You mean the state that's so overrun with conservatives that they managed to pass an idiotic budget amendment to their constitution that keeps them from raising taxes?
You mean the state that switches between Republican and Democratic governors every election?
Yeah, let's pretend that a few liberals in San Francisco (Which, incidentally, is only the fourth largest city in California) mean that 'California' is extremely liberal.
And, again, I have no idea what the fuck this has to do with people Obama has to negotiate with. Obama doesn't run around negotiating with the city of San Francisco, or even the state of California for that matter. He negotiates with their elected officials.
Republicans have batshit insane rightwing elected officials. Democrats do not have batshit insane leftwing elected officials. A few people in San Francisco do not change that.
Uh, no, I speak as if the crazy leftwing in the US has no political power, which they do not. (Except possibly at a very few small jurisdictions, and even then not as much as you think.)
In case anyone is wondering, and didn't want to have to read that article, what these morons are talking about are actually automobile carrying train cars. The 'shackles' are just the stupid rings down the side used to strap in the cars.
These train cars, which have existed for decades, have now have started getting stacked in unused sidings by the dozens as the economy has taken a turn for the worse and less new cars are made and shipped.(1)
And the people reporting these 'death cars', are, of course, complete idiots, and have been so for decades. If we're talking about suspicious things, I'm finding that a little suspicious. They clearly would be unable to feed themselves, and, yet, somehow, manage to still be alive.
1) The real fun in that article comes from people who insist that cars are too wide to be carried by train. Uh, what? Cars have always been carried on trains, you utter idiots. Heck, cars fit in standard shipping containers, which are eight feet wide, while cars tend to be six feet wide. (Although using standard shipping containers is impossible, unless you want the person who drives it into the container to ride inside them, as they can't open the car doors enough to exit it. The specialized car carriers have some trick, I think they put the car in neutral and use the 'shackles' to winch it inside, and then strap it in place.)
I believe the premise is that a group of people feel that the federal law enforcement have become essentially an occupying force.
See, when the premise is that the Federal law enforcement is an 'occupying force', you know it was written by a right wing loon.
Almost all instances of police corruption and brutality are local. If anything, the Feds are the people who actually solve those problems. But, no, the right has to pretend the Federal government is some big boogie-man, and local government is the solution.
Of course, in reality, all of the most horrifically corrupt governments in this country's history, all of the most murderous conspiracies, everything, it's all been local. Usually city or county, a few times it was a state.
That's not to say that the federal government hasn't repeatedly abused its authority in various ways(1), or it's never acted in a corrupt manner in the past (The blatant murder of Dillinger, for example.).
But even when you include the long past Hoover-era of the FBI, it has a much better record than 75% of the local jurisdictions out there, and more current professionalism and accountability than 99% of them.
1) Recent abuses have almost nothing to do with 'law enforcement', though. Witness the illegal wiretapping, done by the NSA, or the detainee stuff, done by the military and CIA. The actual Federal law enforcement is professional. The last actual 'abuse' was Waco, and almost all the information people think they know about the government in that is a lie.
And he tried to citizen's-arrest someone for a misdemeanor, which you can't do anywhere in the US, even in places where you can citizen arrest people.
Laws about citizen's arrest vary from place to place, and some don't allow it at all, but even the in the places that allow it, at the very very minimum to do a citizen's arrest you must has personally witnessed someone committing a felony. That's basically the lowest bar for citizen's arrest, some places have more rules, some ban it except in special circumstances, but every jurisdiction requires you to at least personally witness them committing a felony.
Note that simple trespassing sometimes become a felony, but usually either do to intent (And that takes a jury to decide.), possession of a firearm (Which the other person usually cannot determine) or other factors like previous convictions for burglary (Which the other person usually does not know.)
So the general rule is, you cannot citizen arrest someone for trespassing, unless you have personally witnessed something that would turn it into a felony. (For example, if they start stealing stuff, that makes their trespass the felony of 'burglary', which is unlawfully entering with the intent of committing crimes. Or, you can just forget the stupid trespassing/burglary stuff and citizen's arrest them for theft, duh.)
And, as you point out, you sure as fuck can't charge someone for resisting a citizen's arrest. Ever. That's not even possible. Inherent in the charge of resisting arrest is that you were resisting the arrest of a law enforcement officer.
It is entirely legal to resist even a letter-perfect 100%-correctly-executed citizen's arrest.
Except you're resisting someone for the legitimate reason of trespassing.
Also, I'm unaware of any abilities of rent-a-cops to actually arrest anyone above normal citizen's arrest, and you can only do that for felonies, which trespassing is not.
Anti-HOA stories are about like anti-lawsuit stories.
Everyone has some example that's clearly way out of bounds, and will use it all the time, and it's probably imaginary to start with, or a mangled story of one thing that happened one time in all of human history.
Meanwhile, the actual HOA rules tend to be usually somewhat sane.
And to most people who complain: I'm sorry, your house should be somewhat presentable. As long as homeowners a) are allowed to actually change their house, and the HOA isn't insanely dictating the exact way every house should look, and b) if homeowners get warnings instead of just slapped with fines, the HOA is fine.
The problem is the rare times no one pays attention to the HOA and lets it get hijacked by a tiny amount of people who can make crazy rules. And even then, they can only make the rules until they piss off enough people to override them. Which is fine...unless they decide to pick on you, and no one else. As long as their unreasonableness is tightly focused, no one else is going to step in to help stop them.
This is why, as I said, sane HOAs have quorum requirements that require 50%, or at least 20% or something, to make new rules. So that a tiny group of people can't decide to do whatever they want. If people are so apathetic about the HOA so much the HOA can't get the quorum require to do something, well, it sounds like no one really wants the HOA doing something anyway, so the inability to do anything is a feature, not a bug.
Indeed. The only HOA I'd ever enter into would be one that controls common areas like pools and roads.
That's reasonable to pay for. Hell, I don't even swim and I wouldn't mind that...it's a tiny extra amount of 'taxes', and compared to the actual cost of buying a house, $30 a month or whatever is nominal.
On my property, however, fuck off. I'm not agreeing to anything that lets the HOA say anything about my property.
And this is sad, because I can see an argument that perhaps people should be mandated to keep their lawn mowed and not keep cars on blocks in it, or who pays for fences, or how many cars you can keep on the street...but it's a very slippery slope and all HOAs immediately slide down it to regulating what color your shutters are.
The real problem, of course, is that absolutely no one cares about the HOA, so they end up with like five people actually operating them and making decisions, and those five people will just randomly dislike things and think it's reasonable to outlaw them. Often these people 'cannot handle change', and have some sort of actual mental illness.
I'd like to see HOAs start having much larger quorum requirements, or require a majority of everyone. If the HOA wants to ban something, 50%+ of the homeowners in it should have to agree to ban it, perhaps by petition posted in a common area. Not just 50%+ of the eight people who show up at meetings.
Perhaps when Apple forces you to buy an iDevice, you may have a point. Until then, you opt into buying it, and you can certainly jailbrake it, but don't expect them to support your efforts or your hardware after the fact. Companies have been voiding warranties long before apple when it came to running a product out of specification. This is no different.
I believe you mean 'companies have been attempting to void warranties based on random things long before apple did, and the courts and legislatures have repeated restricted their ability to do that.'
Oh wait. You probably don't even own an iDevice...
I have no idea what the fuck that has to do with anything, but I do own one. An iPhone 3G, in fact, with tethered jailbreak. (The 3G didn't have the PDF exploit.)
I'm not in favor of unlock because while normal people pay the termination fee (And thus should have their phone unlock.), you apparently don't know about the actual reason for locking phones.
Specifically, people walking into AT&T stores with stolen credit cards, use that name, get an iPhone and a 'contract', and walking out and resell it.
I'm all for requiring the phone company to unlock any phone that you've actually paid off, either with time or a termination fee. The thing is, they already do that. In fact, they're required to by law.
Everyone who wants their phone unlocked without that either literally stole it from a warehouse, stole it by buying it with a stolen CC, gained it by claiming it was lost and got a replacement under warranty, or they fled their contract. (The last two are not, strictly speaking, theft...just fraud.) Or they purchased it from someone who did one of those things.
There's not some magical source of locked phones out there in legit hands that need unlocking. There are only two ways for people to legitimately need unlocking:
1) They purchased a replacement phone, and want to use their old phone on a different network, or
2) They bought, or were given, a phone from someone who paid it off, but before that person had it unlocked, so now the new owner can't prove it's paid off and the phone company won't unlock it.
There's several ways to solve these problem without allowing unlocking in general. The second can be solved with better bookkeeping, and I think the burden off proof should be on the phone company to demonstrate the phone isn't paid for yet, or otherwise unlock it.
And the first could be solved by letting people pay off the balance on their phone anytime they want, which would probably be good enough for most people.
No shit. The fact you used to be able to jailbreak your phone by visiting a website was not, in fact, a good thing. At all.
I'm against all sorts of restrictions on devices sold to people. I'd even argue we should make it illegal to restrict them that way, although for safety we should perhaps require some sort of protected reflash to jailbreak them, so normal consumers don't have to worry about viruses.
But, legally, people should be able to walk into an Apple store and demand root on their phone, and Apple would have to do it. And Apple should be able to demand you reflash back to unrooted before you get tech support with any software issue. That is my ideal world. Companies should not be allowed to keep control of devices they sell you. (Note this isn't the same as unlocking the phones, which I don't think they should have to do.)
And even in my ideal world, a website shouldn't be able to get root on an iPhone! Christ, people, think about that for a second. Of course Apple patched that.
Well, fair enough. I was just taking issue with the 'both parties are the same' nonsense, which is exactly the prescription to never have anything change.
The only way to change things is to hold politicians accountable, and the only way to do that is to vote for them them when they aren't very evil. So you can withhold that when they are. Giving up and not voting, or voting for third parties, as a general principle is forfeiting the ability to change anything.
Like it or not, Obama's done a much better job than McCain would have. It's not even debatable.
Meanwhile, we get a few Republicans in the house and they run around threatening to blow up the government because it's what their bugnuts stupid base wants.
I probably won't vote for Obama this time around. (It doesn't matter, my state won't vote for him anyway.) I hope he gets elected, but I also hope that he, and other people, see how much enthusiasm for him died down due to his complete inability to actually operate in progressive manner.
There are plenty of reasonable Democrats, and the other Democrats have to at least pretend they care about working people.
Or, to put it another way, the Democrats have a sane base, so only about half their elected officials are actually evil, and they're hiding it so they kept getting elected. The Republicans, meanwhile, do not have a sane base, so are openly evil. (And also openly insane.)
Pressure can be put on the Democrats to fix health reform, by sane people who threaten not to vote for them. Pressure can't really be put on the Republicans as long as they have their bugnuts base who are convinced the communists are coming.
Acting like there's no difference between the parties is playing right into everyone's hand. Vote for Democrats. If they turn out to be evil, vote for different Democrats.
Do you remember where Obama pre-negotiated right past the single payer and never even proposed it?
Probably not. Let's all pretend that Obama got forced to do what he did by the Republicans, instead of the actual facts, where he didn't even pretend to propose single-payer, and he publicly proposed a public option that he secretly worked with the insurance industry to kill.
The Demoncrats didn't even bother to hold a vote on the public option when the bill was forced through reconcilliation and was unfillibusterable.
But I'm sure it's all those mean Republicans fault that we don't have single payer.
Um, perhaps you should read the grandparent post again. Absolutely no one was asserting that anyone targeted any specific people.
In fact, you and he said exactly the same thing, except he said it was on purpose, and you said it was by carelessness.
And, well, once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
The expression is strangely silent on what two million, five hundred and fourteen thousand, three hundred and sixty seven times is, which is the number of screwups the phone companies have managed to make with their billing so far.
As the other poster pointed out, but didn't explain well:
Drivers not wearing seatbelts have a much higher risk of being bounced around enough to lose control of their car in minor collisions, causing much worse accidents.
In an accident, drivers usually keep their hands on the wheel...and that's a good thing if they're still in their seat. If they fall out of their seat, either forward or leftward, then it's a really bad thing, probably worse than just letting go and letting the car drive wherever it wants. (And most people drive with one hand on the side, which means sliding forward spins the wheel one way or the other.)
If you get sideswiped while driving down the road, or sideswipe something yourself, or have some other minor harm to the car that jolted it, you have a much much greater chance of recovering and continuing to drive forwardish (instead of spinning out across traffic) if you have on a seatbelt.
Same with feet. What exactly do you think happens when someone has their foot on the gas and slides forward in their seat? That's right, they just literally floored the gas. And having slid forward, it's not like they easily correct that by taking their foot off the gas. Sometimes they're even wedged in down there! And if they avoid that, after being thrown around, do you think their feet can find the brakes easily?
A driver not wearing a seltbelt is dangerous to other people, because their body is not secured in the driver's seat, which they need stay in, correctly positioned, at all times, to drive the damn car. Not wearing a seatbelt means they fall out of their seat, or at least flop around in it, so at best they're no longer able to operate the car, and at worst their hands and feet managed to mis-operated the controls on the way out of the seat and now the car is doing something entirely random!
No, that's how laws in the US are, banning things like springblades, switchblades and flip knifes. Basically, they try to ban any knife you can open one-handed. Those sort of don't really have any added purpose over a normal pocketknife beside 'quick draw', and usually have less features than pocketknives, so are fairly useless to carry around unless you plan to use them in combat. That law at least makes some sense.
In England, however, it's a lot crazier. People can't legally carry things like butcher knifes (I think common steak knifes have an exemption.), or any knife with a blade over three inches. Or any pocket knife which 'locks' open, you know, like you'd use in any situation which you don't want it to close on your fingers. (Which obviously includes combat, but includes a lot of other situations also. Like just cutting stuff with a lot of force!)
Basically, the same idiotic rules that schools in the US follow applies to the English public at large. (And I think Scotland and Wales also.)
The problem with England is idiotic hooliganism(1). It would make much more sense, instead of banning knifes, to ban fricking soccer.
I think if England said 'Fans of team X were violent, thus we are dismantling team X for a year', it would, perhaps, be a good slap upside the head. That's it. A single instance of violence, take away the damn team. Zero tolerance. Of course, England will never do that.
In the US, you might get stabbed, or even shot, but it's for money. It's for an actual logical reason, like a mugging, not a bunch of hooligans going around looking for trouble as part of watching a soccer game.
That said, I don't pay enough attention to English stuff to know if hooliganism is the justification for the current idiotic knife crackdown. I'm pretty certain it's been the justification in the past, though.
1) American who don't know this take note: In England, a hooligan is not some little kid who throws popcorn during a movie. He's part of a group that roams the countryside before and after soccer matches, breaking crap and beating up people he doesn't like.
That's when I get pissed when I hear about 'negotiating power with hospitals'. I hear idiots running around on the news yammering about that, how the US government can use 'negotiating power with hospitals' to make things cheaper.
Fuck you assholes. Seriously, fuck you. For every dollar you negotiate cheaper, I pay more, because they won't sell me insurance, so I have to cover the damn costs that you won't.
I refuse to be part of this goddamn plan from the other side, too. 'negotiating power with hospitals' is illegal extortion to make them charge group X less, which results in them charging group Y more. That it is the premise of it.
I have no idea why its not a fucking antitrust violation. Insurance companies are usually oligopolys, and running around threatening to send patients to other hospitals unless the hospital charges them (and only them) less money really sounds like an antitrust violation to me.
The outrageous bills that hospitals produce that patients see are not the fault of hospitals. They are the fault of insurance companies, who have managed to set up a system where they pay a microscopic fraction of those costs, and everyone who doesn't use an insurance companies pays the rest.
Technically, on an itemized bill, they would only list things they actually bill you for. They don't list all the interactions with you, even the ones they didn't charge for. They don't even have a reason to keep track of those, and even if they do know them, they're not billing you for them, so hardly have a reason to tell you.
However, in this case, the customer was charged for some local calls, causing the customer to say 'WTF?' and ask for a reason why, which Verizon felt they didn't have to provide.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the state that's so overrun with conservatives that they managed to pass an idiotic budget amendment to their constitution that keeps them from raising taxes?
You mean the state that switches between Republican and Democratic governors every election?
Yeah, let's pretend that a few liberals in San Francisco (Which, incidentally, is only the fourth largest city in California) mean that 'California' is extremely liberal.
And, again, I have no idea what the fuck this has to do with people Obama has to negotiate with. Obama doesn't run around negotiating with the city of San Francisco, or even the state of California for that matter. He negotiates with their elected officials.
Republicans have batshit insane rightwing elected officials. Democrats do not have batshit insane leftwing elected officials. A few people in San Francisco do not change that.
Uh, no, I speak as if the crazy leftwing in the US has no political power, which they do not. (Except possibly at a very few small jurisdictions, and even then not as much as you think.)
In case anyone is wondering, and didn't want to have to read that article, what these morons are talking about are actually automobile carrying train cars. The 'shackles' are just the stupid rings down the side used to strap in the cars.
These train cars, which have existed for decades, have now have started getting stacked in unused sidings by the dozens as the economy has taken a turn for the worse and less new cars are made and shipped.(1)
And the people reporting these 'death cars', are, of course, complete idiots, and have been so for decades. If we're talking about suspicious things, I'm finding that a little suspicious. They clearly would be unable to feed themselves, and, yet, somehow, manage to still be alive.
1) The real fun in that article comes from people who insist that cars are too wide to be carried by train. Uh, what? Cars have always been carried on trains, you utter idiots. Heck, cars fit in standard shipping containers, which are eight feet wide, while cars tend to be six feet wide. (Although using standard shipping containers is impossible, unless you want the person who drives it into the container to ride inside them, as they can't open the car doors enough to exit it. The specialized car carriers have some trick, I think they put the car in neutral and use the 'shackles' to winch it inside, and then strap it in place.)
Obama is the sort of 'sane Republican' that both the left and the right have wished for for quite some time. As are a lot of the other Democrats.
Sadly, instead of negotiating leftward, they'd negotiating with batshit crazy people further to the right.
I believe the premise is that a group of people feel that the federal law enforcement have become essentially an occupying force.
See, when the premise is that the Federal law enforcement is an 'occupying force', you know it was written by a right wing loon.
Almost all instances of police corruption and brutality are local. If anything, the Feds are the people who actually solve those problems. But, no, the right has to pretend the Federal government is some big boogie-man, and local government is the solution.
Of course, in reality, all of the most horrifically corrupt governments in this country's history, all of the most murderous conspiracies, everything, it's all been local. Usually city or county, a few times it was a state.
That's not to say that the federal government hasn't repeatedly abused its authority in various ways(1), or it's never acted in a corrupt manner in the past (The blatant murder of Dillinger, for example.).
But even when you include the long past Hoover-era of the FBI, it has a much better record than 75% of the local jurisdictions out there, and more current professionalism and accountability than 99% of them.
1) Recent abuses have almost nothing to do with 'law enforcement', though. Witness the illegal wiretapping, done by the NSA, or the detainee stuff, done by the military and CIA. The actual Federal law enforcement is professional. The last actual 'abuse' was Waco, and almost all the information people think they know about the government in that is a lie.
And he tried to citizen's-arrest someone for a misdemeanor, which you can't do anywhere in the US, even in places where you can citizen arrest people.
Laws about citizen's arrest vary from place to place, and some don't allow it at all, but even the in the places that allow it, at the very very minimum to do a citizen's arrest you must has personally witnessed someone committing a felony. That's basically the lowest bar for citizen's arrest, some places have more rules, some ban it except in special circumstances, but every jurisdiction requires you to at least personally witness them committing a felony.
Note that simple trespassing sometimes become a felony, but usually either do to intent (And that takes a jury to decide.), possession of a firearm (Which the other person usually cannot determine) or other factors like previous convictions for burglary (Which the other person usually does not know.)
So the general rule is, you cannot citizen arrest someone for trespassing, unless you have personally witnessed something that would turn it into a felony. (For example, if they start stealing stuff, that makes their trespass the felony of 'burglary', which is unlawfully entering with the intent of committing crimes. Or, you can just forget the stupid trespassing/burglary stuff and citizen's arrest them for theft, duh.)
And, as you point out, you sure as fuck can't charge someone for resisting a citizen's arrest. Ever. That's not even possible. Inherent in the charge of resisting arrest is that you were resisting the arrest of a law enforcement officer.
It is entirely legal to resist even a letter-perfect 100%-correctly-executed citizen's arrest.
Except you're resisting someone for the legitimate reason of trespassing.
Also, I'm unaware of any abilities of rent-a-cops to actually arrest anyone above normal citizen's arrest, and you can only do that for felonies, which trespassing is not.
From what I understand, the IMEI blacklist is almost useless, because almost every phone has the ability to change IMEI numbers.
Anti-HOA stories are about like anti-lawsuit stories. Everyone has some example that's clearly way out of bounds, and will use it all the time, and it's probably imaginary to start with, or a mangled story of one thing that happened one time in all of human history.
Meanwhile, the actual HOA rules tend to be usually somewhat sane.
And to most people who complain: I'm sorry, your house should be somewhat presentable. As long as homeowners a) are allowed to actually change their house, and the HOA isn't insanely dictating the exact way every house should look, and b) if homeowners get warnings instead of just slapped with fines, the HOA is fine.
The problem is the rare times no one pays attention to the HOA and lets it get hijacked by a tiny amount of people who can make crazy rules. And even then, they can only make the rules until they piss off enough people to override them. Which is fine...unless they decide to pick on you, and no one else. As long as their unreasonableness is tightly focused, no one else is going to step in to help stop them.
This is why, as I said, sane HOAs have quorum requirements that require 50%, or at least 20% or something, to make new rules. So that a tiny group of people can't decide to do whatever they want. If people are so apathetic about the HOA so much the HOA can't get the quorum require to do something, well, it sounds like no one really wants the HOA doing something anyway, so the inability to do anything is a feature, not a bug.
Indeed. The only HOA I'd ever enter into would be one that controls common areas like pools and roads.
That's reasonable to pay for. Hell, I don't even swim and I wouldn't mind that...it's a tiny extra amount of 'taxes', and compared to the actual cost of buying a house, $30 a month or whatever is nominal.
On my property, however, fuck off. I'm not agreeing to anything that lets the HOA say anything about my property.
And this is sad, because I can see an argument that perhaps people should be mandated to keep their lawn mowed and not keep cars on blocks in it, or who pays for fences, or how many cars you can keep on the street...but it's a very slippery slope and all HOAs immediately slide down it to regulating what color your shutters are.
The real problem, of course, is that absolutely no one cares about the HOA, so they end up with like five people actually operating them and making decisions, and those five people will just randomly dislike things and think it's reasonable to outlaw them. Often these people 'cannot handle change', and have some sort of actual mental illness.
I'd like to see HOAs start having much larger quorum requirements, or require a majority of everyone. If the HOA wants to ban something, 50%+ of the homeowners in it should have to agree to ban it, perhaps by petition posted in a common area. Not just 50%+ of the eight people who show up at meetings.
Perhaps when Apple forces you to buy an iDevice, you may have a point. Until then, you opt into buying it, and you can certainly jailbrake it, but don't expect them to support your efforts or your hardware after the fact. Companies have been voiding warranties long before apple when it came to running a product out of specification. This is no different.
I believe you mean 'companies have been attempting to void warranties based on random things long before apple did, and the courts and legislatures have repeated restricted their ability to do that.'
Oh wait. You probably don't even own an iDevice...
I have no idea what the fuck that has to do with anything, but I do own one. An iPhone 3G, in fact, with tethered jailbreak. (The 3G didn't have the PDF exploit.)
I'm not in favor of unlock because while normal people pay the termination fee (And thus should have their phone unlock.), you apparently don't know about the actual reason for locking phones.
Specifically, people walking into AT&T stores with stolen credit cards, use that name, get an iPhone and a 'contract', and walking out and resell it.
I'm all for requiring the phone company to unlock any phone that you've actually paid off, either with time or a termination fee. The thing is, they already do that. In fact, they're required to by law.
Everyone who wants their phone unlocked without that either literally stole it from a warehouse, stole it by buying it with a stolen CC, gained it by claiming it was lost and got a replacement under warranty, or they fled their contract. (The last two are not, strictly speaking, theft...just fraud.) Or they purchased it from someone who did one of those things.
There's not some magical source of locked phones out there in legit hands that need unlocking. There are only two ways for people to legitimately need unlocking:
1) They purchased a replacement phone, and want to use their old phone on a different network, or
2) They bought, or were given, a phone from someone who paid it off, but before that person had it unlocked, so now the new owner can't prove it's paid off and the phone company won't unlock it.
There's several ways to solve these problem without allowing unlocking in general. The second can be solved with better bookkeeping, and I think the burden off proof should be on the phone company to demonstrate the phone isn't paid for yet, or otherwise unlock it.
And the first could be solved by letting people pay off the balance on their phone anytime they want, which would probably be good enough for most people.
Because people steal iPhones. They pay for their contract with a bogus credit card, walk out of the store, and resell them.
No shit. The fact you used to be able to jailbreak your phone by visiting a website was not, in fact, a good thing. At all.
I'm against all sorts of restrictions on devices sold to people. I'd even argue we should make it illegal to restrict them that way, although for safety we should perhaps require some sort of protected reflash to jailbreak them, so normal consumers don't have to worry about viruses.
But, legally, people should be able to walk into an Apple store and demand root on their phone, and Apple would have to do it. And Apple should be able to demand you reflash back to unrooted before you get tech support with any software issue. That is my ideal world. Companies should not be allowed to keep control of devices they sell you. (Note this isn't the same as unlocking the phones, which I don't think they should have to do.)
And even in my ideal world, a website shouldn't be able to get root on an iPhone! Christ, people, think about that for a second. Of course Apple patched that.
Well, fair enough. I was just taking issue with the 'both parties are the same' nonsense, which is exactly the prescription to never have anything change.
The only way to change things is to hold politicians accountable, and the only way to do that is to vote for them them when they aren't very evil. So you can withhold that when they are. Giving up and not voting, or voting for third parties, as a general principle is forfeiting the ability to change anything.
Like it or not, Obama's done a much better job than McCain would have. It's not even debatable.
Meanwhile, we get a few Republicans in the house and they run around threatening to blow up the government because it's what their bugnuts stupid base wants.
I probably won't vote for Obama this time around. (It doesn't matter, my state won't vote for him anyway.) I hope he gets elected, but I also hope that he, and other people, see how much enthusiasm for him died down due to his complete inability to actually operate in progressive manner.
Uh, no.
There are plenty of reasonable Democrats, and the other Democrats have to at least pretend they care about working people.
Or, to put it another way, the Democrats have a sane base, so only about half their elected officials are actually evil, and they're hiding it so they kept getting elected. The Republicans, meanwhile, do not have a sane base, so are openly evil. (And also openly insane.)
Pressure can be put on the Democrats to fix health reform, by sane people who threaten not to vote for them. Pressure can't really be put on the Republicans as long as they have their bugnuts base who are convinced the communists are coming.
Acting like there's no difference between the parties is playing right into everyone's hand. Vote for Democrats. If they turn out to be evil, vote for different Democrats.
Do you remember where Obama pre-negotiated right past the single payer and never even proposed it?
Probably not. Let's all pretend that Obama got forced to do what he did by the Republicans, instead of the actual facts, where he didn't even pretend to propose single-payer, and he publicly proposed a public option that he secretly worked with the insurance industry to kill.
The Demoncrats didn't even bother to hold a vote on the public option when the bill was forced through reconcilliation and was unfillibusterable.
But I'm sure it's all those mean Republicans fault that we don't have single payer.
Um, perhaps you should read the grandparent post again. Absolutely no one was asserting that anyone targeted any specific people.
In fact, you and he said exactly the same thing, except he said it was on purpose, and you said it was by carelessness.
And, well, once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.
The expression is strangely silent on what two million, five hundred and fourteen thousand, three hundred and sixty seven times is, which is the number of screwups the phone companies have managed to make with their billing so far.
As the other poster pointed out, but didn't explain well:
Drivers not wearing seatbelts have a much higher risk of being bounced around enough to lose control of their car in minor collisions, causing much worse accidents.
In an accident, drivers usually keep their hands on the wheel...and that's a good thing if they're still in their seat. If they fall out of their seat, either forward or leftward, then it's a really bad thing, probably worse than just letting go and letting the car drive wherever it wants. (And most people drive with one hand on the side, which means sliding forward spins the wheel one way or the other.)
If you get sideswiped while driving down the road, or sideswipe something yourself, or have some other minor harm to the car that jolted it, you have a much much greater chance of recovering and continuing to drive forwardish (instead of spinning out across traffic) if you have on a seatbelt.
Same with feet. What exactly do you think happens when someone has their foot on the gas and slides forward in their seat? That's right, they just literally floored the gas. And having slid forward, it's not like they easily correct that by taking their foot off the gas. Sometimes they're even wedged in down there! And if they avoid that, after being thrown around, do you think their feet can find the brakes easily?
A driver not wearing a seltbelt is dangerous to other people, because their body is not secured in the driver's seat, which they need stay in, correctly positioned, at all times, to drive the damn car. Not wearing a seatbelt means they fall out of their seat, or at least flop around in it, so at best they're no longer able to operate the car, and at worst their hands and feet managed to mis-operated the controls on the way out of the seat and now the car is doing something entirely random!
No, that's how laws in the US are, banning things like springblades, switchblades and flip knifes. Basically, they try to ban any knife you can open one-handed. Those sort of don't really have any added purpose over a normal pocketknife beside 'quick draw', and usually have less features than pocketknives, so are fairly useless to carry around unless you plan to use them in combat. That law at least makes some sense.
In England, however, it's a lot crazier. People can't legally carry things like butcher knifes (I think common steak knifes have an exemption.), or any knife with a blade over three inches. Or any pocket knife which 'locks' open, you know, like you'd use in any situation which you don't want it to close on your fingers. (Which obviously includes combat, but includes a lot of other situations also. Like just cutting stuff with a lot of force!)
Basically, the same idiotic rules that schools in the US follow applies to the English public at large. (And I think Scotland and Wales also.)
The problem with England is idiotic hooliganism(1). It would make much more sense, instead of banning knifes, to ban fricking soccer.
I think if England said 'Fans of team X were violent, thus we are dismantling team X for a year', it would, perhaps, be a good slap upside the head. That's it. A single instance of violence, take away the damn team. Zero tolerance. Of course, England will never do that.
In the US, you might get stabbed, or even shot, but it's for money. It's for an actual logical reason, like a mugging, not a bunch of hooligans going around looking for trouble as part of watching a soccer game.
That said, I don't pay enough attention to English stuff to know if hooliganism is the justification for the current idiotic knife crackdown. I'm pretty certain it's been the justification in the past, though.
1) American who don't know this take note: In England, a hooligan is not some little kid who throws popcorn during a movie. He's part of a group that roams the countryside before and after soccer matches, breaking crap and beating up people he doesn't like.
That's when I get pissed when I hear about 'negotiating power with hospitals'. I hear idiots running around on the news yammering about that, how the US government can use 'negotiating power with hospitals' to make things cheaper.
Fuck you assholes. Seriously, fuck you. For every dollar you negotiate cheaper, I pay more, because they won't sell me insurance, so I have to cover the damn costs that you won't.
I refuse to be part of this goddamn plan from the other side, too. 'negotiating power with hospitals' is illegal extortion to make them charge group X less, which results in them charging group Y more. That it is the premise of it.
I have no idea why its not a fucking antitrust violation. Insurance companies are usually oligopolys, and running around threatening to send patients to other hospitals unless the hospital charges them (and only them) less money really sounds like an antitrust violation to me.
The outrageous bills that hospitals produce that patients see are not the fault of hospitals. They are the fault of insurance companies, who have managed to set up a system where they pay a microscopic fraction of those costs, and everyone who doesn't use an insurance companies pays the rest.
Technically, on an itemized bill, they would only list things they actually bill you for. They don't list all the interactions with you, even the ones they didn't charge for. They don't even have a reason to keep track of those, and even if they do know them, they're not billing you for them, so hardly have a reason to tell you.
However, in this case, the customer was charged for some local calls, causing the customer to say 'WTF?' and ask for a reason why, which Verizon felt they didn't have to provide.
Yes, but they're often in another room or turned off or whatever.
It takes less time for a cracker to fake their way past than it takes to add a legitimate user to the network.
That is not a reasonable security measure.
I personally find the idea of using the same product for ssh and scp a little baffling.
Seriously, that's what WinSCP or Filezilla is for.
Although, frankly, I don't really understand why people appear to be copying files so much.