To the best of my recollection, there is no legal parking on that section of 3rd Street, NW or SW, near the National Mall. If you illegally park your car near the US Capitol Building you should probably expect some scrutiny. If you have a pressure cooker inside in the day and age of improvised explosive devices you should expect further scrutiny. Is the latter bit "fair?" Maybe not. But it's reality in this era.
If the police don't investigate an illegally parked car near a sensitive structure they're grossly negligent. If the investigation reveals you broke the law to get the car there, well, you're going to get charged. If this gentleman was driving on a suspended license it was only a matter of time before he got charged anyway; he just managed to do it in a high profile fashion, vs. the thousands of idiots doing the exact same thing that get picked up in a more mundane fashion every day of the week.
Especially if the cops revoked the owner's driving license just to accuse him/her of something or other.
Not to burst your paranoid bubble, but the cops can't just revoke drivers licenses in the United States. Generally speaking, your drivers license can only be revoked or suspended after convictions for certain serious traffic offenses, a combination of convictions for minor traffic offenses, or failure to pay renewal fees when your license expires. A handful of jurisdictions allow the cops to physically take your license when you're cited for DWI; the actual suspension thereof generally occurs at your first court appearance.
In this instance they haven't released any of the back story, but it would seem that the guy was driving on a suspended or revoked license, which is a crime most everywhere in the World. It's a tough one to get away with in the day and age of license plate readers but if you're gonna attempt it you're probably best advised not to park your car on the Mall in Washington DC.....
Maybe they should shake down Italy and Turkey too.
Funny how Poland isn't flat broke; anyone that thinks Greece came out of WW2 worse off than Poland is delusional or a member of the Greek Parliament. Oh, wait, I'm being redundant.:)
they couldn't possibly hope to recover the $100k+ in legal fees.
$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."
There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.
That's wishful thinking. The number of grocery stores (or any store receiving regular shipments) located close enough to a rail line to cost effectively build a spur is negligible. That's without accounting for external factors (NIMBY and BANANA) that would make it very difficult in any case.
The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
If my phone could mine enough Bitcoin overnight, when plugged in anyway, to cover micropayments for some paywalled articles for me to read the next day, it might seem worth it - even if I was paying more for the electricity than the mined Bitcoin was actually worth.
Won't work. Cell phones and most tablets lack any sort of active cooling system; the CPU is not designed to run at 100% for any significant amount of time and will throttle itself soon it reaches a certain temperature. Heat also degrades li-ion batteries; running the phone "hot" overnight will slaughter the longevity of your battery just as effectively as leaving it in a car on a hot summer day.
I was actually referring to the entire geopolitical situation, not just Iraq. Russia is slicing off parts of neighboring countries, we decapitated Libya (after the guy gave up his WMDs, incidentally, great message to send there....), threw Mubarak under the bus, did nothing while the Iranians crushed a reform movement, the list goes on and on.
The only good thing BHO did with foreign policy was to begin to normalize relations with Cuba. That was long overdue and he deserves some credit for that. The rest has been an unmitigated disaster. The World now looks a lot like it did before WW1, except instead of mustard gas we'll now get to contend with nuclear weapons when the shit hits the fan.
The USN's anti-aircraft weaponry was extremely effective by the standards of the era. It turned the Japanese "victories" at Santa Cruz and Eastern Solomons into pyrrhic disasters that cost them dozens of their best pilots and whatever slim chance they had of winning of the war. That was in 1942. It only got better as time went on. We also had proximity fuses and other technology that the Axis never developed.
Personal anecdote: A friend of mine was a gunner on the 5"/38 mounts aboard USS Antietam. During gunnery practice they wouldn't aim at the target sleeve being towed through their gunnery range, rather they would aim at the cable connecting it to the aircraft doing the towing. More often than not they could hit it.
The fact of the situation is that BHO was sitting in office when things went to shit. I believe it was a Democrat that said, "The buck stops here." BHO doesn't get a pass here.
I don't think anybody seriously believes that BHO was willing to spend time, resources, or political capital on securing a status of forces agreement with Maliki's Government. He viewed himself as elected to "end" wars and conducted his foreign policy accordingly, at least until the rise of IS. I'm skeptical that it's BHO's "fault" per se, but I'm also skeptical of those that give him a complete pass on this issue.
Regime change in Iraq was stated US policy, signed into law by Bill Clinton. The AUMF was approved by Congress, with a bipartisan vote. None of this is to defend GWB, simply to point out the GP is accurate when he said there's plenty of blame to go around.
Why was it speeding? There are a multitude of different reasons why it could have happened. Some of them (joyriding or distracted driving) would be the engineers fault and rise to a criminal level of negligence. Others (mechanical failure, software bug, take your pick) would not be his fault but may indicate civil or criminal liability for someone as yet identified. It might even fall into the "shit happens" category (a syncope with no prior medical warning, not an uncommon occurrence) and be no one's fault at all.
We simply don't know, unless you've got inside information that you're not sharing. Until we know the why it's premature to assign blame.
Unconventional != without honor or legality, two things that terrorists are sorely lacking. The equation (real or implied) with the militia is offensive; the militia derives its authority from the state and fights under the command of officers that were duly appointed by the state. There's a chain of command and accountability that terrorists can not claim. The militia largely obeyed the contemporary laws of war, something terrorists have never even pretended to do.
It's impossible to say how history would have judged the American rebellion had it failed but I think it's safe to say that it would not have judged it the same way that it's going to judge terrorism 200 years from now.
He is a neo-con idiot, one of many, who predicted that American troops would be greeted by Iraqis as heroic liberators
They were, at least by the Shia and Kurds. Of course, we fucked that up, through our own incompetence, and of course the Shia never going to be particularly happy when we got in the way of their pogrom against the Sunnis. The whole country is an artificial creation that is destined for the trash bin of history; everything we're seeing now would have happened eventually without our intervention. Fake countries rarely survive when their strongman dies. Our mistake was in being the one to break it, thus owning the problem.
Recent events (Libya) suggest that we still haven't fully digested this lesson. If you're gonna blow it up you should probably have a plan for what happens afterwards.
There's a South Park parody of New Orleans after Katrina, with the entire town on their roofs, awaiting rescue, while Stan's parents argue about whether or not it was GWB's fault, FEMAs, or the local Mayor. Stan interrupts the argument and says, "But someone's going to help those people, right?" His Dad responds, "That's not important right now son. What's important is figuring out whose fault this is."
It's not oppressing you to say that your city government can't do certain things. My State denies towns under a certain population the ability to have their own police force. Is that oppressive?
If they're banning co-ops you've got a point about oppression but there is no oppression in the State regulating the size and scope of the cities, towns, and counties contained therein.
The Continental Army fought in uniform, under the command of officers, and did not hide behind non-combatants or deliberately target them. The British still regarded them as rebels, rather than POWs, at least during the outset of the war before the Americans captured significant numbers of British men and could retaliate for abuses committed against American POWs.
Either way, there's a huge difference between the actions of the Continental Army and those we currently describe as terrorists. Perception may be a different animal, though it's worth noting that the British never resorted to the sorts of tactics they used in Ireland or India to suppress rebellions.
I am not familiar with the NC Constitution but if the State Legislature is violating it your recourse is with the State Judiciary, not the FCC. The FCC has not claimed NC's Constitution has justification for this power grab. Even a Federal bureaucrat couldn't do that and keep a straight face.
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To the best of my recollection, there is no legal parking on that section of 3rd Street, NW or SW, near the National Mall. If you illegally park your car near the US Capitol Building you should probably expect some scrutiny. If you have a pressure cooker inside in the day and age of improvised explosive devices you should expect further scrutiny. Is the latter bit "fair?" Maybe not. But it's reality in this era.
If the police don't investigate an illegally parked car near a sensitive structure they're grossly negligent. If the investigation reveals you broke the law to get the car there, well, you're going to get charged. If this gentleman was driving on a suspended license it was only a matter of time before he got charged anyway; he just managed to do it in a high profile fashion, vs. the thousands of idiots doing the exact same thing that get picked up in a more mundane fashion every day of the week.
Especially if the cops revoked the owner's driving license just to accuse him/her of something or other.
Not to burst your paranoid bubble, but the cops can't just revoke drivers licenses in the United States. Generally speaking, your drivers license can only be revoked or suspended after convictions for certain serious traffic offenses, a combination of convictions for minor traffic offenses, or failure to pay renewal fees when your license expires. A handful of jurisdictions allow the cops to physically take your license when you're cited for DWI; the actual suspension thereof generally occurs at your first court appearance.
In this instance they haven't released any of the back story, but it would seem that the guy was driving on a suspended or revoked license, which is a crime most everywhere in the World. It's a tough one to get away with in the day and age of license plate readers but if you're gonna attempt it you're probably best advised not to park your car on the Mall in Washington DC.....
Maybe they should shake down Italy and Turkey too.
Funny how Poland isn't flat broke; anyone that thinks Greece came out of WW2 worse off than Poland is delusional or a member of the Greek Parliament. Oh, wait, I'm being redundant. :)
It went to Grand Jury and was no-billed.
A lawyer that can't work out a resolution for the issue at hand in TFA without going to jury trial is a fucking moron.
they couldn't possibly hope to recover the $100k+ in legal fees.
$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."
There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.
That's wishful thinking. The number of grocery stores (or any store receiving regular shipments) located close enough to a rail line to cost effectively build a spur is negligible. That's without accounting for external factors (NIMBY and BANANA) that would make it very difficult in any case.
If big trucks actually had to pay their way, much of their cargo would move to trains.
Not on short and medium haul routes. My local grocery store does not have a rail spur serving it....
The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
Therein lies the problem.
If my phone could mine enough Bitcoin overnight, when plugged in anyway, to cover micropayments for some paywalled articles for me to read the next day, it might seem worth it - even if I was paying more for the electricity than the mined Bitcoin was actually worth.
Won't work. Cell phones and most tablets lack any sort of active cooling system; the CPU is not designed to run at 100% for any significant amount of time and will throttle itself soon it reaches a certain temperature. Heat also degrades li-ion batteries; running the phone "hot" overnight will slaughter the longevity of your battery just as effectively as leaving it in a car on a hot summer day.
Because SSH is mostly used to talk to Linux servers. Since when has Microsoft ever done anything to make Windows easier to use with other systems?
All Windows shops still have switches and routers.....
I was actually referring to the entire geopolitical situation, not just Iraq. Russia is slicing off parts of neighboring countries, we decapitated Libya (after the guy gave up his WMDs, incidentally, great message to send there....), threw Mubarak under the bus, did nothing while the Iranians crushed a reform movement, the list goes on and on.
The only good thing BHO did with foreign policy was to begin to normalize relations with Cuba. That was long overdue and he deserves some credit for that. The rest has been an unmitigated disaster. The World now looks a lot like it did before WW1, except instead of mustard gas we'll now get to contend with nuclear weapons when the shit hits the fan.
The USN's anti-aircraft weaponry was extremely effective by the standards of the era. It turned the Japanese "victories" at Santa Cruz and Eastern Solomons into pyrrhic disasters that cost them dozens of their best pilots and whatever slim chance they had of winning of the war. That was in 1942. It only got better as time went on. We also had proximity fuses and other technology that the Axis never developed.
Personal anecdote: A friend of mine was a gunner on the 5"/38 mounts aboard USS Antietam. During gunnery practice they wouldn't aim at the target sleeve being towed through their gunnery range, rather they would aim at the cable connecting it to the aircraft doing the towing. More often than not they could hit it.
The fact of the situation is that BHO was sitting in office when things went to shit. I believe it was a Democrat that said, "The buck stops here." BHO doesn't get a pass here.
I don't think anybody seriously believes that BHO was willing to spend time, resources, or political capital on securing a status of forces agreement with Maliki's Government. He viewed himself as elected to "end" wars and conducted his foreign policy accordingly, at least until the rise of IS. I'm skeptical that it's BHO's "fault" per se, but I'm also skeptical of those that give him a complete pass on this issue.
Regime change in Iraq was stated US policy, signed into law by Bill Clinton. The AUMF was approved by Congress, with a bipartisan vote. None of this is to defend GWB, simply to point out the GP is accurate when he said there's plenty of blame to go around.
Why was it speeding? There are a multitude of different reasons why it could have happened. Some of them (joyriding or distracted driving) would be the engineers fault and rise to a criminal level of negligence. Others (mechanical failure, software bug, take your pick) would not be his fault but may indicate civil or criminal liability for someone as yet identified. It might even fall into the "shit happens" category (a syncope with no prior medical warning, not an uncommon occurrence) and be no one's fault at all.
We simply don't know, unless you've got inside information that you're not sharing. Until we know the why it's premature to assign blame.
Unconventional != without honor or legality, two things that terrorists are sorely lacking. The equation (real or implied) with the militia is offensive; the militia derives its authority from the state and fights under the command of officers that were duly appointed by the state. There's a chain of command and accountability that terrorists can not claim. The militia largely obeyed the contemporary laws of war, something terrorists have never even pretended to do.
It's impossible to say how history would have judged the American rebellion had it failed but I think it's safe to say that it would not have judged it the same way that it's going to judge terrorism 200 years from now.
He is a neo-con idiot, one of many, who predicted that American troops would be greeted by Iraqis as heroic liberators
They were, at least by the Shia and Kurds. Of course, we fucked that up, through our own incompetence, and of course the Shia never going to be particularly happy when we got in the way of their pogrom against the Sunnis. The whole country is an artificial creation that is destined for the trash bin of history; everything we're seeing now would have happened eventually without our intervention. Fake countries rarely survive when their strongman dies. Our mistake was in being the one to break it, thus owning the problem.
Recent events (Libya) suggest that we still haven't fully digested this lesson. If you're gonna blow it up you should probably have a plan for what happens afterwards.
My first thought was Dice flamebait; but on second thought,
Fixed it for you. :)
There's a South Park parody of New Orleans after Katrina, with the entire town on their roofs, awaiting rescue, while Stan's parents argue about whether or not it was GWB's fault, FEMAs, or the local Mayor. Stan interrupts the argument and says, "But someone's going to help those people, right?" His Dad responds, "That's not important right now son. What's important is figuring out whose fault this is."
It's not oppressing you to say that your city government can't do certain things. My State denies towns under a certain population the ability to have their own police force. Is that oppressive?
If they're banning co-ops you've got a point about oppression but there is no oppression in the State regulating the size and scope of the cities, towns, and counties contained therein.
The Continental Army fought in uniform, under the command of officers, and did not hide behind non-combatants or deliberately target them. The British still regarded them as rebels, rather than POWs, at least during the outset of the war before the Americans captured significant numbers of British men and could retaliate for abuses committed against American POWs.
Either way, there's a huge difference between the actions of the Continental Army and those we currently describe as terrorists. Perception may be a different animal, though it's worth noting that the British never resorted to the sorts of tactics they used in Ireland or India to suppress rebellions.
Washington is a special case, defined by the US Constitution, but of course you already knew that.
Then sue on that basis. Or petition the FCC to override those franchise agreements. I'll support your efforts wholeheartedly. What I can't support is:
City: We want to get into the broadband (or garbage, water, food, or really anything) business.
State: You can't do that.
Uncle Sam: Yes they can.
I am not familiar with the NC Constitution but if the State Legislature is violating it your recourse is with the State Judiciary, not the FCC. The FCC has not claimed NC's Constitution has justification for this power grab. Even a Federal bureaucrat couldn't do that and keep a straight face.