champu

It still makes me cringe every time I have to watch something I help design be subjected to random vibe and pyro-shock testing to ensure it will survive launch. That said, every application has its environmental design challenges, not just space. We, however, have the advantage of a slightly larger budget than firearm manufacturers. You have to appreciate that this snowclone is so unreassuring that its usage has dwindled to near exclusively sarcastic contexts. To see it used literally is sad in a, "what rock have you been under?" kinda way.

I voted "no" on both counts. But they do have something to offer us besides, "stop having the capability to pursue nuclear weapons should you decide to," so I think it's foolish to continue lobbing affronts at them. This article is an interesting read about cooperation with Iran.

He says that like they're bad things!

They talked about this in the news a couple months ago and there was a thread about it at the time. The strikes are actually conducted by four-sided building folks, not five-sided building folks. And although the original article in that thread isn't available, I think I remember it saying the POTUS, SECDEF, and DNI were all to be made aware of the strikes.

(the 'alt' text on that one is classic too) As one of the nerdier nerds amidst my nerdery, I occasionally get in quarrels with my management not over the amount of detail I plan to give in a presentation about a concept, but rather over whether trying to explain the concept to a given audience is even worth attempting. "It's a concise and excellent explanation... but no one cares enough to know how that works. Take the chart out." "But they should know how it works! They should care!" Which is an important part of the "people not making the time to understand science" issue. The people doing the explaining first have to convince the explainees that they should care and listen, an act that may involve little or no science content whatsoever. And before that happens, the explainer needs to convince himself or herself that all that convincing and explaining is worth it for the subject matter in question. A lot of times it's not.

Even if they are, with the tools readily available these days, common conversions are easy for things like wingloading, fuel efficieny, and diet.

Actually, water is pretty arbitrary too since it density varies quite a bit with temperature, so you have to put all sorts of other conditionals on it. Which is why specific gravity and not density is used; it already has standard temperature and pressure built in. Ah, but STP isn't quite where 1 gram of water occupies 1 cm^2. It's closer to 277.13 K and 101.325 KPa. Water is a terrible terrible thing to base standards on. Expanding on DanG's observation of the aerospace industry... space is a mess when it comes to units. NASA/JPL... USAF... component manufacturers... the various national laboratories... everyone's got systems that differ at least slightly, you have to learn to deal with it. Even "Système International" as a name for a unit system leaves something to be desired when you're traveling beyond Earth's immediate vicinity.

What I was getting at between the paragraphs was that ideally we'd like to see a democracy that the people of Afghanistan can get behind, but that in all honesty we'd probably settle for something less ideal as long as whatever it was, it was !Taliban. Whether or not settling in such a way would be smart, I don't know. The democracy push also appears to be the current strategy for wooing the tacit supporters you mention in a sort of "if you build it they will vote" kind of way. Unfortunately, seeding a government only provides a destination for the woo-ees, and does little to erode Taliban influence. What really needs to be done imho is to... 1) Establish a pervasive communication plan with the people of Afghanistan to make clear our intentions 2) Focus on reconstruction efforts and disruption of the Taliban communication plan 3) See #1. We can only hope such a strategy would actually help the people, convince them to stop supporting the Taliban, and encourage them to participate in a new government. Getting back to the original question concerning negotiation, my last post was simply meant to be critical of stepping up to a table in the near term. Between now and then (if there is a then) I think we both agree the way to earn more chips is not more shooting and more bombing.

Negotiations require at least some semblance of common goals. The coalition wants a stable (read: democratic) government that will be willing to help us enforce our anti-terrorism policy in the region and, of course, to stop fighting and bring troops home. According to an interview (albeit a somewhat dated one) with Mullah Wakil (one of Omar's aides), "The Sharia does not allow politics or political parties. That is why we give no salaries to officials or soldiers, just food, clothes, shoes and weapons. We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1400 years ago and jihad is our right. We want to recreate the time of the Prophet and we are only carrying out what the Afghan people have wanted for the past 14 years." So it sounds like a negotiator would have his or her work cut out for themselves. We might be able to work out a stable government (if not a democratic one) if they would give up their Pashtun superiority complex, but whatever one concession they offer would be in exchange for us leaving. I guess this would achieve two of our three goals, but not the one that drew us into fighting over there to begin with. If they really have such pervasive control over the country, why would they give us that final concession on our way out? We would come to the table with nothing to gain, pragmatic as it would be.

Red-tailed Hawks are pretty common in soCal and I see them a lot under canopy at Elsinore. I'd be willing to bet they saw me first every time though. They'd keep pace a few canopy widths off to the side. They liked to play around more when I had a bigger canopy and stayed up longer. I don't think they're as interested in following something if it's headed for the ground too quickly.

Yes, I imagine that's exactly how things would progress. Especially if you didn't know anything.

Unfortunately there's a very large pool of people to brainwash. I'll paraphrase a famous quote, "A fool learns to fight a war by studying tactics; the victor will have studied logistics." In a conventional war that means you don't butt heads and lose man for man at the front lines, you send in planes and bomb their railroads, factories, and bridges. In the game RISK that means you don't attack the giant pile of canons sitting in Afghanistan and Ural, you attack the three lonely mopes that got left in Kamchatka so that all of Asia isn't controlled at the next turn. In a battle with extremists it means you don't torture them to find out where the next camp is so you can firebomb what turns out to be a village where a few bad guys were hiding, it means you do what it takes to keep "borderline cases" from knocking on the training camp doors to begin with.

Not taking care when packing any canopy can cause a lot of various things to happen that may or not be a big deal. In my experience, when you have a funky opening on a cross-braced there's always at least one point in there where all or part of the canopy snaps open abruptly. If you've got cameras on your head that can suck. My velocity likes to take a look around from time to time as it wiggles its way open, but as long as I pay attention to the slider and keep my lines neat it opens softly, which is what I really care about.

For Precision made canopies maybe? I can't attach the C and D lines to different risers with my velocity, they're cascaded.

I have no issue landing downwind or crosswind in any direction personally, but some combinations of fixed patterns and wind changes can have you landing downwind directly at obstacles which, like it or not, is going to cause problems for some people, and I don't think we want to do that. A partial mitigation to the predictability thing is to have different "handedness" for each of the landing directions. If there's two favored landing directions then when doing one you use a left hand pattern and when doing the other you use a right handed pattern. (or if you're at Perris/Elsinore, this translates simply to, "Don't fly a base leg over the runway!") This helps in a few ways... a) it makes the first person down's landing direction easier to distinguish earlier, because you can simply see what direction turns they are making. b) if you're soon to follow the first man down, the base leg for a landing in either direction can start from roughly the same place, so switching causes less of an altitude problem c) it keeps main landing area traffic away from the other side of the runway, where you can put a swoop pond and allow people to do turns over 90 deg :) One issue that can occur at Elsinore is when the first person down lands diagonally in the main landing area, then another person lands 45deg off from that in one direction, and another 45 deg off in the other direction. You now have two people landing orthogonally, both claiming to be following the first person down. The two problems being, 45 degs off a heading is NOT following the first person down, and landing diagonally across a landing area the size of the one at Elsinore is not setting a good direction for the load. Next time I'm out at the dropzone I'm going to try and work with the S&TA and/or DZO to get a "land parallel with the runway" rule implemented. That (if enforced, and I'll be sure to help, especially at the beginning) should make it even easier to tell which way you're going to land, get rid of the diagonal nonsense, and limit the potential ill-effects of using a completely set pattern at take-off to crosswind landings. Tandems would be, of course, exempt.

Unless you're an odd-shaped person, buy used. Jump it until you're a bad-ass, and then take whatever is free.

No, we absolutely did not. My analogy was neither a suggestion nor was it a hypothetical.

Here's a better analogy: Mexico has some criminals on their side of the border that are part of an ongoing fight in Texas. The US would like to do something about them, so we call up Calderòn and he says, "I'd love to help but my military is stretched thin as it is." So the US gives him a crap load of money for his agreement to help us, but he turns around and spends it on advanced weapons because he's in the middle of an arms build-up with Guatemala, but that do him no good to help us. So then we go to him and say, "Alright we've got some info-" and he cuts us off and says, "Look... our helicopters are in no shape to support the missions you want to send us on, we need new helicopters and parts for the ones we have." So the head of the CIA, DoD, and the President shake their heads, and sit down and say, "Let's make an arrangement to collaborate on matters like this, get each others buy in, and go make the strike ourselves. And we'll monitor the operations closely." The US makes an air strike on the criminal camp in Mexico destroying it, and before the plane even lands, a couple of the guys from another camp 100 miles away send photos of dead women and children and reports that the US just bombed an orphanage to the international press and all the local television stations, who readily broadcast the information without sending any of their own reporters to confirm it, because no one in their right mind would go out there. Rinse and repeat. Sure enough, some more people (though not "everyone" as some may claim) are fed up with the US now, because the strategy was incomplete. It took no measures to sell the idea to people while the enemy successfully sold hatred of it. For that reason, and because [hopefully?] things have changed for some countries in the past four years, the strategy should be re-evaluated. Good show, but let's try something else. In the meantime, we can all go back to telling ourselves the idea had no merits, because that fits better into our political ideology.

Kant felt that belief in God was a practical necessity for anyone who also believed in moral objectivity. Moral objectivity was something Kant believed in because it seemed like a groovy idea, and because so many people seemed to be trying to figure out what that objective was. But no matter how many times any late philosophers abstract the final conclusion from the leap of logic, it is still a leap of logic. But anyway... The construction of the last sentence in that quote doesn't make sense, but I'm guessing something was lost in the translation from whichever 18th century Prussian language Kant wrote it in. It sounds similar to Pascal's wager but with less of a focus on the "what happens when you don't believe and you're wrong" box. Which is nice, it's a little more cheery that way. When I think of Pascal's wager, I like to focus on the "what happens when you do believe and you're wrong" box because it's one that gets glossed over by religious folks somewhat often. It's this box that makes me wonder why more religious folks don't take a stronger stand against horrible actions that are performed in the name of God. Is it because from some depth within the rabbit hole it becomes difficult to see them as horrible?

I have white harnesses on both my rigs, and several white panels and embroidery on the containers, and it has worked out quite well. Although I did dial the white back a bit on my second one after learning some lessons. You can get away with white on the reserve container, and even some on the side walls if your landings are good, but don't have white on your main pin cover, or on the yoke. Those two places get dirty pretty fast no matter what you do.

It would appear as though people did a good job informing themselves on the matter though, because prop 6 failed in a landslide.

For any California folks who are interested here are the running totals. Currently there's only about 17% of the precincts in.

Slow motion video is already very helpful in training, particularly on exits and block moves to work out if there's any unwanted movement in the formation and where it's coming from. They're still cost prohibitive for general use, so they're mainly used by coaches to talk to students in freefall, under canopy, or in the wind tunnel. I wouldn't expect radios to ever find their way into formation skydiving. By the time you leave the plane and that 35 seconds starts, you better have already said all you have to say to your teammates. You better be ready to just do it.

Apparently my point wasn't clear because you've quoted the last third of a sentence and mangled the context in the process. I apologize for being a bit wordy in my post, however... I'm not suggesting that every girl who would otherwise get an abortion without telling her parents would be beaten for getting pregnant if made to tell them. I'm saying that you're putting pressure on someone in an already messed up situation that, unless her track record in decision making suddenly gets better, may make her do something even worse for herself, let alone the unborn child. If you want to quote one thing out of my last post, quote this:

Haven't we (Californians) voted this initiative down multiple times already? Setting aside, for a moment, that I don't think minors should ever have kids, and that what I think would be best for society in a case where someone is irresponsible enough to get pregnant at that age is termination, here's my problem with Prop 4... (and whatever it was called on the last ballot, and whatever it will be called on the next ballot.) Think about the situations where it will have to be enforced. Right off the bat, you've got an underage girl who's pregnant, so I'm guessing her home-life isn't warm and loving. She knows she doesn't want a kid and, for whatever reason, she doesn't think her parents are going to be supportive. So, at the very least in her head if not also in reality, she can either go to a shady place that may not be safe (but won't tell her parents) to have the procedure done, or she goes to a clinic, they notify her parents, and they beat the hell out of her for being a whore. If you don't want your daughter to get knocked up and have abortions behind your back, have her respect so she'll come to you in times of need without being forced to. If you're really just don't like abortion, pass an initiative to outlaw that and quit with this frog in the boiling water crap. This amendment is dumb.