Y2HH

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jan 13, 2012 -> 10:51 AM) So nothing the US ever does could possibly incite violent reaction? It's all deterministic? Whether we pass out food or piss on corpses, the responses will be the exact same? If it wasn't the US giving them the excuse you're looking for, it would be someone else. This is no different than me saying, because 1 black guy murdered someone, that it's ok if I blame all blacks for murder, because they're all the same!@#$!@ Because a few IDIOT soldiers did something stupid, that means these would be terrorists should blame the whole of the US, and other countries...and other soldiers for that matter?! How's it different? It's equally ignorant of them... Hateful people don't NEED an excuse to hate. They're going to do it anyway. That's my point...and it's been my point from the start.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 13, 2012 -> 10:27 AM) It doesn't have to be everyone. It just has to be 1. That 1 would have become that anyway, didn't need this as an excuse. That's what you seem to keep pretending, though.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 13, 2012 -> 10:19 AM) No, it's not unfair. Right here you've made the classic, obvious mistake of assuming that the total number of terrorists or people willing to kill Americans is a constant. It isn't. My first statement was that American soldiers will die because of this. My second statement was that the Abu Ghraib videos were key parts of taking people who might not like us and otherwise convincing them to pick up weapons. The people who are already in Al Qaeda, yeah, they aren't going to change their feelings based on this. But the guy who is deciding whether to hide an Al Qaeda member in his home, or the 18 year old kid deciding whether to pick up the AK 47 and go after the Americans, those are the ones this matters for. This isn't changing the context. That is the single biggest key to understanding how to "Win" these conflicts we've gotten ourselves into. When you inflame the local population, you hurt your chances of winning, you create enemies for yourself, and your soldiers die. The other option would be to stop fighting these types of wars. Even if you don't "inflame the local population" there is no winning these conflicts. Nothing will change the mind of a terrorist, or the mind of a person that is prone to becoming a terrorist. If they don't become one today, they will tomorrow...something, anything, will turn them into what they want to become. If it's not this incident, it will be something else, be it something major (like this) or something minor...like perhaps McDonald's released an ad that made him/her/them "angreh". I stand by my notion that this incident won't cost any more American lives than would have already been cost...for the reasons I've already stated multiple times. That 18 year old kid "deciding" whether to pick up that AK47 was going to do it anyway...you're just living in denial of that fact.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 13, 2012 -> 09:26 AM) So they're always going to be angry and thus it doesn't matter if we do anything that pisses them off, but it's also worth having hundreds of our soldiers die to try to change the fact that they're always pissed off. Seriously, if we want to pretend that desecrating the bodies of foreign fighters doesn't matter, then we should stop getting involved in wars where winning the "Hearts and minds" of the local population is so important. You should release your jump to conclusions mat...I bet it'd be a big seller! What you did here was you moved the goal posts. So in response I'm throwing the little yellow flag. If you want to say "seriously", let's actually be serious, then. Rather than changing the original point in which we all responded too, let's stick to the point we all responded too. I outright said (once already) that I do not condone these actions. That's twice. Now, to the point, desecrating the bodies of foreign fighters does NOT matter in relation to angering terrorists. This was the original point we responded too, and the ONLY point we responded too. We said nothing of the fact that it won't help win the "hearts and minds of the local population", because it wasn't what we were responding too in the first place. So you moved the posts from angering/inciting terrorists to the local population. Changing the context in which our original statements were made was unfair.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 13, 2012 -> 08:49 AM) That doesn't mean we have to help! And that's not an excuse at all! I never said I condone what was done, but we need not pretend it's why they're angry, either. Applying bit of logic to the situation is all that's necessary. The people that did this are idiots and I wasn't making an excuse for these idiots...but ironically, you ARE making an excuse for the terrorists by that same token. Point is, they don't need an excuse to be angry, they already are, and have been for eons.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jan 12, 2012 -> 11:12 PM) They get inflamed when they wake up. They get inflamed when KCF added bacon to their chicken bowl. They get enraged if a dog looks at them. Seriously, there isn't one person over there that wasn't a terrorist before that suddenly changed their minds after this and said "you know what, I feel like killing some Americans today, this was the final straw". And the day Karzi expresses such 'outrage' at terrorists killing the good guys over there is the day that I will listen to ANY of his complaints. He is slime trying to play both sides of the fence. Pretty much, they get outraged at anything/everything, so of course they'd be outraged at this. But let's stop pretending they wouldn't have been outraged anyway, even if this never happened...and that's exactly what people are doing right now.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jan 10, 2012 -> 10:41 AM) I would say out of simple observations that yea you won't see many if any direct products from concept car shows sold. But the designs, features, etc will be used heavily later on. All those stylings on the outside of concept cars are pretty much what you will be looking at in buying a car a few years down the road, or at least that's what I feel like I've seen in the past 8 years or so (lived near Detroit for 5 years so car shows were huge and newspapers would have full sections on what was there. I remember many of those stylings now being adapted to standard cars today). Still not nearly the same.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 10, 2012 -> 08:33 AM) Had an interview and wow was that a waste of my time. Here's an interesting little thing I've never seen before.... I asked about the salary that was posted and if that was in concrete or possibly negotiable. Their response was that ALL IT employees make exactly the same amount regardless of experience or tenure. So, the guy who has been there 15 years makes as much as the person there 1 year (under one year employees make $.50 less per hour). Yeah um...no.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 9, 2012 -> 08:08 AM) It's CES week! Where 95% of what they show will never be sold.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jan 6, 2012 -> 08:57 AM) Very encouraging, obviously the more accurate #s could be revised down in 2 months, but very encouraging. After 3 years from college, happy to say finally that all of my friends have jobs. That is, not barista jobs, either. Strippers?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 2, 2012 -> 09:46 PM) This was a fairly stunning event in terms of the godawful Citizens United decision. Basically... not only did the MT Supreme Court in no uncertain terms say that the Citizens United decision was a horrible miscarriage of justice - and that corporations did not deserve even equal duty to voting rights let alone special ones... but also decided it was only very narrowly tailored to fit the specific instance in that case. As such, a Montana state law banning anonymously funded poltiical speech was upheld. This makes me happy, and I thought deserved its own thread. Just curious... did anyone here, no matter what party they associate with, think that SCOTUS decision was a good one in any way, shape or form? No. But then again, I don't know much about the law other than the broad strokes which everyone understands...the underlying details -- if any -- I have absolutely no knowledge of.

QUOTE (Whitewashed in '05 @ Dec 31, 2011 -> 06:19 PM) Every time I look up there's another Adobe Reader update or Flash update. I actually stopped using Adobe Reader and use a different program to read PDFs. It's so bloated as well. There are updates so often because there are that many backdoors/security issues with their software that they have to constantly update.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 31, 2011 -> 06:23 PM) Unfortunately, the pdf format is now so ingrained in the sciences it's going to be really hard to replace it, at least in my life. Most journals have spent 5+ years digitizing their archives, some of them going back 100+ years, and they've put them direclty into pdf format because everyone used it. The hard work of digitizing them was already done, meaning they can be mass converted with scripts and other various easy to do methods without much of an issue.

QUOTE (Swingandalongonetoleft @ Dec 26, 2011 -> 02:18 PM) If .pdf went anywhere, I would curl up into a ball and weep like a child. Not that I'm particularly fond of it, but it makes my work so much easier. There are superior alternatives, ones that don't fill your computer/network with backdoors/security holes, etc. Flash and Acrobat are bug ridden virus havens that hackers rely on 99% of the time in order to hack anyone.

PDF, another proprietary format that needs to die a swift and painful death. f*** Adobe for ever inventing that s*** and conning people into thinking it's a good idea. Adobe needs to stay away from anything that's not video/audio/photographic based software. Buggy garbage code just like Flash and one of the main things (along with Flash again) that opens your computer(s) to most backdoors, security exploits, etc.

MI: Ghost Protocol was amazing...saw it on IMAX, probably the best action movie I've seen in years.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Dec 23, 2011 -> 09:45 AM) I'm still caught off-guard when you manage to out-flank me on the cynicism front. Why for and what exactly do you mean? Care to elaborate a bit so I don't take this out of context?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 23, 2011 -> 09:37 AM) And this is why people gave up and went into the streets. ...and when re-election time comes around, these people marching the streets will vote for the same people they would have voted for the last time...and nothing will change!

All great suggestions, but are any of them actually viable when you have to consider the political landscape they'd have to cross to actually happen? The problem is people continue electing rich connected people to make these decisions, enact these laws, etc. They'll bicker about it, point at each other and blame 'the other party' for a few months time, when IMO, they're all in on it together. A few months after their staged on-camera partisan bickering takes place, the masses will forget the argument ever happened, only to have it rehash at a future time, in which they'll once again forget about it a short while later. They'll only fix it if absolutely forced into doing so, in that if a specific area of interest actually collapses, they'll put together some crappy bi-partisan compromise of a fix and then say 'mission accomplished' -- pun intended. Followed by some extravagant parties, deal making and back patting to congratulate themselves because of how awesome they all are. None of this will get fixed until this nation stops electing the 1% to make the decisions that would prevent the 1% from staying the 1%. The problem with that is, the more money you have, the more electable you become.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Dec 22, 2011 -> 06:06 PM) Here's a pretty awesome series of slides explaining exactly how messed up income and wealthy inequality and economic mobility are in this country. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-s...-about-2011-10# There's been a class war going on for decades, and the 1% have won handily. This same interpretation has been written and re-written 5,000 times over now...we get it, the richest of the rich get paid a lot, while the majority do not. It's not like stories like this are new, people have been saying this same thing since the beginning of time, practically. King's used to eat well while their kingdoms starved, too...we aren't talking about royalty anymore, but we may as well be...what's really changed? The problem isn't in that we don't see it, and it isn't in that we don't get the message. It's that there is no fix to be heard of/seen, and nobody bothers writing a story with suggestions to fix it...all they do is rehash what we already know. And that's the problem...how do you fix what may very well be unfixable? The biggest benefit these ultra rich have is if you do try to impose anything upon them...they can get up and leave.

QUOTE (Brian @ Dec 21, 2011 -> 08:12 PM) Saw the trailer on IMAX, sounds like Bane says, "When Gotham crumbles, feel free to die." It's, "When Gotham is in ashes, you have my permission to die."

QUOTE (Rex Kicka** @ Dec 20, 2011 -> 11:31 PM) Not all advertisers want the same demographic. This is true, but the big money ones all aim for the 18-35 segment.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Dec 20, 2011 -> 07:49 PM) There is a good point hidden in the previous "discussion". There is a big difference between fitness and health. Physical fitness is what most of us focus on. The best measure of physical fitness is VO2 max. However, that can only be done in a clinic. The easiest way for a most of us to determine fitness is by your heart rate. To determine if you are wroking hard enough you should work out at 70-90% of your heart rate max. Determining your max heart rate you should use the Karvonen formula (many people use 220-your age but it isn't specific enough IMO). the formula is Target Heart Rate = ((max HR − resting HR) × %Intensity) + resting HR. This takes into account your indivdualized resting heart rate which will decrease as you become more fit. Another thing to remember is that your heart rate should decrease at least 40 bpm after a 2 minute cool down. If it doesn't you are working out too hard. I think this is something gyms and the fitness industry purposefully blurred the lines between. It is common that people interchange fitness and health, I hear it all the time. And like I said, while they're related, they're NOT the same thing. I know some people that are insanely physically fit...but their health, not so much.

And while I do work out/have for a LONG time, and I've extensive experience in this realm, I do admit parts of my post were specifically designed to troll. That said, I do actually care very much about working out and physical fitness.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 20, 2011 -> 06:30 PM) The problem here is that no one in this thread made the statements that you came in here to refute. You were just trying to make a point by trolling in this thread because you accused me of doing it in the technology thread. Point taken. That being said, I am sure some of what you are saying is correct. It's not as if Tony Horton created these maneuvers, nor did he invent this type of training. What he did do, as you mentioned, it put together this kind of training in a package that the home workout crowd would purchase, and then actually do. I know of no home workout routine that has been as effective or motivating in this country as P90X. It is the #1 selling home workout of all time in this country. Now don't get me wrong, this correlates with an explosion in gym memberships and exercise programs, whether it be spin classes or programs you watch at home. And with this explosion came a lot of people that had no clue what they were doing. So when Rock mentions people at the gym working out incorrectly, he's mentioning all these people (like me) who have never been gym rats, but want to get in better shape but have no idea how to do so. It is absolutely a phenomenal thing for people to be doing P90X or P90X2 or other circuit training programs. I do know there have been hundreds or even thousands of home workouts before that were far more gimmicky than P90X. If anything, P90X was the anti-gimmick. They didn't sell results without extreme effort. X is in the damn name for Christ's sakes. And honestly, if you do put in the effort, you will be in better shape than about 95% of Americans. I am sure there are other programs out there that could do the same, whether they came out of gyms, or were created by personal trainers that work in Hollywood or in professional athletics (what does it say about the program when you've got professional athletes doing THIS workout instead of the workouts prescribed by his/her coaches?), or even came out of military training. But none were packaged in a way that the American public was willing to pay to try them on this scale. And in doing that, Horton is a genius. All I am saying is I love the product. Damnit, he's on to me.