Indeed, if you want to do some target practice to achieve proficiency with your weapons, a friend who lives out in the cut is the best way to do it. It beats the hell out of paying shooting-range fees, you can use whatever you want for targets, and you can also practice at longer distances than anything an indoor facility could offer.

It's simple enough. This was a local police department in a small rural area, so they were held to the rules. If they were a national agency with an effectively unlimited budget, ties to major military-industrial corporations, and loads of political clout, the courts would have performed some mental gymnatics and invented a bullshit reason why that inconvenient Fourth Amendment doesn't really apply. Currently "anti-terrorism" is popular.

Because the Constitution is a document describing what powers the government has and how these powers may be used. It's like a default-deny firewall: the government has no powers whatsoever, except these enumerated powers. The Constitution is emphatically not a document describing what rights a person (citizen or not) has and when they will be honored.

The document was written based on the idea of "natural rights". You have certain rights simply because you are a human being; the government either recognizes that or it becomes dysfunctional and fails to fulfill its major purpose, which is to protect your natural rights. The Founders (mostly Deists) explained it in terms of us having been "endowed by our Creator" with such rights. You could also remove the Creator-concept entirely and argue that such a system simply works better and does the greatest good for all involved, and thus is inherently superior to systems that reject the concept of natural rights.

You don't have rights merely because the government deigned to let you have them, or decided that depriving you of them wasn't worth the trouble. A system where that's the foundational principle has lost even the pretense of human dignity. That kind of system wouldn't even have to bother with the incremental "hey we have an excuse that sells (protect the children! stop the terrorists!)" encroachment of liberty that we're seeing now. It could just go straight into open tyranny without having all those little baby steps for naive people to ignore.

You may wish to brush up on a little American history, specifically why the Tenth Amendment was written. It affirms that the federal government has only those powers which are delegated to it, with the rest being reserved by the states and the people. I'm all for deporting this guy, by the way. We should either enforce our immigration laws (like Mexico and every other sovereign nation) or repeal them, but if we're going to arrest this man, there's a process that must (and should) be followed.

In the U.S. there hasn't ever been an exploitation requirement per se. The only kind of IP that explicitly requires action by the holder is a trademark, which they're required to aggressively defend at the risk of losing it otherwise. However, it used to be that you could file an application and tie up the approval process for years without it actually being issued, which effectively let you secretly hold a patent as long as you wanted and have it formally issued only when it was to your advantage to do so. About 20 years ago the U.S. changed patent terms from "date of issuance" to "date of filing", so the clock now starts ticking when you first send in the application.

We don't know, because she never gets in a fight in the movie, or does anything at all where her physical abilities are tested.

Not per se, but she does make short work of Leon when it's obvious that he's going to kill Deckard.

How indignant is Peru when a wind storm comes through?

Not very, because there's practically no wind in the area. Additionally, the coated pebbles protect the ground even during those rare windy days.

Forcing ANYONE to play either E.T. or (even worse) Friday the 13th on an Atari console would probably be classified as both cruel AND unusual.

I didn't have Friday the 13th, but I still have my E.T. cart, and M*A*S*H and Porky's as well!

Binding arbitration clauses don't hold up in court.

The Supreme Court begs to differ.

That 90k job will have at least 10 hours of unpaid stress/OT vs a 65k/40hr week so the coefficients to compare are 1.625 govt vs1.8 private sector.

Except I already make more than that and do a 40-hour week, and I haven't been given any grief over my vacation schedule. In my situation, the pension would be the only notable benefit. And our department hasn't seen any layoffs in literally decades.

While many places will pass on the basis of a felony record, one of the best Java guys I ever worked with had a felony assault conviction from about five years prior after a guy started a bar fight. He was a contractor when we met, was hired by the company we were doing work for, and hasn't seemed to have too many problems finding work. He was also very up-front about the conviction during the HR process.

Another thing that employers sometimes like to pull with salaried employees is not paying a full week's salary when there's a day or two when the office is closed during the week (holidays, etc.). If work was available at all during the week and you were willing and able to work, regardless of the number of days the office was closed, you're supposed to get your full week's pay unless it was the first or last week of your employment. If an employer has a policy that formally disregards that rule, or doesn't have a policy but regularly violates the rule, they risk losing the exempt status for their employees at that location.

Date libraries, as it turns out, are rather monstrously difficult to make.

They're not too bad if you have only the U.S. to deal with, but throw awareness of time zones worldwide into the code and it becomes a mess quickly because of all of the 30 minute, 45 minute, etc. changes. I had to write a separate date library for an airline reservations system many years ago simply because the stock C++ libraries wouldn't deal properly with Australian time zones. Maybe that's changed since then.

Plus, you can admire your new interactive button anytime you like - you're not on the art gallery's schedule.

Additionally, everywhere that I've worked has been fine about changing the agreement to state that only stuff I work on during work hours belongs to them. Anything I do on my own time is my own. If they want you bad enough, they'll change the agreement. If they're not willing to do that, are you sure it's a place you really want to work?

But if you're north of 35, look at your local state agencies, no one would blink an eye at a 40-something applying for a job.

I've actually looked into public service work a few times, but one thing that I see quite commonly (in my state, anyway) is that skills are extremely undervalued in terms of salary. It's tough to justify going from a position making $90-100K to a comparable one making only $65K, although there are often benefits like pensions that can offset that somewhat.