But the point is that the cable provider is collecting probably $60 per month from every person on the plan. So if there's 500 homes sharing your connection and hogging the bandwidth, the cable company is collecting $360,000 per year from your neighborhood. They could replace all of their copper wiring with fiber and upgrade your connection speed so that everyone in the neighborhood has all the connectivity they can use, and recover the cost of their investment within a few years and have plenty of happy customers.

But why should they bother, when they have a natural monopoly and effectively no competition. They can let you and your neighbors fight for bandwidth on the copper cables, ignore your dissatisfaction, and just cover their operating costs and stick most of the $360,000 per year right into the "net profit" category.

I'm a very fat guy, and I herniated a disk in my lower back five years ago. (Hint: when you're carrying a twenty pound baby seat with a twenty pound one year old around for hours at a time and days in a row, make sure to switch hands frequently and keep the time held by each hand even. I got a few weeks of agony just from being fat and always carrying the baby seat with my right hand.) But my problem was completely fixed with physical therapy. I've found that a daily fifteen minute set of back, stomach, and hamstring exercises does an amazing job keeping my back feeling fine and I'm even fatter now than I was when I got injured. A bodybuilder stresses his back far more than I do on a weekly basis, but the muscles that protect the spine are correspondingly far stronger on him than on me. I'm guessing it's still a net advantage. But that's a wild guess.

Look at Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) or Mariusz Pudzianowski. They both have enormous muscles, but when you see the former acting in his WWE roles or the latter competing in the Worlds Strongest Man competition, they have plenty of agility. Do you really think putting an extra 40 pounds of muscle on either one so they could step onto the stage next to Jay Cutler would suddenly mean they can't touch their toes, or hoist another 240 pound man overhead, or pull a car? If putting 20 pounds of muscle on a regular guy doesn't slow him down (except in long distance competition where weight is a factor), and putting 20 more pounds of muscle on that guy doesn't slow him down (again, except for long distance), and 20 more than that doesn't slow him down... suddenly the last 20 brings him to a halt? In some of Schwarzennegger's earliest movies he was just a few years out from his Mr. Olympia titles, and they show him sprinting - Predator, The Running Man (ironically), etc... does he look like a clumsy oaf?

I'm not saying a competitive bodybuilder can move more heavy things than someone who trains to move heavy things. If you spent a lot of time training to carry stuff and move it, and especially you put a lot of work into your grip, then I'm confident you would outdo many bodybuilders. But I am certain they would still fare much better than someone with little or now strength training in their regular fitness routine.

The Golden Age may be awful, but it's interesting to some people just because it was the beginning of the medium. The first movies mostly suck, but they're still interesting because they're the first movies. James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans" is an awful book, it would never sell if someone wrote it today, but it's notable because at that time and place adventure novels were rare. etc... etc...

Golden Age comics are from the beginning of the medium in the 1930s, to its skyrocket to high sales in 1939 when Superman became immensely popular, until the mid 1950s. The stories you're describing may be really cool, but they're not Golden Age.

And I can't believe the fight between Superman and Doomsday is exciting to anyone. Stories are exciting because of characters, because of emotion, because of facing your demons and overcoming them or falling victim to them. Doomsday was drawn well, but otherwise he has no depth, nothing to make him interesting. Plus, he can't fly - so the only reason Superman didn't fly him to Venus, drop him off forever (or at least until the next supervillain found him and brought him back), and return to Earth was because DC decided to make some extra money by ganking Superman and they couldn't come up with a better premise.

The Ten Cent Plague is a bit of a slow read and repetitive, I really didn't like how it was organized. But it does have plenty of interesting information.

Spend it on something worthwhile, like a giant fucking pickup truck, or a Porsche, or a house with 1000 more square feet of space than you need and ceilings 3 feet higher than you can use for aesthetic reasons and damn the extra $500 a year it adds to your utility bills. Or maybe get a 60" 4K television. Take that trip to Hawaii. Go to strip clubs. Follow The Rolling Stones on tour. Cultivate a gambling addiction. Become an alcoholic. Do something important with your money, dammit! None of this comics crap!

.... seriously, as far as money-burning hobbies for adults go, comics are among the cheapest and least harmful. What do you care if I want to find out what the Green Lantern was doing in 1952?

I'm a weak, sheltered, pasty-white, marshmallow-armed basement-dwelling pussy myself. I just read a lot about strength training. :)

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.