If we didn't have stuff like this to do, Congress might have to talk about the fact that the Middle East is about to descend into chaos due to complete mismangement over the past five years, and this time with a hundred thousand US troups right there in the middle of it.
If the American people caught wind of that, there's no telling what they'd do!
What you need to do is purchase as many PS3s as members of your family, along with a copy of each game for each member of the family that will wish to play it. Install them all, together with a complicated video and controller switching system, in your basement or wherever your servants are, and merely have them connect the correct one up to the nearest TV whenever you want to play. Having video-game systems and disc libraries dangling everywhere is so upper-middle class.
And do the same with DVD players and other things, have them on the same switching system. Although I wouldn't try it with music, you probably just want to rip those onto a computer and have a servent be a 'Dee-jay', they have programs designed for queueing up requests. You can install a nice musical system with multiple 'sound zones', like one at your pool and one in you dining area and control it all from one computer, but that's a bit outside the scope of a discussion about video-games. Bill Gates can tell you more.
With a well-designed system, it shouldn't take up too much of your servant's time, playing a video-game probably will hold someone's interest at least thirty minutes, and movies for an hour and half, and it's just some button pushing when you do switch games. So if you are low on good help who can speak English, he can double as your doorman or lawyer or Congressman.
As for the Hummers, you can get dedicated satellite links quite reasonably, which would be my first bet, but I'm fairly certain playing video-games over a satellite link would be very annoying, so that's probably not that great an idea. Maybe you should approach Sony and see if they can figure out a solution. I think I own 3% of them if you want a reference.
It also might be possible to build a sort of robot to switch out discs, they have them for computers tape drives, but, honestly, then you'd need someone to maintain the robot, so you're back to square one, although he wouldn't have to speak English. And you'd have to manually select what you want instead of just pushing the intercom and getting a servant to do it, like my damned iPod that takes me up to a whole minute to search through to find a song while jogging, and trying to get a servent to jog at the exact same pace as you so he can find the song is just a good way to have the headphones yanked off your head. I really must find a wireless headset for this thing.
And no robot can interpet what movie you mean when you say 'That movie about the robot who gets hit by lightning and comes alive.', whereas servents either will know, or can, I am told, 'Googel it', which is apparently a free way to find things out on the internet, although I'm not sure how it works. But anything that makes a servent's job easier I'm in favor of, it means I can pay them less.
Oh, and I hope this would be obvious, but please take proper precautions when installing televisions in pools. You'd be amazed how dishonest some pool cleaners can be.
And spare me your house analogy, a house is physical property not covered under copyright law.
Neither is watching a copyrighted work. Only copying or a public performance is covered under copyright law.
You need a license to do those two things, so, in a sense, their message about what it is 'licensed' to do is correct, just like someone without a drivers license is only 'licensed' to operate vehicles on private property.
But that's not true because the car's manual tells us, that's just true in general even if it doesn't say it, and thus it isn't, in any legal sense, an actual license.
And, no DVDs don't have any text on the box saying they are 'licensed' for that sort of viewing only, although I have one that says 'Licensed for sale only in the US and Canada'. That is not, in fact, true...what they mean is that Paramount is licensed to sale that only in the US and Canada. It's like the 'Do not remove tag under penalty of law' tag on matteresses and applies to the original seller and anyone who's got an agreement to resale their stuff, not someone who's merely purchased it.
None of them say anything about 'home viewing only', which isn't accurate anyway. There's all sorts of specific rules about when something is a 'public performance' and when it isn't. We had two big screen TV + VCR 'movie room' in my college's student center that were specifically designed to be under the threshold in size for 'public perfomance'. Every so often, people would go 'Hey, can we bring a VCR or DVD player and hook it up to the projector in the actual movie theater instead of using the TV here, so we can have a lot more people? I mean, no one's ever using it, and we'll clean it afterward.', and every time they'd have to explain if they did that people couldn't bring their own movies and show them without any sort of royalties to the movie company, they'd have to aquire licenses for public performances.
(Of course, when I say they were under the threshold, that is by seating, and people would always drag more seats in or just stand if the movie was popular enough, but the student center had plausible deniablity that they didn't know that was happening, it's not their job to monitor that sort of thing.)
You aren't even bound by a license when you buy software. You might be bound by it when you click okay, but who knows.
And, yeah, the meme that copyrighted works are 'licenced' has now spread to other mediums where there aren't any fucking licenses at all. I don't mean 'The licenses aren't legal' or 'The licenses can't change the terms after the sale', but there are simply no licenses, at all, in any way. None.
And, no, there's no such thing as an 'implied license'. No one's ever been sued for a contract violation for doing anything with a music CD. There is merely copyright, which prohibits certain things under the law.
The media should be exposing this, but instead we have the fucking LA Times repeating nonsense. And bringing it up in an article about reselling and renting games and thus implying that practice is a 'license violation' is insane, considering that every store that sells or rents games or music or videos would be in violation if that were so.
I think implying that a huge percentage of our retail establishments (Hell, it would be easier to count the ones that don't sell anything covered by copyright.) are operating in violation of the law by reselling copyrighted material should be more than enough to require a correction and firing of this 'Dawn C. Chmielewski'.
Big video rental places do often pay a bit more than 'normal price', solely because they purchase the movies early. Distributers sometimes sell the big movies at a few bucks more for a week or so, then drop the prices to the 'real' price at which point stores buy it for resale. This lets the big chains get it before anyone else if they're willing to pay extra.
They're still paying less than us, though, and, yeah, even if they buy it early for 'more', they may make up for it with wholesale discounts, which in the end results merely in the big boys promoting the hell out of it for a week or so while they have the exclusive on it, which, in the end, is good for everyone.
However, yes, they aren't under any sort of 'special license', that's just a stupid myth. It is perfectly legal for me to rent my movies out exactly the same as them. Video rental places purchase perfectly normal movies and perfectly normal 'license'. (Except, of course, they, like everyone else, don't purchase 'licenses' at all.)
But if it wins, since online gambling is illegal, I would have two choices: report the true source of the income and be in violation of anti-online-gambling laws, or not report it and be charged with tax evasion.
No.
The courts have ruled that you do have to report illegal income, but you don't have to say where it came from.
Technically, though, that was always allowed, as income tax forms aren't detailed enough to be a confession. You can sit there and swear under oath that you mug people for a living and took $1000 from that job as income, and as long as you don't say who or where, they couldn't get you for it. You can't be arrested for 'general mugging', you have to be charged with specific instances. However, that can be used in a mugging case against you.
And nothing requires you to report if your income is illegal, just what kind it is. They don't know if you gambled in a casino or in a state lottery or illegally online.
However, what you can do is simply assert yur fifth amendment rights when filing the taxes, and put 'Fifth amendment' when disclosing the income.
And, by that same logic, I proved that airbags aren't important safety tools, and schools are justified in searching cars that come on campus with them, or giving students the choice to disable them or to drive in cars that don't have them.
Did you not actually read my comment? Forcing students to choose between their own safety or having their privacy invaded is a pretty fucking stupid thing for a school to be doing, a school which, remember, is charged with student safety, often in opposition to students.
But I guess students who choose not to take their cell phones to school because they don't want school officials poking around in it, and thus don't have it when they're driving home and their car flips down a hill and they end up trapped inside, doesn't actually count as a school safety issue, so the schools are completely in the clear legally. When they are physically at school they can, of course, use the school phones...assuming the problem isn't their teacher having a heart attack and a student having to sprint 300 feet to reach the office or a pay phone.
Or they can bring their cell phones to school, providing a valuable safety service to themselves and others, and the school will respond by poking through their private life, their pictures, their IMs, whenever they want to. (No, leaving it in their car isn't an option. The school already asserts the right to search cars, and, anyway, about half the students in high school can't drive to school and thus don't have a car.)
This is flipping 'security vs. privacy' in school on its head. Before, schools asserted the right to search students to make them 'more secure', to make sure weapons and drugs didn't make it on campus. Whatever. Now, they're actually trying to compile evidence of wrongdoing, but in a way that not only invades privacy, but can't physically make anyone safer, and will inadvertantly make everyone less safe as students simply stop carrying phones, or at least hide them in their car.
The fact people lived without something doesn't make it not an important safety tool. If you think that, you're welcome to go and live at a 1906-level of safety with no emergency services, and drive a car that mets 1906 safety standards, which I belive would consist solely of 'Doesn't spontaneously catch on fire'.
The rest of us, and our children, will choose to live in a modern world where calling emergency services takes fifteen seconds instead of anywhere between three minutes and never. I like this world a lot better than the world ten years ago when I grew up. Less people die.
Actually, the school bus didn't run to my house, but that's a long story.
And I didn't have a cell phone, you moron.
Neither did my car have a fucking airbag, but, you know, I don't feel like disabling that because a school comes up with some idiotic justification to search my car if I were still in school and drove with one onto campus.
No one said you should have to walk home. I didn't have a cell phone, and I never walked home.
I was just taking issue with his idiotic assumption that everyone lived within walking distance of their high school and thus could just stroll home.
And you didn't drive to high school 'every day', unless you were held back when you were younger, or the driving age was absurdly low, or high school starts a lot later in your state. I, like most people, entered the 8th grade, aka, high school, when I was 13 and my state, like most states, has the driving age at least 16.
And I didn't do a lot of after school stuff, and my mother was a teacher in the same system and thus automatically knew about school schedule changes, and her school was in walking distance of my high school for three of the four years, and was easy to track down, and even I spent at least a total of an hour on the pay phone each year trying to track down someone to give me a lift after an after school activity ended.
If I had to do it, you know other people did. This was back in 92-97 when cell phones were completely banned, and I saw plenty of people trying to track down rides.
I don't know where this 'consented to a search' crap is come from. A school is not a highway, and students haven't consented to anything, and they can withdraw consent for a search at any time.
No, airbgas inflate, and then, despite what movies like to pretend, immediately deflate to where they're just a bag in your lap. They are not airtight, they are designed to absorb your impact and deflate.
And the needed 'control' is, at this point, almost always 'braking', which you don't need to be able to see for anyway, not any sort of steering. Not that they normally inflate far enough to keep you from seeing anyway unless you're four feet tall.
You do, however, still have to be inside the car to do that, which seatbelts help with, and not shaken unconcious, which airbags help with.
That said, there probably are one or two crashes where the airbag has caused enough distraction at the exact wrong moment it has made a crash worse than it would have otherwise been. Just like there are probably skydiving incidents where a screwed-up parachute has caused death in a case where the victim would have miraciously survived without any parachute at all, like landing in a lake at exactly the right angle and then have the defunct parachute get tangled and them pulled under.
This is not, however, a good reason to go jumping out of a plane without a parachute.
However, if you want to argue there should be the right to turn airbags off, I don't actually have a much a problem with that as seatbelts. Airbags are almost entirely a 'driver protection' mechanism. If your airbag went off and actually helped you, you almost certainly are not needed to operate the car anymore. Seatbelts keep you in place if sideswiped and keep you from veering into other cars, and keep you from being a projectial, but airbags really only help in front collisions, and you're probably already 'stopped' when they go off.
Not that I've actually ever heard anyone argue they want the ability to turn their own airbag off. Passenger side airbags, for kids, sure, but driver airbags?
Sez you. I have poor circulation, and I've almost passed out before walking between 40 degree changes in temperature, both from 65 to 105 and from 75 to 35.
And anyone who thinks five seconds to grab stuff is going to make a difference in whether or not anyone survives a fire is stupid, anyway.
People die in fires because they walk around, either accidently or trying to find a way out, in smoke-filled areas and pass out.
They don't live or die because they run out two seconds in front of a wall of fire or not. This isn't a damn movie where a fireball chases them down the hall and out a doorway.
Teaching people all the ways to exit a building would be immensely more useful in an actual fire than trying to get them out in fifteen seconds. You want a real firedrill, rent a chemical fog machine (Which you can still breathe in.) from a theatre supply place, lock one exit, barricade another hall, have all the teachers leave the classroom, tell the students what is about to happen, set off the alarm, and see what happens. Then have a big assembly about it afterward where you talk about what everyone did wrong and did right. If you want, you can even have the teachers act as obversers and tag out 'dead' people, like a paintball game.
This whole 'Run everyone outside via pre-determined paths to stand in the cold for fifteen minutes' is not only very annoying and more likely to make people non-responsive to actual alarms, but not the least bit useful in an actual fire. The people who have a clear path out aren't the problem, they can casually stroll out the doors over a span of five minutes for all anyone cares. It's the people who don't have a clear path that are in danger.
Cracking a password on a 'cell phone', which is actually just a computer nowadays, is illegal in most states. It's called 'unauthorized access of a computer'.
Or, at least, the computer you are calling a cell phone.
Please note that, while you may have possession of this computer, that I'm not authorizing you to access it, and am in fact barring all school personal from accessing it right now, and unauthorized access to a computer is a felony in this state.
And if you are in elementary or middle school, then what in the hell are you doing with a cell phone anyway.
Parents can lock cell phones to only specific incoming and outgoing numbers. If I had a kid, I'd probably give them a locked cell phone as soon as I can trust them not to call emergency numbers by accident, which would probably be 10 or so.
Although they probably wouldn't be taking it to school with them, unless they were going somewhere directly afterwards or during.
See, schools don't have due process. So if you refuse to do something the school doesn't have legal authority to do, they will let you get away with it. And label you a 'bad kid'.
And from then on, you're screwed. A legal locker check every day? Yup. Parents getting called in for some pretend reason? Check. Getting hauled in because your Marilyn Manson t-shirt has a skull on it, and 'images of death' are against the dress code? Check. Getting in trouble because you said 'crap' when other people around you seem to get away with saying 'fuck'? Check.
I have called for 'due process' for some time in schools, and not because I think kids deserve a lot more rights than they have (Although searching cell phone memory is outrageous.), but because justice is enforced solely against 'bad kids', and they are often 'bad kids' solely because they don't do whatever authority says. I ended up a 'bad kid' a few times, which would be hilarious if you knew me, but managed to avoid the fate because my mother was a teacher in the same school system and I managed to avoid any rulebreaking, even the rules everyone ignored.
So I say, let's make the justice system in school official. Whatever they're got, right now, let's make it official, with appeals and whatever standards of evidences currently exist. And, most importantly, a trial for disputed charges.
I love how everyone here is acting like people wants to operate phones in the classroom. No kidding that shouldn't, and isn't allowed. That's not allowed in college, much less grade school. All educational enviroments require you to not operate your phone, or even have it turned off. We had that debate, I believe, in 1988.
And while I thought people weren't so incredibly stupid this would have to be spelt out, but: school hours != in a classroom.
At any school where you change classes, which is every high school, you walk from classroom to classroom. You also probably get one or two 15 minutes breaks, and you also have a lunch time, and there might be time before and after school that counts as 'school hours'. (For the purpose of my high school, you could leave by 3:05 if you drove and 3:15 was when the bus left, but you could hang around until 3:20 when the last bell rang. Before that the rules were normal 'Class changing rules' and it counted as 'during school hours', with some teachers out as monitors, afterwards you had to check in at the office and have a purpose in being on campus.)
In other words, if you're in high school, you're already not under direct authority of a teacher for at least an hour and a half, and not in a classroom during that time.
Can anyone give a single fucking reason you shouldn't be able to use your phone during that time? You're allowed to wander the halls freely, talk to whoever you want, you can even play electronic games and listen to music on headset, and some schools even let you leave the grounds for lunch.
Cell phones are important safety tools for children now. They keep kids from being stranded, and allow parents to check that was is supposed to be going on is, in fact, going on. Saying 'Don't take them to school' is idiotic.
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If we didn't have stuff like this to do, Congress might have to talk about the fact that the Middle East is about to descend into chaos due to complete mismangement over the past five years, and this time with a hundred thousand US troups right there in the middle of it.
If the American people caught wind of that, there's no telling what they'd do!
What al Zaquari was running isn't an actual AQ-operated group either. It's a fucking PR stunt naming it the same thing.
What you need to do is purchase as many PS3s as members of your family, along with a copy of each game for each member of the family that will wish to play it. Install them all, together with a complicated video and controller switching system, in your basement or wherever your servants are, and merely have them connect the correct one up to the nearest TV whenever you want to play. Having video-game systems and disc libraries dangling everywhere is so upper-middle class.
And do the same with DVD players and other things, have them on the same switching system. Although I wouldn't try it with music, you probably just want to rip those onto a computer and have a servent be a 'Dee-jay', they have programs designed for queueing up requests. You can install a nice musical system with multiple 'sound zones', like one at your pool and one in you dining area and control it all from one computer, but that's a bit outside the scope of a discussion about video-games. Bill Gates can tell you more.
With a well-designed system, it shouldn't take up too much of your servant's time, playing a video-game probably will hold someone's interest at least thirty minutes, and movies for an hour and half, and it's just some button pushing when you do switch games. So if you are low on good help who can speak English, he can double as your doorman or lawyer or Congressman.
As for the Hummers, you can get dedicated satellite links quite reasonably, which would be my first bet, but I'm fairly certain playing video-games over a satellite link would be very annoying, so that's probably not that great an idea. Maybe you should approach Sony and see if they can figure out a solution. I think I own 3% of them if you want a reference.
It also might be possible to build a sort of robot to switch out discs, they have them for computers tape drives, but, honestly, then you'd need someone to maintain the robot, so you're back to square one, although he wouldn't have to speak English. And you'd have to manually select what you want instead of just pushing the intercom and getting a servant to do it, like my damned iPod that takes me up to a whole minute to search through to find a song while jogging, and trying to get a servent to jog at the exact same pace as you so he can find the song is just a good way to have the headphones yanked off your head. I really must find a wireless headset for this thing.
And no robot can interpet what movie you mean when you say 'That movie about the robot who gets hit by lightning and comes alive.', whereas servents either will know, or can, I am told, 'Googel it', which is apparently a free way to find things out on the internet, although I'm not sure how it works. But anything that makes a servent's job easier I'm in favor of, it means I can pay them less.
Oh, and I hope this would be obvious, but please take proper precautions when installing televisions in pools. You'd be amazed how dishonest some pool cleaners can be.
And spare me your house analogy, a house is physical property not covered under copyright law.
Neither is watching a copyrighted work. Only copying or a public performance is covered under copyright law.
You need a license to do those two things, so, in a sense, their message about what it is 'licensed' to do is correct, just like someone without a drivers license is only 'licensed' to operate vehicles on private property.
But that's not true because the car's manual tells us, that's just true in general even if it doesn't say it, and thus it isn't, in any legal sense, an actual license.
And, no DVDs don't have any text on the box saying they are 'licensed' for that sort of viewing only, although I have one that says 'Licensed for sale only in the US and Canada'. That is not, in fact, true...what they mean is that Paramount is licensed to sale that only in the US and Canada. It's like the 'Do not remove tag under penalty of law' tag on matteresses and applies to the original seller and anyone who's got an agreement to resale their stuff, not someone who's merely purchased it.
None of them say anything about 'home viewing only', which isn't accurate anyway. There's all sorts of specific rules about when something is a 'public performance' and when it isn't. We had two big screen TV + VCR 'movie room' in my college's student center that were specifically designed to be under the threshold in size for 'public perfomance'. Every so often, people would go 'Hey, can we bring a VCR or DVD player and hook it up to the projector in the actual movie theater instead of using the TV here, so we can have a lot more people? I mean, no one's ever using it, and we'll clean it afterward.', and every time they'd have to explain if they did that people couldn't bring their own movies and show them without any sort of royalties to the movie company, they'd have to aquire licenses for public performances.
(Of course, when I say they were under the threshold, that is by seating, and people would always drag more seats in or just stand if the movie was popular enough, but the student center had plausible deniablity that they didn't know that was happening, it's not their job to monitor that sort of thing.)
You aren't even bound by a license when you buy software. You might be bound by it when you click okay, but who knows.
And, yeah, the meme that copyrighted works are 'licenced' has now spread to other mediums where there aren't any fucking licenses at all. I don't mean 'The licenses aren't legal' or 'The licenses can't change the terms after the sale', but there are simply no licenses, at all, in any way. None.
And, no, there's no such thing as an 'implied license'. No one's ever been sued for a contract violation for doing anything with a music CD. There is merely copyright, which prohibits certain things under the law.
The media should be exposing this, but instead we have the fucking LA Times repeating nonsense. And bringing it up in an article about reselling and renting games and thus implying that practice is a 'license violation' is insane, considering that every store that sells or rents games or music or videos would be in violation if that were so.
I think implying that a huge percentage of our retail establishments (Hell, it would be easier to count the ones that don't sell anything covered by copyright.) are operating in violation of the law by reselling copyrighted material should be more than enough to require a correction and firing of this 'Dawn C. Chmielewski'.
Big video rental places do often pay a bit more than 'normal price', solely because they purchase the movies early. Distributers sometimes sell the big movies at a few bucks more for a week or so, then drop the prices to the 'real' price at which point stores buy it for resale. This lets the big chains get it before anyone else if they're willing to pay extra.
They're still paying less than us, though, and, yeah, even if they buy it early for 'more', they may make up for it with wholesale discounts, which in the end results merely in the big boys promoting the hell out of it for a week or so while they have the exclusive on it, which, in the end, is good for everyone.
However, yes, they aren't under any sort of 'special license', that's just a stupid myth. It is perfectly legal for me to rent my movies out exactly the same as them. Video rental places purchase perfectly normal movies and perfectly normal 'license'. (Except, of course, they, like everyone else, don't purchase 'licenses' at all.)
But if it wins, since online gambling is illegal, I would have two choices: report the true source of the income and be in violation of anti-online-gambling laws, or not report it and be charged with tax evasion.
No.
The courts have ruled that you do have to report illegal income, but you don't have to say where it came from.
Technically, though, that was always allowed, as income tax forms aren't detailed enough to be a confession. You can sit there and swear under oath that you mug people for a living and took $1000 from that job as income, and as long as you don't say who or where, they couldn't get you for it. You can't be arrested for 'general mugging', you have to be charged with specific instances. However, that can be used in a mugging case against you.
And nothing requires you to report if your income is illegal, just what kind it is. They don't know if you gambled in a casino or in a state lottery or illegally online.
However, what you can do is simply assert yur fifth amendment rights when filing the taxes, and put 'Fifth amendment' when disclosing the income.
What are you talking about? Taxing would take money away from the people selling it, as would the fact anyone could compete.
Characters in 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' and 'Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey'.
And no amount of speech here can explain why they are relevant to this discussion. You have to see the movies to get it.
And, by that same logic, I proved that airbags aren't important safety tools, and schools are justified in searching cars that come on campus with them, or giving students the choice to disable them or to drive in cars that don't have them.
Did you not actually read my comment? Forcing students to choose between their own safety or having their privacy invaded is a pretty fucking stupid thing for a school to be doing, a school which, remember, is charged with student safety, often in opposition to students.
But I guess students who choose not to take their cell phones to school because they don't want school officials poking around in it, and thus don't have it when they're driving home and their car flips down a hill and they end up trapped inside, doesn't actually count as a school safety issue, so the schools are completely in the clear legally. When they are physically at school they can, of course, use the school phones...assuming the problem isn't their teacher having a heart attack and a student having to sprint 300 feet to reach the office or a pay phone.
Or they can bring their cell phones to school, providing a valuable safety service to themselves and others, and the school will respond by poking through their private life, their pictures, their IMs, whenever they want to. (No, leaving it in their car isn't an option. The school already asserts the right to search cars, and, anyway, about half the students in high school can't drive to school and thus don't have a car.)
This is flipping 'security vs. privacy' in school on its head. Before, schools asserted the right to search students to make them 'more secure', to make sure weapons and drugs didn't make it on campus. Whatever. Now, they're actually trying to compile evidence of wrongdoing, but in a way that not only invades privacy, but can't physically make anyone safer, and will inadvertantly make everyone less safe as students simply stop carrying phones, or at least hide them in their car.
The fact people lived without something doesn't make it not an important safety tool. If you think that, you're welcome to go and live at a 1906-level of safety with no emergency services, and drive a car that mets 1906 safety standards, which I belive would consist solely of 'Doesn't spontaneously catch on fire'.
The rest of us, and our children, will choose to live in a modern world where calling emergency services takes fifteen seconds instead of anywhere between three minutes and never. I like this world a lot better than the world ten years ago when I grew up. Less people die.
I wanted should start my own religion based on that concept, but I think Bill and Ted already beat me to it.
Actually, the school bus didn't run to my house, but that's a long story.
And I didn't have a cell phone, you moron.
Neither did my car have a fucking airbag, but, you know, I don't feel like disabling that because a school comes up with some idiotic justification to search my car if I were still in school and drove with one onto campus.
No one said you should have to walk home. I didn't have a cell phone, and I never walked home.
I was just taking issue with his idiotic assumption that everyone lived within walking distance of their high school and thus could just stroll home.
And you didn't drive to high school 'every day', unless you were held back when you were younger, or the driving age was absurdly low, or high school starts a lot later in your state. I, like most people, entered the 8th grade, aka, high school, when I was 13 and my state, like most states, has the driving age at least 16.
And I didn't do a lot of after school stuff, and my mother was a teacher in the same system and thus automatically knew about school schedule changes, and her school was in walking distance of my high school for three of the four years, and was easy to track down, and even I spent at least a total of an hour on the pay phone each year trying to track down someone to give me a lift after an after school activity ended.
If I had to do it, you know other people did. This was back in 92-97 when cell phones were completely banned, and I saw plenty of people trying to track down rides.
And thus debest was enlightened.
'Having to walk a mile or so home'
Are you a moron or something?
I lived FIFTEEN MILES from my high school.
I don't know where this 'consented to a search' crap is come from. A school is not a highway, and students haven't consented to anything, and they can withdraw consent for a search at any time.
No, airbgas inflate, and then, despite what movies like to pretend, immediately deflate to where they're just a bag in your lap. They are not airtight, they are designed to absorb your impact and deflate.
And the needed 'control' is, at this point, almost always 'braking', which you don't need to be able to see for anyway, not any sort of steering. Not that they normally inflate far enough to keep you from seeing anyway unless you're four feet tall.
You do, however, still have to be inside the car to do that, which seatbelts help with, and not shaken unconcious, which airbags help with.
That said, there probably are one or two crashes where the airbag has caused enough distraction at the exact wrong moment it has made a crash worse than it would have otherwise been. Just like there are probably skydiving incidents where a screwed-up parachute has caused death in a case where the victim would have miraciously survived without any parachute at all, like landing in a lake at exactly the right angle and then have the defunct parachute get tangled and them pulled under.
This is not, however, a good reason to go jumping out of a plane without a parachute.
However, if you want to argue there should be the right to turn airbags off, I don't actually have a much a problem with that as seatbelts. Airbags are almost entirely a 'driver protection' mechanism. If your airbag went off and actually helped you, you almost certainly are not needed to operate the car anymore. Seatbelts keep you in place if sideswiped and keep you from veering into other cars, and keep you from being a projectial, but airbags really only help in front collisions, and you're probably already 'stopped' when they go off.
Not that I've actually ever heard anyone argue they want the ability to turn their own airbag off. Passenger side airbags, for kids, sure, but driver airbags?
Sez you. I have poor circulation, and I've almost passed out before walking between 40 degree changes in temperature, both from 65 to 105 and from 75 to 35.
And anyone who thinks five seconds to grab stuff is going to make a difference in whether or not anyone survives a fire is stupid, anyway.
People die in fires because they walk around, either accidently or trying to find a way out, in smoke-filled areas and pass out.
They don't live or die because they run out two seconds in front of a wall of fire or not. This isn't a damn movie where a fireball chases them down the hall and out a doorway.
Teaching people all the ways to exit a building would be immensely more useful in an actual fire than trying to get them out in fifteen seconds. You want a real firedrill, rent a chemical fog machine (Which you can still breathe in.) from a theatre supply place, lock one exit, barricade another hall, have all the teachers leave the classroom, tell the students what is about to happen, set off the alarm, and see what happens. Then have a big assembly about it afterward where you talk about what everyone did wrong and did right. If you want, you can even have the teachers act as obversers and tag out 'dead' people, like a paintball game.
This whole 'Run everyone outside via pre-determined paths to stand in the cold for fifteen minutes' is not only very annoying and more likely to make people non-responsive to actual alarms, but not the least bit useful in an actual fire. The people who have a clear path out aren't the problem, they can casually stroll out the doors over a span of five minutes for all anyone cares. It's the people who don't have a clear path that are in danger.
Cracking a password on a 'cell phone', which is actually just a computer nowadays, is illegal in most states. It's called 'unauthorized access of a computer'.
Sure, I will physically hand over my cell phones.
Or, at least, the computer you are calling a cell phone.
Please note that, while you may have possession of this computer, that I'm not authorizing you to access it, and am in fact barring all school personal from accessing it right now, and unauthorized access to a computer is a felony in this state.
And if you are in elementary or middle school, then what in the hell are you doing with a cell phone anyway.
Parents can lock cell phones to only specific incoming and outgoing numbers. If I had a kid, I'd probably give them a locked cell phone as soon as I can trust them not to call emergency numbers by accident, which would probably be 10 or so.
Although they probably wouldn't be taking it to school with them, unless they were going somewhere directly afterwards or during.
Sure, why not.
*looks on the back of his phone*
Hey, look at that. FCC ID: PY7AC052012. It looks like this phone came with a permit to operate it. Who'd've thunk it?
That, really, is the whole thing.
See, schools don't have due process. So if you refuse to do something the school doesn't have legal authority to do, they will let you get away with it. And label you a 'bad kid'.
And from then on, you're screwed. A legal locker check every day? Yup. Parents getting called in for some pretend reason? Check. Getting hauled in because your Marilyn Manson t-shirt has a skull on it, and 'images of death' are against the dress code? Check. Getting in trouble because you said 'crap' when other people around you seem to get away with saying 'fuck'? Check.
I have called for 'due process' for some time in schools, and not because I think kids deserve a lot more rights than they have (Although searching cell phone memory is outrageous.), but because justice is enforced solely against 'bad kids', and they are often 'bad kids' solely because they don't do whatever authority says. I ended up a 'bad kid' a few times, which would be hilarious if you knew me, but managed to avoid the fate because my mother was a teacher in the same school system and I managed to avoid any rulebreaking, even the rules everyone ignored.
So I say, let's make the justice system in school official. Whatever they're got, right now, let's make it official, with appeals and whatever standards of evidences currently exist. And, most importantly, a trial for disputed charges.
I love how everyone here is acting like people wants to operate phones in the classroom. No kidding that shouldn't, and isn't allowed. That's not allowed in college, much less grade school. All educational enviroments require you to not operate your phone, or even have it turned off. We had that debate, I believe, in 1988.
And while I thought people weren't so incredibly stupid this would have to be spelt out, but: school hours != in a classroom.
At any school where you change classes, which is every high school, you walk from classroom to classroom. You also probably get one or two 15 minutes breaks, and you also have a lunch time, and there might be time before and after school that counts as 'school hours'. (For the purpose of my high school, you could leave by 3:05 if you drove and 3:15 was when the bus left, but you could hang around until 3:20 when the last bell rang. Before that the rules were normal 'Class changing rules' and it counted as 'during school hours', with some teachers out as monitors, afterwards you had to check in at the office and have a purpose in being on campus.)
In other words, if you're in high school, you're already not under direct authority of a teacher for at least an hour and a half, and not in a classroom during that time.
Can anyone give a single fucking reason you shouldn't be able to use your phone during that time? You're allowed to wander the halls freely, talk to whoever you want, you can even play electronic games and listen to music on headset, and some schools even let you leave the grounds for lunch.
You moron.
Cell phones are important safety tools for children now. They keep kids from being stranded, and allow parents to check that was is supposed to be going on is, in fact, going on. Saying 'Don't take them to school' is idiotic.