You read a lot of strange propaganda if you still believe that stuff even 6 months later. You make it sound like their protesters were American paratroopers. A little too much Pravda in your ear, I'd say.
Yeah, supplying weapons and lunatics crazy enough to fight our enemy has worked so well in Afghanistan, let's do that again!
Most Ukrainians are secular, and those who are religious are mostly Christians. I don't see much parallel at all to Afghanistan and the things that went wrong after we double-crossed them.
Also, we wouldn't economically abandon Ukraine afterwards; all of Europe already have trade ties, and nobody is against trading with them or investing there, post-war. Heck, I've got sunflower oil from Ukraine in my kitchen right now. Afghanistan went sideways because we promised them they could be in the modern family of nations if they drove out the Russians, and that was a lie. They were abandoned to their mud huts.
You cite the advantage of duck-typing as its problem, that tells me you just don't understand the use cases.
Duck typing, done correctly, does not simply give up having defined interfaces, that would be silly. So silly that it would make your criticisms true!
In duck typing, you check if an object has the parts of an interface that you're going to use, instead of checking if it is some named type that presumably has the interface you want to use. The different parts of an interface that go together are also grouped together in code. Just as using static types is a useful tool that tells you how a system is decomposed and what behaviors are likely to be supported, the lines that include the packages of duck-typed behaviors also tell you the exact same thing.
Just because you're not forced to only have pre-defined interfaces does not mean you are prevented from actually defining your interfaces in advance, and using that information in your tools. In fact, fans of duck typing often feel that it enhances this ability, by being able to combine defined interfaces more freely.
There is some storied history to their Ruby use. Basically, they didn't know how to scale databases, couldn't grow fast enough, and spent 3 months falsely blaming Ruby before bringing in some real db people and fixing their architecture. Ruby was never the problem. And they were still using Ruby for years. Over time, they wrote more and more parts in other languages, which is natural because they're big and they want each piece to be optimized.
So you wrongly doubt something which is already widely reported and discussed.;) They're "hardware agnostic" but that means using any commodity hardware. That is not a problem for C++, certainly not in the last 10 years, and twitter isn't 10 yet.
It is meaningless to argue that one unless you attempt to define "clean," and then both sides will turn out to be using different meanings. Using his meaning of clean you'd probably be forced to agree with him; and using yours, he would likely agree with you.
Is boilerplate dirty, is it cruft, or is it O(1) stuff that isn't even counted and is effectively free? That is the real underlying issue. If boilerplate is cruft, then Java isn't clean. If boilerplate is free and to be ignored, then Java is still verbose, but clean.
Most people who ignore boilerplate probably are using tools that write most of it for them anyways, which brings in its own issues and differences of opinion.
Of course he totally ignores the possibility of using efficient methodologies to write large codebases using "scripting" languages. It certainly can and is done. But you can't hire Dilberts to do it, the way you can with Java. If you're planning to be undisciplined except for the what the language forces you into, then he's right.
Well, Ruby is a "scripting language" but then it turns out that you can implement everything in plain C libraries, and just put the business rules in the "scripting" language. And in fact that is how problems are approached. There is no need to switch languages for the project, you can switch languages on a modular basis, as long as the core application language is dynamic and can interface easily with the parts.
"Scripting" can mean "scripting" or it can mean "glue," or just "dynamic."
IMO there are real advantages to having the more static parts in C, and the more dynamic parts in Ruby/Python/Perl/whatever. Though some languages you need an extra glue language to glue the C in, that is why I don't use Perl.
They used COBOL until they were talked into porting to Java, it is a hard sell to convince them they need to change languages again. Every language they ever used sucked, and they used what the Experts told them to use.
COBOL was never cool, either, but is still in use in enterprises.
For learning the craft, they should use what's best to teach it, not necessarily what's relevant at the time (unless it's a job school).
Lawyers aren't cool, and they make almost as much money as COBOL programmers. They even have their own schools.
Everybody should learn COBOL though. "Okay class, now we're going to learn what it is like when you only have pass-by-value, and no references. At the end of the unit we will understand why all modern languages use pass-by-reference, except for optimizing literals, and why modern COBOL programmers write all their new code in C libraries."
Mostly true, but Java was indeed always sold as being scalable. Portable scaling.
Speed and efficiency were supposed to come from the Java-native CPUs, which of course only made it into thin clients. Well, medium thin clients that had application-specific thick client capabilities that could be remote-loaded. I don't think they ever really even worked out how to describe it in a clear way; it flopped before making it out of the buzzword soup. But apparently it ran Sun's web browser really well.
You don't need an "OO... language" because OO is a methodology. You can learn pure, real OOP using almost any language. Plain C works fine.
You can also write bad procedural code in an "OO language" because that is also a methodology. I see that crap all the time; giant 50+ line methods that do a bunch of things and all the utility functions are procedural-style class methods. Lots of Rubyists don't have any idea even what the difference between OOP and Procedural is, they just assume they must be doing OOP since they're using an "OO language."
Same thing with learning scheme; when you associate functional programming with a language instead of a methodology, the first thing new people do is try to find a way to fake some state and they end up with spaghetti procedural instead of functional.
Jeebus people, just open the story from 10 years and press "reload." There you go, you asked again and got the answers again.
It might be that there are real pros and cons for languages. It might be that the reasons languages are "un-cool" are because they address the needs of the pointy-haired, and don't support pocket protectors.
And it does make perfect sense for Java to be the 1 required language in a CS course; it might be the only way to get kids to learn it, since it is so un-cool, lame, and inefficient for the small projects that students are working on. In a well designed CS course, very few problems have a required language past the basic algorithms classes. (Where standardization allows for a higher quality class when the teachers are grad students)
Anyways, it makes sense to teach Java, because the best use case for Java is to be able to use massive teams of low quality developers, potentially with high turnover, and still make working software. These are the people most in need of the job training type of education. People who are going to work in almost any other area are going to have to be able to learn new tools quickly based on the manuals, and it won't matter what they studied.
It is normal for people with advanced degrees to seek out degrees that they personally relate to. Since psychologists earn low pay compared to the number of years they have to study, most of them will have psychological problems, and that is why they identify with the field. That maps better to treating adults who are seeking treatment than to treating children, who are still developing. Few psychological conditions can be treated with psychiatry at a young age, because most conditions change as a person ages and develops. Instead, there is a lot of danger of harm by excess treatment.
That is why in these cases it is almost universally advised to use a Counselor, instead of a Psychiatrist. A counselor is trained in listening, asking good questions, and showing compassion. People who are drawn to the field of Counseling often relate to the field because they felt like people didn't listen to them, or else because they felt people did listen to them, and they valued that, but saw that most others don't have somebody who listens.
Counselors more typically have families, compared to psychiatrists. And they have lower divorce rates, lower suicide rates, etc.
Night and day, actually; psychiatrists have above average suicide rates, counselors have below average suicide rates.
Right, so some Coward who calls people names on the internet, that must be your example of a Good Person? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
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I'll give you a hint, though, even though you're trolling. You didn't attempt to understand my words; and I'm not defending their idiot actions. I'm pointing out the flaws in the complaints against those actions, and also providing examples of better actions they could have taken. Just because they were small-minded idiots doesn't mean that any complaint against them is right. In fact, small-minded complaints about small-minded actions are recommending even worse actions. Like, don't even try to find out if this kid witnessed a murder. Obviously the police aren't the right people to find out why this kid is troubled, or if he even is troubled. But neither is the teacher, or the school nurse. What he needed was to have a trained counselor find out what was wrong. They only should have taken the "punish for being disruptive" attitude if he refused to "come clean" and provide a believable story as to what was going on in his mind. It was clearly not "nothing."
Imagination has nothing to do with the problem. People are knee-jerk reacting to this because it matches the cliche, which most of us experienced first hand, of teachers over-reacting to nonsense.
Using violent imagination in place of non-fiction shows either real emotional problems, or clearly trying to alarm people. If he had simply told the police, "It was just a joke, I wasn't trying to alarm anybody I was trying to make them laugh," then he wouldn't have been charged. Instead, he did a full "freak-out" yelling at the police, so they charged him. Keep in mind, in most States this won't lead to any real charges or a record; it will lead to a visit with a Juvenile Court Judge who will, as long as the kid can show he learned to say what he is supposed to say in front of Authorities, assign some community service and drop the charges.
IMO the mother should be teaching the kid the Big Boy Realities here; freaking people out with fake violence crosses lines, and when you cross lines and Authorities are coming down on you, you need skills for that. I mean, unless you're just going to follow the rules. Instead he's learning to whine and cry about being charged with... what he was actually trying to do. Which he should either deny, or be proud of.
The fact is there could be a dead pet that he killed. Or his dead pet that was murdered might be troubling him. Or a dead human he witnesses being killed. Even more likely than any of those, more likely than "innocently" trying to alarm people, is that the child is abused and asking him to "tell something true about himself" creates a real emotional dilemma for him. If they had used not a teacher, but an actual trained counselor, they would have had a chance to determine that. Maybe the police needed to be called, but with a totally different reported crime. We'll never know.
The whole point of putting it off into a blog is to show that it is not part of the main site. Being owned by a newspaper, or having hosting provided by them, doesn't cause some sort of authority to leak over to it. That would be crazy. If that was the case we'd have to believe everything they say on cable news, too, because those same companies might own trusted newspapers.
Does the blog follow the standards of journalism that the SF Chronicle is so well known for? No. Does it claim to? No, it claims to be a blog. And a quick glance at their methods, they give one side from a "mommy perspective." Which makes sense and is appropriate, because it is The Mommy Files.
I'm quite sure letting the teacher "handle it" would not resolve any of the serious issues. When a student substitutes violent fantasy for a non-fiction assignment, it is highly likely that they need some professional intervention. Obviously, the most effective way to handle that would be gently, by a trained professional, who can provide low-pressure counseling to attempt to uncover what the problem is, or if the student was simply trying to alarm their classmates for fun.
I find it interesting that what he's accused of is actually the least dangerous possibility. The most likely, in my opinion, is that this child is abused and had a pet murdered by a friend or family member, and would benefit from counseling. Obviously in this scenario calling the police is counter-productive and actually harmful.
But it is known that killing animals can lead to killing humans. Most children are at some point cruel to animals, but taking it too far at the wrong developmental phase can lead to dysfunction around the valuing of life. That can, and sometimes does, lead to murder. Getting treatment early could save this kids life, if he wasn't just trying to alarm his classmates.
So it all comes back to, unless it is something worse, then he was indeed trying to alarm people, just like pulling a fire alarm. If you think alarming people with fake violence should be legal, that is a good debate to have in a State legislature, but I don't want workers or school officials to make up their own version of what they think the laws should be, and impose that instead of the real laws.
The part where you claim that using energy requires entropy to increase is the part where you go off the rails. Unfortunately for your point, that is at the start.
Entropy is not guaranteed to increase when all the energy use is controlled by an intelligent actor. The thermodynamics stuff is what happens as a result of known natural processes. Entropy will increase. But that does not mean that with an intelligent actor inside the system that it has to. Basically nobody has done that work, and the people who have tried have all had philosophical, non-scientific bones to pick or points to make. But the reality is that it is not a matter of "science" at all, it is a question of engineering, and it is simply not known if an advanced intelligence would be able to construct such a system. It is not disprovable, so there is little science to do there; if you don't know how to build such a system, you also don't know what technology you don't know about! We can't know what we don't know. We can know what happens naturally when we set up conditions and then let the experiment run within certain bounds without fiddling. How intelligent life itself impacts entropy in the long run is just an unknown. We'll only know if in fact we can control entropy with the right technology; if we can't we'll never know that. We do know that simple life, such as we would grow in a lab, does not have any technology (or intent...) to affect entropy, and does not change anything. If you have a spare few billion years and a bunch of habitable star systems maybe we could get some experiments started, but don't hold your breath.
You also go off the rails talking worrying about if an isolated system "can even exist." That shows deep bias, because that is an engineering concern that is not at issue in the thought experiment. In the thought experiment we're considering what it is like inside the system, not where it came from.
You do a bunch of hand-waving asserting I don't understand and are making stuff up, but that just shows you didn't even try to understand what I said. First, understand what I said; then you can try to disprove it. You can't disprove it by waving your hands, shouting "thermodynamics."
You miss the mark heavily where you talk about a "perpetual motion machine" that is "an isolated system that performs work using energy from a single heat reservoir, without transferring heat to an external cooler reservoir." Do you see the huge gaping problem here? There are 2 problems. The first is that from outside the isolated system there is no work being done. There is the same amount of energy inside the isolated system all the time. It is just a black box to you, and it is dark. You probably can't even know it is there, because it is isolated. You certainly can't see any work being done. And then your "external cooler reservoir" is complete nonsense, sorry to say. An isolated system has no external interactions, by definition, certainly not a "cooler reservoir" that would be sucking heat energy out of the system, causing a decrease in the system's energy. What you describe is an impossible perpetual motion machine.
Presumably somebody told you to come here and "make fun" of my comments, because your comment on this old thread comes right after I posted on a new thread. If so, that bias coming in explains why you so easily mistook what I described for whatever they told you to come and find.;)
And yes, all energy is equivalent. Going into the weeds over the exact semantic meaning of the word "use." I certainly would agree that the English word "use" does not clearly describe actual physical processes of "using energy." But you don't have to go there to understand conservation. Unfortunately your attempt to explain falls victim to the same problems.
Just assume I'm not an idiot and then re-read what I actually said. And instead of assuming that I said what I didn't mean that is wrong, assume I said what I meant. The task of the reader is to find the most-true meaning, not the least-true meaning. And honestly, it should be pretty embarrassing to have such a negative attitude towards my comments while also claiming an isolated system would have an external energy drain. D'oh!
When a blog called "the mommy files" interviews mommy and her little darling and describe his behavior as having been "difficult," without giving any account of the police or school version of events, you should probably read that as, "luckily he didn't get charged with assaulting a police officer, because that is what an adult would have gotten."
A unicorn is a bi-sexual person of either gender, generally in the context of a threesome with a couple and where the unicorn has sex with both members of the couple.
So I think he means he gave a hand job to his neighbors bisexual male third wheel. What a bunch of sluts. LOL
The word "gun" had nothing to do with the problem. The assignment was non-fiction, to write about himself. He wrote that he killed a neighbor's pet. That the "pet" is an imaginary creature suggests he might have serious guilt problems associated with having killed a real pet, or even a human; or witnessed such a crime. Or he could just be a teenager who wanted to be disruptive in class. Most likely the latter, but it is reasonable to check. They probably should have called a district mental health professional, not the police.
If it was a creative writing assignment this would not have raised the same red flags.
Also keep in mind, and I know we don't read the stories, but it is a blog called the "mommy files" and they only interviewed mommy and her perfect little darling. And he didn't freak out during the interview, like he did in the police interview. And neither he nor his mommy attempts to explain factually what behavior he was actually charged with. I'll give you a hint, though, it is the same (minor) charge he'd get if he was caught pulling a fire alarm or shouting "fire."
Maybe it is your anti-American hate that jumped the shark. Will it ever stop? I doubt it. No reason to expect humans to behave differently wherever you come from.
You might have missed the part where the story isn't from a newspaper that is claiming to have researched it and presented the facts. It is actually from a blog called the "mommy files," and they don't describe the actual charges, or interview anybody other than the student and his mother.
Also note that the assignment was not "creative writing." The students were supposed to write something about themselves. So that is what he wrote "about himself," that he acquired had acquired a gun and killed his neighbor's pet. Clearly that is protected speech, but it is perfectly reasonable in that circumstance to investigate if there was an actual pet (or human) who had been shot. It is common for teenagers who do something violent to make up a "story" so they can deal emotionally with their actions. Using an imaginary creature as a proxy for a real person or animal is normal in that situation. They weren't investigating him because he said the word "gun." There is more context here, and anybody with knowledge of child psychology should see that it is worth looking into whatever problems this child had that led him to this expression; at least in a preliminary way to see if he was discussing real violence. Obviously that would be more effectively done by a mental health professional than by the police. But if the police are the ones called, and his behavior towards them is disruptive, it is perfectly normal that he would receive a minor charge based on being disruptive. Unfortunately most schools don't teach children about their rights, and how to deal with police officers in a way that protects your rights without exposing you to legal charges. Freaking out and yelling at them and refusing to cooperate is usually going to get a person a minor charge. That is true in most of the world.
Only in 'Murica. Here' if a 16-year old writes something like that, everyone would have a good laugh.
That's what happens in "'Murica," too. Unfortunately, we also have nationalist bigots like you. You'd feel right at home, I'm sure. You could just replace "'Murica" with France or China in your hate speech.
Did it cross your mind that perhaps you were misled by a sensationalist tabloid? Don't they also have tabloids in your country? I'll bet they do.
Slashdot Mirror
You read a lot of strange propaganda if you still believe that stuff even 6 months later. You make it sound like their protesters were American paratroopers. A little too much Pravda in your ear, I'd say.
Yeah, supplying weapons and lunatics crazy enough to fight our enemy has worked so well in Afghanistan, let's do that again!
Most Ukrainians are secular, and those who are religious are mostly Christians. I don't see much parallel at all to Afghanistan and the things that went wrong after we double-crossed them.
Also, we wouldn't economically abandon Ukraine afterwards; all of Europe already have trade ties, and nobody is against trading with them or investing there, post-war. Heck, I've got sunflower oil from Ukraine in my kitchen right now. Afghanistan went sideways because we promised them they could be in the modern family of nations if they drove out the Russians, and that was a lie. They were abandoned to their mud huts.
You cite the advantage of duck-typing as its problem, that tells me you just don't understand the use cases.
Duck typing, done correctly, does not simply give up having defined interfaces, that would be silly. So silly that it would make your criticisms true!
In duck typing, you check if an object has the parts of an interface that you're going to use, instead of checking if it is some named type that presumably has the interface you want to use. The different parts of an interface that go together are also grouped together in code. Just as using static types is a useful tool that tells you how a system is decomposed and what behaviors are likely to be supported, the lines that include the packages of duck-typed behaviors also tell you the exact same thing.
Just because you're not forced to only have pre-defined interfaces does not mean you are prevented from actually defining your interfaces in advance, and using that information in your tools. In fact, fans of duck typing often feel that it enhances this ability, by being able to combine defined interfaces more freely.
Twitter uses C++, Java, Scala, Ruby.
There is some storied history to their Ruby use. Basically, they didn't know how to scale databases, couldn't grow fast enough, and spent 3 months falsely blaming Ruby before bringing in some real db people and fixing their architecture. Ruby was never the problem. And they were still using Ruby for years. Over time, they wrote more and more parts in other languages, which is natural because they're big and they want each piece to be optimized.
So you wrongly doubt something which is already widely reported and discussed. ;) They're "hardware agnostic" but that means using any commodity hardware. That is not a problem for C++, certainly not in the last 10 years, and twitter isn't 10 yet.
Java cleaner than python? Tell me you're kidding.
It is meaningless to argue that one unless you attempt to define "clean," and then both sides will turn out to be using different meanings. Using his meaning of clean you'd probably be forced to agree with him; and using yours, he would likely agree with you.
Is boilerplate dirty, is it cruft, or is it O(1) stuff that isn't even counted and is effectively free? That is the real underlying issue. If boilerplate is cruft, then Java isn't clean. If boilerplate is free and to be ignored, then Java is still verbose, but clean.
Most people who ignore boilerplate probably are using tools that write most of it for them anyways, which brings in its own issues and differences of opinion.
Of course he totally ignores the possibility of using efficient methodologies to write large codebases using "scripting" languages. It certainly can and is done. But you can't hire Dilberts to do it, the way you can with Java. If you're planning to be undisciplined except for the what the language forces you into, then he's right.
Well, Ruby is a "scripting language" but then it turns out that you can implement everything in plain C libraries, and just put the business rules in the "scripting" language. And in fact that is how problems are approached. There is no need to switch languages for the project, you can switch languages on a modular basis, as long as the core application language is dynamic and can interface easily with the parts.
"Scripting" can mean "scripting" or it can mean "glue," or just "dynamic."
IMO there are real advantages to having the more static parts in C, and the more dynamic parts in Ruby/Python/Perl/whatever. Though some languages you need an extra glue language to glue the C in, that is why I don't use Perl.
They used COBOL until they were talked into porting to Java, it is a hard sell to convince them they need to change languages again. Every language they ever used sucked, and they used what the Experts told them to use.
COBOL was never cool, either, but is still in use in enterprises.
For learning the craft, they should use what's best to teach it, not necessarily what's relevant at the time (unless it's a job school).
Lawyers aren't cool, and they make almost as much money as COBOL programmers. They even have their own schools.
Everybody should learn COBOL though. "Okay class, now we're going to learn what it is like when you only have pass-by-value, and no references. At the end of the unit we will understand why all modern languages use pass-by-reference, except for optimizing literals, and why modern COBOL programmers write all their new code in C libraries."
Mostly true, but Java was indeed always sold as being scalable. Portable scaling.
Speed and efficiency were supposed to come from the Java-native CPUs, which of course only made it into thin clients. Well, medium thin clients that had application-specific thick client capabilities that could be remote-loaded. I don't think they ever really even worked out how to describe it in a clear way; it flopped before making it out of the buzzword soup. But apparently it ran Sun's web browser really well.
You don't need an "OO... language" because OO is a methodology. You can learn pure, real OOP using almost any language. Plain C works fine.
You can also write bad procedural code in an "OO language" because that is also a methodology. I see that crap all the time; giant 50+ line methods that do a bunch of things and all the utility functions are procedural-style class methods. Lots of Rubyists don't have any idea even what the difference between OOP and Procedural is, they just assume they must be doing OOP since they're using an "OO language."
Same thing with learning scheme; when you associate functional programming with a language instead of a methodology, the first thing new people do is try to find a way to fake some state and they end up with spaghetti procedural instead of functional.
Jeebus people, just open the story from 10 years and press "reload." There you go, you asked again and got the answers again.
It might be that there are real pros and cons for languages. It might be that the reasons languages are "un-cool" are because they address the needs of the pointy-haired, and don't support pocket protectors.
And it does make perfect sense for Java to be the 1 required language in a CS course; it might be the only way to get kids to learn it, since it is so un-cool, lame, and inefficient for the small projects that students are working on. In a well designed CS course, very few problems have a required language past the basic algorithms classes. (Where standardization allows for a higher quality class when the teachers are grad students)
Anyways, it makes sense to teach Java, because the best use case for Java is to be able to use massive teams of low quality developers, potentially with high turnover, and still make working software. These are the people most in need of the job training type of education. People who are going to work in almost any other area are going to have to be able to learn new tools quickly based on the manuals, and it won't matter what they studied.
It is normal for people with advanced degrees to seek out degrees that they personally relate to. Since psychologists earn low pay compared to the number of years they have to study, most of them will have psychological problems, and that is why they identify with the field. That maps better to treating adults who are seeking treatment than to treating children, who are still developing. Few psychological conditions can be treated with psychiatry at a young age, because most conditions change as a person ages and develops. Instead, there is a lot of danger of harm by excess treatment.
That is why in these cases it is almost universally advised to use a Counselor, instead of a Psychiatrist. A counselor is trained in listening, asking good questions, and showing compassion. People who are drawn to the field of Counseling often relate to the field because they felt like people didn't listen to them, or else because they felt people did listen to them, and they valued that, but saw that most others don't have somebody who listens.
Counselors more typically have families, compared to psychiatrists. And they have lower divorce rates, lower suicide rates, etc.
Night and day, actually; psychiatrists have above average suicide rates, counselors have below average suicide rates.
Right, so some Coward who calls people names on the internet, that must be your example of a Good Person? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
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I'll give you a hint, though, even though you're trolling. You didn't attempt to understand my words; and I'm not defending their idiot actions. I'm pointing out the flaws in the complaints against those actions, and also providing examples of better actions they could have taken. Just because they were small-minded idiots doesn't mean that any complaint against them is right. In fact, small-minded complaints about small-minded actions are recommending even worse actions. Like, don't even try to find out if this kid witnessed a murder. Obviously the police aren't the right people to find out why this kid is troubled, or if he even is troubled. But neither is the teacher, or the school nurse. What he needed was to have a trained counselor find out what was wrong. They only should have taken the "punish for being disruptive" attitude if he refused to "come clean" and provide a believable story as to what was going on in his mind. It was clearly not "nothing."
Imagination has nothing to do with the problem. People are knee-jerk reacting to this because it matches the cliche, which most of us experienced first hand, of teachers over-reacting to nonsense.
Using violent imagination in place of non-fiction shows either real emotional problems, or clearly trying to alarm people. If he had simply told the police, "It was just a joke, I wasn't trying to alarm anybody I was trying to make them laugh," then he wouldn't have been charged. Instead, he did a full "freak-out" yelling at the police, so they charged him. Keep in mind, in most States this won't lead to any real charges or a record; it will lead to a visit with a Juvenile Court Judge who will, as long as the kid can show he learned to say what he is supposed to say in front of Authorities, assign some community service and drop the charges.
IMO the mother should be teaching the kid the Big Boy Realities here; freaking people out with fake violence crosses lines, and when you cross lines and Authorities are coming down on you, you need skills for that. I mean, unless you're just going to follow the rules. Instead he's learning to whine and cry about being charged with... what he was actually trying to do. Which he should either deny, or be proud of.
The fact is there could be a dead pet that he killed. Or his dead pet that was murdered might be troubling him. Or a dead human he witnesses being killed. Even more likely than any of those, more likely than "innocently" trying to alarm people, is that the child is abused and asking him to "tell something true about himself" creates a real emotional dilemma for him. If they had used not a teacher, but an actual trained counselor, they would have had a chance to determine that. Maybe the police needed to be called, but with a totally different reported crime. We'll never know.
The whole point of putting it off into a blog is to show that it is not part of the main site. Being owned by a newspaper, or having hosting provided by them, doesn't cause some sort of authority to leak over to it. That would be crazy. If that was the case we'd have to believe everything they say on cable news, too, because those same companies might own trusted newspapers.
Does the blog follow the standards of journalism that the SF Chronicle is so well known for? No. Does it claim to? No, it claims to be a blog. And a quick glance at their methods, they give one side from a "mommy perspective." Which makes sense and is appropriate, because it is The Mommy Files.
I'm quite sure letting the teacher "handle it" would not resolve any of the serious issues. When a student substitutes violent fantasy for a non-fiction assignment, it is highly likely that they need some professional intervention. Obviously, the most effective way to handle that would be gently, by a trained professional, who can provide low-pressure counseling to attempt to uncover what the problem is, or if the student was simply trying to alarm their classmates for fun.
I find it interesting that what he's accused of is actually the least dangerous possibility. The most likely, in my opinion, is that this child is abused and had a pet murdered by a friend or family member, and would benefit from counseling. Obviously in this scenario calling the police is counter-productive and actually harmful.
But it is known that killing animals can lead to killing humans. Most children are at some point cruel to animals, but taking it too far at the wrong developmental phase can lead to dysfunction around the valuing of life. That can, and sometimes does, lead to murder. Getting treatment early could save this kids life, if he wasn't just trying to alarm his classmates.
So it all comes back to, unless it is something worse, then he was indeed trying to alarm people, just like pulling a fire alarm. If you think alarming people with fake violence should be legal, that is a good debate to have in a State legislature, but I don't want workers or school officials to make up their own version of what they think the laws should be, and impose that instead of the real laws.
The rest of your post just sounds like the sort of BS a psych major might spew.
So you're bigoted against psych majors, or even software engineers that are well educated enough to sound educated. Gotchya.
Mine was hashbrowns and eggs.
He isn't accused of killing anybody, so who cares if he killed anybody or not? Fail.
The part where you claim that using energy requires entropy to increase is the part where you go off the rails. Unfortunately for your point, that is at the start.
Entropy is not guaranteed to increase when all the energy use is controlled by an intelligent actor. The thermodynamics stuff is what happens as a result of known natural processes. Entropy will increase. But that does not mean that with an intelligent actor inside the system that it has to. Basically nobody has done that work, and the people who have tried have all had philosophical, non-scientific bones to pick or points to make. But the reality is that it is not a matter of "science" at all, it is a question of engineering, and it is simply not known if an advanced intelligence would be able to construct such a system. It is not disprovable, so there is little science to do there; if you don't know how to build such a system, you also don't know what technology you don't know about! We can't know what we don't know. We can know what happens naturally when we set up conditions and then let the experiment run within certain bounds without fiddling. How intelligent life itself impacts entropy in the long run is just an unknown. We'll only know if in fact we can control entropy with the right technology; if we can't we'll never know that. We do know that simple life, such as we would grow in a lab, does not have any technology (or intent...) to affect entropy, and does not change anything. If you have a spare few billion years and a bunch of habitable star systems maybe we could get some experiments started, but don't hold your breath.
You also go off the rails talking worrying about if an isolated system "can even exist." That shows deep bias, because that is an engineering concern that is not at issue in the thought experiment. In the thought experiment we're considering what it is like inside the system, not where it came from.
You do a bunch of hand-waving asserting I don't understand and are making stuff up, but that just shows you didn't even try to understand what I said. First, understand what I said; then you can try to disprove it. You can't disprove it by waving your hands, shouting "thermodynamics."
You miss the mark heavily where you talk about a "perpetual motion machine" that is "an isolated system that performs work using energy from a single heat reservoir, without transferring heat to an external cooler reservoir." Do you see the huge gaping problem here? There are 2 problems. The first is that from outside the isolated system there is no work being done. There is the same amount of energy inside the isolated system all the time. It is just a black box to you, and it is dark. You probably can't even know it is there, because it is isolated. You certainly can't see any work being done. And then your "external cooler reservoir" is complete nonsense, sorry to say. An isolated system has no external interactions, by definition, certainly not a "cooler reservoir" that would be sucking heat energy out of the system, causing a decrease in the system's energy. What you describe is an impossible perpetual motion machine.
Presumably somebody told you to come here and "make fun" of my comments, because your comment on this old thread comes right after I posted on a new thread. If so, that bias coming in explains why you so easily mistook what I described for whatever they told you to come and find. ;)
And yes, all energy is equivalent. Going into the weeds over the exact semantic meaning of the word "use." I certainly would agree that the English word "use" does not clearly describe actual physical processes of "using energy." But you don't have to go there to understand conservation. Unfortunately your attempt to explain falls victim to the same problems.
Just assume I'm not an idiot and then re-read what I actually said. And instead of assuming that I said what I didn't mean that is wrong, assume I said what I meant. The task of the reader is to find the most-true meaning, not the least-true meaning. And honestly, it should be pretty embarrassing to have such a negative attitude towards my comments while also claiming an isolated system would have an external energy drain. D'oh!
Nope. Maybe in your town/circle of friends. But nope.
Interestingly, you not using it that way, does not, cannot, mean that others don't use it that way.
You can look it up, I'm sure any of the websites that keep track of slang can inform you of multiple usages.
When a blog called "the mommy files" interviews mommy and her little darling and describe his behavior as having been "difficult," without giving any account of the police or school version of events, you should probably read that as, "luckily he didn't get charged with assaulting a police officer, because that is what an adult would have gotten."
A unicorn is a bi-sexual person of either gender, generally in the context of a threesome with a couple and where the unicorn has sex with both members of the couple.
So I think he means he gave a hand job to his neighbors bisexual male third wheel. What a bunch of sluts. LOL
Legal in most States. ;)
The word "gun" had nothing to do with the problem. The assignment was non-fiction, to write about himself. He wrote that he killed a neighbor's pet. That the "pet" is an imaginary creature suggests he might have serious guilt problems associated with having killed a real pet, or even a human; or witnessed such a crime. Or he could just be a teenager who wanted to be disruptive in class. Most likely the latter, but it is reasonable to check. They probably should have called a district mental health professional, not the police.
If it was a creative writing assignment this would not have raised the same red flags.
Also keep in mind, and I know we don't read the stories, but it is a blog called the "mommy files" and they only interviewed mommy and her perfect little darling. And he didn't freak out during the interview, like he did in the police interview. And neither he nor his mommy attempts to explain factually what behavior he was actually charged with. I'll give you a hint, though, it is the same (minor) charge he'd get if he was caught pulling a fire alarm or shouting "fire."
Maybe it is your anti-American hate that jumped the shark. Will it ever stop? I doubt it. No reason to expect humans to behave differently wherever you come from.
You might have missed the part where the story isn't from a newspaper that is claiming to have researched it and presented the facts. It is actually from a blog called the "mommy files," and they don't describe the actual charges, or interview anybody other than the student and his mother.
Also note that the assignment was not "creative writing." The students were supposed to write something about themselves. So that is what he wrote "about himself," that he acquired had acquired a gun and killed his neighbor's pet. Clearly that is protected speech, but it is perfectly reasonable in that circumstance to investigate if there was an actual pet (or human) who had been shot. It is common for teenagers who do something violent to make up a "story" so they can deal emotionally with their actions. Using an imaginary creature as a proxy for a real person or animal is normal in that situation. They weren't investigating him because he said the word "gun." There is more context here, and anybody with knowledge of child psychology should see that it is worth looking into whatever problems this child had that led him to this expression; at least in a preliminary way to see if he was discussing real violence. Obviously that would be more effectively done by a mental health professional than by the police. But if the police are the ones called, and his behavior towards them is disruptive, it is perfectly normal that he would receive a minor charge based on being disruptive. Unfortunately most schools don't teach children about their rights, and how to deal with police officers in a way that protects your rights without exposing you to legal charges. Freaking out and yelling at them and refusing to cooperate is usually going to get a person a minor charge. That is true in most of the world.
Only in 'Murica.
Here' if a 16-year old writes something like that, everyone would have a good laugh.
That's what happens in "'Murica," too. Unfortunately, we also have nationalist bigots like you. You'd feel right at home, I'm sure. You could just replace "'Murica" with France or China in your hate speech.
Did it cross your mind that perhaps you were misled by a sensationalist tabloid? Don't they also have tabloids in your country? I'll bet they do.