adrianbravo
Like Bill Gates, the richest American? Oh wait, he didn't inherit that money. Ooops.
This is absurd.
And even if I support abortion rights, the act is technically killing. A 'life' is terminated. Regardless, I'd point out that murder holds a different connotation that implies hatred or ill-will (or "malice aforethought") toward the victim. Same with euthanasia.
Why not take these as opportunities to explore the meanings and limits of a word? One person's definition of what is the archetypal murderer or thief or racist may easily differ from yours depending on their own experiences.
I think this is close to the mark, albeit vague. Challenging their minds in what way? Such a statement could be misinterpreted as, "We need more rigorous test standards!" or some other specific solution that does not necessarily meet the goal.
From personal experience, for classes other than upper-level math at my college, people would constantly ask questions like, "Is this going to be on the test?"
And I was always annoyed by that. It seemed indicative of the meaninglessness of our education, and I can see why math classes are so difficult for people who learn this pattern rather than the subjects. I don't know how different it is at Ivy League or other schools perceived as high in quality, but when the majority of testing is multiple-choice, true-false, or fill-in-the-blank, it becomes easy to look at everything you learn as a task of rote memorization. It's like that saying: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The difference with math that makes it so "hard" is you often can't rely on rote memorization. You have to actually learn the material (or understand algorithms and memorize steps to finding solutions with different initial conditions). People get discouraged (probably early on) by the fact that the skills they use for academic success elsewhere do not always work with math, and I think they associate those negative emotions with "math is hard."
I don't know the solution, but I think people need to at least realize that rote memorization is not indicative of learning. It's an uncomfortable realization because so many of our metrics for academic success rely on the assumption that memorization equals learning or understanding.
Of course, that's unlikely. The status quo is always easier. Why do we expect so little from adults?
So why give it a linkbait-style title?
If icon size is an issue, you can try using Font Awesome: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/. It uses a font-face for the icons rather than sprites, so you can configure further in css by adjusting size and color, whereas bootstrap's icons are limited to black/white (plus some opacity). A potential gotcha with this approach is you need to be sure you can configure your web server to send the right content-type for the font files you'll send. I had to do some minor nginx configuration to get it right for certain browsers.
There are also pre-customized resources like bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com/) if you want to get a look at some of the possibilities.
And if you clone the bootstrap repo, you can fiddle around with the base LESS stylesheets to make quick changes that affect the full system (lots of stuff in variables.less: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/less/variab...) of course.
I don't think the issues you listed are particularly significant unless you know that customization is going to be too costly in terms of time.
I was hoping I could get some feedback on this project I've been working on. It's a music player that plays YouTube videos while allowing search through Last.fm (for better data). Right now it uses node and backbone.js.
It has a few basic features. Primarily, you can make playlists. You can also put the player into 'discovery' mode to listen to music similar to whatever you're already listening to. Search is relatively robust for a site of its kind (in my opinion).
I plan on adding a few more features including genre-based radio, scrobbling, favorites, a mobile app, and "channels" for social listening.
Source code is available too, if you want to check it out. It's written purely in javascript. https://github.com/adrianbravo/jukesy