>> ^Payback:

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^Payback:
Please, the two situations are ENTIRELY different.
The one is a bunch of beaten-down, disenfranchised, angry people, trying to fight back against a tyrannical, all-powerful dictators, with groups of cronies and clandestine corporate interests, which are literally ripping money from the people and passing it around, enriching the tiniest portion of their populace and using violence and rights suppression to further their evil agendas.
The other one, Arab Spring, actually has a chance of succeeding.

So true, though anyone who thinks Obama and Hillary are the dictators really needs their head examined.

Never said I was talking about elected officials.


No head examination for you then!

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^Payback:
Please, the two situations are ENTIRELY different.
The one is a bunch of beaten-down, disenfranchised, angry people, trying to fight back against a tyrannical, all-powerful dictators, with groups of cronies and clandestine corporate interests, which are literally ripping money from the people and passing it around, enriching the tiniest portion of their populace and using violence and rights suppression to further their evil agendas.
The other one, Arab Spring, actually has a chance of succeeding.

So true, though anyone who thinks Obama and Hillary are the dictators really needs their head examined.


Never said I was talking about elected officials.

>> ^Payback:

Please, the two situations are ENTIRELY different.
The one is a bunch of beaten-down, disenfranchised, angry people, trying to fight back against a tyrannical, all-powerful dictators, with groups of cronies and clandestine corporate interests, which are literally ripping money from the people and passing it around, enriching the tiniest portion of their populace and using violence and rights suppression to further their evil agendas.
The other one, Arab Spring, actually has a chance of succeeding.


So true, though anyone who thinks Obama and Hillary are the dictators really needs their head examined.

Please, the two situations are ENTIRELY different.

The one is a bunch of beaten-down, disenfranchised, angry people, trying to fight back against a tyrannical, all-powerful dictators(HIP), with groups of cronies and clandestine corporate interests, which are literally ripping money from the people and passing it around, enriching the tiniest portion of their populace and using violence and rights suppression to further their evil agendas.

The other one, Arab Spring, actually has a chance of succeeding.

Ok. It looks like we mostly agree on the subject, but just have different opinions on whether it would bother us. I ride a lot too. I guess I'm just too picky.

In reply to this comment by dannym3141:
>> ^grinter:

>> ^dannym3141:
>> ^grinter:
It might actually save money if you could get it to work on car tires. Under inflation can seriously shorten the life of your car tires.
another thought: think about how tired you get pumping a tire from 22 to 52 psi. With the self inflating tire you are still doing the same amount of work.. and while the tire stops filling after reaching the desired pressure, it looks like you keep on working the mechanism with every pedal stroke. That kind of wasted energy can really add up.
Of course, energy is wasted through movement of the tires all the time anyway - just feel them after a ride; they are hot. The trick must be in getting the energy wasted by the pump mechanism to overlap with that energy that would be wasted even with a normal tire.

The tire should resist being compressed by an amount which would largely depend on the work needed to raise the bike and its rider by fractions of a milimetre per turn of the pedal which would not be very much extra energy to put in. You're also spreading that "pumping up the tire" energy over thousands of pedal turns. I'm almost certain it'd be negligible.
It's similar to putting a dynamo on a bike to power a light - that light requires energy to run, and it has to come from somewhere (the dynamo resists the motion of the wheel turning) - meaning you have to pedal ever so slightly harder. You wouldn't notice.

Well, you sort of hit on my point. At first it seems like it would be very little energy, but you are doing the same (or similar) amount of work as you would do when inflating the tire directly (the same job is getting done). I know that others have claimed that they don't get tired when blowing up a tire (no pun intended), but for me it is enough of a job that I wouldn't want to be doing it the entire duration of every bike ride that I ever take.
Similarly, most commuters and people riding bikes for sport don't want to deal with the extra energy (and mass) it takes to drive a dynamo powered headlamp, so they choose a battery powered model instead.


Well i mean obviously cyclists cycling for sport won't use any lights to avoid weight, and they have to accurately control such things.

We're talking about the kind of difference between going up some stairs and going up some stairs with a jacket on and after a big meal. It's completely unnoticeable to your strong leg muscles to carry that meal and the jacket up the stairs, but if you stood at the bottom and tried to throw them both up you'd probably find that a bit tiring. Know what i mean? I get your point but i just don't think you'd notice. I cycle a lot and the tiniest things can make it feel easy or tiring, would you notice a miniscule change?

Fair enough though if the potentially large eventual added up calories puts you off.

>> ^grinter:

>> ^dannym3141:
>> ^grinter:
It might actually save money if you could get it to work on car tires. Under inflation can seriously shorten the life of your car tires.
another thought: think about how tired you get pumping a tire from 22 to 52 psi. With the self inflating tire you are still doing the same amount of work.. and while the tire stops filling after reaching the desired pressure, it looks like you keep on working the mechanism with every pedal stroke. That kind of wasted energy can really add up.
Of course, energy is wasted through movement of the tires all the time anyway - just feel them after a ride; they are hot. The trick must be in getting the energy wasted by the pump mechanism to overlap with that energy that would be wasted even with a normal tire.

The tire should resist being compressed by an amount which would largely depend on the work needed to raise the bike and its rider by fractions of a milimetre per turn of the pedal which would not be very much extra energy to put in. You're also spreading that "pumping up the tire" energy over thousands of pedal turns. I'm almost certain it'd be negligible.
It's similar to putting a dynamo on a bike to power a light - that light requires energy to run, and it has to come from somewhere (the dynamo resists the motion of the wheel turning) - meaning you have to pedal ever so slightly harder. You wouldn't notice.

Well, you sort of hit on my point. At first it seems like it would be very little energy, but you are doing the same (or similar) amount of work as you would do when inflating the tire directly (the same job is getting done). I know that others have claimed that they don't get tired when blowing up a tire (no pun intended), but for me it is enough of a job that I wouldn't want to be doing it the entire duration of every bike ride that I ever take.
Similarly, most commuters and people riding bikes for sport don't want to deal with the extra energy (and mass) it takes to drive a dynamo powered headlamp, so they choose a battery powered model instead.


Well i mean obviously cyclists cycling for sport won't use any lights to avoid weight, and they have to accurately control such things.

We're talking about the kind of difference between going up some stairs and going up some stairs with a jacket on and after a big meal. It's completely unnoticeable to your strong leg muscles to carry that meal and the jacket up the stairs, but if you stood at the bottom and tried to throw them both up you'd probably find that a bit tiring. Know what i mean? I get your point but i just don't think you'd notice. I cycle a lot and the tiniest things can make it feel easy or tiring, would you notice a miniscule change?

Fair enough though if the potentially large eventual added up calories puts you off.

I hate to say it, but he probably knows full well that abstinence-only education is ineffective. However, for political purposes, it is achieving the goal of placating the ultra-religious morons that think sex is evil.

Anybody with the tiniest shred of common sense can look at the statistics and figure out that hormones + peer-pressure will defeat religious nonsense frequently and thoroughly. Just look at Bristol Palin.

@messenger

@quantumushroom is right that previous immigrant groups learning the language and assimilating into the culture allowed for the creation of a coherent society in which cooperation and sacrifice for the common good was often reasonable.

Since liberals don't care about the good of society enough to do things like, in this case, ask immigrants to adopt even the tiniest of successful habits, preferring instead to create social decay like that which you created in California, I stand by my initial statement: it's rational for the smart fraction to be capitalists and let society sort out it's own endless self-caused problems.

>> ^messenger:

1. So you believe a person's decisions should never reflect their own preferences or comfort where they conflict with society's, even so slightly as reading a single prepared deposition in a different language with an interpreter? What if he believed that lack of inclusion of people from other cultures was a greater social problem in America --he represents a group of immigrant workers, so we can assume he strongly holds that belief-- and he was in a position to represent his own culture in a public place? Wouldn't that mean he's doing exactly the right thing based on his own opinions of what's important?
2a. Dealt with above.
2b. How would you phrase what you believe then?
I have no idea how government handouts suddenly entered this conversation, so I'll just ignore that. Prosperity comes through a combination of hard work and social services, in that order. I'm guessing you think greater prosperity = greater success. I don't agree that prosperity is the only measure of success. I think happiness = success and prosperity is almost always a factor in happiness. Having to reject your own culture publicly is not. Maybe that's where we're disagreeing.

Her intellect is... just revolting... She is an absolute embarrassment... not just to Republicans... or even Politicians... or even Women... that she has risen to the point where she can even be seriously discussed as a presidential candidate is humiliating to all of us.

You said it perfectly Blank... to not do... just the tiniest margin of prep work... Her stupidity exists on so many levels.

I think lots of people believe "high level science" consists of 3 or 4 ideas:

1. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, a cat in a box could be seen as both alive and dead until an observer collapses the waveform
2. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't know both the exact position and momentum of a particle
3. General relativity states time slows and mass increases for objects at relative high velocity
4. Light's behavior exhibits a wave/particle duality, as demonstrated by interference experiments

Know those 4 things? Have you watched Star Wars once? Good, you're now equipped to understand pretty much all "oh wow that guy's a crazy brainiac nerd" humor. Somehow if you reference things like that, you get a pass to do a comedy routine without any jokes. You're stroking people's ego enough that they don't care you're not funny.

I think people would just get pissed off if he left the "nerd humor" script, though. People don't want to be challenged, or hear pop culture references they don't know. Anyone who's the tiniest, tiniest bit interested in Greek mythology knows Pandora opened a jar, not a box - but nobody wants to hear a joke involving Pandora's jar. They want the same reference that 1000 previous pop cultural references have prepared them for. They want affirmation that they're part of the special club that knows about stuff.

So, to do "nerd" humor the plan is to avoid anything actually nerdy. Stick to the most often recycled bits of pop culture and pop science, mix in some clumsy, senseless double entendres so that people know when to laugh, and you're good to go.

>> ^jmzero:

Westy: I don't believe you could be spending a tenth the time reading as you do posting. If you did, I can't imagine you wouldn't have picked up on some basic spelling and grammar rules. If you want people to accept or pay attention to your ideas, why not put in some small effort in writing - and why post if you're not trying to convey ideas?
If you're using "its" as a contraction for "it is", you need an apostrophe: "it's".
If you're talking about something belonging to "they", then you should use "their" instead of "there".
I'm sure you can comprehend those two rules - and following just those two rules would make your posts much easier to read and likely improve your posts' reception greatly.
Moving out from there, there are a tremendous number of spelling and grammatical mistakes in your posts. Some are understandable - it's easy to confuse "reining" and "raining" and only a pedant would jump on you for that kind of error. On the flip side, it's distracting and almost incomprehensible to see "someone" spelled "sum-one". This is a very common English word. Even if you're normally reading another language or have a deep learning/reading disability, how would you have avoided something approximating a proper spelling soaking in at some point? Surely just in the process of posting to this site you would have seen this word spelled correctly thousands of times.
Again, I think the solution is either "spend a tiny amount of time reading instead of posting" or "show a modicum of respect to people reading your posts by making the tiniest effort to spell correctly". Even if your goal is trolling, I think you'll find you get better bites if you put in some effort.
PS: Yes, I'm sure I've made some spelling or grammatical errors in this post. No, I'm not going to proofread it. No, that doesn't make me a hypocrite. I don't believe posts need to be perfect; I just think some effort should be made, and I do make some effort to write reasonably.


Gr8 job there ignoring a comment and spending all your time telling sumone how to spell depsite the fact that what they write is enterly legible.

Westy: I don't believe you could be spending a tenth the time reading as you do posting. If you did, I can't imagine you wouldn't have picked up on some basic spelling and grammar rules. If you want people to accept or pay attention to your ideas, why not put in some small effort in writing - and why post if you're not trying to convey ideas?

If you're using "its" as a contraction for "it is", you need an apostrophe: "it's".
If you're talking about something belonging to "they", then you should use "their" instead of "there".

I'm sure you can comprehend those two rules - and following just those two rules would make your posts much easier to read and likely improve your posts' reception greatly.

Moving out from there, there are a tremendous number of spelling and grammatical mistakes in your posts. Some are understandable - it's easy to confuse "reining" and "raining" and only a pedant would jump on you for that kind of error. On the flip side, it's distracting and almost incomprehensible to see "someone" spelled "sum-one". This is a very common English word. Even if you're normally reading another language or have a deep learning/reading disability, how would you have avoided something approximating a proper spelling soaking in at some point? Surely just in the process of posting to this site you would have seen this word spelled correctly thousands of times.

Again, I think the solution is either "spend a tiny amount of time reading instead of posting" or "show a modicum of respect to people reading your posts by making the tiniest effort to spell correctly". Even if your goal is trolling, I think you'll find you get better bites if you put in some effort.

PS: Yes, I'm sure I've made some spelling or grammatical errors in this post. No, I'm not going to proofread it. No, that doesn't make me a hypocrite. I don't believe posts need to be perfect; I just think some effort should be made, and I do make some effort to write reasonably.

Yes, this is Portugal. And he didn't drive badly at all, although he is obviously a moron. What he says after getting back in the car is: "huh... Slick tires!" which I'm pretty sure everyone knows are completely illegal in a road car, and that's probably why he lost control. There was probably the tiniest amount of water or oil on the road, and a car with regular tires would've been able to keep on driving like it was nothing.

>> ^guymontage:

Criticalthud,the links you posted dont seem very credible and while they do use actual data, its their interpretation of said data were they lose credibility. http://www.detailshere.com/earthquakeactivity.htm
Just at a glance, this site claims there are more earthquakes now than ever, because in the 1970 there were around 4000 earthquakes, and in 2002 there were just over 23 000 earthquakes. Probability does play a role in science, but so does critical thinking. When i see these numbers the first thing that comes to mind is, "Well no kidding! Instruments in 2002 are probably orders of magnitude more sensitive than they were 30 years ago!" Technological progress alone can easily explain these numbers. Now days we can detect even the tiniest earthquakes almost anywere, unlike in the 40 years ago.
I checked wikipedia as i typed this, and yep, here is a quote confirming my thoughts exactly;
"The number of seismic stations has increased from about 350 in 1931 to many thousands today. As a result, many more earthquakes are reported than in the past, but this is because of the vast improvement in instrumentation, rather than an increase in the number of earthquakes."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake#Size_and_frequency_of_occurren
ce
If the author of the web site you quote has done so little research, you can barely take anything he or she writes as credible.

The site also lists 6 earthquakes over a magnitude of 7.0 that occurred in 2002, but the average number of earthquakes per year in the 1900s over 7.0 is 18. So by the figures he is going by, the author should state that earthquakes are decreasing! How ever this line of thinking just shows a lack of understanding of probability.
If the yearly average is as low as 18, then the law of large numbers indicates that the standard deviation will be large enough to affect the number of earthquakes on a yearly basis enough that some years there will be several more than 18 and some years several less. In other wards if one year there are only 10 and some years later there are 24, its still normal.
More over, one must consider geography and probability of the location of earthquakes. The location of 90% of the worlds earthquakes occurs along the ring of fire. However a lot of the ring of fire is not near large cities susceptible to widespread damage. Most of it is in the middle of nowhere. some years large earthquakes will occur close to high population areas, and other years most of the earthquakes will occur too far to cause any harm. on the years that several earthquakes happen to occur near populated areas, it might seem like earthquakes are increasing, but its just probability. This also would be normal.


fantastic. i would be very happy if science could disprove this theory. but we're still looking at probability.

Criticalthud,the links you posted dont seem very credible and while they do use actual data, its their interpretation of said data were they lose credibility. http://www.detailshere.com/earthquakeactivity.htm

Just at a glance, this site claims there are more earthquakes now than ever, because in the 1970 there were around 4000 earthquakes, and in 2002 there were just over 23 000 earthquakes. Probability does play a role in science, but so does critical thinking. When i see these numbers the first thing that comes to mind is, "Well no kidding! Instruments in 2002 are probably orders of magnitude more sensitive than they were 30 years ago!" Technological progress alone can easily explain these numbers. Now days we can detect even the tiniest earthquakes almost anywere, unlike in the 40 years ago.

I checked wikipedia as i typed this, and yep, here is a quote confirming my thoughts exactly;
"The number of seismic stations has increased from about 350 in 1931 to many thousands today. As a result, many more earthquakes are reported than in the past, but this is because of the vast improvement in instrumentation, rather than an increase in the number of earthquakes."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake#Size_and_frequency_of_occurrence
If the author of the web site you quote has done so little research, you can barely take anything he or she writes as credible.


The site also lists 6 earthquakes over a magnitude of 7.0 that occurred in 2002, but the average number of earthquakes per year in the 1900s over 7.0 is 18. So by the figures he is going by, the author should state that earthquakes are decreasing! How ever this line of thinking just shows a lack of understanding of probability.

If the yearly average is as low as 18, then the law of large numbers indicates that the standard deviation will be large enough to affect the number of earthquakes on a yearly basis enough that some years there will be several more than 18 and some years several less. In other wards if one year there are only 10 and some years later there are 24, its still normal.

More over, one must consider geography and probability of the location of earthquakes. The location of 90% of the worlds earthquakes occurs along the ring of fire. However a lot of the ring of fire is not near large cities susceptible to widespread damage. Most of it is in the middle of nowhere. some years large earthquakes will occur close to high population areas, and other years most of the earthquakes will occur too far to cause any harm. on the years that several earthquakes happen to occur near populated areas, it might seem like earthquakes are increasing, but its just probability. This also would be normal.