Here's a nice news program covering a student who had her wrist broken by a school security guard who apparently didn't like the way she reacted to him ordering her to clean up a piece of cake.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to why a security guard was handing out orders like that, perhaps he wasn't well-instructed on what he was supposed to be doing other than just making sure the children learn thoroughly to never question any authority figure, but that's another matter... The video explains itself.
MIT student arrested for entering Boston airport with art project
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:25 pm EDT, Sep 22, 2007
She's extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used," Pare told The Associated Press. "And she's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."
The quote above is a Massachusetts State Police Officer publicly threatening to murder an MIT student who accidentally showed up at the airport wearing an electronic art project. She has, yet again, been charged with carrying out a hoax. Remember kids, anytime a Massachusetts police officer is confused, its your fault for confusing them, and not theirs for being fucking stupid and paranoid, and you are likely to go to prison or worse if it happens.
For standing on stage like a cowardly sack of crap, because in theory you more than anyone else there should have known what was going on in that room was illegal and would have had the power to stop it with a word but didn't.
FUCK YOU.
You're done. As far as a lot of Americans and myself are concerned, you will never be worthy of a vote again. You very obviously don't have our best interests in heart, and even more clearly don't give a crap what happens to your fellow man even when it's right in front of you.
A few months ago a torrent site broke the news that quite possibly, one of the companies currently engaging in prosecuting copyright violations, might have just set up a website for the sole purpose of providing users on the internet with copyright material to violate, willy-nilly.
...basically, facilitating the very illegal actions they were pursuing damages for in court. (Boy howdy is that illegal. Wow.) So of course, it would be very bad for them if this were actually happening.
The company, MediaDefender, denied it completely.
(time passes)
It turns out the report was, in fact, true.
In one of the most spectacular security leaks I've ever seen, somehow, 700Mb of the company's internal emails found their way into a bunch of torrent streams and are winging their way around the interwebs right this very moment.
I would imagine that right about now, to the executive management over there, the internet has just opened up and poured thousands upon thousands of kittens into their offices and homes... and they're allergic.
Joy Robinson-Van Gilder is a small-town mom from Earlville, Illinois (population 1,778) who began a one-woman campaign to fight the use of biometrics in the schools — and won.
In August of 2005, the public school in Earlville installed biometric equipment, allowing the school to track students by scanning their fingerprints. Use of the scans for school lunch was apparently mandatory. When Robinson-Van Gilder objected, she was told: “If they don’t scan, they don’t eat.”
We need this to be a Federal Law... to protect our youth.
Why on earth build a relay computer when there are already computers over a hundred thousand times faster? Well, for two reasons: to prove that silicon is not magic and because I want to.
The simple relay adder was built using free NOS relays sometime in 2005, but my goal was to someday build a more elaborate one that could run programs but not fill up a room like the early computers. Harry Porter built an incredible 415-relay computer which can be seen at this page: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/
I never thought I'd fully understand how his computer worked, let alone build one. Finally in spring 2007, I gained more understanding of computer systems from a course in college then joked to a friend about using the x86 instruction set for a relay computer to boot up Windows, which would’ve taken several hundred years on a relay computer running on a 50Hz clock. And so the inspiration began... (note: if you want to skip the hardware details of the computer, the pictures and videos are at the end of this page).
AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Anti-War Minister Is Attacked, Gets Leg Broken for Trying to Enter Petraeus Hearing
Topic: Politics and Law
9:28 pm EDT, Sep 13, 2007
Watch the cops beat this guy down and then charge him with assault!
After waiting in line throughout the morning for the hearing that was scheduled to start at 12:30pm, Rev. Yearwood was stopped from entering the room, while others behind him were allowed to enter. He told the officers blocking his ability to enter the room, that he was waiting in line with everyone else and had the right to enter as well. When they threatened him with arrest he responded with "I will not be arrested today." According to witnesses, six capitol police, without warning, "football tackled him. He was carried off in a wheel chair by DC Fire and Emergency to George Washington Hospital.
Rev. Yearwood was examined for possible head and leg injuries then transferred to Central Processing. He has been charged with "assaulting a police officer."
He obviously made a sudden move which provoked the police to tackle him. Its not clear why the police decided to order him to the back of the line. Its not clear that it took 6 cops to subdue him. What is clear is that he did not assault a police officer. He was arrested for failing to comply with an order, and he resisted arrest. If this video did not exist he probably would, however, be convicted of assault, because the police would all testify that he had done so, and the counter testimony would all come from a bunch of nutty protesters. The charge is clearly a dishonest attempt to inflict harm on him because he refused to do what he was told to, and the charge is at the heart of why this will be controversial.
The bottom line is that many police officers believe that there is no limit to the level of force that they may employ to obtain compliance from people who refuse to follow their orders, no matter how unreasonable their orders may be or how passive the resistance to them is. Its clear from the video that the police are not at all interested in discussing whether or not their order that he move to the back of the line was or was not reasonable. They were simply focused on the fact that they had issued an order and that order was not complied with. Its not about protecting the hearing from unruly people. Its not about right or wrong. Its about power. They could have let him walk away. They tackled him because they wanted to tackle him. The dishonest charge is the evidence that is impossible to explain another way.
While we're on the subject of using force as a legitimate part of your job vs. using force because you like hurting people and now you've got a job that gives you a passable explanation for having done so, the final public report on the UCLA taser incident from last November is available.
The conclusions of this report are that the officer's actions were completely outside of UCLA policy and that the policy is also too liberal. This is obviously unwelcome news to variouscommentators who supported this incident as model police behavior. However, for their benefit it there is also a second "internal" report that you and I are not allowed to read which concludes that there was absolutely nothing wrong with what happened. This enables UCLA management to change their policies without admitting that anyone has done anything wrong.
Which report is correct? Such questions completely miss the point. Its not about right or wrong. If you want to really understand all of this please refer to my previous post on how everything everywhere actually works.
At the behest of acting UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams, the Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC) conducted a seven- month, independent investigation of a November 14, 2006 incident at UCLA’s Powell Library in which the UCLA Police Department (UCLAPD ) arrested UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad. This report sets forth our factual findings and conclusions.
This story has no heroes. The event triggering the repeated electrical shocking of Tabatabainejad was a declination by the UCLA student to produce a BruinCard identification in the Powell Library computer lab after hours. While the student should have simply obeyed the order to produce the card, and by not doing so brought trouble upon himself, the police response was substantially out of proportion to the provocation. There were many ways in which the UCLAPD officers involved could have handled this incident competently, professionally, and with minimal force. We find that one UCLAPD officer violated UCLA use of force policies in the incident. We further conclude that UCLAPD’s current policies are, in any event, unduly permissive, giving the police unnecessary latitude, and are inconsistent with the policies of other universities and leading police departments across the country, including other University of California campuses, the LAPD, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD). The UCLAPD policy stands alone in its legitimization of the Taser as a pain compliance device against passive resisters. The current UCLA policy is more permissive than the Sacramento Police Department policy on which it was based and the Taser policy recommended by its chosen outside expert on the question.
