Verizon guy was a bully. plain and simple. He should go to jail and the victim should get monetary compensation. 50k sounds about right. Unless the perpetrator is punished and the victim is rewarded, we're just perpetuating a society that allows bigger and stronger people to get away with violence just because they can. If the victim was a woman, this would have been shocking, since it was a man, there are some people that are on the assaulter's side!

Is that if you're old enough to be charged as an adult for a crime, you should legally count as an adult for all other purposes as well..

Well, technically, the kid could be victim of murder in the 2nd degree, or at least manslaughter. It's wrong that children don't get the same protections as adults do against physical harm. A lot of corporal punishment handed out by these 'camps' is technically assault, far beyond it. If you beat a rude man to death in a bar in a fit of drunken anger it's murder...if you beat a rude child to death in a fit of power-mad anger, who's safety you were entrusted to, isn't that much worse?

Posts here seem to have some kind of assanine over-reaching international agenda. Kid here was beat by overzealous camp counselours that abused their authority and deceived parents for financial gain. They screwed up and now they're covering it up. I believe this issue was covered in America some time ago..anyone remember the Camp Krusty episodes of the Simpsons? This is not some kind of symptom of an elusive and corrupt communist state, it's simple greedy bastards taking advantage of lax regulations of other people taking care of their kids. Sure, China's head government is an soulless autocracy..but quite frankly that has nothing to do with it. You may as well blame GW Bush's Invasion of Iraq for...increased divorce rates and proponents of teaching ID in schools. Not really related..

Here is the crux of the situation- it's not illegal to be stupid, in fact you can willingly forego any notion of higher education if you wanted to. Sorry, but as a person in the world, you need to deal with this. What IS illegal, is if you take advantage of them to perform illegal acts. It's the same situation if you 'tricked them' into shooting someone. The person who GIVES orders is just as responsible, or even more responsible, then the one who follows them.

Reagan's just one man, and it wasn't just one man. However, he was a very important man and deserves -some- credit. The truth stands that Reagan...and whoever the major players during the communist era were, didn't need to infringe on constitutional rights to take down networks of spies and an evil empire, they did it with military spending. These days we spend WAY more on military spending then we did then and still lose our constitutional rights. It's just a symptom of lawmakers flailing around uselessly trying to find a legislative solution to an executive problem. The solution is spending more money on CIA and FBI agents and training, and NOT uselessly flailing about the civilian population. Homeland security laws pretty much do nothing, terrorists are going to break them anyway. I've never really heard of terrorists being being caught because of our 'new security measures', it's pretty much the tried and true way of relying on skilled intelligence operatives who have modern investigative tools.

If China ever had a state religion, (and it did back in the Imperial days) it would be ancestor worship. The Chinese have a strong belief in the power of the dead. A skeleton shows disrespect of the dead as obviously this body was unburied and now the spirit is angry and in the world. It's sort of like consigning the person to an eternal hell. Proper burials are a big thing. It is indeed a cultural taboo, maybe like how witchcraft and wicca is taboo in large portions of America. The Chinese government, up to the Last Emperor in the early 1900's, seriously believed in the Mandate of Heaven and superstition. Supernatural evidence such as ominous dreams and the testimony of ghosts was used in court cases as late as the 1890's. The Dowager Empress' support of the Boxers during the Boxer rebellion, was based on her belief that they literally posessed magical kung fu powers- that they could deflect bullets, and defeat the colonial powers in the country. The government may have rejected superstition, but as we in America know, just because the government rejects religion, doesn't mean the whole country is not tainted by it. Replace ALL of our Christian influenced stuff with Ancestor Worship/Taoist/Buddhist synchrotism influenced stuff, and you get China. The Chinese government has long been the protector of cultural sensibilities, it's one role that the Chinese government takes on today. Cultural control is a key part of Confuscian society, not just government. Even Democratic Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea promote 'social repression and lack of individual expression' as it were, through strict educational regimes based on memorization, and encouraging a highly disciplined and hierarchal family structure. To the CCP's credit, they've done much more for women's rights and the equal rights of minority in China (societally) than the above mentioned Asian democratic countries. The above countries harshly disapprove of things like interracial marriage and women acting outside of or neglecting 'the traditional role', and never had anything like the Civil Rights movement to change old perceptions on race/eugenics. That doesn't justify censorship of course. If they could just get with the program and institute some kind of genuine elections and government respect for human rights, then mainland China would be one of the most open and free countries in Asia.

Uhmmm...to the trolls saying it's possible that Ahmedinejad's win was possibly legitimate, did you not see all those people in the streets? You know, the ones getting shot in the face and tear gassed? This is the biggest protest in Iranian history since the 1979 revolution. Just because you're all fired up with white liberal guilt doesn't mean the rest of us don't see what's going on.

These liberals lost the 2004 elections fair and square to Ahmedinejad, and were he to have won fairly, they wouldn't be out on the streets risking DEATH. Snarky mathematical countermands aren't going to silence them anymore than gunfire. Comparisons to Bush's wins in 2004 only highlight your white liberal guilt...just because the US fairly elected someone unpopular, doesn't mean that things are alright in Iran. Let's not forget that Bush neither had the Basij intimidating voters, and that there was no direct, explicit power structure in charge of him and counting the votes.

Honestly? It doesn't even matter now. The Iranian people have seen what their government does to its' own citizens. It's not a third world country. Even farmers and merchantmen can see that shooting and beating nonviolent protestors is wrong. Bush may have done a lot of bad things, but he never turned his dogs on American citizens enmasse like this.

Most physicists I know have moved onto C++ code. At least I know they use this at the Brookhaven and Tskuba Particle Accelerators in Long Island,NY and Japan respectively.

Uhmmmmm...this just in, kids in gradeschool/highschool AREN'T allowed to make notes in the margin, resell or keep their text books, whatsoever. What you're talking about is college text books. And yeah, since you can't do anything like that, an online textbook is indeed, the right solution. As to writing notes in the margin, I've never done that. I don't understand why people do that. Just write it on a piece of paper like everyone else.

How about a waste of time tax where legislators have to pay 1% of their income for every piece of legislation that they propose that get shot down or struck down in court?

Does France suddenly start regulating wine according to EU standards? Does any government just give up valuable research apparatuses and functions for some so called 'public good'? Even participants in the CERN program don't get a free ride. DNS servers run on US equipment, were made by US citizens, and was paid for by the US government. What would the UN like next? Would you like control over GPS? Satellites? How about you just regulate our economy too, since much of the world relies on US-based companies. The international community is asking the US to give up a valuable strategic resource FOR FREE. It's true that giving away things to people that need it is morally right-Âbut you don't give away your life savings to free, right? The US already contributes billions of dollars to random foreign aid and the UN. Quite frankly, the day I think we should give up DNS is the day the UN starts subsidizing high-speed internet connections for everybody. Until that happens, you can live with it.