Four is a lot harder... I found (and still find) four harder than five, since juggling four in a cascade pattern is basically juggling five but "passing the gap" — making sure that the gap, where the fifth ball should be, is harder for me than actually having that fifth ball in place.
A very useful (as much as any juggling is "useful"...) technique for four is to learn to juggle two in each hand simultaneously, in both rotations and in columns. Asynchronous columns of two balls in each hand (no pun intended but, in the juggling world, "take two balls in your right hand" is a common phrase!) helps with coordination greatly. If you can juggle two ball rotations in each hand, you're not too far off being able to juggle three balls in one hand — just increase the height of the rotation to give you the extra time, and then lower the pattern down as your coordination and technique improves.
Sod knows how I ended up being a lawyer, but I still have "can juggle three machetes whilst blindfolded" on my CV:)
Not hard to "crack" a code if you have access to the relevant code book
It was not a "code book" in any traditional sense of the term, at least in a crypto context — the message, according to this solution, was simply heavily-abbreviated plaintext.
It seems that "txtspk" actually originated from pigeon messaging:)
The contract was terminated with all the proper notices and acceptances
You may have terminated the agreement, but this does not (necessarily) mean that you do not have a right to be paid, which is probably good news for you. However, it does mean that threats based on withholding performance will have no power, and, conversely, that you could not be in a position of breach yourself for withholding payment.
The exact position would depend on the contract you have and, whilst I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, so can't offer specific legal advice. However, what does the contact say in terms of taking action? For example, is there a pre-agreed escalation protocol, or does it set out a dispute resolution procedure?
If you are in the UK, take a look at money claim online, and see whether that would suit your needs. If you'd like a recommendation for a lawyer, feel free to drop me a line; having someone local can be helpful, so the odds of me knowing someone I'd be willing to recommend in your area are probably slim, but, potentially worth a try.
Are you still working with them / do you want to continue working with them? If so, the approaches you might take may well be different to those if you were "just" after your money.
I've not idea where you live, but it's worth being careful that breaching a contract yourself (such as failing to provide services which you are obliged to provide) is not excused on the basis that the other party is not complying with its obligations — unless your contract says that you can stop providing services if you have not been paid, simply ceasing to do so might put yourself in breach. But consider what the risk is to you, if the company really is that far behind in payments to you.
Depending on where you are, how about a letter before action — that, unless you are paid, you will take legal action? Depending on the sum you are owed, you might have a route through a local small claims procedure, even a money claim online — if it's a case of a project manager causing delays to try and stretch their budget, this approach might just get it before the company's legal team. If you've got as strong a case as your summary suggests (that might be a big "if," of course), it may be in the company's interests just to settle, to avoid litigation; you may just be looking for their legal department to put a boot up the backside of the relevant business unit to stop messing about and get it paid. If no response, go to court seeking default judgment, or perhaps see if local laws support you applying for the company to be wound up on the grounds that it is not able to meet its liabilities as they are due — even if you do not want to wind the company up (you want your money), it can take something as drastic as this to get someone to sit up and take notice.
Some companies publicise their CEO's details — try looking for those, and writing directly. Else, write a snail mail letter to the CEO's office, or the head of legal, explaining the problem succinctly, and asking that they personally attend to getting the matter fixed.
If you have no other way in, contacting them via Twitter might work, even if they are already receiving bad press — as long as you are polite and accurate, could it do anything but help at the cost of a few (more minutes) of your time?
Many lawyers will offer a free / fixed fee initial consultation — if nothing else, find out how much they would charge to take your case. Push for a fixed fee; you'll pay more for the certainty, but you will have certainty rather than billable hours which are harder to control. If the cost of getting a lawyer involved increases the likelihood of recovery sufficiently, you'll get less overall than you were hoping for, but that might be better than nothing.
Your comment prompts me to take another look. I'd looked at Papers, Sente and one other (I can't remember) for managing academic documents — thousands of them — but none worked very well for me. I wanted to have the software on multiple devices, and to be able to keep them in sync pretty effortlessly but without using a third party server. I wanted to be able to access the documents on my iPad, mark them up and have them synced back. I wanted the whole lot to be easily exportable to some common format, so that, if I didn't want to stick with the software forever, I could move easily.
I ended up with a directory hierarchy and owncloud, but I'll take another look, in case things have come on.
Autodesk do a handy app sketchbook express, its a sketch pad
I note you are using Android, so my suggestion may not be worthwhile, but I am using PenUltimate for all my hand-written notes, and, for that simple task, it does an excellent job. No OCR, but, frankly, I'm not sure how much processing power you'd need to throw at my handwriting...
One more issue some pdf files are locked and cannot be edited or annotated. Some software will ignore this and let you annotate others will not.
I may be able to help you here, if you have access to a Linux machine (heck, it may work natively on Android; I don't know): use ghostscript to assist in removing the lock. I have this as unlock_pdf.sh:
#!/bin/bash
# takes specified file and prints output using ghostscript
Most e-readers allow annotations, including kindles.
From memory — it was some time since I checked, and perhaps a software update has improved things — some basic annotation was possible on the Kindle, but it was not at all easy, particularly to type anything of more than a few words. I'll see if things have improved — thanks for the heads-up.
iAnnotate apparently requires users to register with their e-mail address
It was a good couple of years ago since I first installed it, but I'm pretty cagey about this sort of thing, and don't remember having to give an email address. I think there's an option to register for an online account for some online document conversion functionality, but I haven't done this, and it has not caused me any problems in my use of the application (nor nagged me to do so).
Perhaps worth double-checking if you are otherwise tempted?
I find the iPad is just slightly too large to make reading really comfortable, at least for long periods of time. However, I've never really read something that I needed to annotate, instead I just end up reading, well, books.
I used the "fullsize" iPad, and it is that bit too heavy to be comfortable holding it at a good angle to avoid a cricked neck for reading over longish periods. That being said, the retina screen was beautiful to read on, and I miss that on the Mini — perhaps enough to make me return the Mini, and put up with the extra weight.
I think a huge chunk of this is "what works for you." My wife hates reading on the iPad, and loves her Kindle; I'm struggling with the Kindle, but like reading on the iPad, even though I previously enjoyed reading on eInk devices. Without annotating, I don't retain as much information, or have thoughts easily to hand for reference in the future, so that kind of makes my decision for me anyway, until better annotation support for eInk-based readers is available.
There's always a trade-off — for me, I'd rather ensure I was reading in good lighting conditions, and reading for reduced periods and taking regular breaks, but with the ability to make annotations and the like easily, than to be able to read for considerable periods and lack that support. Without annotating, I'd end up reading things multiple times, which wouldn't work so well.
(I really, really wanted to use an eInk reader for studying, having loved reading fiction on them, but I found that they just did not work for me, hence getting the iPad. Now, having got myself a Kindle for my leisure reading, I find I struggle to read on it, and would rather read on a tablet screen, as I find reading far faster. Two and a bit years ago, before having used a tablet for all the reading for a reading-heavy course, I would have pushed an eReader too — having seen what worked for me, I've got a slightly different view.)
I use iAnnotate rather than GoodReader, and the annotations are added to the PDF directly — open the annotated PDF on my computer, and the annotations are there. There is also an option to export the annotations on their own — I've occasionally used this when I have highlighted key parts of a text and wanted to extract these to a new file, for a quick reference / summary.
I may check out iAnnotate for the annotation capability.
iAnnotate was the reason I bought an iPad — I just wanted a tool for reading and marking up hundreds, if not thousands, of PDF documents. I've been hugely impressed, not just with the software, but also the support*. I use it multiple times every day, and am a huge fan.
I use owncloud on my computers, to keep everything in sync, and, since this can expose things via webdav, it makes syncing with iAnnotate trivial too — it all fits together really rather well.
*At one point, after their support team had dug into an issue caused by my own stupid fault (incorrect permissions setting on my server, which was causing the synchronisation to fail), I tried my best to convince them to accept a donation, pizza, cash, whatever, to say thank you for their time, as it was worth way more to me than the $10 purchase price, and yet they declined. I could not convince them to accept anything for their efforts.
I can't say what is right, but, having finished a masters in law via distance learning, with all my reading done on my iPad, I could recommend this as a solution. iAnnotate worked incredibly well for me, as a tool for reading and annotating PDF documents, which I then synchronised back to the server so they were available for access, including the notes, on my computers for actually writing things up. I'm now testing an iPad Mini, to see whether that offers a better experience — the lower quality screen is bugging me at the moment, but I do like the lighter weight.
I found the backlit screen irritating at first, but considered it a necessary evil for the benefit of having the annotation functionality, which my previous eReaders did not have. I bought a Kindle a couple of months ago for reading fiction, and found I really struggled with it — I'd rather read on the iPad (via iBooks, usually via DeDRM and Calibre). Perhaps oddly, I find I read much faster on the iPad than on the Kindle, without a noticeable impact on understanding — I wonder if this is due to me being able to scan large blocks of text quite quickly on the iPad but not on the Kindle for some reason. Suffice to say, having been really looking forward to a Kindle — going back to an eReader, having previously have a COOL-ER and a Sony PRS-505 — I was disappointed. My wife, on the other hand, hates reading from a tablet, and carries her Kindle pretty much everywhere.
My pleasure. If you do read the Usedsoft decision, there's a good chance you'll find it pretty impenetrable, unless you are familiar with the computer programs directive — I prepared some slides for a friend's talk on Usedsoft a couple of weeks back, which you might find helpful alongside the decision. (Listed as (c) to me (ironic, given the thread here) but, as far as I'm concerned, treat as CC0.)
You can take any code which you find and put it into your project, or even combine bits of code with incompatible licenses.
Distribution might be where GNU GPL 2.0 kicks in, but copyright certainly kicks in to prevent you from just taking code and putting it into your own project, at least in Europe — the restriction on "copying," for example. (You might have a defence of fair use in the US, but that's an affirmative defense, not an absence of copyright.)
Whether anyone would find out, or consider it worth suing for, is perhaps another matter, but copyright is not just limited to distribution.
When in the recent past have you seen a court rule on copyright with common sense?
I'm not sure that Usedsoft applied common sense, but rather some convoluted reasoning, but the outcome seems sensible enough. Picking on rulings relevant here, I think the US court's decision in Wallace v. IBM was common sense, as was the finding of the German court in Welte v. Skype.
Perhaps look also at Griggs v. Evans — a pragmatic decision on the facts, to my mind.
Sure, there are some odd judgments, but there are some sensible, practical judges out there too.
Github doesn't claim to provide a repository for open source software
Agreed, although it does claim to be a platform for "social coding," and that it is "the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers," having been founded "to simplify sharing code."
I am not reading the article as anything more than "if GitHub wants to promote sharing of code, make it easier for a developer to specify licensing terms" — and that seems imminently sensible to me.
4. Get annoyed that a court finds the existence of an implied licence, or, in some nuanced cases, that the action is prevented under the principle of non-derogation from grant. Assuming the defendant can afford to argue.
He's not saying that the lack of licence information is GitHub's problem, nor that it's unique to GitHub. Rather, he's saying that there is a problem — code without clearly attributed licence information — and, whilst each would-be user could contact each developer and find out the licensing conditions, GitHub could make a simple tweak to their platform to encourage developers to select a licence.
I would not favour pre-selecting a default licence, but rather having a developer presented with a set out option, perhaps with a tool to help aid selection based on requirements. No requirement, no default licence, but just a helpful reminder — if someone wants their code to be reused, but didn't know to think through the legal aspects, this would help them out, without harm to anyone who would rather not specify a licence for whatever reason.
Once the robbery started, he made the shift from citizen to law enforcement as would be expected
Absolutely — there is a transition from the role of citizen to the role of law enforcement. Where I struggle in this case is the line:
Despite getting all flashy with his FBI badge, Auther still considered this digging being done by a concerned parent, rather than a professional investigation.
It seems that the transition did not take place in this case — an ongoing role of parent, rather than a transition to FBI agent.
I was originally going to post that TFA makes it clear that this was a case of a person who happened to be employed by the FBI, finding himself in this situation, but is just described by TFS as "an FBI agent" — it made me wonder whether someone should be defined by their employer.
It rather broke down for me when TFA starts saying how he got "all flashy with his FBI badge" to investigate, rather than just reporting it to the police — is this really still just someone acting as a father?
Slashdot Mirror
Four is a *LOT* harder.
Four is a lot harder... I found (and still find) four harder than five, since juggling four in a cascade pattern is basically juggling five but "passing the gap" — making sure that the gap, where the fifth ball should be, is harder for me than actually having that fifth ball in place.
A very useful (as much as any juggling is "useful"...) technique for four is to learn to juggle two in each hand simultaneously, in both rotations and in columns. Asynchronous columns of two balls in each hand (no pun intended but, in the juggling world, "take two balls in your right hand" is a common phrase!) helps with coordination greatly. If you can juggle two ball rotations in each hand, you're not too far off being able to juggle three balls in one hand — just increase the height of the rotation to give you the extra time, and then lower the pattern down as your coordination and technique improves.
Sod knows how I ended up being a lawyer, but I still have "can juggle three machetes whilst blindfolded" on my CV :)
Not hard to "crack" a code if you have access to the relevant code book
It was not a "code book" in any traditional sense of the term, at least in a crypto context — the message, according to this solution, was simply heavily-abbreviated plaintext.
It seems that "txtspk" actually originated from pigeon messaging :)
The contract was terminated with all the proper notices and acceptances
You may have terminated the agreement, but this does not (necessarily) mean that you do not have a right to be paid, which is probably good news for you. However, it does mean that threats based on withholding performance will have no power, and, conversely, that you could not be in a position of breach yourself for withholding payment.
The exact position would depend on the contract you have and, whilst I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, so can't offer specific legal advice. However, what does the contact say in terms of taking action? For example, is there a pre-agreed escalation protocol, or does it set out a dispute resolution procedure?
If you are in the UK, take a look at money claim online, and see whether that would suit your needs. If you'd like a recommendation for a lawyer, feel free to drop me a line; having someone local can be helpful, so the odds of me knowing someone I'd be willing to recommend in your area are probably slim, but, potentially worth a try.
Best of luck.
Are you still working with them / do you want to continue working with them? If so, the approaches you might take may well be different to those if you were "just" after your money.
I've not idea where you live, but it's worth being careful that breaching a contract yourself (such as failing to provide services which you are obliged to provide) is not excused on the basis that the other party is not complying with its obligations — unless your contract says that you can stop providing services if you have not been paid, simply ceasing to do so might put yourself in breach. But consider what the risk is to you, if the company really is that far behind in payments to you.
Depending on where you are, how about a letter before action — that, unless you are paid, you will take legal action? Depending on the sum you are owed, you might have a route through a local small claims procedure, even a money claim online — if it's a case of a project manager causing delays to try and stretch their budget, this approach might just get it before the company's legal team. If you've got as strong a case as your summary suggests (that might be a big "if," of course), it may be in the company's interests just to settle, to avoid litigation; you may just be looking for their legal department to put a boot up the backside of the relevant business unit to stop messing about and get it paid. If no response, go to court seeking default judgment, or perhaps see if local laws support you applying for the company to be wound up on the grounds that it is not able to meet its liabilities as they are due — even if you do not want to wind the company up (you want your money), it can take something as drastic as this to get someone to sit up and take notice.
Some companies publicise their CEO's details — try looking for those, and writing directly. Else, write a snail mail letter to the CEO's office, or the head of legal, explaining the problem succinctly, and asking that they personally attend to getting the matter fixed.
If you have no other way in, contacting them via Twitter might work, even if they are already receiving bad press — as long as you are polite and accurate, could it do anything but help at the cost of a few (more minutes) of your time?
Many lawyers will offer a free / fixed fee initial consultation — if nothing else, find out how much they would charge to take your case. Push for a fixed fee; you'll pay more for the certainty, but you will have certainty rather than billable hours which are harder to control. If the cost of getting a lawyer involved increases the likelihood of recovery sufficiently, you'll get less overall than you were hoping for, but that might be better than nothing.
my 677 page summary of proceedings — it's in point 8 Times New Roman, three columns to the A5 page.
Your comment prompts me to take another look. I'd looked at Papers, Sente and one other (I can't remember) for managing academic documents — thousands of them — but none worked very well for me. I wanted to have the software on multiple devices, and to be able to keep them in sync pretty effortlessly but without using a third party server. I wanted to be able to access the documents on my iPad, mark them up and have them synced back. I wanted the whole lot to be easily exportable to some common format, so that, if I didn't want to stick with the software forever, I could move easily.
I ended up with a directory hierarchy and owncloud, but I'll take another look, in case things have come on.
Autodesk do a handy app sketchbook express, its a sketch pad
I note you are using Android, so my suggestion may not be worthwhile, but I am using PenUltimate for all my hand-written notes, and, for that simple task, it does an excellent job. No OCR, but, frankly, I'm not sure how much processing power you'd need to throw at my handwriting...
One more issue some pdf files are locked and cannot be edited or annotated. Some software will ignore this and let you annotate others will not.
I may be able to help you here, if you have access to a Linux machine (heck, it may work natively on Android; I don't know): use ghostscript to assist in removing the lock. I have this as unlock_pdf.sh:
#! /bin/bash
# takes specified file and prints output using ghostscript
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f $1
Just save the file in question to your machine, and run sh unlock_pdf.sh pdfname.pdf and wait for output.pdf to be generated.
There may be better ways of doing this, but this has worked pretty well for me over the last couple of years, so I hope it offers some assistance.
Most e-readers allow annotations, including kindles.
From memory — it was some time since I checked, and perhaps a software update has improved things — some basic annotation was possible on the Kindle, but it was not at all easy, particularly to type anything of more than a few words. I'll see if things have improved — thanks for the heads-up.
iAnnotate apparently requires users to register with their e-mail address
It was a good couple of years ago since I first installed it, but I'm pretty cagey about this sort of thing, and don't remember having to give an email address. I think there's an option to register for an online account for some online document conversion functionality, but I haven't done this, and it has not caused me any problems in my use of the application (nor nagged me to do so).
Perhaps worth double-checking if you are otherwise tempted?
We should be asking ourselves what is the best way to communicate information, and then figure out what devices can enable that.
As part of the bigger picture, and the future of information sharing and knowledge creation, I agree fully with you.
As someone with a stack of documents in .pdf which I needed to read, my immediate need was finding a device which could enable me to do that :)
I find the iPad is just slightly too large to make reading really comfortable, at least for long periods of time. However, I've never really read something that I needed to annotate, instead I just end up reading, well, books.
I used the "fullsize" iPad, and it is that bit too heavy to be comfortable holding it at a good angle to avoid a cricked neck for reading over longish periods. That being said, the retina screen was beautiful to read on, and I miss that on the Mini — perhaps enough to make me return the Mini, and put up with the extra weight.
I think a huge chunk of this is "what works for you." My wife hates reading on the iPad, and loves her Kindle; I'm struggling with the Kindle, but like reading on the iPad, even though I previously enjoyed reading on eInk devices. Without annotating, I don't retain as much information, or have thoughts easily to hand for reference in the future, so that kind of makes my decision for me anyway, until better annotation support for eInk-based readers is available.
Ignore the people suggesting iPads
There's always a trade-off — for me, I'd rather ensure I was reading in good lighting conditions, and reading for reduced periods and taking regular breaks, but with the ability to make annotations and the like easily, than to be able to read for considerable periods and lack that support. Without annotating, I'd end up reading things multiple times, which wouldn't work so well.
(I really, really wanted to use an eInk reader for studying, having loved reading fiction on them, but I found that they just did not work for me, hence getting the iPad. Now, having got myself a Kindle for my leisure reading, I find I struggle to read on it, and would rather read on a tablet screen, as I find reading far faster. Two and a bit years ago, before having used a tablet for all the reading for a reading-heavy course, I would have pushed an eReader too — having seen what worked for me, I've got a slightly different view.)
Can you transfer/export the annotations?
I use iAnnotate rather than GoodReader, and the annotations are added to the PDF directly — open the annotated PDF on my computer, and the annotations are there. There is also an option to export the annotations on their own — I've occasionally used this when I have highlighted key parts of a text and wanted to extract these to a new file, for a quick reference / summary.
I may check out iAnnotate for the annotation capability.
iAnnotate was the reason I bought an iPad — I just wanted a tool for reading and marking up hundreds, if not thousands, of PDF documents. I've been hugely impressed, not just with the software, but also the support*. I use it multiple times every day, and am a huge fan.
I use owncloud on my computers, to keep everything in sync, and, since this can expose things via webdav, it makes syncing with iAnnotate trivial too — it all fits together really rather well.
*At one point, after their support team had dug into an issue caused by my own stupid fault (incorrect permissions setting on my server, which was causing the synchronisation to fail), I tried my best to convince them to accept a donation, pizza, cash, whatever, to say thank you for their time, as it was worth way more to me than the $10 purchase price, and yet they declined. I could not convince them to accept anything for their efforts.
iAnnotate PDF — looks like there is an Android version coming soon too.
I can't say what is right, but, having finished a masters in law via distance learning, with all my reading done on my iPad, I could recommend this as a solution. iAnnotate worked incredibly well for me, as a tool for reading and annotating PDF documents, which I then synchronised back to the server so they were available for access, including the notes, on my computers for actually writing things up. I'm now testing an iPad Mini, to see whether that offers a better experience — the lower quality screen is bugging me at the moment, but I do like the lighter weight.
I found the backlit screen irritating at first, but considered it a necessary evil for the benefit of having the annotation functionality, which my previous eReaders did not have. I bought a Kindle a couple of months ago for reading fiction, and found I really struggled with it — I'd rather read on the iPad (via iBooks, usually via DeDRM and Calibre). Perhaps oddly, I find I read much faster on the iPad than on the Kindle, without a noticeable impact on understanding — I wonder if this is due to me being able to scan large blocks of text quite quickly on the iPad but not on the Kindle for some reason. Suffice to say, having been really looking forward to a Kindle — going back to an eReader, having previously have a COOL-ER and a Sony PRS-505 — I was disappointed. My wife, on the other hand, hates reading from a tablet, and carries her Kindle pretty much everywhere.
Interesting links. Thanks.
My pleasure. If you do read the Usedsoft decision, there's a good chance you'll find it pretty impenetrable, unless you are familiar with the computer programs directive — I prepared some slides for a friend's talk on Usedsoft a couple of weeks back, which you might find helpful alongside the decision. (Listed as (c) to me (ironic, given the thread here) but, as far as I'm concerned, treat as CC0.)
You can take any code which you find and put it into your project, or even combine bits of code with incompatible licenses.
Distribution might be where GNU GPL 2.0 kicks in, but copyright certainly kicks in to prevent you from just taking code and putting it into your own project, at least in Europe — the restriction on "copying," for example. (You might have a defence of fair use in the US, but that's an affirmative defense, not an absence of copyright.)
Whether anyone would find out, or consider it worth suing for, is perhaps another matter, but copyright is not just limited to distribution.
When in the recent past have you seen a court rule on copyright with common sense?
I'm not sure that Usedsoft applied common sense, but rather some convoluted reasoning, but the outcome seems sensible enough. Picking on rulings relevant here, I think the US court's decision in Wallace v. IBM was common sense, as was the finding of the German court in Welte v. Skype.
Perhaps look also at Griggs v. Evans — a pragmatic decision on the facts, to my mind.
Sure, there are some odd judgments, but there are some sensible, practical judges out there too.
Github doesn't claim to provide a repository for open source software
Agreed, although it does claim to be a platform for "social coding," and that it is "the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers," having been founded "to simplify sharing code."
I am not reading the article as anything more than "if GitHub wants to promote sharing of code, make it easier for a developer to specify licensing terms" — and that seems imminently sensible to me.
2. Make everyone think it's free to use.
3. Sue everyone you can get your hands on who do.
4. Get annoyed that a court finds the existence of an implied licence, or, in some nuanced cases, that the action is prevented under the principle of non-derogation from grant. Assuming the defendant can afford to argue.
your chosen licence"
He's not saying that the lack of licence information is GitHub's problem, nor that it's unique to GitHub. Rather, he's saying that there is a problem — code without clearly attributed licence information — and, whilst each would-be user could contact each developer and find out the licensing conditions, GitHub could make a simple tweak to their platform to encourage developers to select a licence.
I would not favour pre-selecting a default licence, but rather having a developer presented with a set out option, perhaps with a tool to help aid selection based on requirements. No requirement, no default licence, but just a helpful reminder — if someone wants their code to be reused, but didn't know to think through the legal aspects, this would help them out, without harm to anyone who would rather not specify a licence for whatever reason.
Sounds sensible to me.
Once the robbery started, he made the shift from citizen to law enforcement as would be expected
Absolutely — there is a transition from the role of citizen to the role of law enforcement. Where I struggle in this case is the line:
Despite getting all flashy with his FBI badge, Auther still considered this digging being done by a concerned parent, rather than a professional investigation.
It seems that the transition did not take place in this case — an ongoing role of parent, rather than a transition to FBI agent.
I was originally going to post that TFA makes it clear that this was a case of a person who happened to be employed by the FBI, finding himself in this situation, but is just described by TFS as "an FBI agent" — it made me wonder whether someone should be defined by their employer.
It rather broke down for me when TFA starts saying how he got "all flashy with his FBI badge" to investigate, rather than just reporting it to the police — is this really still just someone acting as a father?
Don't forget this the UK; crowbars may be a bit difficult to come by.
Pretty much any anyDIY store will have them :)