Here you go, courtesy of my mothers AARP magazine. Nothing new and scary there, just a phone.

And if that compartment is actually full of drugs and you didn't know? (This sort of thing has in fact happened).

Personally I think laws against both are unconstitutional, but that's not the best argument. Good luck ever convincing anyone in the legal system you didn't know.

I second that. It's well established that intelligence is associated with strong belief in social justice and right/wrong in general. There's a very strong argument that taking drugs is not wrong, and drug laws are a great social injustice in countless ways. How can you respect laws that are so obviously wrong if your morality isn't based on external dictations?

As a hoarder, my downloading has slowed down quite a bit. I've downloaded every TV show and movie I'd ever be interested in watching, in HD if available. Now the only downloading I do is new episodes or new movies (and of course when something I like comes out higher quality). I am indeed quite satisfied with my 10TBs of 281 movies and 82 full series.

But streaming/pay services for video in their current form will never see a penny from me. For the way I consume media, their shortcomings are a deal breaker:

• Streaming is wholly unacceptable since it requires an internet connection. Offline viewing, and viewing without "buffering..." if it drops out for a minute, is important. Even "1080p" streams are noticeably worse than actual Blurays (and 12gb rips for that matter). Streaming should be AN option, not the only one.
• Permanent copies in a non-DRM'd format are still not the norm for movies/tv. They haven't learned from music.
• There's no excuse for such poor selections and different services offering different things. It's a blatant example of corporate greed preventing what consumers want.
• So are all types of geographic limitations/delays.
• Even more infuriating is when items available are removed from the service. And when the service itself up and shuts down.

None of these are limits of technology, and all of these are why legit offerings can't compete with illegal ones, regardless of price. Fix all of those, and add what is lacking in pirated sources (bonus materials, dl speed on some stuff, ease of access), and you'll find that like audio, legit video can also successfully compete with free.

Some public defenders are good. A lot aren't. And they're almost universally saddled with far more case work than they can effectively handle. In my experience, they decide who is deserving of a break and focus more on their case. And this is first hand experience from inside the system.

This should be modded informative, not funny. The reality is that if you're travelling with any large amount of currency, the cops can and routinely do seize it. They've even seized bail money brought to the police station. It's done under civil forfeiture laws, and you then have to prove in court that the money came from legitimate activities. Often at an expense that exceeds the value of what you're trying to get back.

Seems like every job these days conducts a criminal background check. But what that actually means varies widely. Some jobs will of course bar anyone with any felony whatsoever, but the proposed regulations are somewhat more reasonable:
"Any felony criminal conviction within seven years prior to the date of the background check for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, fraud, use of a motor vehicle to commit a felony, a violent crime or act of terror, a sexual offense, a crime involving property damage, and/or theft will make the applicant ineligible to be a TNC driver."

The "zero tolerance" policy on the other hand is much more onerous. Apparently they want to require the apps to have a feature to report suspected intoxication, and a single such report will trigger an automatic suspension until it's investigated further (implicitly until they complete a drug/alcohol test). While it may sound reasonable on the face of it, consider the potential for false reports based both on good intentions and worse, bad intentions ("that guy disagreed on [random political issue]! click, suspended!"). The training program isn't detailed, but that could certainly dissuade non-professionals if it requires actual online/offline classes.

Source: Full CPUC Proposed Rulemaking (via TechCrunch) (PDF) http://www.scribd.com/document_downloads/169457749?extension=pdf&from=embed&source=embed

I had a 12 hour delay at Gatwick (UK). They gave us a single £2 voucher and nothing else. Had to wait in the terminal. If I had to guess, they would be required to provide accommodation in another hour or two... because after 12 hours they made us board the plane. But then we didn't leave the gate for another 2 hours (and they wouldn't let us back off to sit inside). Total 14 hours. Also British Airways, back in 2000.

If you're with your friend, sure. But if your friend comes up to you and says 'hey, I just robbed a store and killed someone!', you are not legally responsible for the act nor obligated to tell the police. With drunk driving, if you're just a bystander, you're not liable if you know your buddy is drunk driving if you're not with him and not providing him with alcohol. You must act in furtherance of an illegal activity after you have knowledge to be liable.

You're wrong on a couple points. First of all, it's not entirely about stopping violent crimes. If that was the case, it would simply end after a determination that the person didn't have weapons. But in the majority of instances, they rifle through every little thing in your pockets looking for drugs and interrogate you about your activities. Even the small percent of stops that lead to an arrest are overwhelmingly for petty drug possession charges. And further, they wouldn't engage in the despicable tactic of telling people to empty their pockets and then elevating the charge to public display of marijuana, something that continued after Ray Kelly "ordered" them to stop.

Second, calling them "terry stops" is not accurate. Terry requires them to be able to cite "specific and articulable facts" that give them reasonable suspicion to believe the individual was involved in a crime. Also, Terry limits the search to the outer garments solely for the purpose of checking for weapons for officer safety. As noted above, this is not the case. 780 guns from 685,724 (2011) isn't limiting themselves to this standard.

Also, the evidence is quite clear that they have quotas on how many of these stops they have to make. How fair do you think an officer struggling not to get reassigned to traffic duty is going to be? Is he really stopping people to help end violent crime?

And just to add an anecdote, I used to routinely conduct business on a block with one of the highest stop and frisk rates in Manhattan, in East Harlem. But I'm white and clean cut and well dressed. I was never been stopped in over a year of just standing there for 20-30 minutes 3 times a week. And the majority of white people in the neighborhood are there for a particular reason, but I wasn't profiled.

You don't turn the computer on and it just starts streaming porn to your desktop

Clearly you weren't around during the days where plugging in a stock Windows machine resulted in just that if you didn't update it fast enough.

It's perfectly legal to record things with your VCR, and something the average person is able to do. Ripping streams violates the DMCA and the TOS of the providers, and is not something the average person can do. Pretty big difference.

This is the same Scalia who believes the federal government has the authority to arrest and jail you for a plant grown in your own home for your own consumption and never transferred to anyone else. He's just as selective as anyone else about what the original meaning is. You'll never convince me the founding fathers intended the commerce clause to be interpreted the way Scalia did in that case (Gonzales v. Raich).

That's definitely just for you. Just look at all the places that have the death penalty for drug offenses. Doesn't stop it one bit.

New front? Where have you been? That's all the drug war is unless you or a loved one is actually the one arrested. If a dealer is busted, it's a minor inconvenience to find one of the 10 dealers who took his spot. If a trafficker loses a major shipment, it's a minor inconvenience since it's a cost of doing business. If a mule goes down, it's a minor inconvenience for everyone else. Hell, Mexico seized a lab with 15 tons of pure meth worth $4 BILLION dollars. That was a minor inconvenience- they didn't even bother to defend it, and there was virtually no impact on availability or prices.

And that's the totality of accomplishment for spending billions and billions every year for decades trying to stop it, while eviscerating the constitution and running a mass incarceration policy that sees higher per capita imprisonment than any nation on earth, so-called 'oppressive' countries included... not to mention all the collateral damage, like an epidemic of forcing people to live in pain, torturing them and being a drain on the economy; or the complete loss of trust in a now profoundly corrupt law enforcement sector which views citizens as an enemy.