The "starting fresh" thing was done so disrespectfully and there was no need. You don't take a giant dump on Luke, our understanding of The Force, and basically everything that came before and then try to make up for it by sucking the marrow out of the previous movies with constant homages and call-backs. You want to start fresh? Go start your own universe. One of the pro-TLJ things I've heard was "I like that it opens the force up to everyone". It's ALWAYS been open to everyone. That's why the Jedi had to search out new candidates. Doesn't it make sense that it could be a little hereditary too?
"it's time for the Jedi to end" Ya, because they only kept the peace for 10,000 years and in the 60 years since they got Pearl-Harbored, we've had galactic oppression, wars, and serial planetary genocide. Yep, makes sense, time for the Jedi to go.
"I like that it shows there is no pure good or evil". We've ALWAYS known that. That's why ROTJ worked. I guess now the only truly evil, beyond redemption people are people who have money, because the ONLY way they could make money was by selling arms to both sides. Obviously those people should all die in a fire. No exceptions.
And I'll just add that immediately after the movie I thought it was OK. I was still gobsmacked by lightspeed ram and a few other great shots. By the time I had walked out to my car I had questions and started reflecting on the story arc. By the time I got home, I hated the movie. That could explain why the data from poll takers right outside the theater tilts more towards positive than the RT audience score. In my experience 50/50 seems pretty accurate.
I wonder how they KNOW all the mosquitoes are infected, or that 5% of them aren't immune to the bacteria and they're just breeding super mosquitoes. I'm sure they've thought about this, but there still has to be a certain amount of risk involved in this type of venture.
Like a great mathematician once said.. "Life finds a way". He also explained chaos theory in a fairly creepy way.
because their tires will eventually wear out the road
What do you think wears out a road? It's not the tires, it's the 3k - 4k pound car that sits ON the tires. If a residential road takes 500 cars a day, maybe it will last 10 years. If you turn that road into a freeway bypass, and shove 5000 cars a day down it, it's going to wear out sooner, maybe every year. So the residents have to pay an extra $800 a year because freeway people have shitty lives, need a nap and want to save 10 minutes on their commute? The same Freeway people that quite possibly don't live in the same city and pay no taxes to the city they're ruining.
I think that's just incredibly selfish. 5000 short-cutters gain a tiny reprieve while destroying the quality of life for the 50 neighborhood residents. "My life sucks, so it's ok to make yours suck more." That's backwards.
Sounds great. Why don't the local residents do that? Why should they not be burdened by the problem just as much as the drivers are? Why the double standard?
So your solution is to cause a problem for someone else. Nice.
The residents are deliberately ruining a public resource for everyone.
Back in the long-long-ago, people had some courtesy and respect for other people. Your attitude is exactly why we can't have nice things anymore. Generally, if you don't have any reason to be in a residential area, you should stay out of it. That's just common courtesy. Just because it's not illegal to drive on the road, doesn't mean it's not a douche move to cut through someone else's neighborhood. Those people pay for the road in front of their house through property taxes and assessments, so you should show some respect by not wearing the road out prematurely because it was not designed nor built to support freeway levels of use. "If it's legal, it's OK" is a shitty mentality. I'd rather not live in a society where they have to try and legislate good manners.
Seriously, I feel bad for the guy, but there are seven stranded castaways with no light, no motor car, not a single luxury, RIGHT HERE ON EARTH! Can't somebody help those poor people? (dibs on Mary Ann).
Not quite. It entails making decisions that the children are unable to make for themselves. It does not entail overriding the decisions that they are able to make.
Seriously? Are you saying that our hypothetical lead-eating kid did not decide to put the toy in his mouth? Did it just fall in there like spiders do when we're asleep? Babies can't make decisions? Do they crawl around like roombas all the time? No. When you call a baby and he crawls to you, what is that? Obviously that is a decision. So judging by your own statement (bolded even!), you believe that when a child makes a decision that will result in harm, you have to intervene. If that is not the case then you must convince me that babies are incapable of making any decisions. (ie should I put this in my mouth or not).
Let's save the legal age debate until we can get some of these basic premises worked out. I will say that I know nothing magical happens on your 18th birthday. However, when the drinking age was 18, there was often some voo-doo going on the next morning:)
You're just being obtuse because you do not want to admit that parents are morally obligated to raise their children and that entails making decisions for them. If you admit it, even if the kid is a baby, your whole argument goes down the crapper. If you admit that parents need to make decisions for their babies, then the question becomes "when do they stop"?
I've never heard you give a specific age at which children should have the right to make their own 'life decisions' because you know that picking any indicator, or any age is going to be just as arbitrary as 18 is. So your position that "children should not have to go to school if they don't want to" is unsupportable. If you want to continue discussing this, you will have to state "Yes, parents are required to make decisions for their babies" in your next post and we can go from there.
There are plenty of teens that have been released from their prisons early, they're called drop-outs. Maybe we should do a survey to see how the job market is for them. Oh wait, we don't have to, there are a ton of those already:
The decision to drop out is a dangerous one
for the student, particularly in a post-Industrial
and technological age in which workers need at
least a high school diploma to compete in the
workforce. Dropouts are much more likely than
their peers who graduate to be unemployed, living
in poverty, receiving public assistance, in prison,
on death row, unhealthy, divorced, and ultimately
single parents with children who drop out from
high school themselves.
(This is from a pdf called "The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts".) Free form learning doesn't seem to work out too well for most of these people, why do you think it will work for everyone? Unemployed, on the dole, or on death row, good times. Here's another little blurb:
One 17-year-old male in our focus groups put
it simply, "It's important to get an education to
do well in life." A 19-year-old female said of drop
ping out, "I wouldn't make the same decision. I
would stay in school." A female from Baltimore
put it succinctly, "I think it's one of the worst
regrets of my life."
They said they did not think of their future
when deciding to drop out but wanted freedom
or money right then, or gave up on their dreams
because graduation seemed far away. This con
forms to models of adolescent psychology that
have found adolescents have difficulty with
long-term planning and delayed gratification.
Let me head you off before you point out that this particular study was done for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now just because Bill Gates was involved does not necessarily invalidate the study!;)
I didn't say 18 was too early for kids to go off on their own. I think 18 is about right. They'll start paying real world consequences for not paying attention to their spiffy new brain function.
Come on, even though it annoyed you, that Boo Hoo comment was pretty funny. BTW My attitude has less to do with my own past and more to do with my current observations... sigh, rolls eyes.
I'm not sure how we made the leap from comparing two groups of people with sub-optimal decision making abilities to racism and misogyny, but if I understand you, you want to abolish school and have feral children running around 'starting their careers'? You neatly sidestepped the point I made about sweatshops. What, exactly, is your plan for keeping our sons out of ditches and our daughters off of poles?
Your computer analogy is flawed. All of your computers would presumably arrive at the same answer. A more appropriate analogy would be to ask a computer with a math-co to add four numbers together and then ask a random number generator to do it. Oh, you'll get an answer from the random number generator, and it might even be right once in a while, but it's probably not the best answer.
[the brain] doesn't look the same at 15 as it will at 35 -- nor does it the same at 35 as it will at 85. Does that mean geriatric brains are the only ones that can make valid decisions? No, because decision-making is a process, not a lobe or a gland or an organ.
Decision making is a process that relies on lobes and an organ to function optimally.
"when teens make choices in emotionally charged situations, those choices are often more weighted in feelings (the mature limbic system) over logic (the not-yet-mature prefrontal cortex)." Priorities are a matter of opinion, and there is no right answer.
Teenagers make decisions with an "I want now", immediate gratification slant. Planning ahead and estimating risks are two skills that helped humans get the top dog slot on this planet. Allowing kids to make all their own 'life' decisions would probably result in us losing that slot to the dolphins or possibly border collies. If immediate gratification is a good priority to use in life, then you're advocating not only feral children, but a feral society. Helping your children make decisions and sometimes making decisions for them, is called 'raising them'. It's your job to try and stop your kid from making decisions that will make him happy for a week but he'll regret the rest of his life. They'll be teenagers for less than 10 years. They'll be adults for 60 more. Teen-kid doesn't give a shit about adult-kid, so you have to watch out for adult-kid.
And how are you unaware that we already emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them? We wait until their 18th birthday to do it, but we don't require them to demonstrate any maturity or responsibility whatsoever.
Eighteen is the age our culture has determined MOST kids have had enough time to become equipped to doing something productive with their lives. IMO they are still not able to make the best decisions that will result in their long term happiness. Hopefully they won't do anything that will seriously limit their chances of attaining that goal, but you have to cut them loose sometime.
I haven't heard your plan for teaching children the basic skills needed to deal with life. Unless you have one, you're just complaining about school, which is the best plan we've been able to come up with so far.
Why are they asking her for a phone number? You're telling me that the school doesn't have emergency contact information for all of their students?
Where do you think they get the contact information? The student brings it from home. Besides, it doesn't matter, they couldn't get in contact with her parents with whatever information they had and she wouldn't give them the information either.
Or, she's afraid to tell her mom that she got suspended. Which indicates to me that informing the parent (directly, don't send home a note) might be effective.
She was arrested. Her legal guardians would have had to pick her up and post bail. You don't think they knew she was suspended? Awww come on, admit it, she's just a little snotty bitch and not the helpless victim of heinous human rights violations!
So we shouldn't make kids go to school at all? Should we fling the doors open on the mental institutions too? The residents' movements are restricted and not many employers get away with treating their employees like that. Children and mental patients aren't that different. There are plenty of studies that show the teenage brain isn't fully developed, and the last thing that develops is decision making. Insane people don't know they're insane, and teen age kids think they know everything. So when do we allow kids to make all their own decisions? At what point should we let them start their careers? 15? 10? 5? Then Martha Stewart won't have to use foreigners in her sweat shops. She can use good 'ol American child labor. The whole point of school is to TRY and teach them some kind of skills so they're qualified to do something besides menial labor or pole dancing. I'm not saying the current curriculum does a great job of that, not by a long shot. But I do believe that most teachers do their best and what is taught needs to be generic enough to give the students a fundamental base.
The real thing they're learning in school is how to work in a group and follow rules. Yes, a lot of the rules are stupid, but that's just part of living in a society. Everyone follows some stupid rules at some time. Sitting at a red light when no one is coming is stupid, but I do it. If some kid is already totally equipped for life and school has nothing to offer him, then he always has the option to file for emancipation. That's really what you're talking about. Except you want to emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them. And them with their silly putty decision making brains. Tsk tsk.
I think we disagree on just one point. She gave them the wrong numbers to call her parents. At that point I'd say "screw it, arrest her, I'm not sitting here and watching her until somebody misses her. That could be days!" I think that girl has a single mom that is in over her head and is struggling just to make ends meet. Inconveniencing the mom to the point of possibly losing her job probably won't change things for the better. Hopefully being arrested and suspended still has enough social stigma attached to it these days that her friends will bring some peer pressure to bear on her problematic behavior. That would do more to fix her attitude than anything else.
BTW, here's an update on the story: She got suspended but they caught her hiding in the girls bathroom on two different days. I guess she's not there against her will if she'll trespass to be there.
Please, don't you agree the statement "school is more like a sentence" is just a tinsy bit melodramatic? Yes, I suppose I could have started my own business, but by the same token, there must be a school out there that doesn't crush the fragile flower of a students individuality too. So it's possible she has other choices as well.
Bottom line is, she lied to a cop and gave them false telephone numbers when they tried to contact her parents. That alone is enough to get you arrested in many jurisdictions. Had she refused to speak, there might be some legal question but, to be honest, I'm not even sure what civil rights a minor has. Maybe there's a cost associated with not being legally responsible for your actions, perhaps some rights are part of that cost. One of the reasons the cop is there is because the teachers can't maintain order without the school getting sued by somebody who feels they're entitled to a free ride. That same sense of entitlement is what led our heroine to believe it was her right to be a defiant, bald-faced liar to the teacher, the principle and two cops. The whole thing is certainly stupid, but it is far from a human rights travesty.
BTW, She hates being in that school so very much that, even though she was suspended, they caught her in the girls bathroom on Thursday and Friday and cited her with trespassing. If your school experience was truly horrific, Sorry about the boo-hoo. If it was pretty much average, I'll let it stand.
First off, I don't disagree with you, but at the same time, I don't think that having the on site cop handle the matter is that far off base either. Let me play devils advocate here:
We know you have been using your cell phone and disrupting class. You can either give it up or we'll call your parents and keep you in the office until they come to get you. We'll return your phone to you at the end of the day.
Eat me
We're calling your parents and keeping you here until they come to get you.
Eat me
1-3 days in house detention/suspension
Eat me
See where I'm going with this? The fact is, some parents won't or can't discipline their kids. The school can't either because no matter what they do, they'll get sued. I think you're right, the school is asked to act as a parent, and given parenting responsibilities, but none of the rights. So they had one of societies disciplinarians take care of it, and she pissed him off. If this was a private school, I don't doubt she would have been booted with no police involvement. But she was in a public school (BTW, it's a pretty public place when you vote) and expulsion from a public school is probably more serious than some pissy little juvi offense that's going to go away in three years. And how do you KNOW she wasn't there voluntarily? She could have skipped and texted all the live-long day. She obviously isn't afraid of getting in trouble. Let me say once again, I agree, I don't think this was handled very well, but I don't think it's as big a fiasco as people are making it out to be.
A job is something you take on voluntarily for compensation. Attending school against your will, under the threat of legal penalty, is more of a sentence.
School is more like a sentence? B-o-o H-o-o. A job is something you take on voluntarily? I don't know anyone that wouldn't quit their job if they could still live in a house and feed their family without one. I'm not saying calling the cops is what SHOULD have happened, I just don't think it's as utterly preposterous as people are making it out to be. Say they try and expel her, what does the school say when the parents ask for proof? They can't do anything to the kid because they'll get sued, so they use the cop that is on site so they have some kind of case. I'm guessing here, but I'd say you're either still in, or freshly out of school. I'm sorry to say, as much as school sucks, real life sucks just as hard.
What's "disruptive" about wanting to be left alone? Where's the evidence that this girl typing text messages on her phone was actually interfering with anyone else's education
The teacher noticed and it annoyed her. Therefor it interrupted every single student's education. The police report states she 'talked' to a student in the hall. When the cop asked the other student about it, the other student said snowflake was trying to ditch her phone because she knew she was in trouble. The other student said she wanted no part of it and confirmed snowflake was using the phone in class. Does that sound like the other student was routing for poor snowflake? A lot of kids have ONE job to do, and that's to go to school so they can do something besides sleep, eat, shit and text.
So if I lie to my teacher, or otherwise violate school policy, I can be searched and arrested? (cite some legal basis here please, I can find none and would find it most disturbing)
How is this different from saying "If I smuggle an 8oz can of Coke through a TSA security check point, and there are witnesses, and I lie and am a complete prick about it, I can get in trouble?" Why should she get away with texting when my tiny swiss army knife had to go in the bin? I'm pretty sure if I tried to hide it in my butt crack and played games with the TSA officers, I would've had a worse day than she did. If you're voluntarily in a public place that has rules, you have to follow them. It sucks but that's the way it is.
Seriously, I don't want to have to 'relate' to my slaves. If I have to relate to my remote control to use it, I'll order a new one and change the channels by hand until it arrives. My god, if they stick me in a home when I'm old and give me a friend-in-a-box that I have to relate to, I hope they deliver a noose along with it.
Or maybe we could just rotate the profile once a week. One week use behavioral profiling, one week it's turbans, the next it could be people with long fingernails, and then maybe if your airline ticket number ends in 42. I'll bet each one of those profiles would net you a 1 in 100 chance to bust somebody for something.
If this guy was just some dumb ass recording a movie then the penalties were a bit excessive and strange. However, I think the authorities believe this guy is part of piracy operation. They don't have enough proof to bust him for everything they suspect him of, so they put the screws to him for what they do have on him. From TFA:
The conviction came as a relief to the motion picture industry, which had lobbied for the legislation that came into effect on June 1, 2007, and conducted a six-month investigation that led to Lissaman's arrest.
She said all movies are distinctly watermarked, which means legal or illegal copies can be traced back to a specific theatre. That led to the lengthy surveillance.
To me, this implies they've found pirtated movies being distributed, studied the watermark, staked out the theater identified by the watermark, and busted this guy recording a movie in that theater. That makes this statement seem more accusatory and less FUD:
Jones and Christiansen said in their statements to the court a single copy of a movie made in a Canadian theatre can be used to distribute both unlimited numbers of DVDs that are shipped around the world via the Internet or other means for distribution.
If that's the case, they should have let him go, followed him around and busted him in the actual act of distributing. Sounds to me like the cops were just lazy and the guy could be getting off easy. That's going under the assumption that the article is telling the whole story, which is doubtful. If it told the whole story, it would be longer than a sound byte and the public would get bored.
Thnk about it for a second. You don't install a keylogger on a server and then capture logins from students from remote machines... the keyloggers were installed on the students' laptops. This is NOT "hacking" or "cracking" the university's computers. He installed keyloggers on up to 37 other students' laptops to capture their login info.
Not so. According to http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/09/09/ot-hacker-080909.html he installed the keylogger on a public terminal. He didn't run around installing software on everyone's laptop. Another interesting note here is the accounts he compromised were all Journalist student's accounts.
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The "starting fresh" thing was done so disrespectfully and there was no need. You don't take a giant dump on Luke, our understanding of The Force, and basically everything that came before and then try to make up for it by sucking the marrow out of the previous movies with constant homages and call-backs. You want to start fresh? Go start your own universe. One of the pro-TLJ things I've heard was "I like that it opens the force up to everyone". It's ALWAYS been open to everyone. That's why the Jedi had to search out new candidates. Doesn't it make sense that it could be a little hereditary too?
"it's time for the Jedi to end" Ya, because they only kept the peace for 10,000 years and in the 60 years since they got Pearl-Harbored, we've had galactic oppression, wars, and serial planetary genocide. Yep, makes sense, time for the Jedi to go.
"I like that it shows there is no pure good or evil". We've ALWAYS known that. That's why ROTJ worked. I guess now the only truly evil, beyond redemption people are people who have money, because the ONLY way they could make money was by selling arms to both sides. Obviously those people should all die in a fire. No exceptions.
And I'll just add that immediately after the movie I thought it was OK. I was still gobsmacked by lightspeed ram and a few other great shots. By the time I had walked out to my car I had questions and started reflecting on the story arc. By the time I got home, I hated the movie. That could explain why the data from poll takers right outside the theater tilts more towards positive than the RT audience score. In my experience 50/50 seems pretty accurate.
I wonder how they KNOW all the mosquitoes are infected, or that 5% of them aren't immune to the bacteria and they're just breeding super mosquitoes. I'm sure they've thought about this, but there still has to be a certain amount of risk involved in this type of venture. Like a great mathematician once said.. "Life finds a way". He also explained chaos theory in a fairly creepy way.
because their tires will eventually wear out the road
What do you think wears out a road? It's not the tires, it's the 3k - 4k pound car that sits ON the tires. If a residential road takes 500 cars a day, maybe it will last 10 years. If you turn that road into a freeway bypass, and shove 5000 cars a day down it, it's going to wear out sooner, maybe every year. So the residents have to pay an extra $800 a year because freeway people have shitty lives, need a nap and want to save 10 minutes on their commute? The same Freeway people that quite possibly don't live in the same city and pay no taxes to the city they're ruining. I think that's just incredibly selfish. 5000 short-cutters gain a tiny reprieve while destroying the quality of life for the 50 neighborhood residents. "My life sucks, so it's ok to make yours suck more." That's backwards.
Sounds great. Why don't the local residents do that? Why should they not be burdened by the problem just as much as the drivers are? Why the double standard?
So your solution is to cause a problem for someone else. Nice.
The residents are deliberately ruining a public resource for everyone.
Back in the long-long-ago, people had some courtesy and respect for other people. Your attitude is exactly why we can't have nice things anymore. Generally, if you don't have any reason to be in a residential area, you should stay out of it. That's just common courtesy. Just because it's not illegal to drive on the road, doesn't mean it's not a douche move to cut through someone else's neighborhood. Those people pay for the road in front of their house through property taxes and assessments, so you should show some respect by not wearing the road out prematurely because it was not designed nor built to support freeway levels of use. "If it's legal, it's OK" is a shitty mentality. I'd rather not live in a society where they have to try and legislate good manners.
Seriously, I feel bad for the guy, but there are seven stranded castaways with no light, no motor car, not a single luxury, RIGHT HERE ON EARTH! Can't somebody help those poor people? (dibs on Mary Ann).
When the boot is on the other face.
Orwell had some great imagery, didn't he?
I would very much like to sign up for this Sharon car pool you speak of.
Seriously? Are you saying that our hypothetical lead-eating kid did not decide to put the toy in his mouth? Did it just fall in there like spiders do when we're asleep? Babies can't make decisions? Do they crawl around like roombas all the time? No. When you call a baby and he crawls to you, what is that? Obviously that is a decision. So judging by your own statement (bolded even!), you believe that when a child makes a decision that will result in harm, you have to intervene. If that is not the case then you must convince me that babies are incapable of making any decisions. (ie should I put this in my mouth or not).
:)
Let's save the legal age debate until we can get some of these basic premises worked out. I will say that I know nothing magical happens on your 18th birthday. However, when the drinking age was 18, there was often some voo-doo going on the next morning
You're just being obtuse because you do not want to admit that parents are morally obligated to raise their children and that entails making decisions for them. If you admit it, even if the kid is a baby, your whole argument goes down the crapper. If you admit that parents need to make decisions for their babies, then the question becomes "when do they stop"?
I've never heard you give a specific age at which children should have the right to make their own 'life decisions' because you know that picking any indicator, or any age is going to be just as arbitrary as 18 is. So your position that "children should not have to go to school if they don't want to" is unsupportable. If you want to continue discussing this, you will have to state "Yes, parents are required to make decisions for their babies" in your next post and we can go from there.
If your kid decided that lead toys from China where simply delicious, would you allow him to continue to eat them?
So, feral children it is.
;)
There are plenty of teens that have been released from their prisons early, they're called drop-outs. Maybe we should do a survey to see how the job market is for them. Oh wait, we don't have to, there are a ton of those already:
The decision to drop out is a dangerous one for the student, particularly in a post-Industrial and technological age in which workers need at least a high school diploma to compete in the workforce. Dropouts are much more likely than their peers who graduate to be unemployed, living in poverty, receiving public assistance, in prison, on death row, unhealthy, divorced, and ultimately single parents with children who drop out from high school themselves.
(This is from a pdf called "The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts".) Free form learning doesn't seem to work out too well for most of these people, why do you think it will work for everyone? Unemployed, on the dole, or on death row, good times. Here's another little blurb:
One 17-year-old male in our focus groups put it simply, "It's important to get an education to do well in life." A 19-year-old female said of drop ping out, "I wouldn't make the same decision. I would stay in school." A female from Baltimore put it succinctly, "I think it's one of the worst regrets of my life." They said they did not think of their future when deciding to drop out but wanted freedom or money right then, or gave up on their dreams because graduation seemed far away. This con forms to models of adolescent psychology that have found adolescents have difficulty with long-term planning and delayed gratification.
Let me head you off before you point out that this particular study was done for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now just because Bill Gates was involved does not necessarily invalidate the study!
I didn't say 18 was too early for kids to go off on their own. I think 18 is about right. They'll start paying real world consequences for not paying attention to their spiffy new brain function.
Come on, even though it annoyed you, that Boo Hoo comment was pretty funny. BTW My attitude has less to do with my own past and more to do with my current observations... sigh, rolls eyes.
Your computer analogy is flawed. All of your computers would presumably arrive at the same answer. A more appropriate analogy would be to ask a computer with a math-co to add four numbers together and then ask a random number generator to do it. Oh, you'll get an answer from the random number generator, and it might even be right once in a while, but it's probably not the best answer.
Decision making is a process that relies on lobes and an organ to function optimally.
Teenagers make decisions with an "I want now", immediate gratification slant. Planning ahead and estimating risks are two skills that helped humans get the top dog slot on this planet. Allowing kids to make all their own 'life' decisions would probably result in us losing that slot to the dolphins or possibly border collies. If immediate gratification is a good priority to use in life, then you're advocating not only feral children, but a feral society. Helping your children make decisions and sometimes making decisions for them, is called 'raising them'. It's your job to try and stop your kid from making decisions that will make him happy for a week but he'll regret the rest of his life. They'll be teenagers for less than 10 years. They'll be adults for 60 more. Teen-kid doesn't give a shit about adult-kid, so you have to watch out for adult-kid.
Eighteen is the age our culture has determined MOST kids have had enough time to become equipped to doing something productive with their lives. IMO they are still not able to make the best decisions that will result in their long term happiness. Hopefully they won't do anything that will seriously limit their chances of attaining that goal, but you have to cut them loose sometime.
I haven't heard your plan for teaching children the basic skills needed to deal with life. Unless you have one, you're just complaining about school, which is the best plan we've been able to come up with so far.
Where do you think they get the contact information? The student brings it from home. Besides, it doesn't matter, they couldn't get in contact with her parents with whatever information they had and she wouldn't give them the information either.
She was arrested. Her legal guardians would have had to pick her up and post bail. You don't think they knew she was suspended? Awww come on, admit it, she's just a little snotty bitch and not the helpless victim of heinous human rights violations!
Good discussion though. Take care.
So we shouldn't make kids go to school at all? Should we fling the doors open on the mental institutions too? The residents' movements are restricted and not many employers get away with treating their employees like that. Children and mental patients aren't that different. There are plenty of studies that show the teenage brain isn't fully developed, and the last thing that develops is decision making . Insane people don't know they're insane, and teen age kids think they know everything. So when do we allow kids to make all their own decisions? At what point should we let them start their careers? 15? 10? 5? Then Martha Stewart won't have to use foreigners in her sweat shops. She can use good 'ol American child labor. The whole point of school is to TRY and teach them some kind of skills so they're qualified to do something besides menial labor or pole dancing. I'm not saying the current curriculum does a great job of that, not by a long shot. But I do believe that most teachers do their best and what is taught needs to be generic enough to give the students a fundamental base.
The real thing they're learning in school is how to work in a group and follow rules. Yes, a lot of the rules are stupid, but that's just part of living in a society. Everyone follows some stupid rules at some time. Sitting at a red light when no one is coming is stupid, but I do it. If some kid is already totally equipped for life and school has nothing to offer him, then he always has the option to file for emancipation. That's really what you're talking about. Except you want to emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them. And them with their silly putty decision making brains. Tsk tsk.
I think we disagree on just one point. She gave them the wrong numbers to call her parents. At that point I'd say "screw it, arrest her, I'm not sitting here and watching her until somebody misses her. That could be days!" I think that girl has a single mom that is in over her head and is struggling just to make ends meet. Inconveniencing the mom to the point of possibly losing her job probably won't change things for the better. Hopefully being arrested and suspended still has enough social stigma attached to it these days that her friends will bring some peer pressure to bear on her problematic behavior. That would do more to fix her attitude than anything else.
BTW, here's an update on the story: She got suspended but they caught her hiding in the girls bathroom on two different days. I guess she's not there against her will if she'll trespass to be there.
Please, don't you agree the statement "school is more like a sentence" is just a tinsy bit melodramatic?
Yes, I suppose I could have started my own business, but by the same token, there must be a school out there that doesn't crush the fragile flower of a students individuality too. So it's possible she has other choices as well.
Bottom line is, she lied to a cop and gave them false telephone numbers when they tried to contact her parents. That alone is enough to get you arrested in many jurisdictions. Had she refused to speak, there might be some legal question but, to be honest, I'm not even sure what civil rights a minor has. Maybe there's a cost associated with not being legally responsible for your actions, perhaps some rights are part of that cost. One of the reasons the cop is there is because the teachers can't maintain order without the school getting sued by somebody who feels they're entitled to a free ride. That same sense of entitlement is what led our heroine to believe it was her right to be a defiant, bald-faced liar to the teacher, the principle and two cops. The whole thing is certainly stupid, but it is far from a human rights travesty.
BTW, She hates being in that school so very much that, even though she was suspended, they caught her in the girls bathroom on Thursday and Friday and cited her with trespassing.
If your school experience was truly horrific, Sorry about the boo-hoo. If it was pretty much average, I'll let it stand.
Eat me
Eat me
Eat me
See where I'm going with this? The fact is, some parents won't or can't discipline their kids. The school can't either because no matter what they do, they'll get sued. I think you're right, the school is asked to act as a parent, and given parenting responsibilities, but none of the rights. So they had one of societies disciplinarians take care of it, and she pissed him off. If this was a private school, I don't doubt she would have been booted with no police involvement. But she was in a public school (BTW, it's a pretty public place when you vote) and expulsion from a public school is probably more serious than some pissy little juvi offense that's going to go away in three years. And how do you KNOW she wasn't there voluntarily? She could have skipped and texted all the live-long day. She obviously isn't afraid of getting in trouble. Let me say once again, I agree, I don't think this was handled very well, but I don't think it's as big a fiasco as people are making it out to be.
School is more like a sentence? B-o-o H-o-o. A job is something you take on voluntarily? I don't know anyone that wouldn't quit their job if they could still live in a house and feed their family without one. I'm not saying calling the cops is what SHOULD have happened, I just don't think it's as utterly preposterous as people are making it out to be. Say they try and expel her, what does the school say when the parents ask for proof? They can't do anything to the kid because they'll get sued, so they use the cop that is on site so they have some kind of case. I'm guessing here, but I'd say you're either still in, or freshly out of school. I'm sorry to say, as much as school sucks, real life sucks just as hard.
The teacher noticed and it annoyed her. Therefor it interrupted every single student's education. The police report states she 'talked' to a student in the hall. When the cop asked the other student about it, the other student said snowflake was trying to ditch her phone because she knew she was in trouble. The other student said she wanted no part of it and confirmed snowflake was using the phone in class. Does that sound like the other student was routing for poor snowflake? A lot of kids have ONE job to do, and that's to go to school so they can do something besides sleep, eat, shit and text.
How is this different from saying "If I smuggle an 8oz can of Coke through a TSA security check point, and there are witnesses, and I lie and am a complete prick about it, I can get in trouble?" Why should she get away with texting when my tiny swiss army knife had to go in the bin? I'm pretty sure if I tried to hide it in my butt crack and played games with the TSA officers, I would've had a worse day than she did. If you're voluntarily in a public place that has rules, you have to follow them. It sucks but that's the way it is.
This thing would never turn. So the guy riding it can only go straight. And yet he's wearing flip-flops.
Seriously, I don't want to have to 'relate' to my slaves. If I have to relate to my remote control to use it, I'll order a new one and change the channels by hand until it arrives. My god, if they stick me in a home when I'm old and give me a friend-in-a-box that I have to relate to, I hope they deliver a noose along with it.
Or maybe we could just rotate the profile once a week. One week use behavioral profiling, one week it's turbans, the next it could be people with long fingernails, and then maybe if your airline ticket number ends in 42. I'll bet each one of those profiles would net you a 1 in 100 chance to bust somebody for something.
The conviction came as a relief to the motion picture industry, which had lobbied for the legislation that came into effect on June 1, 2007, and conducted a six-month investigation that led to Lissaman's arrest.
She said all movies are distinctly watermarked, which means legal or illegal copies can be traced back to a specific theatre. That led to the lengthy surveillance.
To me, this implies they've found pirtated movies being distributed, studied the watermark, staked out the theater identified by the watermark, and busted this guy recording a movie in that theater. That makes this statement seem more accusatory and less FUD:
Jones and Christiansen said in their statements to the court a single copy of a movie made in a Canadian theatre can be used to distribute both unlimited numbers of DVDs that are shipped around the world via the Internet or other means for distribution.
If that's the case, they should have let him go, followed him around and busted him in the actual act of distributing. Sounds to me like the cops were just lazy and the guy could be getting off easy. That's going under the assumption that the article is telling the whole story, which is doubtful. If it told the whole story, it would be longer than a sound byte and the public would get bored.
Not so. According to http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/09/09/ot-hacker-080909.html he installed the keylogger on a public terminal. He didn't run around installing software on everyone's laptop. Another interesting note here is the accounts he compromised were all Journalist student's accounts.