A jury might find that a reasonable argument, but state legislatures have decided that youths need to be protected from sex so much that, like the gp said, it's a 'strict liability' law, even if the minor wants sex so bad they're willing to lie and obtain forgeries to help assist with their lies.

Budget balance: First, the pipeline opened when I was ONE. I literally don't remember a time when the pipeline(and therefore oil money) wasn't flowing in. Still, from what I've been told, during that time we did have an income tax.

Old budget adjusted for population:
1. It's been well over 30 years since we had to do a budget without oil money. It wouldn't be valid anymore
2. It still wouldn't balance because we cut other taxes in response.
3. We ARE cutting spending. Quite severely. 2013 Budget? 9B revenue, 8B spent, 1B saved. 2014 was 7.6B revenue, 7B spent. 2016? Like I said, $5B was what our congress authorized, but with only $2B of income, that would mean $3B from the reserves, which needs that 75% vote. Spending is half what it was 3 years ago.

The main point is that it takes time to properly wind down spending and spin up new sources of revenue.

No Kidding. Remember the 'socking away' part? Given sufficient time with the high prices, we would have had enough to cover the government on the interest alone.

Some limited amounts of farming. Fishing is fairly big. Tourism. Other resource extraction. Believe it or not, some people like retiring up here as opposed to Florida. The military is huge, which helps drive federal spending up here.

Worst case, along with cutting spending in various ways, we may have to implement a state-wide income or sales tax. It's that or jack up the property tax *A LOT*.

1. Student employee at the state university at the moment. I'm not actually too worried about the job. My job security consists of 'He's literally 1/5th the cost of anybody else!'.
2. Mostly fix up web pages*, some script programming, emails lists. It's actually relaxing compared to my last job.
3. I'm actually security+ certified, and have a wide field of experience, but I have this wonderful scholarship from my last employer that pays as much as what I could get elsewhere. So I'm going for a higher degree.
4. Going back to college has been fun. The student position is mostly to widen my resume, provide some spending cash(so I don't have to tap into investments during the summer), etc...

*The department reps who create them do great, mostly. I fix up things like 509 compliance, make sure they're not putting in multi-megabyte images unless necessary, etc...

I buy a good upper mid-grade card and use it until I'm no longer satisfied with it. I'm currently at 5 years with my current card, but am looking at upgrading now.

However, given Alaska's budget situation(currently a state employee)*, I might be out of a job in a couple weeks. So I'm holding on.

*We're having the same thing on a state level as has happened on the federal level several times. Due to the drop in oil prices, our income has gone from about $6B down to $2B. Our budget was about $5B. Being smart lads, our congress had been socking money away, but per the constitution it takes a 75% majority to tap that money. They voted a $5B budget, but didn't manage to vote to tap the reserve. Ergo the Governor did what he had to do and line item vetoed $3B out of $5B in spending. The police and emergency services are the only ones funded after mid-June. My section is looking at a 60% cut, mostly due to us being partially federally funded.

Electricity prices are high enough up here in Alaska that you don't want to be using a space heater either. Oil/Gas is much cheaper.

I'm still 'rocking' a Radeon HD 5870. Looking them up on passmark, I have about 400 points on you.

Personally, my standard for upgrading my video card is that the benchmarks would have to double - which just wasn't happening last year, at least affordably. This year it looks like a GTX 960 might be a good choice.

5 years out of a video card isn't bad at all.

Tesla has opened their patents up. So, no, these are not Tesla-specific and not of fleeting usefulness.

The vast majority of stock is held for 10 years or longer. Something like 1% of stocks see 99% of the trading.

And yours doesn't mention 'the people'. That mention is rather a big deal, I think.

The 'well regulated milita' is known as a prefactory clause. It explains part, not necessarily all, of the reasoning for the following rule. Which is that the right of the people to keep and bear arms 'shall not be infringed'.

Personally, to me that means that the government can't prevent you from purchasing, keeping, or carrying firearms short of conviction(or commitment) in a court of law.

Consider it like the right to have an abortion - but the right to keep arms is actually in the bill of rights. It's #2 even.

Consider what the pro-life types are trying to do with abortion - same darn things as the anti-gun types are. Waiting periods - make it a pain in the butt, discourage it. Not allowed past a certain point. Gun Permits - equivalent to the briefings/propaganda that they're trying to push on women seeking an abortion. Extra fees compared with forbidding insurance from paying in order to increase the cost. Banning specific versions. Etc...

The 'shall not be infringed' part should be a high standard against all of the above. Road blocks and detours when it comes to 'arms' should NOT be allowed. Despite this, there's a lot of unconstitutional law out there, and some of it has been in place for quite some time. It's a constant battle to protect our rights - freedom of speech, to bear arms, to privacy, religion, etc...

(I'm pro-choice and pro-gun btw).

Isn't this self-contradicting? 'quaint' ~ 'old fashioned'. A decision as recent as 2008 is very much not old fashioned.

The NRA wasn't a lobbying organization until late in the last century, so this statement is incorrect. The NRA ended up becoming a lobbying organization due to the spread of gun control laws resulting in it's membership having it create a lobbying branch.

Given what I've read in sources like the federalist papers, I think that the NRA version is closer to reality than yours.

That being said, your rights can be restricted through 'due process of law', IE conviction by a court and jury of your peers. So I'm okay with things like the NICS check, prohibition by felons. I think that the post-facto punishment of misdemeanor DV charges is a violation, because there's a very good chance that people like police officers who were convicted of such things, usually by pleading guilty, long before this rule was in effect, would have fought it in court and won at least a percentage of the time if the rule had been in place, or they knew it was coming, before they pled guilty.

Personally, I allow the adblock allowed ads. Not many sites use them.

Sites I frequent that give me the 'Please disable your adblocker' I tend to respond with(and yes, I've used their forum/webmaster address to do this) 'Then use adblocker approved ads'.

After about the 3rd time the ad sites tried to serve me malware it became more about protecting my computer than anything else. The fact that many sites are unusable to the point that I wonder if their web-admin is even testing the sites without an ad blocker doesn't help.

Interesting how governments sometimes differ. USA, supposedly land of the free, would quickly have the Department of Transportation having a word with the owners of said billboards, as you describe them.

Things like lit scrolling marquees are fine - most gas stations show their prices using a digital billboard today, and rolling time/temperature/ad is common,

But there are rules in place about potentially 'distracting' displays.

By the way, I just did the survey and it worked fine for me. Latest version of firefox.

Cowering in the corner isn't necessarily a bad strategy, but it's not optimal. Defending yourself with an effective weapon generally has the best options. The 'passive aggressive' strategy of passive non-compliance that police were recommending for a while is actually the worst.

Though I'll admit that I have a good deal of belief in the theory of 'all that evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing', thus believe that even if it's non-optimal for the first person, the prevention of a criminal from attacking successive targets makes everybody safer in the long run.

Personally, I want as many guns in 'good' hands as possible, while denying them to the 'bad' people. However, denying 'bad' people weapons is a never-ending battle. Witness England, where they're even trying to crack down on knives, sturdy umbrellas, and the sort. All that does is enable the physically fit thug.

I may have to change my sig. It's been years since I visited it.

The survey is more an SocraticExercise than anything else, the results aren't actually tabulated.

Well, I was just correcting what I saw as mistakes in the AC's posting. There's a reason why I said 'kind of sucks.' It's my expression for 'well, that didn't work out, but there's really nothing that can be done to recover from it'.

As for benefiting the drivers - not really. You have to remember that they're also losing fairs to the cheaper and more lushly equipped Uber drivers who, not having to pay for the medallion or follow the cumbersome NYC taxi rules, can afford to run a nicer vehicle than the cabbies.

Note on following NYC taxi rules - Uber is, to my knowledge, operating perfectly legally in NYC. NYC has several categories of 'hired vehicle'. There's two categories of taxi and several for non-taxi private car. Uber is NOT operating as a taxi service per NYC rules, but as a 'black car' service. It's drivers hold a chauffeur license, do not respond to street hails(IE putting out a hand and yelling as opposed to the app), have certain destination and pickup restrictions, etc... Matter of fact, Uber would likely fire any drivers found responding to street hails in NYC.

That being said, I have the feeling(not confirmed) that due to Uber's rating system and having superior pay, that cabbies that can do customer service better are being lured away by Uber. I remember reading somewhere that Uber effectively fires any driver whose rating drops below a 4.4 out of 5 stars.

So a guy who's friendly and shows up with a Tesla model S* will retain his position in Uber while the grouch with an old smelly Crown Vic might as well stick to the cab side.