08:01 – Amazon changed its spiff a couple of weeks ago for Prime members who opt for no-rush shipping instead of Prime 2-day shipping. Until then, they were offering a $1 credit per order on ebooks and music purchases. I was just accumulating those $1 credits and using them toward buying e-books. Now, they offer a $5 credit/order on Prime Pantry orders, so I’m accumulating those. Not that it’s really much of a deal, because I can get most Prime Pantry items cheaper locally, but if I accumulate enough credits I’ll be able to get a Prime Pantry box or two for free. Of course, this provides an incentive for people to make multiple small orders instead of one larger one, but Amazon deals with this by not issuing the credit until the order actually ships. Presumably, if I put in a bunch of smaller orders, they’ll simply wait and combine those orders before shipping.
Speaking of orders, yesterday was an administrative day. I put in a bunch of orders for chemicals from different vendors and components for science kits. I was, for example, down to about a pound of rubber stoppers, so I ordered another 20 pounds from one vendor, along with a couple hundred inoculating loops and 5,000 plastic dropper pipettes. I ordered three kilos of salicylic acid from one vendor, two kilos of yeast from another, and a bunch of different chemicals from still another.
And yet another fatal shooting of a black victim by a white police officer, this one in Cincinnati. Well, a kind-of police officer. This guy was a university cop, and from the initial news reports it sounds like he was a psycho Barney Fife. If those reports are accurate, which of course is always questionable, this guy shot and killed a middle-age black man after making a traffic stop for a missing front license plate. The DA has already said publicly that this cop should never have been a cop, and apparently footage from the cop’s bodycam, which I haven’t seen, makes it pretty clear that the shooting was not justified. We’ll see if things degenerate into violent rioting and looting.
And, in a man-bites-dog local story, an on-line petition has been created to demand that Winston-Salem authorities remove a marker honoring the Black Panthers, on the basis that the Black Panthers were a violent, racist group.
10:34 – Well, I watched the video, and it doesn’t look to me as straightforward as the police brass and DA said. The cop seemed to behave politely and professionally during the first part of the encounter. I was surprised that he didn’t order the driver to get out of the car and that he allowed him to fish around in the glove box. And the driver did have an open bottle of booze in the car. At the point the cop ordered the driver to remove his seatbelt, presumably intending to order him to get out of the car, things went badly wrong in less than a second. It seemed that the driver was starting to make a run for it when the cop fired. I couldn’t tell for sure if the cop’s hand was inside the window and if he was struck by the window frame as the driver moved the car forward. At any rate, for me the video certainly doesn’t establish that this was a bad shooting.
It doesn’t matter if the guy has an open container, or if he’s going to drive away. Unless he actually threatens the cop (or someone else) with a weapon or some credible attack, there is no reason to shoot him.
Deadly force for a traffic stop, wtf.
Isn’t there some rule on equal force? That is, deadly force can only be used to stop deadly force? So, unless the officer’s life could be considered in imminent danger by any reasonable person then he’d better taze, punch, spray, baton, or run instead. If he does shoot them, then he should know he’s going to be guilty until proven innocent. Law Enforcement should be actively practicing “reverse profiling.” That is, if their skin is darker than yours then don’t pull them over, or confront them, or even make eye contact. That’s the world we live in now.
“That is, if their skin is darker than yours then don’t pull them over, or confront them, or even make eye contact. That’s the world we live in now.”
As we discovered last Friday night at the Newark Airport.
Other LE and shooting instructor types have examined that video tape six ways from Sunday and the only possible alternative explanation they can find that might knock the charges down to involuntary manslaughter is what they see as simultaneous clenching of the cop’s trigger finger while his left hand was clenching to grab the motorist’s keys. Notwithstanding that his finger should not have been on the trigger in the first place.
If he takes off on ya, you have to jump back in yer cruiser and follow accordingly while radioing in all the info and the camera is still working. You can’t just blow somebody away for trying to escape in motor vehicle stops like this. He could have open containers galore, bricks of heroin on the back seat and be cursing you like a dog, but you can’t shoot him.
On three motor vehicle stop occasions during my short police “career” down in MA, I came within a second of squeezing the trigger on three guys, all of whom were coming up with guns to point at me, including a sawed-off shotgun. Luckily for them, and me, probably, they dropped them at the last possible nanosecond.
The guy in this latest case wasn’t apparently reaching for a weapon and he was not in a position to run the car at the officer, who didn’t start getting dragged until the car rolled forward, and he was still in no danger.
Gonna be an interesting court case, esp. if media and the usual suspects raise a stink and if there are any mass “disturbances,” a.k.a. riots. Have the Reverends Jackwagon and Sharpless made a statement yet? How ’bout Dear Leader? We wait with baited breath.
Again, I put this down like so much else now to shitty training.
Keeping the site stats rockin’….
“According to Zimmermann, we are witnessing the emergence of pervasive, retroactive surveillance, and the response is obvious. “We have to do something about this,” he said.”
Eric Blair was only thirty years off.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/defending-the-last-missing-pixels-phil-zimmermann/?tag=nl.e036&s_cid=e036&ttag=e036&ftag=TREa988f1c
I thought Phil Zimmerman was dead. Maybe I am thinking of Phil Katz.
“Well, I watched the video, and it doesn’t look to me as straightforward …”
Here are the violations:
1. Driving without license plate
2. Driving without driver’s license
3. Obstruction of justice – refusing multiple times to answer question directly
4. Open container of alcohol
5. Driving away with glass alcohol bottle on roof falling to ground and breaking – improper disposal of hazardous waste, environmental pollution
6. Driving away – resisting arrest
That must be at least three felonies.
Why is cop indicted? Precludes Baltimore, Ferguson behavior.
Oh yes, on improper disposal of hazardous waste in LA:
1. homeless defecates on sidewalk in front of store
2. shopkeeper hoses off into gutter (eventually out to Pacific)
3. Cop cites storeowner
4. homeless gets another free meal to dispose of without citation to him
But wait….there’s more:
1. A private citizen cannot make a purchase of a single shopping cart (supermarket type)
2. homeless are never cited for harboring stolen property
Wow. The microaggressions here from this Cowboy Slim character are too many to count. Just…wow.
Has he been arrested yet? If not, why not? Someone needs some serious counseling and re-education….
I say six months as HILLARY’S! bra adjuster should do it.
Gee whiz, that’s harsh!
H’s toenail clipper?
nick
From bad to worse.
We gotta cut Slim a bit of slack here; he’s already living in Kalifornia, mind ye.
Too easy to commit microaggressions out in that heat; Mrs. OFD informs me that it was 111 yesterday in the East Bay and 106 today and “thank God for air-conditioning.”
Yikes.
Just finished my Hugo voting.
The field was FAR superior this year to last. Some of the rankings were tough.
Last year was like reading thru a fanzine slush pile. This year there was actual science in most of the science fiction and some fun stories that I’d like to read a lot more from the authors and more in their worlds.
There was only one that was absolute dreck with no redeeming virtue. That is a HUGE improvement from last year. For the others, even if I don’t find some of the them exactly to my taste, I appreciate the style and writing, and recognize the talent required.
We’ll see how it goes, if the SJWs vote ‘no award’ and if there are enough of them… or if the puppies campaigns succeeded in getting out the vote. If nothing else, they got much better stories nominated. I wish I had time to see the other related media, but no chance of that. I barely got thru the printed material.
nick
I have been mini-prepping, today I decided to bottle some rice and beans. I had what I thought would be a usable funnel but that didn’t work out well. The stem of the funnel obstructed too much of the neck of the 2-litre bottle. Holding the funnel in place while shaking was ‘I can’t think of the word’. So I improvised a field-expedient funnel.
Using a sharp, very sturdy pocket knife I punched holes in the tops of two bottle-caps, the holes turned out to be hexagonal. Put the bottle-caps back on the bottles and whittled the holes out until they were round and the same diameter as the bottle’s necks. Duct taped the two holey bottle-caps together top-to-top. That took about 15 minutes, I’m elderly.
Screwed a bottle into each end of the contraption and ended up with something like an hourglass. Cut the top/bottom off the top upside-down bottle and then had a screw on funnel does not constrict the neck of the bottle and holds itself in place.
Rice, pinto beans, salt, sugar, and corn meal all flowed through with no or little shaking. The wheat flour took shaking and poking with a straw, but the flour was cheap and clumpy.
A cursory google search shows that there are 3D-printer plans for 2-liter bottle-caps. It should be easy for someone else to design, 3D-print, and sell proper funnels. Paying me my percentage of course.
@Nick: Kudos for reading through the submissions. I’ve only read a couple, just happenstance, and hence didn’t feel like I should vote.
The results will be the proof, one way or the other. If the votes go through normally, the SJWs are the minority we think they are. If they are blocked by “no awards”, then we’re living in an echo chamber.
Ky. man arrested after shooting down $1,800 drone hovering over sunbathing daughter
I’d like to say “no jury will ever convict”, but I don’t have that much faith in the legal system. Still, I hope some “rights” organization takes up the case and helps to curb-stomp the charges against him. Subpoenaing the video feed the drone operators got would be a good step, too.
I’ve also been thinking about automated anti-drone measures, like IR lasers to blind the cameras without damaging them. I think I could build such a system, but I’m too lazy to start a Kickstarter campaign.
Erf… Younger son is a computer type, actually really good for his age (18). He’s doing some semi-pro website development, and asked if he could have a spot on my wife’s company’s webserver. Sure, said I. I was even paranoid enough to set things up so that he has SFTP access, very tightly restricted to his particular directory.
What I didn’t expect: He uploaded 4GB of pics. The poor web server only has (well, had) an 8GB disk. Which was always plenty. It’s a Linux instance in the AWS cloud, you pay by GB, and I had just enough space for what we needed, plus 1-2 GB extra.
Anyhow, stuffing the disk full caused the server to behave in weird ways – it took me a while to figure out what was going on. Of course, the backups also failed, because they weren’t expecting an extra 4GB of stuff to be thrown at them (the company website is maybe 1/10 of that). So I had a nice little puzzle-and-panic yesterday, trying to figure out what was going on, and getting it fixed. Got it all up and running yesterday, but I still didn’t know what the cause of the problem was. Only today, when I saw the backups running..and running…and running did I realize why the disks were suddenly so full.
Today I moved his stuff to a separate disk, so he can stuff it as full as he likes, and I don’t have to worry. I’ve so far managed not to strangle him. I suppose it’s not really his fault, since I never discussed disk space with him. On the other hand, he could show a little contrition…all I got, when I described the situation to him, was a classic 18yo grunt.
The drone story: the police really f***ed that up. They arrested the guy who shot the drone, but they gave the drone back to the four guys. They didn’t keep it for evidence. That’s going to make it harder to file trespassing charges, because they can erase any incriminating footage.
In another story, with more detail, the guy described watching the drone fly under his neighbor’s patio roof. These guys were snooping, pure and simple.
There is a lot of disinformation out there about air rights. You do have full rights to the airspace immediately above your property; violation of this airspace is legally trespassing. The line is kind of vague, but a drone ducking under patio roofs has clearly violated it.
@Klide
Good idea. I did the same thing, except I used super glue instead of duct tape to secure the two caps together. But Barbara had an even better idea. She bought me two sets of Pampered Chef flexible funnels for about $8 per set. There are two funnels in each set, made from flexible silicone plastic. The stem of the larger funnel is a slip fit for the inside mouth of a 2-liter bottle.
I do wish that 3-liter bottles were still available. They’re much easier to fill. Well, they’re still available, but only with store-brand soft drinks and other stuff that I prefer not to drink. We’ve started buying Costco bottle water in one-gallon PET bottles, which are ideal for food storage. Large mouths, fairly thick plastic, and they stack well.