I'm guessing it's an NFA Title II "Destructive Device", if you'd like to look up the rules. Get a background check, wait six months for the result, pay a $200 tax stamp -- something like that would be my guess. As to what you'd use it for -- ummm.... playing Mythbuster on the weekend?
Most of education outcome is more correlated with the parent's money than anything else.
Ummm.... no. Dead wrong. Show me your citation. Everything I've read says that education outcome correlates much more with parent involvement than with household wealth or any other factor.
.. is that they can end up being successful, at which point they end.
In the decades leading up to the Napoleonic wars, Great Brittian had a continously growing navy, They built ships at a crazy rate, and were very successful capturing enemy ships and re-flagging them as Brittish war ships. They took in huge numbers of young educated gentlemen as midshipmen, (at age 12 or so) who later became lieutenants, and the leading edge of that Ponzi scheme made it to Commander and Captain. Once made captain, they were tenured and moved up to flag-rank on a purely seniority basis.
This was a great career as long as Napolean was around as a threat. But the day he was defeated, the whole Navy career Ponzi scheme came crashing down. The fleet shrank, so there were no posts. Admirals, competent or not, sane or not, hung onto their posts like grimm death. It about killed the navy. Many a bright lieutenant never saw blue water again, at least in a King's ship.
So, anyway, we've seen this movie before. Too many Captains, not enough ships, is the same problem as too many PhD's, not enough gigantanic, multi-national particle accelerators.
OK, first off, I was making a point about fire roads, how they are used, and why they are used that way. Is your hatred of motor vehicles so deep that you can't see the point I was trying to illustrate? Does your hatred of motor vehicles invalidate the point I was trying to make? I take it that you don't own any motor vehicles, or ever ride in one when offered. Or perhaps you check the fuel usage per average passenger-mile (accouting for actual ridership numbers) and don't ride in anything with a poor number -- ie: you never take a city bus.
Next time you visit Mariposa, bring along some topo maps and I'll give you the coordinates of some interesting places for you to go see. On foot. Every step of the way.(*) I just don't get where your anger is coming from, and why you make such assumptions about me, my back-country skills, and my level of physical fitness. How exactly is your anger adding information to the discussion of the challenges of fighting a back-country fire?
Where will you evacuate all the inhabitants of San Francisco to, who haven't stocked up on potable water, and how will you keep them alive?
a) Not to where I live, and b) do we have to?
Actually, the situation isn't that dire. They can buy power from other utilities, and just in case you haven't noticed, SF is one town where having an air conditioner is pretty much pointless, so a brownout or rolling blackouts means eating cold sandwiches, no one dies of heat prostration or from lack of heat. Secondly, they can get water from other towns in the pennisula. All of the cities sell water back and forth from their wells or other capture sources. And the rule "if it's yellow, let it mellow" saves a lot of water.
Ah ha! Someone who can math. You are right, the hike would have been a major undertaking. The right answer to get to those places is an overnight horse-pack trip.
Anyway, I'm used to city people in California giving me crap about my 4X4 (which acually is a small, fuel-efficient one). Of course, they've never been caught in the mountains in 8 inches of wet snow two miles from the nearest maintained road and one mile to the nearest neighbor. In those conditions, your choices are: 1) take a chance on a 4X4, 2) use the old reliable horse (but I don't keep a horse), 3) Make the food in the pantry last, 4) hike in the snow. City people make a lot of bad assumptions.
Cowboys have a saying: "All hat, no cattle." It is used to describe somebody who hasn't lived the situtation, and who's opinion therefore isn't worth much.
Well, first off, Hetch Hetchty never should have been built. That aside..,..
The country around there is very rugged. Its hard to imagine without seeing it. The last two winters have seen 70% of normal snow-pack, so the area is very dry. Normal annual precipitation is 11 inches. There has been no rain since April or so, which is normal. I have a cabin 30 or so miles to the south. Not threatened by this fire, but the road to my place was a firebreak for the "Telegraph Fire" of a couple of years ago -- I had orange grass for a few days from fire retardant bombings.
Here is the deal.... the country is so extremely rugged that you *do* *not* send fire crews anywhere near an active crown fire, it can jump them in minutes and you end up with 100 roasted fire fighters and a dozen burned up Cats. There are placed where if a rancher's cattle get down in a valley full of rocks, they can't get up, and you can't ride a horse down there anyway to bring them back up. Totally forget about driving a 4WD vehicle in there, you parked that back with the horse trailer because it couldn't go any further. Taking a Cat down those slopes is suicidal. So all the fire equipment comes in and out on fire roads, which are few, narrow, and very rough. There are placed I've wanted to see, but after 40 minutes of 20 MPH kindney-busting driving in a 4WD pick-up, I turned around. That is a fire road. That is your escape route. The *one* escape route. You don't go into the fire on those, you go outside the edge of the fire, start cool-burning back-fires and cut fire breaks, and call in fire-retardant tanker bombers.
So... the powerlines to the Hetch Hetchy and the water pipeline out of it and down the foothills run through the threatened area. The fire can easily take out the power lines. I don't know about the aquaduct, but I suspect it is vulnerable also.
I'm relieved this time that there are two major river canyons between my cabin and the fire. My sympathy goes out to those in the path of the fire -- it's gut-wrenching to have one get close.
I'm a ham, so I spend a lot of time climbing my own towers. (You couldn't pay me enough to do it for a living.) In my experience, when planning a job, I figure anything that takes one hour on the ground takes four hours in the air, at least for me. I also am careful to "do the same thing the same way every time". for example, when repositioning my work positioning belt, I use my right hand to unclip and move the left belt clip. Repeating a motion drives it into muscle memory so that mistakes are less likely to happen. I can tell you that I still goof once in a while (there are certain operations, like moving my positing belt, that I always double check.) Occasionally, I work with another man on the tower, which would be common for pros. The added distraction of having another person with you can cause you to forget steps. If you add some time pressure, its easy to forget to double check steps.
I've met pro tower riggers. I hire pros for work that is outside my comfort zone. They free climb much more than I would, but I'm a chicken and rig a 100% contact lifeline for most jobs. I suspect most accidents don't come from the free climbing phase of the work, because there your mind is focused on just climbing. I'd guess that accidents happen when you think you are solidly positioned with work belt, and actually are mis-rigged. I always lean into a work belt before letting go with my hands just to make sure there isn't any surprise slack. Sometimes there is....
So, nobody is perfect -- everybody forgets steps for things they've done many times. Tell me you've never started your coffee maker without coffee in it, at least once. That's a good rule to remember in the air, especially if there are any distractions or unusual circumstances. Time pressure works against doing all those double checks.
One tool I have that I've never seen a pro use is a temporary life line. I have a line that I rig to the top of the tower on the first trip up, and tie off at the bottom. A trailing clutch grip that follows me up, but requires being gripped to slide down is always attached. Once in that rig, I'm never disconnected from the tower. It's not good for work positioning, and if I ever slip I'm still a yo-yo swinging on a 3 foot string, so I'll collect a nice set of bruises from banging into the tower, but the trip to the ground will be deferred. The pros that have seen that usually comment to the effect that it must slow me down a lot. I. Don't. Care.
Who does the most reading? Older people. Who buys the most tablet devices, younger folks.
Well, I guess I should say "citation needed", because I'd be really interested in seeing the real data. As it turns out, my wife and I are the exceptions to your assertion -- we are both deep into bifocal-ville, and the ability to get large print by pinch zoom is for me one of the great selling points of e-books. My wife is a declutter fiend, and she actually calculated the cost of a cubic foot of bookshelf space based on a Silicon Valley mortgage, and decided that e-books are a financial no-brainer just from the physical space savings.
She's been pushing me for a long time to get on the e-book bandwagon, but I kept holding off because the rendering of technical material sucked on early Kindles and bretheren. I've been waiting for e-books to become "O'Reilly Ready", that is a Nutshell book has to render well, or it's no-sale. I finally got a Kindle Fire HD about 3 weeks ago. Technical books are decent on it, and I like having my reference bookshelf in my pocket. That said, it still is not as convenient as a paper edition -- it's harder to find things and lacking in contextual feedback about where I am in the book.
Well to be precise, there is a list of handguns you can buy, but in general, you are correct that in most of the populous counties of California a CCW permit is simply not available since it is at the discretion of the sheriff. In my county, Santa Clara, sheriff Laurie Smith used to grant them. The process was simple: you called her office, a deputy told you where to send a $5000 check to her campaign fund, and her office called you back to bring in your paperwork when the check cleared. After federal investigators quizzed her about the practice, no CCW permits have been issued except for a small handful of well-connected wealthy people such as the CEO of Cisco.
The OC spray limit is on the size of the container, I believe, not the strength of the OC. OC is not much better than a knife -- it's a close-in tool that has a high chance of blowing back on the user. I had a conversation with a Cal State Forrest Ranger bear control expert about that. Even as an expert with training and relatively frequent practice (he worked in a park with a large bear population), he was about 1 for 3 in getting both himself and the bear at the same time.
And if the victim can't legally obtain a gun, the rapist will not bother to illegally obtain a gun? Bad guys will have guns no matter what. Why, heck, they might 3D print them.
What you have pointed out is that a knife is terrible as a defensive weapon. A knife the the hands of a 240 lb rapist is a nasty offensive weapon, a knife in the hands of a 95 lb assault victim isn't much defense, because it is only good close in. Give the victim a handgun, however, and she has a stand-off weapon than can equalize the situation.
As you say, no one wants the situation to get more violent than necessary, so the rapist will very likely make a quick exit as soon as the gun is shown.
So I lived through 30 Minnesota winters, which I would say are more or less the same as Buffalo winters as measured by chilliness of the walk to the mailbox, and for most of those 30 years lived in places where the mailbox was a reasonably long hike. Long enough that you didn't skip putting on a parka. People have been walking to the mailbox for generations in ex-urban and rural America. It's not crazy. Having somebody walk up to my front door with the mail is what feels kind of odd to me.
My flather-in-law, to this day, has to walk to the *next* *state* to get his mail. Of course, that is because the road in front of the house is on the state line, and the mailbox is across the road, so while the mailbox technically *is* in the next state, it's only about 100 yards of walking to get there.
OK,what about the phrase "... with a 3D printer" makes this hard for people to understand? Designers copyright and/or get design patents (which are different from functional (is that the right word?) patents) on their designs. They then license those designs as theys see fit. The licensee's manufacture them, and some of the artifacts end up at Target or Macy's. There is nothing about manufacturing with a 3D printer that changes the idea of a copyrighted/patented design that needs to be licensed in order to manufacture it.
Stratasys screwed up, pure and simple. They manufactured a design without a license. Perhaps they misunderstand CC licenses. Perhaps they are jerks.
In the end, there is nothing new here. Some designs have licenses. Some companies are run by people that are clueless and/or jerks.
The phrase "... with a 3D printer" is simply newshead velcro -- people use it to get a story published. Don't let those people weaken your mind.
That probably says a lot about how pleasant sport diving is off the North East coast of England. Let's see...... Grand Cayman, or the North Sea.... think think....
Exactly. The only way this could not be dead-obvious to the most casual observer is if they have spent their entire working life inside the beltway's realitiy distortion field. Oh wait.....
It seems to me that "Stand your ground" was not in play at all, ever. SYG says that if confronted in a public place, you do not have a duty to retreat. That's all.
There have always been two narratives in this case: a) GZ stalked and killed TM. b) TM had GZ on the ground, beating him.
Narrative 'a' is manslaughter or murder of some flavor. SYG is not a hunting license.
Narrative 'b' is self-defence -- there is no possibility of retreat when you are pinned on the ground being attacked, again, *not* SYG.
The whole discussion of Stand Your Ground was just the press trying to create controversy and clicks. SYG was never in play.
That said, when I found myself in a similar situation to the OP, here is what I did and found: 1) Read Date. 2) Make some toy databases. 3) Go back to 1 for a few iterations. At the point where I needed to deploy a database at work, I was able to do two things: a) convice my boss to hire a database expert, and b) have a strawman design for a database to go along with a spec when the expert came on board.
I learned that database experts learn to be very good at diplomacy:) I learned a huge amount from her as she showed me how to work up a better design and show me why it was better. Of course, that is why I hired her.
After reading Date and making toy databases I had the fundamental concepts, but lacked the practical experience to make good choices in how to normalize the database. How you normalize impacts performance, maintainability, and ease of maintaining data integrity. So bottom line is I found that self-teaching database design got me to something useable, but like many other things in software, the fastest way to learn is to make friends with a smart cube neighbor.
Never shopped at Amazon? I find that more astounding than finding a honest man in congress. I'm just curious as to why... Is it a political statement? You live where shipping would be outrageous? You spend too much time on Slashdot to have any time to shop?
I remember when I made my first Amazon purcahse. It was some O'Reilly Nutshell book, I can't remember which. I had to install a web browser on my workstation at work to do it. I got the latest and greatest web browser available -- Mosaic -- which I downloaded as a tarball from UI and did./confgure;make all. Amazon has been around for a while... finding someone who has never bought anything from them is both amusing and amazing.
So, you had no actual data to call on, not even an anectdote. Not one couter-example. Thought so. Another example of an urbanite who knows everything they need to know about rural America 'cuz they've flown over it several times.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe address the cause of all the anger and frustration?
I'm guessing it's an NFA Title II "Destructive Device", if you'd like to look up the rules. Get a background check, wait six months for the result, pay a $200 tax stamp -- something like that would be my guess. As to what you'd use it for -- ummm.... playing Mythbuster on the weekend?
Most of education outcome is more correlated with the parent's money than anything else.
Ummm.... no. Dead wrong. Show me your citation. Everything I've read says that education outcome correlates much more with parent involvement than with household wealth or any other factor.
... that I don't send my child to the local collectivist indoctrirnation camp.
This doesn't even pass the giggle test.
When it comes to educating my child the way that I want, this is pretty much the top of the list of freedoms that I will fight to preserve.
.. is that they can end up being successful, at which point they end.
In the decades leading up to the Napoleonic wars, Great Brittian had a continously growing navy, They built ships at a crazy rate, and were very successful capturing enemy ships and re-flagging them as Brittish war ships. They took in huge numbers of young educated gentlemen as midshipmen, (at age 12 or so) who later became lieutenants, and the leading edge of that Ponzi scheme made it to Commander and Captain. Once made captain, they were tenured and moved up to flag-rank on a purely seniority basis.
This was a great career as long as Napolean was around as a threat. But the day he was defeated, the whole Navy career Ponzi scheme came crashing down. The fleet shrank, so there were no posts. Admirals, competent or not, sane or not, hung onto their posts like grimm death. It about killed the navy. Many a bright lieutenant never saw blue water again, at least in a King's ship.
So, anyway, we've seen this movie before. Too many Captains, not enough ships, is the same problem as too many PhD's, not enough gigantanic, multi-national particle accelerators.
OK, first off, I was making a point about fire roads, how they are used, and why they are used that way. Is your hatred of motor vehicles so deep that you can't see the point I was trying to illustrate? Does your hatred of motor vehicles invalidate the point I was trying to make? I take it that you don't own any motor vehicles, or ever ride in one when offered. Or perhaps you check the fuel usage per average passenger-mile (accouting for actual ridership numbers) and don't ride in anything with a poor number -- ie: you never take a city bus.
Next time you visit Mariposa, bring along some topo maps and I'll give you the coordinates of some interesting places for you to go see. On foot. Every step of the way.(*) I just don't get where your anger is coming from, and why you make such assumptions about me, my back-country skills, and my level of physical fitness. How exactly is your anger adding information to the discussion of the challenges of fighting a back-country fire?
(*) Don't forget your snake-bite kit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rN4OIS9NkI
Note that in the river canyons and also closer to Yosemite the country is a lot more rugged.
Where will you evacuate all the inhabitants of San Francisco to, who haven't stocked up on potable water, and how will you keep them alive?
a) Not to where I live, and b) do we have to?
Actually, the situation isn't that dire. They can buy power from other utilities, and just in case you haven't noticed, SF is one town where having an air conditioner is pretty much pointless, so a brownout or rolling blackouts means eating cold sandwiches, no one dies of heat prostration or from lack of heat. Secondly, they can get water from other towns in the pennisula. All of the cities sell water back and forth from their wells or other capture sources. And the rule "if it's yellow, let it mellow" saves a lot of water.
Ah ha! Someone who can math. You are right, the hike would have been a major undertaking. The right answer to get to those places is an overnight horse-pack trip.
Anyway, I'm used to city people in California giving me crap about my 4X4 (which acually is a small, fuel-efficient one). Of course, they've never been caught in the mountains in 8 inches of wet snow two miles from the nearest maintained road and one mile to the nearest neighbor. In those conditions, your choices are: 1) take a chance on a 4X4, 2) use the old reliable horse (but I don't keep a horse), 3) Make the food in the pantry last, 4) hike in the snow. City people make a lot of bad assumptions.
Cowboys have a saying: "All hat, no cattle." It is used to describe somebody who hasn't lived the situtation, and who's opinion therefore isn't worth much.
Well, first off, Hetch Hetchty never should have been built. That aside..,..
The country around there is very rugged. Its hard to imagine without seeing it. The last two winters have seen 70% of normal snow-pack, so the area is very dry. Normal annual precipitation is 11 inches. There has been no rain since April or so, which is normal. I have a cabin 30 or so miles to the south. Not threatened by this fire, but the road to my place was a firebreak for the "Telegraph Fire" of a couple of years ago -- I had orange grass for a few days from fire retardant bombings.
Here is the deal.... the country is so extremely rugged that you *do* *not* send fire crews anywhere near an active crown fire, it can jump them in minutes and you end up with 100 roasted fire fighters and a dozen burned up Cats. There are placed where if a rancher's cattle get down in a valley full of rocks, they can't get up, and you can't ride a horse down there anyway to bring them back up. Totally forget about driving a 4WD vehicle in there, you parked that back with the horse trailer because it couldn't go any further. Taking a Cat down those slopes is suicidal. So all the fire equipment comes in and out on fire roads, which are few, narrow, and very rough. There are placed I've wanted to see, but after 40 minutes of 20 MPH kindney-busting driving in a 4WD pick-up, I turned around. That is a fire road. That is your escape route. The *one* escape route. You don't go into the fire on those, you go outside the edge of the fire, start cool-burning back-fires and cut fire breaks, and call in fire-retardant tanker bombers.
So... the powerlines to the Hetch Hetchy and the water pipeline out of it and down the foothills run through the threatened area. The fire can easily take out the power lines. I don't know about the aquaduct, but I suspect it is vulnerable also.
I'm relieved this time that there are two major river canyons between my cabin and the fire. My sympathy goes out to those in the path of the fire -- it's gut-wrenching to have one get close.
I'm a ham, so I spend a lot of time climbing my own towers. (You couldn't pay me enough to do it for a living.) In my experience, when planning a job, I figure anything that takes one hour on the ground takes four hours in the air, at least for me. I also am careful to "do the same thing the same way every time". for example, when repositioning my work positioning belt, I use my right hand to unclip and move the left belt clip. Repeating a motion drives it into muscle memory so that mistakes are less likely to happen. I can tell you that I still goof once in a while (there are certain operations, like moving my positing belt, that I always double check.) Occasionally, I work with another man on the tower, which would be common for pros. The added distraction of having another person with you can cause you to forget steps. If you add some time pressure, its easy to forget to double check steps.
I've met pro tower riggers. I hire pros for work that is outside my comfort zone. They free climb much more than I would, but I'm a chicken and rig a 100% contact lifeline for most jobs. I suspect most accidents don't come from the free climbing phase of the work, because there your mind is focused on just climbing. I'd guess that accidents happen when you think you are solidly positioned with work belt, and actually are mis-rigged. I always lean into a work belt before letting go with my hands just to make sure there isn't any surprise slack. Sometimes there is....
So, nobody is perfect -- everybody forgets steps for things they've done many times. Tell me you've never started your coffee maker without coffee in it, at least once. That's a good rule to remember in the air, especially if there are any distractions or unusual circumstances. Time pressure works against doing all those double checks.
One tool I have that I've never seen a pro use is a temporary life line. I have a line that I rig to the top of the tower on the first trip up, and tie off at the bottom. A trailing clutch grip that follows me up, but requires being gripped to slide down is always attached. Once in that rig, I'm never disconnected from the tower. It's not good for work positioning, and if I ever slip I'm still a yo-yo swinging on a 3 foot string, so I'll collect a nice set of bruises from banging into the tower, but the trip to the ground will be deferred. The pros that have seen that usually comment to the effect that it must slow me down a lot. I. Don't. Care.
Some career advice for you:
An engineer takes 10 data points, carefully computes a regression, and plots a curve that fits the data points.
A marketing manager takes 3 data points, stands back and squints, and free-hands a line that sort of fits the points.
A Vice President uses one data point, and his line doesn't have to go through the point.
Who does the most reading? Older people. Who buys the most tablet devices, younger folks.
Well, I guess I should say "citation needed", because I'd be really interested in seeing the real data. As it turns out, my wife and I are the exceptions to your assertion -- we are both deep into bifocal-ville, and the ability to get large print by pinch zoom is for me one of the great selling points of e-books. My wife is a declutter fiend, and she actually calculated the cost of a cubic foot of bookshelf space based on a Silicon Valley mortgage, and decided that e-books are a financial no-brainer just from the physical space savings.
She's been pushing me for a long time to get on the e-book bandwagon, but I kept holding off because the rendering of technical material sucked on early Kindles and bretheren. I've been waiting for e-books to become "O'Reilly Ready", that is a Nutshell book has to render well, or it's no-sale. I finally got a Kindle Fire HD about 3 weeks ago. Technical books are decent on it, and I like having my reference bookshelf in my pocket. That said, it still is not as convenient as a paper edition -- it's harder to find things and lacking in contextual feedback about where I am in the book.
Well to be precise, there is a list of handguns you can buy, but in general, you are correct that in most of the populous counties of California a CCW permit is simply not available since it is at the discretion of the sheriff. In my county, Santa Clara, sheriff Laurie Smith used to grant them. The process was simple: you called her office, a deputy told you where to send a $5000 check to her campaign fund, and her office called you back to bring in your paperwork when the check cleared. After federal investigators quizzed her about the practice, no CCW permits have been issued except for a small handful of well-connected wealthy people such as the CEO of Cisco.
The OC spray limit is on the size of the container, I believe, not the strength of the OC. OC is not much better than a knife -- it's a close-in tool that has a high chance of blowing back on the user. I had a conversation with a Cal State Forrest Ranger bear control expert about that. Even as an expert with training and relatively frequent practice (he worked in a park with a large bear population), he was about 1 for 3 in getting both himself and the bear at the same time.
And if the victim can't legally obtain a gun, the rapist will not bother to illegally obtain a gun? Bad guys will have guns no matter what. Why, heck, they might 3D print them.
What you have pointed out is that a knife is terrible as a defensive weapon. A knife the the hands of a 240 lb rapist is a nasty offensive weapon, a knife in the hands of a 95 lb assault victim isn't much defense, because it is only good close in. Give the victim a handgun, however, and she has a stand-off weapon than can equalize the situation.
As you say, no one wants the situation to get more violent than necessary, so the rapist will very likely make a quick exit as soon as the gun is shown.
This.
So I lived through 30 Minnesota winters, which I would say are more or less the same as Buffalo winters as measured by chilliness of the walk to the mailbox, and for most of those 30 years lived in places where the mailbox was a reasonably long hike. Long enough that you didn't skip putting on a parka. People have been walking to the mailbox for generations in ex-urban and rural America. It's not crazy. Having somebody walk up to my front door with the mail is what feels kind of odd to me.
My flather-in-law, to this day, has to walk to the *next* *state* to get his mail. Of course, that is because the road in front of the house is on the state line, and the mailbox is across the road, so while the mailbox technically *is* in the next state, it's only about 100 yards of walking to get there.
OK,what about the phrase "... with a 3D printer" makes this hard for people to understand? Designers copyright and/or get design patents (which are different from functional (is that the right word?) patents) on their designs. They then license those designs as theys see fit. The licensee's manufacture them, and some of the artifacts end up at Target or Macy's. There is nothing about manufacturing with a 3D printer that changes the idea of a copyrighted/patented design that needs to be licensed in order to manufacture it.
Stratasys screwed up, pure and simple. They manufactured a design without a license. Perhaps they misunderstand CC licenses. Perhaps they are jerks.
In the end, there is nothing new here. Some designs have licenses. Some companies are run by people that are clueless and/or jerks.
The phrase "... with a 3D printer" is simply newshead velcro -- people use it to get a story published. Don't let those people weaken your mind.
That probably says a lot about how pleasant sport diving is off the North East coast of England. Let's see...... Grand Cayman, or the North Sea.... think think....
Exactly. The only way this could not be dead-obvious to the most casual observer is if they have spent their entire working life inside the beltway's realitiy distortion field. Oh wait.....
It seems to me that "Stand your ground" was not in play at all, ever. SYG says that if confronted in a public place, you do not have a duty to retreat. That's all.
There have always been two narratives in this case: a) GZ stalked and killed TM. b) TM had GZ on the ground, beating him.
Narrative 'a' is manslaughter or murder of some flavor. SYG is not a hunting license.
Narrative 'b' is self-defence -- there is no possibility of retreat when you are pinned on the ground being attacked, again, *not* SYG.
The whole discussion of Stand Your Ground was just the press trying to create controversy and clicks. SYG was never in play.
Yup. Date is the One True Source.
That said, when I found myself in a similar situation to the OP, here is what I did and found: 1) Read Date. 2) Make some toy databases. 3) Go back to 1 for a few iterations. At the point where I needed to deploy a database at work, I was able to do two things: a) convice my boss to hire a database expert, and b) have a strawman design for a database to go along with a spec when the expert came on board.
I learned that database experts learn to be very good at diplomacy :) I learned a huge amount from her as she showed me how to work up a better design and show me why it was better. Of course, that is why I hired her.
After reading Date and making toy databases I had the fundamental concepts, but lacked the practical experience to make good choices in how to normalize the database. How you normalize impacts performance, maintainability, and ease of maintaining data integrity. So bottom line is I found that self-teaching database design got me to something useable, but like many other things in software, the fastest way to learn is to make friends with a smart cube neighbor.
Never shopped at Amazon? I find that more astounding than finding a honest man in congress. I'm just curious as to why... Is it a political statement? You live where shipping would be outrageous? You spend too much time on Slashdot to have any time to shop?
I remember when I made my first Amazon purcahse. It was some O'Reilly Nutshell book, I can't remember which. I had to install a web browser on my workstation at work to do it. I got the latest and greatest web browser available -- Mosaic -- which I downloaded as a tarball from UI and did ./confgure;make all. Amazon has been around for a while... finding someone who has never bought anything from them is both amusing and amazing.
So, you had no actual data to call on, not even an anectdote. Not one couter-example. Thought so. Another example of an urbanite who knows everything they need to know about rural America 'cuz they've flown over it several times.