Bamboo.

Hard - check
Pretty - check (beauty..eye..beholder..blah)
sustainable - check
inexpensive - check

"what price can we put on avoiding extinction"

sounds like someone's got a great idea for a kickstarter campaign!

The point of the article is that 138,469 wished they lived in a kingdom with a benevolent dictator who can simply make people do stuff because they want it.

...except HE gets to tell you that. Because Master Blaster runs Bartertown.
Like Stalin... Here to administer the equality, not to participate in it.

If there's one thing Obama is passionate about, it is expanding federal power to all aspects of everything.
Why not cut out the middle man and create a petition that asks the White House to assume authority over all levels and government branches? That's essentially what you are asking for.

if your president decides who sells what, where, when, and how... you aren't free.

ditto if your governor, state legislature, or city council is doing it.

this entire thing is bullshit. it isn't up to any of them, for or against.

UFC was more interesting before the weight classes and rounds. The old Gracie way, it was over when it was over.
The modern implementation before you today was scientifically formulated to maximize PPV revenue from people who want to see flying elbows instead of crafty omoplatas.

When someone attacks you, you are reacting to something that is already happening. So of course, without any experience one might revert to panicked pointing and shooting. But with experience and training, you can become fast, accurate, and mindful of the elements like [ firepower, terrain, time, strengths, weaknesses, and leverage ] which MAY help you overcome a time and/or luck deficit. Panic doesn't have to be a forgone conclusion.

USPSA, and even more so, IDPA competition can help you prepare for some of these aspects. Quick and panicked is that guy I was talking about, no formal experience, at best just shooting garbage out in the desert, at worst just bought a gun and tried it once at an indoor range. Practical shooting isn't about pinpoint accuracy, it is about balancing speed, accuracy, and power to achieve the most damage in the least amount of time. And going to local matches on a regular basis provides the repetition necessary for a conditioned-response-style drilled training (read On Killing, Col. Grossman).

Watch some videos of people like Jerry Miculek.

I never said girls couldn't. I said that on paper they should be able to just fine, but that out in the real world it just doesn't happen.

As far as wasting their lives, I disagree. A USPSA C-classified female shooter is likely to come out on top in a gun fight against the average guy who is has only informal experience shooting junk in the desert.

Maybe they won't be a champion, but 94.9% of all USPSA shooters won't achieve what Jessie Duff has achieved in GM status.

A couple months ago a 12-ish year old girl beat me in all 6 stages of a local match.... but... uhh... i had magazine problems!

hence my original post.... that females on paper should be able to compete just fine with males and there's no reason to hand out separate awards.

females do compete on equal terms, but their scores are compared only to other females for awards. you are blaming the symptom for causing the disease.

ahh, the "certain amazonian society" argument whereby someone seeks to argue against the prevalent facts by citing some small exceptions.

of course there will be a few exceptionally talented black swans that show up from time to time. these are exceptions to the rule.

for the year-after-year slog of shooters making their way to various competitions up to the top... WPW's, Camp Perry, USPSA nationals, IPSC championships, and all the hundreds of others, including the olympics, the males statistically dominate the top.

as far as I know, none of the scores are scaled differently for male vs female. the courses-of-fire are generally the same. the scores can be compared apples-to-apples, but we just hand out more trophies. females don't do worse BECAUSE of the separation, that is ridiculous.

i see this debate in shooting sports going the other way.

there really aren't any good reasons why a female should be a worse marksman or shooting competitor than a male. in fact, small efficient muscles and better color eyesight make females more ideal than males.

so a lot of people think that there should be no gender seperation in shooting sport competitions, and I tend to agree. but for some reason, the top females can never quite break into the top levels with the top males. just last year, Jessie Duff became the first female USPSA grand master-level shooter. on paper, there's no reason why they can't be as competitive as the guys, but in reality it just hasn't happened. so we end up with segregated competitions (in most cases. there ARE plenty of gender-immeterial competitions out there) to keep it "fair".

disclaimer: i will never be able to compete against the competitive girls.

and anthropogenic co2 production is several magnitudes lower than natural sources.

uh oh.

redneck...
how is it acceptable to use that geo-discriminatory slur?

you think you are so much better than someone because you grew up in a suburb or something?

the sheriff is elected. unlike most police chiefs, state police commissioners, or the heads of the FBI, DEA, BATFE, or the hundred other federal agencies that somehow have arrest powers and guns. think about that for a second. That is a LOT of people who can ruin your life who don't answer to anyone you will EVER have any control over. I bet the sheriff can't invent constitution-free zones like the CBP.

I say get all that hardware into small town hands where it will fall into disrepair, rusting in weed-covered motor pools in a few years when a fleet of MaxxPros that ride like SHIT is last year's Christmas present.

Since I have have started seriously working on BSD systems I have enjoyed the simplicity/straight-forwardness of it's configuration setup. The only thing that keeps me from switching to OpenBSD for all my servers: apt-get dist-upgrade

I have only been bitten in the ass once by this (15'ish years ago), and it makes keeping the system updated so easy.