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Nope. Sorry, Charlie, not so fast. Men have better upper body strength. Women, by and large have greater flexibility. Men have larger muscle mass. Women do better at high G-forces. And so on. Both have advantages for not only different aspects of in-person combat but for other types of frontline jobs. Some experts have been saying that women, once we know how to accomodate them, will turn out to be better fighter pilots. Jeebus! Heinlein was pointing this out in Starship Troopers in the fifties. This is nothing new.

Follow-up studies have demonstrated that women respond to strength exercise in the same rate as men (Westcott 1991). They are therefore not the weaker sex. They are the smaller sex, but on a muscle-for-muscle basis, women are just as strong as men..

Lighter bones, smaller muscles and higher fat ratios make women more suitable for swimming, where buoyancy is an issue. More body fat means more fuel to burn in endurance pursuits like running, cycling, swimming and hiking. Smaller tendons and ligaments along with less bulky muscles allow for greater potential for flexibility. This is a favorable situation for pursuits like gymnastics and rock climbing where flexibility is at a premium.

In other cases, I agree that there are physiological differences, but there, too, it gets kinda messy and the wise experts agree that in some ways what we're seeing is data from male athletes, who have at least five thousand years of expertise behind their training techniques, and women, whose techniques have only been getting suited to their bodies in the past forty years.

I'm a big, hearty fella. Probably bigger than you. And I have very clear memories of sparring sessions where a tiny woman used her superior agility to simply not be where I hit. I went for her, she dropped, rolled, came up somewhere else. And part of it was simply that she was down below where I was used to striking a given blow.

And moving on from there, have you seen all the recent studies about "mean girls"? Funny thing, now that we're finally starting to get useful data, waddayaknow, women aren't always "nicer" than men, they just conceal the blow better. As with my old sparring partner, they hit ya where you're not looking. If you think that this isn't applicable to warfare then you don't know a lot about war.

Lastly, you think that we're "being pussies" because women have a responsible role in society? What a load of crap! The U.S. was letting France and England push us around for years before and after 1812. Korea seized and killed the crew of the Sherman and it took us eleven years, until 1871, iirc, to get around to reprisals. The "backwoods" Seminoles and Cajuns kicked the ass of all Federal interlopers in the Florida swamps for decades before the "revenooers" just gave up and left them alone. Shit, son, there was a period that we were afraid that Venezuala's navy was going to kick our butt. Never in our history, not under Teddy Roosevelt, not under Jackson, have we had a White House as belligerent as the one we've got right now. Why do we have to play it safe with Iran? A.) All of our troops are committed to Iraq and other "War on Terror" stuff to the point that we no longer have, for example, a full strength available Rapid Deployment Force. B.) Ahmedinijad was screwing around, like Quaddaffi before him, as many foreign policy people have suspected all along, C.) England, hard though you may it find to understand, actually is a sovereign nation with their own foreign policy and military and everything. It's not our job to get their soldiers back. D.) IRAN HAS NUKES, YOU DIMWIT!

Your premise is faulty, your data is false, and your conclusions are invalid. Here's a nickel, boy. Buy a clue.

I can get the theora files to play under the latest version of VideoLAN client.

There are instructions for setting up Real Player to view Theora files. Although some people are saying that the latest version of Real Player is not so bad I still don't want to install it. I must have a grudge :-) and Real Alternative using Media Player Classic (MPC) works fine.

Is there anyway to get Theora files to play with MPC? I thought that if I installed the Directshow Filters it may work but no such luck. This would be really handy because I use MPC for just about everything else.

http://stream1.hia.no/instructions/theoraandrealwi ndows.html

There's a Heidelberg Map in Agder University College which an arrow and the text "You are probably here".

WHAT'S BETTER -- PURIFY, from Purify Systems, does a much better job than Electric Fence, and does much more. It's available at this writing on SPARC and HP. I'm not affiliated with Purify, I just think it's a wonderful product and you should check it out.

GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) will be offered as a commercial service probably within a year. GPRS will offer packet switched TCP/IP service via the GSM network, and will not be veery expensive to use as the solution used in this car, since you pay mainly for data traffic and not for keeping up 16 GSM connections as used here..

GPRS will be able to utilize free GSM channels and give up to 128 kbit/s performance via GSM. (And it will not congest the network, since the network provider can set policies/priorities on network traffic.)

Nils Ulltveit-Moe