I'm going to go even further and say the family hasn't even seen the picture in question, if there even is a picture to be seen, and are randomly guessing at its content and explanation. Everyone is in the dark here.

The kid has to be lying. As outrageous as the claims against the school are, and to be sure they are outrageous and will require equally outrageous evidence, this is the part for me that just doesn't pass the smell test. No one in their right mind is going to mistake a kid eating candy for a kid popping pills. This is so unbelievable that it sounds like just the kind of lie a young teenager would come up with when caught. I know I used to try. His parents are going along with his obvious ridiculousness because they smell money. It brings to mind the case of the kid in MA over Christmas who supposedly "got suspended for drawing a picture of Jesus". In reality, it wasn't a picture of Jesus, and he didn't get suspended, but because there was a lawsuit and publicity to be had, his father knowingly played up the false claims. I would bet my right arm the same thing is going on here. "If my kid says he was eating candy, then he was eating candy!" No way. Regardless of what the school did or didn't do, the family's account of it is utterly ridiculous. I'm withholding judgment accordingly.

This is so wrong as to be flamebait. As has been discussed ad nauseum for the last week, Iran is not the country the western media under Bush had said it was. Over 60% of the population now lives in cities, expected to be 80% by 2030, and it has had one of the highest urban growth rates in the world for the past several decades. Tehran isn't the only city in Iran. It's not even the only city with more than a million people, and coincidentally not the only city that has been rioting over this election.

That's why this is such a big deal, and why the election was such an obvious sham: Ahmedinejad may have majority support in those "mud huts" you talk about, but since rural people make up a diminishing minority of Iranians, the claim that the election results accurately reflect the current demographics of Iran is laughable if you've been paying even the slightest attention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iran_cities_by_population

You have no idea what you are talking about. Calling a mix of HTML, CSS, and JS a "mess" is uniformed FUD. The vast majority of the visible web is based on these three technologies, and at least in their current form, they are designed to work together pretty well. I'm not sure how you could have written any scripts in your life and not come to this conclusion. What exactly did you do with GreaseMonkey if you weren't using it to manipulate HTML and CSS?

Also, jQuery is terribly popular. Not including support for it would have been a huge oversight. Did you just step out of a time machine from 1999?

I lied to my parents all the time about how classes were going. The more the lie made me sound like the victim, the better it came across. I bet if he told you the administration is completely on the side of the prof, you would believe him, because why not? Your son wouldn't lie, and all universities these days are new-age feel-gooderies.

I would suggest a more likely scenario is that the event went down in exactly the opposite way. Your son started an argument he couldn't win, his fellow classmates shouted him down, and he dropped the class in shame.

I was in the first required TEAL class, so I have first-hand knowledge that this stat is bullshit. There are two reasons for improvement, and neither of them have to do with the quality of the class (which is anecdotally awful). First, the class coincided with the first term on grades for freshman. Previously, all freshman classes had been graded on a Pass/No Record basis, so all former iterations of 8.02 E&M had been taken by students with *no chance of actually failing the class*. A=B=C=P, and if you got a D or F, it didn't show up on your transcript, and you just took it again. For my class, we didn't have this option, so we all had to try a little bit harder, because Cs don't look that good, it turns out.

Secondly, freshman classes have the highest failure rate at MIT, so the noted improvement is also weighted by that fact. As above, the failure rate wasn't necessarily because the classes are too hard or taught poorly, it was because it's tough to do just enough to get a C-. Sometimes you undershot that goal and got a D or F.

This isn't happening. You can't get the coupon if you don't need it. I mean, I suppose you could lie and say you don't have cable, but the application makes it pretty clear that cable subscribers don't need a box.

The giant assumption behind your entire argument is that there are more, or at least similar amounts of, illegal immigrants than poor citizens. This is just not true. There are somewhere between 7-12 million illegal immigrants, but 40% of Americans have lived below the poverty line sometime in the last decade. That's an order of magnitude difference.

Regarding paying no income tax, yes, it's likely that these immigrants don't pay any, but again, this is irrelevant. The "unskilled laborers" you believe have been deprived of jobs by illegal immigrants wouldn't make enough money to pay income taxes either, and they would use more public services. We're talking about jobs that need to be done, but pay next to nothing. I fail to see how installing legal citizens in these jobs would generate any additional revenue for the government.

I really don't understand your point. Very very few people in this country make enough to pay $14k in income taxes...does that mean their children shouldn't be attending public school either? Let's imagine a person who makes enough to pay $14k in taxes. Does he have to choose between sending his child to school or partaking of local police service? We've already established that these illegal immigrants you're convinced are ruining 'Merka are paying taxes. What's the issue? Illegal immigration is a problem, for myriad reasons, but poor immigrants not making enough money to pay the full share of their children's education costs is not one of them, especially since illegal immigrants are less likely to use other public services than citizens.

you didn't cite anything yourself. Your numbers are probably more made up than the GP's.

I played GoW for PC and for 360, and I must say, the PC version was completely useless. They prettified the graphics and made it 'harder' by making your weapons useless. No thanks. I'm not one to argue for 'realism' in games, but come on: it takes 40+ rounds to take down the first guys you fight in the game. That doesn't make the PC version harder, just repetitive. Those stupid holes in the ground from which enemies appear are just disheartening, because you know you're going to have to take about 5 or more enemies, and since each enemy takes upwards of 30 seconds to kill, you've got minutes of stock-still pointing and shooting on your hands.

I wasn't a fan of the 360 version, but at least you didn't have to try so damn hard for so long to hit the enemies. That fact improved the gameplay 10-fold.