StrangeSox

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 14, 2014 -> 09:42 AM) There is a lot of land in that cone of uncertainty that belongs to terror organizations, such as the Tamil Tigers and Al Qaeda. The Tamil Tigers were basically wiped out a few years ago.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Mar 14, 2014 -> 07:14 AM) http://www.soxtalk.com/forums/index.php?sh...t=0&start=0 lack of use and it got buried FYI for everyone, I didn't ever notice this until I asked and ss2k5 pointed it out, but the default display option for most of the forums here is "last 30 days." You can change that at the bottom of the page to find older threads.

Pilots can shut off equipment as necessary because it might be malfunctioning, causing a fire, etc. Planes can still always be picked up on primary radar (classic, military-style radar that sends out high-energy radio waves and looks for reflections) because its a passive response, and nobody has ever tried to hijack a large jet liner in order to make it vanish. They're typically trying to get to a specific country or, in the case of 9/11, use them as a weapon.

re: the Malaysian military picking up the plane on radar: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airli...ng-plane-again/ I'm not seeing anything today about the oil rig worker who claims to have seen a plane on fire in the sky.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Mar 13, 2014 -> 03:10 PM) That's because you only know my mental age Usually, I think this is a pretty easy decision...but when you start talking about law or medicine, especially the latter, it becomes a very difficult one, given the residency period. You've got to be really, really sure. Law school tuition was also growing exponentially for a while there, leaving students from 2nd and 3rd tier law schools with $200k+ in loan debt and terrible job prospects. I have a friend who got a late start on college because he was trying some other things for a few years. He's going to finish up his dentistry degree this year, and then he's doing some sort of oral surgeon/MD dual residency program that'll take 4-6 more years or something like that. By the time he's finished, he'll entering his mid-life crisis at age 37....oh, wait, sorry....

My mom uses some plastic travel containers and dyes her vodka with food coloring so it doesn't look so obviously like alcohol. Years ago, I remember the adults we were with stocking up with cheap coronas from a stand on the beach and smuggling them back on the boat.

For some reason I thought you were younger, shack. My wife quit her job to go back to school to get her teaching certificate. Granted it was only two semesters and I was still working full time, but we were trying to buy a house and were getting married in about 9 months. Plus, education hasn't exactly been a booming field the last several years. Luckily, everything worked out and although it can be very stressful at times, she's so much happier now teaching than she was working an office job.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 13, 2014 -> 08:47 AM) We donate to a dozen or so different charities a year, some of them are ones people would be familiar with: St. Jude's, Mercy Home (Park Ridge). Another couple are specific places where we know people involved - my wife's uncle runs a Haiti mission that has built a school and some other stuff (I also went to Haiti myself once and helped them set up the first internet "cafe" in the entire province, in the school administrative building. I tend to favor environmental causes, but a lot of national organizations (Sierra Club for example) spend a TON of their money on lobbying and the like. There is one exception though - The Nature Conversancy. They also do some lobbying (they all do), but to a much smaller extent, and they use a different model for most of their spending. They actually go out and either outright acquire, or purchase easements of different types, for land they want to protect. They use their own or other scientific resources to study the land to see what it needs to be healthy, comes up with a future plan for it, and the plan dictates who the sell it to and with what easements. Once the land is sold, they move onto the next. I just really like that, instead of spending most of their money complaining to other people, they use most of it to actually DO something. We donate to them as well. Usually we do Oxfam, Red Cross, one or two local food banks, and we donated to the charity alpha is associated with last year.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 12, 2014 -> 01:12 PM) I'd always been telling my wife, after the kids are out of the house (youngest is about 2, so we've got a while, LOL), I really want to move somewhere warmer, sunnier, and with more outdoor opportunities. New Mexico, Oregon, Colorado all in the running, maybe even Texas hill country (though maybe not a great cultural fit for us) or Arizona. She was not so apt to go along with that... until this winter. Now she's on board. yes, please Hard because aside from a few cousins/second cousins here and there, all of our relatives are clustered in and around Chicago and mostly in the SW-W suburbs.

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Mar 12, 2014 -> 01:01 PM) This phrase is a pet peeve of mine. Some school districts don't call it that any more, it's a recognition ceremony or something like that.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 12, 2014 -> 10:27 AM) Thats the heaviest snow all winter. My snowblower couldnt get some of it up. not even going to bother shoveling any of this

I don't think the Malaysian military ever officially confirmed that they made radar contact (or at least thought they did), but they did expand the search to the other side of the peninsula.

BBC has confirmed the contact by the oil rig worker with Vietnamese air traffic control http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26541057

Here's the coordinates of the rig (arrow, not the A marker) https://www.google.com/maps?t=m&ll=8.37...sic&dg=ntvo

I somehow doubt that there was an option other than Kim Jong Un

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 12, 2014 -> 08:55 AM) My wife and I talked about moving to Hawaii after our honeymoon. It's always been dream talk, like "yeah that'd be nice." This winter and the extended commutes have accelerated the talking to actually looking for jobs online. It'd be tough to leave, but I'd go in a heartbeat. $$$$$

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26541057

A League of Their Own?

Some brokerages have no-free ETF's.

guys put all of your money in one of these:

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 11, 2014 -> 01:17 PM) With computers doing day trading these days, it's impossible for a regular person to be successful at this long term. By the time you hear the news, or login to sell your stock, it's already been dumped by the computers running these elaborate schemes for traders, and there is no possible way for you to match that speed. Even by the time your computer "hears" it, the big firms' computers have already heard it and processed a huge number of transactions on it.

Day trading at the top of a five-year bull market sounds like a great, can't-fail idea...

It turns out that Julie Boonstra, the cancer-fighting star of a recent Americans for Prosperity anti-Obamacare ad who claimed that her new policy didn't cover her treatments and was more expensive, will actually save at least $1000 a year thanks to her new Obamacare-compliant plan: Honestly, there have to be people that have been negatively impacted by the ACA--why can't any of these groups attacking it find them? Every one of these big stories so far turns out to be either a straight-up fabrication or actually a success story for the program.

They may be evil, but that would lend support to the leftist criticism of the media as corporatist-slanted, not to the idea that MSNBC is the partisan mirror of Fox News.

QUOTE (GoSox05 @ Mar 11, 2014 -> 11:36 AM) If the pilots were having problems, wouldn't they have radioed in that the plane was going down? Aviate, navigate, communicate in that order. I don't believe Air France 447 ever contacted anyone, but in that case the two pilots didn't comprehend what was going on until the captain came in and by then it was too late.