Didn't ZImmerman stand his ground by shooting Trayvon?
No. Zimmerman was not standing his ground. According to witnesses, Martin had Zimmerman pinned to the ground, and was bashing Zimmerman's head into the cement over and over and over again, as Zimmerman shrieked for help. After Martin had literally* beaten Zimmerman beyond recognition, Zimmerman managed to shoot his attacker fatally.
*I use the word "literally" here in the classic sense, not in the new "adding emphasis" sense. Zimmerman's own neighbor was unable to recognize him after Martin was through beating him, therefore, beating beyond recognition.
Niggerdly has a meaning, and it's not very flattering.
No, it doesn't. "Niggerdly" is not a word.
Another word, niggardly, means "miserly". I suppose you might argue that that is unflattering, but lots of words are unflattering. Etymologically, the word "niggardly" long predates the offensive, pejorative word "nigger", which sounds a bit like "niggardly", and causes uneducated buffoons to become confused. Not that that's hard to do.
We have serious problems with our public schools, but I believe educating our children is essential for a functioning society; it is more so for a democracy. Let's not throw out the system because it has flaws. Let's work together to fix them.
Do you really think that our schools are that bad? I mean, I realize that we routinely get our asses handed to us on international standardized testing, but I'd shudder if the top priority for our nation's schools suddenly became "improving our PISA scores".
Our schools produce all kinds of stuff, but one product is creative, innovative, well-rounded young adults. That's what we want to make more of. We're not trying to be India or China. We're trying to be America.
What I'm referring to is awards for "participation", which has nothing to do with effort.
"Ninety percent of life is just showing up." --Woody Allen
Based on my experience, there's a lot of wisdom in that quote. All of your genius will get you precisely nowhere in life if you can't be bothered to participate.
You still remember your PSAT scores and you're worried about schools over emphasizing the standardized tests?
All kidding aside, I don't know about where you went to school, but I didn't take PSATs until high school. If your kid got a 48/80 in 7th grade, that sounds pretty good to me.
The schools aren't the problem. The teachers aren't the problem. The problem is the parents. To prove my point, picture two schools: School #1 is the top, suburban, affluent school in your nearest major metro area. School #2 is the crummiest, most violent and decrepit school in the poorest ghetto of the inner-city.
Imagine, for a moment, that all laws of time and space were suspended, and you could just pick up both schools and switch them. The building, the teachers, the administration, the budget. Everything but the students and the students' parents. Would School #1, now in the ghetto with ghetto students and ghetto parents remain the top school in the area? And would School #2, now in affluent-ville still provide zero education? No, of course not. School #2 would quickly improve to be tops again, and School #1 would immediately go to shit.
That's because it's not like teachers in affluent districts are super-teachers or something. They just have fewer discipline problems and better-prepared students who arrive ready to learn, so their job is easier. By way of example, my youngest started Kindergarten today. He speaks 3 languages, reads at a 5th grade level, knows how to collect samples of nature and study them under a microscope, can perform arithmetic in both positive and negative rational numbers, knows where most of the countries of the world are, knows when major public figures lived and died, and tons of other stuff that I'm sure I've long-since forgotten about having taught him. Most of that is because he's a naturally-curious little guy, but who would have taught him had he not had well-educated parents? His curiosity would have gone totally unfulfilled. And now his teachers will congratulate themselves on being at the top of their field for having him and all of the other students like him just destroy the standardized tests when they get older, but we know the real story.
Why the hell do you live in such a crummy place, then?
A lot of parents make the choice between a higher mortgage and sending kids to public schools, assuming you don't wind up getting a special needs kid, or having a smaller mortgage and paying private school tuition (which is often subsidized). My wife and I chose to send our kids to public schools, but we chose one of the top schools in one of the top school districts in the country, and we pay for it dearly each month when our mortgage bill arrives.
sports programs need to be separated from academia.
A huge percentage of kids wouldn't be able to participate in sports if it weren't subsidized by the schools. Enrolling kids in private sports and providing transportation to practices and competitions is not cheap. Easy for you and me to forget sometimes since slashdot is a pretty affluent crowd, all told. But it's not really fair to the kids, and anyway, we are trying not to raise a nation of fatass kids, right?
The school budget should focus solely on math, science, the english language (in the USA), history (not 'social studies'), and a life-skills program (minus the political correctness in current health classes).
Not sure what you're trying to defund here, but I think it's important to be strong in the STEM areas, but also to be strong in other areas. We're not trying to be China or India.
If the kid plays sports in after-school camp, then he's exempt from phys ed.
That seems silly to me. Having athletic kids in the phys ed class helps motivate non-athletes to participate. Athletic kids need a little break from sitting still all day, too. At least that was the case when I was in school. I loved PE because it's hard to sit still all day.
I pretty much agree with the rest of what you wrote, though.
People who send their kids to private schools still pay taxes that support the public schools. By not sending their child to the public school, there is actually more revenue per student enrolled in the public school, unless the state legislature does something like reappropriate it elsewhere (which would make them evil, but again, they are politicians).
I think a lot of states do just that, with state funding based on enrolled student attendance. But US schools in most states get most of their funding from the local county.
Anyway, my real reason to comment was to say that there is *so* much more that goes into making a great school than just money. Money actually has precious little correlation with school quality. Just look at any major metro area. The inner-city schools are often way more expensive to operate than the suburban schools, yet which students get the better education? The ones whose parents turn off the TV and make the kids study. The ones where the parents volunteer at the school and are involved with it. The ones where the parents provide solid role models for how to be mature adults.
Thanks for telling me up front that you don't know what you're talking about so I got to save time by not reading the rest.
Dude, this is par for the course for slate. They post a link-whoring title and write a controversial and completely uninformed puff piece designed to generate floods of angry comments and even bigger floods of ad impressions and clicks.
I remember when the Internet made an effort not the feed the trolls, but those days are long gone. Trolling the Internet is Slate's bread and butter.
Catching people is hard; we can't even catch pedophiles who are banging kids, instead settling for people watching dirty videos and claiming this helps somehow.
Getting a bit OT, but we'd prevent a lot more child-rape if we handled pedophiles in the US like they do in Canada. In Canada, pedophiles can seek treatment for their condition without getting put into "the system". In the US, we have mandatory reporting laws, so if you walk into your friendly neighborhood shrink's office and say, "Help me, doc! I'm attracted to kids and I want those urges to stop!", then you are risking your entire livelihood.
There currently are effective treatments for pedophiles for a generous enough definition of the word "effective". Basically, they involve libido-killing medications, since there isn't yet a way to make adults who are sexually attracted to children be attracted to other adults, instead. But many pedophiles are satisfied with the libido-killing solution so they don't have to walk around with impossible-to-achieve-ethically urges all the time.
NSA needs a large army of sysadmins because they have a huge number of employees and a huge number of servers. That's just a given, because there's a lot of work to be done. But they could have minimized their exposure had they had a different, smaller team, responsible for protection of classified materials.
That smaller team, maybe with just a few people on it with the highest levels of clearance, would be responsible for keeping classified materials encrypted so that they'd resist a casual root attack (obviously if a rogue admin installed a keylogger engaged in some other sabotage, that admin could probably subvert the document management scheme, but that would be much more detectable than a brainless su + "drag and drop" style document theft).
Having 1000 superusers running around your network is just begging for trouble. I can't believe it took this long for a breach to occur.
Last car I bought I didn't really deal with a salesman other than to do test drives. The Internet has made the negotiation phase so much more painless.
The difference is that in a lot of states, it's illegal to circumvent the auto dealership network. But you can buy and sell as much real estate as you want without using a Realtor in all 50 states. Hiring a Realtor is 100% optional.
As a real estate investor, I can say two things. First: a good Realtor is definitely worth having a relationship with. Second: most Realtors suck utter ass at what they do.
You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.
If I understood correctly, the texter doesn't automatically share in responsibility for the collision just for having sent a text to someone he knew was driving. The texter has to have had reason to believe that the driver was going to read the text while he was driving.
One issue I have with text records is that my phone will keep trying to send the message until it gets signal.
I didn't read the article, but from the discussion, it looks like the text sender, in order to share in liability for the collision, needs to have had reason to know that the driver was going to read the text while driving. In your case, you might have sent the text that the driver read while causing the collision, but that wouldn't be enough for you to share in liability because you wouldn't have had any reason to think that your text would have been read while driving. Heck, your text didn't even go out when you thought that it would.
Because when you try and make everyone responsible for everything the outcome is nobody is responsible for anything. The next level out is someone is going to suggest the telco can reasonably know if a phone is in a moving vehicle; so how come they failed to hold the messages until the phone was not observed to be traveling at rate a speed beyond a running human?
As we speak, people are working on a technical solution to try to prevent texting and driving. Personally, I think it will be impossible to do that without preventing passengers from texting, but anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there.
Also, I'm OK with shared responsibility in this case, as long as it's clear that the driver is the primarily responsible party, and the text sender has to be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have known that the driver was going to read the text while driving. In that case, the driver is still, what, 90% responsible? Seems reasonable.
The driver has free will. The driver as moral awareness. The driver is a legal adult. The driver is capable of being in control of himself and the situation.
This is all true, yet I'm still fairly comfortable with the narrowness of the rule.
I look at it like this. If I have a gun and you come up to me and say, "Hey, could I please borrow your gun? I want to go shoot my wife and run off with my girlfriend," wouldn't I be partly responsible for your wife's murder if I were to lend you my gun under the circumstances? Because that's the difference. If you had instead asked to borrow my gun to go blow off some steam at the target range, then I would not share in responsibility, because I couldn't have known your true intentions.
This case is the same. If I send you a text that I know you intend to read while driving, I know that that's dangerous, and I know that that's illegal, and I know that that could lead you to cause a collision. So why am I off the hook completely if you read my text and then crash into a busload of nuns? In this case, I still believe that the driver has primary responsibility for the collision (say, 90%), but am I really not even a tiny bit responsible for that negative outcome?
When my kids were little, they bounced off of walls over the excitement of consuming sugar. They start bouncing before consuming the sugar and would continue for a while, before collapsing from exhaustion.
Exactly. I've done both, currently working for myself. All my friends say, "Oh man, that's great, you can take the day off if you want." Sigh... when you work for yourself you don't get a day off.
I work for myself, and I force myself to take vacation. Sure, it causes problems when I'm on vacation, but what the hell is the point if I can't spend time with my family?
Why import something natural when you can synthesize something much worse locally?
Because the US has high tariffs on sugar imports to protect the local sugar growers. This is widely considered to be bad policy, but it's tradition and the sugar lobby is powerful, so anyway, that is the reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't ZImmerman stand his ground by shooting Trayvon?
No. Zimmerman was not standing his ground. According to witnesses, Martin had Zimmerman pinned to the ground, and was bashing Zimmerman's head into the cement over and over and over again, as Zimmerman shrieked for help. After Martin had literally* beaten Zimmerman beyond recognition, Zimmerman managed to shoot his attacker fatally.
*I use the word "literally" here in the classic sense, not in the new "adding emphasis" sense. Zimmerman's own neighbor was unable to recognize him after Martin was through beating him, therefore, beating beyond recognition.
Niggerdly has a meaning, and it's not very flattering.
No, it doesn't. "Niggerdly" is not a word.
Another word, niggardly, means "miserly". I suppose you might argue that that is unflattering, but lots of words are unflattering. Etymologically, the word "niggardly" long predates the offensive, pejorative word "nigger", which sounds a bit like "niggardly", and causes uneducated buffoons to become confused. Not that that's hard to do.
UMUCk?
We have serious problems with our public schools, but I believe educating our children is essential for a functioning society; it is more so for a democracy. Let's not throw out the system because it has flaws. Let's work together to fix them.
Do you really think that our schools are that bad? I mean, I realize that we routinely get our asses handed to us on international standardized testing, but I'd shudder if the top priority for our nation's schools suddenly became "improving our PISA scores".
Our schools produce all kinds of stuff, but one product is creative, innovative, well-rounded young adults. That's what we want to make more of. We're not trying to be India or China. We're trying to be America.
What I'm referring to is awards for "participation", which has nothing to do with effort.
"Ninety percent of life is just showing up." --Woody Allen
Based on my experience, there's a lot of wisdom in that quote. All of your genius will get you precisely nowhere in life if you can't be bothered to participate.
You still remember your PSAT scores and you're worried about schools over emphasizing the standardized tests?
All kidding aside, I don't know about where you went to school, but I didn't take PSATs until high school. If your kid got a 48/80 in 7th grade, that sounds pretty good to me.
The schools aren't the problem. The teachers aren't the problem. The problem is the parents. To prove my point, picture two schools: School #1 is the top, suburban, affluent school in your nearest major metro area. School #2 is the crummiest, most violent and decrepit school in the poorest ghetto of the inner-city.
Imagine, for a moment, that all laws of time and space were suspended, and you could just pick up both schools and switch them. The building, the teachers, the administration, the budget. Everything but the students and the students' parents. Would School #1, now in the ghetto with ghetto students and ghetto parents remain the top school in the area? And would School #2, now in affluent-ville still provide zero education? No, of course not. School #2 would quickly improve to be tops again, and School #1 would immediately go to shit.
That's because it's not like teachers in affluent districts are super-teachers or something. They just have fewer discipline problems and better-prepared students who arrive ready to learn, so their job is easier. By way of example, my youngest started Kindergarten today. He speaks 3 languages, reads at a 5th grade level, knows how to collect samples of nature and study them under a microscope, can perform arithmetic in both positive and negative rational numbers, knows where most of the countries of the world are, knows when major public figures lived and died, and tons of other stuff that I'm sure I've long-since forgotten about having taught him. Most of that is because he's a naturally-curious little guy, but who would have taught him had he not had well-educated parents? His curiosity would have gone totally unfulfilled. And now his teachers will congratulate themselves on being at the top of their field for having him and all of the other students like him just destroy the standardized tests when they get older, but we know the real story.
Why the hell do you live in such a crummy place, then?
A lot of parents make the choice between a higher mortgage and sending kids to public schools, assuming you don't wind up getting a special needs kid, or having a smaller mortgage and paying private school tuition (which is often subsidized). My wife and I chose to send our kids to public schools, but we chose one of the top schools in one of the top school districts in the country, and we pay for it dearly each month when our mortgage bill arrives.
sports programs need to be separated from academia.
A huge percentage of kids wouldn't be able to participate in sports if it weren't subsidized by the schools. Enrolling kids in private sports and providing transportation to practices and competitions is not cheap. Easy for you and me to forget sometimes since slashdot is a pretty affluent crowd, all told. But it's not really fair to the kids, and anyway, we are trying not to raise a nation of fatass kids, right?
The school budget should focus solely on math, science, the english language (in the USA), history (not 'social studies'), and a life-skills program (minus the political correctness in current health classes).
Not sure what you're trying to defund here, but I think it's important to be strong in the STEM areas, but also to be strong in other areas. We're not trying to be China or India.
If the kid plays sports in after-school camp, then he's exempt from phys ed.
That seems silly to me. Having athletic kids in the phys ed class helps motivate non-athletes to participate. Athletic kids need a little break from sitting still all day, too. At least that was the case when I was in school. I loved PE because it's hard to sit still all day.
I pretty much agree with the rest of what you wrote, though.
People who send their kids to private schools still pay taxes that support the public schools. By not sending their child to the public school, there is actually more revenue per student enrolled in the public school, unless the state legislature does something like reappropriate it elsewhere (which would make them evil, but again, they are politicians).
I think a lot of states do just that, with state funding based on enrolled student attendance. But US schools in most states get most of their funding from the local county.
Anyway, my real reason to comment was to say that there is *so* much more that goes into making a great school than just money. Money actually has precious little correlation with school quality. Just look at any major metro area. The inner-city schools are often way more expensive to operate than the suburban schools, yet which students get the better education? The ones whose parents turn off the TV and make the kids study. The ones where the parents volunteer at the school and are involved with it. The ones where the parents provide solid role models for how to be mature adults.
There are some things that money can't buy.
Thanks for telling me up front that you don't know what you're talking about so I got to save time by not reading the rest.
Dude, this is par for the course for slate. They post a link-whoring title and write a controversial and completely uninformed puff piece designed to generate floods of angry comments and even bigger floods of ad impressions and clicks.
I remember when the Internet made an effort not the feed the trolls, but those days are long gone. Trolling the Internet is Slate's bread and butter.
Catching people is hard; we can't even catch pedophiles who are banging kids, instead settling for people watching dirty videos and claiming this helps somehow.
Getting a bit OT, but we'd prevent a lot more child-rape if we handled pedophiles in the US like they do in Canada. In Canada, pedophiles can seek treatment for their condition without getting put into "the system". In the US, we have mandatory reporting laws, so if you walk into your friendly neighborhood shrink's office and say, "Help me, doc! I'm attracted to kids and I want those urges to stop!", then you are risking your entire livelihood.
There currently are effective treatments for pedophiles for a generous enough definition of the word "effective". Basically, they involve libido-killing medications, since there isn't yet a way to make adults who are sexually attracted to children be attracted to other adults, instead. But many pedophiles are satisfied with the libido-killing solution so they don't have to walk around with impossible-to-achieve-ethically urges all the time.
</rant>
NSA needs a large army of sysadmins because they have a huge number of employees and a huge number of servers. That's just a given, because there's a lot of work to be done. But they could have minimized their exposure had they had a different, smaller team, responsible for protection of classified materials.
That smaller team, maybe with just a few people on it with the highest levels of clearance, would be responsible for keeping classified materials encrypted so that they'd resist a casual root attack (obviously if a rogue admin installed a keylogger engaged in some other sabotage, that admin could probably subvert the document management scheme, but that would be much more detectable than a brainless su + "drag and drop" style document theft).
Having 1000 superusers running around your network is just begging for trouble. I can't believe it took this long for a breach to occur.
Last car I bought I didn't really deal with a salesman other than to do test drives. The Internet has made the negotiation phase so much more painless.
The difference is that in a lot of states, it's illegal to circumvent the auto dealership network. But you can buy and sell as much real estate as you want without using a Realtor in all 50 states. Hiring a Realtor is 100% optional.
As a real estate investor, I can say two things. First: a good Realtor is definitely worth having a relationship with. Second: most Realtors suck utter ass at what they do.
You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.
If I understood correctly, the texter doesn't automatically share in responsibility for the collision just for having sent a text to someone he knew was driving. The texter has to have had reason to believe that the driver was going to read the text while he was driving.
One issue I have with text records is that my phone will keep trying to send the message until it gets signal.
I didn't read the article, but from the discussion, it looks like the text sender, in order to share in liability for the collision, needs to have had reason to know that the driver was going to read the text while driving. In your case, you might have sent the text that the driver read while causing the collision, but that wouldn't be enough for you to share in liability because you wouldn't have had any reason to think that your text would have been read while driving. Heck, your text didn't even go out when you thought that it would.
Because when you try and make everyone responsible for everything the outcome is nobody is responsible for anything. The next level out is someone is going to suggest the telco can reasonably know if a phone is in a moving vehicle; so how come they failed to hold the messages until the phone was not observed to be traveling at rate a speed beyond a running human?
As we speak, people are working on a technical solution to try to prevent texting and driving. Personally, I think it will be impossible to do that without preventing passengers from texting, but anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there.
Also, I'm OK with shared responsibility in this case, as long as it's clear that the driver is the primarily responsible party, and the text sender has to be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have known that the driver was going to read the text while driving. In that case, the driver is still, what, 90% responsible? Seems reasonable.
The driver has free will. The driver as moral awareness. The driver is a legal adult. The driver is capable of being in control of himself and the situation.
This is all true, yet I'm still fairly comfortable with the narrowness of the rule.
I look at it like this. If I have a gun and you come up to me and say, "Hey, could I please borrow your gun? I want to go shoot my wife and run off with my girlfriend," wouldn't I be partly responsible for your wife's murder if I were to lend you my gun under the circumstances? Because that's the difference. If you had instead asked to borrow my gun to go blow off some steam at the target range, then I would not share in responsibility, because I couldn't have known your true intentions.
This case is the same. If I send you a text that I know you intend to read while driving, I know that that's dangerous, and I know that that's illegal, and I know that that could lead you to cause a collision. So why am I off the hook completely if you read my text and then crash into a busload of nuns? In this case, I still believe that the driver has primary responsibility for the collision (say, 90%), but am I really not even a tiny bit responsible for that negative outcome?
When my kids were little, they bounced off of walls over the excitement of consuming sugar. They start bouncing before consuming the sugar and would continue for a while, before collapsing from exhaustion.
Exactly. I've done both, currently working for myself. All my friends say, "Oh man, that's great, you can take the day off if you want." Sigh... when you work for yourself you don't get a day off.
I work for myself, and I force myself to take vacation. Sure, it causes problems when I'm on vacation, but what the hell is the point if I can't spend time with my family?
Try pricing out stuff like beans, kale, cabbage, spinach etc. instead.
What the fuck are those things? They sound like the stuff that food eats.
Sugar doesn't make you fat. Marriage makes you fat. Just compare the waistlines of your single and married friends to see what I mean.
This is basically true. It's amazing the amount of incentive provided by needing to compete for pussy/penis on the open market.
Why import something natural when you can synthesize something much worse locally?
Because the US has high tariffs on sugar imports to protect the local sugar growers. This is widely considered to be bad policy, but it's tradition and the sugar lobby is powerful, so anyway, that is the reason.
Calorie restriction without exercise *works*, but it requires willpower AND some kind of stimulant (such as caffeine, smoking, etc).
Why does calorie restriction without exercise require a stimulant?
I'm just curious. I've noticed that empirically (I use caffeine), but I didn't know that it applied to those other than me.