Unprofessional people who have entirely too much ego investment in their work will find it difficult to take constructive criticism and feedback.
Professionals who are actually committed to being the best they can be (rather than trying to pretend they're the best) will welcome constructive criticism because it may actually help them get better. Nobody is perfect, nobody knows everything, so there's always something to learn.
I don't mean to say that people should just blindly accept any criticism unthinkingly, but rather that they should be capable of listening and integrating any improvements into their process.
My question to the OP: You don't get very specific in the summary and I can't quite tell if the guy actually shuts you down or if you're just backing down because you are intimidated.
If you're getting shut down, my suggestion would be to look at getting other team members involved (or management if necessary) and present it as the code being written works but it is not maintainable and it is written in a style that doesn't conform to standards and thus forces everyone else to waste productive time just sussing out what it does. If your team and management are unwilling to get involved, then you can figure out if you want to work there enough to deal with this particular issue and go from there.
If it's just that you're intimidated, then I would say get over it and approach them in a professional manner - there have been numerous good suggestion about diplomatic ways to handle this in the responses so far.
Eh, I'd say it's good odds we will have humans back on the moon inside 30 years, even if it is a staggering waste of resources to send people there. My bet is one of the emerging superpowers does it to prove they can, much like we did, but I'd also bet they'd try to one-up us (well, actually much more than one-up) by throwing up tons of supplies first so that their teams can spend a much longer time there.
Much better than focusing on human rated flights (which won't be significantly less expensive until we can make humans more robust) would be what we're doing now - relatively (compared to human rated flights) inexpensive robots going there. As robotics tech and AI gets better we'll be able to do a lot more for less expense than we do now. Couple that with private industry and hobbiests getting much more involved - SpaceEx, the space mapping (then mining) consortium, cubesats ($10,000 USD per cubesat, putting it well in the reach of small groups!) and it's a pretty good bet that Earth/Moon/Mars is going to get really busy fairly quickly.
For longer range stuff - thinking Voyager here - for the same money we spent back then we can have MULTIPLE probes that are vastly more capable and, with the propulsion systems coming on line that provide lower but constant thrust, much faster than those previous efforts.
The initial justification for sending humans into space - other than just "because it's there" - was because we did not have remotely the same kind of automation capabilities that we do now, and what we can do now will be massively eclipsed by what we have in 10-20 years from now. I don't mind it if we don't send people back to the moon if it means we'll be focusing space resources on something that, at least in practical terms, was nothing but an EXTREMELY expensive parlor trick.
I agree, your responses do show a definite lack of understanding about the basics of human interaction, but that's not terribly unheard of, especially amongst nerds.
Once you realize that people having discussions often enjoy discussing things that are outside of the area covered by an extremely specific example you might be able to contribute something more interesting than "you are all wrong."
In any case, before you get too down on yourself, think about it like this: yes, your ability to contribute meaningfully to a conversation is absolute shit right now, but that just means you can only get better!
What's funniest is that you did the exact same thing in your very first response to anything I wrote in this thread. You told everyone disagreeing with your stance that we didn't get it, that we had baggage that was clouding our judgment here, etc.
Maybe you can take a lesson from the fact that you don't seem to like it when people communicate with you in the same way you communicate with them.
You are very obviously not a manager, or if you are, you have no more responsibility than telling teenagers "if you have time to lean you have time to clean!" If somehow you have gotten to a senior position at a firm that isn't serving fast food, please let me know which one so I can avoid them like the plague.
A good manager recognizes that the goal is to get the absolute best performance from their team. It is extremely unlikely that taking a huge public shit on one team member will accomplish that.
Explaining what is expected, how to accomplish it and what the consequences will be if those goals are not met is not "lacking courage" - it's basic "dealing with people 101."
Think about it for a moment. Manager comes out and instead of being diplomatic screams at Bill. Bill then is put into a position where he has no way to save face - if he meekly accepts the abuse he's going to get shit from his teammates and be humiliated. If he tries to explain further he's going to just get screamed at because it's obvious his boss isn't interested in listening, just screaming. At best that manager has motivated Bill to do better work JUST to avoid screaming, but Bill won't be motivated to do anything beyond the bare minimum to avoid that, and also lets everyone else know that this is a workplace that does not respect the workers and where one should be extremely careful about EVER disagreeing with the boss. Ultimately you wind up with everyone underperforming, the boss having to be a micromanaging screamer, and everyone loses.
But hey, at least you weren't being a giant pussy by being polite but firm to the people who work for you, am I right?
Linus may have been right about the underlying technical issue (I think he was), and the other guy may have been trying to blame shift, but what some people will see is that maybe it isn't so black and white, and that when Linus believes he is right about something he will not be willing to listen to the other side, and he will be more than happy to take a giant public shit on other people he disagrees with.
He also opened himself up for numerous attacks. He also got a lot of people talking about this whole stupid way of arguing rather than working on other, more useful, things. He also validated the "management by screaming until you do something right" mode of thinking that is unfortunately all too pervasive in tech circles.
There was more downside than upside to the way Linus handled himself here.
Ask why it would be hard to work for them and demand a meaningful answer if they offer something stupid like "I expect amazing things from my people" - ask them why that's hard to handle and what support they would give you to accomplish that.
Make them be specific in their answers to all questions. If they describe something about themselves, make them give an example from real experience.
Question them about their use of buzzwords and bullshit.
Other co-workers will be interviewing them, too - so ask them to take notes then ask your potential boss about the things they said.
Don't be an asshole, just make it clear that you expect anyone who is going to be managing you to be amazing because you're amazing, so you're being hard nosed to weed out the empty suits.
Any decent boss is going to relish having an employee who isn't afraid, and if the place you work for is worth working for, they won't hire someone who would use such an interview against you.
I don't want to crap all over your nostalgia, but if you truly believe this, you're a moron or at least pig ignorant.
Stuff today is vastly better than the stuff back then in any way you care to look at it. Children have toys that are more complex than Voyager (sans power supply) and it would be a fairly trivial feat to make a probe that is vastly more capable, vastly more reliable & redundant, and vastly less expensive than Voyager with today's technology and processes.
Consumer devices today are built knowing that the technology in them will be absolutely obsolete in short order, so they are made "good enough" and cheaply enough to be a throwaway item. We can build better - and we do - but just not for that market. And by the way, the electronics in even the shittiest consumer electronics today are still vastly more powerful than the machines in Voyager.
I did not buy mine with a Black Friday deal. Lenovo offers sales all the time and it is also stupidly easy to get an affiliation discount on top of it. Literally anyone can sign up for the B&N Gold one, for example, which is what got me mine. After buying an SSD from Newegg and more RAM I had a much more functional machine for not much more that he surface would be - had I gone with the standard warranty, in fact, it would have been less (even with the after purchase addons) less than the Surface Pro. I'm not sure what you're on about with the 3-cell battery since even with that little battery it would have battery life comparable (better actually) an the Surface Pro.
My point here is still the same: the Surface Pro simply isn't compelling at that price point. There are more capable machines that can fulfill the same role (tablet that also can have a keyboard and be used as a laptop) with better specs for about the same price. It doesn't have the drool factor that makes people buy iPads, either. There's just no real reason for it to exist and so many reasons for it not to.
It is an ok piece of kit, just not at that price. Ad then on top of it it only has 4 hour battery life which totally defeats the purpose of a tablet. If you've got to be tethered to an outlet you might as well just use a laptop.
I posted in another thread about this about the ThinkPad X230T. Buying from Lenovo with an affiliated discount (I have a discount from Barnes & Noble Gold but there are tons of others) and being smart about upgrading after purchase (buying 16GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD from Newegg) my total, with a good warranty and all taxes, was a but under $1050.
The X230T blows the Surface Pro away and is a very good tablet and laptop.
That is very likely with some factory installed upgrades. On the Lenovo site right now - without any affiliate bennies right now - you can get the stock X230T for - little over 900. When I look at it with my affiliated service (Barnes & Nobel Gold) it's a bit less than that.
Lenovo is like Dell - they have some amazing deals frequently enough tha anyone who wan can take advantage if hey are slightly patient.
It was a big problem for YOU, but for Amazon it was a trivial cost of doing business that was likely vastly outweighed by the benefits of their system.
As long as that circumstance isn't too common (and it isn't since it took them so long to address and was confusing - that means it's rare enough that they had to figure out a process to identify and handle it) it isn't worth changing their system.
Compare it to full-blown laptops that are also touchscreen tablets and the Pro is still overpriced and underperforming.
I just wanted to cover the "but but it's a taaaaablet, not a laptop!" counter to your very valid point:)
What's funny is that if ever there was a person who would have a need for a "pro" tablet, it's me - but the Surface just can't come close in value to what I went with.
The problem is that there are better devices at or just below this price point that have pretty much the same use-case as a Surface Pro.
Maybe I'm not being terribly imaginative, but I can't see a use case where the Pro meets form factor, function and price point while being a better value than many, many other tools.
And, it's aimed at "Pro" users - who will shop around and who likely have no particular loyalty to Microsoft.
I'm on the opposite end - my use case recently changed and I needed a more powerful tablet (I was using an iPad2 for walkaround site visits), so I grabbed a ThinkPad X230T. With decent factory specs and some upgrades bought from Newegg (ssd, more RAM) it ran me $1030, and I get a battery life of 9.5-11 hours with the extended battery.
Surface Pro just seems like a product stuck in the not-so-sweet spot. People who need just a tablet can go with any number of choices (iPad, Galaxy, whatever) and people who need a tablet+, which is what the Pro seems to be going for, can just get a much better device for around the same price.
THQ could try this on their own without any of the infrastructure in place and without any expertise in this kind of offering, leading to a large number of potential problems that would make it much, much more difficult to succeed...
-OR-
They could work with an established partner in the field and avoid a bunch of pitfalls due to inexperience, improve their chances of success, and also give that established partner a framework with which to offer this kind of plan to other publishers in the future and some good charities get a bunch of cash as well...
Everybody - except for zealots - wins with the choices that were made.
I want THQ to make money off of this - or at least cover whatever costs there are associated with it - so that other publishers will try this in the future.
No, but what they do teach in business school is don't spend $10 to go after a dime.
Cross platform development is nice, but unless the payoff from the costs associated with such development and the support hassles it creates is substantial, it's ultimately not worth the effort.
The only stuff I buy locally is stuff that I need instantly or can't get on-line, or that I need to physically verify works for my need, or that is somehow cheaper than on-line, or that would be completely inconvenient to get on-line. Usually that means clothes, gas, food and services.
I would rather local businesses be based on offerings that make sense rather than be artificially propped up by a movement that ultimately makes little sense.
In my area there is a huge turnover in storefronts as small businesses start and fail there - because all of the businesses don't make any sense when their clientele are all local but what they offer is stuff that is better to source non-locally. People starting businesses need to catchup to how the world actually works.
It's true that in the US we need small businesses to thrive for our economy to be healthy, but wouldn't it be better all around if the businesses that were thriving were doing so without artifice? I include corporate welfare in this also.
Certainly intelligent aliens may have no need for or not make CFCs.
But CFCs are not something that occur in nature by any process we know, and thus if we see them in abundance where they should not be, that's a sign something very interesting is happening there, caused by something that is worth investigating. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's a new natural phenomenon.
Again, the problem here is that if Zimmerman had not been stalking Martin this would not have happened.
Martin did not initiate the sequence of events that lead to his death. Zimmerman did.
If we are now saying that one can pick a fight with someone and then claim self-defense afterwards, this is seriously complete insanity.
My problem with this situation -aside from the insanity mentioned above- is that people are getting upset that Zimmerman is even being charged or having to stand trial. If Zimmerman shouldn't stand trial that just opens up the floodgates for insane scenarios. "This woman I was stalking through the park confronted me about following her, and I thought she might kill me so I shot her!" "I broke into this guy's house and he pulled out a gun, and fearing for my life I shot him!" "I started taunting this g at a bar, and he reached into his jacket, and fearing he was going to pull out a gun and kill me, I shot him!"
Zimmerman stalked Martin and ignored police suggestion that he not pursue. Zimmerman did not identify himself as any kind of watch. Zimmerman did not tell Martin he was armed and would defend himself. All Martin would have known was that some crazy motherfucker was following him and Martin had a right to stand his ground. The only way to pretend this was actually self-defense on Zimmerman's part is to pretend like the events that lead up to the confrontation did not happen.
I'm done even trying to understand the mindset of the people who think Zimmerman shouldn't be tried (note i said tried, not necessarily convicted)it makes no sense, it won't make sense, but thanks for trying to explain it. The underlying issues absolutely should be sorted out in court because as I said, insane scenarios could be excused under the reasoning I'm hearing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite.
Unprofessional people who have entirely too much ego investment in their work will find it difficult to take constructive criticism and feedback.
Professionals who are actually committed to being the best they can be (rather than trying to pretend they're the best) will welcome constructive criticism because it may actually help them get better. Nobody is perfect, nobody knows everything, so there's always something to learn.
I don't mean to say that people should just blindly accept any criticism unthinkingly, but rather that they should be capable of listening and integrating any improvements into their process.
My question to the OP:
You don't get very specific in the summary and I can't quite tell if the guy actually shuts you down or if you're just backing down because you are intimidated.
If you're getting shut down, my suggestion would be to look at getting other team members involved (or management if necessary) and present it as the code being written works but it is not maintainable and it is written in a style that doesn't conform to standards and thus forces everyone else to waste productive time just sussing out what it does. If your team and management are unwilling to get involved, then you can figure out if you want to work there enough to deal with this particular issue and go from there.
If it's just that you're intimidated, then I would say get over it and approach them in a professional manner - there have been numerous good suggestion about diplomatic ways to handle this in the responses so far.
Again I will point out that you're getting upset when someone speaks to you the same way you've been speaking to other people.
Thanks again for proving my point that nothing productive comes from talking to people in this fashion.
Eh, I'd say it's good odds we will have humans back on the moon inside 30 years, even if it is a staggering waste of resources to send people there. My bet is one of the emerging superpowers does it to prove they can, much like we did, but I'd also bet they'd try to one-up us (well, actually much more than one-up) by throwing up tons of supplies first so that their teams can spend a much longer time there.
Much better than focusing on human rated flights (which won't be significantly less expensive until we can make humans more robust) would be what we're doing now - relatively (compared to human rated flights) inexpensive robots going there. As robotics tech and AI gets better we'll be able to do a lot more for less expense than we do now. Couple that with private industry and hobbiests getting much more involved - SpaceEx, the space mapping (then mining) consortium, cubesats ($10,000 USD per cubesat, putting it well in the reach of small groups!) and it's a pretty good bet that Earth/Moon/Mars is going to get really busy fairly quickly.
For longer range stuff - thinking Voyager here - for the same money we spent back then we can have MULTIPLE probes that are vastly more capable and, with the propulsion systems coming on line that provide lower but constant thrust, much faster than those previous efforts.
The initial justification for sending humans into space - other than just "because it's there" - was because we did not have remotely the same kind of automation capabilities that we do now, and what we can do now will be massively eclipsed by what we have in 10-20 years from now. I don't mind it if we don't send people back to the moon if it means we'll be focusing space resources on something that, at least in practical terms, was nothing but an EXTREMELY expensive parlor trick.
I agree, your responses do show a definite lack of understanding about the basics of human interaction, but that's not terribly unheard of, especially amongst nerds.
Once you realize that people having discussions often enjoy discussing things that are outside of the area covered by an extremely specific example you might be able to contribute something more interesting than "you are all wrong."
In any case, before you get too down on yourself, think about it like this: yes, your ability to contribute meaningfully to a conversation is absolute shit right now, but that just means you can only get better!
What's funniest is that you did the exact same thing in your very first response to anything I wrote in this thread. You told everyone disagreeing with your stance that we didn't get it, that we had baggage that was clouding our judgment here, etc.
Maybe you can take a lesson from the fact that you don't seem to like it when people communicate with you in the same way you communicate with them.
Nah, I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. But thanks for contributing - you're adorable, and you should never change.
You are very obviously not a manager, or if you are, you have no more responsibility than telling teenagers "if you have time to lean you have time to clean!" If somehow you have gotten to a senior position at a firm that isn't serving fast food, please let me know which one so I can avoid them like the plague.
A good manager recognizes that the goal is to get the absolute best performance from their team. It is extremely unlikely that taking a huge public shit on one team member will accomplish that.
Explaining what is expected, how to accomplish it and what the consequences will be if those goals are not met is not "lacking courage" - it's basic "dealing with people 101."
Think about it for a moment. Manager comes out and instead of being diplomatic screams at Bill. Bill then is put into a position where he has no way to save face - if he meekly accepts the abuse he's going to get shit from his teammates and be humiliated. If he tries to explain further he's going to just get screamed at because it's obvious his boss isn't interested in listening, just screaming. At best that manager has motivated Bill to do better work JUST to avoid screaming, but Bill won't be motivated to do anything beyond the bare minimum to avoid that, and also lets everyone else know that this is a workplace that does not respect the workers and where one should be extremely careful about EVER disagreeing with the boss. Ultimately you wind up with everyone underperforming, the boss having to be a micromanaging screamer, and everyone loses.
But hey, at least you weren't being a giant pussy by being polite but firm to the people who work for you, am I right?
Except that's not how people work.
Linus may have been right about the underlying technical issue (I think he was), and the other guy may have been trying to blame shift, but what some people will see is that maybe it isn't so black and white, and that when Linus believes he is right about something he will not be willing to listen to the other side, and he will be more than happy to take a giant public shit on other people he disagrees with.
He also opened himself up for numerous attacks. He also got a lot of people talking about this whole stupid way of arguing rather than working on other, more useful, things. He also validated the "management by screaming until you do something right" mode of thinking that is unfortunately all too pervasive in tech circles.
There was more downside than upside to the way Linus handled himself here.
You pretty obviously didn't read my post as I explained how to get around that. I addressed the bullshit issue.
My point is this: beat them up. If they are worth being your boss they can take it and they will respect it.
Ask why it would be hard to work for them and demand a meaningful answer if they offer something stupid like "I expect amazing things from my people" - ask them why that's hard to handle and what support they would give you to accomplish that.
Make them be specific in their answers to all questions. If they describe something about themselves, make them give an example from real experience.
Question them about their use of buzzwords and bullshit.
Other co-workers will be interviewing them, too - so ask them to take notes then ask your potential boss about the things they said.
Don't be an asshole, just make it clear that you expect anyone who is going to be managing you to be amazing because you're amazing, so you're being hard nosed to weed out the empty suits.
Any decent boss is going to relish having an employee who isn't afraid, and if the place you work for is worth working for, they won't hire someone who would use such an interview against you.
I don't want to crap all over your nostalgia, but if you truly believe this, you're a moron or at least pig ignorant.
Stuff today is vastly better than the stuff back then in any way you care to look at it. Children have toys that are more complex than Voyager (sans power supply) and it would be a fairly trivial feat to make a probe that is vastly more capable, vastly more reliable & redundant, and vastly less expensive than Voyager with today's technology and processes.
Consumer devices today are built knowing that the technology in them will be absolutely obsolete in short order, so they are made "good enough" and cheaply enough to be a throwaway item. We can build better - and we do - but just not for that market. And by the way, the electronics in even the shittiest consumer electronics today are still vastly more powerful than the machines in Voyager.
I did not buy mine with a Black Friday deal. Lenovo offers sales all the time and it is also stupidly easy to get an affiliation discount on top of it. Literally anyone can sign up for the B&N Gold one, for example, which is what got me mine. After buying an SSD from Newegg and more RAM I had a much more functional machine for not much more that he surface would be - had I gone with the standard warranty, in fact, it would have been less (even with the after purchase addons) less than the Surface Pro. I'm not sure what you're on about with the 3-cell battery since even with that little battery it would have battery life comparable (better actually) an the Surface Pro.
My point here is still the same: the Surface Pro simply isn't compelling at that price point. There are more capable machines that can fulfill the same role (tablet that also can have a keyboard and be used as a laptop) with better specs for about the same price. It doesn't have the drool factor that makes people buy iPads, either. There's just no real reason for it to exist and so many reasons for it not to.
It is an ok piece of kit, just not at that price. Ad then on top of it it only has 4 hour battery life which totally defeats the purpose of a tablet. If you've got to be tethered to an outlet you might as well just use a laptop.
I posted in another thread about this about the ThinkPad X230T. Buying from Lenovo with an affiliated discount (I have a discount from Barnes & Noble Gold but there are tons of others) and being smart about upgrading after purchase (buying 16GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD from Newegg) my total, with a good warranty and all taxes, was a but under $1050.
The X230T blows the Surface Pro away and is a very good tablet and laptop.
That is very likely with some factory installed upgrades. On the Lenovo site right now - without any affiliate bennies right now - you can get the stock X230T for - little over 900. When I look at it with my affiliated service (Barnes & Nobel Gold) it's a bit less than that.
Lenovo is like Dell - they have some amazing deals frequently enough tha anyone who wan can take advantage if hey are slightly patient.
It was a big problem for YOU, but for Amazon it was a trivial cost of doing business that was likely vastly outweighed by the benefits of their system.
As long as that circumstance isn't too common (and it isn't since it took them so long to address and was confusing - that means it's rare enough that they had to figure out a process to identify and handle it) it isn't worth changing their system.
Compare it to full-blown laptops that are also touchscreen tablets and the Pro is still overpriced and underperforming.
I just wanted to cover the "but but it's a taaaaablet, not a laptop!" counter to your very valid point :)
What's funny is that if ever there was a person who would have a need for a "pro" tablet, it's me - but the Surface just can't come close in value to what I went with.
The problem is that there are better devices at or just below this price point that have pretty much the same use-case as a Surface Pro.
Maybe I'm not being terribly imaginative, but I can't see a use case where the Pro meets form factor, function and price point while being a better value than many, many other tools.
And, it's aimed at "Pro" users - who will shop around and who likely have no particular loyalty to Microsoft.
I'm on the opposite end - my use case recently changed and I needed a more powerful tablet (I was using an iPad2 for walkaround site visits), so I grabbed a ThinkPad X230T. With decent factory specs and some upgrades bought from Newegg (ssd, more RAM) it ran me $1030, and I get a battery life of 9.5-11 hours with the extended battery.
Surface Pro just seems like a product stuck in the not-so-sweet spot. People who need just a tablet can go with any number of choices (iPad, Galaxy, whatever) and people who need a tablet+, which is what the Pro seems to be going for, can just get a much better device for around the same price.
THQ could try this on their own without any of the infrastructure in place and without any expertise in this kind of offering, leading to a large number of potential problems that would make it much, much more difficult to succeed...
-OR-
They could work with an established partner in the field and avoid a bunch of pitfalls due to inexperience, improve their chances of success, and also give that established partner a framework with which to offer this kind of plan to other publishers in the future and some good charities get a bunch of cash as well...
Everybody - except for zealots - wins with the choices that were made.
I split it 25/75 in favor of Child's Play.
I want THQ to make money off of this - or at least cover whatever costs there are associated with it - so that other publishers will try this in the future.
No, but what they do teach in business school is don't spend $10 to go after a dime.
Cross platform development is nice, but unless the payoff from the costs associated with such development and the support hassles it creates is substantial, it's ultimately not worth the effort.
The only stuff I buy locally is stuff that I need instantly or can't get on-line, or that I need to physically verify works for my need, or that is somehow cheaper than on-line, or that would be completely inconvenient to get on-line. Usually that means clothes, gas, food and services.
I would rather local businesses be based on offerings that make sense rather than be artificially propped up by a movement that ultimately makes little sense.
In my area there is a huge turnover in storefronts as small businesses start and fail there - because all of the businesses don't make any sense when their clientele are all local but what they offer is stuff that is better to source non-locally. People starting businesses need to catchup to how the world actually works.
It's true that in the US we need small businesses to thrive for our economy to be healthy, but wouldn't it be better all around if the businesses that were thriving were doing so without artifice? I include corporate welfare in this also.
He says, without any irony, in a post on the Internet.
Certainly intelligent aliens may have no need for or not make CFCs.
But CFCs are not something that occur in nature by any process we know, and thus if we see them in abundance where they should not be, that's a sign something very interesting is happening there, caused by something that is worth investigating. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's a new natural phenomenon.
Again, the problem here is that if Zimmerman had not been stalking Martin this would not have happened.
Martin did not initiate the sequence of events that lead to his death. Zimmerman did.
If we are now saying that one can pick a fight with someone and then claim self-defense afterwards, this is seriously complete insanity.
My problem with this situation -aside from the insanity mentioned above- is that people are getting upset that Zimmerman is even being charged or having to stand trial. If Zimmerman shouldn't stand trial that just opens up the floodgates for insane scenarios. "This woman I was stalking through the park confronted me about following her, and I thought she might kill me so I shot her!" "I broke into this guy's house and he pulled out a gun, and fearing for my life I shot him!" "I started taunting this g at a bar, and he reached into his jacket, and fearing he was going to pull out a gun and kill me, I shot him!"
Zimmerman stalked Martin and ignored police suggestion that he not pursue. Zimmerman did not identify himself as any kind of watch. Zimmerman did not tell Martin he was armed and would defend himself. All Martin would have known was that some crazy motherfucker was following him and Martin had a right to stand his ground. The only way to pretend this was actually self-defense on Zimmerman's part is to pretend like the events that lead up to the confrontation did not happen.
I'm done even trying to understand the mindset of the people who think Zimmerman shouldn't be tried (note i said tried, not necessarily convicted)it makes no sense, it won't make sense, but thanks for trying to explain it. The underlying issues absolutely should be sorted out in court because as I said, insane scenarios could be excused under the reasoning I'm hearing.