In my mind the solution to this problem is simple, if the information in EULA's and other similar documents is really that important and legally binding then people should be forced to read through all of them before buying anything. In this new system you can't go down to the corner store and buy a pack of gum without first reading through a small novel's worth of legalese and proving that you understand all of it.
Do that and this crap will go down in flames faster than the Hindenburg, even the corporate lawyers who dream this horseshit up will quickly get tired of it and decide this wasn't worth the trouble.

wow,this video is getting way more comments than expected.

some are saying the semi sped up.
i do not see any evidence of this.if this trucker shifted and hit the gas..you would know it,i am partially deaf and i would know it.
i do,however,see conditions further up that precipitate the lane slowing down,which of course will give the illusion the trucker is speeding up.

i am not that interested in the legalese as some of you are,considering that lawful right or wrong are meaningless when people can die.

i am far more concerned with safety.
maybe if the trucker was not on the phone he would have noticed captain retard inching in and could have responded appropriately i.e:downshift..let off the gas.(NOT jam the brakes,unless you want a scene from the A-team).

conclusion=fail

maybe if speedy gonzales didn't treat a 40 ton big rig as a normal 2 ton car that had the ability to defy the laws of physics and just assumed that he/she would be let in by mr nice rig master,maybe they would not have 5k worth of body work on their car.

conclusion=fail

this could have gone so much worse than it did,and for that i am glad.

it still bothers me how some drivers deal with semi big-rigs.they truly are clueless and endanger not only themselves but everybody on the highway around them by their impatient and selfish driving.

A better question might be...What is the Law? When can a citizen 'stand their ground' and shoot/kill an offending/abusive cop? At some point, it must dawn on the legislature that cops kill 10 times as many citizens as the reverse (citizens killing cops) and it must be considered that we need protection FROM the police, as well as protection by the police. ;-)

As to your actual question, it's been reported that they were given the entire 'file' of evidence by the DA, everything they had, which must have been boxes upon boxes of information, as well as multiple 'laws' in their legalese entirety, including some that had already been removed for being unconstitutional. When that's done to an actual defendant in a trial, it's often called 'burying them in evidence', and is a tactic to hide a needle (of evidence) in a hay stack. I've never heard of it happening in a grand jury, where there is no defense side offered only the prosecution side (normally). It really seems the 'prosecution' this time was designed to both confuse the grand jury and offer them reasonable doubt...which is not how grand jury's work against citizens/non-police. Again, why I hope for disbarment of the DA, this was not zealous representation of their client, us.

@Yogi
im gonna go out on a limb and guess you never dealt with the courts and CPS.

i have and this mans experience resembles my own.
i realize this is not conclusive proof of anything.my evidence would be anecdotal.

i had children with two women,
feel free to judge me,i dont care,the courts and CPS judged me plenty so i am used to it.

my two oldest boys were with a woman who i remained friendly with which translated to a fantastic relationship with my boys.i never experienced the courts nor CPS in any negative fashion.

conversely my two youngest boys were with a sociopath (no hyperbole here)
.we have no relationship.in fact we are totally enstranged.
tragic in all regards.

she used the courts to punish me.
she used CPS to harrass me.

and the attitudes of CPS were so much like this purple chick.
that somehow THEY knew better and they NEVER questioned the mother.
in fact one CPS "counselor" went as far as trying to force me to relinquish my parental rights.

when you get caught in this system you realize a few things very quickly.
1.fathers are the enemy
2.they know better than you
3.you know nothing
4.if the mother makes an allegation then it MUST be true
5.if YOU make an allegation you are just being contrary and bitter

the one CPS counselor was terminated due to falsifying records.
no shock here.

i have sat through interviews almost identical as what this man is experiencing.
the difference is i am a much more adept debater than this poor dad is.

i do not suffer fools lightly and when in regards to my children i am unrelenting.
i also realized fairly early that the CPS workers never had my nor my boys best interests at heart.
they spoke in legalese and authority but it was evident it was all about control.
to control me and dictate how i was as a parent.

ah...i remember those schoolings with fondness.a certain satisfaction in putting an arrogant,self-important knowitall in their place.

but in the end i still didnt get to see my kids.
so who is the loser eh?

goddammit.now im depressed......

Due process is a nebulous term that legalese speakers can twist and turn whichever way they need. The law informs you of what is not allowed and in doing so tacitly informs you of what is allowed. Obama skates that thin edge with the best of them.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:


If Trayvon had been the one holding the gun when police arrived..
Best believe he'd have been sitting in cell facing 1st degree murder charges on February 27th or 28th.


He'd probably have about 40 bullet holes in him.
>> ^Yogi:


Although they're pretty stupid, I don't think they're that stupid. They didn't write the law in such a way, and there's other things to consider. He's not going to just walk, it's going to be an interesting trial and it may mean the death of this stupid bill.


Well that's the point of laws. Solid rules you follow no matter what so everyone knows the deal. Unfortunately I dont speak legalese. But a sound law is intelligible to the common man and widely understood. The 'public' version of this law is 'if you are scared for your life you can pull a concealed weapon and murder the other guy first'.
So it seems like either civil society or the common understanding of law is history down there. Be interesting to see which.

>> ^Darkhand:

Can someone tell me why we need speculators? In all seriousness I just want to understand. Please correct me if I am wrong but speculators just seem to me to be people who tell investors how to invest their money so the investors doesn't have to do research themselves?


It's partly in the video. Speculators help farmers and people who use farmers' goods by pre-purchasing and pre-selling harvests at fixed prices. That way, a farmer knows exactly how much his crop will be worth when he harvests it, and a bread company or whatever knows exactly what they will be paying for the next batch of incoming wheat/flour/etc. The speculator studies the market and establishes a price both parties are willing to pay, even though neither party has produced or consumed the good yet. These are called futures.

This stabilizes food sources, which is a good thing. The problem is when people speculate on the speculators and sign all sorts of promises to pay each other depending on what happens...these are referred to in common terms as "bets". Yes...they bet each other on the outcomes of food production. It gets made to look complicated with lots of legalese, but it really isn't very complex.

Issykitty, I couldn't dislike you if I wanted to. I understood where you were coming from even without the added context of your bad day. I hope the owner is prompt in contacting you, but I so doubt that. Do you have the names of the movers who were touching your stuff? Do you have documentation or some form of proof or a photo of the object in question? Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail. Keep a log of the attempts to contact, when they've contacted you. Don't do it over the phone if you can help it, use snail mail or email, anything that can be logged.

Do you have a lawyer friend? Sometimes a strongly worded, threatening legalese type letter works.

In reply to this comment by Issykitty:
Thank you, Prozac. I'm glad you aren't taking things personally. I appreciate your words in friendship. Yeah, I have a mind to call BBB and I am already going to post terrible reviews all over the web about the moving company. I dealt with a customer service rep who acted towards me with zero respect, didn't call me back in over a week, and then I called and fucking told her off. Now I am awaiting a call from the owner. Sorry to hear this has happened to you.

>> ^Porksandwich:

From third party experience and personal observations of the system, the checks and balances need to be returned into the system. Like I stated earlier, the police department refused to comply with written orders from a judge. And this same judge when shown the paperwork the police department wanted signed said that he'd never seen that paperwork before and that he himself wouldn't have signed it under any circumstance.
There's just too much complication to the system, each part of the 3 wanting to take the powers of the other two upon itself while being completely kept out of the loop as to the other branches goings on. No handful of people have the time to check out the other goings on when they are so busy trying to get more power for themselves.
They need to implement a system in which laws that are reviewed and thrown out when a new law takes over it's function, or if the law is outdated with the times and requires an update to create an update that doesn't require broad interpretation of every word in it. Lots of interpretation slowly becomes the new "spirit" of the law that was never intended to be used in such ways.

I guess I see a problem with both of these suggestions. First, how do you restore checks and balances? If the police refuse to comply with written instructions from a judge, what's supposed to happen? If the police refuse because the judge didn't use a particular form the police expect for a particular type of legal request, who settles the dispute? For that matter, who's supposed to take action to resolve the dispute?

I'd also point out that isn't really a question of checks and balances so much as trouble with inefficient communications.

Second, the problem with all law is that it's still written in English, which is not a formal language, free of all ambiguity. I mentioned in another thread that so-called "legalese" is usually about trying to make law more precise, so that it reduces the ambiguity of its meaning. But even then, there's often still room for interpretation, because legalese is still just technical English, and is therefore bound to include ambiguous elements.

For example, if you're going to ban "drunk driving" you have to come up with rigorous, objective standards for what constitutes being "drunk", and also what constitutes "driving". Is a separate law needed for boats and aircraft, for example? What about farm machinery? Is drunkenness determined by a test for impaired function, or by some sort of biochemical standard? In either case, you need to set a standard for what constitutes a valid test, how you verify the authenticity of the test, and how you document the test.

If the law defines "driving" as operating a gasoline-powered vehicle with 2 or 4 wheels, and someone is driving around with an ethanol-fueled car or a trike, should he be exempt from the law?

As for legal precedent, a lot of times that comes into play because the law was intentionally written to leave room for judges to make their own interpretation on the meaning of things that could never be exhaustively defined (e.g. "reasonable suspicion"). Over time you do start building up a more regular definition of "reasonable suspicion" by the way cases have been decided in the past, and so you'll find that the topic of precedent will naturally come up whenever a prosecutor or defense wants to challenge (or defend) the way one of those ambiguous standards was applied.

As for the way the courts tend to screw you if you try to file claims, I think part of that is because the court system is perpetually starved for resources, and they want to try to stave off frivolous lawsuits by making the process a pain in the ass.

English is ambiguous, programming languages are not. If law were written algorithmically, they would not be ambiguous, but they would also not take everything into account unless they were extraordinarily complex.

"Legalese" is in essence an attempt at making English as un-ambiguous as possible, which results in a lot of nearly unreadable text.

I encourage law makers to look at what's being written in the comprehensive rules for Magic the Gathering - they do a better job of making them properly. The system of law is too slow, too bureaucratic, too many people skimming the top. This town needs an enema!

Staffers with legal expertise are the ones reading and writing the bills. You can't write the law in plain English because it's too imprecise, just like you can't write computer programs in English.

Now what they could do to address this concern is release the plain-English parent documents that the Congressmen use when they're negotiating, which later gets translated into legalese by staffers.

That way you'd at least have documentation of what the intended structure of the law was when it was written.

Netrunner, (Quoting comments has become a mess of HTML every time I try)

Ugh I hate legalese. I'll have to read those tomorrow when my brain meter is at a higher level.

There is no love lost at OpenCongress.com for the carrier bill.

>> ^jimnms:
There was a local tea party thing here last week. I caught part of it on the news when they were interviewing some of them. This guy said that he was against the health care bill because it violated his constitutional rights and was a slap in the face to the soldiers over seas fighting for our freedom. WTF??? Having a choice violates your rights?


Half of them didn't read the text of the bill, they are just spouting talking points.

I read it, part of it. It's all legalese. No public option and punishment for not being insured(more taxes), followed up by litigation and prosecution for not paying the taxes.

Universal Health Care starts with re-education in the U.S., pardner-All for it too...a nation of healthy, strappin' folks, who know how not to kill themselves with food, being given what they need as far as health care....mind, body, and spirit.-Believe me, It'll be cheap...insurance companies may go out of business, or be OUR bitches instead of we theirs....Get the drift blogger? Health Care starts from inside, not with gimme gimme back what i already gave away tactics or policies.
Fuck Obabma's health care bullshit-he's a fucking prawn!

Pharmaceutical companies can play somewhere in a fucking shallow grave with a bit of lye to keep em all frosty!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Alimentarius
ever hear of this NetRunner??...Nazi fucking eugenics shit...plain and simple, in the most pompous legalese imaginable, as for most to be totally clueless

...Doesn't look at medical bankruptcy at all. It basically just looks at the per capita bankruptcy rate of Canada and the US, finds them similar, and declares Canada's program as being no help in general bankruptcy.

In every country on Earth there are thousands of bankruptcies. Other nations do not offically list 'medical expenses' in a legal docment as the cause of their bankruptcy because of nationalization. However, those charges (which still exist) are in the taxes that went to supporting aforementioned medical systems and contributed to the person's bankruptcy. Person "X" still had medical expenses and had to pay all his life. What Franken does is confine his definition to ONLY include persons who filed for chapter 7 or chapter 13 (a specific legal action) with medical expenses as a factor. Well, that 'factor' contributed to the bankruptcies of persons in Germany too - but didn't get listed in an official legal document. It's nothing but semantic humbuggery.

Fewer U.S. citizens are going bankrupt than Canada (proven). That probably extends to Germay, France & Switzerland as well, but maybe not. Regardless, it is sophistry to claim make propogandistic emotional pleas for 'no one should go medically bankrupt' and claim it doesn't happen in other countries. Bull. It happens all the time. It just isn't listed in the documents because it got smooshed into the tax code.

Liar liar, pants on fire.

It's exactly what Democrats said. You just don't like it. Cowboy up, pardner, and stop running away from what your guys are saying. Democrats have openly stated they are going to have no choice but to ration health care based solely on economic motivations. Their legislation is being crafted to relect that. By design, their plan will treat old people as nothing but expenses to be written off the books ASAP, and young people as cash-cows who get no treatment but have to pay taxes to support the program. Those are their words. This is medical care as envisioned by liberal democrats...

But that means you--particularly you young healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. "If you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and drugs for the last couple of years of your life. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market.

If someone is sick, gets free care, and then goes bankrupt, they didn't go bankrupt from medical costs.

There is no such thing as 'free' care'. This is a neolib myth that only exists in the realm of pink unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters. Socialized medicine is - in fact - very very expensive for all citizens. As I stated above, just because their bankruptcy costs were hidden away as 'taxes' instead of defined as 'medical costs' going to a medical provider doesn't mean they didn't go medically bankrupt. It is legalese. It is buearucratic legerdemain.

The whole point of the health care reform is to attempt to address those issues.

No - the whole point of the Democrat vision of health care is so they can go to dinner parties and not have to get crap from other liberals about America not having a 'European' medical system. There are tons of better solutions than the specific policies of liberal democrats. They just don't want to try them. They don't even want to study them.

Its just immoral, unethical, and unwise. Winston, does not understand pain and suffering. Nor does he understand sacrifice. But, given my knowledge of life, I KNOW, he will have to face up to reality sooner or later in his life time. And then, he'll just be a hypocrit.

Standard neolib ad hominem bilge. I served as a volunteer unpaid missionary. I donate a large percentage of my personal income to charities. I volunteer in the community to help people get jobs, find work, and train. I visit the sick & widows in my community frequently. And just because I disagree with a top-down socialist so-called 'solution' to a problem I therefore don't understand sacrifice? All your words prove is that you don't know jack about me, and that you are a very small-minded, simplistic, judgemental buffoon.