No, but you generally need counsel to litigate in anything but small claims court. And "clearly did not mean" is rarely so clear. Just because someone uses "ain't no" doesn't necessarily mean they didn't mean to reference a statute (and if it's in their interest, they will argue that). Like I said, the courts try their best to look to the intent of the parties in whatever dialect they used, but in real life things get messy. Really, the legal profession does not intentionally go out and create opaque language or language that is outside the vernacular.

Right, which is why I mentioned that you can try to adjust, but someone will get hosed or game the system. It's just too complicated. It probably works better in Scandinavia than it would in the U.S. due to the more homogeneous population and more even cost of living.

Perhaps, but here is the problem: the redneck that is advantaged by the use of the "magic word" instead of the redneck definition is going to swear up and down that's what he meant, and it's going to be mighty hard to prove him wrong. The court can't just assume "aww that just a redneck, he couldn't be that sophisticated" because there are plenty of savvy rednecks who might very well have understood what they were putting in the contract. It's true that the courts are supposed to apply the meaning of the contract, but usually there would be no litigation in the first place if the parties agreed what that original meaning was. It may be the case that one party understood the significance of a "magic word" and the other did not. The advantage of this system is that, at least in theory, no matter what dialect you speak, if you are represented by competent counsel, you will be able to enter into and enforce contracts that are fair to your interests.

I assume this comment was in jest, but over-population is unlikely to be a serious long-term problem for humanity. We've already solved over-population with reliable and safe birth control. The only thing that keeps the population growing is that many people in the developing world don't have access to contraception. That is changing rapidly. Accordingly, most projections of human population have it peaking within at least some of our lifetimes and slowly declining thereafter.

This type of solution seeks equality, but in reality would have a difficult time achieving it. $100,000 a year allows one to live a relatively deluxe lifestyle if you are in upstate New York and own a house outright with no dependents. But someone making $100,000 a year with 5 kids in New York city has very little cash to spare. Besides location and dependents, other factors could greatly determine your actual spending power. Someone making $100,000 with student loans of $300,000 won't have much spending money. Or someone with cancer and crummy medical insurance. Sure, you can attempt to adjust for these differences, but in the end someone is going to get hosed due to a special circumstance. Far better to just do a flat rate. In the end, the real fine is from your insurance company anyways as your increased rates will likely go up several multiples of the assessed fine.

I would add that even Shakespeare is intelligible to a modern audience. It can be a bit hard to read as literature, but when performed live, subtitles are seldom required. Obsolete words and constructions are sufficiently rare as as to be easily discerned from context if you are watching the action. You have to go back another 100 years to get to the point that written text requires translation for modern audiences. Even much of the Canterbury Tales can be understood by a modern speaker without translation (with considerable difficulty). You have to go back to the time of Beowulf for English to be completely unintelligible to a modern speaker.

I've never understood "my bad" to disclaim responsibility. It's always been synonymous with "my mistake" in my experience.

As a lawyer, I would like to point out that "legalese" is actually officially disfavored within the legal community. Most law schools caution against legal writing loaded with unnecessary jargon and stress clarity to the extent possible. However, one thing that trips up efforts in clarity is our common law system. Much of the "law" is created by precedents in past cases. The court opinions in the common law tradition often create "magic words" within a contract. For example, the statute may say something has to be done in a "reasonable" amount of time. A lawyer might know that the courts have defined "reasonable" to mean generally 30 days, but a layperson doesn't know what "reasonable" means. It becomes a magic word. Now, you may ask, why not just use "30 days" instead of the word "reasonable?" Well, the court probably has packed into that "generally 30 days" many exceptions that were created due to special circumstances over the years. By using the magic word "reasonable", you neatly incorporate all those exceptions into the contract without having to tediously enumerate and define all of them. "Two rednecks" can and do conclude contracts in their native dialects. The result is usually a train wreck if litigated because their language may or may not map onto the "magic words." One party may be forced to argue that when they said "reasonable" they didn't really mean "reasonable" as defined by the statute and court precedents- they meant the redneck definition (whatever that might be). Their contract may work of the "mediator" is a redneck, but if mediation breaks down, they are left to argue in the court system, which does not operate with a redneck dialect.

The $10k Apple watch is a red herring. It will be purchased by people for whom dropping $10k on a watch is akin to the average person buying an impulse candy bar in the grocery store checkout line.

For me, the real gouging is the straps of the non-sport edition watch. The "sport" watch bands really don't work in a professional setting or with any sort of formal clothing. The low end non-sport come with the sport wristband which also does not look very professional. So, for something acceptable at the office, you are looking to spend at least $700. Essentially, you are forced to pay double the price just to get a band that doesn't look like it comes on a swatch. If the bands were replaceable with standard bands, you could get a perfectly professional looking band for $50

In any event, my take on Apple products is that they make a good product, but they never make sense to buy until the second or third generation. By then, the kinks have been worked out.

I'm a long-time BF player (going back to the original 1942 edition). It's true that it's a game that is constantly being rehashed, but game play and team strategy is a traditional strong point for the series. It relies far less on fast twitch response than COD. Many of the eye candy features also have interesting strategic elements (i.e. the destructive environments and suppression effects). I do worry, however, that the race to compete with COD has meant more bugs and less innovation in the series. I do not intend to buy Hardline- it's really a side project to milk more cash out of the Bf4 development project and not really a new game.

There is a difference between censorship and refusing to allow a private forum to be a venue for objectionable speech. Free speech means you can set up a soapbox, a printing press, or your own website and say whatever crazy things you want without interference. It does NOT mean that I have to let you use MY private space, printing press, or website to say things I think are objectionable.

My 87 year old Grandfather recently got one of these calls. Fortunately, he is still very sharp and smelled a rat. They called and said "Hi, it's your grandson". He said, which one? They said, "you know, your Grandson!" and proceeded to come up with a story asking for money. Since my Grandfather has 11 grandchildren and 4 grandsons, that didn't exactly narrow things down. He figured it was a scam and hung up. But I worry that one day his mind won't be so sharp.

IIAAL.

What robots are doing is not replacing lawyers per-se, but making lawyers more productive (just like accountants, programmers, and a host of other white collar professions). It used to be (and still is to some extent) that in large lawsuits, you would need armies of lawyers just reviewing documents produced by the other side to see if they were relevant to the case. 90% of them would just be emails asking to go grab coffee, 9% would be tangentially related to the case, and 1% would actual be important to the case. The people who did this work were either junior associates or temporary "doc review" attorneys, who generally graduated from bottom of the barrel law schools and couldn't find more interesting work. Now, algorithms can sort out most of those irrelevant documents, leaving human attorneys to sort through only the tangentially relevant documents from the very relevant documents.

But while this allows fewer lawyers to handle more cases, it doesn't remove the fundamental need for lawyers. The only way a robot will handle substantive legal work, no matter how good the AI, will be if a robot has the same psychological impact on humans as another human. Would you rather a robot deliver the closing arguments in your murder trial or a human? Even if the words were the same, I imagine most people are far more likely to emotionally connect with a human. Even if we were to accept robot lawyers, the profession really boils down to politics and the weighing of the rights of different parties. If we ever get to the point we are comfortable with robots doing that, we will be at the point where ALL human professions are obsolete.

Pretty much stayed the same. I rarely watched TV 10 years ago, and I rarely watch TV today. Life is too short to watch commercials.

I voted indifference (really initial fascination, followed by indifference).

The most likely scenario for the discovery of intelligent life would be a program like SETI picking up a signal from a civilization hundreds of thousands or millions of light years away. Were there something closer, it's likely we would have picked up on it by now. There would be no way to actually communicate with the civilization, which would likely be long gone anyways by the time their signal reached us. Scientists would spend careers attempting to discern the meaning of the signals, but it's unlikely much useful information would be gleaned. After all, most broadcasts from earth amount to "I Love Lucy" reruns, and there's no reason to think the aliens would be any different.