This video of a utah cop tasing a motorist has been a hot button issue lately and has shown a lot of confusion over what your rights are and aren’t. I’m interested to hear everyone’s perspective on this one.

Problems laws “broken”

Does not have Miranda rights read to him
This kid asks quite a few times to have his Miranda rights read to him but doesn’t seem to know much about the law. Miranda rights or a Miranda warning is only required to be mentioned in the event that the Police officer is interrogating someone. Wikipedia has a whole section on the misconceptions on Miranda rights. “On the side of the road” is in fact not the place to have your rights read to you.

The officer never tells him he is under arrest!
Actually, as is my understanding, an officer doesn’t have to tell you that you’re under arrest (even though this officer does) and then he has to give a reason, as per Habeous Corpus. In fact you’re not under arrest when an Officer tells you to but you are under arrest when you are no longer free to leave.

Unlawful search!
I don’t have a reference from this one but I’m pretty sure that once you’re under arrest your immediate property is fair game. They have to search you for obvious reasons and then I think he had reasonable suspicion to search the car. Maybe he was going back for a gun, whatever. At anyrate the officer hands over the “vehicle” to his wife which probably means that it was temporarily the officer’s to look through.

He never tells the motorist how much he was speeding
At this point I think what he was speeding was irrelevant. He wasn’t arrested for speeding, he was arrested for disobeying a lawful order. His arrest has nothing to do with speeding other than the fact that he wouldn’t sign the ticket.

Beyond that his ticket must have had a speed on it because you can’t even get a speeding ticket without a speed written on it. If you did the court would have no idea how to punish you or what class of violation it is. Quickest way out of a ticket ever.

What I think

It seems to me that the police officer was fully within his right to taser this dude and arrest him. At which point would anyone with half a brain think it’s a good idea to walk away from a cop when he is telling you to stop?

I’m all about sniffing out police brutality and I think we’ve seen it quite a few times on youtube but this doesn’t see to be a case of police brutality.

To the motorist’s defense

When the motorist tells the police officer that he will not sign the ticket and that first they will go have a look at the sign the police officer says “alright, get out of the vehicle”. The officer intends to put him under arrest at that point for not signing the ticket. The motorist seems to think they’re going to go look at the sign but then disregards the police officer’s warnings.

So, what do you think?

I had really high hopes for 10.5.1, the first patch, for Leopard. I assumed it would fix all the little problems I’ve noticed since upgradding from Tiger (10.4). The patch was great fixing some really important problems. But it didn’t fix very many of my problems. In fact, I was hoping that Leopard was going to fix problems that I had in Tiger but alas, this was not the case. Not entirely anyway.

List of bugs/”fixes”

• Hidden networks don’t auto-rejoin 80% of the time
• Mail smart folders don’t really work 100% of the time
• Multiscreen support is still lame
• Firefox hangs*
• Safari still doesn’t support plugins
• Power Management still has a ways to go
• iChat is cool and sucks in all of the wrong ways
• Changing icons is harder than ever!

Hidden networks don’t auto-rejoin 80% of the time

Like any responsible wireless user I make sure that my network is as secure as possible, that means a good encryption (nothing WEP) and not broadcasting your SSID. Leopard doesn’t pick up hidden networks automatically, even when they’re on your preferred network list. I guess I could start broadcasting my SSID (it’s not the most essential security anyway) but I shouldn’t have to downgrade.

Mail smart folders don’t really work 100% of the time

I have three or four smart folders that simply refuse to pick anything up, I’ve double checked the settings and the filters but it doesn’t matter because they won’t ever find any mail…at all.

Multiscreen support is still lame

In Tiger there was a glitch where trying to zoom while using multiple monitors would yield dubious results, the screen would jump around and move randomly like a possessed mongoloid mouse moving powers.

I figured it would be fixed in Leopard and it was…sort of…actually instead of fixing it they just turned magnification off altogether while using multiple screens.

Since when did fixing a bug mean turning a feature off completely?!

Update:Turns out this was an error with trying to zoom while suing synergy and a mouse from another machine. (Mac in client mode) Works fine ont he track pad or with a plugged in mouse.

The other thing that’s missing is a decent option for having the menu bar on both screens. If Im doing some work in office (neooffice the OO alternative) and I need to get something out of the menu it means going to a different screen to select the menu bar. Thats a pain.

All in all, multi-screen support is still pretty good and years ahead of anyone else. You can easily choose different desktops and screen savers which is rad.

Firefox hangs*

This really isn’t Leopard’s fault. Firefox is quickly becomming crap on any platform. Its hard to say because I’ve been a big supporter of Firefox since it’s debut but this memory leak business is getting ridiculous. The other day it was up to 1.21 GBs!!! Like I said, this doesn’t really have anything to do with leopard but I get beachballs when loading new tabs or saving something that stop me from doing anything else. Talk about irritating. Which brings me to my next point

Safari still doesn’t support plugins

Safari is a great browser, a lot more light weight than firefox and it doens’t seem to have any rendering issues unfourtunatly it also doesn’t support plugins officially. Sure you can hack it to make plugins work and you can hack it for quick searches but I shouldn’t have to.

On the flip side Safari is pretty awesome other than those two deal breaking features. I may follow gthing’s route and hack Safari so I can quit firefox.

Power Management still has a ways to go

Wait, let me rephrase that power management is actually really good, lots of features that are easy to manage. The problem is that since switching to leopard I have the impression that my battery life has cut itself in half. I could be wrong and it could just be that my battery is getting old. I invite anyone reading this to give their input.

iChat is cool and sucks in all of the wrong ways

iChat has some really rad features, the video chat is off the hook and way beyond anything else I’ve ever used but iChat still sucks in all of the important ways. It keeps contacts from different services in different windows. So instead of having a single contact list with MSN, AIM and your jabber contacts all together it has seperate contact lists. This is supremely irritating.

Adium actually lets me merge contacts from different services. I have friends that use several chat clients and I can merge them all into one that is easy to manage. Awesome.

iChat also doesn’t support MSN chat which kills half my friends list right off the bat. Apple is in pretty close relations with microsoft these days, you’d think they could swing some support for the second most popular chat client out there (I assume it’s second to AIM).

For all of it’s frills iChat is still unsutible for everyday use

Changing icons is harder than ever!

In tiger changing most icons could be done by copy and pasting between info boxes. Not the best but not terrible, it didn’t work for the trash bin or the control panel but it still worked for drives and apps and folders. So, rather than building out the feature of changing icons, they stripped out the copy and paste way to easily change them. Now anyone that wants to change icons either has to dig around in system files to replace the icons with new ones and then delete the current system cache to get them to actually show up or buy Candybar.

Candybar is lame. Flame all you want but it’s still lame. It supports something that should be built into the OS already.

Digging around in system files is equally lame for something that should be such a simple task.

I still love Leopard

I still like Leopard and I have no temptation to downgrade back to Tiger. The system is faster, smoother, more responsive and seems more stable even. There have been a lot of great backend changes to increase usability and build out the OS but that doens’t mean there aren’t a few things I want changed.

There will always be things to fix.