Comment Re:Patents ought to be like Trademarks (Score -1, Troll) 116
Just say it out loud: Abolish software patents.
+1
Just say it out loud: Abolish software patents.
+1
You are truly one nasty sack of shit.
And you, clearly, are a scholar of international law.
Uh, title of the story is "Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt."
I'll come back when you've sobered up.
It's reading comprehension then. You apparently really think what went on in Boston rivals what Israelis deal with. OK then.
"The father of three was killed when terrorists infiltrated Israel from Sinai and led a coordinated attack against those constructing the fence on the Israel-Egypt border. The attacking terrorists used automatic rifles in addition to anti-tank missiles." When you have a team of guys with anti-tank missiles running around Boston, and it's not the first time this year, and your body count from terror is routinely actually higher than your body count from accidental shooting by police, we'll talk. That entire country is one big ongoing rampage. You would be able to see it as easily as the rest of the world, if you weren't doing the mental equivalent of cowering in your basement even still.
I see you still have no answer for my point. It really doesn't matter if you get it or not - only if the next people who'd like to shut down Boston get it.
The T was closed. Which means among many, many other things some people couldn't even easily get to medical care.
As officers fanned out across the Boston area, Bryce Acosta, 24, came out of his Cambridge home with his hands up.
"I had like 30 FBI guys come storm my house with assault rifles," he said. They yelled, "Is anybody in there?" and began searching his house and an adjacent shed, leaving after about 10 minutes.
*****
Watertown, Mass. — Samantha Piccaluga, a 23-year-old university student, said that at about 3:30 p.m. Friday, jittery police whipped out their guns and rushed toward a man who appeared to come out of a house on Dexter Street in Watertown, near where the shootings had occurred in the early morning.
The neighborhood has been cordoned off by police, who have ordered residents to stay inside.
“They’re yelling, ‘Why did you get out of your house,’” Piaccaluga said, as she watched the drama unfold from her upstairs window on nearby Nichols Avenue. Angry, cursing police were “in his face,” she said. They then slapped handcuffs on the man, who was about 40 years old and was wearing a T-shirt, she said, and then began interviewing him.
Early in the morning, she said, she saw officers bring a nude, handcuffed man down the street and put him into a patrol car. “He was completely naked, no underwear,” she said, adding that police brought the man a blanket. At around 4 a.m., the man was taken out of the car and apparently transferred away in an ambulance, she said. She said she did not know who the man was.
*****
Apparently the police in Boston and the IRS have a slightly different definition of "voluntary" than you or I.
Second, they may have interned US citizens, but let's not switch topics from the fact that they didn't panic and shut down their cities.
Dude, I'm not the one saying "So yes i can see rescuing the morons costing more than just shutting down the state because every moron that slips in the snow will be suing the state for 20 million bucks."
There just is no tort reform angle on the Boston Bombing. None. There isn't even a tort reform angle period; the only reason to be worrying about it is because you lost about 1,000 other more important issues off your list. Which in fairness happens to me all the time on the days when I start drinking early. But still.
I mean, if you don't read the news and can't Google, I don't know why you want to come here and hold forth on these topics.
Any fool knows that things happen in Israel all the time that make those two kids, with their civilian guns and their couple of pressure cooker bombs look like an episode of sesame street:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/victims.html
I see you didn't answer my main point at all - which is that any two kids can cause the city of Boston to shut down, and cost the economy potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. So how long until it happens again? The US has a glass jaw to the world's thugs with this attitude of "run to your houses and hide under your beds" at the first sign of terrorism. We cower and ask how quickly we can roll back the bill of rights, when our grandparents would have stood vigilant to guard them. And all for what - something less dangerous to us than slipping and falling. Terrorists are forced to use the media and fear because they are so ineffective at actually causing harm. Why on earth hand them the win?
One guy? Really? An entire city cowers in fear from one guy?
Go to Israel, man. Look into their eyes as they confront fear and show you what bravery is.
They have a lot more than one guy after them on any given day, and they refuse to hide unless a missile is actually going to land near them.
Americans once had some backbone, too. Now that we've announced it's open season on our economy, we're going to see how many other terrorists and hostile foreign powers want to arrange the shutdown of a major city via one or two armed kids.
You think it's a one-time deal?
Oh no sir. You raised the coward flag. You just rolled out the red-carpet to every terrorist and hostile foreign power. They now know for a certainty that all it takes to shut down a city the size of Boston is two kids with a couple of shitty guns and some home-made bombs that, while actually functional, would flunk you out of IED class back in Afghanistan or Iraq.
It's going to get so much worse. Because of this degree of weakness, of overreaction and immaturity, I can guarantee we will have just enticed more who wish to be as famous and momentarily powerful as we chose to make these two assholes.
Whatever happened to the America of our grandparents? Hitler said every day, "I want all your cities closed," and we said, every day, "Not for an hour, not for a minute."
All kidding aside, do you not watch the news? Which is full of surveillance video of people robbing, raping, and murdering on a scale any terrorist organization can never dream of? Pick just one case: grainy footage of a group of several guys who killed someone just like you, raped someone just like your wife, and then disappeared into the night, most certainly to be seen again soon?
I await your command to shut down every city where this occurred this week.
You've never been to East New York, obviously.
200 whole rounds of ammo? I cringe in wide-eyed fear. The NYPD once spent 41 rounds of ammo shooting at a single unarmed civilian (reference).
Cops are way more likely to kill you by accident than terrorists are on purpose (reference).
If the cops really thought it was dangerous outside, instead of just putting on security theater, they'd have let the donut shops close too (reference).
The war on terror is like real war, except that we have millions of people in our "army" and they have dozens in theirs. Peanut allergies kill more Americans than terrorists.
This cowardly attitude is an open invitation for any terrorist or hostile foreign government to shut down any American city any time they choose by sending one or two armed men to our shores. Or, apparently even recruiting one or two people from our labor pool. If our grandparents thought this way while fighting the Nazis, Hitler could have won the war against the allies with a hundred "terrorists."
And... we shut the whole city down - except for the Dunkin Donuts shops?
We cower in fear from these two kids, so that we don't even read them their rights when we arrest them?
Somewhere your grandparents are rolling in their graves from shame, that this is the once mighty country they fought wars to defend.
It wasn't optional. My job closed. My school closed. My government office closed.
Everything closed but Dunkin Donuts, because... well, read it:
Wow - you felt like this was the right time to beat the "tort reform" horse?
Dead civilians, dead cops, and you pulled that hoary old saw out of your trove of political hobbyhorses?
By the way - you can let it go.
Visit China or Mexico or India. The courts have no power over the rich in those places, and safety measures are considered a foreign luxury. If while at work on the assembly line, you lose your hand en la Máquina then there's no system at work to tell anyone it should have had a simple safety feature to keep your hand out - you were the careless one, after all - so you just go on the street to beg with your other hand, with the crowd of other one-handed people. Your life is worth less than the little money and effort a bit of safety engineering would cost, in those places.
Oh, for the millions of people it benefits, a small percentage of people abuse it - just like health insurance, taking fake sick days at work, the welfare system, the military procurement system, and every other human system ever invented, except at least in the case of torts, you have to fool both a judge and a jury to do it. It's actually one of the least abusable systems we have. If only everything else worked that way.
And yet, propagandists will try to convince you to be riled up over someone who got a jury award in a courtroom because they want to distract you from a banker who got a bonus on a bailed out bank, or bribery in congress, or a drug company who thinks quality control is a big government intrusion onto their profits.
Even that lady who got millions for spilling McDonalds coffee on herself... didn't get millions for spilling coffee on herself. She got $640k, in the end, because McDonalds decided to serve coffee 40 degrees hotter than everyone else, and when it spilled on her lap, she suffered horrific agony, massive burns on her vagina, needed skin grafts, and her medical treatments continued for two years. McDonalds already knew they were injuring hundreds of people like her, and even paid out up to half a million in the past in settlements, but they couldn't be bothered to tell people to turn down the knob in the coffee makers to where everyone else sets it. And the manager of that particular location was a douche, and decided "no one should get money for spilling coffee." Well, if you make it hot enough, you do injure people, to the point where it shocks the conscience. (reference) Amazingly after this case the knobs got turned down and the coffee went to normal temperature and everyone stopped getting hurt.
This is why I say you can let it go. Get outraged about legal bribery (Citizens United, etc), bank bailouts and billions of military budget dollars wasted and lost that was supposed to go support our troops. If you really hold on to tort reform so much that it seems relevant in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, go live in one of the many earthly paradises that has no tort, and see for yourself what it's like.
What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
