Crap Throwing Monkey

So what? There are periods of time in the past 20 years that their stocks have performed well. Every company has a fair price. You want to be a successful investor? Find the companies that have low debt, positive net margins, growing revenue streams, and are priced below their fair price on the market. Second-tier company or not, US Steel has met those criteria in the recent past more than once.

And the moral of the story is: there is a difference between the stock and the underlying company. The US steel industry may not be very competitive...but US Steel itself was a steal at $11/share. You have to know, when you're buying a stock, whether your intent is to hold a share of the underlying company, or whether you're trading market risk. I've never gone wrong as long as I've kept that single thought in mind during a trade - I've made bad choices, but I've always been able to back out of them when they've turned against me. It's only when I didn't know why or what (market risk or the company) I was buying that I've gotten killed in the market.

Hey, I criticize because I care. You should hold yourself to a higher standard that that joke.

More to the point, what was up with Tia Dalma? Nothing like introducing a perfectly pointless and useless character into an already bloated script...

I also said "latex". And I would think inkman would wear an octopus on his face, come to think of it...

Ditto here. They uninsured !@#$ who wrecked my car is paying my insurance company back (in cash, out of his own pocket), so my rates aren't increasing.

The character was a real actor. Bill Nighy. I thought he did a pretty good job, considering he basically had just his eyes to work with. The face may have been CGI...but it looked an awful lot like an applique. Wouldn't surprise me if it were a hybrid - latex mask with cgi effects added (the texture, moving tentacles, etc.) Probably have to wait for the director's commentary on the DVD to find out...

I know about Centaur...but there was also a design on paper for an internal fuel tank that would take up a third of the cargo bay. I believe it would have carried LOX/LH2 for the SSME's...which, as you say, is why it was scrapped. It was intended more for very high orbit missions (i.e. to provide an extra couple minutes thrust past ditching the EFT), but I suppose with some planning it could have been used for a large trans-orbit burn.

Worse...they significantly changed the characterizations from the first one. Elizabeth Swann in "Dead Man's Chest" was not the same Elizabeth Swann as in "Curse of the Black Pearl". Not even remotely. I actually felt bad for Keira Knightley, having that BS part forced on her - it says a lot about the quality of the movie that she was mis-cast in a role she's played before. The deepest, most believable character, frankly, was Davey Jones...I was impressed with the quality of his acting, and his ability to, with just his eyes, express the emotional depth of a tormented soul while wearing a latex octopus on his face. The movie, though, is no worse than any other modern part 2 of a trilogy. There was a time (Godfather II, Empire Strikes Back), when the inner movie of a trilogy could stand alone as a story. Nowadays, they film the last two parts of a trilogy at the same time...and use the second story as a setup for the final film. Some trilogies do it better than others (Lord of the Rings, for example, or the Spiderman series)...but Dead Man's Chest is one of the worst examples of this I've seen, with a cliffhanger so blisteringly in-your-face obvious it should have been made for TV.

What part of "read the annual report" sounds like "invest in American steel"?

It's rumored he's getting a tattoo of a Honda Fit to go with it...

Read the annual report yourself, Joe.

That HST service mission is worth the risk. The astronauts would probably agree with me as well. HST is one of the most successful scientific devices of the past 40 years. Scientific American had a "Top Ten Discoveries of the HST" this month. It's amazing to see what the program has accomplished.

Actually, it's not that easy. HST and ISS are in significantly different orbits; orbital physics pretty much prohibits going from one to the other. No one's thought about it in the past ten years because they know physics. And there was a component designed for the shuttle to carry extra OMS or SSME fuel in the cargo bay, for significant (not drastic, like HST-to-ISS) orbital changes or high-orbit launches. They scrapped it after Challenger because it was somehow decided it was "unsafe" to put liquid fuel in the cargo bay...

Sorry. The answer is no.

Yes.

Must be off the sauce. Or hitting it harder.

What, now you're trying to recruit? Is this one of these deals where, if you sign up three guys to be gay, you get a free toaster?

The odd thing is: he's apparently really not a POS. Kind of like Steve Tasker getting booted out of his last game...

Zidane was ovbiously more than willing to let it go, until the Italian guy said SOMETHING that set him off. A well-deserved red card nonetheless. And not caring much about this game (my biggest concern is not having to listen to meazza for the next four years), I though it was kind of funny. Not every day you see someone put their forehead in someone else's chest...

With this crowd...yeah, probably...

Yeah...but I just can't get excited about this game. These dumbass announcers aren't helping, either...

All very true...and then every time I find myself rooting for France, I think "But...they're French." Then I start rooting for Italy, and think "But...they're the biggest !@#$ing divers in the world." I think I'll change the channel...

Ah, yes...the thread that started Ed down the path to being the legendary gay-ass Fit driver (but with the sport package!) that he is today. (Note to Ed: "Gay-ass" applies to the car, not you. "Sasquatchian ass" applies to you. Gay-ass Honda Fit...Sasquatchian-ass Ed.)

Let's assume for the sake of argument (because the assumption really has no business associating with reality) that the NYT is, in fact, guilty of treason. You want to execute the entire New York Times? What brand of glue do you snif? I want to try it...seems like good stuff...