Student Fined For Taking Photos Of Police Officers
Well, not exactly.
His actual infraction, worth a whopping $628, was the “improper use of city structures.” As anyone who’s been to Émilie Gamelin Park knows, pretty much everyone and anyone sits on the concrete ledges in question.
Jones, an economics and history student in his last year as an undergraduate, was studying at the Bibliothèque nationale when he decided to take a break and catch a few rays at the park.
He saw police approach people who were drinking alcohol nearby, took out his small digital camera and shot some photos.
“I saw this as an opportunity to observe how police deal with underprivileged people,” Jones recounted.
Then a police officer came by and asked if he had been taking pictures.
“Once I realized she was attempting to get me to give her my camera, I became confused and told her I would not give it to her,” Jones said.
“I had not committed any crime and had been sitting peacefully, just like many others around me.”
The officer’s two partners joined her, and Jones slipped the camera into his pocket. The police then told him it was illegal to sit in a city park when not on a bench and he would have to leave.
They said sitting on the ledge qualified as improper use of city structures, he recounted.
From: Canada.com
It’s an utterly ridiculous application of a bylaw aimed at preventing transients from loitering in public places; it’s fairly obvious that Jones was only accosted by police for having taken photos of the officers in action.
For shame.
And The “Slowest Site On The Net” Award Goes To…
I’ve been trying to get the ASUS website to load for the last 15 minutes. You’d think that one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer parts would have their site running on something more recent than a TRS-80 with a 14.4kbps uplink to the Intardwebnets.
All this for a stupid BIOS update.
Hiking Mount Jo/Heart Lake
Concordia Outdoors took a trip out to Saranac Lake, New York for a little bit of hikin’. The weather held out admirably aside from a light sprinkling while we were on the peak. I brought my zoom lenses and managed to get a couple of decent shots.
As always, click to open a larger version in a new window.
Upgrading the Digital Darkroom
Minor update — my PC has been a little sluggish lately, so I decided to splurge on a bit of an upgrade:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66GHz Processor OEM
- ASUS P5K-E ATX Motherboard
- Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X4096-6400C5 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 RAM
- Seasonic M12 600W Power Supply
- Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition 64BIT OEM
The PSU was specially priced at $99 when bundled with the motherboard.
This will be joining my Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA2 hard drive, my Pioneer DVR-112 DVD burner, and my EVGA GeForce 7600GS video card — I’ll probably upgrade the video card a little bit later, and maybe add another 4GB RAM.
I’m looking forward to seeing just how fast this bugger will rip through Noise Ninja processing and such.
