Well, the don't want camera's off. I'm sure they would be very adamant about that. Just, they want control of the cameras. CCTV, DashCams, even the new "Officer Safety Cameras" that they want to start deploying in PA, are all controlled by the police. All footage is recorded and managed by the same departments that record it. So they are monitored themselves. Not a bad concept, ie Internal Affairs, except for the fact that there is _no_ oversight of this. Up until now, this has not been too greatly called into question, as citizens have taken their own video and stills and provided third party documentation. So if a police officer steps across the line, that footage can find it's way to the media/youtube.

As a local editorial said: "Ever try to subpoena the footage from a DashCam? We have 8 times. Of those eight attempts, 3 actual subpoenas were issued. However, in each instance the tape had been 'erased' for reuse. However, in one of the instances, the police were able to produce a DashCam tape that was 3 and a half years old as evidence. When questioned as why they had a 3 and a half year old tape but could not produce a 2 month old record, their response was 'the older tape had been misplaced and as such was not erased on schedule'."

On another note, how do you know if you took a picture of an undercover cop? Shout out "Everyone who is an undercover cop, raise your hand?" Yup, that should work.

I watched the short and long versions of the video also.

My problem with the whole thing is that they didn't have a properly identified target. Shoulder straps != weapons. At two points there could have been a weapon, but they never fully identified. First with the subject who appeared to have a long object with a shoulder strap hanging down from his right shoulder before the attack. Second, when the photog stuck his lens around the building. Either way, get clarification. The IP didn't all have uniforms at the time this was shot.

The children came in when the van came up. This is another problem, as it was well known (at least among the Marines) that people where using regular vans as ambulances as most had already been shot-up by this point. I'm not sure of the intelligence of bringing them to "work", and don't blame the gunner for firing on them. I blame him for firing without a properly identified target.

Regardless of their being journalists or not, you properly identify your target before you open fire. When I did my time, it was hammered into us. You are 110% sure of your target, otherwise you can get your buddies killed. The real issue was the light crews not identifying their targets before firing. If you listen to their radio traffic, you can hear the mis-reports going out to command. Where was the RPG that they supposedly had that justified firing on the van? I never saw one a) before the guy was hit, b) get unloaded from the van or c)magically show up. If I remember correctly, at one point they were reporting on something that they couldn't see due to a wall being in the way.

What made it worse was the stonewalling about it. But if you remember the time this happened, the Army was getting hammered about a lot of "friendly-fire" incidents. It's what you get when you put a bunch of guys in a high stress environment without proper support, backup or oversight. Doing things "on the cheap" gets people killed. Innocent people.

But then again, how many things the are "attributed" to him where actually generated by him? How much of what he signs and says was actually generated by a staffer somewhere? How hard would it be to either pull a Radar O'Reily on him, or just generate a list of sites for him to sign? Wasn't that one of the supposed issues of the Iran-Contra affair? Staffers convincing people they were working in the President's name? If they were smart, they would just generate an oversight committee to handle this. Then the executive branch would confirm with that committee prior to enabling any blackout and then retain the 48 hour disclosure rule for the rest of the Senate/Congress. With today communications abilities, if they can not contact 5 or 6 congress men and senators in a DDoS storm, we have other problems to worry about.

I would agree, except that the Ambassador of a Country is considered under international law to be the personification of that Country. So if you wanted to play semantics, then yes, they were members of the UN on behalf of their country. I agree that it doesn't make logical sense, but show me any set of man made laws that do.

However, I think the problem with this is more aimed at Interpol employees. For example investigators seconded to Interpol by their host countries or directly employees by Interpol. However a number of nations have Legal Attaches at their embassies with a Diplomatic Immunity, so it is kinda silly. Also, if you check out the State Departments page about this, it breaks it down as to who on the staff would even get this protection.

I gather he is blaming the political idiot, and not the guy who actually put up the light. I wouldn't imagine that the physical installer would have the ability to choose not install an option like a heating element. Even if they did, by this point we would have seen them arrested and sued by those very same politicians you mentioned earlier.

From what I took away from the article, he was complaining about bandwidth and LOS to the server. A better analogy would be going to DOT to complain about a bridge and them asking for your car keys to test it. Then 'jacking it when you say no.

Having been on both sides of this, like just about every other slashdoter, I take the whole situation with a bit of salt. I have seen colo-techs access machines they had no business in, but have also had calls from customers who claim that our network went down when we don't have anything on our logs. There is a right way to handle this that just about everyone has mentioned, (send them the logs or move to a different colo). However in the heat of the moment, who knows what happened.

Regardless, if he feels that he has a large enough physical security problem to warrant the encryption to protect it from staff, leave! It sets a bad precedent on both sides and just sows seeds for future problems. He will always see them as invasive bastards, and they will see him as a righteous PITA. Better to just move on.

I was taught as a young child that:

Science Fantasy said the sky was purple.
Science Fiction said the sky was purple, but gave a scientifically plausible reason as to why.

I know it's simplistic, but it's been my litmus test thus far. My dad originally attributed the distinction to a John W Campbell quote, but I have never been able to find it published anywhere.

I love how quickly every intelligent discussion quickly dissolves into personal insults. Regardless of topic. (Insert Deity here) bless /.!

Civil War broke down to one group telling another group what to do. North said we don't like slavery. South said we do. A president was elected on an anti-slavery platform. The South said your not gonna tell us what to do, right? When Lincoln didn't say yes, they decided that they didn't like the Feds telling them what to do and didn't feel they had any power to stop it. (There's a lot more here then is slashdot worthy, but remember how we pick our congressmen.) So the South said "Later" and broke away. There was a Southern slogan that said they they traded a single tyrant 3000 miles away for a nest of the only 300 away, or words to that effect. This is the Civil War in a nutshell.

The issue didn't have to be slavery, it could have been a religious or gender issue too. Just slavery was that era's social hot button. Imagine in the last election if all the "Red States" said "Later" and tried to secede. Remember the Union was less then 100 years old and people were still trying to figure it out as they went. Did a state have the power to seceded after the fact? Slavery was the catalyst, but the issue was deeper, more culture. The Civil War would have happened even if the South accepted Lincoln and rolled over on slavery. Then who knows what we would be having this argument over, a women's right to vote?

To continue the States right is a euphemism theme, it is also a euphemism for: abortion, identification, drinking, ability to control local militia, and definition of citizenship. These are all issues that have been tied to the States Rights banner. The Civil war did not fully end the question of how far Federal Rights can trump local right, just it showed that armed rebellion at the State level didn't work.

As for agriculture, the history of a repressed mass as forced manpower is older then the reverse. Historically we have called them many names, but the position is the same, the Russian serfs, the Irish tenet farmer, the whole "feudal" system, the Chinese peasant classes. Until mechanization,and not even then, the use of forced labor has always seemed "easier". Hell, in some parts of the world it is still practiced, just the name changed so it doesn't offend people.

Northern textile factories did use slave labor up until the passing of the 22nd amendment. the EP only outlawed slavery down south, except for two states (Tennessee and Texas I think). The North made wide use of indentured servants and indebted peoples, usually children who had to "re-emburse the company" for their food and clothes. Northerners where no better at human rights then the South, just their forms of slavery didn't rely on a skin color, just an economic status.

Huh? If you mean on an industrial scale, their lack of factories had to do with climate and land fertility. They had a longer growing season, so it was more economically viable to grow then to manufacture. The South was part of the Global Market before anyone else knew what it was. The goods the produced where readily trade-able on the world market and in demand. Also, climate control was an issue, as earlier factories used basic machinery which was influenced by weather much more so than today. How is that protectionist? (Honest question)

I do have to agree with you on one thing, I also find those who blindly worship a flag scary, either Confederate, Nazi, or American. It is one thing as an honorarium to the dead (ie flying a Confederate flag in a civil war graveyard to symbolize the soldiers who fought under that flag), another to idolize without question the government behind it. People aren't perfect, what makes us think a group of them can be.

Oh and BTW: I am a Northerner who had family who served in the Connecticut militias, two of whom never came home. Oh, and my great, great grandfather stories.. they were of Bella Wood and the trenches. I might feel old, but I'm not that old.

True for military units, as State militias accounted for most of the land forces available to the Union. Hence the 3rd Connecticut or the 2nd Virginian. Army's were expensive, and since we as a country had a tradition of citizen soldiers, we continued the concept even to this day. Except when we federalize we tend to remove state designators.

What I was referring to was general citizens while abroad. If you read back through period letters and books, Southerners abroad would usually say "I'm a Virginian" or such when asked from whence they came. Northerners would say "American" or I'm from the US". Sorry for the confusion on that point.

I disagree here. I think too much weight is getting assigned to this. If I tell you that to be part of my club you have to can not wear a silly hat, you say no and start your own club, might you not specifically allow by your bylaws the ability to wear a silly hat? I think it came more down to a legislative "See, you can't tell us what to do" more then any overriding love of slavery. It was important to them, but not that much. They openly agreed with the US Constitution, just not the Federal goverments level of power.

I can't remember the title or author, but in an old history class they made us read a book by a professor from UoG that speculated that slavery only had another generation or 2 to live due to economics and mechanization. But he did say that a civil war was inevitable due to social and political considerations.

Again, I'm sorry to disagree. Protectionism didn't help as much as the outright cost of shipping did. Local good where cheaper then shipping. Nowadays, we have the inverse problem with foreign goods, like things from China. In today's environment, I would agree with you except for the resources. Look at Japan in WWII, they were protectionist, but lacked the resources to keep up production.

Civil War was about States rights vs the rights of the Federal Government. Slavery just was the right that was most publicly in contention. In the North, it made an easy target; "See the evil slave holders!" In the South, from most historical accounts, it was more a of "Leave us alone. It's our decision." These were issues that went all the way back to the Revolutionary War and the Articles of Confederation. It's no accident that the South took the name of Confederate States of America. They wanted a strong State government with a weaker Federal one. The North favored a stronger Federal and a weaker State.

Even if you look at how people identified themselves abroad back then. Northerners usually referred to them selves as Americans or from the US. Southerners usually referred to them selves as coming from a state, like "I am a Virginian". This was a social dynamic that would have come to a head eventually. Mass media and Lincoln just brought it to a head.

Anyway the anti-slavery acts (commonly called the Emancipation Proclamation) wasn't created till after the war already started. If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that it may have been done, not for the betterment of man, but to incite revolt in the CSA. If the slaves thought that hindering the CSA would by them freedom, then they might rise up against their government. Fighting an uprising at home not only saps troops from the front to fight it, but also has a sizable effect on troops moral.

The economics was also a lot more complex then that. Prior to mechanization, manpower was the only way to get things farmed or done. The south needed masses of manpower, and slavery was the cheapest way to do it. Freeing the slaves was seen as depriving those slave owners of their economic livelihood. To the mechanized north, the need for slave labor wasn't a high, so it ddn't have the same economic weight.

Protectionism didn't win the war for the North any more then free trade or workers rights made the South lose it. What wins wars historically is three things, beans, boots, and bullets. Or to put it more succinctly, resources. The South lost because it needed to import most of it finished goods. The North didn't. The only goods it needed where some raw materials, but those were available to them after the opening months of the war because of their ability to create finished goods. And that same ability allowed them to cut off the South from their trading partners.

If I may paraphrase: If you don't think that resources are important to fighting and winning a war, just ask Germany. Either Nazi or Imperial.

I think you hit on it there. Windows, it's self, has gotten better over the years. It's buggy, but I've never seen an OS that isn't. From my years of working on customer walk in and corporate contract machines, Windows "buggyness" usually comes from 3 vectors (in order of severity): flaky drivers, flaky software, or PEBKAC. Mac has less "crashes" only due to a controlled hardware pool. Start attaching lost of 3rd party hardware and see how your mileage goes. Linux has the advantage of having mostly open drivers, so you get geeks tinkering and putting back. But you still need those geeks to have the hardware and time to fix it. Windows does not have those advantages, because of the market they want to participate in. If this bugs you that much, use another OS. God knows there are plenty. No OS is perfect. I personally use 3 on a daily basis (XP, OS X, Ubuntu Linux). And yes, they all crash occasionally.

Actually, you can return boxed software, mostly. During my stint as a a one man software business, I retained a lawyer to write my EULA and they stated that under Federal Law, you have to offer the ability to return the product as you are not disclosing all the requirements of ownership until the EULA is displayed. Otherwise it was an illegal contract and unenforceable. The Feds got involved due to it most likely being interstate commerce. Here's the caviat, the local store doesn't have to take it back, as that's controlled by local laws and consumer rights. I only would HAVE to accept it from the store, unless you bought from me directly. However most states have laws concernign this, and they are fairly pro-consumer, from what I've seen. It actually spelled this out in a M$ software sale partner agreement I got to see later when the store I worked from became a partner. "Guidelines for the Acceptance of Declined Software and Requirements of Funds Distribution." After reading it, basically if you wanna be a partner and sell our stuff, you have to accept EULA declined returns.