bigbywolfe

"Idiocracy". Not sure if it was comedy or horror.

Please don't lower yourself to putting words in my mouth. My post didn't go anywhere near there. We're done here.

I am wondering if there is anyone but me, that is divided on the 2 incidents.
 
1)  Michael Brown.  As near as I can tell for me, while I cant say without a reasonable doubt Wilson is innocent.  I can most certainly am much. much closer to that, than the opposite.  Dorian Johnson=liar, for me.  While, the prosecutor's handling was shameful, that is a seperate issue, and probably needs to be dealt with.  An unfortunate implication for me, that keeps popping up in my head; Darren Wilson SHOULD have let Michael Brown kill him.  Like it or not, that is the implication the protesters lead me to (right or wrong) and that rankles me.  (And I am not a fan, of "well they should have indicted him anyway", if you have little chance of convicting a guy, proceeding anyway, just because you are afraid of some external politicalreaction, putting a likely not guilty person's life on hold, for your own benefit,  strikes me as worse than evil)
 
2) Eric Garner. I come to a different conclusion.  I have to ignore the idiocy of the "Democratic Republic" of NYC's policy on cigarettes, which without it this situation wouldnt have occurred. So, ignoring that,  Looking at the video, it looks like Garner is gesturing with his hands while talking and some idiot cop panics and goes choke-crazy, because well this guy is rather large.  At that point of course, Eric Garner probably struggled, due to the fact that most people when unable to breathe, will struggle to do whatever they can to try to breathe, aka live.
 
If anything with me, these incidents prove that the local prosecutors arent the ones who should be in charge of these things.  Humans are susceptible to conflict of interest.  So, outsiders are needed to see these incidents clearly.
 
And it has irked me where the public for so long made such an issue of Michael Brown, but completely ignored a similar case with greater chance of legitimacy (to me).   They should have focused on both, to be sure.  But, both sides of the media decided to put all the eggs in one basket.

I need to stop reading the comments on Yahoo articles.

Monstrorum Historia

"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, 
Greenest state in the land of the free. 
Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree, 
Killed him a bear when he was only three. 
 
Davy, Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier."

I just read an interview that said they got permission to make Skye who she is at the very beginning, so I doubt the all normals team was ever a mandate. Her powers could still be fairly low-key, though, keeping the show at street level more or less.

Just reading this made my face hurt. And I haven't shaved in years.

Guess there were some when I took my FORTRAN class in 1976; that was a general engineering techniques course, not a computer science course.
 
No, what's daunting about all that listing she's got is that at best it's FORTRAN 4. Probably a hell of a lot of assembly in there too. A huge amount of assembly.
 
And not to be overlooked here: there was the code that brought back Apollo 13. When the Service Module blew out, you didn't know the magnitude or direction of the impulse imparted by the explosion, so you no longer knew what trajectory the spacecraft had. They had to track the spacecraft and solve for the new orbit. And only after that, they had to compute the burns needed to bring the crippled spacecraft back. And you had to do that by experiment, making guesses at what to do and see the predicted trajectory. The three-body orbital mechanics problem does not have an algebraic solution; it can only be solved numerically.
 
I read in a source I trusted, but I have never been able to verify, that to solve all the orbital mechanics equations in the terribly limited amount of available time, NASA got the use of a quarter of the computing capacity of North America. Nowadays, the computing requirements don't bear mentioning. At the time, it was heroic ... no, superheroic.

This young lady (31 at the time of this photo in 1969) is Margaret Hamilton, standing beside her code. She was the lead software engineer for Project: Apollo. 

I really find it hard to believe that the general attitude of police in the US is either "let's go kill us a brown!". Or "let's see how many crimes we can commit without punching a hole in the Blue Wall?"
 
The opinion of some, both here and elsewhere seems to be that the vast majority of police officers are criminals if not murderous monsters.
 
I really think some diaphragmatic breathing is in order.
 
It is not like all of us live in New Orleans, or, well, maybe Cleveland. Or as an even better example, Mexico or Rio.
 
If there were active police death squads throughout the country, there would be a hell of a lot more dead people.

And that statement is just as wrong in this case. I am not saying that they acted appropriately. I am saying that confirming if the gun is real before drawing their own would be stupid and irresponsible. I'm not saying they did right, in fact I have given specific examples of what they did wrong without falling back on name calling and rhetoric, but claiming, even if they had approached the situation correctly, slowly, and from a distance, that they shouldn't have drawn their weapons at all is simply wrong.  

Per the dispatcher actually.  I'm still looking for anything that claims they were there for 5 minutes before shooting.  I can't find that claim anywhere.  It was nearly 5 minutes after the shooting before the boy got medical attention, which is pathetic since the cops should have immediately administered first aid after securing the scene.

That video looks like it's censoring the actual shooting. I saw the uncensored footage, and it did look like his hand went for his waistband.
 
EDIT: The second video matches the one I saw. Just before he goes down, he reaches for his waistband.
 
IMO, they came in hard and fast, probably shouting at the kid to drop the gun before they got out of the car, the kid got confused by the noise and lights and sudden appearance of the vehicle, and reached for the gun to show them it's not real. The "shock and awe" tactic they used wasn't really called for (IMO) when the kid was just sitting there quietly, and I think it led to him getting confused and doing exactly the wrong thing to do when an amped up, amateurish cop shows up.
 
The problem here is that those officers weren't in control of their emotions. They got the call of a kid waving a gun around. Then they assumed that they were acting on good information, despite the fact that their training and past experiences should have shown them that eyewitnesses are unreliable at best. So, they went in with the intent of taking down some kid with a gun instead of the intent of finding out what the situation was. Even had they been right, it was foolish to make that approach with just one unit.
 
At the end of the day, the officers created the situation and shot a confused boy. However, I think criminal prosecution is highly unlikely. Shooting someone who is reaching for a gun isn't going to put any police officer in jail, regardless of their blunder of an approach to the situation. I sincerely hope that they are taken to the cleaners in civil court, to the extent that the city both screens and trains its officers better and that both their careers are permanently ended.

They claim they yelled "show us your hands".  If a cop tells someone to show their hands, and that person reaches for their waistband/pocket that person is going to get shot, especially if the cops were told before hand the person had a gun.

Again, I'm not backing the cops in this case, though I think the driver is much more at blame even though he wasn't the one that shot. 

Not at all. If someone is pointing a weapon at you or drawing a weapon, you simply shoot them. Doing otherwise would be foolish. That said, there are situations where someone is armed but not immediately threatening someone's life, and where police have been able to talk them down or take them down without killing them. But in general, if an officer's life is under immediate threat, there won't be any warnings.
 
Not supporting the officers in the case under discussion, mind you.

Last night my eldest (7) took all his remaining allowance and birthday money (~$40) and put it in an envelope to give to the church. He said, "The church needs it more than I do. It will help."
 
My wife and I were absolutely stunned. He's had his eyes on a big set of Legos for a while and was saving for that.

I love how everyone claims the Ferguson prosecuted didn't try hard enough, the people processing the  physical evidence were biased, the witnesses were scared to testify, yet they ignore the fact that most of the witnesses who made a big deal about the "execution" on TV were caught in lies or just disappeared after their few seconds of fame, yet the dozen or so witnesses that confirmed the cop's story were mostly black people from the same poor neighborhood. The reason they weren't thrown in the spotlight was twofold, one it wouldn't fit the race-baiting sound bites the media loves, and two, many of them are scared of being persecuted by their own community for simply telling the truth. So apparently everyone is lying except the people who were caught lying or gave hugely contradictory accounts.  

Yeah, sure.  That's totally plausible.  

When a cop engages in an activity that he is barred from doing because it causes suffocation and death then the victim complains of suffocation, he ought to do everything possible to confirm the guy's safety. But no, he ignored the reasonable pleas of a dying man. Why? Because the jerk and his jerk friends don't care out the safety of the citizenry, only with making sure people respect their authoritah! The police officer should have never done that, and now we have a dead man who may of committed the awful crime of selling some cigs.
 
The office got away with murder.
 
 
La Rose.

"It's not like any cheese I've ever seen." -Wallace

According to this online conversion tool http://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Hero/Conversions/Firearms/rw_conversion.htm (which is pretty well written in my opinion) the .577 Tyrannosaur would do 3d6+1K with 1 point of Piercing and a +4 Stun Multiplier.

I love how everyone claims the Ferguson prosecuted didn't try hard enough, the people processing the  physical evidence were biased, the witnesses were scared to testify, yet they ignore the fact that most of the witnesses who made a big deal about the "execution" on TV were caught in lies or just disappeared after their few seconds of fame, yet the dozen or so witnesses that confirmed the cop's story were mostly black people from the same poor neighborhood. The reason they weren't thrown in the spotlight was twofold, one it wouldn't fit the race-baiting sound bites the media loves, and two, many of them are scared of being persecuted by their own community for simply telling the truth. So apparently everyone is lying except the people who were caught lying or gave hugely contradictory accounts.  

Yeah, sure.  That's totally plausible.  

I love how everyone claims the Ferguson prosecuted didn't try hard enough, the people processing the  physical evidence were biased, the witnesses were scared to testify, yet they ignore the fact that most of the witnesses who made a big deal about the "execution" on TV were caught in lies or just disappeared after their few seconds of fame, yet the dozen or so witnesses that confirmed the cop's story were mostly black people from the same poor neighborhood. The reason they weren't thrown in the spotlight was twofold, one it wouldn't fit the race-baiting sound bites the media loves, and two, many of them are scared of being persecuted by their own community for simply telling the truth. So apparently everyone is lying except the people who were caught lying or gave hugely contradictory accounts.  

Yeah, sure.  That's totally plausible.  

Just as a point of order -- and a correction to what I said above -- the NYPD did bar choke-holds, but their definition of "choke-hold" is a hold that specifically stops breathing or the flow of blood to the brain. They did not ban holds to the neck which are not intended to stop breathing or blood-flow. The problem is, such holds can easily turn into a choke-hold during an altercation and in the heat of the moment the officer may not realize it in time -- or may be in fight-mode and not have the presence of mind to let up and adjust. Another problem is that such holds, with a struggling subject and multiple officers trying to subdue them, could easily result in serious spinal or neck injury, or a crushed trachea. Such techniques should not be used unless the officer had reason to fear for their life. In this case, not. I watched the video and the NYPD has a serious training problem. Its not just the tactics employed by the officers. They're technique was sloppy and they looked inept. One of the things officers need to be proficient at is -- drum roll please -- arresting people. 

Yep. When I say I'm not convinced of his guilt I certainly don't mean I'm convinced of his innocence. I simply don't have enough information for that. I don't have a huge problem with the outcome of this grand jury, though.