champu

Not every oil producing country is blowing through their reserves as quickly as we are. When the US runs out of oil, Americans aren't going to just stop using fossil fuels. With a response like that I'm really curious as to what you think I meant by that and what you assume my stance on the matter is...

I tried to make a similar point earlier this year... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4617733;#4617733 With the limited quantities, geopolitical implications, and large number of uses of fossil fuels in the economy not just as fuels, why are effects on climate of the CO2 that burning them releases the focus of so much debate? It's past time to move on to other arguments in favor of reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Really dude, "the left?" Your problem here isn't "the left." I've been arguing both sides of this because I think most people in this thread are being at least a little absurd. Some quite intentionally. One major problem in a lot of your "ID should be no issue..." examples is you're forgetting there's a lot of inertia in the system. Just because someone doesn't have ID doesn't mean they never had ID. I've been registered to vote, employed, housed, and have had bank accounts in California for over a decade. In the last decade I've renewed my driver's license twice (online, mind you) and I've used ID for those above things one time (I bought a house, which is pretty easy to not do.) I'm not someone who jumps through hoops to use ID as infrequently as possible (in fact, as I wrote earlier I use it all the time) and I think the people trying to convince you that theoretically you too could get by without ID are going about the argument all wrong, but it really shouldn't be that confounding that some people don't have ID. While it is your story, as you say, it is 22 years old, and it took place in Miami in the 80s. That's not exactly a heavy ink and paper kind of environment.

Personality, flying skills, attention to safety, and willingness to follow general experience recommendations are (in my observation) not really as separable as you suggest. You generally get the whole package for better or for worse. It's why you have to give out free pizza and beer at safety day. The people who don't really need to be there show up anyway.

A person with 200 jumps and who is doing his or her first camera jump should keep the jump simple. There's no reason to introduce something new on a type of jump you aren't very comfortable with. And at 200 jumps I think a three way with at least one of the other people having several hundred jumps or more fits the bill. The size here is a consideration for their sake. A person with 150 camera jumps and 200 jumps total has probably stunted the development of their flying skills. As I said before, you can start out thinking it's a flight data recorder, but once you start watching your video it gets in your head and it gets in the way. Plus if they started jumping a camera with 50 jumps they no doubt think they're a boss at it having done it a whopping 150 times, and chances are good they'll do something stupid. The size here is a consideration for my sake.

I'd rather jump with the person who is doing their first camera jump and I wouldn't go on more than a 3-way jump with either of them.

The second amendment doesn't say anything about shooting. More importantly though, the problem of people who are ineligible to own a firearm legally being able to purchase firearms doesn't stack up well against the problem of people who are ineligible to vote (whether it's because they aren't citizens or because they already voted) being able to vote. This is true both in terms of quantity of instances and in terms of how well it is actually curbed by having to furnish ID. As I said about 100 posts ago in this thread, I think requiring ID to vote in order to stop voter fraud can be better compared to banning magazines that hold over ten rounds (or a whole host of other firearms laws out there) in order to stop gun violence. People just end up using their imagination rather than any sort of real-world data to agree with and argue on behalf of something that was not conceived in good faith

Meh... not the best of your arguments in this thread. In your example the fraudulent vote removes 1/1,000,000th of one million peoples' votes, not just yours. The overall damage from a single instance of each is on par. I know people like to think of their vote as a personal unique snowflake or whatever, but it really just is about the amount of accumulation. That still makes the imbalance between people who would be denied vs. people who would be stopped from committing fraud heavily favor not enacting voter ID requirements though. More generally I also prefer to error on the side of government inaction rather than government action when it comes to problem solving. A given quantity of damage done by the government because they did a crap job at trying to fix a problem is fundamentally worse than that same amount of damage allowed by the government because they did nothing.

That lasts right up until the point where you watch your first video and are disappointed with it. You really can't "unsee" your footage and continue to ignore it. And the problem with comparing to things like skiing or riding sleds is how little experience you get out of one or a few jumps. Think about how much active, mentally-engaged, reflex-building time you get out of a weekend of skiing vs snowmobiling vs skydiving. You wouldn't stop halfway down your first ski run ever and say, "Woo, alright I've got a few minutes of that under my belt, time for a camera!"

You would place them in a hexagonal close-packed arrangement and, since you have seven, you end up with nice symmetry. You have to overlap them though or else you have pockets slightly further away. How much overlap is a bit less trivial... http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDcQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhandle.dtic.mil%2F100.2%2FADA463920&ei=yEs8VMe0KI2qyATy9oDoCw&usg=AFQjCNGcyGLRFyxskeTQA2uDX8il-oJ0Sw&bvm=bv.77161500,d.aWw&cad=rja (see equation 23) If you set A=0 (this is the area that is triple-covered) and solve for d/r (I couldn't be bothered, but from the plot it looks like about 1.75), this tells you how far apart to locate them given the worst-case allowed distance to any one. /edit: oops didn't actually answer the question... if r = 10 mi and you space them 17.5 miles apart, that means each overlap is ~16.35 sq miles. there are a total of 12 overlapping regions resulting in about 200 "wasted" square miles. So 7 * Pi * 10^2 - 200 = ~2000 sq mi you can theoretically cover with 7 locations

To be fair, by the way, there's a bit of an elephant-repellent conundrum there. The number of fraudulent/invalid votes that are successfully cast are pretty hard to estimate without making some assumptions that are moot. ONCE AGAIN, I'M NOT ADVOCATING FOR VOTER ID REQUIREMENTS Yes. .

I agree too. If an officer gives you a ticket on an open freeway, and has the matching lidar recording to go with it, it's a pretty tough argument. A few years back I did give someone a hand writing a "trial by declaration" letter that was successful in getting a speeding ticket dismissed (this may just be a California thing.) In that case the ticket was for 53 in a 35 on a surface street. The conversation with the officer had gone something like this... Officer: "I clocked you at 53." Friend: "I wasn't going 53, can I see the reading?" Officer: "Well I didn't clock you but you were passing the car I did clock, so I estimated your speed to be 53 mph, and I'm writing you a ticket." Friend: "Okay, could you please write what you just told me on the ticket?" And he did, and that was a pretty easy argument to win. It also helped that the car in question was a 4-banger accelerating up a hill from being stopped at a stoplight and couldn't have hit 53 mph by the point the officer puller her over if she had been trying.

Yeah but seriously, that entire list of stuff, all of it qualifying as 'recent' and (supposedly) not living under a totalitarian 'papers please' regime? I'm sticking with sketchy as hell. My problem with his list of stuff was that it presented the argument "try going a few weeks" and then included things like buying cars, jumping at a new dropzone, getting a library card, getting new jobs, buying houses, getting collage transcripts. and selling at a pawn shop. Anyone doing all of those things is not doing any of those things with a frequency of a few weeks. Everyone has different experiences. Some people almost never need ID and some people spend a large chunk of their waking life with photo ID hanging around their neck. Here's an idea if people really think double voting is a problem... We don't have votes very often... Get some really strong dye that's also reactive to UV and just smear it into people's forehead after they vote. Check everyone with a black light on the way in. Not-established-as-a-problem solved! For everyone else that complains about showing something as an established problem before doing something about it, please feel free to write any and all representatives you may have about state and local bans on magazines that hold over 10 rounds.

Re: Chip and pin, I fully agree with you, I'm getting really sick of replacement credit cards. Re: the rest of the post, this is usually where I do a search and link to a few posts over the last year or so where I've explained that voter ID requirements are a crap idea with ulterior motives, but I'm on my phone and dont really care enough. I was keying off of your "you must look like a sketchy dude, I only get carded at the airport comment." Plenty of people use ID on a regular enough basis to not appreciate that some people don't, and telling them it's because they're weird isn't helping.

I know, I just thought the "If they don't have ID how can they complete their weekly house purchase?" and "I've never been carded in my life cause I make all my purchases in bitcoin" posts were a little much.

I get carded when using a credit card at about the same rate I get carded when buying alcohol, which is about 50%. It's pretty common around here. I've never been randomly asked for ID by police. I've never been carded buying spray paint. I've been carded each of the few times I've purchased Claritin-D (because it contains psuedophedrine.) I've been carded for every flight, rental car, and hotel I can remember. It's ridiculous both to assume everyone else needs ID constantly because you do and to assume ID is barely necessary because you are rarely or never asked for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoHXsuBEAts&t=42m54s

http://www.amazon.com/900-Count-Earth-Rated®-Lavender-Scented-Refill/dp/B008BGRXXM/ref=zg_bs_3052413011_12 They're "Earth Rated" (! ... ? .... ? but still !, right?)

Why would police riot over an officer being shot and killed when the whole department can drop everything else and go on a manhunt for the person they think did it and railroad the sumbitch if necessary? ...maybe shoot up some random peoples' vehicles while they're at it "because pickup truck."

500? P'shaw... We used to DREAM of 500 new laws a year. The Assembly goes through 3000 and the Senete goes through 1500 easy. Seriously, go to gov.ca.gov, click on "newsroom" and look at the legislative updates to see what comes out of the California legislature.

A few semi-related thoughts on the matter... If you leave your country to join and fight for an organization that your country has declared to be an enemy, that was the crime. So while you can presume innocence until it's established that that happened, I don't think the British government owes them a trial where they have to prove anything more specific than that. Also, why would you trust these people when they say they've defected a second time? If they claim they're afraid to come back to the western world because of the punishment they'd face, I say good. If they ditch the fight in Syria and head to Pakistan to settle down with extended family and lay low because they honestly feel they made a mistake and that's the only option they left themselves, even better. This is what happens when you burn bridges. Joining a jihadist group in the middle east is not a sabbatical that you can quit early, come back from, and get a rap on your shoulder and a, "Told you so" from your mates.

There are certainly one or two drawbacks I can think of to using a minigun for home defense, but I think they are mitigated pretty well in the hypothetical that was proposed.

My biggest problem with paper bags is that the handles were apparently designed under the assumption that only one bag would be carried per hand at a time. If you pick up two bags that are fairly full with one hand the load paths* get all screwed up and you'll rip the handles off of one or both of the bags, even if there's not a lot of weight in them. * the handles are glued on in such a way that they're only any good in sheer, they suck with tension or peel forces applied.

You mean when I tell the butcher to throw a pork shoulder, a whole raw chicken, and three pounds of ground beef directly into my canvas bag that's wrong? Should I not do that?

Yeah, I think people have shown a distinct lack of imagination in this scenario when they're picturing the gun. If you know there is a person who is going to be coming through a door, and you know this person is a bad guy, and you know when they are coming through (which is asking a lot) then just set an M134* on a swivel tripod aimed at the door as far back as you can with your family behind you. Of course at that point, you could just "remove" the door ahead of time and leave. * I would go with an M61 but technically that's a "cannon" and not a "gun" and I didn't know if that was allowed.