champu

Rockstar eh? ...rubs chin...

How about C-802 ASCMs? Look, it's really not important how advanced the armaments of each side are. Precision weaponry just makes it easier to strike military and only military targets, you still have to want to not kill civilians, and care if you do. Attack helicopters, laser guided bombs, Katyusha rockets, and PBIEDs are all perfectly capable of killing military or civilian targets just the same.

If it works, 100 bucks. if it doesn't, a case of beer.

The buildings were designed to survive a run in with the largest commercial airliner around at the time (the 707 iirc) but only in an accidental scenario where presumably the plane would be near the end of it's journey (low fuel) and lost in fog/clouds (low airspeed.)

RW -> 4.0 / 3.2 / 1.8 FF -> 5.0 / 3.2 / 1.8 WS -> 5.0 / 4.0 / 2.5 /eta: The only real change I ever make to these is to bump the first warning up by an extra 500ft if it's more than a 4-way or so.

Wow, do these analysts actually get paid for coming up with that?

Yeah, it depends quite a bit on both the cameras and both the lenses. As indicated by the 'x' in '0.5x' or '0.43x' it's a multiplication factor. For example... I have a couple sony pc-105s, their spec focal length is meaningless for comparison to still cameras because their image sensors are so small. But, with a little googling I've found they have a "35mm equivalent focal length" of about 50mm when zoomed all the way wide. On one I have a stealth 0.5x and the other a diamond 0.3x yielding equivalent focal lengths of about 25mm and 15mm respectively. My still camera is a RebelXT which has a sensor that is, although larger than the image sensors on the video cameras, still smaller than 35mm. Again, a quick lookup tells me it has a focal length adjustment factor of 1.6x. Combined with a 15mm lens, that yields an equivalent focal length of 24mm. Sure enough, my still camera has a little bit wider field of view than my pc105 with a 0.5x lens, and a pretty significantly narrower field of view than the one with the 0.3x lens. /edited to add: the 400D/Rebel XTi will have the same size image sensor as the 350D/Rebel XT (22.2 x 14.8 mm) and will thus incur the same 1.6x adjustment factor.

That, or one hell of a morose walk to the end of the driveway to drop flat daddy off in the recycle bin. You thought your chores were bad as a kid.

That brings up an interesting hijack. Who would actually ever maintain a "bad porn" folder? Do they actually think they're fooling the person that finds it? If you really thought it was "bad" wouldn't you just delete it? Following the philosophy that the truth sets you free, I think a more appropriate folder name would be "/home/username/porn/I'm really not proud of this/"

...they uh... ...they might not have to search too hard...

We will force them to travel the vast oceans alone, on small maniacal wind-powered trimarans.

How exactly does one "unearth" something on Pluto?

They have a terrible understanding of how their state school system works? This is true, but the offer for my current job actually included a requirement that I continue going to school to get my masters. I certainly don't think I'm a "better person" because I have a degree, but I can assure you I'm better off. I do, however, share your frustration when dealing with people that try and ride the name of the university they went to as far as possible, even though the particular program they went through was nothing special at that school. Ain't it grand when an engineer's best job security is in the form of ITAR regulations?

How about, "name two simple machines you use on a daily basis and explain how they work." There are plenty of things I know as an engineer that affect people's lives each and every day, and most would benefit from learning more about. There are also plenty of things I know as an engineer that I don't expect many people to know, nor would it upset me to learn that most people don't care*. There are, obviously, volumes of knowledge out there in other fields as well. It's my opinion people in those fields should make the same distinction I have before they write polls with the intent of showing, "just how ignorant" the average person is. *speaking of Mercury

Happy uh... lamp... speakers... keyboard...

ah... what fun... To get the two parts of a 16-bit integer and force write it as either "big-endian" or "little-endian" you can isolate the 8msbs as described above (right bit-shift by 8) and the 8lsbs by masking the input appropriately. I forget what the bit-wise logical AND operator is in visual basic, but in C... foo = bar & 255; Be sure and pay attention to the most signifigant bit too, whether you're using signed integers or unsigned integers on your target hardware makes a big difference as to its meaning. /edited to add: That'll prolly work. I'm hesitant cause my immediate thought when I see that is "floating point errors", but I may just be paranoid.

Yes well... Fuck you very much.

Quiet kiddo. You're not old enough for disagreeableness to be an indicator of smarts. I think you're probably right.

Ah, a fellow Mythbusters fan I'm guessing...

They do the later today, short of actually killing the person of course. IANAL, but my understanding is whether it's considered entrapment is all in the details. For example if an undercover cop walks up to a guy he knows wants someone dead and says, "I'll kill so-and-so for you if you pay me $1000, what'dya say?" and he says, "yes." they can't arrest him for that or it's entrapment. On the other hand if they go to the same guy and say, "I understand you have a problem you need taken care of; I might be able to help you with that." and the guy says, "yeah I'll give you $1000 to kill so-and-so." then they can arrest him and it's not entrapment.

After the 9/11 attacks, reporters flocked as close as possible to the epicenter to get photos and (I don't specifically recall but certainly don't doubt) claim that lower Manhattan lay in ruins. That was hyperbolic then and this is hyperbolic now. Satellite imagery is somewhere on the spectrum between photos from ground zero and simply reading something dry like "out of foo buildings or bar area, baz% are severely damaged and qux% are completely destroyed." I guess we can only arrive... ...again... ...at the conclusion that we should take all news sources, photographic or otherwise, with a grain of salt as they will always have their biases. Photoshopping extra smoke into an image may not "reveal a bias" so much as it reveals the laziness of the photographer who didn't want to get off his butt and move to another location so he can get a photo where the smoke filled more of his frame.

The damage dealt to Lebanon by IDF artillery and airstrikes has been extensive, orders of magnitude over what the short/medium range rockets have done to northern Israel. I was commenting on this journalist's caption as it related to the photograph. When I go out on a freefly jump to shoot stills, I use the action program on my camera. I like taking a few shots of every one thing I want a photo of. The people I often jump with, myself included, aren't that good at freeflying so I usually end up getting a good shot that looks like a really solid point surrounded by a shot or two on either side that would indicate it was a bit of a combat dock. Obviously I'm not going to parade around the combat images. I'm going to focus on the one that looked really good. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that as that's what photos are for, to capture a moment in time. However, if I write a caption to go with this cherry picked photo that says, "So and so banging out points on a training jump" well then I'm still full of shit, even if the photo is legitimate. Battlefield photographers are there to get photos that make their point. If they didn't feel strongly about their subject material, why in hell would they go into harms way to photograph it? They may take a hundred or a thousand photos of a neighborhood that was struck by a bomb and pick the one that makes it look as much like a complete hell-hole as possible. That's understandable. But if, under that cherry-picked photo, the caption reads, "This neighborhood lies completely in ruins from relentless airstrikes" well then they're still full of shit, even if the photo is legitimate.

Imagine the "orchestration" needed for this shot of Beirut! It's panoramic by the way. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/panorama/2006/07/20/PA2006072001249.html I see the viewpoint of someone standing on what used to be a building until it was struck directly by a bomb. The five or so surrounding buildings were likely pummeled with debris and have sustained quite a bit of damage, but appear to be structurally in tact. Debris from this explosion has landed in the streets up to a couple blocks away. I don't really see how this amounts to, "rubble is all that remains of much of Beirut's southern suburbs." Credit goes to the photographer, though, for figuring out that if you stand exactly at ground zero and look all around you, you'll get the worst-case perspective of the damage. Also keep in mind, Hezbollah was in control of this area, and allowed reporters only into this one neighborhood to take photographs. I wonder how this particular neighborhood was selected.

Excessive intellegence can lead to neurosis/misanthropy perhaps? Too much of a good thing?

I'm also a fan of the "wind in the face feeling" but when doing 4-way I try and borrow a full face helmet because I don't like the "shins in my face feeling"