Why should I be compelled to join that lot's game when I don't agree with their premise in the first place?
Getting involved and being a part of changing the rules seems to me a better solution than standing outside complaining that the rules are not to your liking. Though if you just dislike the game in the first place, I guess you don't have to play. You could play a different game, which is probably the equivalent of finding a political system that is more to your liking.
Well, here's an idea. Instead of letting that lot decide things for you, how about becoming part of that lot and influence them with some good ideas?
What percentage of people on slashdot have been to a city council meeting in the last year?
How many have actually stood up and voiced their opinion in a city council meeting?
I know there will be an anecdotal few, but I bet its lower than 1%.
How about becoming an alderman, committee member, mayor or other representative? Forget the Us and Them philosophy. Them is just Us that decided to get involved. Believe me, most towns with under 50,000 are hurting for representatives, and probably have empty seats on several committees and may even have whole districts with no representative. Get involved. Make a difference. Voting is only the first step.
No, they are taxed the most on their taxable income. You have just chosen to use a different definition of income than the IRS does. As a percentage of taxable income or in whole dollars, the rich pay more.
Mod parent up. The bridge collapse had nothing to do with poor construction and everything to do with more usage than it was designed for, and lack of funding for replacement. The news was all over the fact that the bridge had been declared substandard. So what? I'll bet you money more than half the bridges in America are listed as such. I know at least 60% of the ones here in Oklahoma are. But that by no means is an indicator that they are about to fall over. The allocation of monies for bridge repair/replacement across our country is woefully less than it would need to be for bridge evaluators to be happy, but the likelihood of unfortunate accidents even on a substandard bridge is still pretty low.
Remember all that stuff that you used to say you wish your manager would do for you? Remember, those things that your occasional good manager did?
Do those things.
It already happened. Luckily, so far the airplanes have all been successfully landed despite the fire or had not taken off yet when the batteries caught fire.
The problem is that if you let your insurance company handle it, you have now filed a claim, so your rates will go up, or they may drop you. The insurance company will happily reimburse you for the laptop, then sue Dell or Sony or somebody and collect from them, then raise your rates or drop you and due to the claim on your file you will have a hard time finding a reasonably priced policy now.
Insurance is not for small piddly things. Insurance is for catastrophes where the risk of getting dropped afterwards is eclipsed by the cost of the claim. It probably didn't start out this way, but insurance companies pretty much are giving us the "don't file a claim" price. In other words, they will charge us X, but with the understanding that they won't actually cover any claims, or will drop us if we make one. Oh, you want to actually be covered in case of accidents? Well, that price is 3X.
I was in charge of PC buying for a trading firm back in 1994. Well, I was in charge, but the know-it-all manager overrode my recommendation of Zeos, and insisted on Gateway, which I knew to be poor quality and poor service. Here is the result (pasted from my whining on USENET):
We have purchased 9 Gateways. 7 were 486's and 2 were Pentiums. Here is
a list of the problems which have occurred.
The chip fan in one of the Pentiums went out. Gateway sent a replacement.
It took only about half an hour to have tech-support place the order.
The video card in a 486 went bad. Gateway wanted to send us upgraded
driver software, but I surmised that the card was bad because it had been
working. Plus I tried it in another machine. Gateway sent us a
replacement. We had to ship the original back to them at our expense.
It took about half an hour to for the process.
The chip fan in the other Pentium went out. Gateway sent a replacement.
It took only about half an hour to have tech-support place the order.
A 15" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Tech support was difficult to
reach. The recording would tell me to call again later. There was no
option for staying on the line. After two days, I was able to get
support, and they sent a new monitor. We had to ship the old one back
at our cost.
Another 15" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Same story with tech
support. Same symptoms with monitor. They sent another, we had to
pay return shipping for the old monitor.
A 17" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Same symptoms, same awful
tech support. Same cost for shipping.
The hard drive on one of the 486's started making an awful whining noise.
I didn't bother with tech support because I was able to solve the
problem by horizontally mounting the drive.
One of the replacement 15" monitors went bad. Same story. It is starting
to take at least three days to get ahold of tech support. They shipped
us a new one, we had to pay shipping to return the old one.
Another 17" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Same symptoms. Tech support
was hard to reach again. They also refused to help because the one year
warranty had expired. Spent $175 to have the monitor fixed. After two
weeks the problem was back.
Two of the 486's we bought came with only 4 mb of memory. They were extremely
unstable in windows. They tended to lock up every 30 minutes or so, even
if there was not activity. Gateway persuaded us to get 4 more MB of memory.
This solved nothing.
So, 9 PC's bought, 11 problems. Total cost for shipping was on the order of
$400.00 . Now we buy Dell. We bought two. One had a bad monitor. They sent a
replacement and there was no charge.
God doesn't have physical attributes. He created the universe, he isn't defined by the atrributes of the universe. We were not created in his physical image, because he doesn't have a physical image. We can't eat and breathe the same time.
I can. Why is it that a hyena can pretty much eat shit and not get sick of it, yet us, designed in the image of "God" would die from that or get very sick?
I have a theory that we probably once were able to pretty much eat anything, the same as a Hyena or cat or dog. People with weaker stomaches would tend to die out from natural selection. But then we discovered fire, and started cooking many of our foods. Then it no longer mattered significantly if we could tolerate raw food. So that genetic ability to handle raw food is no longer important and so it probably got completely randomly knocked out of the population. If we were to lose the ability to make fire, there may be few or no humans alive now with the ability to digest raw meats.
I think there are many such traits out there in our population which would have gotten weeded out due to natural selection some time ago, except for the crutch of our modern society: lactose intolerance, premature birth, abnormal spine or bone conditions. Many of these problems can now be successfully passed on to the next generation due to the miracles of science. Yes, I am aware that this makes me sound like a complete unsympathetic jerk. I am just saying, nature is cruel and the strongest survive. Or in the case of humans, just about everyone, strong or not, survives.
Cancer? Is that some kind of stack overflow in the DNA programming by "God"
There are many types of cancer, but in general it seems that if your organs don't fail you, you'll eventually die of cancer. Humans are made to last long enough to survive until reproductive age. After that, all bets are off. Your body quite obviously has the ability to create new brain cells, skin tissue, bones, and whatever, because it does this both while you are brewing in the womb, and even afterwards when you are growing up. But one by one, these things stop fuctioning. The time when they stop functioning is a genetic trait. It is later in life for some and earlier for others. If it gets too early, than they don't survive to bear offspring. If it is too late, you compete with your offspring, and THEY may not survive to bear offspring. My understanding is that we are alwys getting cancerous cells, but that our system is able to expunge them, until some point where the immune system begins to wind down and the number of cancerous cells overwhelms it. Not all cancers are the same of course. But it has been described to me that if we were perfectly healthy in every other way and had no accidents, we would definitely die of cancer.
If we're created in the image of your god, does he have a tail bone and an appendix?
No, because until Jesus came to Earth, God had no physical attributes at all. We are not made in the physical image of God, because there is none. Jesus came to Earth in human form, but that is not a physical form that God takes, it says he became one of us, in other words he took on our form.
I believe Man was created in a perfect form and has been genetically mutating away from perfect. In fact, genetic mutation seems to me like a "life gives you lemons. make lemonade" type of deal. Seems like natural selection is just (albeit on a hug numerical level) picking the most survivable imperfect DNA copy. Granted, this may be a good thing, like if a Rhino has a gene go nuts and give it a bigger horn, that may be beneficial.
I don't have a problem with religion. I don't even have a problem with teaching religion. Just do it down the hall in the Philosophy department with the rest of the Humanities subjects and leave it the hell out of the science labs.
Well, I for one will be glad to agree with you on that. And since you want to keep the Christian philosophy out of Science, let's also keep all other philosophy out of science. Science is supposed to be about studying this universe we live in, not dictating whether there is or is not a God.
I consider the creation event to have been explained to Moses in a way that he would understand it in the science of his day. I do not think it likely that it could have been a literal six days, although I guess a supreme being could do whatever he wanted including making stars with their light having already traveled thousands of light years along their paths to our eyes.
However, it is my opinion that the reason literalists are so rigid is because of the non-believers. There are people out there who would discredit the entire Bible as non-literal if even a single phrase could be considered as an allegory. I have watched Christian versus Atheist debates and time-and-again the tactic is to find one bad apple and declare the whole tree to be bad.
I used $450 Billion, which is the figure I got off of costofwar.com. The first site I looked up said only $80 billion was the cost of the war. You say 1.3 Trillion is a conservative estimate. I figured $450 billion was safely in the middle, but I guess not. I don't know how anyone can expect to make a reasonable estimate of what else could have been done with that money since we can;t even get a figure of the cost within a multiple of 15.
If that much money had been spent on internet infrastructure, we'd probably have 99% wireless penetration and 10Gbps fiber to the home for $30/month.
You really think $1,000 per capita could do that? Heck, the contractor would charge that much just to bury the last 50 feet to your house.
I have an uncrippled phone, because I opted to buy my own. I could either buy an uncrippled phone, or let the telco subsidize my purchase, but they want to cripple the phone so I would end up paying more money in the long term.
So is $700 the subsidized price of the iPhone. If so, ouch. If not, then why is AT&T/Apple crippling a full priced device? Maybe people should speak with their wallets and not buy it. I know I have. But that wasn't because it is locked. They've just priced it out of my range.
it shows how SERIOUSLY messed up the system is when the president of one of the companies that decides whether or not you get to get a credit card, a car loan, a home loan, or impacts any number of other financial transactions you may need or want to make is one of the 400 RICHEST people.
I used to work for Transunion. If I would have known the president was in the Forbes 400 I would have asked for more money. As it is, my contract was cancelled two weeks early because they couldn't afford me anymore due to 9/11. I guess they could have afforded me and a thousand more like me if they stopped paying the president.
For the record, Transunion has nothing to do with deciding whether or not you get a credit card, car loan, home loan, or anything else. They just report to potential creditors exactly what has been reported to them. Manipulating that in any way would be a crime.
Credit Fraud is not done by the big three. That would be very dumb. Credit Fraud is done by creditors. Case in point. My sister was feeling threatened by Automax Hyundai of Midwest City Oklahoma (do not shop there) and walked off the lot. She went to several other Hyundai dealers and was turned down for credit because Automax had submitted multiple denials of loans all for the same day and she had not applied for a loan at all. She eventually got a dealer to give her a loan at something like 15% interest. I told her she should have done without the car for a week, gotten a lawyer and then she probably wouldn't have had to pay for a car at all. Too bad she didn't listen. Rarely, lawyers are actually useful.
Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist for at least part of the year is more important than atmospheric composition.
At least for our own narrow-minded view of life.
Maybe in high school math. Once the questions start asking you to prove or disprove things, there are always either many (or no) right answers.
I agree with you. I got A's in all of my algebra and calculus in high school, A's in all four semesters of college Calculus, and Differential Equations and Probability and Statistics. But I eked out a C in Geometry. Why? Because, as you said, there are multiple ways of proving things, and they way you chose is not always the "right" one according to the teacher. Also, since we tended to cover three or four weeks at a time in class before having an exam, I had a difficult time on the exams because I couldn't keep track of what I should know and what I shouldn't know. ie, I would have done better, if the test had said something like "assuming we hadn't already proven that Y is true, Prove the following...". Additionally, some of the things they asked us to prove, I kind of looked at and went "well, that is just obviously true", but I didn't have the ability to recall which silly theorems might be used to prove it.
In math, unless the question is worded poorly or they are trying to pull some sort of trick on you, there is exactly one right answer (though that answer may be that there is more than one answer). Therefore, as the guy from India says, it ought to be easier to score highly in math than in some subjects where there is more subjectivity. It used to be easy for me to get above 95% on any given math assignment, and that was because I was too lazy to go back and check my answers for silly mistakes. Really, there was no excuse for me not to get 100%, since the right answer is absolutely the right answer, and can be logically, mathematically derived. But hey, 94% and above was an A, so why shoot for 100%.
Now, in English, I tended to get bad grades from our sport coaches that taught English part-time. This is because in High School, creative writing also had only one right answer, and often the one I came up with wasn't it. On the other hand, when I got to college, my English teachers asked me to drop my engineering major and become an English Major.
I remember in grade school being tested on something or other and they determined I needed to be put in remedial reading. This was in first grade. In fourth grade, they decided that the prognosis was wrong and I needed to be put in Gifted and Talented. It seems the characteristics of a child who is behind the class are similar to those of a child who is ahead of the class.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should I be compelled to join that lot's game when I don't agree with their premise in the first place?
Getting involved and being a part of changing the rules seems to me a better solution than standing outside complaining that the rules are not to your liking. Though if you just dislike the game in the first place, I guess you don't have to play. You could play a different game, which is probably the equivalent of finding a political system that is more to your liking.
Well, here's an idea. Instead of letting that lot decide things for you, how about becoming part of that lot and influence them with some good ideas?
What percentage of people on slashdot have been to a city council meeting in the last year?
How many have actually stood up and voiced their opinion in a city council meeting?
I know there will be an anecdotal few, but I bet its lower than 1%.
How about becoming an alderman, committee member, mayor or other representative? Forget the Us and Them philosophy. Them is just Us that decided to get involved. Believe me, most towns with under 50,000 are hurting for representatives, and probably have empty seats on several committees and may even have whole districts with no representative. Get involved. Make a difference. Voting is only the first step.
No, they are taxed the most on their taxable income. You have just chosen to use a different definition of income than the IRS does. As a percentage of taxable income or in whole dollars, the rich pay more.
Right on. Someone should raid his mansion in the middle of the night with a backhoe and carve out huge Xs in his driveway.
Mod parent up. The bridge collapse had nothing to do with poor construction and everything to do with more usage than it was designed for, and lack of funding for replacement. The news was all over the fact that the bridge had been declared substandard. So what? I'll bet you money more than half the bridges in America are listed as such. I know at least 60% of the ones here in Oklahoma are. But that by no means is an indicator that they are about to fall over. The allocation of monies for bridge repair/replacement across our country is woefully less than it would need to be for bridge evaluators to be happy, but the likelihood of unfortunate accidents even on a substandard bridge is still pretty low.
Remember all that stuff that you used to say you wish your manager would do for you? Remember, those things that your occasional good manager did?
Do those things.
Well, no, that would be catastrophic enough to involve the insurance company.
It already happened. Luckily, so far the airplanes have all been successfully landed despite the fire or had not taken off yet when the batteries caught fire.
The problem is that if you let your insurance company handle it, you have now filed a claim, so your rates will go up, or they may drop you. The insurance company will happily reimburse you for the laptop, then sue Dell or Sony or somebody and collect from them, then raise your rates or drop you and due to the claim on your file you will have a hard time finding a reasonably priced policy now.
Insurance is not for small piddly things. Insurance is for catastrophes where the risk of getting dropped afterwards is eclipsed by the cost of the claim.
It probably didn't start out this way, but insurance companies pretty much are giving us the "don't file a claim" price. In other words, they will charge us X, but with the understanding that they won't actually cover any claims, or will drop us if we make one. Oh, you want to actually be covered in case of accidents? Well, that price is 3X.
We have purchased 9 Gateways. 7 were 486's and 2 were Pentiums. Here is a list of the problems which have occurred.
The chip fan in one of the Pentiums went out. Gateway sent a replacement. It took only about half an hour to have tech-support place the order.
The video card in a 486 went bad. Gateway wanted to send us upgraded driver software, but I surmised that the card was bad because it had been working. Plus I tried it in another machine. Gateway sent us a replacement. We had to ship the original back to them at our expense. It took about half an hour to for the process.
The chip fan in the other Pentium went out. Gateway sent a replacement. It took only about half an hour to have tech-support place the order.
A 15" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Tech support was difficult to reach. The recording would tell me to call again later. There was no option for staying on the line. After two days, I was able to get support, and they sent a new monitor. We had to ship the old one back at our cost.
Another 15" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Same story with tech support. Same symptoms with monitor. They sent another, we had to pay return shipping for the old monitor.
A 17" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Same symptoms, same awful tech support. Same cost for shipping.
The hard drive on one of the 486's started making an awful whining noise. I didn't bother with tech support because I was able to solve the problem by horizontally mounting the drive.
One of the replacement 15" monitors went bad. Same story. It is starting to take at least three days to get ahold of tech support. They shipped us a new one, we had to pay shipping to return the old one.
Another 17" monitor went bad on one of the 486's. Same symptoms. Tech support was hard to reach again. They also refused to help because the one year warranty had expired. Spent $175 to have the monitor fixed. After two weeks the problem was back.
Two of the 486's we bought came with only 4 mb of memory. They were extremely unstable in windows. They tended to lock up every 30 minutes or so, even if there was not activity. Gateway persuaded us to get 4 more MB of memory. This solved nothing.
So, 9 PC's bought, 11 problems. Total cost for shipping was on the order of $400.00 . Now we buy Dell. We bought two. One had a bad monitor. They sent a replacement and there was no charge.
God doesn't have physical attributes. He created the universe, he isn't defined by the atrributes of the universe. We were not created in his physical image, because he doesn't have a physical image.
We can't eat and breathe the same time.
I can.
Why is it that a hyena can pretty much eat shit and not get sick of it, yet us, designed in the image of "God" would die from that or get very sick?
I have a theory that we probably once were able to pretty much eat anything, the same as a Hyena or cat or dog. People with weaker stomaches would tend to die out from natural selection. But then we discovered fire, and started cooking many of our foods. Then it no longer mattered significantly if we could tolerate raw food. So that genetic ability to handle raw food is no longer important and so it probably got completely randomly knocked out of the population. If we were to lose the ability to make fire, there may be few or no humans alive now with the ability to digest raw meats.
I think there are many such traits out there in our population which would have gotten weeded out due to natural selection some time ago, except for the crutch of our modern society: lactose intolerance, premature birth, abnormal spine or bone conditions. Many of these problems can now be successfully passed on to the next generation due to the miracles of science. Yes, I am aware that this makes me sound like a complete unsympathetic jerk. I am just saying, nature is cruel and the strongest survive. Or in the case of humans, just about everyone, strong or not, survives.
Cancer? Is that some kind of stack overflow in the DNA programming by "God"
There are many types of cancer, but in general it seems that if your organs don't fail you, you'll eventually die of cancer. Humans are made to last long enough to survive until reproductive age. After that, all bets are off. Your body quite obviously has the ability to create new brain cells, skin tissue, bones, and whatever, because it does this both while you are brewing in the womb, and even afterwards when you are growing up. But one by one, these things stop fuctioning. The time when they stop functioning is a genetic trait. It is later in life for some and earlier for others. If it gets too early, than they don't survive to bear offspring. If it is too late, you compete with your offspring, and THEY may not survive to bear offspring. My understanding is that we are alwys getting cancerous cells, but that our system is able to expunge them, until some point where the immune system begins to wind down and the number of cancerous cells overwhelms it. Not all cancers are the same of course. But it has been described to me that if we were perfectly healthy in every other way and had no accidents, we would definitely die of cancer.
If we're created in the image of your god, does he have a tail bone and an appendix?
No, because until Jesus came to Earth, God had no physical attributes at all. We are not made in the physical image of God, because there is none. Jesus came to Earth in human form, but that is not a physical form that God takes, it says he became one of us, in other words he took on our form.
I believe Man was created in a perfect form and has been genetically mutating away from perfect. In fact, genetic mutation seems to me like a "life gives you lemons. make lemonade" type of deal. Seems like natural selection is just (albeit on a hug numerical level) picking the most survivable imperfect DNA copy. Granted, this may be a good thing, like if a Rhino has a gene go nuts and give it a bigger horn, that may be beneficial.
Dominion means something that you are in control of and responsible for. That means you take care of it, not destroy it.
I don't have a problem with religion. I don't even have a problem with teaching religion. Just do it down the hall in the Philosophy department with the rest of the Humanities subjects and leave it the hell out of the science labs.
Well, I for one will be glad to agree with you on that. And since you want to keep the Christian philosophy out of Science, let's also keep all other philosophy out of science. Science is supposed to be about studying this universe we live in, not dictating whether there is or is not a God.
I consider the creation event to have been explained to Moses in a way that he would understand it in the science of his day. I do not think it likely that it could have been a literal six days, although I guess a supreme being could do whatever he wanted including making stars with their light having already traveled thousands of light years along their paths to our eyes.
However, it is my opinion that the reason literalists are so rigid is because of the non-believers. There are people out there who would discredit the entire Bible as non-literal if even a single phrase could be considered as an allegory. I have watched Christian versus Atheist debates and time-and-again the tactic is to find one bad apple and declare the whole tree to be bad.
I used $450 Billion, which is the figure I got off of costofwar.com. The first site I looked up said only $80 billion was the cost of the war. You say 1.3 Trillion is a conservative estimate. I figured $450 billion was safely in the middle, but I guess not. I don't know how anyone can expect to make a reasonable estimate of what else could have been done with that money since we can;t even get a figure of the cost within a multiple of 15.
If that much money had been spent on internet infrastructure, we'd probably have 99% wireless penetration and 10Gbps fiber to the home for $30/month.
You really think $1,000 per capita could do that? Heck, the contractor would charge that much just to bury the last 50 feet to your house.
It's not that bad. Girls don't want to go out with nerds in High School, but 10 years later, they all want to marry one.
I have an uncrippled phone, because I opted to buy my own. I could either buy an uncrippled phone, or let the telco subsidize my purchase, but they want to cripple the phone so I would end up paying more money in the long term.
So is $700 the subsidized price of the iPhone. If so, ouch. If not, then why is AT&T/Apple crippling a full priced device? Maybe people should speak with their wallets and not buy it. I know I have. But that wasn't because it is locked. They've just priced it out of my range.
it shows how SERIOUSLY messed up the system is when the president of one of the companies that decides whether or not you get to get a credit card, a car loan, a home loan, or impacts any number of other financial transactions you may need or want to make is one of the 400 RICHEST people.
I used to work for Transunion. If I would have known the president was in the Forbes 400 I would have asked for more money. As it is, my contract was cancelled two weeks early because they couldn't afford me anymore due to 9/11. I guess they could have afforded me and a thousand more like me if they stopped paying the president.
For the record, Transunion has nothing to do with deciding whether or not you get a credit card, car loan, home loan, or anything else. They just report to potential creditors exactly what has been reported to them. Manipulating that in any way would be a crime.
Credit Fraud is not done by the big three. That would be very dumb. Credit Fraud is done by creditors. Case in point. My sister was feeling threatened by Automax Hyundai of Midwest City Oklahoma (do not shop there) and walked off the lot. She went to several other Hyundai dealers and was turned down for credit because Automax had submitted multiple denials of loans all for the same day and she had not applied for a loan at all. She eventually got a dealer to give her a loan at something like 15% interest. I told her she should have done without the car for a week, gotten a lawyer and then she probably wouldn't have had to pay for a car at all. Too bad she didn't listen. Rarely, lawyers are actually useful.
Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist for at least part of the year is more important than atmospheric composition.
At least for our own narrow-minded view of life.
Kids these days! They probably don't even know how to make a line printer play "We Wish you a Merry Christmas"
Maybe in high school math. Once the questions start asking you to prove or disprove things, there are always either many (or no) right answers.
I agree with you. I got A's in all of my algebra and calculus in high school, A's in all four semesters of college Calculus, and Differential Equations and Probability and Statistics. But I eked out a C in Geometry. Why? Because, as you said, there are multiple ways of proving things, and they way you chose is not always the "right" one according to the teacher. Also, since we tended to cover three or four weeks at a time in class before having an exam, I had a difficult time on the exams because I couldn't keep track of what I should know and what I shouldn't know. ie, I would have done better, if the test had said something like "assuming we hadn't already proven that Y is true, Prove the following...". Additionally, some of the things they asked us to prove, I kind of looked at and went "well, that is just obviously true", but I didn't have the ability to recall which silly theorems might be used to prove it.
In math, unless the question is worded poorly or they are trying to pull some sort of trick on you, there is exactly one right answer (though that answer may be that there is more than one answer). Therefore, as the guy from India says, it ought to be easier to score highly in math than in some subjects where there is more subjectivity. It used to be easy for me to get above 95% on any given math assignment, and that was because I was too lazy to go back and check my answers for silly mistakes. Really, there was no excuse for me not to get 100%, since the right answer is absolutely the right answer, and can be logically, mathematically derived. But hey, 94% and above was an A, so why shoot for 100%.
Now, in English, I tended to get bad grades from our sport coaches that taught English part-time. This is because in High School, creative writing also had only one right answer, and often the one I came up with wasn't it. On the other hand, when I got to college, my English teachers asked me to drop my engineering major and become an English Major.
I remember in grade school being tested on something or other and they determined I needed to be put in remedial reading. This was in first grade. In fourth grade, they decided that the prognosis was wrong and I needed to be put in Gifted and Talented. It seems the characteristics of a child who is behind the class are similar to those of a child who is ahead of the class.