I'm not asking about the phrase "in the closet." We agree on that.

Although I would not use the word "disparaging" -- it is more deeply sad that someone feels the need to hide.

What do YOU mean by disparaging? I just realized maybe we do look at that phrase differently.

It is disparaging of our society that someone feels the need to be in the closet. It is insulting to say to someone's face "hey, you are in the closet" when they have put themselves there.

Do you read Savage Love or Dan Savage's blog? I love that guy. Potty mouth and brilliant mind -- a great combination.

I shall continue my informal survey just because I am dang curious!

So I did an unofficial survey at work this afternoon.

One lesbian was totally with me -- it is fine to "out" yourself. She even said what I said -- everyone wins when people decide to leave the closet.

She also agrees with you (and me) that outing someone else is horrible.

She had no trouble with the phrase "outing herself."

The next person I asked was a straight woman. She didn't even know what I was talking about AT ALL.

I shall gather more data later.... I'm very curious about how this is going to play out....

Seemed like they had already emerged at least once.... or at least looked out and surveyed the destruction... I can't imagine that as the first reaction.

please fill out my survey regarding the homoerotism from an audiences perspective on Top Gun

[url redacted]

They stay that way in all proceeding pictures? Or just the long exposure ones?

I would assume the latter, cosmic rays slow down and lose quite a bit of their energy by the time they hit us down here on the ground....exposure to one in space though will certainly kill a pixel for good.

Saturation of light sensitive photodiodes (ill call them PD's henceforth) (essentially what the CCD is PACKED with) causes damage over time. You can just over-saturate the PD, to the point of damage (usually around 3dBm above its rated saturation point), and it will bounce back ok. The sensitivity of the pixel will be harmed dependant on the time and the level above saturation it was exposed at.

You can see a similar phenomenon in video footage of nuclear reactor survey footage from drones, or....stupid people that are way too close....where the reactors have a nasty event.

Family Feud is a show where two families try to guess the most popular answers to surveys. The family that piles up the most points goes on to this final round where two family members, individually, try to guess the most popular answers to five different survey questions. One family member answers while the other is isolated backstage. Then the other family member comes out and is asked the same survey questions and can't repeat the other family member's answers. The points you see are the percentage of people who gave that particular answer, and are also the number of points awarded for that answer. The goal is 200 points total.

EDIT: Oops. Didn't see that @schlub already answered you.

Someone answered the same questions about 2 minutes before. You need to make X points to "win" the feud. If the first person questioned doesn't make X points, they ask a second person to answer the same questions but they must give different answers than person 1. The answers must match those supplied by a survey group.
Points: The number of people surveyed (out of 100) who chose the same answer.

I really can't stand this show now that that r-tard is hosting it.

I don't understand the rules at all. He wasnt allowed to answer the stuff on the left. why? Did someone else already take them? And what are his points? % of people who gave that answer in surveys?

I know the source. It's called Facebook meme's, or in other words, some attention seeking dumbass with absolutely no facts posting some random bullshit and then other dumbasses repost it because it was a picture and a quote.

There's a reason you can't find a source on it . . . Because it's simply not true.

I've read your posts on here and I have to say, I thought we left YouTube. This level of stupidity and willful dumbassery is usually only found there.

Liberal street gangs? Do you even know what liberal means?? Or what a street gang is?

I really hope you're just a pathetic troll and not really this stupid.

This is called a "survey" where people do statistical data mining to find FACTS.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21496/gun-ownership-higher-among-republicans-than-democrats.aspx

As far as gangs: "The profile of a typical gang member is a male school dropout or truant, who is unemployed or has no employable skills. The gang member is usually in trouble with the police and does not receive adequate family attention. The gang provides identity and status and, in return, the member develops a fierce loyalty to the gang and nation."

https://portal.chicagopolice.org/portal/page/portal/ClearPath/Communities/Gang%20Awareness

Sorry, but liberal isn't listed as a requirement. What really happens is gangs tend to pick on poor, disenfranchised people that liberals, as a political party, are typically trying to help out of those situations so they can become productive members of society. Such programs include, public education, adult literacy programs and so forth.

My only guess is someone's been watching too much Fox News. . .

That's interesting. In his Democracy in America Vol 2, Chapter XX "HOW AN ARISTOCRACY MAY BE CREATED BY MANUFACTURES", Baron de Tocqueville warned of these dangers (in 1840!):

In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more
extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more
narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art advances, the arti-
san recedes. On the other hand, in proportion as it becomes more
manifest that the productions of manufactures are by so much the
cheaper and better as the manufacture is larger and the amount
of capital employed more considerable, wealthy and educated
men come forward to embark in manufactures, which were here-
tofore abandoned to poor or ignorant handicraftsmen. The mag-
nitude of the efforts required and the importance of the results to
be obtained attract them. Thus at the very time at which the sci-
ence of manufactures lowers the class of workmen, it raises the
class of masters.

While the workman concentrates his faculties more and more
upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys an extensive
whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in proportion as that
of the former is narrowed. In a short time the one will require
nothing but physical strength without intelligence; the other
stands in need of science, and almost of genius, to ensure success.
This man resembles more and more the administrator of a vast
empire; that man, a brute.

The master and the workman have then here no similarity, and
their differences increase every day. They are connected only like
the two rings at the extremities of a long chain. Each of them fills
the station which is made for him, and which he does not leave;
the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the
other and seems as much born to obey as that other is to com-
mand. What is this but aristocracy?

Then in Vol 3, Chapter VI, "WHAT SORT OF DESPOTISM DEMOCRATIC NATIONS HAVE TO FEAR" he goes on, describing a situation where a democratic nation has become
subject to a despotic government, and when the people give up and stop participating in democracy:

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by
the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to
resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to
surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is grad-
ually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedi-
ence which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only
exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it
upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people
who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to
choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this
rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it
may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties
of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually
falling below the level of humanity.

Or in other words, once you have managed to oppress the people of a democratic nation, the very equality that defines a democratic nation leaves them powerless and unable to organise together and throw off their chains.

Survey says.............. <DING> Fix Windows!

1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surviellience platform by DARPA.
1 million terabytes a day saved forever.

The ARGUS array is made up of several cameras and other types of imaging systems. The output of the imaging system is used to create extremely large, 1.8GP high-resolution mosaic images and video.

The U.S. Army, along with
Boeing, has developed and is preparing to deploy a new unmanned aircraft
called the “Hummingbird.” It’s is a VTOL-UAS (vertical take-off and
landing unmanned aerial system). Three of them are being deployed to
Afghanistan for a full year to survey and spy on Afghanistan from an
altitude of 20,000 feet with the ability to scan 25 square miles of
ground surface.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e95_1359267780

the equivalent of 100 predator drones looking at one place AT ONCE ... hahah they stole my idea

international measurements -> Corruption Perceptions Index

Look at who "perceived" this corruption. (According to your source
2012 CPI draws on 13 different surveys and assessments from 12 different institutions.
The institutions are the African Development Bank, the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, Global Insight, International Institute for Management Development, Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, Political Risk Services, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and the World Justice Project.Many of these private organizations have strong ties to particular governments or nations, such as the World Bank which is funded by certain countries.

The 13 surveys/assessments are either business people opinion surveys or performance assessments from a group of analysts.Early CPIs used public opinion surveys. Countries must be assessed by at least three sources to appear in the CPI.)

Should one take these numbers for real ?

1) Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
2) I think there are levels of corruption not measured and mapped by this aggregation of data.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Just like @bareboards2, I didn't give an opinion or say anything about gun laws. I am just stating facts.

The woman (in the article I linked) used a gun for self protection. The gun was used to shoot her attacker in her own home.

Those are facts.

If you think that there is something to conclude from those two facts, go ahead and make your own conclusions.

In case you didn't notice, all I did was copy and paste @bareboards2's post and change a few words to reflect the article I linked. I don't see you lecturing @bareboards2 about anecdotal evidence. The difference is that @bareboards2's story fits with your opinion and mine doesn't.

You certainly are an expert in anecdotal evidence as you gave me a prime example when you said: "Problem is, when you count ALL the cherries, the reality is that domestic weapons have caused more needless deaths than they have saved." Actually I wouldn't even call that anecdotal evidence, it's more like anally extracted evidence because it's neither evidence nor factual.

Here are some real facts, no opinions:

70 million Americans own guns (NRA 2010)

45% of American households have a firearm in them (Gallup 2011)

Homicides by firearm in 2010 = 11,078 (CDC)

Average homicide by firearm 1999-2010 = 12,807 (CDC)

The 2008 US Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reported 5.3 million violent crimes (simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders), with 430,000 (8%) committed by an offender armed with a gun. Just looking at murder alone, 67% of the murders were committed with a firearm (this number doesn't separate how many of these homicides are gang related or committed with illegally obtained guns). The NCVS also reported that guns were used for self defense 116,000 times.

There are no records kept for when a gun is used in self defense. The NCVS report only counts reported self defense cases during the survey. Other studies have been done to attempt to get a more accurate estimate on the use of guns for self defense. These studies show estimates ranging from 500,000 (CDC) to 2.5 million (1995 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology) times per year. A couple of other studies both estimate around 1 million times per year (2000 Journal of Quantitative Criminology).

You claim "domestic weapons have caused more needless deaths than they have saved," but look at the numbers. Even the lowest estimated use of guns for self defense per year, 116,000, is still greater than the number of murders committed with a gun per year. That is at least 116,000 assaults, robberies, rapes and murders prevented by civilians with a guns.