champu

Actually! I think I've just solved the age old riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" You take a chicken, and you take an egg, and you place them both in a blender, set it to "high" and... er wait, no... that doesn't solve anything.

At some point, all the "chicken and the egg" nonsense has to stop. I'd prefer it stop before bombs get dropped and anti-ship cruise missiles get launched, but maybe that's just me. What you said earlier about this not being about today or even this decade is, in effect, writing the outcome of this predicament before it even became one. This has to be about today. This has to be about this decade. Much like you can't quit drinking, you can't quit fighting, but you can not kill/capture people and/or blow things up today. /edited: damn, someone already came up with "Waraholics Anonymous."

That's what I read too... As usual, the press can't even report a simple series of four events without ambiguity. Well if that's not clear as mud...

The belief of people who sing the song of the FSM is that intelligent design is a farce. Indirect? Perhaps. Illegitimate?

Is it possible to feel both the public display of Hussein immediately after his capture, and the video of the British sailors and Marines being captured to be in poor taste? Is it possible to be appalled both at what happened to prisoners at US detention facilities, and the use of these captives as propaganda? Defense, at any stage in the game, of reprehensible behavior because you align yourself more closely to the overall stance of a particular side is about as far from objectivity as you can get.

Oh absolutely, they practically call themselves "The Federation Intent on Convincing You Plastic Bags are Made of Laughter and Rainbows," I was just pointing out there were two sides to the story. I called it "crap, feel good legislation," because it addresses a problem in a popular manner, and not necessarily the best manner. I never said I didn't think there was a problem. I know what litter looks like, I've driven on freeways in Riverside County. I kinda like the idea that Ian mentioned is used in Ireland. Charge a quarter a bag (paper or plastic) and see what starts happening.

The grommets I use have a fairly small inner diameter, so when I'm not using the cable I push the cable back into the helmet and the strain-relief molding around the connector seats itself in the grommet and holds it there. This makes installing them a bit harder, but here's what you do. Dremel/drill a hole that is just barely big enough to get the jack on the end of the cable through. Run the cable through, and use a pull-up cord to stretch the grommet over the end of the cable. Finally, push the grommet down and seat it in the surface of the helmet. /edited to add photos

If by "we" you mean "people who do 270's in the pattern" then the absence of such people will be a big selling point for Eloy. yep, now i will feel ok to jump there. How do you feel about a canopy flying right at you and then turning at the last possible moment to swoop? 180s and 270s are both dangerous in a pattern that is "mostly 90s" for different reasons. A 270 setup makes it difficult to see a person below and behind you that you may collide with. However your approach will be easy to recognize and plan around for those roughly on level with you or above you. Your, how shall I say, "courting" of the landing area between opening and landing approach will be similar to the rest of people in the pattern. A 180 setup gives you a better view of people lower than you who are on their base leg and will be landing straight in at about the same time you are, making it easier for you to avoid encountering anyone during the terminal phase of your swoop. But (and this is a huge "but") this kind of approach is extremely difficult to recognize and plan around for those roughly on level with you or above you. It involves flying over the landing area during all or part of your downwind leg and extra turns (usually in the direction opposite the rest of your pattern) to make your downwind leg intersect the base leg directly over where you want you land. To make matters even worse, different canopy designs and wingloadings will have people initiating 90s and 180s from roughly the same height. This is asking for trouble because, and this should be obvious, the root cause of every canopy collision ever is people flying different directions at the same altitude. There seems to be a ridiculous misconception that there's a knob calibrated in both "degrees of turn" and "safety" and that you can turn it one way or the other to get what you want. "180s are okay and 270s aren't" isn't a sensible compromise, it's a misunderstanding of the problem. A rule should not segregate "180", it needs to be "90s" and "everything else."

Well, there are two sides to every story. Since both paper and plastic (HDPE) bags can be recycled in an economically viable manner, and pretty much any locale that has recycling centers will accept both, my vote would be plastic if you had to choose a disposable method. Obviously, reusable canvas bags or something similar would be ideal, but that's not what this ban addresses. This reeks of crap "feel-good" legislation.

Does it not strike you as strange that people wishing to reveal, "the biggest secret in the history of our world," would do so via a white-on-black website (yes, this is a disparaging term) and a dvd with cheesy text-effects, overly dramatic music, and crappy CG animation? Wouldn't a formal conference or a scientific journal be a more appropriate venue? Is it possible that the target audience is actually a bunch of idiots that are interested in hollywood-style cinematographic nonsense rather than educated critical thinkers eager to study and know more about the world around them? Can you imagine the response I'd get if I designed a new, more flexible, and efficient way of formatting data frames for satellite communications and I presented it to an audience with a fog machine running and lasers shooting all over the place?

I've never been much of a history buff, save for a few specific topics, but what you just said struck me as interesting, and it makes me want to examine some of these cycles more closely. It's funny, isn't it? It only takes a handful of people to go through a revolutionary period, but it takes hundreds of millions to stagnate.

This is obviously a conspiricy to hide truths! Since at least the early 1900s, when the phenomenom began in Britain, colored scarves have been traditional supporter wear for fans of association football teams across the world, even those in warmer climates. These scarves come in a wide variety of sizes and are made in a club's particular colors and may contain the club crest, pictures of renowned players, and various slogans relating to the history of the club and its rivalry with others. In the United Kingdom, the most popular and traditional type is a simple design with alternating bars of color in the individual team's traditional colors. In continental Europe many Ultras groups produce their own scarf designs. As part of pre-match build-ups, or during matches, fans will create a 'scarf wall' in which all supporters in a section of the stadium will stretch out their scarves above their heads with both hands, creating an impressive 'wall' of color, usually accompanied by the singing of a club anthem such as "You'll Never Walk Alone" at Liverpool F.C. & Celtic F.C. or "Grazie Roma" at A.S. Roma. This was initially solely a British phenomenon, but has since spread to Europe and South America. Scarf wearing is also a noted feature of support for Australian rules football clubs in the Australian Football League

It reminds me of a giant refill bottle of Windex I saw at the store labeled, "Institutional Size" which I read to mean, "If you need this much Windex in your life..." As far as organization at work, it really depends on what. On one hand, everything I create on my computer is very carefully filed with meaningful names, and I usually combine fragments of work into a more organized file structure before moving on to something else. On the other hand, I also carry a 3x5" notebook everywhere I go into which I pour random thoughts, notes from meetings, block diagrams, numbers and figures I want to remember, equations I've worked out, reference tables, etc. with absolutely no structure whatsoever. In fact looking at it right now, and this is funny because for the life of me I can't remember why anymore, the pages are getting filled both from the front cover forward and the back cover backwards as I go.

Essentially all the embedded devices out there with 1394 interfaces that I've seen are a little more than "microcontrollers." TI makes one such device to communicate with consumer electronic devices (see attached) that you'll find is actually a 50MHz ARM processor, though it would probably be your best bet. Similar devices exist by other semiconductor manufacturers for high-speed data transfers and such, but they might not be as friendly to work with in this application. Meanwhile, implementing a 9600bps LANC interface on a $0.50 part with some LEDs and a couple buttons is a weekend project.

Exactly. It has always been the one factor that has made me very pessimistic about SETI. Having two rare civilizations occur even remotely near each other such that communication could take place before one ended is mind-bogglingly unlikely. Which is, of course, not to say that it can't or even hasn't happened in the past (I smile a little bit and think about, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." ) but odds are we're on a pretty lonely rock.

Also... -lean over four other people and smack my cameras with your elbows to give each other hand shakes. -maneuver yourself to give someone a pin check and be sure to scrape your own pin covers and main handle against the side of the airplane/seatbelts/my face in the process. -when walking down the center aisle, be sure to stand as far away from the person in front of you as possible, butt/rig up in the air in a sprinter starting block posture so that only three people take up the entire length of the plane. -tap the pilot on the shoulder just before rotation and remind him there's a hop-n-pop on the load.

Here's a breakdown of pretty much all the LANC control words, and frame format. I would probably use a PIC12F509 microcontroller. It's small (8-pin DFN), plenty fast (4MHz), can be easily powered off the 5.8V LANC terminal, should have plenty of flash memory (1KWord), has 6 I/Os which is enough to give you your comm, a remote shutter release, a couple status LEDs, and a start/stop button. The PIC instruction set isn't too bad to work with, but if you're squeemish you can always get a model with some more memory to give you wiggle room and use a C compiler. Also, I'm not sure if you'd need any kind of additional line driver/receiver as I don't know LANC all that well, you'd have to look into it. Best of luck!

Unfortunately, if they had the same intellegence as man and evolved a few hundred thousand year ago, they'd have probably destroyed themselves by now.

Hey, that was my high school... Small world. I agree. I think the word, "Die!" when exclaimed while standing over someone with a gun would be pretty hard to top, but you know how high school kids love their melodrama.

Well... not all wavelengths. The only problem I have with the conclusions of that study is that, assuming you pack in the shade, the vast majority of a canopy's exposure to sunlight is accompanied by air cooling as it flies. While you can't outrun UV and the negative effects it has on Nylon in and of itself, the heat build-up due to exposure takes a greater toll if the canopy is laying out than if it is in actual use. In short, the study provides a meaningful comparison of the relative strengths of the different color fabrics after exposure to sunlight, but converting a lifespan measured in such a manner to an absolute number of jumps is probably not as straight-forward of an exercise as it has been made out to be.

Not compared to the costs of some of the systems out there - also remember i come from the land of the $40 lift tickets and $300 annual BPA membership !!!! Anyway how can you mention costs when jumping a Mirage system Just joking !!!! Hey... I like my Mirage. (and I'm not even being paid to say that) I was just pulling your leg because when I think of a camera set up meant to "keep the costs down" I picture a freefly helmet with a simple add-on metal top or side mount bracket and maybe a sony HC2X/3X/4X series camcorder off of eBay. The HC5 looks to be one of the nicest freefall cameras out there, and 2k Composites make some of the best helmets I've seen. (I jump an FF2 myself) As with most things you can always spend more if you want to, but the set-up you describe makes for a pretty nice baseline.

Sorry, but that's a funny statement. That said, I'm flying rather than filming 4-way this year, so right this minute I'm not in the market for anything, but I intend to buy the HC5 over the HC7 towards the end of the year because I only want to use it for freefall. /edit to add: Are you going to run into any PAL/NTSC issues bringing a camera back to Europe with you?

Also, if you'll note in the video rolling behind them in the report, United Flight 175 actually crashed into WTC-2 five times! And the towers collapsed twice! Holy shit! How the fuck is anyone going to explain that?!?

Being snivelly doesn't necessarily mean opening softly. Soft openings come from graceful and symmetrical inflation of the cells whether your canopy just sniveled for one second or for three. Snivelling only slows you down so much, after that you're wasting altitude. I've found rolling stuff and tucking things is a good way to make your canopy snivel longer, but controlling your slider, keeping your packjob symmetrical, making sure your lines are in trim, and staying even in your harness during deployment will make your canopy inflate symmetrically.

Not jumping at Eloy will guarantee that you do not get involved in a canopy collision... at Eloy. Flying a safe pattern in the presense of fairly heavy traffic is something you have to figure out if you want to jump at large multi-otter dropzones. Flying a safe pattern to avoid the one other canopy in the area at the time you're landing is something you have to figure out if you want to jump at any dropzone.