I mean 'practical' as in "can actually move heavy weights". The way the grandparent post is written, I had the impression the writer believes the big bodybuilders have developed huge muscles without also developing the ability to lift and carry heavier weights than the average adult male. i.e. The muscles are all show and no "go". In my personal experience, limited though that may be, that's not the case.

If you're asking about "practical" as in "useful on a day to day basis", then I think there are plenty of manual labor jobs where they are useful. You would never, or almost never, be required to move a 400 pound object in most laborer jobs. But if you're capable of moving a 400 pound object, you should be able to tolerate carrying a firefighter's gear, or delivering 200 pound washing machines, or working as a mason with far less wear and tear to your body and fatigue from the work than a regular person would receive.

Endurance is relative to work load. What's a typical triathlon competitor's endurance when carrying 500 pounds? 0. I guess that means their endurance sucks, right?

Put a triathlete in a contest carring 200 pound sacks against the guys on stage in a bodybuilding competition. He'll finish last, or near last.

When you're running, cycling, or dancing, extra muscle mass is dead weight as sure as fat. That means the people who excel in those exercises tend not to have much extra fat or much extra muscle mass. When you're pushing cars, carrying heavy sacks, throwing 40 pound tires, etc... you need all of the muscle mass you can build.

Sure, there may not be much practical value in a bodybuilder doing isolation exercises for their rear shoulder muscles, or wrist curls to increase the girth of their forearms, or neck roller moves to thicken the neck, or calf raises to increase the size of their calves. But to strengthen many of the most visible muscles on a stage - quadriceps on the thigh, gluteus in the butt, abdominal muscles, upper back, lower back, shoulders, chest, and upper arms these guys do squats, deadlifts, pullups, overhead press, and bench press. Those five exercises might be done for the sake of vanity, but the result is still plenty of practical strength.

"pretty much pussies" yeah sure.

I had this experience when I bought Heroes of Might and Magic 6 - a game I was looking forward to playing. I couldn't get UPlay to work on my machine, so I got a refund. (I guess that's the one advantage of the crazy DRM - at least they had proof I never got to play the game I bought, so the refund request was fair.)

It's a shame, I have fond memories of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and 4 and was looking forward to 6 - but not if that's what is required.

I even have mixed feelings about Steam on Linux and SteamOS. Valve does a great job making DRM as low-headache as possible. And I am 100% in moral agreement that people should pay for the content they use. But the moral right for Valve/Ubisoft/Sony/Disney and so forth to get revenue for their content does not offset the moral wrong of writing software and building hardware that interferes with my ability to use computing devices I purchased. You can't battle evil with evil and call yourself the good guys.

Fedora is a community-developed Linux distribution with a small amount of financial backing from one company (Red Hat) that does barely a billion dollars a year in business. They're up against two companies, Microsoft and Apple, that both do comfortably more than 50 billion dollars in revenue a year. OEMs scramble to make their consumer computer products Microsoft-compatible because that's where literally 99% of their revenue is. OEMs ignore Linux (outside the server room) because that's where their revenue is not. Somehow the Fedora developers - just like the Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, etc... can't come up with an end product that matches Windows for ease of install and hardware support.

All of this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone paying attention. I am sympathetic to great-grandparent AC's problems with Fedora 20 install. I've had similar problems many times. But I'm not angry that a team of volunteers can't match the hardware support from a company that has literally more than a hundred times more developers, testers, etc...

Now look at cost. In the past five years I refurbished one computer in my house, assembled a new computer, and received three different computers from my employers. That's $250 in Microsoft's pocket, and I haven't donated $250 or anything near it to any open source project in the same period. We the Linux 1% have to start putting our money where our mouth is on this - either donate cash, or help out.

You're rehashing an ancient debate. You want software to be free as in free beer. When you get free beer, you can do whatever you want with it and the person that gave it to you has no say after you get it. Stallman wants software to be free as in free speech. You can't incorporate President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into a book you wrote, put the book on sale, copyright the book's contents, and then sue anyone anywhere that quotes the Gettysburg Address for infringing on your copyright.

He makes a clear distinction between what he calls "free software" and "open source" software, and for him the phrase "free software" are inescapably linked to a particular philosophy. Stallman didn't launch open source, he launched free software.

On the bright side, you would no longer need a heater for that room in winter. Just run Folding@Home.

I still think Intel's business agreements in the mid 2000s that put AMD in its current position were immoral if not illegal, so I buy AMD anyway. But I don't buy because the product is better, I buy because the competition were assholes even though they're currently assholes with better products.

Interesting, thanks for the link. But it's not clear to me that they have any way for the disks to last longer. Maybe this is a cost-controlling interim solution until they come up with anything better? The same article says they eventually want to use low power flash instead.

The phone companies can compete with the cable companies already, and for the most part they don't compete. There may be no formal back room deals, but the phone companies and cable companies could be in a deadly battle for consumers with low prices and high bandwidth coming out and razor thin profit margins. Instead they make token gestures and compete in a few key markets, but prices and bandwidth have stagnated for more than five years.

I used to use DVD-Rs for personal backups but unlike commercial DVDs, some of the disks started having read errors (despite very careful handling) after less than three years.

On the other hand, Amazon certainly has the resources to get whatever the hell it is the movie studios use to create the same Blu Ray disks you get when you buy Back to the Future on Blu Ray. I have yet to have a Blu Ray have a read error, and I've got a few dozen of them. So maybe Amazon uses that.

It's the scaling. If you have fixed resource requirements, set up your own servers in a good colocation somewhere. If you usually run with X server capacity but a few times a year or more you need 5X or 10X, go with AWS (or Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, DigitalOcean, etc.... )

Outrage gets more visitors, which increases ad revenue. So 'frugal' became 'cheapskate' for the sake of a few extra dollars. Welcome to the modern internet, where the people who aren't launching flamewars as fast as they can lose their business to those that do.

Or lose her because she quits to work for a company that has less travel.

If you were correct in your analogy we would not have our current stagnation. At present, Compete.net decides to spend $10 million on lawyers and lobbyists to throw legal obstacles in front of potential adversaries to keep their effective regional monopoly and puts the other $55 million or $70 million it might have spent on network upgrades into profits, and lets their infrastructure continue to suck.

We still need a mixed public/private solution - regulation to keep the playing field open, and then competition on that open playing field. Pure private and pure public both lead to stagnation (even if the pure private solution stagnation is actually accomplished by having the private companies influencing public policy).

The article says "independent of activity level, sleep, and eating habits", so even people who eat and sleep the same amount and went jogging later in the afternoon were heavier.

But I think the study size is too small and the duration too short to mean anything.