I'm aware of the studies. I've read and applied Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert, just about half the books by Ellington Darden, the Nautilus Bulletins by Arthur Jones, Heavy Duty 2 by Mike Mentzer, every article at Cyberpump (back when all of the site content was free), Power Factor Training by John Little and Pete Sisco, articles by Doug McGuff and Drew Baye, and even the Power of 10 by Adam Zickerman and Super Slow: The Ultimate Exercise Protocol by Ken Hutchins. I've also read the fitness research paper published in the June 2004 edition of the Journal of Exercise Physiology online. I've worked out as often as every other day to as infrequently as once every three weeks. I've done routines with full body single set circuits at each workout. I've also done routines with different muscle group splits. I've trained to concentric failure, to static failure, and even occasionally to eccentric failure. All that from 1996 to 2014 and in all cases the gains stopped after the first few weeks and plateaued for months until I quit and started over.

The only thing great about HIT is that it's easier on the joints. When I do higher volume work I tend to develop joint pain, and of course in the long run it's better to have barely-better-than-untrained muscles and healthy joints than strong muscles and damaged joints.

Strength training studies are problematic. A trainee can hold back at the initial strength test, thus giving false gains at the end of the study. The trainees can do additional workouts outside of the supervision of the study supervisors. Study participants can be using steroids. Perhaps worst of all, regaining muscle mass you formerly possessed tends to be much faster than gaining new muscle mass. ( There are several studies that document this. One such link: http://www.thinkmuscle.com/art... ) Most workout studies don't control for the influence of this factor on outcomes or try to control for it but only rely upon word-of-mouth of the study participants, which is unreliable. So if you conduct a strength study and your random assignment of subjects puts five people that each used to have twenty more pounds of muscle mass in one group, they're going to make much greater gains in a shorter time than other subjects in the same group, and skew your results. If you're familiar with Arthur Jones' "Colorado Experiment", the two research subjects had both gained and then lost over thirty pounds of muscle in the years before the experiment. So the fact that they made massive gains on HIT doesn't mean anything for trainees that had never previously had thirty additional pounds of muscle.

I've heard that explanation before, but it always strikes me as a retcon made by people associated with the film once software professionals started lampooning it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

It's a difficult genre, right? It would be very difficult to make a real film about hacking interesting or understandable to the average person. So you've got the difficult task of making it dramatic and understandable without turning it into cyber-fantasy.

For the physical fitness - but nothing else - you can assume the guy got into great physical condition after going to prison. According to my cousin the prison guard, a lot of prisoners get into great shape - they have nothing to do all day, so exercising around the clock is just a way to pass the time.

In my experience, an hour three times a week will carry you for a month or two and then all progress will stop no matter how hard you push during those three hours. To go further, you need a higher volume of work - or maybe anabolic steroids.

The reason people in boot camp, people in prison, and personal trainers get into great shape isn't an hour of hard work here or there and days of rest. Instead they have work, rest, work, rest, work rest throughout the day for days at a time. The soldiers work that way because they have instructors breathing down their necks, the prisoners work that way because they're totally bored and doing another sets of pushups, pullups, and burpees is just a way to pass the time, and the trainers work that way because they keep demonstrating exercises and moving weights in position and leading exercise classes and working out to kill time between clients.

Trying to tell John Q Public he can look like Chris Hemsworth on three hours of work a week is a marketing gimmick for people trying to sell exercise DVDs, fitness magazines, and gym memberships. If they said, "You can look like this with just three moderate workouts per day, six days per week!" they couldn't pay rent.

You don't need a Core i7 running at 3.6 GHz to run Minecraft, and that's the CPU and CPU speed the author was complaining about. If he needs that kind of performance, he's working his laptop five or ten times harder (of course I'm making that number up, I can't make an educated guess at the exact value) than you work yours. Minecraft works fine on a PC I have from early 2006, a core i7 can probably run it at idle.

But I think the great majority of people are fine with a laptop. I work on a medium size Java application and my laptop runs an IDE, a few browsers with many tabs, Maven, git, virtualization software, etc... all without hiccups, and I only have an Intel core i5. What percentage of PC users outside people running high end games need more computing power than that? (Oh, and if anyone wants to bash Java, be my guest - I don't love it either, but it pays the bills.)

I like the look a lot. But my first friend to get a device with Lollipop - a Nexus 6 - had a crash-happy experience. I haven't had any crashes on Android 4.4.2 since I got my current device nine months ago, why would I give that up for something that obviously got pushed to customers before it was ready?

New Year's Resolutions are for suckers, but I think the real reason people try something new this time of year is that the dust settles from Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza/Yuletide/Saturnalia/whatever. The social schedule moves off the "insane" setting it's had since mid November and except for a blip around Valentine's day, schedules are relatively calm until spring.

Well, if you're going to blow the source material to hell than I guess throwing in some Harkkonens would be fun too. Maybe add Darth Vader while you're at it, and General Zod.

Good point - you are correct and I don't dispute what you write.

However, my interpretation of the original writing and similar epic fantasy stories is that the heroes are just a bit faster, stronger, more skilled, and more lucky than their adversaries. Think of the medieval fantasy equivalent to James Bond, Rambo, Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon's Riggs (in fighting ability if not in humor), or True Lies' Harry Tasker. Each manages to handle dozens of opponents, even multiple at any given time. Instead, Peter Jackson gave us the medieval fantasy equivalent to The Avengers or Kung Fu Panda and I think it's a terrible fit for the genre.

Even the use of big battle sequences might have been forgivable if they seem to fit the story. But instead, the dwarves fight like each one is just about as tough and difficult to harm as the terminator, the elves fight like they're major characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the fearsome orcs and goblins "bred for war" die so fast and easily one thinks Azog might conquer more territory by arming a bunch of Hobbits.

I thought the scenery was beautiful, the costumes stunning, the sets breathtaking, and outside of combat most of the character interactions were reasonable and enjoyable. I especially did like the relationship Thorin and Bilbo develop over the films. But otherwise, there's two or three hours of good film in there.

To be fair, my sons love it and if it gets them to read more I'll call it a winner, period.

Yeah, of all the dumb elements in the film, the spice worms annoyed me the most. Why didn't the orcs have them dig directly into Erebor, and take the fortress from inside and then have any elves and dwarves that were outside face attack from two directions?

I was assuming a standard Visual Studio Professional subscription: http://www.visualstudio.com/pr... ($1200 per user per year). Maybe you can negotiate big discounts. I never tried. I saw $1200 and balked. :)

You have it backwards. I'm saying that for the past 5 years Microsoft's technologies have been competitive very consistently in every domain - operating systems, office suites, browsers, toolkits, databases, security, you name it. Before that their technology was inconsistent in quality.

For performance, .NET has compile-time optimization. Java has runtime optimization. .NET uses less memory to launch, and starts faster, and in many applications (especially desktop applications) that's an advantage. But for long running applications like a web server, the Java Virtual Machine has the edge because it profiles the running code and rewrites it on the fly, which offers better optimization than compile-time optimization.

Excellent point, thanks.