Rothgery v. Gillespie County, Texas
Petitioner Rothgery was arrested by a cop as a felon in possession of a firearm, brought before a magistrate judge, denied appointed counsel, and required to post bail; he was subsequently indicted, re-arrested, had his bail increased, and jailed when he could not post his new bail. His appointed attorney at the time assembled the paperwork that demonstrated that Rothgery was not a felon and therefore got the indictment dismissed.
Rothgery sued, maintaining that had he been appointed counsel at the magistrate stage, he would never have been indicted or jailed, and that this violates his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The district court and Fifth Circuit appellate court dismissed on the grounds that right-to-counsel did not attach until a prosecutor was involved in case (here, at the indictment stage).
The Court held, 8-1:
A criminal defendant's initial appearance before a magistrate judge, where he learns the charge against him and his liberty is subject to restriction, marks the initiation of adversary judicial proceedings that trigger attachment of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
Sounds pretty fricking obvious to me. Your right to counsel attaches at the moment they can send you to jail. I'm surprised they had to explain this.
My experiences with Comcast customer service have been positive, despite Comcast's miserable reputation across the net. However, note that Comcast only recently took over from Time-Warner in Houston, and so Houston service is probably still mostly former Time-Warner personnel.
That being said, it took me only ten minutes to exchange my DVR for an HD DVR. I am, admittedly, a block away from a payment center, which are widely spaced, so it's much more convenient for me than someone else. The payment center itself was attractive and well-staffed by efficient service reps.
When I arranged for a service call a couple of months ago, I had to wait three days, but the dude came on a Sunday morning, exactly as scheduled, and fixed my problem with no hassle.
Admittedly, I haven't had any problems with the cable modem, which are legendary sources of service hell when they go bad. (The dude who installed it also seemed to know what he was doing.)
Basically, they seem to know where their towels are.
After having watched "The Doctor's Daughter" last night (she's really beautiful, but the episode was a bit too light, and the death of Martha's friend was horribly staged to the point of leaching all the pathos), I had the following awful idea for a Doctor Who fanfic series:
The eleventh doctor, tall and very elegant, dresses in Savile Row suits and tuxedos, charming, debonair, very dry, and his companion, a short 1950s English bureaucrat named Fleming, visit "Casino Interplanetary".
Subsequent adventures include stopping a plot to blow up the moon and destroy life on Earth in "Moonbreaker", dealing with smugglers in "Eternium Crystals", managing to stop "The War from Sontar", counteracting a Cyberplot to neutralize the Doctor in "Doctor Negation", and foiling an attempt to steal the Key of Time from the vault on pre-Time War Gallifrey in "Timefinger".
I really, really shouldn't be allowed to write.
So I tried out my new bluray player with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and this may be the most evil disc I have ever encountered.
First, bluray takes fucking forever to load. Just unbelievably long. It's got a fucking progress bar that you can watch crawl across the screen. And repeat. And that's just to load the disc's customized loading progress bar! So it loads and loads and loads and then it starts playing.
A bluray promo.
Jumping to the disc menu is blocked. Jumping to the disc menu is blocked. Every DVD on the planet, you want to skip the previews, you hit "menu". Nope, not this time, prohibited.
So you hit next chapter. Thank god, that works.
Because there are eight previews and promos.
Oh, and by the way, incredibly slow reaction to button clicks is normal. That's important, because the button clicks are buffered, so if you hit pause and it keeps playing and hit pause again, it'll eventually pause, and then immediately unpause from your second pause.
Oh, and by the way, during the promos, the stop button is disabled.
So you finally get to something like a disc menu, where there's a talking skull who talks some of the least inspired pirate talk I've ever heard at you for a while before letting "Play Movie" come up.
And, just because the disc hasn't treated you badly enough yet, the skull is asymmetric, with one orbit, cheekbone, and mandible slightly deformed compared to the other. Not a lot, just enough to be noticeable. What the fuck!
Anyway, you start the movie playing, and let's say your friend Chris calls or you want to go get a bowl of ice cream or something, so you hit stop. When you get back, you can just hit play and pick up from where you left off, right, like every other DVD player in the world, right?
Wrong! This disc disables the resume function. You better block out enough time to sit through the whole fucking thing, my bucko, because you're fucked if you don't. You hit stop and hit play some time later, the disc goes all the way back and starts the loading process over again.
[Having now seen the opening thirty seconds of the movie about four times now, I can say with great authority that HD makes it really easy to see that the ship looming out of the fog and little Elizabeth at its bow are pure CGI with no trace of reality. Already, my appreciation of the film is enhanced. No, diminished. I meant diminished.]
I did finally discover that there's a thing called a pop-up menu that you can get to come up while the movie is playing, that you can use to e.g. jump forward to a scene. Hooray for technology, we've walked backward to the point that blu-ray movie cases have to list the chapter breaks again, after DVD developers discovered that people didn't really watch movies that way, but we have to now, because the fucking disc won't let the player remember where we were when we left off.
So, y'know, fuck off and die, Disney Blu-Ray.
Further adventures of the Eleventh Doctor and Fleming include:
Following "The Thing", Fleming is returned to Britain. It is left unclear whether the Doctor stabilizes or regenerates.
I apologize for all this. There is something wrong with me.