champu

For starters, when you do something out of hate, it's more than likely both wrong and counter-productive. You made the purchase in bad faith as you never intended to keep the items, which is wrong. And of all the things Walmart does, you're shoving one of the few things they do that is actually kinda nice back in their face and daring them to change their policy, which is counter-productive. Just because they're aware people abuse the policy and they try to plan accordingly doesn't make abusing the policy right. If someone is aware of Walmart's business practices and chooses not to shop there as a result, it doesn't make the business practices right either.

This one comes in a close second: And the winner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqJ752JS5eY Main suspension line snagged on the main pin cover flap of an Omega container. /edited to add: in my opinion the use of a hook knife in this incident might have yielded better results but really only when you look at it in hindsight knowing that the suspension line would not clear the container when the main was cut away and that the RPC would not clear the fouled main. In other words, there was no point in this malfunction where going for a hook knife was the best choice.

I doubt we will agree on what I am saying. I'm sorry but, the whole ongoing discussion aside, that's one of the funniest exchanges I've ever read on this forum.

Using taxes to try and accomplish anything besides paying for the bills is putting the cart before the horse. But on the same note, complaining about taxes in and of themselves is too. I don't advocate either. I chose $2M. It would be similar to my current situation: I pay what I owe but I also take tax credits, use 401(k), and write off donations, mortgage interest, and taxes where I can. At then end of the day it's not really about an extra million bucks from some imaginary guy who just made $10M out of thin air even though that's apparently the only situation that's fun to argue about. Tax increases are about an extra couple grand avg from the 45M households that make $60-250K and maybe an extra $50K avg from the 2M households that make more than $250K. What's that raise? A couple hundred billion? That'll help, but it won't cover the deficit and it's not a hose bibb you can keep cranking wider.

One jumper wore something along those lines on the San Francisco demo under his jumpsuit and harness and it looks like it worked out really well. When picking something out it's important to consider how long you might expect to be out the water before someone comes to get you. Are you doing a high-profile demo with coast guard vessels patrolling the area or are you doing a night jump off some tropical coast at a boogie? I also agree with rhys that an auto-inflating vest will probably cause more problems than it solves.

You know how everyone complains that "normal" muslims don't stand up and do something about the radical islamic people who commit atrocities? Joining DHS could probably be construed as standing up and doing something about the radical islamic people who commit atrocities.

Being here illegally is an absurd thing to make a primary offense because it doesn't look like anything. Likewise, you can't pull someone over on the freeway on suspicion of tax evasion. "That's an awful nice car you're driving for someone in their late 20s, care to show me your 1040s for the last few years?"

The 350D was my first DSLR body five years ago because it is super lightweight, full featured, and has a very respectable sensor. Since then, well... The Canon 70-200 mm f2.8L IS is probably my single favorite purchase I've ever made.

The second law of thermodynamics states entropy increases until equilibrium is reached for any isolated system. Life is not an isolated system but rather one that sinks entropy into its surroundings. It's why you get hungry even if you just sit around all day.

apparently

If you throw a handful of them up in the air they play the Star Spangled Banner as they flutter back to the ground.

is it. /edited to add: "Apart from the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the Lydian way of life is not unlike the Greek." -Herodotus The Histories c. 440 BC

I like the information theory approach and he has a lot of good points, but you only have to make one errant leap to ruin your conclusion. There's a "forest from the trees" problem in his argument in that he's trying to decompose the genetic code of an extremely mature collection of species that exists today using the simplest type of mutation (random single "bit" errors.) Life is sufficiently complex at this point that we should expect mutations resulting in potentially beneficial traits to involve whole blocks of DNA. He admits this happens and that it is likely responsible for the evolutionary process. But you can't assume life and the underlying genetic code was always as complex as it is today. Life spent a really long time in an extremely unimpressive state before looking like it does today.

Particularly the one that went swimming last year. Monitoring carbon dioxide levels along with air, cloud, ocean, and land temperatures is a good idea regardless of which side of the AGW debate you're on. If national and/or international measures are implemented to reduce CO2 emissions, it's helpful to know if they're being followed and if they're working.

Agreed, and I think W.V.T. Rusch would agree too. But your antenna doesn't have to get very complicated before closed form solutions starting with Maxwell go right out the window. Throw in extra gotchas like multi-mode horns and you're basically just taking an educated guess and kludging together a numerical analysis to get a rough idea of what to expect. Even after you build the thing simply measuring it isn't always straight-forward. That's what I mean when I say black magic.

I remember when I was first taught how transistors work (although "taught" may not be harsh enough a word for what they do to you on the subject at Illinois.) For all the headaches the associated maths can induce they are, conceptually, a very elegant application of physics. Antenna technology however... I don't care what anyone says a lot of that shit is black magic.

3:00

By "transforming" I don't necessarily mean alone and by "others" I don't necessarily mean nations.

I'm inclined to agree with the president in that having low Earth orbit pretty well worked out and having been to the Moon several times, NASA needs to move on. Other than for studying the Moon itself, long duration manned missions there don't really serve much of a scientific purpose in my mind. Plus the technical challenges of establishing a permanent Moon colony (upmass, communications, transit time, space weather, local weather) are all watered down versions of the challenges in sending a manned mission elsewhere in the solar system. The tag-line of NASA's manned space program needs to read, "Transforming the incredible to the mundane, and leaving the mundane to others."

Even disregarding the selection bias though, one out of 450 planetary systems suitable for earthlike life would still equates to a simply mind-boggling number of hospitable planets in just one galaxy, let alone the known universe. I think you mean two out of 450 planetary systems. For better or for worse, the same facets of evolution that allow for the emergence of an intelligence capable of interstellar communication or travel will tend to produce highly competitive beings. A utopian end-game of peace in perpetuity after a millennia an ages-long struggle against natural selection does not seem very likely to me.

So, no one from outside of the US of A should buy gear from the States? No, just maybe not jumpsuits. I have a 2k Composites camera helmet, a full face by Parasport Italia, half a dozen L&B products, and a Cypres 2. But my jumpsuits are all Liquid Sky and Tony Suits. An added benefit is that now I have Liquid Sky and Tony Suit "compatible" measurements that I know will net me a good fitting suit if I need another one in the future.

I'm a weekend jumper so most in a week is fairly low at 32. Most in a 9-day span (two adjacent weekends) was 48 (8 on Sat; 8 on Sun doing 4-way FS; then 10, 12, 10 on Fri, Sat, Sun the following weekend shooting VFS video) I always pack for myself. /edited to add: Working 10-12 hour days during the week, making 600 jumps a year, and doing 8-10 hours a season of tunnel time as a weekend jumper lasts about 2-3 years before you turn into a white dwarf.

Voting trends are tied to population density. Spending is tied to geographic area which is inversely related to population density. Tax receipts are tied to income which is tied to cost of living which is, again, tied to population density. Republican politicians will push for things like roads, rural communication access subsidies, military bases (of which there are a lot out in the middle of nowhere) and other stuff that benefits low population densities. Democratic politicians will push for social programs that try to benefit individuals directly which increases spending to higher density areas. Everyone votes selfishly in a geographic sense, I don't think this is news.

First off, I've only met one person who can put a camera on their head, turn it on, and actually, honestly, forget about it during the jump. The result is some of the most nauseating blair witch shit I have ever seen. Even when done well I consider inside video to be novelty footage that it's hard to watch a whole lot of, but that's just my opinion. Regarding how you handled you mal, you need to understand that adding things to the skydive complicates your emergency procedure decision tree. It doesn't just add steps to existing decisions which, based on the way you handled the mal, appears to be how you are approaching things. You made one decision during your mal, "I can't land this." and then you executed a sequence of steps to fix the problem. That's all anyone can really expect of a jumper with a hundred or even a few hundred jumps. The problem is this sequence you planned and executed ended up being silly given what was actually going on. And as another person pointed out, unclipping your helmet and having it come off your head in the middle of a main release and skyhook deployment actually made the situation more dangerous. I agree with the "more flies with honey" argument, but I think it's pretty clear you've taken "shelving the camera for a while" off the table... so... best of luck with that.

I remember joking with colleagues at Motorola about this dystopian future of cell phones back in 2001 when even the concept of "rebooting your phone" was laughable. It really keeps me from getting excited about consumer electronics like I used to.