You're right that you have to deal with people like this all through life, and I can definitely sympathize with what you've written having dealt with the "you're not as smart as you think you are" bs many times when I actually *was* as smart as I thought I was. It may not sound like it from above but I'm acutely aware of my limitations.
I will say, though, that I also stood up for myself and detention wouldn't have happened to me. I never had any qualms about handling issues directly and going to higher authorities where necessary, the highest being my parents. Still teaching my kids about that concept.
The 6th grade teacher referenced above actually wrote on my report card mid-year that I was a trouble-maker. My 6th grade home room teacher (we had two teachers in grades 4-6) actually wrote at the end of the year that she had asked the students in class and I wasn't the trouble-maker, my other teacher was the problem. That particular woman, by the way, came out strongly against ongoing teacher testing when it was proposed in Indiana. Surprise, surprise.
My hometown isn't a very wealthy area and our teachers were paid terribly back then (starting salary in 1982 was $13,000/year). Still, we had some great teachers who really put everything into it and didn't let the lack of resources hamper their teaching noticeably. I didn't mind the few who were subpar because they were the exception.
To give you an idea of what our monetary situation was, we had a junior high (7th and 8th grades) and a high school (9-12) a city block apart with classes in each building. Junior high was built in the mid 1940s and the high school was built in 1916. I graduated in 1986 and the building was about to fall in. I could talk a lot about it but the county was able to put new schools up I think the year after we left. We had steam heat, asbestos-covered pipes, we were poor but we loved it. Had to wear coats to some classes. Those were the days...
Note that I said nothing of the books being on a tablet. While that's certainly possible it would be nice to see text books distributed solely for the cost of printing and distribution.
I'm pretty sure I knew math, science and sometimes English better than my teachers through high school. Experienced teachers know how to deal with students like us - how would this be any different?
The real difference is you thought you knew math, science and sometimes English, but when it really came down to it, masters-level mathematics could be whipped out to gently remind you, or perhaps break down some English sentence structure to show your actual understanding vs. what you think you know.
Experienced teachers know the difference between knowledge and wisdom. The difference today is you don't have students going home spending another 4 - 6 hours every day tinkering with math or English like you might with computing.
Um, don't know about you but I quite well did know math and science far better than many of my teachers. I don't think you know the difference between knowledge and wisdom, either.
I first pointed out an error in a text book in 3rd grade and explained it to my teacher who was quite impressed (yes, I was correct and the book wasn't). I wasn't wiser than her by a long shot. But I was a little smarter in one area.
My 6th grade math and science teacher hated me because I had to point out the errors that she made on her exams. One of my favs was when she insisted that a geiger counter detects "visible light". She was copying the tests out of the back of the book and rearranging the answers. Since she had little actual knowledge of the subject she didn't know or care. She refused to look at the page in the book that clearly contradicted her answer. I finally got her to fix the answer by pointing out that I don't need a fancy detector to detect something that's visible. She generally missed one or two answers on her math tests and the occasional science test, too. She would then humiliate herself by not simply listening when I would politely point out the problem.
The record, though, was set in an 8th grade electronics class that I took. The teacher there managed to miss 14 on his first test. Not his strongest subject. To be fair, he was a gym teacher that was forced to teach a subject of which he had no real knowledge. He also taught drafting, and actually marked one of my drawings as incorrect because I had studiously drawn correctly a partially hidden line. He said it was "wrong" because there was no need to actually make it so exact.
I was well ahead of most of my math teachers past 7th grade or so. I remember one particularly humiliating experience that my 8th grade math teacher had. I was thinking about squares one evening and was thinking about how if you knew a certain square you could easily calculate forward or back one square. For instance, 25 squared is 625 so to get 24 squared I subtract 25 and then 24 from 625 giving 576. The reason that works is easy: when you subtract 25 you end up with 24 x 25, subtracting 24 then leaves you with 24 x 24. One of my examples was 50 squared at 2500, meaning the squares on each side are 2401 and 2601.
The next day in math class my teacher was pissed at something I did so he decided to humiliate me in front of class. He looked at me in front of everybody and said "if you're so smart tell me what 49 squared is." Yes, this happened. I didn't miss a beat and said "two thousand four hundred and one". He actually didn't know the answer so he looked at a kid in the front row with a calculator and said "check it". The kid said "he's right". My teacher would have crawled into a hole had one been handy. He never pulled that stunt again.
I could go on and on, but, yes, at an early age I was advanced in *knowledge* beyond many of my teachers. I did spend hours reading mundane crap - I think I had read through all science books in the school libraries and city library by 9th grade or so. I also had a teacher with a masters level education who was just brilliant and taught physics and science and such.
What we need is to develop open text books with a creative commons license. Doesn't work for everything - sure - but let's face it: math, algebra, works of Shakespeare, these are things that never change (and Shakespeare isn't copyrighted, anyway, although I'm sure you can find copies of the works that are "protected"). Basic science changes slowly - talking about stuff that kids learn in school here. Really, there's no reason anybody should be making money from elementary school textbooks at this point in history.
telling their members to vote against a candidate because she's going to take their handguns and hunting rifles away, when all she said was that she'd look into restricting sales of assault weapons.
Look into the issue and you'll find that there's no real definition of "assault weapons" and it usually comes down to simple aesthetic components that have nothing to do with the lethality of the weapon. And it's usually pushed by people who openly want to ban general ownership of guns.
But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.... It was much the same in the early 1990s when Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called “assault weapons.”... This politically defined category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns with “military-style” features — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crimes nationwide before the ban.
No. it doesn't. "Pro-life" extremists may believe it, but Christian faith is no stronger a justification for violence than Muslim faith. Abortion clinic bombers are terrorists by definition.
It has nothing to do with anybody's faith, and I find it odd that people always try to portray it as such (on both sides, I might add).
We have the pro-abortion crowd advocating for abortion at any time up until birth. You cannot argue that a baby aborted at 9 months or even 8 months is anything but a baby. I know a girl who is now 5 years old who was born just after 5 months and she's still alive. You might have called her a bundle of cells but she's now a living breathing (and highly intelligent) human.
On the other hand I can understand that a fertilized egg that has been dividing for the last 3 days isn't exactly a baby, either.
Like most folks, I don't know where to draw that line so I'd rather err on the side of caution as much as possible.
Why you think that requires some sort of "faith" or whatever is something that I find bizarre, but it's likely just your way of shutting down argument...
The Motor Pool supervisor gets a 7 WORK day suspension
I'm sure you are happy to have the same rule applied to you at your job.
At all the actual jobs I've had that bad of a screwup would simply mean getting fired. Of course, I didn't have a highly politicized union making sure that I could shamelessly break laws and face no consequences.
These are the same guys who broke the antennae off their cars to disable audio recorders that they had to wear. Nobody ever faced any punishment even though over half the antennae in one precinct had been broken off.
The cameras are good, but they need statutory backup making it a felony to not have the camera turned on. There also needs to be a statutory presumption that in the absence of camera footage anything the "defendant" says is considered absolute truth in court and the officer doesn't get to testify.
Without these basic laws in place (which no honest officer would disagree with, by the way) it's useless.
The difference is that abortion results in a dead baby, so abortion clinic bombers at least think they have some justification, even if few people agree with them that the ends justifies the means.
On the other hand a cartoon is just that - a cartoon; a piece of paper with a drawing. Nobody is harmed by a cartoon.
My point here though is that the case never made it to court. In fact it really was quite a ways from making it to trial. This makes it basically impossible to tell what she (or her office) would have presented in the trial that never happened. Calling her an evil person based on a trial that never happened is not exactly well connected to reality.
Yes it is. She charged him and then brought out the plea deal. When he refused she piled more charges on in an attempt to get him to take the deal. Had he not killed himself it's difficult to say where she might have stopped. She's nothing but scum for doing that. Literally, she is as valuable to our society as a piece of dog shit that I might find on the bottom of my shoe. Nothing more.
An honest prosecutor would have brought forth a set of charges that are proper for the crime, offered a plea deal (which wouldn't be 1/100th of the possible sentence for the charges, by the way) and then let it go to trial if the deal was rejected. It shouldn't be legal for a prosecutor to pile charges on, but moral and ethical people don't actually need a law to make them do what is moral and ethical.
Ortiz showed what she really is (scum) by doing that. Also, saying "everybody does it" also doesn't absolve her of guilt. See the last paragraph if you want to go down that road.
Swartz was an idiot, not a hero. Stop making him a religious idol. Has anyone criticized Carmen Ortiz for the prosecution that her office led on Whitey Bulger or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
No, they have not. This petition isn't about Carmen Ortiz, it is about more people trying to make a hero out of a fool. Carmen Ortiz worked hard to get to where she is, don't paint her as a super-villian just because Swartz crapped himself when he realized how stupid his choices were.
You're creating a false dichotomy where either Swartz was a hero or Ortiz is a hero. In fact, neither is a terribly respectable character.
The issue with Ortiz's prosecution was that she offered him a plea deal of 6 months with the alternative of prosecuting him with charges that would carry up to 50 years in jail and $1,000,000 in fines. If she thought the crime was worth 6 months in jail then she should have simply prosecuted it as such (and frankly should be forced to prosecute it as such since she obviously can't be trusted with any discretion).
She's scum. That doesn't mean that Swartz is some kind of hero.
I hope Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter doesn't discover slashdot since the article uses his name (Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter). Ack, so does my post, see the previous sentence that has "Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter" in it. Argh!!!
I think I'll call Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter and ask for permission to use his name.
Hey good list. Given that everything you listed there is totally against the simple principles espoused by Jesus Christ, I'll have to point out that the perpetrators were not Christians. Not everybody who claims to be a Christian actually is. Tune your television to TBN for an endless 24-hour parade of examples.
The problem is that those who kill in the name of Islam actually *are* following their holy book to the letter.
"I have two daughters of my own coming up on college age," he said to the NYT. "I want them to have a world that's got equal opportunity for them."
Yeah, I'm sure a couple of rich white girls whose father is the CEO of Intel are going to have all sorts of problems finding "equal opportunity" in the tech industry unless he acts quickly.
I have used Apple software since the early 00s. Like any software, there have always been bugs. There always will be.
I have had no more problems (and possibly less) with Yosemite and iOS 8 than with any other release. Those who use words like 'nosedive' either have short memories or are in need of clicks.
Let us recall the software update of a decade ago that erased every external drive with a space in the volume name - and let us be happy that things like that do not happen any more.
A.
I spent last weekend doing a factory reset on my phone and my wife's phone. Why? I tried to add my niece's new mp3 to my phone so I could listen. Lost all my music, got it back by full reinstall.
It's a net loss *for the police departments*. Less law enforcement is needed so there are fewer officers. That means fewer union members, which means less union money with which to buy politicians. It might also be a loss for the state when you factor in Byrne grants, but it's the police unions that are going nuts over this.
So they know their service is crappy. But instead of improving it, which would require actual work, they hide it from the people who make decisions. Every person that accepts one of these cards and does not put it online for public use is corrupt. But I guess being corrupt is normal in the US.
I spent 10-15 hair-pulling minutes yesterday with my 71 year old stepfather (whom I otherwise love dearly) as I, well, let me start from the beginning.
He called and said "We've broken flash on both Macs and can't watch youtube videos now. I've installed it twice on your mom's Mac but it didn't help."
So, I explained that 1) they didn't break anything, flash quits working automatically when it's outdated and waits for you to update it and 2) he didn't "install" it, he merely downloaded it and these two actions are not the same thing.
He apparently couldn't figure out where to download it from and I didn't want him to wander to some web site that would purport to give him flash while giving him something else so I sent him the official link from Adobe. So he went to that link.
I did, too, just so I would know what he would see. I asked if it popped up the box about downloading flash and he assured me that it didn't. He started getting frustrated around this point. (Note that it actually had downloaded and he hadn't paid attention to what he clicked). It was here that he claimed that his only option was to pay $9.99/month for "something called PS and LR - I have no idea what that is" (it's "Photoshop and Light Room" for those wondering).
I'll spare you some pain and just say that he finally found the download, which is in some popup thing on the dock at the bottom. He couldn't figure out how to open it and claimed that when he clicked it it wouldn't do anything. I tried to get him to drag it to the desktop but it finally just opened. I doubt he clicked on it the first 10 times he claimed that he did.
Now, at this point he is looking at the installer for the easiest piece of software in the world to install. He cannot proceed as there is no option to proceed. I ask him to tell me what he sees and (it's different than mine - no idea why - maybe because I have Yosemite) he says something about some license and there's a quit button. Oh, wait, there's an install button but it's black and I can't use it. So he clicks "quit" and says "well, it went away and isn't doing anything".
I asked him what he did and he said "I clicked the quit button, I couldn't do anything else and that doesn't seem to be doing anything".
I convince him to open it back up. I tell him there has to be something else to click. Then he says "there's a bunch of stuff!". I ask him if the browser is open and he replies "well, I don't know but there's a bunch of stuff." I suspect that he's clicked on the license stuff and it's showing it in a browser and he then begins reading the section headings for the license. I tell him "you're in the browser, you need to close it" but he's frustrated and pissed at this point so he begins talking louder over me as he continues to read section headings and then starts to tell me the url. I tell him again "you're in the browser and need to close it" and he finally listens and closes it.
At this point my blood pressure is "high over dangerous". He's back at the window where he can only quit. I ask him "isn't there a box to check to say you've agreed to their license?" and he finally says "oh, yeah" and clicks it and then "I can click install now". I actually expect it to not work but he clicks it and it works.
I cannot get my 10 minutes back.
Imagine that over and over and over and over again for 8 hours.
It doesn't make sense for Comcast to put experienced tech support people on the front lines because dealing with crap like that doesn't require a lot of knowledge. Comcast has a pretty good monitoring system and they know when their stuff isn't working 99% of the time. Most of their calls are probably
That's because the next time it won't be with carpet knives.
No, it's because hijacking of airplanes ended on 9/11. Unless you can get more hijackers than passengers onto a plane (or at least enough hijackers to physically overpower the passengers) it can no longer work. It only worked before because passengers figured if they just went along all would end well and they would be - at worst - inconvenienced. That changed on 9/11/2001.
There have been people try to hijack planes since then. Here's one story:
6 people tried to hijack a plane - 4 of them survived. I probably don't have to explain it but the other 4 didn't exactly "meet their objectives" if you know what I mean.
Here's a guy who actually had a gun on the plane - I think he was the one who's life was saved by the police who stormed the plane after it landed. He had boiling water thrown on him before the beating:
Hijacking was ruined by Mohammed Atta and friends 13 years ago. Since then we had the shoe bomber (failed) and Smokey the Terrorist who set fire to his own penis (brilliant) before being subdued by the other passengers. Even on Flight 77 over Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001 the passengers found out what was going on, but the hijacker was able to ditch the plane before they breached the cabin door. The sap that they had left out to keep an eye on the passengers was burned with boiling water and beaten with a fire extinguisher - keep that in mind in case you have stupid hijacking friends and they want to lock you outside the cabin.
still, legalizing it would be the better option, Colorado already proved that with the tax revenue they brought in from legalized marijuana, plus it frees up law enforcement to pursuit more serious crimes, empties jails and prisons of otherwise law abiding citizens that were only merely in possession or smoking a small amount of herb, i hope this forces the federal Govt to finally realize that marijuana should be legalized just like alcohol (legal for any adult, and no driving under the influence)
The problem is that federal Byrne grants are very lucrative and legalized marijuana is probably a losing proposition financially for states. Or, at least, for police agencies. Ever wonder why the officers on COPS turn into raving lunatics looking for drugs every time they pull some poor guy over? I mean, seriously, they act like addicts looking for a fix. The reason is that if they find drugs they make money from the feds, so every little joint is worth money.
We've set up a system of perverse incentives. Apparently in Nebraska it's reached the point that subsequent arrests for drugs aren't yielding more federal dollars so it's not worth it to them.
I can put you in touch with 3 people that I can think of off the top of my head who's insurance went up by over 100% due to Obamacare. They're business owners who buy their own insurance. Once again the Democrats figured out a way to screw small business.
Yep. I've used nothing but Ruby/Rails for 8 years now and it has increased my productivity to a level that wouldn't have been possible 15 years ago. But I just spent a weekend writing a C program, my first in 10+ years. Why?
Because I need to be able to analyze wav/aif files and create a fancy "waveform" like soundcloud. I have a great little Ruby gem for doing it and it takes 3-4 minutes to generate a PNG of the wave form for each audio file. My C program takes.05 seconds to do the same. Yes, I got a speed up of about 3000-4000 times by using my own hand-written C that takes into account everything that I know about optimizing code. I started out doing assembly and machine code (I'm serious) 25+ years ago so I know what makes a modern CPU fast. Ruby ain't it:)
But that's one little piece. Most of my applications are pulling data from databases and putting it on the internet - speed like that would be of little value and it would take me 5 times as long to write the code in order to get a minimal speedup.
Use each tool where it's appropriate. But don't claim that "_____ sucks" just because it doesn't fit your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that you have to deal with people like this all through life, and I can definitely sympathize with what you've written having dealt with the "you're not as smart as you think you are" bs many times when I actually *was* as smart as I thought I was. It may not sound like it from above but I'm acutely aware of my limitations.
I will say, though, that I also stood up for myself and detention wouldn't have happened to me. I never had any qualms about handling issues directly and going to higher authorities where necessary, the highest being my parents. Still teaching my kids about that concept.
The 6th grade teacher referenced above actually wrote on my report card mid-year that I was a trouble-maker. My 6th grade home room teacher (we had two teachers in grades 4-6) actually wrote at the end of the year that she had asked the students in class and I wasn't the trouble-maker, my other teacher was the problem. That particular woman, by the way, came out strongly against ongoing teacher testing when it was proposed in Indiana. Surprise, surprise.
My hometown isn't a very wealthy area and our teachers were paid terribly back then (starting salary in 1982 was $13,000/year). Still, we had some great teachers who really put everything into it and didn't let the lack of resources hamper their teaching noticeably. I didn't mind the few who were subpar because they were the exception.
To give you an idea of what our monetary situation was, we had a junior high (7th and 8th grades) and a high school (9-12) a city block apart with classes in each building. Junior high was built in the mid 1940s and the high school was built in 1916. I graduated in 1986 and the building was about to fall in. I could talk a lot about it but the county was able to put new schools up I think the year after we left. We had steam heat, asbestos-covered pipes, we were poor but we loved it. Had to wear coats to some classes. Those were the days...
Note that I said nothing of the books being on a tablet. While that's certainly possible it would be nice to see text books distributed solely for the cost of printing and distribution.
I'm pretty sure I knew math, science and sometimes English better than my teachers through high school. Experienced teachers know how to deal with students like us - how would this be any different?
The real difference is you thought you knew math, science and sometimes English, but when it really came down to it, masters-level mathematics could be whipped out to gently remind you, or perhaps break down some English sentence structure to show your actual understanding vs. what you think you know.
Experienced teachers know the difference between knowledge and wisdom. The difference today is you don't have students going home spending another 4 - 6 hours every day tinkering with math or English like you might with computing.
Um, don't know about you but I quite well did know math and science far better than many of my teachers. I don't think you know the difference between knowledge and wisdom, either.
I first pointed out an error in a text book in 3rd grade and explained it to my teacher who was quite impressed (yes, I was correct and the book wasn't). I wasn't wiser than her by a long shot. But I was a little smarter in one area.
My 6th grade math and science teacher hated me because I had to point out the errors that she made on her exams. One of my favs was when she insisted that a geiger counter detects "visible light". She was copying the tests out of the back of the book and rearranging the answers. Since she had little actual knowledge of the subject she didn't know or care. She refused to look at the page in the book that clearly contradicted her answer. I finally got her to fix the answer by pointing out that I don't need a fancy detector to detect something that's visible. She generally missed one or two answers on her math tests and the occasional science test, too. She would then humiliate herself by not simply listening when I would politely point out the problem.
The record, though, was set in an 8th grade electronics class that I took. The teacher there managed to miss 14 on his first test. Not his strongest subject. To be fair, he was a gym teacher that was forced to teach a subject of which he had no real knowledge. He also taught drafting, and actually marked one of my drawings as incorrect because I had studiously drawn correctly a partially hidden line. He said it was "wrong" because there was no need to actually make it so exact.
I was well ahead of most of my math teachers past 7th grade or so. I remember one particularly humiliating experience that my 8th grade math teacher had. I was thinking about squares one evening and was thinking about how if you knew a certain square you could easily calculate forward or back one square. For instance, 25 squared is 625 so to get 24 squared I subtract 25 and then 24 from 625 giving 576. The reason that works is easy: when you subtract 25 you end up with 24 x 25, subtracting 24 then leaves you with 24 x 24. One of my examples was 50 squared at 2500, meaning the squares on each side are 2401 and 2601.
The next day in math class my teacher was pissed at something I did so he decided to humiliate me in front of class. He looked at me in front of everybody and said "if you're so smart tell me what 49 squared is." Yes, this happened. I didn't miss a beat and said "two thousand four hundred and one". He actually didn't know the answer so he looked at a kid in the front row with a calculator and said "check it". The kid said "he's right". My teacher would have crawled into a hole had one been handy. He never pulled that stunt again.
I could go on and on, but, yes, at an early age I was advanced in *knowledge* beyond many of my teachers. I did spend hours reading mundane crap - I think I had read through all science books in the school libraries and city library by 9th grade or so. I also had a teacher with a masters level education who was just brilliant and taught physics and science and such.
What we need is to develop open text books with a creative commons license. Doesn't work for everything - sure - but let's face it: math, algebra, works of Shakespeare, these are things that never change (and Shakespeare isn't copyrighted, anyway, although I'm sure you can find copies of the works that are "protected"). Basic science changes slowly - talking about stuff that kids learn in school here. Really, there's no reason anybody should be making money from elementary school textbooks at this point in history.
Voter shows ID to election worker.
RACIST!!!!
telling their members to vote against a candidate because she's going to take their handguns and hunting rifles away, when all she said was that she'd look into restricting sales of assault weapons.
Look into the issue and you'll find that there's no real definition of "assault weapons" and it usually comes down to simple aesthetic components that have nothing to do with the lethality of the weapon. And it's usually pushed by people who openly want to ban general ownership of guns.
From this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.... It was much the same in the early 1990s when Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called “assault weapons.” ... This politically defined category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns with “military-style” features — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crimes nationwide before the ban.
abortion results in a dead baby
No. it doesn't. "Pro-life" extremists may believe it, but Christian faith is no stronger a justification for violence than Muslim faith. Abortion clinic bombers are terrorists by definition.
It has nothing to do with anybody's faith, and I find it odd that people always try to portray it as such (on both sides, I might add).
We have the pro-abortion crowd advocating for abortion at any time up until birth. You cannot argue that a baby aborted at 9 months or even 8 months is anything but a baby. I know a girl who is now 5 years old who was born just after 5 months and she's still alive. You might have called her a bundle of cells but she's now a living breathing (and highly intelligent) human.
On the other hand I can understand that a fertilized egg that has been dividing for the last 3 days isn't exactly a baby, either.
Like most folks, I don't know where to draw that line so I'd rather err on the side of caution as much as possible.
Why you think that requires some sort of "faith" or whatever is something that I find bizarre, but it's likely just your way of shutting down argument...
I'm sure you are happy to have the same rule applied to you at your job.
At all the actual jobs I've had that bad of a screwup would simply mean getting fired. Of course, I didn't have a highly politicized union making sure that I could shamelessly break laws and face no consequences.
These are the same guys who broke the antennae off their cars to disable audio recorders that they had to wear. Nobody ever faced any punishment even though over half the antennae in one precinct had been broken off.
The cameras are good, but they need statutory backup making it a felony to not have the camera turned on. There also needs to be a statutory presumption that in the absence of camera footage anything the "defendant" says is considered absolute truth in court and the officer doesn't get to testify.
Without these basic laws in place (which no honest officer would disagree with, by the way) it's useless.
The difference is that abortion results in a dead baby, so abortion clinic bombers at least think they have some justification, even if few people agree with them that the ends justifies the means.
On the other hand a cartoon is just that - a cartoon; a piece of paper with a drawing. Nobody is harmed by a cartoon.
My point here though is that the case never made it to court. In fact it really was quite a ways from making it to trial. This makes it basically impossible to tell what she (or her office) would have presented in the trial that never happened. Calling her an evil person based on a trial that never happened is not exactly well connected to reality.
Yes it is. She charged him and then brought out the plea deal. When he refused she piled more charges on in an attempt to get him to take the deal. Had he not killed himself it's difficult to say where she might have stopped. She's nothing but scum for doing that. Literally, she is as valuable to our society as a piece of dog shit that I might find on the bottom of my shoe. Nothing more.
An honest prosecutor would have brought forth a set of charges that are proper for the crime, offered a plea deal (which wouldn't be 1/100th of the possible sentence for the charges, by the way) and then let it go to trial if the deal was rejected. It shouldn't be legal for a prosecutor to pile charges on, but moral and ethical people don't actually need a law to make them do what is moral and ethical.
Ortiz showed what she really is (scum) by doing that. Also, saying "everybody does it" also doesn't absolve her of guilt. See the last paragraph if you want to go down that road.
Swartz was an idiot, not a hero. Stop making him a religious idol. Has anyone criticized Carmen Ortiz for the prosecution that her office led on Whitey Bulger or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
No, they have not. This petition isn't about Carmen Ortiz, it is about more people trying to make a hero out of a fool. Carmen Ortiz worked hard to get to where she is, don't paint her as a super-villian just because Swartz crapped himself when he realized how stupid his choices were.
You're creating a false dichotomy where either Swartz was a hero or Ortiz is a hero. In fact, neither is a terribly respectable character.
The issue with Ortiz's prosecution was that she offered him a plea deal of 6 months with the alternative of prosecuting him with charges that would carry up to 50 years in jail and $1,000,000 in fines. If she thought the crime was worth 6 months in jail then she should have simply prosecuted it as such (and frankly should be forced to prosecute it as such since she obviously can't be trusted with any discretion).
She's scum. That doesn't mean that Swartz is some kind of hero.
I hope Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter doesn't discover slashdot since the article uses his name (Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter). Ack, so does my post, see the previous sentence that has "Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter" in it. Argh!!!
I think I'll call Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter and ask for permission to use his name.
Ack, I did it again.
Hey good list. Given that everything you listed there is totally against the simple principles espoused by Jesus Christ, I'll have to point out that the perpetrators were not Christians. Not everybody who claims to be a Christian actually is. Tune your television to TBN for an endless 24-hour parade of examples.
The problem is that those who kill in the name of Islam actually *are* following their holy book to the letter.
"I have two daughters of my own coming up on college age," he said to the NYT. "I want them to have a world that's got equal opportunity for them."
Yeah, I'm sure a couple of rich white girls whose father is the CEO of Intel are going to have all sorts of problems finding "equal opportunity" in the tech industry unless he acts quickly.
I have used Apple software since the early 00s. Like any software, there have always been bugs. There always will be.
I have had no more problems (and possibly less) with Yosemite and iOS 8 than with any other release. Those who use words like 'nosedive' either have short memories or are in need of clicks.
Let us recall the software update of a decade ago that erased every external drive with a space in the volume name - and let us be happy that things like that do not happen any more.
A.
I spent last weekend doing a factory reset on my phone and my wife's phone. Why? I tried to add my niece's new mp3 to my phone so I could listen. Lost all my music, got it back by full reinstall.
It's a net loss *for the police departments*. Less law enforcement is needed so there are fewer officers. That means fewer union members, which means less union money with which to buy politicians. It might also be a loss for the state when you factor in Byrne grants, but it's the police unions that are going nuts over this.
So they know their service is crappy. But instead of improving it, which would require actual work, they hide it from the people who make decisions. Every person that accepts one of these cards and does not put it online for public use is corrupt. But I guess being corrupt is normal in the US.
I spent 10-15 hair-pulling minutes yesterday with my 71 year old stepfather (whom I otherwise love dearly) as I, well, let me start from the beginning.
He called and said "We've broken flash on both Macs and can't watch youtube videos now. I've installed it twice on your mom's Mac but it didn't help."
So, I explained that 1) they didn't break anything, flash quits working automatically when it's outdated and waits for you to update it and 2) he didn't "install" it, he merely downloaded it and these two actions are not the same thing.
He apparently couldn't figure out where to download it from and I didn't want him to wander to some web site that would purport to give him flash while giving him something else so I sent him the official link from Adobe. So he went to that link.
I did, too, just so I would know what he would see. I asked if it popped up the box about downloading flash and he assured me that it didn't. He started getting frustrated around this point. (Note that it actually had downloaded and he hadn't paid attention to what he clicked). It was here that he claimed that his only option was to pay $9.99/month for "something called PS and LR - I have no idea what that is" (it's "Photoshop and Light Room" for those wondering).
I'll spare you some pain and just say that he finally found the download, which is in some popup thing on the dock at the bottom. He couldn't figure out how to open it and claimed that when he clicked it it wouldn't do anything. I tried to get him to drag it to the desktop but it finally just opened. I doubt he clicked on it the first 10 times he claimed that he did.
Now, at this point he is looking at the installer for the easiest piece of software in the world to install. He cannot proceed as there is no option to proceed. I ask him to tell me what he sees and (it's different than mine - no idea why - maybe because I have Yosemite) he says something about some license and there's a quit button. Oh, wait, there's an install button but it's black and I can't use it. So he clicks "quit" and says "well, it went away and isn't doing anything".
I asked him what he did and he said "I clicked the quit button, I couldn't do anything else and that doesn't seem to be doing anything".
I convince him to open it back up. I tell him there has to be something else to click. Then he says "there's a bunch of stuff!". I ask him if the browser is open and he replies "well, I don't know but there's a bunch of stuff." I suspect that he's clicked on the license stuff and it's showing it in a browser and he then begins reading the section headings for the license. I tell him "you're in the browser, you need to close it" but he's frustrated and pissed at this point so he begins talking louder over me as he continues to read section headings and then starts to tell me the url. I tell him again "you're in the browser and need to close it" and he finally listens and closes it.
At this point my blood pressure is "high over dangerous". He's back at the window where he can only quit. I ask him "isn't there a box to check to say you've agreed to their license?" and he finally says "oh, yeah" and clicks it and then "I can click install now". I actually expect it to not work but he clicks it and it works.
I cannot get my 10 minutes back.
Imagine that over and over and over and over again for 8 hours.
It doesn't make sense for Comcast to put experienced tech support people on the front lines because dealing with crap like that doesn't require a lot of knowledge. Comcast has a pretty good monitoring system and they know when their stuff isn't working 99% of the time. Most of their calls are probably
This is why we can't hijack nice things.
Wish I could mod you up.
That's because the next time it won't be with carpet knives.
No, it's because hijacking of airplanes ended on 9/11. Unless you can get more hijackers than passengers onto a plane (or at least enough hijackers to physically overpower the passengers) it can no longer work. It only worked before because passengers figured if they just went along all would end well and they would be - at worst - inconvenienced. That changed on 9/11/2001.
There have been people try to hijack planes since then. Here's one story:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-...
6 people tried to hijack a plane - 4 of them survived. I probably don't have to explain it but the other 4 didn't exactly "meet their objectives" if you know what I mean.
Here's a guy who actually had a gun on the plane - I think he was the one who's life was saved by the police who stormed the plane after it landed. He had boiling water thrown on him before the beating:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Again, he had two guns, it didn't matter.
Hijacking was ruined by Mohammed Atta and friends 13 years ago. Since then we had the shoe bomber (failed) and Smokey the Terrorist who set fire to his own penis (brilliant) before being subdued by the other passengers. Even on Flight 77 over Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001 the passengers found out what was going on, but the hijacker was able to ditch the plane before they breached the cabin door. The sap that they had left out to keep an eye on the passengers was burned with boiling water and beaten with a fire extinguisher - keep that in mind in case you have stupid hijacking friends and they want to lock you outside the cabin.
still, legalizing it would be the better option, Colorado already proved that with the tax revenue they brought in from legalized marijuana, plus it frees up law enforcement to pursuit more serious crimes, empties jails and prisons of otherwise law abiding citizens that were only merely in possession or smoking a small amount of herb, i hope this forces the federal Govt to finally realize that marijuana should be legalized just like alcohol (legal for any adult, and no driving under the influence)
The problem is that federal Byrne grants are very lucrative and legalized marijuana is probably a losing proposition financially for states. Or, at least, for police agencies. Ever wonder why the officers on COPS turn into raving lunatics looking for drugs every time they pull some poor guy over? I mean, seriously, they act like addicts looking for a fix. The reason is that if they find drugs they make money from the feds, so every little joint is worth money.
We've set up a system of perverse incentives. Apparently in Nebraska it's reached the point that subsequent arrests for drugs aren't yielding more federal dollars so it's not worth it to them.
I can put you in touch with 3 people that I can think of off the top of my head who's insurance went up by over 100% due to Obamacare. They're business owners who buy their own insurance. Once again the Democrats figured out a way to screw small business.
Yep. I've used nothing but Ruby/Rails for 8 years now and it has increased my productivity to a level that wouldn't have been possible 15 years ago. But I just spent a weekend writing a C program, my first in 10+ years. Why?
Because I need to be able to analyze wav/aif files and create a fancy "waveform" like soundcloud. I have a great little Ruby gem for doing it and it takes 3-4 minutes to generate a PNG of the wave form for each audio file. My C program takes .05 seconds to do the same. Yes, I got a speed up of about 3000-4000 times by using my own hand-written C that takes into account everything that I know about optimizing code. I started out doing assembly and machine code (I'm serious) 25+ years ago so I know what makes a modern CPU fast. Ruby ain't it :)
But that's one little piece. Most of my applications are pulling data from databases and putting it on the internet - speed like that would be of little value and it would take me 5 times as long to write the code in order to get a minimal speedup.
Use each tool where it's appropriate. But don't claim that "_____ sucks" just because it doesn't fit your needs.
At the Beam store in Palo Alto, Calif., no human salespeople physically appear, only robots.
From what I can tell Best Buy beat them to it by 10+ years...
Ah, yes, "flamebait" - because someone's too stupid to recognize humor....