But how does a laser push an object into the atmosphere? What good does heating up one side of it do?
Photons carry momentum. Not much, but they do. So, the laser itself can push the object. Heating one side so it emits more photons would push it as well. If it's spinning that's not much use, but the laser would still impart momentum.
"Conflict of interest" is when you're a Judge, with a duty to administer impartial justice, but you have a material or personal investment in seeing a particular outcome. Or any similar case where official and personal interests conflict. That's what it means.
Slashdot's official interest is to make money for itself and its parent company. Slashdot is not a civil servant. Whatever duty to impartiality you imagine Slashdot has is simply that -- your imagination. But in reality, Slashdot has never been impartial, and barely ever tried to appear as such.
In short, shameless plugs are not a conflict of interest, they are entirely within Slashdot's interests. At least they are upfront about it.
In France, Spain, Italy, Brasil and perhaps a few other countries, you can not call yourself homeopath if you're not a certified general practionner with an additional specialization, complete with a university diploma.
So they require you to be a doctor to call yourself a doctor. That's good to know. But I didn't ask about them teaching real medicine to people who want to be homeopaths. I asked about teaching homeopathy. Google so far has turned up a list showing one university in France. Got any links?
That still does not equip them with the proper interviewing techniques to keep the needed level of attention.
Well it should be a lot easier to teach just that than to teach that plus the menagerie of bullshit remedies that comprise homeopathy.
Though with this "who cares that it doesn't work, it's good for public health anyway" mentality, I guess all you'd really need to teach them is how to pour a glass of tapwater and make up an impressive Latin-sounding name for it.
Or we could just forgo the bullshit that is homeopathy altogether. Seriously. If there's a medical benefit to the diagnosis technique, then let's use that. Accepting the most important part of homeopathy, the ridiculous "like cures like" and "dilution makes more potent" axioms, is completely unnecessary.
There are more urgent issues in healthcare than eliminating homeopathy and greater scandals in medecine than correcting a fringe of innocuous homeopathy believers.
Of course because there are more urgent issues, we can't or shouldn't do anything about this one. That's a great false dichotomy.
And I really don't see them as innocuous. Yes their concoctions have the benefit of usually being completely harmless (because they're water), but there's more to it than that.
The collusion between big laboratories, World Health Organisation and western governments on the orchestration of the AH1N1 flu vaccination campaign, and various other "big medecine" abuses are far more detrimental (and costly) to public healthcare.
Those are serious issues. However I think that ignorance, and rejection or even contempt for science is also a serious issue for public health.
Homeopaths are purveyors of ignorance. Every person they convince is another person who rejects scientific evidence-based thinking for mystical hand-wavy stories that make them feel good. In this they are bosom buddies with the ones who refuse to vaccinate their children because vaccines cause autism, or people in Africa who think that fucking a virgin will cure AIDS. Hey, sex often causes AIDS and "like cures like" right? Yeah I think homeopathy would appeal greatly to them. And these are not separate groups -- believers in "alternative" (where alternative means no scientific evidence) medicine are the same ones accusing big pharma of causing autism.
When diseases that are nearly forgotten come roaring back (as they've already started to) because we're losing herd immunity, I call that a problem. When people reject proper scientific treatments for thoroughly shaken bottles of water, I call that a problem.
We cannot tolerate ignorance and deliberate rejection of reason like this. Certainly, if you want to fix the problems caused by WHO and pharma corporations, then you aren't going to fix them by encouraging ignorance! Or at least, if you don't want to "fix" those problems by causing greater ones.
You said it. So caffeine represents the concept of awakeness, so the "potentized"* version represents the concept of sleepiness.
I'm glad to know that these solutions follow human conceptual reasoning and categorization.
Magic is vastly better at this than science. Science-based remedies are forced to follow rules that have no respect at all for human preconceptions, and it takes a lot of hard work and tinkering to get effects that map even roughly onto what we could easily describe in two words -- "cure insomnia" -- to the forces of Magic.
* lol just learned that word from the WP page on homeopathy. What an awesome Doublespeak way of saying "make into water".
The point the studies made is that it's easier for an homeopath to detect and enquire about subtle changes in the patient's physiology, because of the arcane classification of patient's physiological characteristics. All it costs is long conversations with your (homeopath) doctor that a regular doctor won't want to bother with when diagnosing a cold or the flu.
Then the solution is to have real doctors available for the purpose of having those discussions. Yes that might be hard with the U.S.' current health care insurance nightmare, but it's still the solution.
The solution is not to have fraudulent quacks have these discussions under the guise of creating a bottle of water that is perfectly tuned to the person taking it when everyone with two braincells to rub together knowns that is total bullshit.
For one, the quality of discussion and recommendations will clearly be better if performed by a real doctor.
For two, presenting homeopathy as though it is legitimate medicine simply for the purpose of tricking people into getting preventative health screenings is counter-productive. In the long term you're simply encouraging ignorance and disrespect for actual science and medicine. If a person actually believes that a bottle of pure water can cure them just as well or better than a complicated pharmaceutical, this same person could just as easily believe that a vaccine containing a molecule with mercury in it causes autism even though the mercury isn't in its normally toxic form and even though mercury poisoning doesn't cause autism. Because they don't understand anything about dosages or chemicals -- things you can't understand if you believe in homeopathy.
So, did this long-term study account for increased scientific ignorance and disrespect for "mainstream" medicine?
Real doctors who are taught real medicine and discuss their patient's health in the context of real medicine is the solution.
But when a serious condition occurs (early signs of cancers, hormonal imbalances...), the homeopath is much more inclined to detect the change and prescribe additional examinations, thus playing a major preventive role.
Adding to this that the actual costs of homeopathic cures is ridiculously low, the conclusion from La Recherche was that, even though the scientific basis for homeopathy was wrong, from a public health perspective, it was better to keep the system as is, keep teaching homeopathy in medical schools and refund homepathic cures.
What a bullshit conclusion.
What they actually found is that improved attentiveness to changing health conditions improves detection and prevention of actual maladies. That's great. It has nothing, specifically, to do with homeopathy. The proper response to this is to encourage doctors/nurses to take more interest in their patient's general health, and to promote social awareness about health issues so that people will be informed and attentive to their own bodies.
NOT to keep on acting like a bullshit non-science is actually worth something when it isn't.
And wait a minute, WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?! I mean, outside of a lecture that also covers demonic possession and hexes and other things that were a product of times when medicine was founded on unscientific ignorance.
what's the difference if you find the info through Wikipedia or not?
Whether or not you can automatically dismiss the source and implicitly assume the opposite in lieu of having to find a better source of information that actually supports the opposite view.
No really, that's the difference -- "WP, LOL" retorts.
Well, the Falcon 9 has been in development and testing for a long time, especially if you factor in the Falcon 1 which the 9 is based on, and they sure don't seem to be rushing the first launch of the 9, with test firings beforehand and no commitment to launch on a specific date.
So, cheap and safe looks like what they're going for.
B) Like cures like. When someone comes to you complaining about insomnia, you give them something that causes insomnia. E.g., caffeine.
No, it's sadly not a joke. The ingredient in most real homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.
Omg, LOL.
Okay, I knew homeopathy involved diluting something to the point that it is no longer even present and that the water somehow "remembers" what used to be in it. I always thought this was hilariously dumb when the effect of the thing being diluted is based on a chemical reaction, and how exactly can there be a chemical reaction when there's no chemical left? "The memory of a carbon ring" isn't going to bond with anything...
But I never knew that this was okay, because the whole idea is the diluted substance will counter the effects that the actual chemical reaction, were any chemicals left to react, would cause. So I guess the water's caffeine-memory is somehow anti-caffeine?
That's simply fucking awesome. I seriously believe that if I spent an hour bashing my face into a brick wall, this would make perfect sense.
One watt from an inch-long and hair-thin area? How freaking intense would that light source have to be? Pretty hard to believe.
Okay so the big stumbling block in this method of powering nano-scale devices is the macro-scale Fresnel lens you need to focus sunlight on it. But other than that it's perfect!
I thought the summary was saying that the Constellation program had been canceled in Dorothy's little dog. Which makes sense to me; I never saw how a heavy-lift rocket could possibly fit inside a little terrier.
Nazi German forbid 'non random looking' "passwords" (I believe it's a 3/4 letter combination) so things like AAA, ICH etc were banned as a message password in Enigma machines.
Back in England, code breakers took this into account simplifying (significantly) password breaking.
So instead of the usual spy stealing the actual codes themselves, they could instead bring evidence of this policy to Bletchley Park for the code breakers to use. Just a nerdy "Cryptonomicon" take on old WWII spy movies...
My guess would be custom though not completely different from everyday stuff. I was familiar with "metastability" from my college courses where it was mentioned as a classic problem in electronics. I suppose there could be a way to harvest this data from hardware before it gets corrected.
It'd most definitely be custom hardware, especially if you want it to be on the cpu die or very close to it for speed, but nothing exotic like you say. CMOS logic is normally designed to avoid metastability simply through appropriate circuit delays for synchronous stuff, and with complex synchronizers for communicating between asynchronous clock domains. Clearly if they have to be designed to avoid metastability, they can be designed to not avoid it, heh. Trying to exploit existing hardware to do it would be rough, though. At least not without wasting a lot of hardware.
It looks to me like the promising thing about this technique is the small amount hardware needed. It only says a "small array" of flip-flops results in a 20x improvement (with more being better). Flip-flops are much larger than the memory elements in DRAM or CPU caches, so they can be somewhat expensive, but like the WP says they are prone to metastability. Depending on how small the array per random output bit needs to be this could be pretty exciting.
I think I've read of the network guys fighting metastability so their incorrectly implemented hardware could probably be exploited as sources of random bits.
That's a really neat idea. Until good sources of entropy (which if you think about it every computer should have) are built on chip then a little USB doohickey made of a short run of fiber optics would be pretty cool too.:)
Let's just say the weight of evidence is not against the school either. In fact, there's essentially zero evidence.
Not really.
Here's the evidence: - School has software on the laptop that allows them to remotely use the webcam on the laptop. - Access to the webcam is restricted to this software, i.e. the student cannot use the webcam without jailbreaking the laptop. - The school acquired a photo taken from the laptop's webcam. - The school did not confiscate the laptop prior to acquiring the photo.
So, what this suggests is that the school got the photo from the laptop remotely, using the software specifically designed to do that. It's possible that the student jailbroke their laptop, took the photo, and either didn't disable remote access so the school was able to browse his HD, or it was posted somewhere and the school saw it. Because both are possible does not mean they are equally likely.
None of which changes the facts - we don't know how the school came into possession of the picture. Period, end of sentence.
Like just about anything that has to be ended with "period", this is a simplification that makes sense if you do not continue thinking.
Yes, we don't know how the school came into possession of the picture. However we most definitely do have an idea, and saying that there's no evidence either way is simply wrong. Nothing is proven, evidence is not proof. But we sure know how they could have acquired the photo, via a mechanism whose mere existence is suspicious, and it's the simplest and most obvious mechanism for it to have arrived in their hands. Occam yadda yadda.
"Knowing for certain" and "there exists evidence for" are not the same thing, and this is the main problem with your line of reasoning.
Mostly because of twisted non logic like you exhibit above - the school hasn't protested it's innocence and slandered the poor kid, so they must be guilt. But the beauty of your non logic is that if the school protested its innocence, it that people like you would be among the first to cry "they're slandering the poor boy, he must be innocent and they must be guilty".
Except it's neither twisted nor illogical. They could eliminate 99% of the controversy, and any need for the FBI to be involved, simply by stating that they did not use the laptop's remote picture taking ability to get the photo, and instead found it on Facebook or whatever. If it were true. Yet they don't say that.
Because they don't want to slander the boy? Is that really what you're suggesting is the reason why they don't let the air out of this controversy, prevent federal investigation, and reassure their community? They're already basically accusing him of being a drug user, so there goes that theory. Or was that just part of your strawman of what they GP would have thought had they actually tried to provide an alibi? "Twisted non-logic" indeed.
Life is already like an RPG to me... or rather, an Adventure/RPG hybrid. The main difference being that instead of the emphasis being on leveling up, a lot more is placed on collecting useful items that serve unique functions.
For example I recently acquired the Spyglass item when I found a monocular small and rugged enough to keep in my cargo pants. This goes along with my Lantern (actually two items... LED flashlight for light and propane lighter for lighting things on fire).
Whenever I buy something like that, I can't help but mentally hum the Zelda "dah dah dah-dah!" power up theme.
Features a new gameplay mechanic where if your civilization becomes too authoritarian, a crazy person in a Guy Fawkes mask murders you with knives.
or
Civilization V: In addition to the traditional civilizations from previous games, introduces the Visitors who are an alien race stranded on earth and who are quite adamant that they do not find humans delicious in the least, not even with fava beans and a nice chianti.
Slashdot Mirror
But how does a laser push an object into the atmosphere? What good does heating up one side of it do?
Photons carry momentum. Not much, but they do. So, the laser itself can push the object. Heating one side so it emits more photons would push it as well. If it's spinning that's not much use, but the laser would still impart momentum.
Yeah well another man is an idiot.
"Conflict of interest" is when you're a Judge, with a duty to administer impartial justice, but you have a material or personal investment in seeing a particular outcome. Or any similar case where official and personal interests conflict. That's what it means.
Slashdot's official interest is to make money for itself and its parent company. Slashdot is not a civil servant. Whatever duty to impartiality you imagine Slashdot has is simply that -- your imagination. But in reality, Slashdot has never been impartial, and barely ever tried to appear as such.
In short, shameless plugs are not a conflict of interest, they are entirely within Slashdot's interests. At least they are upfront about it.
In France, Spain, Italy, Brasil and perhaps a few other countries, you can not call yourself homeopath if you're not a certified general practionner with an additional specialization, complete with a university diploma.
So they require you to be a doctor to call yourself a doctor. That's good to know. But I didn't ask about them teaching real medicine to people who want to be homeopaths. I asked about teaching homeopathy. Google so far has turned up a list showing one university in France. Got any links?
That still does not equip them with the proper interviewing techniques to keep the needed level of attention.
Well it should be a lot easier to teach just that than to teach that plus the menagerie of bullshit remedies that comprise homeopathy.
Though with this "who cares that it doesn't work, it's good for public health anyway" mentality, I guess all you'd really need to teach them is how to pour a glass of tapwater and make up an impressive Latin-sounding name for it.
Or we could just forgo the bullshit that is homeopathy altogether. Seriously. If there's a medical benefit to the diagnosis technique, then let's use that. Accepting the most important part of homeopathy, the ridiculous "like cures like" and "dilution makes more potent" axioms, is completely unnecessary.
There are more urgent issues in healthcare than eliminating homeopathy and greater scandals in medecine than correcting a fringe of innocuous homeopathy believers.
Of course because there are more urgent issues, we can't or shouldn't do anything about this one. That's a great false dichotomy.
And I really don't see them as innocuous. Yes their concoctions have the benefit of usually being completely harmless (because they're water), but there's more to it than that.
The collusion between big laboratories, World Health Organisation and western governments on the orchestration of the AH1N1 flu vaccination campaign, and various other "big medecine" abuses are far more detrimental (and costly) to public healthcare.
Those are serious issues. However I think that ignorance, and rejection or even contempt for science is also a serious issue for public health.
Homeopaths are purveyors of ignorance. Every person they convince is another person who rejects scientific evidence-based thinking for mystical hand-wavy stories that make them feel good. In this they are bosom buddies with the ones who refuse to vaccinate their children because vaccines cause autism, or people in Africa who think that fucking a virgin will cure AIDS. Hey, sex often causes AIDS and "like cures like" right? Yeah I think homeopathy would appeal greatly to them. And these are not separate groups -- believers in "alternative" (where alternative means no scientific evidence) medicine are the same ones accusing big pharma of causing autism.
When diseases that are nearly forgotten come roaring back (as they've already started to) because we're losing herd immunity, I call that a problem. When people reject proper scientific treatments for thoroughly shaken bottles of water, I call that a problem.
We cannot tolerate ignorance and deliberate rejection of reason like this. Certainly, if you want to fix the problems caused by WHO and pharma corporations, then you aren't going to fix them by encouraging ignorance! Or at least, if you don't want to "fix" those problems by causing greater ones.
It's magical thinking at its finest, really.
You said it. So caffeine represents the concept of awakeness, so the "potentized"* version represents the concept of sleepiness.
I'm glad to know that these solutions follow human conceptual reasoning and categorization.
Magic is vastly better at this than science. Science-based remedies are forced to follow rules that have no respect at all for human preconceptions, and it takes a lot of hard work and tinkering to get effects that map even roughly onto what we could easily describe in two words -- "cure insomnia" -- to the forces of Magic.
* lol just learned that word from the WP page on homeopathy. What an awesome Doublespeak way of saying "make into water".
The point the studies made is that it's easier for an homeopath to detect and enquire about subtle changes in the patient's physiology, because of the arcane classification of patient's physiological characteristics. All it costs is long conversations with your (homeopath) doctor that a regular doctor won't want to bother with when diagnosing a cold or the flu.
Then the solution is to have real doctors available for the purpose of having those discussions. Yes that might be hard with the U.S.' current health care insurance nightmare, but it's still the solution.
The solution is not to have fraudulent quacks have these discussions under the guise of creating a bottle of water that is perfectly tuned to the person taking it when everyone with two braincells to rub together knowns that is total bullshit.
For one, the quality of discussion and recommendations will clearly be better if performed by a real doctor.
For two, presenting homeopathy as though it is legitimate medicine simply for the purpose of tricking people into getting preventative health screenings is counter-productive. In the long term you're simply encouraging ignorance and disrespect for actual science and medicine. If a person actually believes that a bottle of pure water can cure them just as well or better than a complicated pharmaceutical, this same person could just as easily believe that a vaccine containing a molecule with mercury in it causes autism even though the mercury isn't in its normally toxic form and even though mercury poisoning doesn't cause autism. Because they don't understand anything about dosages or chemicals -- things you can't understand if you believe in homeopathy.
So, did this long-term study account for increased scientific ignorance and disrespect for "mainstream" medicine?
Real doctors who are taught real medicine and discuss their patient's health in the context of real medicine is the solution.
Quacks are never the solution.
But when a serious condition occurs (early signs of cancers, hormonal imbalances...), the homeopath is much more inclined to detect the change and prescribe additional examinations, thus playing a major preventive role.
Adding to this that the actual costs of homeopathic cures is ridiculously low, the conclusion from La Recherche was that, even though the scientific basis for homeopathy was wrong, from a public health perspective, it was better to keep the system as is, keep teaching homeopathy in medical schools and refund homepathic cures.
What a bullshit conclusion.
What they actually found is that improved attentiveness to changing health conditions improves detection and prevention of actual maladies. That's great. It has nothing, specifically, to do with homeopathy. The proper response to this is to encourage doctors/nurses to take more interest in their patient's general health, and to promote social awareness about health issues so that people will be informed and attentive to their own bodies.
NOT to keep on acting like a bullshit non-science is actually worth something when it isn't.
And wait a minute, WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?! I mean, outside of a lecture that also covers demonic possession and hexes and other things that were a product of times when medicine was founded on unscientific ignorance.
I think it'd be easier to just dilute my brains.
what's the difference if you find the info through Wikipedia or not?
Whether or not you can automatically dismiss the source and implicitly assume the opposite in lieu of having to find a better source of information that actually supports the opposite view.
No really, that's the difference -- "WP, LOL" retorts.
So, something more like Falcon 1 launch 2 rather than launch 1.
Yeah, I'd hope for that too. But hey as long as I'm hoping, I'm going to hope for success!
Well, the Falcon 9 has been in development and testing for a long time, especially if you factor in the Falcon 1 which the 9 is based on, and they sure don't seem to be rushing the first launch of the 9, with test firings beforehand and no commitment to launch on a specific date.
So, cheap and safe looks like what they're going for.
B) Like cures like. When someone comes to you complaining about insomnia, you give them something that causes insomnia. E.g., caffeine.
No, it's sadly not a joke. The ingredient in most real homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.
Omg, LOL.
Okay, I knew homeopathy involved diluting something to the point that it is no longer even present and that the water somehow "remembers" what used to be in it. I always thought this was hilariously dumb when the effect of the thing being diluted is based on a chemical reaction, and how exactly can there be a chemical reaction when there's no chemical left? "The memory of a carbon ring" isn't going to bond with anything...
But I never knew that this was okay, because the whole idea is the diluted substance will counter the effects that the actual chemical reaction, were any chemicals left to react, would cause. So I guess the water's caffeine-memory is somehow anti-caffeine?
That's simply fucking awesome. I seriously believe that if I spent an hour bashing my face into a brick wall, this would make perfect sense.
Like lasers?
Yes I do like lasers, thanks for asking.
Remember, drug use and drug abuse are two different things.
That's right. It's only abuse if the drugs don't consent. ;)
One watt from an inch-long and hair-thin area? How freaking intense would that light source have to be? Pretty hard to believe.
Okay so the big stumbling block in this method of powering nano-scale devices is the macro-scale Fresnel lens you need to focus sunlight on it. But other than that it's perfect!
They have their own on-board power generation. Ergo, self-powered.
Any other definition means that nothing was self-powered except possibly and extremely hypothetically the Big Bang.
Clark Kent is not Superman's idea of a human, he's Superman's idea of a weak human. It doesn't mean that he thinks all humanity is like Clark Kent.
They don't have to all be like Clark Kent for him to still represent a critique on humanity; a critique by its nature will often emphasize flaws.
But yes, the fact that the monologue is delivered by Bill is certainly relevant to how you should take it. Still, it's pretty insightful. :)
Oh is that what that meant?
I thought the summary was saying that the Constellation program had been canceled in Dorothy's little dog. Which makes sense to me; I never saw how a heavy-lift rocket could possibly fit inside a little terrier.
But they don't care... Oh no, they're an Uninfected! Meme-free thinker on the loose! Quarantine! Quarantine!
Nazi German forbid 'non random looking' "passwords" (I believe it's a 3/4 letter combination) so things like AAA, ICH etc were banned as a message password in Enigma machines.
Back in England, code breakers took this into account simplifying (significantly) password breaking.
So instead of the usual spy stealing the actual codes themselves, they could instead bring evidence of this policy to Bletchley Park for the code breakers to use. Just a nerdy "Cryptonomicon" take on old WWII spy movies...
My guess would be custom though not completely different from everyday stuff. I was familiar with "metastability" from my college courses where it was mentioned as a classic problem in electronics. I suppose there could be a way to harvest this data from hardware before it gets corrected.
It'd most definitely be custom hardware, especially if you want it to be on the cpu die or very close to it for speed, but nothing exotic like you say. CMOS logic is normally designed to avoid metastability simply through appropriate circuit delays for synchronous stuff, and with complex synchronizers for communicating between asynchronous clock domains. Clearly if they have to be designed to avoid metastability, they can be designed to not avoid it, heh. Trying to exploit existing hardware to do it would be rough, though. At least not without wasting a lot of hardware.
It looks to me like the promising thing about this technique is the small amount hardware needed. It only says a "small array" of flip-flops results in a 20x improvement (with more being better). Flip-flops are much larger than the memory elements in DRAM or CPU caches, so they can be somewhat expensive, but like the WP says they are prone to metastability. Depending on how small the array per random output bit needs to be this could be pretty exciting.
I think I've read of the network guys fighting metastability so their incorrectly implemented hardware could probably be exploited as sources of random bits.
That's a really neat idea. Until good sources of entropy (which if you think about it every computer should have) are built on chip then a little USB doohickey made of a short run of fiber optics would be pretty cool too. :)
Let's just say the weight of evidence is not against the school either. In fact, there's essentially zero evidence.
Not really.
Here's the evidence:
- School has software on the laptop that allows them to remotely use the webcam on the laptop.
- Access to the webcam is restricted to this software, i.e. the student cannot use the webcam without jailbreaking the laptop.
- The school acquired a photo taken from the laptop's webcam.
- The school did not confiscate the laptop prior to acquiring the photo.
So, what this suggests is that the school got the photo from the laptop remotely, using the software specifically designed to do that. It's possible that the student jailbroke their laptop, took the photo, and either didn't disable remote access so the school was able to browse his HD, or it was posted somewhere and the school saw it. Because both are possible does not mean they are equally likely.
None of which changes the facts - we don't know how the school came into possession of the picture. Period, end of sentence.
Like just about anything that has to be ended with "period", this is a simplification that makes sense if you do not continue thinking.
Yes, we don't know how the school came into possession of the picture. However we most definitely do have an idea, and saying that there's no evidence either way is simply wrong. Nothing is proven, evidence is not proof. But we sure know how they could have acquired the photo, via a mechanism whose mere existence is suspicious, and it's the simplest and most obvious mechanism for it to have arrived in their hands. Occam yadda yadda.
"Knowing for certain" and "there exists evidence for" are not the same thing, and this is the main problem with your line of reasoning.
Mostly because of twisted non logic like you exhibit above - the school hasn't protested it's innocence and slandered the poor kid, so they must be guilt. But the beauty of your non logic is that if the school protested its innocence, it that people like you would be among the first to cry "they're slandering the poor boy, he must be innocent and they must be guilty".
Except it's neither twisted nor illogical. They could eliminate 99% of the controversy, and any need for the FBI to be involved, simply by stating that they did not use the laptop's remote picture taking ability to get the photo, and instead found it on Facebook or whatever. If it were true. Yet they don't say that.
Because they don't want to slander the boy? Is that really what you're suggesting is the reason why they don't let the air out of this controversy, prevent federal investigation, and reassure their community? They're already basically accusing him of being a drug user, so there goes that theory. Or was that just part of your strawman of what they GP would have thought had they actually tried to provide an alibi? "Twisted non-logic" indeed.
I'm from the Vincent/Chrono school of Squaresoft monologues.
"..."
The nice thing is that it easily scales to whatever length monologue you need.
Especially when the swarm notices that you've learned to ignore it so it swoops down to 10 feet above your head.
Life is already like an RPG to me... or rather, an Adventure/RPG hybrid. The main difference being that instead of the emphasis being on leveling up, a lot more is placed on collecting useful items that serve unique functions.
For example I recently acquired the Spyglass item when I found a monocular small and rugged enough to keep in my cargo pants. This goes along with my Lantern (actually two items... LED flashlight for light and propane lighter for lighting things on fire).
Whenever I buy something like that, I can't help but mentally hum the Zelda "dah dah dah-dah!" power up theme.
Features a new gameplay mechanic where if your civilization becomes too authoritarian, a crazy person in a Guy Fawkes mask murders you with knives.
or
Civilization V: In addition to the traditional civilizations from previous games, introduces the Visitors who are an alien race stranded on earth and who are quite adamant that they do not find humans delicious in the least, not even with fava beans and a nice chianti.