She was rather shy before she met me. There was a lot of time spent building her confidence and dragging her out of her shell when we first met.

Of course, there was also quite a bit of time spent yelling at her, telling her to stab harder (fencing) lol

And yes, of the two of us, my IQ's higher. ;)

Yeah. Yeah. We're in the same 5 point range so it's debatable whether or not there's any real difference in scores :P

Though to get a woman *twice* as smart he'd probably have to drink a hell of a lot of alcohol and kill a fair few brain cells since we're both rather high up on the scale.

Not to be immodest, but to get a partner twice as smart as either of us, we'd basically have to find someone on a level with Hawking and even that might be debatable...

(This would be bladesjester's girlfriend of... shit, how many years has it been now? are we up to four?).

Probably, yeah. Possibly a little more.

Women are much better at deception than men, and they're smart enough to know that stupidity is a turn on for guys...

I must be weird then, because stupidity is a *huge* turn off for me. I have met incredibly beautiful women before that pretty much instantly turned me off because they had no freaking brain.

As I said, some ways are faster. However, the problem with guns tends to be the noise. It's one thing to not care who finds the body, but most people, I would think, would generally want to be somewhere else when the body is found.

Sure, you can make a single use silencer, but that adds other difficulties (prep time, actually knowing/learning how to do it, etc etc etc)

Making stops to kill people takes much longer than stopping for potty breaks or tossing Gatorade bottles out of the car.

Not really. People are rather fragile. It doesn't take a lot to kill someone in all honesty.

What takes time is hiding the evidence. If you just want someone dead and don't care who finds the body, you can do it in a couple of minutes (and that's for opening an artery or two and letting them bleed out. Certain other ways can be even faster).

Unfortunately, we find much of this same short-sighted idiotic MBA behaviour in the US government [salon.com] over the past several years:

There's a reason for that. George W Bush *does* have an MBA from the Harvard Business School...

Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.

This is part of the problem with the kind of short term "thinking" that a lot of the MBAs who decide to outsource a lot of this stuff engage in. They don't realize and/or don't care that paying 1/3 of what it would cost to write it here is actually more expensive in both "money cost" and missed opportunity (which is often the *really* big price that causes a lot of companies to go under) when you have to do it several times over before you get something close to usable.

Instead, they tend to see things more like this: "I cut our expenses by x%. I want a bonus. Now let me find another place to work before this decision catches up with me."

You raise an excellent point, which only begs a very interesting question, what should we call it then? What's your idea?

AFK =]

I would also suggest just going to things that interest you. Chances are that you'll find people there that you find interesting and who find you interesting. Plus you'd already have something in common.

The thing is that "I have to go to this place and find people who will like me" should not be your goal. You should go to things that you want to go to or are interested in. Going places just to meet people with the "will you be my friend" thing tends to make you come off as weird and not in the good way.

I met most of my really good friends that way. So have a lot, if not most, of the people I know.

And Olberman offered to give $1000 to charity for each rock that Hannity had thrown at him =]

Microsoft cannot vote.

Okay. It's time for a reality check and/or to pull your head out of your nether regions.

A company is not a person. It is a construct created at the sufferance of the people. It exists to, among other things, limit the liability of the people who control it and, believe it or not, actually work for the good of society while making a profit.

A lot (if not most) people in this country seem to forget that, *especially* the people here who think that the "free market" is the answer to everything.

The representation granted is to the people who control the company. Ballmer and the other people who control Microsoft most certainly CAN vote provided they are citizens and have not been convicted of a felony, and most likely do so.