No doubt planned by a guy with a cat in his lap, who likes to say "eeexcellent" a lot.

There was nothing far-fetched about the idea that the government was dong metadata analysis, or working with large corporations to access their data. Both of those things were pretty much an open "secret" well before Snowden leaked anything; he merely provided greater detail about the extent of those operations, and brought that information into the public consciousness.

Besides which, if your thought process goes along the lines of "these far-fetched things have happened, therefore all these other far-fetched things are probably true" .... you are not a rational person. People who think that way end up believing every goddamn conspiracy theory under the sun.

Oh, irony.

See, a rational person would have looked at what's going and concluded that the NSA's position is "of course you're more likely to be an extremist" rather than "of course you must be an extremist". But self-styled "free-thinkers" such as yourself always seem to tend toward these extreme, paranoid views that barely resemble the actual situation. It's almost as if you tended towards extremism or something.

Read my sig, then try again. Thanks.

I once saw a platoon of soldiers fire ~600 rounds on a crowd of protesters who threw an egg. The first guy to fire thought it was a grenade. The rest followed suit. Luckily it was a training exercise ... but in real life shit goes sideways all the time, too. If you think you're any better, you couldn't be more wrong. If you had been there manning the perimeter, you would have fired right along with the rest.

We train hard to reduce the chances of shit like this happening in a real scenario, but no amount of training can completely eliminate it. And when you have millions of cops engaging daily in violent interactions ... it's a miracle that these kinds of fiascoes happen as rarely as they do. The only reason people find it exceptional is because youtoube is full of videos of cops behaving badly, and you can watch 50 of them in an afternoon. If you actually had to view them in proportion to normal, everyday interactions, you'd be sitting there all year. People just don't understand large numbers and selection bias.

Yes, that's quite possible, if unlikely. Thanks for being one of the fee reasonable commenters.

They ended up inside the house. The hit rate is actually quite good. Take it from me. On the range I get every round in the bullseye. In a kinetic situation I'm lucky if I get 1 out of 4 on target. And I'm a guy who has better training than the police.

Civvies seem to expect every cop to be trained to special-forces standards. That expectation is ... unrealistic, to say the least.

No, I weigh the evidence based on the most likely scenario. Never met a cop who would blow away grandma for no reason. If you can introduce me to some, I may change my mind.

Come again? I think these kinds of statements are why the [citation needed] tag was invented.

Spoken like someone who's never been in a firefight. 10% is actually well above what I would expect.

I've seen lots of friends get slammed into a brick wall (or concrete floors) by the cops. Without fail it happened because they were drunk and belligerent and begging for a beating. If the cops hadn't gotten them first, some other guy at the bar would have fucked them up and left them far worse off than just a few bruises and having to go to court. Yet, again without fail, they all claim they were the innocent victims of police brutality.

There are certainly cases where police misbehave, and they should be held accountable for that. But the cases where idiots convince themselves that they were innocent victims of police brutality are far, FAR more common. You'll forgive me if I lump you into the latter category based on the odds.

There's definitely plenty of room for questioning police actions, but when you find yourself suggesting that they executed a grandmother in cold blood and then made it appear that she fired first ... you've probably gone a bit past the point of "reasonable questioning" and strayed into "fuck the pigs" land.

Is there so little happening in the world right now that the best "story" you can come up with is a guy with obvious mental issues claiming police made him post Facebook comments?

They might the whole internet.

Not believing in unicorns means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without unicorns.

Depends on your needs. In Canada I tend to go with Koodo mobile; pay $15 for the month as a base charge, then buy however much data or voice I'll need. I conserve my data usage so 1 gig of 4G data can cost me for 4-5 months. And both data and voice with them are "Canada wide", so no roaming or long distance charges, plus they never expire. I had my phone with them for a full year, and on average it's cost me about $25 / month, total.

In the US, on the other hand, I tend to shell out the $60 per month so I can have unlimited data and calling. Unfortunately you're right about Canada not really having any decent offerings for "unlimited use".

You can walk into any cellphone repair shop and have them punch your existing sim to a nano.

Kinda. But he could just as easily have written it as a VB Script. More easily, actually, since he was working on windows and ended up having to write Excel VBA for it later anyway.

Profit bad. Trolling good!

I received a CO's commendation for writing a website. Felt rather silly. But I had to write the damn thing in classic ASP so I guess you could say the award was hard-earned.