You mean like when NYC cops "professionally" trash the 4th Amendment rights of hundreds of thousands of people by feeling them up for no reason?

Who do you guys even think you're kidding here? When was the last time you heard of a LEO held in contempt of court for perjury or falsifying evidence, much less charged by a DA, much less convicted? The cops that murdered Kelly Thomas by bashing his head in as he screamed for help from his father were just let off scott free. You have to have something as egregious as a cop shooting a handcuffed man lying facedown on the pavement, on fucking video, before they serve time. And even then, they serve less time than a football player who shot himself in the leg.

So again, who do you even think you're kidding here, Slick? Try and tell us with a straight face that if you give a group of people a huge amount of authority, with next to zero accountability, that their authority wont be abused on a constant basis.

I'll ignore your "all cops are perjurers" tirade.

You mean you're going to ignore anything that interferes with your worship of authority. When cops dare to actually enforce the law against fellow cops, they get stalked and harassed.

It's almost like both sides benefit from there being a camera on them.

It's almost like you don't know that Cops has been on the air for 25 years. Whether the person is innocent and being hassled by power tripping cops, or an actual "bad guy" worrying about going to jail for the meth stashed in his trunk, the very last thing on their minds is whether or not they're on video.

I suspect you should have a good chat with Kelly Thomas and revise your storyline. Or read up on LEO departments stealing millions from people not convicted of any crime via "asset forfeiture". Or how hundreds of thousands of mostly black and brown men are stopped in NYC without probable suspicion under "stop and frisk".

A lot of the good (from the police perspective) is that people don't act like jerks when they're clearly being filmed.

Everyone knows that cops have had video cameras mounted in their cars, for decades. Neat how you skipped the parts of the summary talking about how police violence and complaints have dropped dramatically where these cameras have been used.

Almost like it's the cops who are the real jerks here. Interesting.

but the overwhelming majority of police are good people with a genuine desire to do good in the world -- and they're not out there looking to bust heads and turn off their cameras...especially in a world where every last person on a planet has their own camera and might catch it

The problem with the "aww, it's just a few bad apples" canard is that one bad one rots the whole barrel. When all your "good cops" are willing to commit perjury to cover up for the "bad apples", there are no good cops.

Except for when they weren't doing just fine and were teetering on bankruptcy. So how wildly popular and successful were they when Bill Gates had to loan them several hundred million to keep them as a competition?

Except those are both Zombie Urban Legends. At the time Apple had 10 times the size of Bill's investment in liquid assets, so they weren't even close to even thinking about bankruptcy.

You mean considering how many slashdot geeks hate Apple don't you? The general public likes Apple.

That sounds like fanboy talk to me.

Sounds like impotent Hateboi rage to me.

Corporate executives, government employees, and any other high-powered types who are already tied deeply to Blackberry might not care to pay extra for a feature they'll never use.

As if you look sideways at new TV's with Hulu or Netflix integration, Hateboi.

and not driving down private driveways insisting "this is the best route to Roundtop Mountain!!!"

As the other guy pointed out, all nat-nav systems have errors, Hateboi. Apple's only mistake was not pulling a Google and calling their product "beta" for oh, I don't know, half a decade or more. Then all sins are forgiven!

Microsoft also sells millions of products a year and we hate them too.

But Apple isn't in the habit of releasing actively user-hostile shit like Windows 8 while being a convicted monopolist.

It was all demoed to Jobs in 1999 as it happens.

Ahem. Development started 12 years before 1999.

The people who keep insisting that Apple did everything first essentially know nothing about the history of mobile devices.

You were saying?

You mean an irrelevant red herring. Wikileaks cables have nothing to do with polling the population of Crimea, which is 60% ethnic Russian. As for Putin's meddling, that's a perfectly valid subject, so long as you aren't throwing stones in a glass house. That's the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, wife of PNAC neocon Robert Kagan, openly bragging about how the U.S. has spent $5 billion supporting "pro-west" capitalists to give Ukraine "the future it deserves".

In front of banners for fucking Chevron and ExxonMobile. A scene that you would have laughed out of the room if you were Tom Clancy's editor for one of his ghostwritten books.

How about Germany? Japan?

USA Today reports, "Ukraine may have to arm itself with nuclear weapons if the United States and other world powers refuse to enforce a security pact that obligates them to reverse the Moscow-backed takeover of Crimea, a member of the Ukraine parliament told USA TODAY.

Slashdot, just because the rest of the media refused to lean any lessons from the invasion of Iraq doesn't mean you have to follow along with crap like "here's what some officials say but we wont say how they're full of shit". Russia has an existing treaty with Ukraine for a military base in the Crimea. They have no more "invaded" than the U.S. has invaded more than half the countries on the planet, since most if not all of our 900+ military bases were established with the same sort of diplomatic agreements that Russia has for it's base in Sevastopol.

Furthermore, I'd like to see American Exceptionalist coup supporters say with a straight face that the "interm" government of Ukraine has legitimacy based on popular will, but that the Russian supporting, ethnic Russian majority of Crimea has no right to self-determination. Based on popular will.

but the main argument I've seen opposing minimum wage increase is that it also increases unemployment

Sure, you've seen those arguments. The problem is that they are from lying greedy shitbags spouting naked propaganda. First, because every business already hires the minimum number of workers necessary to do the job. Second, because a higher minimum wage means far more money going into local economies, which reduces unemployment. Third, because they've been wiping away the same crocodile tears every since the minimum wage was first enacted and every time it's been raised - without their storyline coming true. Finally, you pay more in taxes for food stamps and Medicaid so said shitbags can continue to pay their workers poverty level wages.

You don't seem to be very in touch with reality, though.

I could say I find your lack of self-awareness disturbing, but it's become rather predictable.

Talk about setting a low bar.

Talk about missing the (obvious) point.

was NEVER a shining beacon of rationality and human freedom

You mean the PR campaign when the Soviet Union was still around? The U.S. has never ever ever evah been a beacon for anything but capitalist scumfuckery. Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

How about you name one country that was NOT founded in that manner. Hm?

How about you use your brain for two seconds, or at least read the responses already in the thread, so you don't embarrass yourself. Hm?

You start forcing people to accept injections of anything into their bodies and you lose the moral basis for that argument.

Proportion. 9 months of carrying a fetus plus 18 years of child care (unless you give the baby up for adoption) vs a 5 second needle stick and 10 hours of a sore arm. And if a woman decides to have an abortion after a condom breaks, that's not going to give her roommate the measles.