do it doomed Occupy Wall Street from the get-go and has allowed many other movements to be hijacked over the years.

And think about the potential for changes to rehab...

It's not about learning, it's about habits. If you develop the tech for people, you can stimulate the reward centers for your own brain when consolidating memories of productive behaviors.

Post it on youtube. Include the URL and maybe a checksum in the capsule. Make it someone's job to hold onto a copy, check once a year, and re-upload if it's gone for any reason. Make it someone else's job to make sure that someone is responsible if the first person dies or moves away, etc...

They won't respond without a subpoena. So what? That's actually a reasonable position. Subpoena them. If somebody is being threatening to the point where it should not be permitted in our society, then you go after the threatening person using the law.

Welcome to having a social contract. I know it's easier to have knee-jerk reactions than it is to use due process. But that's also how lynch mobs existed. I'd much rather require the subpoena.

No it's not. It's well-documented that if a very slightly different serious of events had occurred leading up to Pearl Harbor, either (1) Battleship Row would have been ready for the attack and there would have been much smaller loss of life, or (2) the US Carriers would have been at Pearl Harbor, fundamentally shifting the strategic balance of power in the pacific from 10:4 favoring Japan to closer to 10:0 favoring japan--so the Americans were incredibly fortunate in how much the loss of life galvanized the nation and how it did not seriously undermine their strategic interests.

But there's not enough evidence to show any of it was deliberate. So all you've got is speculation. When you're arguing someone deliberately let thousands of Americans and the pride of the navy old guard die and be destroyed, you need more than speculation.

Conspiracy theories emerge when you either have complicated events that are not entirely explained or when it would have been very easy for one or two actions to have caused a profoundly different result. Think of them as very unlikely possibilities that should, for the most part, be assumed to be untrue. A conspiracy theory only becomes a conspiracy when you have enough evidence to show that it is not merely possible, but that it is the most probable version of events. (There is a middle-ground, obviously, where investigation should be done to rule it out, if it is somewhat probable but not the most probable version of events.)

This--very much this. Values, and as crucially *narratives*, are very much formed by the culture in which you grew up. If you've ever had a serious discussion with an intelligent politician, you'll learn that they understand the narratives they need to draw on to sell policy positions. Lawyers do a microcosm of that in jury arguments, where they try to put together a story that fits a comfortable narrative that the jury will believe, based on who the jury is and what they've experienced.

The great thing about science fiction using another culture's narratives is that it does what science fiction does best--explores the human condition in a new way.

Like reading Childhood's End after the Asimov robot novels (which are mostly more hopeful), seeing science fiction explored from a different cultural context can give us profoundly different insights.

What are you talking about? You can't hit it from behind with the same kind of bullet fired under the same conditions, but that's not the same thing. We have the ability to intercept missiles with limited but significant success; intercepting a bullet is a harder problem, but that doesn't mean it's undoable.

The case law is different and evolving at the border, but still within the law. The general rule is that search and seizure must be conducted pursuant to a lawful search warrant based upon probable cause.

However, the First Congress, which (more or less) drafted the constitution, also gave customs officers full authority to search ships for contraband without a warrant.

There's a line of cases going back to that which basically means that the sovereign has a right to control what enters the country, and that includes a right to search. There is a little pushback against that today--for example, you need reasonable suspicion in order to do a *destructive* search of a vehicle--but in general border guards are given a great deal of discretion to search you.

Nothing is inherently wrong with taking a position on either side of the issue, and defining where the sphere of individual liberty meets the public interest in catching individuals responsible for crime will always be open for debate in a free society.

But the summary and headline here are profoundly wrong. SCOTUS receives *THOUSANDS* of petitions every year and only hear about 100 cases. When they don't accept a case, it doesn't mean they're approving it, even tacitly, and the case doesn't become binding precedent nationwide like it would after SCOTUS heard it.

Sometimes they won't hear a case because it's a messy fact pattern which may be important for a couple of guys, but is a bad case to use for establishing precedent that will actually set meaningful rules for future court cases in lower courts. Sometimes they won't hear it because it's not interesting enough or they don't want to get involved. Sometimes they won't hear it because the petitioner failed to present a convincing case for why he should be heard.

Don't read anything into it. Doing so is profoundly uninformed in a way that would give even an otherwise informed opinion a big hurdle to get over before it became persuasive.