On top of this, the money supply has increased almost 300% in the past few months.
I don't know what universe you live in, but it's not this one. The money supply has recently vanished because a goodly portion of it was created via loans. When a bank loans money out, it creates maybe 15x times as much money.
These loans which are no longer being issued, and, of course, older loans are being paid off. 'Money' is vanishing.
I seem to recall Democrats complaining at the top of their lungs when the GOP used these types of tactics (say by linking every Democrat to Al Sharpton, Michael Moore or Sean Penn), so where's the outrage now that one of their own is engaged in the same behavior?
When Republicans links Democrats to crazy figures on the far left, what do Democrats do?
Say 'No, they don't speak for us, and I totally disagree with what they say.', and that's pretty much the end of that. It helps, of course, than they don't.
When Democrats link Republicans to to crazy figures on the far right, what do Republican do?
Half of them leap to his defense, and half of them attempted to distance themselves but then have to crawl back to Rush on their hands and knees begging for forgiveness when he turned on them.
You're right...we used to complain, but doing the exact same thing against you guys is just sooooo much funnier. Cause, you know, our wackjobs are actually fringe, whereas yours are in charge of your base. Please, continue to link the left to fringe figures on the far left. That, as you say, allows the left perfect cover to do it to the right...and we'll see which party needs their crazy blathering fringes more.
When I saw Obama link you guys to Rush I just about died laughing, because I could almost predict the future at that point. I didn't know exactly who'd attempt to defect from Rushland and be cut down by friendly fire in the back, but I know it would happen.
I hope Obama does it again every few months. Maybe with someone else beside Rush. Malkin's due for some sort of moronic comment soon.
Link her to some moderate Republican who appeared on her show, watch the moderate Republican attempt to distance themselves, watch Malkin attack the disloyalty, watch the moderate Republican leap back towards supporting Malkin, proving the point and looking like a dishonest loyalty-lacking weasel, and I'll be rolling on the floor laughing. Political jujutsu.
A reasonable person might wanted to have kept those facts in mind...until the judge threw out the case for exactly that stated reason, that he had an alibi that placed him out of state for many of the supposed incidents. Which the police did not even slightly bother to investigate.
Um, duh. I don't know why you're acting like this is a 'he said she said' situation where we should wait for the court to decide, because the court already decided the complaint his wife filed against him...in his favor. The judge totally and immediately dismissed the case.
This guy's first contact with the police department stems from a messy divorce, and charges of harassment and stalking.
No. This guy's first contact with the police was when his wife filed bogus charges against him, and the police refused to look at the fact he was out of the state at various times he was supposedly bothering her.
They, instead, managed to ignore his alibi all the way to court, where the judge immediately threw the entire case out because, duh, he had an alibi.
Cases where the defendant has an alibi, at least one that is fairly solid, should not make it to court in the first place. No criminal case that immediately gets thrown out due to lack of evidence should make it to court in the first place.
Which, incidentally, is a damn good reason to be pissed at the police.
When you have an alibi for the crimes, you should not end up in front of a judge at all.
The DA should have declined to press charges, and he has every incentive to do so, because having a case immediately dismissed for lack of evidence looks really bad.
So either the DA is a moron(1) or, more likely, the police didn't bother to actually inform him that the guy was saying 'Hey, I have an alibi for this', much less check out this alibi to see if it was true.
So they kept him in the criminal justice system (even if out on bail, he had various restrictions on movement and a curfew and whatnot) for months or longer on a case that any idiot could see was bogus.
Abuse of police power isn't just confined to planting evidence and lying under oath and other things that are outright illegal. They have a lot of power simply to screw people's lives up for months until they show up in front of a judge, even if the judge immediately dismisses everything.
1) Incidentally, the DA's the guy this person should have talked to when the police kept pursuing a case they were obviously going to lose in court, because, like I said, he's got an incentive to just drop the case if he's going to lose, but good luck for people with court appointed lawyers even talking to their own lawyer, much less the DA.
There really should be an investigation on how his own lawyer handled this. While technically speaking they don't have to turn over information to the prosecution, they obviously should turn over information that would result in the case being dropped!
If they did turn it over, OTOH, that's the sort of stuff that takes down district attorneys, when they, or people under them, spending time and taxpayer money on cases they know they can't win.
There are a lot of delusional people here who think harassment is illegal, and that running a web site can be harassment.
First off, it's not illegal. If someone is harassing you, the thing to do is to take out a restraining order against them, during which you can present evidence they were harassing you. No harassment before that is issued that is 'illegal' in any way. (And these cops don't have restraining orders against this guy.)
Secondly, harassment requires interaction. Speaking to them, following them, emailing them, watching them, something. That's what restraining orders stop people from doing.
Simply posting things publicly on your website cannot be harassment. On their website, sure. Not yours.
Like what sort of 'petty theft' he was charged with, the totally nonsensical claim of having stolen police faceplates from their desk. (As opposed to him simply running down to the local trophy shop and having some printed up.)
Because one of the 'crimes' he was accused of was stealing desktop faceplates (Those things on desks with a person's name.) from a police department, taking pictures of them, and putting those pictures on the internet?
Things people don't do, #29483: Steal things worth five dollars, with people's name on them, from the police, and post pictures of that on the internet.
I don't know in what universe you happen to live in, but in the real one you can't charge people with 'harassment'.
Harassment is simply one of the possible grounds for getting a restraining order. It is not a criminal action per se.
And also harassment requires communication with the victim. You cannot harass people simply by talking about them in public.
That would be slander or libel, which is not a crime, although you could be sued for it.
He was charged with the crime of 'pretty theft', based on pictures he'd made of things that looked like police nameplates but he asserts he created himself. Getting a search warrant based on publicly posted pictures and asserting 'theft' is pretty absurd...and I hope those police actually reported their nameplates stolen.
Nameplates, in case you're confused, are those things on police officer's desks. He created some in photoshop for his website, or just had some fakes engraved (They cost like 5 dollars.), and they're asserting that he actually stole nameplates from the police department, in what would be the stupidest theft ever.
He's also charged with 'computer tampering with the intent to harass', which is the same crime as 'computer tampering', which he almost certain did not do.
I can't even imagine what they're claiming when they 'review the data' for cough medicine.
Does cough medicine actually assert to cause less coughing or something? That's not why I take it, I take it because it makes my coughs hurt less!
Reducing coughs would be a damn stupid thing for medicine to attempt to do...you're coughing for a reason. Your body does not want what is in your lungs in your lungs, do not force it to stay there. It's like trying to sneeze less when you have a cold. Um, no. If you want to medically treat the problem, what you need to do is take that stuff that loosens mucus and makes coughs more productive, so you can actually start expelling the stuff you're trying to expel.(1)
And, like me and everyone else, take cough medicine so that your throat hurts less and is less irritated. (And if you were coughing solely because your throat was irritated, you might cough less, but that's not the point.)
1) I actually wish people would realize that a lot of 'sickness' like fevers and sneezing and coughing are our body doing that on purpose, and that you shouldn't attempt to stop them, you should help them along. (Well, except sometimes our body will drive straight over a cliff and kill us with a fever it itself generated, but normally you should help them along.)
Yeah. tell that to my brother, who got his kneecap broken in half thanks to a kayaking accident and had surgery to attach it back together with titanium pins, and is now fine. I sure he could have just rolled around in a wheelchair his whole life.
Seriously, saying 'knee surgery doesn't work' is about as stupid as his previous assertion that 'antibiotics is a bad idea for bronchitis or sore throat or sinusitis'....yeah, tell that to people with Streptococcus pneumoniae infections who didn't take antibiotics.
Oh, you can't? They developed full-blown pneumonia or meningitis or endocarditis or all the other places Streptococcus pneumoniae can live and kill you...and they died? Well, silly them.
I especially like the fact that 'infections usually recede within days'...um...yeah, and those people usually don't see a doctor in the first place. People go to the doctor when infections don't recede.
Just because people want medication that's harmful for their health doesn't mean doctors should do it.
Antibiotics are dangerous. They are dangerous for society as a whole, as they increase resistant strains, but they're also dangerous for each individual use. There is a non-zero risk of causing some sort of harm by using things that, after all, are designed to kill cells in your body. They're supposed to take out bacteria cells, but friendly fire is always happening. Although your body can stand to lose a lot of cells with no problem, there's always some risk, like a guy above who apparently suffered nerve damage, probably because an attack took out a nerve cell or two.
And hence it is unethical, period, to prescribe antibiotics when doctors know it's a viral infection. It is risking harm for no possible gain.
Doctors should just start prescribing high qualities of vitamins for viruses, if people really want something. People who have influenza and even the common cold often do not eat correctly, and lacking various vitamins has been demonstrated to vastly increase the time it takes to fight off infections, so there's a medical rationale there, and if the medical profession started promoting how they've discovered how to fight off some disease without using dangerous antibiotics, we'd all win.
It's not that simple with sore throats. Some are viral and some (very painful) are bacterial.
Oh, is that what the stupid summary is talking about?
Because I read that and said 'Um, antibiotics are harmful for bronchitis? Talk about absurdly dangerous medical advice.'.
Obviously, you should only take antibiotics if you have a bacterial infection, and 'most' bronchitis goes away on its own...but they say that when most of it goes away on its own in such a short time people don't actually see a doctor in a few days. That 'bronchitis' is never even officially diagnosed.
That's like saying 'most pain' goes away by itself...most pain, in fact, is caused by something specific, and will quickly fade away. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see a doctor if you have inexplicably leg pain for a week because 'most pain' goes away by itself.
By the time people get to a doctor about their bronchitis, after four or five days, it has usually become clear it is not a cold or a simple flu. At that point it is likely to be some sort of bacterial infection, although it might be a flu that their body cannot fight off.
Obviously, it's idiotic to prescribe antibiotics for the later, but they're being prescribed for everyone who shows up for one simple reason: Antibiotics are cheaper than tests to see what sort of infection it is.
Obama gave her a signed Rogers (Of Rogers and Hammerstein, who the queen loves,and considers the a song from Oklahoma her and her husbands 'song') songbook.
It was an absurdly good gift. Personal, and yet historic enough that it can be displayed with a bunch of other historic things.
He also gave her a bunch of footage of her trip here that was filmed. He presented this to her within a video iPod.
And everyone trying to make an issue of this is a giant moron.
Technically, what they did was illegal. You're not allowed to create rolling blockades like that, and people in the slow lanes are supposed to drop back if people can't get around them at the speed limit. (Or they should move to the other lane.)
Continually driving next to other cars like that is illegal, for exactly the reason it blocks all other drivers. Yeah, they did it at the speed limit, but the minimum speed on roads without it marked is 20 under the max speed...and can you imagine if you did it at 35? Or if the speed limit on that road really was 75 and they did it at 55?
However, instead of driving at the speed limit, they should vary between the speed limit and five under, and pass and repass each other. That would be legal.
It would, by necessity, let a lot of cars get by, but it would still be more than enough to completely fuck up traffic in many places where the speed limits are blatantly ignored.
And, as an added bonus, it would only work in places where they were ignored by a large amount. If everyone was going 5 over, it'd only cause slight slowdowns as people waited to pass.
But something like I-75 through the middle of Atlanta, where the speed limit is 55 and 75 is considered slow (I live in Atlanta.), it would just totally blow the road up. One person going the speed limit causes major problems.
I think the theory is that the camera takes a picture of you behind the line, when the light's red, and then another of you in front of it.
It's a certain distance in front, like ten feet, so you can't argue that you're just a 'poor stopper' and didn't halt entirely behind the line. (Which is technically illegal, but in reality being a foot or two over the line won't get you a ticket. I'm not sure that being stopped over the line is actually 'running the light' or some other, lesser, offense.)
That is the theory. Some cameras do not, in fact, take two pictures.
I don't know who told you that or if the rules are different in California or what.
Here in Georgia it is illegal to change lanes in an intersection, and even to change lanes a certain number of feet before and after.
Granted, as it's also illegal to block an intersection, you might want to do the illegal thing that will actually continue you on your way to your destination instead of waiting it out in the intersection.
Although, strictly speaking, if you enter the intersection without a place to go on the other side, you have legally 'blocked an intersection', regardless of whether or not your gamble pays off and you can get out before the light changes. So technically, changing lanes wouldn't fix that.
Unless you want to make the argument you intended to change lanes illegally, and hence you did have somewhere to go, namely, the other lane. 'I didn't break that law because I was intending to break a different law' would be an interesting defense in court.
Ha, I wish. When I visited NYC, people blocked intersections all the time.
It's probably lower in other places, but $500? Damn. That's what going the 25-34 MPH over the speed limit fines are capped at. I take back what I said, but, seriously, that seems totally stupid.
Blocking the intersection is only when you enter it without being able to fit in your lane at the other side.
You're not legally blocking an intersection if you can't get across because of other people in other lanes being in your way, like if you're turning left and opposing traffic is stopping you. Even if they stop where they are, blocking traffic, and thus strand you as you're unable to turn through them, you're still not committing the offense of blocking the intersection.
No, you only commit 'blocking the intersection' that the moment you enter the intersection if, and only if, you don't have a clear place to be on the other side of it, regardless of what happens inside it. In theory, they can charge you with it even if your gamble paid off and the other side is clear by the time you get to it. Entering without a clear place to be is illegal, just like entering on a red light is illegal.
The law usually lets you do random maneuvers if someone's blocking traffic. I don't know about Britain, though.
I think the point of the notice about "not responsible for objects coming from road" is to warn you that even if the chunk of rock that hit you came from the truck's cargo, they will claim that it came from the road. Hence try to bully you out of complaining in the first place.
Indeed, and, like I said, some have managed to phrase it in such a way it sounds like they're not responsible to anything that happens to you if you're behind them. Some are even outright lies.
I'm required to be a certain distance behind them at a certain speed. Far enough for me to stop when they do. (Which actually means I can be closer to trucks, with their longer stopping distance, than other cars, although I don't know if the law recognizes that.)
I'm not required to do anything else, I'm not even required to read their fucking signs, and if they hit me with their criminally-negligent loose cargo, my insurance company will see theirs in court.
Presumably, if the 'parking ticket' version of 'blocking traffic' existed, that is what you should get a ticket for.
As that crime apparently doesn't exist at all, you shouldn't get a ticket at all.
Also, I have to disagree that blocking an intersection carries a 'large fine'. Although for the life of me I can't figure out how much it is...I can find the fines for speed, but nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
On top of this, the money supply has increased almost 300% in the past few months.
I don't know what universe you live in, but it's not this one. The money supply has recently vanished because a goodly portion of it was created via loans. When a bank loans money out, it creates maybe 15x times as much money.
These loans which are no longer being issued, and, of course, older loans are being paid off. 'Money' is vanishing.
I seem to recall Democrats complaining at the top of their lungs when the GOP used these types of tactics (say by linking every Democrat to Al Sharpton, Michael Moore or Sean Penn), so where's the outrage now that one of their own is engaged in the same behavior?
When Republicans links Democrats to crazy figures on the far left, what do Democrats do?
Say 'No, they don't speak for us, and I totally disagree with what they say.', and that's pretty much the end of that. It helps, of course, than they don't.
When Democrats link Republicans to to crazy figures on the far right, what do Republican do?
Half of them leap to his defense, and half of them attempted to distance themselves but then have to crawl back to Rush on their hands and knees begging for forgiveness when he turned on them.
You're right...we used to complain, but doing the exact same thing against you guys is just sooooo much funnier. Cause, you know, our wackjobs are actually fringe, whereas yours are in charge of your base. Please, continue to link the left to fringe figures on the far left. That, as you say, allows the left perfect cover to do it to the right...and we'll see which party needs their crazy blathering fringes more.
When I saw Obama link you guys to Rush I just about died laughing, because I could almost predict the future at that point. I didn't know exactly who'd attempt to defect from Rushland and be cut down by friendly fire in the back, but I know it would happen.
I hope Obama does it again every few months. Maybe with someone else beside Rush. Malkin's due for some sort of moronic comment soon.
Link her to some moderate Republican who appeared on her show, watch the moderate Republican attempt to distance themselves, watch Malkin attack the disloyalty, watch the moderate Republican leap back towards supporting Malkin, proving the point and looking like a dishonest loyalty-lacking weasel, and I'll be rolling on the floor laughing. Political jujutsu.
A reasonable person might wanted to have kept those facts in mind...until the judge threw out the case for exactly that stated reason, that he had an alibi that placed him out of state for many of the supposed incidents. Which the police did not even slightly bother to investigate.
Um, duh. I don't know why you're acting like this is a 'he said she said' situation where we should wait for the court to decide, because the court already decided the complaint his wife filed against him...in his favor. The judge totally and immediately dismissed the case.
This guy's first contact with the police department stems from a messy divorce, and charges of harassment and stalking.
No. This guy's first contact with the police was when his wife filed bogus charges against him, and the police refused to look at the fact he was out of the state at various times he was supposedly bothering her.
They, instead, managed to ignore his alibi all the way to court, where the judge immediately threw the entire case out because, duh, he had an alibi.
Cases where the defendant has an alibi, at least one that is fairly solid, should not make it to court in the first place. No criminal case that immediately gets thrown out due to lack of evidence should make it to court in the first place.
Which, incidentally, is a damn good reason to be pissed at the police.
When you have an alibi for the crimes, you should not end up in front of a judge at all.
The DA should have declined to press charges, and he has every incentive to do so, because having a case immediately dismissed for lack of evidence looks really bad.
So either the DA is a moron(1) or, more likely, the police didn't bother to actually inform him that the guy was saying 'Hey, I have an alibi for this', much less check out this alibi to see if it was true.
So they kept him in the criminal justice system (even if out on bail, he had various restrictions on movement and a curfew and whatnot) for months or longer on a case that any idiot could see was bogus.
Abuse of police power isn't just confined to planting evidence and lying under oath and other things that are outright illegal. They have a lot of power simply to screw people's lives up for months until they show up in front of a judge, even if the judge immediately dismisses everything.
1) Incidentally, the DA's the guy this person should have talked to when the police kept pursuing a case they were obviously going to lose in court, because, like I said, he's got an incentive to just drop the case if he's going to lose, but good luck for people with court appointed lawyers even talking to their own lawyer, much less the DA.
There really should be an investigation on how his own lawyer handled this. While technically speaking they don't have to turn over information to the prosecution, they obviously should turn over information that would result in the case being dropped!
If they did turn it over, OTOH, that's the sort of stuff that takes down district attorneys, when they, or people under them, spending time and taxpayer money on cases they know they can't win.
There are a lot of delusional people here who think harassment is illegal, and that running a web site can be harassment.
First off, it's not illegal. If someone is harassing you, the thing to do is to take out a restraining order against them, during which you can present evidence they were harassing you. No harassment before that is issued that is 'illegal' in any way. (And these cops don't have restraining orders against this guy.)
Secondly, harassment requires interaction. Speaking to them, following them, emailing them, watching them, something. That's what restraining orders stop people from doing.
Simply posting things publicly on your website cannot be harassment. On their website, sure. Not yours.
There are actual facts available, moron.
Like what sort of 'petty theft' he was charged with, the totally nonsensical claim of having stolen police faceplates from their desk. (As opposed to him simply running down to the local trophy shop and having some printed up.)
Because one of the 'crimes' he was accused of was stealing desktop faceplates (Those things on desks with a person's name.) from a police department, taking pictures of them, and putting those pictures on the internet?
Things people don't do, #29483: Steal things worth five dollars, with people's name on them, from the police, and post pictures of that on the internet.
I don't know in what universe you happen to live in, but in the real one you can't charge people with 'harassment'.
Harassment is simply one of the possible grounds for getting a restraining order. It is not a criminal action per se.
And also harassment requires communication with the victim. You cannot harass people simply by talking about them in public.
That would be slander or libel, which is not a crime, although you could be sued for it.
He was charged with the crime of 'pretty theft', based on pictures he'd made of things that looked like police nameplates but he asserts he created himself. Getting a search warrant based on publicly posted pictures and asserting 'theft' is pretty absurd...and I hope those police actually reported their nameplates stolen.
Nameplates, in case you're confused, are those things on police officer's desks. He created some in photoshop for his website, or just had some fakes engraved (They cost like 5 dollars.), and they're asserting that he actually stole nameplates from the police department, in what would be the stupidest theft ever.
He's also charged with 'computer tampering with the intent to harass', which is the same crime as 'computer tampering', which he almost certain did not do.
Or, and here's a crazy idea, the summary could not talk about 'knee surgery' if it actually meant a specific kind of knee surgery.
Just because a specific type of knee surgery is a placebo doesn't mean it is correct to say 'knee surgery' is.
I can't even imagine what they're claiming when they 'review the data' for cough medicine.
Does cough medicine actually assert to cause less coughing or something? That's not why I take it, I take it because it makes my coughs hurt less!
Reducing coughs would be a damn stupid thing for medicine to attempt to do...you're coughing for a reason. Your body does not want what is in your lungs in your lungs, do not force it to stay there. It's like trying to sneeze less when you have a cold. Um, no. If you want to medically treat the problem, what you need to do is take that stuff that loosens mucus and makes coughs more productive, so you can actually start expelling the stuff you're trying to expel.(1)
And, like me and everyone else, take cough medicine so that your throat hurts less and is less irritated. (And if you were coughing solely because your throat was irritated, you might cough less, but that's not the point.)
1) I actually wish people would realize that a lot of 'sickness' like fevers and sneezing and coughing are our body doing that on purpose, and that you shouldn't attempt to stop them, you should help them along. (Well, except sometimes our body will drive straight over a cliff and kill us with a fever it itself generated, but normally you should help them along.)
Yeah. tell that to my brother, who got his kneecap broken in half thanks to a kayaking accident and had surgery to attach it back together with titanium pins, and is now fine. I sure he could have just rolled around in a wheelchair his whole life.
Seriously, saying 'knee surgery doesn't work' is about as stupid as his previous assertion that 'antibiotics is a bad idea for bronchitis or sore throat or sinusitis'....yeah, tell that to people with Streptococcus pneumoniae infections who didn't take antibiotics.
Oh, you can't? They developed full-blown pneumonia or meningitis or endocarditis or all the other places Streptococcus pneumoniae can live and kill you...and they died? Well, silly them.
I especially like the fact that 'infections usually recede within days'...um...yeah, and those people usually don't see a doctor in the first place. People go to the doctor when infections don't recede.
Just because people want medication that's harmful for their health doesn't mean doctors should do it.
Antibiotics are dangerous. They are dangerous for society as a whole, as they increase resistant strains, but they're also dangerous for each individual use. There is a non-zero risk of causing some sort of harm by using things that, after all, are designed to kill cells in your body. They're supposed to take out bacteria cells, but friendly fire is always happening. Although your body can stand to lose a lot of cells with no problem, there's always some risk, like a guy above who apparently suffered nerve damage, probably because an attack took out a nerve cell or two.
And hence it is unethical, period, to prescribe antibiotics when doctors know it's a viral infection. It is risking harm for no possible gain.
Doctors should just start prescribing high qualities of vitamins for viruses, if people really want something. People who have influenza and even the common cold often do not eat correctly, and lacking various vitamins has been demonstrated to vastly increase the time it takes to fight off infections, so there's a medical rationale there, and if the medical profession started promoting how they've discovered how to fight off some disease without using dangerous antibiotics, we'd all win.
Yeah, but that's the government dictating what medication you can and can't take!
Here, we prefer to leave it to the private sector, which doesn't want to actually spend money on figuring out what would be a good idea.
It's not that simple with sore throats. Some are viral and some (very painful) are bacterial.
Oh, is that what the stupid summary is talking about?
Because I read that and said 'Um, antibiotics are harmful for bronchitis? Talk about absurdly dangerous medical advice.'.
Obviously, you should only take antibiotics if you have a bacterial infection, and 'most' bronchitis goes away on its own...but they say that when most of it goes away on its own in such a short time people don't actually see a doctor in a few days. That 'bronchitis' is never even officially diagnosed.
That's like saying 'most pain' goes away by itself...most pain, in fact, is caused by something specific, and will quickly fade away. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see a doctor if you have inexplicably leg pain for a week because 'most pain' goes away by itself.
By the time people get to a doctor about their bronchitis, after four or five days, it has usually become clear it is not a cold or a simple flu. At that point it is likely to be some sort of bacterial infection, although it might be a flu that their body cannot fight off.
Obviously, it's idiotic to prescribe antibiotics for the later, but they're being prescribed for everyone who shows up for one simple reason: Antibiotics are cheaper than tests to see what sort of infection it is.
They didn't give her an iPod, they gave her footage of her visit that was on an iPod.
Is everyone here a moron? The iPod was the frame.
I can just imagine if they'd burned the footage to DVD: President gives queen DVD-R!
He did give her an actual gift too: A signed songbook by Rogers, who wrote some of her favorite musicals.
Obmama didn't 'give her an iPod' at all.
Obama gave her a signed Rogers (Of Rogers and Hammerstein, who the queen loves,and considers the a song from Oklahoma her and her husbands 'song') songbook.
It was an absurdly good gift. Personal, and yet historic enough that it can be displayed with a bunch of other historic things.
He also gave her a bunch of footage of her trip here that was filmed. He presented this to her within a video iPod.
And everyone trying to make an issue of this is a giant moron.
Technically, what they did was illegal. You're not allowed to create rolling blockades like that, and people in the slow lanes are supposed to drop back if people can't get around them at the speed limit. (Or they should move to the other lane.)
Continually driving next to other cars like that is illegal, for exactly the reason it blocks all other drivers. Yeah, they did it at the speed limit, but the minimum speed on roads without it marked is 20 under the max speed...and can you imagine if you did it at 35? Or if the speed limit on that road really was 75 and they did it at 55?
However, instead of driving at the speed limit, they should vary between the speed limit and five under, and pass and repass each other. That would be legal.
It would, by necessity, let a lot of cars get by, but it would still be more than enough to completely fuck up traffic in many places where the speed limits are blatantly ignored.
And, as an added bonus, it would only work in places where they were ignored by a large amount. If everyone was going 5 over, it'd only cause slight slowdowns as people waited to pass.
But something like I-75 through the middle of Atlanta, where the speed limit is 55 and 75 is considered slow (I live in Atlanta.), it would just totally blow the road up. One person going the speed limit causes major problems.
I think the theory is that the camera takes a picture of you behind the line, when the light's red, and then another of you in front of it.
It's a certain distance in front, like ten feet, so you can't argue that you're just a 'poor stopper' and didn't halt entirely behind the line. (Which is technically illegal, but in reality being a foot or two over the line won't get you a ticket. I'm not sure that being stopped over the line is actually 'running the light' or some other, lesser, offense.)
That is the theory. Some cameras do not, in fact, take two pictures.
I don't know who told you that or if the rules are different in California or what.
Here in Georgia it is illegal to change lanes in an intersection, and even to change lanes a certain number of feet before and after.
Granted, as it's also illegal to block an intersection, you might want to do the illegal thing that will actually continue you on your way to your destination instead of waiting it out in the intersection.
Although, strictly speaking, if you enter the intersection without a place to go on the other side, you have legally 'blocked an intersection', regardless of whether or not your gamble pays off and you can get out before the light changes. So technically, changing lanes wouldn't fix that.
Unless you want to make the argument you intended to change lanes illegally, and hence you did have somewhere to go, namely, the other lane. 'I didn't break that law because I was intending to break a different law' would be an interesting defense in court.
Ha, I wish. When I visited NYC, people blocked intersections all the time.
It's probably lower in other places, but $500? Damn. That's what going the 25-34 MPH over the speed limit fines are capped at. I take back what I said, but, seriously, that seems totally stupid.
It's been done.
Blocking the intersection is only when you enter it without being able to fit in your lane at the other side.
You're not legally blocking an intersection if you can't get across because of other people in other lanes being in your way, like if you're turning left and opposing traffic is stopping you. Even if they stop where they are, blocking traffic, and thus strand you as you're unable to turn through them, you're still not committing the offense of blocking the intersection.
No, you only commit 'blocking the intersection' that the moment you enter the intersection if, and only if, you don't have a clear place to be on the other side of it, regardless of what happens inside it. In theory, they can charge you with it even if your gamble paid off and the other side is clear by the time you get to it. Entering without a clear place to be is illegal, just like entering on a red light is illegal.
The law usually lets you do random maneuvers if someone's blocking traffic. I don't know about Britain, though.
I think the point of the notice about "not responsible for objects coming from road" is to warn you that even if the chunk of rock that hit you came from the truck's cargo, they will claim that it came from the road. Hence try to bully you out of complaining in the first place.
Indeed, and, like I said, some have managed to phrase it in such a way it sounds like they're not responsible to anything that happens to you if you're behind them. Some are even outright lies.
I'm required to be a certain distance behind them at a certain speed. Far enough for me to stop when they do. (Which actually means I can be closer to trucks, with their longer stopping distance, than other cars, although I don't know if the law recognizes that.)
I'm not required to do anything else, I'm not even required to read their fucking signs, and if they hit me with their criminally-negligent loose cargo, my insurance company will see theirs in court.
Well, whatever it is, it's still the wrong thing.
Presumably, if the 'parking ticket' version of 'blocking traffic' existed, that is what you should get a ticket for.
As that crime apparently doesn't exist at all, you shouldn't get a ticket at all.
Also, I have to disagree that blocking an intersection carries a 'large fine'. Although for the life of me I can't figure out how much it is...I can find the fines for speed, but nothing else.