The USPTO isn't funded by campaign contributions, it's funded by patent application fees. Much easier to follow the money than assume ulterior motive being applied in a more roundabout way.

You've shown negligence, not malice. To me this is clearly negligent homocide. I see no evidence of murder (intentional homocide) much less malice aforethought. This doesn't mean they aren't there, but you haven't even started to make that case.

No. The only way to hope to (re-?)establish order and honor in the police is to hold them to the very laws they are expected to enforce. If there are no consequences when they disobey the laws, then they will continue to become more arbitrary, dishonorable, an untrustworthy.

For that matter, they should be held to a higher standard. A police officer should be held more stringently to obedience to the law than a normal citizen, and the punishment should be harsher (though not by too much) when they break the laws.

That they are not is quite clear, so their powers should be reduced, because they have been repeatedly shown to not be trusted with the ones that they have. For this reason I am in favor of requiring a camera that they cannot disable to be upon them at all times, and that malfunction of the camera should mean that they are not paid for that period AND that an independent investigation of the case is launched. It should record sound as well as video, and should be immediatedly transmitted to a secure read-only cache. Also, they should be on leave without pay from the instant the camera is disabled until it is repaired.
This is clearly an onerous requirement, and if the police had been shown to be at all trustworthy I wouldn't consider anything this strict. They have, however, shown that they cannot be so trusted.

Also, any action that they take while the camera is known to be non-operational and they are in uniform should be considered taken "under the cloak of authority", i.e., if they commit a crime, there is an additional penalty because they are fraudulently claiming to represent the law. Because of this the camera should be equipped with a soft beep that plays intermittently while it is operational, and a louder chirp that plays intermittently (once every 2 sec.?) while it is non-functional. Perhaps the chirp could encode the camera id, so that others recording in the area would have information as to which one.

OK, then *I'll* say that the supervisor who said that was legal superior and ordered police to follow it should be charged with ... I want "conspiracy to commit manslaughter", but I don't think that's possible, so I'd settle for malfeasance. And I don't think that excuses the officer from negligent homocide....unless you want to argue that he did it intentionally.

The fact that this is a part of a pattern of behavior means that I don't think he should be exonerated even if the evidence were to show that in this particular case the bicyclist *did* swerve out in front of him.

Imagined? I doubt that. From what I read in the summary it sounded like they were pissed off when their old programs couldn't read the new file format. To me that sounds fair. I don't think very highly of breaking backwards compatibility. It's occasionally necessary, but extremely more rarely than it is done. Usually it seems a strategy to force a purchase of new versions. And to me that sounds like abuse of a dominant market position. (I'd say abuse of monopoly, but somebody always thinks that means there aren't any competitors.)

No, it is still the lowest forms of argumentation, not because of the factuality of the ties of a speaker with the technology or industry they are defending, but because they attack the speaker instead of the arguments they present

But the son was not presenting an argument. He was putting words in his dead father's mouth.

In any case, whatever he meant, it was a rhetoric statement, torn completely out of context and expressing a personal sentiment, not the official stance of the atomic energy program.

At least you're tacitly admitting that saving consumers money was never part of the nuclear fission story.

Sometimes an accident is just an accident. Sometimes there's just not enough evidence to determine who (if anyone) is at fault. Sometimes you may suspect the driver was doing something other than driving, but you can't prove it.

However, generally if you hit someone after drifting out of your lane, you'll be charged.

Yep, actually. He is exempted from the law that makes typing while driving negligenmce per se.

All that particular law means is that if anyone other than a cop is typing while driving, no further discussion is required, it *IS* negligent.

Absent that law, the cop is still required to drive with due care. We cannot take his typing while driving as necessarily being negligent but we CAN take swerving into the bike lane and running someone over as evidence of negligence.

Just because there's no specific law against popping corn while driving doesn't mean you wouldn't get charged with negligence if you did it (somehow).

I believe the industry prefers 'venting with flame'.

If the Passenger Pigeon has been extinct for this long, it's safe to say that ecosystems have adjusted to their demise. Let's not see what the consequences of re-introducing them are.

AFAIK there wasn't any dramatic changes when the PP went extinct, so whatever function they had, some other species took over - in engineering terms, the ecosystem switched to using Backup Pigeon System. If so, then re-introducing Passenger Pigeon is analogous to getting primary system back online, which is a good thing both because it re-introduces a layer of redundancy, as well as allows the ecosystem to return to the balance its species have evolved into (and haven't have time to evolve out of), thus giving much-needed stress reduction on a system already facing enough challenges.

And since that person is apparently now dead, how can they just somehow arbitrarily decide that charges should be dropped?

Because dead men tell no tales. Which rises a question of what incentive does any officer have to ensure that the merely wounded survive? Delay calling help a little and there won't be any confusion over conflicting testimonies.

Ultimately he is the only one who can determine if the environment is safe for him to operate that computer and drive. He failed. It cost a life. He needs to pay a price for that.

Alternatively, we could decide that the blame resides partially - probably mostly - on the police department and current social climate as a whole. After all, the latter has all but declared police to be above law or even the very concept of accountability, while the former certainly took advantage of it. People planted into a poisonous cultural atmosphere cannot help but internalize and treat it as a baseline for what's "normal", and can individually only decide whether they're better or worse than that. And assigning all the blame on that individual lets the system that spawned them off the hook, thus ensuring the same thing will happen again, and again, and again.

we're generally more willing to believe a tragedy was accidental and not the result of systemic problems between the police and a particular community when it was accidental and not the result of systemic problems between the police and a particular community.

The problem is, this death was a result of systemic problems between the police and society at large, specifically the police thinking - correctly, it appears - that they're above the law.

This also goes to show why you should not tolerate such problems even when you are currently not affected: eventually they'll grow to the point where even you aren't safe.

Accusations of shilling are among the lowest form of argumentation.

Unless you happen to be identifying an actual shill.

The person who is attributed with explaining away his father's quote is not some pseudonymous person on the internet. He actually happens to be an nuclear industry shill. Calling him such is not a "form of argumentation". It is simply informative.

Now calling you a shill would be a low form of argumentation. I would never do that without evidence. So keep going. Before you're done, who knows?