"He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell on July 5, 1989, to a three-year suspended prison term, two years probation, $150,000 in fines, and 1,200 hours of community service. North performed some of his community service within Potomac Gardens, a public housing project in Southeast Washington, D.C."

"However, on July 20, 1990, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), North's convictions were vacated, after the appeals court found that witnesses in his trial might have been impermissibly affected by his immunized congressional testimony."

Nope. There are exactly six qualifications you must meet to be elected President: a) You must be a native born citizen of the US b) you must be at least 35 years old c) you must have been a resident of the US for at least fourteen years d) you can't have engaged in rebellion against the government of the US e) you can't have been impeached by Congress and f) You can't have already served two terms as President.

Oliver North was ultimately acquitted of all charges. That's adequate?

The Chinese Scrabble set takes a forklift to carry around...

Illegal play: "french toast" is two words. Crosswords may do multiple-word phrases all the time, but they aren't legal Scrabble plays.

That's not dialect.

Yes, it most certainly is. From the Oxford Dictionaries site:

These are alternative forms of the past tense and past participle of the verb learn. Both are acceptable, but learned is often used in both British English and American English, while learnt is much more common in British English than in American English.

If the word is "questionable", then it should be resolved in a dictionary challenge, which is what the rules call for. Before play starts, you decide what your reference dictionary will be (Scabble publishes an official one, which is what is used in tournament play and anyone can get one if they want. It's handy, since all the things in a regular dictionary that are illegal Scrabble plays like proper nouns and so on are left out). If you think a guy's word isn't kosher, you can challenge it. If you can't find it in the dictionary, he picks up his tiles and loses his turn. Otherwise, the challenger loses his next turn.

Sorry, I must have missed that issue. What's "pocket dialed"?

Corollary: Every system can be gamed.

So it becomes a terribly dis-incentive for the best teachers to go to the schools that need them the most - they'll grab all the plum assignments in the nice, rich, suburban schools, while fresh teachers get sent to the inner-city schools (perpetuating this situation).

Which is what happens now anyways, so at least it's not making things worse.

His idea was basically to clone the IBM PC and compete with them; it wasn't some brilliant engineering feat but rather a guess at what it takes to survive. Quite a few vendors tried just that strategy and wound up bankrupt despite their efforts.

True. However, except for Apple, only those who tried that strategy survived. Not everybody who tried that strategy lived, but everybody who lived used that strategy.

"Mens rea" does not cover ignorance of law. It means you intentionally committed the illegal act, not that you knew the act was illegal. If you are on trial for emfozing a whatzit, the prosecution has to show you knew you were emfozing a whatzit, but not that you knew emfozing a whatzit was illegal.

I think I'll just stick with debit and credit, thank you.

Don't be an idiot. You know that "chemicals" in the vernacular doesn't mean you or your lunch.

Okay, then give us a definition.

As far as I've been able to determine, "chemicals" in the vernacular means "substances that scare me." Not a very useful standard for determining what you can bring onto the site.

I also bring my own hookers and drugs.

And blackjack?