DrewEckhardt

It's trick OR treat. While many tricks are legally considered vandalism, where the vandals aren't caught you're stuck cleaning up the mess.

A reverse osmosis filter will do you more good since it'll provide drinking water even if there isn't a fresh water source or you can't catch enough fish to suck the water out of their eyeballs and bones.

Facts have nothing to do with it. What we get in terms of health reform will be where public opinion (which needn't be fact based) and insurance/medical lobby dollars (which needn't be fact based) collide.

A single sample point is irrelevant. Lots of us got away with things that injured or killed people who did the same things. Too many didn't. Individual ability to deal with abnormal situations requiring survival skills is unknown unless they've had a number of out landings, down wind, into small areas, with low turns to avoid obstacles they didn't see until the last second. Without those data points we have no idea how they'll react in those situations, so they should be following Brian Germain's guidelines based on how fast people tend to learn and pickup skills. With those data points from only a few hundred skydives, we know that the individual in question has a history of bad judgement which means they should be following the conservative guidelines so they pose a lesser danger to others and themselves. You can count the instructors who know a lot about teaching canopy flight on one hand. You should be taking advice from those people (like Brian Germain) and only favoring your instructors' opinions when it's more conservative. Your instructors usually won't be the ones that end up in the hospital if you do something stupid. I know plenty of people who've been quite successful at drunk driving (at least until they lost their licenses) but wouldn't choose to follow their lead.

Since police are paid to take more risks than other citizens they have no business with guns where the rest of the population doesn't need them for personal protection.

My kitty.

Jose Padilla was born in New York and was still a US citizen at the time he was arrested in Chicago, designated an "illegal enemy combatant", sent to military prison, and held 3.5 years without a trial until the charges were dropped. We don't know what the NSA did after they installed fiber-optic splitters in the AT&T internet backbone and connected them to semantic traffic analyzers in secure wiring closets.

Gay jokes? WTF? Or heterosexual S&M/B&D thing.

If you go to court the prosecutor will probably offer you a plea deal so they don't have to try it. While the fine is unlikely to go down, the ticket can change into a non-moving violation like "defective vehicle" (like you had a tail light out) which does not cause you to spend hundreds of dollars in increased premiums over the next three years.

OK, I'm curious; That is a rented apt, correct? I owned the Boulder town house. Correct. Way more than enough. Sanity checked against Machinery's Handbook and Tyco's product specs at the time. The 2x10 joists at the front and back have 1 5/8" square 12 gauge uni-strut and center joist thinner 12 gauge uni-strut attached along their center lines with half a dozen 3/8" lag screws. Working load is 200-300 pounds per inch of thread engagement after reduction by the American Wood Council's 1.6 safety factor; so each bolt will hold over 400 pounds (a 3" lag screw has 2" of thread, and I might have used longer). A piece of 3/8" all-thread (better than 5000 pounds) at the end of each unistrut supports lengthwise 1 5/8" square unistrut. The projector hung from heavy C-section steel across that.

We live 6 miles out off a 2 lane highway, speed limit 50. Anytime there is any traffic, some A-hole is driving 35-40 mph in the 50 zone, past more than one speed limit sign. Hey, just 'cause it's scenic out where I live doesn't mean you can't push on the g-damned gas pedal. There are few good places to pass and I just want to get home, for cryin' out loud. Too many Washington state drivers around the Puget Sound can't pedal fast enough unless they're on icy roads and overdo it. When I lived in Colorado, I could make it the hundred miles between Boulder and Brush in an hour fifteen minutes either direction (there wasn't too much traffic and people didn't stay in the passing lane). When I lived in Washington, 60 miles Seattle to Mt. Vernon usually didn't happen in 1:15. At first I worried that there'd been an accident and some one might be hurt, but then I realized people just slowed down for no reason and tried to relax. A couple 80 mile drives returning from Skydive Kapowsin (Shelton) reached 3 hours. I did not visit often. At first I wondered why Washington even had a highway patrol, because it was usually physically impossible to speed. Then I saw what people did with a little snow, and learned that the slow drivers causing congestion meant highway patrol officers had to deliver babies when their mothers couldn't get through traffic to the hospital.

With the viewing distances that go with an average 14' wide room, 60 inches is likely to be way too small. You need to start thinking in terms of small movie screens instead of "big" TVs. The big deal is a sense of immersion which you loose when you get too far away. The THX guys want to see a 36 degree subtended field of vision in the farthest seat from the screen which translates into seating at 1.52 screen widths. A 60" screen is about 52" wide which makes it sub-optimal for viewing distances beyond 6' and 6". Human visual acuity is about one minute of angle which means you can't visually resolve 1920x1080 HD when you move beyond a 32 degree subtended field of vision which happens at 1.8 screen widths. That gets you out to 7' 10". You can see sharpness from computer graphics and pickup scaling artifacts; although for film/video the resolution isn't buying you anything when you get living room distances away from the screen and good scaling is a better fix for the artifacts than higher resolution. With kids in college I'd buy the biggest screen which fits the budget even at 720 (probably 768) lines; so there's a Samsung 5054 in my bedroom. As a bachelor I opted for a 9" CRT projector (225 pounds, 40" long) on an 87x49" (100" diagonal) 1.3 gain Stewart screen with seating at 11'; moving up to around 9' for nice DVD scope transfers because those were looking a bit small compared to movie theater expectations and decent DVD transfers didn't get too soft until closer. With the kids out of the metaphorical nest and/or stock options having real value, the next main setup will be a constant height scope screen around 3 heights out (for example 11' implies a 103 x 44" screen, or the 2.35:1 image size you'd get on a 118" HDTV) with LCOS front projection, a grey (Stewart Firehawk does a great job rejecting low levels of ambient light) or black screen, and decent blinds (the vertical blinds I stuck in our rental apartment would be fine).

Right! System software on disk based digital video recorders for the post production and broadcast markets at Pluto Technologies through the Avid acquisition, leaving a couple months before they closed the office as I predicted. On the hobby side starting in 2002 at home I ran a surplus 9" CRT projector which would resolve 1080p, although 1440x960 @ 71.928 Hz or 1440x720 with a bit of vertical astigmatism worked out best for DVD with no micro-judder or scaling artifacts. CRT projectors will scan any resolution which fits within their frequency limits, have no gaps between pixels horizontally, and can be adjusted for no vertical gaps so you don't have a screen door effect as on digital projectors. On the more interesting models beam shape can be altered electro magnetically so the film-look holds at different resolutions.

First, no channels are in 1080p. All the major networks are using either 1080i or 720p. But nearly every film can be displayed at 1080p given a 1080i source. Nearly all movies shot on film start out life at 24 full frames per second and get converted to 60Hz interlaced video by a 3:2 pull-down process three fields from a frame, then 2 fields, etc. Video frame 1, field 1: film frame 1 Video frame 1, field 2: film frame 1 Video frame 2, field 1: film frame 1 Video frame 2, field 2: film frame 2 Video frame 3, field 1: film frame 2 Video frame 3, field 2: film frame 3 Video frame 4, field 1: film frame 3 Video frame 4, field 2: film frame 3 Video frame 5, field 1: film frame 4 Video frame 6, field 2: film frame 4 The digital video streams are flagged as to where the original content came from, and when that's incorrect cadence recognition can be used to figure it out. Then the software does an inverse of the telecine process producing: Video frame 1 : film frame 1 Video frame 2 : film frame 1 Video frame 3 : film frame 1 Video frame 4 : film frame 2 Video frame 5 : film frame 2 Voila! 60 frame per second progressive. And Bluray ships at a higher bit rate than ATSC over-the-air HD.

People jump from planes at 2000 feet all day long. its called a hop n pop. One second after your 2000 foot exit you're at 1984 feet, at two seconds you're at 1936 feet, at three seconds you're at 1856 feet which is approximately the USPA recommended cutaway decision altitude. One second after reaching 2000 feet at terminal you're at 1834 feet. While instructor ratings demonstrate some level of competence in freefall and with teaching students, they don't make people experts or even guarantee that their advice will agree with accepted practices.

USPA disagrees with your instructor, saying that below 1800 feet you should pull your reserve. To quote the SIM regarding malfunctions: 4. You should decide upon and take the appropriate actions by a predetermined altitude: a. Students and A-license holders: 2,500 feet. b. B-D license holders: 1,800 feet Obviously where the cut-away decision altitude is at least 1800 feet people need to have pulled before then. This ignores that a 1500' pull can create 2-out situation with Cypreses, that smaller modern parachutes have exciting spinning malfunctions which result in harness distortion (so people have problems locating their handles) and hard-cutaways, etc. all of which make going for the reserve a better idea.

1) Little going on that drives jumpers to other DZs. Skydiving is a social sport, and it's not much fun when you don't have people to jump with who are proficient in your chosen disciplines whatever they may be. Fewer rules help here. 2) Location. Good weather, proximity to where people live and work (It's great to have a DZ you can get to in 15 minutes to make a few loads after work). 3) Turbine aircraft 4) Landing area close to packing. It's nice to make a lot of loads and you aren't going to when there's a long shuttle ride back to the airport. Bonus points for free load-organizing, free-beer, etc.

You're missing a third choice "never seen it." Life is too short and television too boring to waste time watching it, especially with commercials.

It was funny, actually worth the $21 a pair of movie tickets costs these days.

One day I headed off to the airport for a commercial flight to a BASE jumping destination that my wife refers to as "the baby bridge" where we all learned to do our thing. "The baby bridge" with 480' of altitude and nice landing areas straight ahead does not command respect, especially following the previous weekend's 370' bridge with a couple seconds delay followed by a quick 180 degree turn over trees to land in an uneven rocky area. For some reason I felt compelled to wear my Han Wag paragliding boots to the airport instead of shoes in spite of them being harder to get off in the security area. Somewhat before landing I had an overwhelming feeling that the plane was going to crash and that I needed to re-tie and tighten my boots. That NEVER happened before in 1500 skydiving flights, over a hundred landings as a student pilot (where strong cross-wind landings scared me as much as my first BASE jumps but didn't make me think I was going to crash; and with an instructor who couldn't get his ATP because of age I'd had unusually strong cross-winds on landing), and oodles of commercial flights including a dozen in the last few months. I re-tied my boots tightly. We landed, drove a few hours to the object, and jumped. I managed to hit something immovable in weeds and break my tibia + fibula below the top of my boots. I'm sure that wearing my beefy boots (I've jumped in running shoes, and wouldn't hesitate to use them for a soft landing area like that) and making sure they were tight prevented a compound fracture. Five weeks later the guy I usually skydived with hitched a ride on the DZ plane going to a boogie and crashed on the return trip with no survivors. Given that I wasn't unwinding enough and have a wife who encourages me to get out and have fun with my friends (she actually drove us to the exit point the week before my acident), I'm sure I'd have been on that plane if I wasn't on crutches at the time. I've had premonitions which happened. I believe in witchy women. And I miss Casey.

My theory is that you want your long bones to break in their shaft instead of at the ends, because breaks in the middle can usually be repaired without lasting effects while damage to the ends can lead to bone spurs and permanent arthritis. Without any hard-ware, the weak point is in the shaft that you want to act as a fuse. With a 12mm titanium rod up the middle and full-strength bone around it the shaft is no longer the weak point. My current orthopaedic surgeon said flat out not to jump with the nail. So I'm going to get it out after the bone graft to patch the hole heals.

I would not buy another home until I'd lived for a while (years) in a place as an adult and had a good feel that I wanted to stay there which would mean both things to do and a good concentrated job market so I wouldn't want to move to shorten my commute when things changed. I only lost $15,000 the last time ($15K of appreciation since I bought, no selling agent's commission from doing a FSBO all helped) I bought a home and sold it within the year although it could have been a lot worse. >I was initially thinking of renting an apartment for the first 6 months so that I wouldn't feel any rush to buy, which I still might do, but the market seems pretty good right now and I'm not sure how that might change in 6 months. That would be a fine idea.

When the gov taxes they don't tax the poor. The bottom 50% pay < 3% of all taxes, so let's understand taxes are almost exclusively for the rich. wow i want to know what fantasy land your in where the gov doesnt tax the poor. It's a land called America. In 2008, the lowest quintile had an average individual income tax rate of -8.1%. Second quintile -3.1%. You don't get positive income tax rates until the third quintile at 3.3. You don't have to be rich to bear a high tax burden. Professionals living in high-cost areas reach that 95th percentile with a 16.8% average Federal income tax rate and 26.5% total tax burden before being able to afford a single family. Treating FICA like other taxes isn't really fair. It's more a mandatory retirement savings, disability insurance, and life insurance package. At the low end it serves peoples' needs for retirement, disability, and life insurance for surviving dependants with the old-age benefit replacing 75% of a low paid single-earner couples' wages. That gets the federal tax rate up to 1.1% in the bottom quintile and 8.3% in the second quintile. At the high end it only replaces 25% of the wage cap for a single person, although other tax deferred retirement savings make the benefits taxable so the real number is less and high earners must save to compensate for the reduced government benefits. Adding that to 26.5% gets you to over 1/3 of income for Federal taxes and full government benefits.

Most people find that jumping by themselves doesn't stay fun, and without the frame of reference provided by other people you're more likely to pickup bad habits that you later need to fix. You'll want to jump with other people real soon. Bigger people need more drag to match rw (belly to earth, back to earth, head-up, head-down, it's all the same) overlapping (or just more neutral/comfortable) fall rates than when they wear shorts and a T-shirt and small people need less (taking the form of spandex). A T-shirt can also come loose and cover your handles which is bad.

$18,500. With deals like 2.99% interest until the loan was paid off and no transfer fees, many people moved car loans, remodeling projects which were on their HELOC, student loans, etc. onto credit cards. This problem is most likely the credit card companies increasing their minimum payment from 2% of the balance to 5% which turns $370 into $925 (less a bit for whatever the last payment did to the principle) The solution in this case is rejecting the new terms in writing within the specified time window and closing the account with the balance paid off under the old terms. Obviously that means one less credit card and a credit score decrease from the increased credit utilization and perhaps account longevity. The underlying issue is that credit card companies are allowed to change the terms any time they want.