Can you show me where I argued against the statement, "Blanket racial statements are wrong and racist."

If not, perhaps you should go back and take some refresher English classes (preferably some Logic classes too).

Just like Newtboy, you're trying to put words in my mouth. Until you learn how to actually parse sentences and assemble a logical argument there's just no point.

And, in case you had trouble figuring it out, words like "likely" and "could" tend to defuse the "blanket" nature of statements. I can make a ton of statements using those words that are 100% correct.

"A randomly-selected group of Black Americans likely has a lower income than an equal-sized group of White Americans."

Explain to me how that's wrong. For that matter, explain to me how it's a "blanket" statement.

And, just to be clear, there's a wide chasm between using such a statement and arguing against the proposition that such statements are bad. People do bad things all the time that they fully acknowledge are bad. Simply doing a thing does not mean you think it's good.

Why? Mustn't be that difficult to pull off such NOE flying for those skilled pilots and not that impressive to look at for the public...unless they actually want to actually alarm/unease the public. But IF the .001% chance of an accident does happen, it'll be a big mess economically, politically and a huge embarrassment for the military.

Is this done because of the UN General Assembly I saw & heard going on? It's the only reason that this makes sense.

Thanks to your father-in-law for all his hard work.

Looks like it took blood, sweat and years to find, create, and assemble such a fine one man show.

Before the space shuttle would launch, the main engine would ignite first. After six seconds the two solid rocket boosters would ignite and the shuttle would launch.

The six second delay was necessary because the main engine ignition would rock the "stack" or the entire assembly of the shuttle, fuel tank and boosters forward. It took 6 seconds for the stack to return to the upright position.

This 6 second period of sway was referred to as "twang."

Figured I'd pass that little bit of info on to you in case you're ever asked about twang on a radio quiz show.

It's not giving up the gun that might save lives, it's giving up the right to own them.
His gun probably wouldn't ever kill someone.
The right of any non restricted person to buy one is what leads to murderers having this tool often used to commit mass murder.
Would that stop all mass murders? Absolutely not, but it would stop SOME...probably most. Other methods people use are harder to assemble without being caught (bombs), are far less lethal (knives, arrows), and/or are harder to procure (tasteless poisons or gas). There's no other legal tool available to the public capable of mass murders with so little effort.

And yes, @BSR, this guy just made a sawed off AR15. He better post the video of him cutting it in half again if he doesn't want a visit from ATF. That gun almost certainly still fires, it's just incredibly more dangerous to the user now, and highly illegal. Not sure what you're saying in your snarky post, he didn't ever say a word otherwise.

The mass in the neighborhood of 1800 lbs.

I've always thought of it as a VW spinning around one body.
You have the Xray tube on 1 side and its detector on the other along with a heat ex-changer for the tube and then other assemblies.

Ive worked on Cath labs and have few times helped replacing tubes and installing these systems. Fun stuff.

Plug this in to a VR headset and a pneumatic chair and you'd be in for a hell of a ride.

Also, how great was the sound design in Aliens 1, 2 (SE) and 3 (Assembly Cut Obvs)? The maternal self destruct voice from the first movie never gets old.

Is this directed at my point of view, asmo?

If it is, I don't recognize myself in it.

My criticisms were all pointed at men choosing ONLY facade.

I never said the women shouldn't wear makeup. I didn't talk about their intelligence or their skills with guns -- I have no idea how intelligent or skilled these women are.

My being creeped out was related to whoever assembled a statistically impossible collection of beautiful women, and then using a camera to give them prominence in a video purported about Keanu's shooting skills.

I admitted my error at assuming that Keanu was the person who gathered these women in one spot.

Certainly, I am guilty of being unhappy that women allow themselves to be used this way. But I didn't say that out loud. They are responding to the market, and there is indeed a market for beautiful facades.

I have no problem with sex workers (if they are protected from human trafficking and enslavement.) These women, whatever their other skills, are sex workers.

I do have a problem with men who surround themselves with ONLY sex workers.

Damn, sorry to hear that. I could go off on a frothing at the mouth rant at how bad it was, what we went through. To save money our original company, a nationwide US health insurance company, outsourced us right at merit raise time (nice touch, a-holes) to an off-shore company that would probably only ever meet expectations running an assembly line operation for building PCs.

They were out of their league taking over level 1 and 2 operations for a large company, which was already working through the pains of merging with other companies they had acquired. Instead of inspiring the legacy workers to stick around to make the transition work, their attitude was we were lucky the host company insisted we get first crack to reapply for "our" jobs. Like it was all one big assembly line and we could be easily replaced with someone with an A+ cert for $11\hr. The equivalent of pulling up to a storefront and having IT landscapers jump in the back of a pickup truck to work that day. Might work for an assembly line but not for a complex embedded IT infrastructure with 1001 local support quirks. They were completely clueless.

Add insult to injury, their internal processes were so bad, over the course of a year they asked us continually to remind them of the phone# of the iPhone they gave us and the serial# of the laptop they gave us. At least half a dozen times, it was fucking absurd. And when we were offered an incentive to help reduce the ticket log backup, they mailed unsigned money orders to fictional home addresses they had on record for us. With the stamp on the wrong part of the envelope for those lucky enough to receive their unsigned money orders. You had the option of mailing the money order back to get it signed (good luck getting it back) or committing a felony to get the money you legally earned, by not using the first option. Took me 7 months to finally get my money order, who knows where they originally mailed it. Their indifference during this whole mess was staggering, you had to badger management and HR like they were a deadbeat drunk brother-in-law who owes you money.

And they kept putting off the review\raise process until they finally offered us 50 cents an hour for the highest performers. I gave my notice the next day.

Sorry for the rant, it was such a colossal failure on all fronts, except no doubt for the amount the host company saved on IT during that time. But of course nobody is interested in capturing the countless hours of downtime and lost productivity introduced by these IT cost "savings". Last I heard they were putting the contract back out to bid before the scheduled end of the current contract, which doesn't surprise me. What a freaking waste.

I hope you find work soon, Ant.

That's the worst time, the inevitable second act dilemma, of PC building.

You can budget in the expectation of how long it takes to do the housekeeping stuff. Loading the OS, essential programs, personal preferences - the games themselves...but there's often that one random thing.

I built a nice medium-range game PC with someone else recently, my building partner was so excited. It's amazing how much of a bond that creates between people, or how it can strengthen a relationship. Not just for building PC's specifically, but for sharing something and having that moment of realization of how cool that thing shared really is.

I felt more pissed off than anything for a brief moment during the boot up, when the display seemed to shutdown startup before anything really happened. Luckily, I'd paid attention enough when researching the GPU and eventually remembered someone mentioning there was a button on the card itself that controls the LED lights on it, pressing it seemed to clear whatever was blocking the startup processes for the card.

There was definitely a soul-crushing few hours of doubt and agony before I remembered that detail. During that time, I stared at the clean interior of the fully assembled build, having had a hard enough time getting the cords to fit and wondering if something minor and imperceptible had wiggled loose, wondering if I would go mad.

Having someone else depending on the solution was another intense emotion heightening element. I'd done my best to prime for this likelihood. I'd shared stories of problems I'd had on previous builds, the random thing that went wrong. I stressed the fact that the computer had always, eventually, got built.

It's a good, stinging bit of humility for me. Even when I try to minimize problems and anticipate potential issues, I'll still miss something as obvious as a big button right in front of my face.

I lived in Cape Canaveral during the shuttle program and was fortunate enough to watch all but 5 launches live.

An excellent video with scenes I thoroughly enjoyed in slow motion and HD.

A brief mention in the video about the 6 seconds from when the main liquid engines ignite until the solid boosters ignite is called "twang."

When the main engines ignite, the power causes the whole assembly to rock forward. It takes 6 seconds for the assembly to fall back to vertical again and then the boosters light up and away it goes.

Too damn slow. Even back in the 90's a single employee could put that thing to shame, while doing everything that assembler guy was doing.

Love this song! *promote good times

Haha ... the video reminds me of a play I wrote [directed and was a feature player in] titled 'Beach Blanket Parcheesi' for the senior class assembly in high school ... indeed good times

Trying split up addressing your points and enoch's here, forgive me if things bleed over between a bit.

Large terrorist networks like Al Qaida were and still are using your definitions against your country. They operated with impunity and effectively as their own autonomous state within the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The question is whether acts of war launched from that region then are classed as an act of the Afghan or Pakistani state. If they are, then Afghanistan and Pakistan are to be held to account as states launching the act of war. If they are not, then they have for intents and purposes yielded the sovereignty of that territory to a new independent state waging it's own independent war.

The jihadists are trying to hard to live in an international loophole where they are operating with the autonomy of a state right up until another nation state wants to wage war back against them and then suddenly they are just citizens of the larger state they are technically within the borders of.

When the Bush admin pushed back hard, the Afghanistan government refused(more on this in my reply to Enoch) while the Pakistani government extremely begrudgingly agreed to at least pretend they weren't friendly with them in back channels anymore. Thus act of war met with war in Afghanistan, and yes, I would insist a war that Afghanistan initiated and NOT GW.

As for Saudi Arabia, they are more responsible for Jihadi ideology and funding than any other state, and yes the west largely has ignored it so long as they sold their oil and then used the money to buy back top of the line American made military hardware. I have to say I think it's a bit shortsighted to have made Saudi Arabia number 3 on the global military budget charts... You won't find my hypocritically trying to defend them, they are the ones sending most of the money into Pakistan's mountains to build the madrasa's that don't seem to teach anything after how to fire and assemble your AK.

Finally, some hope: http://www.politico.eu/pro/belgian-regional-government-set-to-block-eu-canada-trade-deal/

In a sign of increasing frustration on the Canadian side, the normally cheery Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Thursday that not signing CETA would issue a “deplorable” message that Europe is heading towards an “unproductive path” post-Brexit.

Deplorable, you say?

The fact that power over trade — one of the EU’s core negotiating competences — has shifted to Europe’s 38 national and regional parliaments is a major embarrassment for Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. In July, he was pushed by French and German Socialists into designating CETA as a “mixed agreement” requiring ratification in national and regional assemblies.
(...)
The decision was highly controversial, because Juncker and his chief lawyers believed this wasn’t necessary from a legal point of view, but was a gesture of political goodwill.

A gesture of political goodwill. Or as we call it: a Hail-Mary attempt at keeping it alive, because both the French and the German government are facing serious domestic pressure on this issue. If they hadn't acknowledged parliament's vote on this, CETA might have been taken out back and shot in the head already, like it fucking should be.