cp702

You may have been reading different posts than I did. The hidden posts were about "new world order", "banker thugs", and the like. It was a wild tangent, and was taking the thread EXTREMELY off-topic. It's part of my generic shorthand for "conspiracy theories".

MODERATOR NOTICE This thread is about Russian troops in the Crimea. It is not about international bankers ruling the world, the Illuminati, lizard people, or other such conspiracy theories. Off-topic posts hidden.

True, but misleading - defamation in the US is extremely hard to prove. Defamation of a private figure requires proving that they made or implied false statements of fact - obvious hyperbole and satire is protected, as is opinion based on disclosed and true facts. For private persons, you are limited to actual damages stemming from the harm to your reputation, unless you prove defamation to the public figure level, which requires reckless disregard for the truth or intentional falsehood. The defendant gets the benefit of the doubt, and especially for a public person, the plaintiff must show material falsehood (if you say someone robbed 4 banks with a rifle when they robbed 2 with a pistol, it's not materially false). Most other countries have a defamation standard weighted much more heavily towards personal privacy; the US standard is extremely weighted towards free speech. True, but this seems to be a public school. Government-run organizations are generally bound by the First Amendment, with a few exceptions. A public school is absolutely bound by the First Amendment. This is the key point. If these were adults, this would not fly, period. Kids do, however, have some First Amendment rights; school restrictions are more permissible than criminal laws, but are limited to maintaining an educational environment.

You know, Darkangel actually has a point. It is NOT legal for the government to discriminate against speech in a non-content-neutral manner; the American flag gets no special exception because it's the American flag. You might be able to make a case about harassment interfering with school for Nazi or KKK symbols in a way it doesn't interfere for the American flag, but it's dependent on the area. To those not in the US: Note that the US doesn't prohibit people from expressing Nazi viewpoints like, say, Germany does. The US form of freedom of speech is considerably broader than most countries' forms; for instance, adults have the constitutional right to hold a neo-Nazi march down the center of a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and the city isn't allowed to prohibit it or to require an excessive bond against damages. Public schools are different, but students are considered to have certain free speech rights as long as they don't interfere with instruction (that's high school; public college falls under full free speech protection, as the students are adults with the full complement of rights).

As far as I know, the EU's limited in its ability to enforce sanctions against Russia by the fact that Russia provides most of their natural gas.

I think it's fair to call that utterly terrifying. The US and Russia are major nuclear powers. A war would be pretty much the worst thing that could happen for the entire world.

I think the radio thing is that it doesn't respect IV's volume settings, so high computer volume and low IV volume is ineffective; I remember asking LMS about it during testing, and I think he said there's no good way to detect and respect the GTA IV volume controls from a script. The better way to control volume is using Windows (click "Mixer" in the volume bar to control individual program volume), as LCPDFR does run within those constraints.

Just so we're clear: At the end of the Crown Vic's life, Ford actually gave up on selling them on the general American market. Even *before* they shut down production, they decided that it wasn't even worth *offering* to the general public; there wasn't enough interest to justify the cost of keeping it in dealers' inventories. The only people who might have convinced them not to stop offering the car would be fleet managers (i.e. their actual customers at the end); however, I seriously doubt there would be anywhere near enough fleet sales to justify re-establishing production (which is rather expensive, since they trade higher upfront cost for lower continuing cost of production - e.g. robots).

MODERATOR NOTICE I've just hidden a number of posts consisting of nothing more than personal attacks and flaming. If you don't have something to say about the subject of this topic, don't post.

What makes you think it's the type you said? If you want to know for sure what kind it is, try opening up the computer and checking for a label.

isup.me is the same site, with much less typing required.

You can't do that. Cars are produced in mass quantities; assembly lines are not cheap to set up. Cars can't be made economically in small quantities. Also, I'm not sure how many orders they'd receive. If they did this, it'd be useless for a police department - they couldn't reliably replace broken cars. The Crown Vic is a very dated design. It's increasingly hard for it to meet emissions and safety standards (they at least used to be deathtraps in rear-end collisions, in the fine Ford Pinto tradition). Emissions and safety standards getting more stringent is a good thing, in general.

This thread was made because of an offtopic tangent in a different one; it's here to contain the tangent. Arguing about grammar is yet another offtopic tangent. Again, please take it elsewhere - that's not what this thread is about.

Moved to the development forum.

MODERATOR NOTICE I believe I just said that this is off-topic. Further posts on this tangent in this thread will be hidden.

This topic is about the NSA. Illuminati-style conspiracy theories aren't really what it's about; if you want to talk about them, feel free to make a thread about them.

The same Founding Fathers who wrote that the government may not search private papers without probable cause? Those founding fathers? They supported the government spying to keep people safe? Are you serious? The citizens don't and shouldn't trust the government - suspicion is healthy. Terrorism is not some new threat. It's not a war, this is not a military operation. Espionage is acceptable against foreign governments, but the American people aren't an enemy you get to spy on for nebulous claims of "safety".

Why have faith? What have they done to deserve it? You misread the Elastic Clause. First, it exists because Congress doesn't have a general police power. In general, unless the Constitution specifically allows Congress to make a law about a topic, they can't. Unfortunately, any simple list of specific topics will inevitably leave out things that are in fact needed; the classic example was that Congress doesn't explicitly have the authority to create a national bank, but it's hard to control a currency without one. It does not override any of the rights in the Bill of Rights. Second, the Fourth Amendment, coming later than Article I, overrides it. Later laws override previous laws. I'm not sure what kind of life you have to have nothing to hide from anyone. There are plenty of things I don't want to announce to the world. There are things I don't consider public info. I don't see why an NSA analyst should get to know whatever they choose to know. I don't feel comfortable talking about private matters to strangers on the street; what has an NSA employee done to move from "stranger" to "trusted confidant"? The NSA didn't do this to scare off terrorists. I'm sure you forgot the part where they kept this whole program secret until someone leaked it, resulting in him being pursued by the government. They'd rather you *not* know they're listening; their role isn't intimidation. It's information gathering.

It does in fact say the name of the user reading it, whoever that is. No comment on whether or not it's a troll account, but before you call bullshit, try logging out and looking at the page.

Also, here's a way to view the NSA spying on Americans (and note that their original foreign-espionage, as well as their crypto efforts, are *not* unconstitutional; spying on communications outside the US between non-Americans is certainly legal for the NSA): Officers of the US government (including military officers, members of Congress, and judges, but not enlisted military or others who aren't considered 'officers') swear an oath to the Constitution. They don't swear to prevent terrorist attacks, or to follow orders (this includes military officers, though not enlisted [who do swear to obey orders]). Edward Snowden, as a contract sysadmin, did not swear such an oath. And yet, he followed it better than those who did.

The NSA's job isn't stopping terrorism. That's not why they were created. They were created as a foreign intelligence agency. Spying on Angela Merkel's phone? That's the sort of thing they were made to do (and if you think spying on allies is unusual, you're wrong; everyone spies on everyone, as a rule). You're all talking as if they were initially created to stop terrorist attacks; that's simply false. They're under the Department of Defense, and anti-terrorism isn't the DoD's job. Also, if you seriously think Snowden committed treason, note that treason involves supporting the enemies of the United States. Snowden leaked info for the benefit of the American people; if that's treason, it means the citizens of the United States are the enemies of the United States.

MODERATOR NOTICE This topic is about the petition, and about the NSA spying revelations. Please stay on that topic. Thanks. On topic: Given that the NSA is legally prohibited from looking at the info about citizens (in fact, even they had a policy where an analyst who found info they weren't legally allowed to collect had to delete it), I can't see how it made anything safer. It is ABSOLUTELY a human rights issue; human rights include privacy. That said: Comparing this to the Soviet Union is fairly ridiculous. A true Soviet-style police state is orders of magnitude different than anything seen in the US. Among other things, spying there was routine, intentional, expected, legal, not allowed to be criticized, and expressly political.

I know that multiple suspects, even in the same car, count as separate pursuits for maximum unit purposes. Is that possibly what's happening there?

We're using different meanings of "support". What you're saying is "we don't provide support to users who are using third-party mods; any users who have LCPDFR issues and use third-party mods should remove the mods first and try that, and we only provide support if that doesn't solve the problem." What I'm saying is "LCPDFR is designed to work with third-party mods that use the API, and we help third-party developers who are having trouble with the API." Different meanings.