The "friend talks to the bullies convincing the bullies to stop" aspect may be pretty rare, but I'm betting that the "group of bullies terrorize a kid" is quite common. What I realized, in hindsight, is that the bullies tend to makes things worse for the bullied by making it seem like they (the bullied) should not go to anyone for help. The bully defines the situation as bully vs bullied with the possible inclusion of the bully's friends if the bully decides on it. This makes it harder for friends, family, and parents to help the bullied. A strong support network can really help the bullied (which is something the bully doesn't want happening).
Unfortunately, my son experienced a bullying incident last year (second grade). We came to his defense and wound up pulling him from school when the principal waffled on making any response (including blaming my son for the kid punching my son in the stomach and saying my son "isn't the type to be bullied"). We put him in a new school (there were other issues also... the bullying was the last straw) and he's doing really well. Any school is going to have bullying, but some school administrators want to stick their heads in the ground and deny it exists. Meanwhile, we're teaching our son that he's not alone in facing these challenges.
I can sympathize. We had a problem with our son's teacher last year. They were using a spiral curriculum for math which meant they kept going back and learning the same things over and over again. My son learned 8 + 3 = 11 the first time, he didn't need to learn 4 more ways of figuring it out. Actually, I should modify that statement. He learned 8 + 3 = 11 the previous year. He was ready to go onto multiplication and division (and quickly grasped the concepts when I taught them to him). He was hungry for more math.
The teacher's response? He had to sit and learn 8 + 3 = 11 with the rest of the class. He got bored. And when he gets bored, he tends to act out, as kids tend to do. So he got in trouble. So the teacher began considering him a "problem student" who needed to be controlled when all he wanted was new things to learn.
We moved schools and got a teacher who actually taught him new things. Suddenly, Mr. Problem Student was Mr. Model Student and was passing all of his "advanced-compared-to-the-last-school" tests with flying colors. He actually cried when summer vacation started because he thought it meant he'd need to stop learning.
There are some really great teachers out there. Unfortunately, there are some really lazy ones also. As a parent, I'm not going to put up with my child getting a lazy education. I want him to be challenged and pushed to do his best!
Unfortunately, it isn't always possible to fight back. When I was in high school, a group of about 6 kids would bully me daily. If I encountered one of them in the hall, they would ignore me, but they got brave when their buddies were with them. Even if I decided to fight back, there was no way I could take on all 6 at once. I might hurt one of them but before long I'd be beaten up (and get in trouble for fighting). What lesson would they learn if one of them got hit once and then they pounded me into pulp? That it's fun seeing me in pain?
What actually stopped them was a friend of mine who saw that I wasn't joking when I said I was feeling psychological effects from the bullying (e.g. paranoia... I thought anyone who was laughing about anything was actually laughing at me). He spoke with them and they stopped bullying me. They thought they were just "having fun" and didn't consider that constantly tormenting me every day would affect me at all.
Some bullies respond to talking, some respond to fighting back, some don't respond to anything. No approach is 100% effective.
Question: How would this handle people who to convert to Judaism?
Also, not all sects of Christianity believe this, unfortunately. There is a strong group of Christians (Southern Baptists, for one) who believe that Jesus won't return until all of the Jews believe in him. So when Jews (like me) don't believe that he's the Messiah, we delay their paradise-on-Earth. Thus, we Jews must be converted by any means necessary. These people tend to be strong supporters of Israel, but only because they think that the Jews need to be in Israel before they all accept Jesus and thus bring about the end-of-days. Needless to say, when someone in the religious right gains political power, I get nervous wondering if they are one of these folks or just one of the people who will push for religion (aka Their Religion) in the government/schools.
And even if it wasn't, we couldn't harm other planets right now if we tried. Ok, if we really set our minds to it, we might be able to mess up Mars and the Moon a bit, but that's it. We definitely couldn't touch other planets. Aliens who saw our race as a threat could station a vessel somewhere to monitor our technological progress. If we got too advanced (read: developed interstellar travel), then they could invade and crush us. Otherwise, they could save their weaponry and wait for us to quietly (by cosmic standards) kill ourselves off.
Actually, the LRO is currently taking some photos of the Apollo landing sites. From the LRO's Twitter feed on August 10th:
"Today I will begin dipping down from my usual ~50 km orbit to an orbit that will allow me to image the Apollo sites from about 20 km away!"
"Once I reach my new temporary orbit, I'll take images of and around the Apollo sites between August 14 and 19."
"After that, I'll return to my 50-km-orbit until December."
Of course, the conspiracy theorists won't be satisfied. They'll claim the images are Photoshopped or staged or something. You could put them in spacesuits and rocket them to the Moon and they'd still figure out a reason why it's fake. ("NASA drugged our food and this is just a hallucination!")
If I look at the titles I have for my Nintendo Wii, most of them are uncompleted. Even Kirby's Epic Yarn (which I finished) has challenges that I could complete... perhaps one day. The problem is, with everything else going on in my life (family, projects, freelance work, etc), I don't have hours upon hours to grind away at games. I prefer if I can pick up a game, play it during a free hour or two and then put it down.
My son, for his 8th birthday, got Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 for the DS. He had so much fun playing it that I decided to give it a go. It's not an overly challenging game. Dying just means you move back a bit and you appear to have unlimited lives. Still, it's fun and that's what I'm really looking for. Something fun to entertain me for a bit.
There will always be a place for the takes-weeks-to-complete, consumes-your-entire-life kind of game, particularly for the hard core gamer, but there's a growing market for the can-finish-it-quickly-but-still-fun kind of game.
It happens all the time. Granted, most of those times it's for things like "Boss fired me because my religious and/or political beliefs differed from his" or "Boss fired me because I refused his/her sexual advances." For more mundane firings, suing isn't a very good option.
If I get a small business loan from a bank to start up a business, does that mean that what my business produces is owned by the bank as a "work for hire"?
If yes, then the RIAA has a case, but small businesses everywhere will cry out in anger.
If no, then the RIAA doesn't have a case (as they were acting like a bank in this regard), and small businesses are safe.
But long copyright terms encourage the creation of new content! The RIAA said so! Oh, never mind. I see here that they've redefined "content" as "profit."
New rule (if corporations get their way): Law trumps contract if contract is not in the company's favor. Contract trumps law if the contract is in the company's favor. If both are in the company's favor, the company gets to choose which trumps which.
Actually, I'd expand that. It should be legal to record/photograph in a public area period. No need for there to be a crime or for you to be an eyewitness. If you are in a public area, you have no expectation of privacy and can't claim "wiretapping" when someone videos you whether you are beating someone senseless or just talking on your cellphone. Now, if the person is in a private area (e.g. their home) and you photograph/video them without their knowledge (e.g. Paparazzi with ultra-zoom lenses aimed at the one window whose blind wasn't drawn fully) then all bets are off.
I'd guess he hurt his arm. Hey, you think it's easy beating a guy that badly? You can really wreck your shoulder/arm doing that! Won't someone think of the poor officer?
(And now, I must clean up this puddle of dripping sarcasm.)
Technically speaking, the officers that received the 45 day suspensions stood around watching and cheering the officer who did the beating. The officer who did the beating was brought up on criminal charges. However, had you stood around watching and cheering as your buddy beat up a police officer, I'd be willing to bet that you'd be looking at a lot more than spending 45 days off from work in your house. I'd guess you'd be looking at something like 10 years in prison.
Probably because McDonald's doesn't attract people who like feeling power over other people. Chuckling to yourself saying "Yeah? They'll get their fries when I'm GOOD AND READY" just doesn't give you the same feeling of power. Police work attracts a lot of good people who intend to uphold the law, but the nature of the job also attracts people who want power over others. (Alternatively, someone might go into the job intending to be a good cop but get corrupted by the level of power they experience.)
You get bad apples at McDonald's too, but it's not the "beat you senseless for looking at you funny" kind of bad apple. It's more the "spit in your food when nobody's looking" kind of bad apple.
While they are correct that a single sheet of aluminum foil will block the alpha and beta radiation of thorium, you'll need a good thickness of lead to stop the gamma radiation. And if you're creating a cascade event in the thorium as a beam of energy, you're going unleash a whole mess of gamma radiation.
Gamma Radiation + Road Rage sounds like a bad combination. HULK SMASH PUNY HUMAN WHO CUT HIM OFF!!!!!
I think you misunderstood the term "limited government." Most people who use the term mean for the definition to be: "Government that is limited in the things I want it to be limited in and that limits people from doing things I don't want them to do."
It would be just my luck that my car, instead of an Avatar, would come with Grouchy Smurf instead: "I hate low tire pressure! I hate overheating engines! I hate running out of gas!!!"
(Side note: My boys recently discovered the Smurfs and have gone Smurf crazy. Personally, I never was too crazy about the little blue guys.)
The RIAA has been using similar tactics only with copyright instead of patent. They file a bunch of John Doe lawsuits, get the people's names, contact them and say "Hey, you can settle with us for a low, low (but not too low) fee or we will sue you for a ton of money." Of course, this patent troll isn't as big as the RIAA is, so the chance that they would be found to be extorting money out of alleged infringers is much lower.
We already know that our atoms come from supernovae. Carbon, Oxygen and other atoms are formed in stars and scattered around the Universe via supernovae. Every atom in your body was once in the fiery furnace of a star just before it exploded. Now we know that, later on, the precursors to the DNA that makes us who we are were floating around in meteors in space. They crashed to Earth where, over time, it developed into DNA, cells, and life.
Scientific explanations don't make things boring, they make them incredibly cool!
Maybe this could be the plot of Toy Story 4. The toys somehow wind up aboard an interplanetary probe and must figure out a way to divert it back to Earth before it crashes, stranding or destroying them. It's revealed that Buzz Lightyear actually knows a great deal about astrophysics. (He is a space toy, after all.)
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The "friend talks to the bullies convincing the bullies to stop" aspect may be pretty rare, but I'm betting that the "group of bullies terrorize a kid" is quite common. What I realized, in hindsight, is that the bullies tend to makes things worse for the bullied by making it seem like they (the bullied) should not go to anyone for help. The bully defines the situation as bully vs bullied with the possible inclusion of the bully's friends if the bully decides on it. This makes it harder for friends, family, and parents to help the bullied. A strong support network can really help the bullied (which is something the bully doesn't want happening).
Unfortunately, my son experienced a bullying incident last year (second grade). We came to his defense and wound up pulling him from school when the principal waffled on making any response (including blaming my son for the kid punching my son in the stomach and saying my son "isn't the type to be bullied"). We put him in a new school (there were other issues also... the bullying was the last straw) and he's doing really well. Any school is going to have bullying, but some school administrators want to stick their heads in the ground and deny it exists. Meanwhile, we're teaching our son that he's not alone in facing these challenges.
That, plus the fact that you'd be in the cloud of Axe when it blew up. You'd need to rig up some kind of remote ignition source.
I can sympathize. We had a problem with our son's teacher last year. They were using a spiral curriculum for math which meant they kept going back and learning the same things over and over again. My son learned 8 + 3 = 11 the first time, he didn't need to learn 4 more ways of figuring it out. Actually, I should modify that statement. He learned 8 + 3 = 11 the previous year. He was ready to go onto multiplication and division (and quickly grasped the concepts when I taught them to him). He was hungry for more math.
The teacher's response? He had to sit and learn 8 + 3 = 11 with the rest of the class. He got bored. And when he gets bored, he tends to act out, as kids tend to do. So he got in trouble. So the teacher began considering him a "problem student" who needed to be controlled when all he wanted was new things to learn.
We moved schools and got a teacher who actually taught him new things. Suddenly, Mr. Problem Student was Mr. Model Student and was passing all of his "advanced-compared-to-the-last-school" tests with flying colors. He actually cried when summer vacation started because he thought it meant he'd need to stop learning.
There are some really great teachers out there. Unfortunately, there are some really lazy ones also. As a parent, I'm not going to put up with my child getting a lazy education. I want him to be challenged and pushed to do his best!
Unfortunately, it isn't always possible to fight back. When I was in high school, a group of about 6 kids would bully me daily. If I encountered one of them in the hall, they would ignore me, but they got brave when their buddies were with them. Even if I decided to fight back, there was no way I could take on all 6 at once. I might hurt one of them but before long I'd be beaten up (and get in trouble for fighting). What lesson would they learn if one of them got hit once and then they pounded me into pulp? That it's fun seeing me in pain?
What actually stopped them was a friend of mine who saw that I wasn't joking when I said I was feeling psychological effects from the bullying (e.g. paranoia... I thought anyone who was laughing about anything was actually laughing at me). He spoke with them and they stopped bullying me. They thought they were just "having fun" and didn't consider that constantly tormenting me every day would affect me at all.
Some bullies respond to talking, some respond to fighting back, some don't respond to anything. No approach is 100% effective.
Or you could be like Sheldon Cooper and celebrate Saturnalia or Isaac Newton's birthday. (Merry Newtonmas?)
http://wiki.the-big-bang-theory.com/wiki/Christmas
Question: How would this handle people who to convert to Judaism?
Also, not all sects of Christianity believe this, unfortunately. There is a strong group of Christians (Southern Baptists, for one) who believe that Jesus won't return until all of the Jews believe in him. So when Jews (like me) don't believe that he's the Messiah, we delay their paradise-on-Earth. Thus, we Jews must be converted by any means necessary. These people tend to be strong supporters of Israel, but only because they think that the Jews need to be in Israel before they all accept Jesus and thus bring about the end-of-days. Needless to say, when someone in the religious right gains political power, I get nervous wondering if they are one of these folks or just one of the people who will push for religion (aka Their Religion) in the government/schools.
And even if it wasn't, we couldn't harm other planets right now if we tried. Ok, if we really set our minds to it, we might be able to mess up Mars and the Moon a bit, but that's it. We definitely couldn't touch other planets. Aliens who saw our race as a threat could station a vessel somewhere to monitor our technological progress. If we got too advanced (read: developed interstellar travel), then they could invade and crush us. Otherwise, they could save their weaponry and wait for us to quietly (by cosmic standards) kill ourselves off.
Actually, the LRO is currently taking some photos of the Apollo landing sites. From the LRO's Twitter feed on August 10th:
"Today I will begin dipping down from my usual ~50 km orbit to an orbit that will allow me to image the Apollo sites from about 20 km away!"
"Once I reach my new temporary orbit, I'll take images of and around the Apollo sites between August 14 and 19."
"After that, I'll return to my 50-km-orbit until December."
Of course, the conspiracy theorists won't be satisfied. They'll claim the images are Photoshopped or staged or something. You could put them in spacesuits and rocket them to the Moon and they'd still figure out a reason why it's fake. ("NASA drugged our food and this is just a hallucination!")
Running out of helium? Won't someone think of the children of the future? Those poor kids unable to enjoy chipmunk voices! Oh, the humanity!
If I look at the titles I have for my Nintendo Wii, most of them are uncompleted. Even Kirby's Epic Yarn (which I finished) has challenges that I could complete... perhaps one day. The problem is, with everything else going on in my life (family, projects, freelance work, etc), I don't have hours upon hours to grind away at games. I prefer if I can pick up a game, play it during a free hour or two and then put it down.
My son, for his 8th birthday, got Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 for the DS. He had so much fun playing it that I decided to give it a go. It's not an overly challenging game. Dying just means you move back a bit and you appear to have unlimited lives. Still, it's fun and that's what I'm really looking for. Something fun to entertain me for a bit.
There will always be a place for the takes-weeks-to-complete, consumes-your-entire-life kind of game, particularly for the hard core gamer, but there's a growing market for the can-finish-it-quickly-but-still-fun kind of game.
It happens all the time. Granted, most of those times it's for things like "Boss fired me because my religious and/or political beliefs differed from his" or "Boss fired me because I refused his/her sexual advances." For more mundane firings, suing isn't a very good option.
Smart kid. Obviously, they should put Wolverine on Canada Dry!
If I get a small business loan from a bank to start up a business, does that mean that what my business produces is owned by the bank as a "work for hire"?
If yes, then the RIAA has a case, but small businesses everywhere will cry out in anger.
If no, then the RIAA doesn't have a case (as they were acting like a bank in this regard), and small businesses are safe.
But long copyright terms encourage the creation of new content! The RIAA said so! Oh, never mind. I see here that they've redefined "content" as "profit."
New rule (if corporations get their way): Law trumps contract if contract is not in the company's favor. Contract trumps law if the contract is in the company's favor. If both are in the company's favor, the company gets to choose which trumps which.
Actually, I'd expand that. It should be legal to record/photograph in a public area period. No need for there to be a crime or for you to be an eyewitness. If you are in a public area, you have no expectation of privacy and can't claim "wiretapping" when someone videos you whether you are beating someone senseless or just talking on your cellphone. Now, if the person is in a private area (e.g. their home) and you photograph/video them without their knowledge (e.g. Paparazzi with ultra-zoom lenses aimed at the one window whose blind wasn't drawn fully) then all bets are off.
I'd guess he hurt his arm. Hey, you think it's easy beating a guy that badly? You can really wreck your shoulder/arm doing that! Won't someone think of the poor officer?
(And now, I must clean up this puddle of dripping sarcasm.)
Technically speaking, the officers that received the 45 day suspensions stood around watching and cheering the officer who did the beating. The officer who did the beating was brought up on criminal charges. However, had you stood around watching and cheering as your buddy beat up a police officer, I'd be willing to bet that you'd be looking at a lot more than spending 45 days off from work in your house. I'd guess you'd be looking at something like 10 years in prison.
Probably because McDonald's doesn't attract people who like feeling power over other people. Chuckling to yourself saying "Yeah? They'll get their fries when I'm GOOD AND READY" just doesn't give you the same feeling of power. Police work attracts a lot of good people who intend to uphold the law, but the nature of the job also attracts people who want power over others. (Alternatively, someone might go into the job intending to be a good cop but get corrupted by the level of power they experience.)
You get bad apples at McDonald's too, but it's not the "beat you senseless for looking at you funny" kind of bad apple. It's more the "spit in your food when nobody's looking" kind of bad apple.
Gamma Radiation + Road Rage sounds like a bad combination. HULK SMASH PUNY HUMAN WHO CUT HIM OFF!!!!!
I think you misunderstood the term "limited government." Most people who use the term mean for the definition to be: "Government that is limited in the things I want it to be limited in and that limits people from doing things I don't want them to do."
It would be just my luck that my car, instead of an Avatar, would come with Grouchy Smurf instead: "I hate low tire pressure! I hate overheating engines! I hate running out of gas!!!"
(Side note: My boys recently discovered the Smurfs and have gone Smurf crazy. Personally, I never was too crazy about the little blue guys.)
The RIAA has been using similar tactics only with copyright instead of patent. They file a bunch of John Doe lawsuits, get the people's names, contact them and say "Hey, you can settle with us for a low, low (but not too low) fee or we will sue you for a ton of money." Of course, this patent troll isn't as big as the RIAA is, so the chance that they would be found to be extorting money out of alleged infringers is much lower.
We already know that our atoms come from supernovae. Carbon, Oxygen and other atoms are formed in stars and scattered around the Universe via supernovae. Every atom in your body was once in the fiery furnace of a star just before it exploded. Now we know that, later on, the precursors to the DNA that makes us who we are were floating around in meteors in space. They crashed to Earth where, over time, it developed into DNA, cells, and life.
Scientific explanations don't make things boring, they make them incredibly cool!
Maybe this could be the plot of Toy Story 4. The toys somehow wind up aboard an interplanetary probe and must figure out a way to divert it back to Earth before it crashes, stranding or destroying them. It's revealed that Buzz Lightyear actually knows a great deal about astrophysics. (He is a space toy, after all.)