Bullshit. To myth24601 as well. I'll address his/her point first.

Charges rarely get "dropped". Cases simply don't get pressed. Felony arrests can be prosecuted up to five years later in many places (WA, for one), once sufficient evidence is obtained to make a case. The constitutional prohibition against being placed in double jeapardy means prosecutors only get one kick at the can, unless the same evidence can be repackged under a different charge.

In 2010, when my ex had custody, my son was hungry. As she hardly ever fed our kids, she let me take him to dinner, and wrote a permission slip (as I did not have visitation rights that day, and insisted on one). Well, she let the poor kid out, in February, with one shoe having the sole completely flop off. I told him, either before or after dinner, I'd get him new shows. He chose after dinner. Well, after dinner, he wanted to go home to mom, and I feared she'd have police waiting to illustrate the "poor footwear" that "I" had on him. So, I took him to Payless for those shoes first.

My son has issues. He suffers from Conduct Disorder (Oppositional Defiant Disorder in his younger days, that psychologists and psychiatrists have not been able to stem). In order for him to not run into traffic, I had to carry him into the store, all the while him screaming "He's choking me! He's killing me! Help, he's kidnapping me!" I handed a worker one shoe, asked, for a matching pair, got them paid, and took him home to his mother. Unbeknownst to me, on the way, he brusied himself with his seatbelt buckle.

He alleged I struck him, she called police, they interviewed store staff ("He was choking and trying to kill the child he was kidnapping"), and there was plenty of probable cause to arrest me for felony assault of a minor. I spent four days in jail before being able to post bail. Getting to one's own money behind bars is surprisingly difficult: banks won't release it to attorneys without a notarized power of attorney, and while your lawyer can visit you in lockup, a notary might be made to wait weeks. Lawyers are generally not permitted for front bail monies, because the offer can be used as a incentive to force an attorney-client relationship under duress.

Well, the case against me fell apart: he refused to testify, and his mental illness came to light.

Were the charges dropped?

No.

I got custody of my kids 18 months later, but to remove the uncertainty of a possible felony prosecution over the next 3-1/2 years, I had to get the original charges disposed. Despite not prosecuting me, the DA refused to drop the charges unless I pled to "something". I chose disorderly conduct (as someone might have thought I was actually kidnapping my son, and assaulted me: in WA, acting in a manner that might invite assault is disorderly conduct), and paid a $1200 fine. The original charges were disposed.

All this is public information. I could not hire a nanny for my son through nannies4hire.com because of my arrest record. But, and this addresses the AC: I had no trouble getting a new job some years later. Decent employers research things like this.

I thought about this and think it justifies citizens' right to bear arms to include nukes: so long as the jackbooted things don't back off, we periodically (every few minutes we're holding out), kill a million or so who did not come to our aid, and therefore supported the unlawful government act.

1. Yeah, Barack Obama says he can kill any American if he does not know whether he poses a threat or not.

2. I don't know if Barack Obama poses a threat to me.

3. Sadly, instead of "Profit!" I rather see either a predator drone or Gitmo in my future.

The proper thing for these parents to do is organize, arm themselves, head down to the school administration buildings, and kill every official, employee, and agent in sight. If the school board members are not there, hunt them down, and kill them too.

No doubt, that would result it an armed SWAT response, arrests, and deaths.

It would not be legal.

But, it would be proper, and therefore should be legal. Specifically, it should be an affirmative defense against the charge of murder that the slain (a) be an (1) elected member of government, (2) employee or (3) other agent thereof; and (b) (1) had committed, (2) passed into law, or (3) supported the passage into law of (c) an unconstitutional measure that (d) was (1) applied, or (2) applicable, to the accused. In this case, the students', and by extention their parents' fourth amendment rights were violated.

Governments are supposed to exist at the pleasure of the people and be their servant, not the other way around.

The founding fathers didn't go far enough with the second amendment. They had the right idea, that in extremis, armed rebellion against a tyrannical state was justified. But, they failed in thinking a separation of powers and enumerated restrictions on government powers, would be sufficient to ward off that necessity. So, now we are left with a society that has no idea when to take up arms against the state, save the vague notion of "when enough others do". And so, we just sit and look at one another. When the time comes (and, it will), the response will not be a gentle local reminder of who's the boss, but rather a widespread revolution that runs a clear danger of leaving a power vacuum, as revolutions tend to do.

It would have been far better for there to be a "rulebook" as it were, that clearly enumerates, but not in an exhaustive sense, when to kill an agent of the state.

Government is best viewed as a beast of burden: useful for a time, but to be put down when it has outlived it's usefulness, or otherwise become ornery.

Trust no agent of the state who is not willing to enumerate a number of actions that, if they undertook, would justify their killing under the affirmative defense of protecting constitutional rights.

Radical? Obviously, I don't think so. Affirmative defenses are not legal "walks in the park". They shift the burden from the state having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the accused having to prove innocence under the specific affirmative defense shield, having admitted to comitting the act under consideration.

I can attest to that, having escaped Canada for the U.S.

I is also illegal to spend your own money to save your own life: everyone has to be on the same government health plan, "to be fair". Cuba and North Korea are the same.

That's interesting, since I've been sinking email for my domain at home for over a decade now. And yes, because that is clearly running a server, I've always gotten business class service from the cable companies. The DSL providers that I used in the past had loose enough terms of service that running a server wasn't an issue: I was up front about the mail and ssh servers, and all they cared about was that I didn't run an open relay (which I had no intention of doing, and appreciated when I messed up my config once and they told me).

Though, personally, the assymetry bothers me, as it results in a "producer" vs. "consumer" divide on the 'net, which really should be about interconnectin peers -- running servers should not be an issue.

I can even understand a provider wanting bandwidth asymetry on their last mile, and prohibiting the running of servers tends to achieve that (though game traffic bandwidth can be quite symmetric direction-wise), but it's the wrong approach, IMNSHO.

I think that's called an armed revolution.

Actually, the principle of estoppel HAS been used in divorce cases to compel a man to continue to support his now ex-wife in "the manner to which she has become accustomed".

Bullshit. My then-wife was so lazy, CPS required me to hire a maid and nanny to care for the kids, because she was neglecting them,

No, I was not smart enough to divorce her before 50% community property amounted to much. Mea culpa.

Not only did she sit around, watching TV, letting the nanny and maid (paid for by me) raise the kids, but she actively trashed the house.

"In the manner to which she has become accustomed" should be replaced by "commensurate with the degree she contributed to the household". I don't buy that a stay at home wife is "worth" half her working husband's earnings: at most she's worth the value of a maid and nanny (which can be significant, though certainly not millions of dollars a year), and certainly not that, if those are required through her doing nothing in the household. And, the same if the gender roles are reversed.

Besides not divorcing her sooner (yes, my bad, but I stuck it out until I had a moral reason), we had a "marriage contract" that stipulated whoever stayed at home was responsible for the household and child-rearing. Unfortunately, where we divorced, "marriage contracts" were not recognized, only "prenuptual agreements" were (which was the EXACT OPPOSITE situation where we were married), and only then regarding property division and not performance agreements (who does what).

But, now, alimony has ended, I have primary residential and sole legal custody of the kids, and she is homeless.

Karma's a bitch.

That's why some of us think about engineering biological weapons that are selective on genetic markers evidencing an inability to perform the work necessary to ensure employment.

It has been suggested than an ability to reason logically, to the point of being able to program (they myriad kinds of robots that will be around), will become the new literacy standard, and those of us who have this literacy will have to fight off those who don't: the knows against the know nots.

Such biological weapons will be our line of defense, and possibly euthenasia for the poor suffering masses.

Ah, eugenics.

Emphasis mine.

I've often thought one of the few things money shound not be able to purchase are law, and disproportionate dissemination of political candidate's platforms.

Thus, I would support equitable (though not necesarily equal) distribution of funds donated to the political process among all candidates, overseen by an organizatoin not tied to the incumbancy.

You are forgetting estoppel:

Estoppel in its broadest sense is a legal term referring to a series of legal and equitable doctrines that preclude "a person from denying or asserting anything to the contrary of that which has, in contemplation of law, been established as the truth, either by the acts of judicial or legislative officers, or by his own deed, acts, or representations, either express or implied." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel] (emphasis mine).

A common example is a stream on private property that borders a road. If people have come to take water from the stream, even if the landowner povided a pipe on his own land to make it easy (that did not extend to the public property), then after some time, the landowner can not suddenly deny access to the water in that stream, whether by his pipe, or not. If he tried, a court would likely grant a public "easement by estoppel".

The same principle is used in divorce cases to ensure that a soon to be ex-wife received alimony so that she may live "in the manner to which she has become accustomed", even as alimony is granted less and less frequently in recognition of women's ability to independently earn income. (It is still granted in many cases when a wife has never worked, and her husband supported her: she often gets 50% of the community property (to which she contributed nothing financially) AND alimony.)

So, if a company provides a free service, that many have come to rely upon, for some significant time, it may very well be held to continue to provide that service, unless the nature of the free offering was made clear (e.g. reserving the right to discontinue it at any time).

Generally, estoppel applies to either real property easements, or income streams, or other tangible benefit, but I see no reason that it can not be applied to a service.

In this case, the court would weigh the time the service was offered, the reasonable expectations of the public regarding it, and the public harm if it were terminated against the costs of the company to continue to provide it for free.

Be warned, however, that public easements by estoppel, for even an essential thing like water, often only are granted if free access was provided for extended periods of time, say 25 or 50 years. Often this is codified in municipal bylaws, or state, or federal laws.

This is why one should ALWAYS be careful of "being nice": one may unwittingly create an obligation by estoppel to continue to do so.

No, there is more to the "bad old programmer", than uwillingness to work long hours, often for free.

As people age, many become "set in their ways". And, in an industry, where half of what you know becomes useless every three years (I used to claim five years), getting "set in one's ways" is suicide. I once encountered a Cobol programmer who was writting business applications for IBM PCs in the language because he didn't want to learn anything new. Well, Cobol on PCs always was kind of creaky. He didn't last long (and his applications were bears to debug and modify).

If you're not willing to learn for the rest of your working software career, you might as well quit now.

I speak with some of the wisdom of age. I've been doing this professionally since September 1974: 38 years ago.

I started with BASIC, moved on to Fortran, CDC 6600 assembly, Cobol and Pascal (remember that language), 8080, 6809, 80x86, 680x0 assemblers, C, C++, with a stint doing Java (in JNI hell), and the odd bits of Lisp, Forth along the way. HTML was no worse than the proprieatry formatting language I used to typeset my Master's thesis (in 1984). Perl, Python, and others, I tend to forget, and relearn every six months when they happen to be the right tool for the job: C/C++ does seem to have some staying power and what I use daily.

I've built X.25 PADs and switches, digital radio modems, voice recognition systems, POTS test equipment, internet security appliances, and most recently web application acceleration devices. I've even built stuff to control industrial smoke houses. Oh yyeah, there was that CICS/IDMS stint for the railroad for their in-house modified DISOSS email app in 1984/5. Think I hacked some IBM 360 assembler there. I was grateful to move to cross-assembling Z80 assembler code and burning EAPROMS after that.

I'dve been "DONE" years ago if I didn't keep learning.

To make it in this business you neeed a logical mind and a keen desire to keep learning (programming languages, processor architectures, and operating systems being admitedly a bit more interesting than the "application or graphics framework of the day").

If you can do that, age is no barrier.

The bottom line is that one should not presume guilt because of the difficulty of proving it either to a civil "preponderance of the evidence" standard, or the criminal "beyond a reasonable doubt" one.

As it stands now, it's akin to somone stealing a puppy, having it grown up to be an adult dog (say, a Bull Mastiff or other large dog), and seeking support for food and vet bills from the original owner!

Heck, men have been ordered to pay support for kids that didn't even exist on a woman's simple claim they did, and even men who were known not to be biological fathers, were ordered to pay support simply because they took pity on a single mother and helped her a time or two without any romantic relationship!

The standard for support should require ((a) a biological relationship AND (b) proof of consensual insemination) or (c) a voluntary agreement to support. Yes, this is a burden for a woman to prove. The burden for a man is having defensive evidence that sex was consentual and not rape. Yes, this appears to turn "innocent until proven guilty" on it's head, but it should be considered insurance against a fraudulent rape charge that can be very expensive to defend against.