It seems the United States has managed to evolve the term "police state" into something new: in the traditional form the police are the enforcement arm of a political power. In the current United States, the police are seemingly beholden to no-one (I include district attorneys as part of that mechanism).
For lack of a better term, American police forces now operate largely 'extra-state'.
You could draw a parallel to a state overrun by terrorist groups, with a government that doesn't want to intervene for political reasons, and a public so terrorized out of its mind that it feels the safest thing to do is to not make eye contact.
> public so terrorized out of its mind that it feels the safest thing to do is to not make eye contact.
My goodness! I shuddered to note that this is not only very true but also almost unstoppable at the moment. Unless a miracle of unity comes by, that brings people together.
Acting so nonchalantly about it certainly doesn't help that fact. OP is right to get pissed off about it, it's an unbelievable injustice that is surpassed only by the magnitude of the failure of those in power who don't do anything about it.
This is a symptom of the ends-justify-the-means attitude that police departments around the US are fostering (along-side the holier-than-thou attitude), and one of the ways of showing them that it's unacceptable is by getting pissed off enough to do something about it.
It's a nasty little feedback loop. Law enforcement displays force, people who use words like "statist" increase their arsenals and their desire to use them against what they see as illegitimate government, law enforcement feels it needs more force, people use angrier rhetoric and buy more guns.
If you believe strongly that the government is an out-of-control terroristic undemocratic police state and We The People are divinely endowed with the right to bear arms against it (like so many people in this thread do), then you must recognize that an agent of that state would be taking an incredibly stupid risk by entering your home in a way that would give you an opportunity to shoot first.
Maybe you think that risk is the price of doing business with an unjust institution, but the officer serving a warrant against you probably doesn't.
There is just no truth to what you're saying at all, and it's hard for me to even know how to respond. I've written out several responses that I've deleted because your worldview seems so far removed from reality that I'm not sure how to address it.
If the police show up during the day and knock on the front door with a warrant at the house of the NRA-supporting, libertarian, "statist" terminology using person you allude to, he's not going to respond violently. He'll call a lawyer while reading the warrant, then maybe call the media if he thinks it will help. Please stop "othering" people who hold different views than you. Taking it to such an absurd extreme as to suggest that if someone supports the full bill of rights then they need to be treated as dangerous and dealt with like terrorists is just ridiculous.
If someone plans to murder a police officer, they probably don't really care whether the gun they use to do it is legally owned or not.
I think you're right, the US culture indeed favors these unfortunate developments. The 2nd amendment is a misguided idea.
I had an argument with Czech expat living in the US, who was a staunch libertarian. At one point he was "either I have my freedoms, or I will defend myself with the gun". I told him that there is no need for guns, we can also have a peaceful discussion and agree on compromise that everybody will hate. Couldn't explain value of that..
And Americans can change this culture. Respect to rights of others doesn't come from "natural rights" or "republic", but from cooperation among people. Respect to individuals doesn't come from having guns, but rather determination to face guns (or other problems) without having any.
(It doesn't mean that guns are never necessary. It only means that it's often much less hassle and blood to make opponent part of your in-group rather than have fight with him as your out-group.)
>So a level of force once reserved for hostage situations, bank robberies and active shooters is now being used on low-level drug offenders, people suspected of white-collar crimes, people who have unkempt property and to make sure the local bar is properly labeling its beer.
Now think about this - when the police go in a situation guns drawn when there isn't a reason to believe there would be a real threat to personal safety the THEY are being the aggressor and potentially escalating the situation. Which creates danger when there wouldnt otherwise be. Officers are supposed to protect the public, not threaten it. Eventually the police's relationship with the public degrades to a point that officer safety is now actually in much more jeopardy.
Police officers quest for safety also vastly increases the risks of unintentionally harming the people in the places they raid - people that are innocent until proven guilt, and people who are often not directly involved in the crime.
Most importantly it harms the respect and dignity of the society they are protecting. No non-threatening person should ever have AR-15s pointed at their heads, screamed at, their faces pushed into the ground, and handcuffed regardless of their potential criminality. Especially when the whole investigation is for non-violent crimes.
This hostility towards everyone generates more hostility and doesn't make any society more civilized and respectable - which is the over-arching intention of law and order.
Not that it helps at all, but if this is the same case, the police claimed the crib was positioned to block the door. So given a situation where the police thought they were after "evil" drug dealers, and they encountered something blocking the door, it's slightly less absurd sounding.
It's still utterly disgusting, from the drug laws down to the police themselves.
I know, right! I mean, there's already Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Imgur, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google+, email, MMS, LinkedIn, Myspace, and hosting one's own site. But we need more options to share blurry photos of backgrounds or mediocre desserts.
The article's point is that it needs several mutations to become airborne and that those mutations have a cost; so unless the benefit of becoming airborne outweighs the cost, it won't happen.
Bear in mind that the traditional method of dealing with Ebola was simply to shut down travel in/out of affected settlements until the disease ran its course. This isn't working as well this time for a variety of reasons (I'll guess increased urbanization, better transportation, and problems with public information -- e.g. distrust of governments telling people to do sensible things).
What's probably far more likely is that a less lethal mutation will displace it. A disease that kills and kills quickly is maladaptive -- that's why the Ebola reservoir is believed to be bats which can catch it but not suffer ill effects.
Cost simply isn't how it works, the mutations are completely random. It has no direction other than chance as to if it becomes airborne. People can talk about it but a strain this virulent going airborne would be a disaster.
Mutations are random, but to get a new "feature" you need many small mutations in the right direction. To accumulate the useful mutations you usually need that the intermediate mutations have some are useful alone. Most of the time these mutations have a side cost, so if the intermediate steps are not useful they are "discarded" because the non mutated members of the population outnumber the mutated population.
I think that most of us understand more about ostrich than about virus. Let's make a think experiment. How difficult is that ostrich become airborne? How many mutation they need? Is it possible? Is it dangerous?
I hope there is an ornithologist nearby, but I'll try:
* Stronger chest muscles
* More white meat in the chest muscles
* Longer wings
* Better feathers
* Lighter bones
* Shorter and lighter legs, to reduce weight
* Less brain? (less weight)
* Do you need some special brain areas to fly?
Ostrich is a case of neoteny ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny ), so many features can be possible changed at one. But it's a old case, so the genes for the features needed to fly are probably partially overwritten with garbage since a long time.
Costs are exactly how it works, the "randomness" of mutations notwithstanding. Becoming airborne is not inherently an advantage for ebola - if the costs outweigh the benefits the virus with said mutation will not survive to replicate enough, thus the mutation will lose out long term.
Not explicitly, but this is the nature of evolution; advantages against costs translate to greater success and replication.
You might say, for example, it would be advantageous if humans had feet that allowed them to climb trees faster or hold things with them. But that of course becomes a disadvantage for upright movement, etc. In this very article they discuss this concept in terms of costs for the Ebola virus to become airborne.
It doesn't ask itself that, but an airborne mutation wouldn't have a meaningful advantage, since the current virus is highly effective in spreading already.
My main complaint is that services such as yours are not extending XMPP! By god, it's begging for it! Imagine if every e-mail service was a walled garden. Differentiate on features and user experience and otherwise embrace interoperability and you'll be better than the vast majority of chat startups out there.
I think the biggest reason for many modern chat services to disregard XMPP is, because they fear that most advanced users might resort to their Adiums & Pidgins and wont use their web-services or Apps at all, resulting in half of the customers not experiencing the UX or unique features and therefore the value.
We had a long discussion in the beginning of the project and decided to make our architecture XMPP-friendly, but release it later in the future, as we need our early adopters to use the system.
So the answer to XMPP is "Yes, but after we gathered enough feedback"
most advanced users might resort to their Adiums & Pidgins and wont use their web-services or Apps at all
Oh, noes, that would be terrible. I cannot explain in words how much I loathe the Slack app and by extension how much I loathe their "UX experience and unique features."
Since my company just recently left HipChat for Slack, I think the odds of switching again this year are pretty slim, so I haven't evaluated your app. I just want to ensure that you have considered that a non-trivial portion of the engineering group of a company may want to resort to their Adiums.
I think some of it is "worse than what": we were on HipChat, and it was not very nice, but at least they made an actual OS X application and allowed one to customize its behavior on my machine. The Slack "app" is just a packaged version of WebKit and has almost zero customizations. Worse of which is that there isn't a per-channel setting to hide images by default, since I've had no luck getting folks to stop posting animated gifs into the general channel. I'm not at work right now in order to speak to the specifics, but the Slack app doesn't handle that situation correctly at all.
And the notification is merely a red dot. Oh, you only want the red dot if you're at-mentioned or someone posts in your team's channel? Too bad.
If you just distribute your site's webpage as an app, you're phoning it in. And that is why I want a chat company to use XMPP so that I can use Adium to manage my interaction (or lack of it) with the chat service.
I'm glad you like Slack. I'm sure they're going to do well, given how many folks sing their praises.
I think your UX and other unique features should be so compelling that customers want to use your system (over than Adium or Pidgin).
Think GMail for example. It's got full IMAP and POP3 support, and people who want to use a mail client are free to do so. If they do (and I assume many people do), then Google doesn't get to serve ads to them. But Google still gives you the freedom to choose. And they've succeeded in alluring even the nerdiest of people to their web app.
In short, let your users decide. Make your UI so awesome that they want to use it. Having XMPP support will actually draw many customers to your service, since it's something that not all competing services offer.
You and others made some very compelling points in regards of XMPP.
We learned a lot from this discussion and I'll soon write a post about the takeaways we got from this HN-Thread at our blog - http://blog.chatgrape.com/.
I get that you want to showcase your features, but speaking for myself at least, choosing not to support XMPP means you don't even make the list of possible alternatives to what we have now.
Making that promise is nice (if we can agree to call that a promise), but I have to make a decision based on what you provide now, not what you promise to provide in the future.
It is much easier to differentiate a service if you don't need to take other clients that are out of your control into account.
One of the most time consuming things you can do is to diagnose, fix or work around issues in other applications that you don't control or even have source code access.
Acting unilaterally when your decisions affect others deserves no praise. It's the kind of egocentric dick-waving we saw in the US in the 90s (again in the 2.0 bubble), and plenty of companies crashed and burned because of it. We need fewer glorious cult-leaders in business, not more.
Your comment is spoken from a perspective that favors the investors... not the worker who is seeking better employment.
Workers should be free to seek to improve their lives without old white men making back-room deals against them. In this regard the tech industry is no more progressive than any other, and that's incredibly disappointing. We're supposed to be such an intelligent bunch.
Not convinced this helps the investors either, if the employee is staying within their broader portfolio of companies. Yes, he may cost a bit more, but presumably he's moving to do more valuable and / or productive work, so the uptick in salary should pay for itself several times over.
I wasn't saying that he wouldn't be right to or they shouldn't pay market rates. I was just refuting the idea that an employee working at a company in a portfolio that interviews at another company in the same portfolio could only do so at a benefit to portfolio shareholders. That's really naive.
Yes, my comment favors investors, by way of favoring companies (and the potential return on investment), but it does not (in my opinion) hinder employees.
I believe you misunderstood my point based on the following comment:
> Workers should be free to seek to improve their lives without old white men making back-room deals against them
I support the "Do Not Poach" rule. "Do Not Poach" does not prevent workers from seeking employment. It means, me as an employer, will not actively solicit employees of other companies if we have shared investors (given the size and complexity of the investments).
"Do Not Hire" on the otherhand, seems to be what you are taking umbrage with, and I concur. Employees should (generally speaking) be allowed to seek employment opportunities without back-room deals preventing that.
There's no practical difference. If I hire Ben away from you, then protest "he came to us! we didn't poach him!" it matters not one bit to our now shattered relationship.
And how many entry level recruiting employees or their immediate managers do you think even want to have this conversation with someone like Steve Jobs? No single candidate is going to be worth having to defend yourself to the CEO, whether it was unsolicited or not. Practically speaking, these people are going to be the untouchables.
