Funny, my moral responsibility says that if I overheard a group planning a bombing in a pub, I would need to clearly hear the entire conversation from start to finish before I would even begin to think of assuming it was anything more than the discussion of some work of fiction or another,
How many sitcom plots have revolved around the idea of such an innocent discussion being misunderstood?
Mistakes happen. But this collection of errors snowballed into an accidental shooting of an unarmed man.
The original mistake is the second amendment, or at least its interpretation to include modern handguns.
The US does not actually allow an unlimited "right to bear arms". If it did then privately owned tanks, fighter planes and tactical nuclear weapons would be allowed. Clearly the 2nd amendment could be restricted to the kind of armaments that were available when it was written.
Without a plethora of privately owned handguns a police officer would not have felt the need to draw his gun in this situation and in fact would not even have needed a gun. UK police manage fine without them - and have resisted calls for them to be issued.
Not true. The insurance companies are able to negotiate down prices, so they end up paying much less than you or I ever could for the exact same service.
But a comprehensive goverment organised health system like the UK's NHS is able to negotiate down prices much more effectively than even an insurance comapny can. This is why UK healthcare costs us half what US healthcare costs (as a percentage of GDP) AND it covers everyone AND outcomes are better for most people.
Whitacre's entitlement attitude in turned spawned the misleading argument that service and content companies (that already pay for bandwidth and own much of their own infrastructure) somehow get a "free ride," and therefore should start paying phone companies their "fair share."
Whilst certain content companies I could name contend that ISPs are getting a free ride off their content.
i just read where the results of the enquiry into the death of a soldier has found that had the isp that was being used by the murderers brought the emails to the attention of the authorities, the death may have been prevented. if ever there was a fabricated reason for any government to increase surveillance on everyone
Huh - I would have thought that that revelation was a reason NOT to increase surveillance - since the existing surveilance is clearly adequate (if not already excessive). What is lacking is the will or ability to actually DO anything about what it reveals in a timely way. (Except of course in those cases where what it reveals are nothing to do with the stated purpose of preventing terrorism.)
When you've got piles of 'hay', larger than any stadium to sort through, finding the individual needles becomes very difficult, especially finding them in time to actually do anything about them before it's too late. The spy agencies have become so enamored by the 'Collect it ALL' idea, that they've actually sabotaged their own capabilities with regards to finding, and responding to, actual threats.
Well demonstrated by the fact that the perpetrators of most recent attacks were already known to the authorities but they were too busy to do anything to stop them.