"I 100% agree that communication is vital. But if people are hesitant to communicate because they fear the reaction from their leader/boss/whatever they will not communicate."
Very true. Now look at the situation. Was she afraid of his reaction here? No, she was not, she spoke right up and made her point directly. People are not afraid of Linus, the use of the word 'violence' is just gratuitous drama digging. The best I know he's never punched anyone, ever. He can and will let you know he thinks you are being an idiot if you do something idiotic. That's not violence, and to whatever degree the reaction can be characterised as 'fear' it's a good fear - we dont want people doing things that are idiotic. That's not being abusive, that's just communicating clearly.
Excessive politeness is not a positive in a situation where people need to communicate effectively with each other.
The stats are truly sad. The problem is people who dont understand or practice firearm safety. There are plenty of teachers available, so that can ultimately only be their own fault. We can blame the media for encouraging the cavalier attitudes and idiotic/suicidal/negligent practices they portray, and they deserve to get called for it, but ultimately each individual still has choices to make. If you choose to arm yourself with a weapon without learning how to properly and safely store and handle that weapon it is ultimately your responsibility. I just hope you shoot yourself, instead of someone else.
Frankly people that dont care and cannot be bothered to understand and practice good firearm safety should not have weapons. But their stupidity must not be allowed to turn into an excuse to disarm the rest of us, which would ultimately cause far greater harm, to the rest of us.
The supposedly safer weapons will wind up being more dangerous, because they will just encourage the idiots in their idiocy. "Oh dont worry it's not loaded" will be joined by "oh dont worry it's a smart gun!" on the list of things morons say just before blowing away themselves or their friends.
You are partially correct, but what you are missing is why it works. And it works because it's about communication. Communication is the most important thing here.
You get real communication between people who arent afraid to yell and curse each other out (and dont take it personally.)
Political correctness on the other hand promises to protect us from being made uncomfortable, and there may be room for argument on how well it serves that goal, but the hidden cost is a stiff tarrif on communication. When you more than one person working on the same project, communication is generally pretty important.
'No one has the unfettered right to abuse others in whatever manner they see fit."
To the contrary, since you are clearly abusing the word abuse, using your definition (where simply speaking to you like an adult is considered abuse) everyone has the right to do that. Your remedy, if you dislike it, is to not listen to us.
Because it seems pretty obvious that Linus is right, and it's the other developer who is throwing her threatening a hissy fit like a three year old because she isnt used to anyone daring to speak frankly in front of her.
You view his forthrightness as something you would have to 'put up' with and dont like it, but you are not everyone. For many, it is the nauseating 'professionalism' of the office, where everyone puts on a polite little front and never a mean word is heard as the knives are sharpened and backs brutally pierced.
THAT is what you have to pay me to put up with. I havent worked with Linus but from what I have read it would be a pleasure.
You need to read a little better. Although I congratulate you on posting good links and formatting your message readably, you sadly missed the point. Those are not text ads, and text ads arent how drive-bys work. The 'annoying javascript contraptions' I was talking about - THAT is how the drivebys work.
Genocide is really a modern concept and no one in ancient times actually had the power to pull it off - not to say that something very like it was not attempted routinely. But a modern genocide implies killing off a group utterly - men women and children. In ancient times it was very rare to kill the women and children, though that does not necessarily mean they would be treated well. But more importantly the scale of conflicts was simply much smaller. You could have all hell break loose in one valley without it having too much effect a mile or two up the road. At that scale what we think of as genocide really isnt possible.
The closest to genocide you would be likely to see was a small group of warriors moving into an area, killing men and taking women. Small groups of males would travel large distances for this sort of thing, while people generally, most males and essentially all females appear to have lived and died within a mile of where they were born. And that is what the genetics of the British Isles appears to reflect - continuity on the female side going all the way back to early stone age settlements, with episode after episode of 'peppering' with foreign men, celtic, scandinavian, saxon, and so forth.
Pretty much the same story all over the world, actually, not just the british isles.
When you made the mistake of pointing a web browser at their site without making sure that javascript execution was disabled or controlled in some other way first.
Did you really not even read the message you replied to?
He said (and I agree) that the problem is NOT ads. But if you choose to make your ads annoying javascript contraptions instead of readable text, THEN we will block your ads. And not feel bad at all about it. If you want us to see your ads, you know what to do.
Whee, the UI of a game is scripted. That's not exactly a critical application, and it's not like they tried to write the whole thing in ecmascript. And it's not like the gamer market hasnt been well traind to accept and even expect to constantly buy more powerful hardware in order to 'consume' a never-ending string of bugfixes from game launch date to EOL.. Anyone that sets anything up so that his game UI crashing or malfunctioning in strange or unforseen ways is a big problem is an idiot.
"Scripted languages have enormous advantage of being much easier to bugfix than native apps."
This is a strange statement to make. They do avoid certain types of bugs by not giving you enough control to introduce them, of course. But when you hit a bug it's more likely to be a bug in your environment (beyond your control) that you cannot fix. Other than that, what? A shorter text to sort through finding the bug I guess. A molehill beside mountains, in the wrong application.
I am not the GP but I sympathise with his comment.
"It looks like you want to get rid of all JavaScript in web pages. What's a better way to present interactive forms over the Internet that doesn't involve reloading an entire 100 kB page whenever the tiniest bit changes and doesn't involve paying someone to make six different native applications, one for each operating system?"
Dont force a single 100kB monster to begin with, doh. Break the monster down into bytesized chunks and this suddenly doesnt look so impossible to do in straight html, now does it? You can even keep your 100kB script as well if you want, but you must put a link to the straight version in the noscript tags at the very least. (Personally I urge you to give me an option to use the straight version even in a scriptless browser, otherwise you will probably force me to disable all scripts on your site, but it's not a formal requirement like the noscript tag.)
From day one that was the way you were supposed to do it when you added scripts to your web pages, and it's not that I want to remove all scripts from the web, I want to remove this idiotic assumption it's ok to skip the webpage, hand out a script instead, and pretend all is well. It isnt. Javascript is fine for making a fancier version of a webpage (but only as long as you dont use it as an excuse to skip the simple version.) But scriptless browsers are an integral part of the web as long as it's existed and they arent going away. If you dont support them you arent supporting the web and are missing the point of the web.
With the current threats and trends in malware, you're likely to see only more and more scriptless browsers. Browsers that support scripts just fine are being told not to support YOUR scripts - at least not until you are trusted. Making a good first impression more and more means making a good first impression WITHOUT grabbing your ecmascript crutches, without just ASSUMING that the visitor is immediately comfortable enough with you to be touched in that way.
Even if you cant figure out how to write a webpage or hire someone that knows, you should not need to pay for 6 different native apps - unless your app has a really niche market at least. Just get it written once in a high level language, release it GPL so that anyone interested in porting it to a new platform can. You'll likely have ports contributed back faster than you can pick out the right guy internally to receive them. (This part assumes your app does something that a computer literate person might find useful, of course, it strikes me that is a blind assumption though.)
Dont tell me your afraid to release your precious source - you're doing that right now every time your server sends out 100kB of ecmascript already.
They arent useless but they are certainly not always the best (or even simply an appropriate) tool to use. Scripting is great for the trivial-but-useful, particularly a one-off or a mock-up. But any sort of serious computer program is going to be better if you program it and most anything that is trivial-but-useful enough to have a jscript app should be quickly reproducable on any platform that you want in a native fashion. Do you need a native program to have a simple calculator? No, javascript will do. And that's great.
At the same time, if that simple calculator is something you use very often, make an app. You dont have to be worried about the simple calculator overwhelming your phone to think that makes sense - because we all multitask these days and/or worry about electricity/battery life etc. on many devices.
It's funny seeing how people are rediscovering the importance of programming as a result of these phones. The reason it makes me chuckle is that I remember working with PCs that had orders of magnitude less system resources than these phones do, so I understand that it is actually the abstraction layers in use that make the hardware seem so limited.
You kids nowadays think a power-throttled ARM processor and a couple gigabytes of RAM is 'limited resources.' You should try a z80 with 8kb ram. Believe it or not, if you actually program the thing instead of expecting your libraries and abstraction layers to deal with it for you, you could make that work too.
All those FDA approved food additives are are fine.
The scanners the TSA uses are safe and effective.
Putting millions on subsidized healthcare and ensuring even more of the incidental costs are hidden from consumers will reduce healthcare spending.
There was no coup in Egypt...
One of those, the third one specifically, stands out as not fitting the theme.
You do realise it's the *same government* that has given us the TSA, the FDA, and the many other ruinous mistakes in every area it's involved in that you expect is magically going to take charge of health care and make us all better?
In order for your fantasy-view of this to work, the SC would have to be infallible like the Pope is supposed to be. They arent. Even they will admit they are fallible human beings, and anyone that has studied american legal history at all would understand this. The Constitution didnt change to make "separate but equal" no longer ok in between court decisions. It was actually unconstitutional all along, the courts were simply wrong up until the 1950s when they started slowly re-evaluating the subject. That isnt my wild interpretation, that is their own opinion.
So, no, even if the SCs had ruled some of this stuff we are hearing about legal, it wouldnt make it legal. (The obvious inference would be that a majority of the court had been successfully blackmailed or threatened by the Executive.)
The stuff we are talking about here hasnt been signed off on by the SC anyway though. It's been signed off on by the super-sekrit special court which violates just about every rule of jurisprudence before the opening gavel anyway.
911 operators are always going to recommend the least dangerous course of action, they are trained to do that to minimise liability. Their instructions dont have the force of law, and GZ had no obligations to do as she advised. So that part, while (sort of) true, is just utterly irrelevant to the question here.
The rest? Nonsense. Name any evidence that pointed to a conspiracy by Zimmerman? None was presented, none exists.
The fact is that GZ shot a man who was on top of him pounding his head into the concrete, which is not illegal to do but more like a positive obligation. Full details of just how these two men wound up in that situation may be unknowable, but there was absolutely no evidence to say that GZ started it, or to contradict his story of what happened. Normally when people lie to get out of something, they make a mistake and that mistake will hang them.
Is GZ lying? I wasnt there, I dont know, but it seems quite likely he was telling the truth, if only because if he wasnt, it would have been so very likely that he get caught saying *something* that some piece of evidence could clearly contradict.
Given all that, the benefit of the doubt goes to the defendent, the guy has to walk. He would have probably never been charged in the first place if the media hadnt picked up on it and gone into feeding frenzy mode, selling more ads by catering to racist idiots on all sides.
"Had this been in earlier times, but in the present tense, and a random cross section of that town been chosen, in all probability Zimmerman would have been justifiably convicted, as he should have been! "
Err I was with you up to there.
However I cannot see how an honest jury could possibly have convicted him on this. All the evidence presented to them argued for acquittal. Arguably the judge should have directed the verdict, the prosecution case was that threadbare.
Both ballistics and witness accounts put TM on top of GZ when the shot was fired.
Getting your pistol out of a holster on the ground isnt actually very difficult at all. Much easier than throwing someone who is larger, stronger, younger, and knows how to ground and pound back off of you physically, that's for sure. (And check the medical reports on GZ if you dont realise that is what was happening.)
When someone is doing that, you dont have any time to hesitate. Each time your head is slammed into the concrete could be the end of waking thought, and the end of physical life is a decent bet to follow it closely behind. In that situation, using force to defend yourself is clearly reasonable.
Those facts being established in court, the only remaining legal question would seem to be whether or not GZ was the aggressor here. Self defense is clear on the merits, but self defense is a barred claim for the aggressor. But there is no evidence that GZ was the aggressor here, all the evidence seems to point the other way. TM had no wounds other than a minor laceration on a hand (tends to happen when punching someone else, among other possible explanations) and the bullet wound. GZ had injuries consistent with being punched and slammed to the concrete as he claims, but nothing to indicate he had thrown a punch. None of the witnesses saw anything to indicate GZ was the aggressor. So why do you believe that he was the aggressor?
No, I am talking about the validity of laws, and you seem to be (willfully?) avoiding the point. The unconstitutionality of a law is a result of its conflict with a higher law, not of any pronouncement from a court. The court, should it work correctly, will refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws when that issue is brought before it, however should it fail to perform that duty the law remains unconstitutional nonetheless. It is void from the moment the legislature passes it and no one has any legal obligation to obey it at any time.
The idea that the legislature can rule that 2+2=5 and this will somehow be true until or unless a court rules otherwise is a pernicious falsehood.
The general misconception is that any statute passed by legislators bearing the appearance of law constitutes the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statute, to be valid, must be In agreement. It is impossible for both the Constitution and a law violating it to be valid; one must prevail. This is succinctly stated as follows:
The General rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted.
Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection, and justifies no acts performed under it.....
A void act cannot be legally consistent with a valid one. An unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the lend, it is superseded thereby.
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.
Slashdot Mirror
"I 100% agree that communication is vital.
But if people are hesitant to communicate because they fear the reaction from their leader/boss/whatever they will not communicate."
Very true. Now look at the situation. Was she afraid of his reaction here? No, she was not, she spoke right up and made her point directly. People are not afraid of Linus, the use of the word 'violence' is just gratuitous drama digging. The best I know he's never punched anyone, ever. He can and will let you know he thinks you are being an idiot if you do something idiotic. That's not violence, and to whatever degree the reaction can be characterised as 'fear' it's a good fear - we dont want people doing things that are idiotic. That's not being abusive, that's just communicating clearly.
Excessive politeness is not a positive in a situation where people need to communicate effectively with each other.
The stats are truly sad. The problem is people who dont understand or practice firearm safety. There are plenty of teachers available, so that can ultimately only be their own fault. We can blame the media for encouraging the cavalier attitudes and idiotic/suicidal/negligent practices they portray, and they deserve to get called for it, but ultimately each individual still has choices to make. If you choose to arm yourself with a weapon without learning how to properly and safely store and handle that weapon it is ultimately your responsibility. I just hope you shoot yourself, instead of someone else.
Frankly people that dont care and cannot be bothered to understand and practice good firearm safety should not have weapons. But their stupidity must not be allowed to turn into an excuse to disarm the rest of us, which would ultimately cause far greater harm, to the rest of us.
The supposedly safer weapons will wind up being more dangerous, because they will just encourage the idiots in their idiocy. "Oh dont worry it's not loaded" will be joined by "oh dont worry it's a smart gun!" on the list of things morons say just before blowing away themselves or their friends.
You are partially correct, but what you are missing is why it works. And it works because it's about communication. Communication is the most important thing here.
You get real communication between people who arent afraid to yell and curse each other out (and dont take it personally.)
Political correctness on the other hand promises to protect us from being made uncomfortable, and there may be room for argument on how well it serves that goal, but the hidden cost is a stiff tarrif on communication. When you more than one person working on the same project, communication is generally pretty important.
'No one has the unfettered right to abuse others in whatever manner they see fit."
To the contrary, since you are clearly abusing the word abuse, using your definition (where simply speaking to you like an adult is considered abuse) everyone has the right to do that. Your remedy, if you dislike it, is to not listen to us.
That's funny, did we even read the same exchange?
Because it seems pretty obvious that Linus is right, and it's the other developer who is throwing her threatening a hissy fit like a three year old because she isnt used to anyone daring to speak frankly in front of her.
You view his forthrightness as something you would have to 'put up' with and dont like it, but you are not everyone. For many, it is the nauseating 'professionalism' of the office, where everyone puts on a polite little front and never a mean word is heard as the knives are sharpened and backs brutally pierced.
THAT is what you have to pay me to put up with. I havent worked with Linus but from what I have read it would be a pleasure.
If you would seriously physically assault someone speaking to you bluntly, you are the one with a problem.
You need to read a little better. Although I congratulate you on posting good links and formatting your message readably, you sadly missed the point. Those are not text ads, and text ads arent how drive-bys work. The 'annoying javascript contraptions' I was talking about - THAT is how the drivebys work.
Genocide is really a modern concept and no one in ancient times actually had the power to pull it off - not to say that something very like it was not attempted routinely. But a modern genocide implies killing off a group utterly - men women and children. In ancient times it was very rare to kill the women and children, though that does not necessarily mean they would be treated well. But more importantly the scale of conflicts was simply much smaller. You could have all hell break loose in one valley without it having too much effect a mile or two up the road. At that scale what we think of as genocide really isnt possible.
The closest to genocide you would be likely to see was a small group of warriors moving into an area, killing men and taking women. Small groups of males would travel large distances for this sort of thing, while people generally, most males and essentially all females appear to have lived and died within a mile of where they were born. And that is what the genetics of the British Isles appears to reflect - continuity on the female side going all the way back to early stone age settlements, with episode after episode of 'peppering' with foreign men, celtic, scandinavian, saxon, and so forth.
Pretty much the same story all over the world, actually, not just the british isles.
When you made the mistake of pointing a web browser at their site without making sure that javascript execution was disabled or controlled in some other way first.
Enable netbios over nbf only, dont let it bind with any routable protocols. Easy filesharing on your local network, no exposure past the first router.
Good to see Linus still has a sense of humor.
I suppose shipping intentionally buggy IPX drivers with it might be taking the joke too far though.
That's true with any interpreted language, it isnt unique to scripts. You've been able to work like that for decades with LISP for instance.
"So your big complaint is ads?"
Did you really not even read the message you replied to?
He said (and I agree) that the problem is NOT ads. But if you choose to make your ads annoying javascript contraptions instead of readable text, THEN we will block your ads. And not feel bad at all about it. If you want us to see your ads, you know what to do.
Whee, the UI of a game is scripted. That's not exactly a critical application, and it's not like they tried to write the whole thing in ecmascript. And it's not like the gamer market hasnt been well traind to accept and even expect to constantly buy more powerful hardware in order to 'consume' a never-ending string of bugfixes from game launch date to EOL.. Anyone that sets anything up so that his game UI crashing or malfunctioning in strange or unforseen ways is a big problem is an idiot.
"Scripted languages have enormous advantage of being much easier to bugfix than native apps."
This is a strange statement to make. They do avoid certain types of bugs by not giving you enough control to introduce them, of course. But when you hit a bug it's more likely to be a bug in your environment (beyond your control) that you cannot fix. Other than that, what? A shorter text to sort through finding the bug I guess. A molehill beside mountains, in the wrong application.
I am not the GP but I sympathise with his comment.
"It looks like you want to get rid of all JavaScript in web pages. What's a better way to present interactive forms over the Internet that doesn't involve reloading an entire 100 kB page whenever the tiniest bit changes and doesn't involve paying someone to make six different native applications, one for each operating system?"
Dont force a single 100kB monster to begin with, doh. Break the monster down into bytesized chunks and this suddenly doesnt look so impossible to do in straight html, now does it? You can even keep your 100kB script as well if you want, but you must put a link to the straight version in the noscript tags at the very least. (Personally I urge you to give me an option to use the straight version even in a scriptless browser, otherwise you will probably force me to disable all scripts on your site, but it's not a formal requirement like the noscript tag.)
From day one that was the way you were supposed to do it when you added scripts to your web pages, and it's not that I want to remove all scripts from the web, I want to remove this idiotic assumption it's ok to skip the webpage, hand out a script instead, and pretend all is well. It isnt. Javascript is fine for making a fancier version of a webpage (but only as long as you dont use it as an excuse to skip the simple version.) But scriptless browsers are an integral part of the web as long as it's existed and they arent going away. If you dont support them you arent supporting the web and are missing the point of the web.
With the current threats and trends in malware, you're likely to see only more and more scriptless browsers. Browsers that support scripts just fine are being told not to support YOUR scripts - at least not until you are trusted. Making a good first impression more and more means making a good first impression WITHOUT grabbing your ecmascript crutches, without just ASSUMING that the visitor is immediately comfortable enough with you to be touched in that way.
Even if you cant figure out how to write a webpage or hire someone that knows, you should not need to pay for 6 different native apps - unless your app has a really niche market at least. Just get it written once in a high level language, release it GPL so that anyone interested in porting it to a new platform can. You'll likely have ports contributed back faster than you can pick out the right guy internally to receive them. (This part assumes your app does something that a computer literate person might find useful, of course, it strikes me that is a blind assumption though.)
Dont tell me your afraid to release your precious source - you're doing that right now every time your server sends out 100kB of ecmascript already.
They arent useless but they are certainly not always the best (or even simply an appropriate) tool to use. Scripting is great for the trivial-but-useful, particularly a one-off or a mock-up. But any sort of serious computer program is going to be better if you program it and most anything that is trivial-but-useful enough to have a jscript app should be quickly reproducable on any platform that you want in a native fashion. Do you need a native program to have a simple calculator? No, javascript will do. And that's great.
At the same time, if that simple calculator is something you use very often, make an app. You dont have to be worried about the simple calculator overwhelming your phone to think that makes sense - because we all multitask these days and/or worry about electricity/battery life etc. on many devices.
It's funny seeing how people are rediscovering the importance of programming as a result of these phones. The reason it makes me chuckle is that I remember working with PCs that had orders of magnitude less system resources than these phones do, so I understand that it is actually the abstraction layers in use that make the hardware seem so limited.
You kids nowadays think a power-throttled ARM processor and a couple gigabytes of RAM is 'limited resources.' You should try a z80 with 8kb ram. Believe it or not, if you actually program the thing instead of expecting your libraries and abstraction layers to deal with it for you, you could make that work too.
Actually on re-reading I believe I misunderstood the OP and responded erroneously to it.
You then misunderstood us both. Ah well. One of the few times I wish slashdot had a delete button. Hopefully the whole thread will be modded down now.
All those FDA approved food additives are are fine.
The scanners the TSA uses are safe and effective.
Putting millions on subsidized healthcare and ensuring even more of the incidental costs are hidden from consumers will reduce healthcare spending.
There was no coup in Egypt ...
One of those, the third one specifically, stands out as not fitting the theme.
You do realise it's the *same government* that has given us the TSA, the FDA, and the many other ruinous mistakes in every area it's involved in that you expect is magically going to take charge of health care and make us all better?
Surely you jest.
You are still wrong.
In order for your fantasy-view of this to work, the SC would have to be infallible like the Pope is supposed to be. They arent. Even they will admit they are fallible human beings, and anyone that has studied american legal history at all would understand this. The Constitution didnt change to make "separate but equal" no longer ok in between court decisions. It was actually unconstitutional all along, the courts were simply wrong up until the 1950s when they started slowly re-evaluating the subject. That isnt my wild interpretation, that is their own opinion.
So, no, even if the SCs had ruled some of this stuff we are hearing about legal, it wouldnt make it legal. (The obvious inference would be that a majority of the court had been successfully blackmailed or threatened by the Executive.)
The stuff we are talking about here hasnt been signed off on by the SC anyway though. It's been signed off on by the super-sekrit special court which violates just about every rule of jurisprudence before the opening gavel anyway.
911 operators are always going to recommend the least dangerous course of action, they are trained to do that to minimise liability. Their instructions dont have the force of law, and GZ had no obligations to do as she advised. So that part, while (sort of) true, is just utterly irrelevant to the question here.
The rest? Nonsense. Name any evidence that pointed to a conspiracy by Zimmerman? None was presented, none exists.
The fact is that GZ shot a man who was on top of him pounding his head into the concrete, which is not illegal to do but more like a positive obligation. Full details of just how these two men wound up in that situation may be unknowable, but there was absolutely no evidence to say that GZ started it, or to contradict his story of what happened. Normally when people lie to get out of something, they make a mistake and that mistake will hang them.
Is GZ lying? I wasnt there, I dont know, but it seems quite likely he was telling the truth, if only because if he wasnt, it would have been so very likely that he get caught saying *something* that some piece of evidence could clearly contradict.
Given all that, the benefit of the doubt goes to the defendent, the guy has to walk. He would have probably never been charged in the first place if the media hadnt picked up on it and gone into feeding frenzy mode, selling more ads by catering to racist idiots on all sides.
"Had this been in earlier times, but in the present tense, and a random cross section of that town been chosen, in all probability Zimmerman would have been justifiably convicted, as he should have been! "
Err I was with you up to there.
However I cannot see how an honest jury could possibly have convicted him on this. All the evidence presented to them argued for acquittal. Arguably the judge should have directed the verdict, the prosecution case was that threadbare.
Both ballistics and witness accounts put TM on top of GZ when the shot was fired.
Getting your pistol out of a holster on the ground isnt actually very difficult at all. Much easier than throwing someone who is larger, stronger, younger, and knows how to ground and pound back off of you physically, that's for sure. (And check the medical reports on GZ if you dont realise that is what was happening.)
When someone is doing that, you dont have any time to hesitate. Each time your head is slammed into the concrete could be the end of waking thought, and the end of physical life is a decent bet to follow it closely behind. In that situation, using force to defend yourself is clearly reasonable.
Those facts being established in court, the only remaining legal question would seem to be whether or not GZ was the aggressor here. Self defense is clear on the merits, but self defense is a barred claim for the aggressor. But there is no evidence that GZ was the aggressor here, all the evidence seems to point the other way. TM had no wounds other than a minor laceration on a hand (tends to happen when punching someone else, among other possible explanations) and the bullet wound. GZ had injuries consistent with being punched and slammed to the concrete as he claims, but nothing to indicate he had thrown a punch. None of the witnesses saw anything to indicate GZ was the aggressor. So why do you believe that he was the aggressor?
No, I am talking about the validity of laws, and you seem to be (willfully?) avoiding the point. The unconstitutionality of a law is a result of its conflict with a higher law, not of any pronouncement from a court. The court, should it work correctly, will refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws when that issue is brought before it, however should it fail to perform that duty the law remains unconstitutional nonetheless. It is void from the moment the legislature passes it and no one has any legal obligation to obey it at any time.
The idea that the legislature can rule that 2+2=5 and this will somehow be true until or unless a court rules otherwise is a pernicious falsehood.
"If the courts uphold them, they aren't illegal"
This is unfortunately a common misunderstanding.