champu

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Everything posted by champu

  1. champu
    Guy goes to the doctor and says, "Doc, ya gotta help me." Doc asks, "What's the matter?" Guy says, "Every morning... I... Well... I can't bring myself to get out of bed until I listen to 'What's New Pussycat?'" Doc says, "Ah, yes... Sounds like a case of Tom Jones Syndrome." Guy asks, "Is it common?" Doc says, "It's not unusual."
  2. champu
    And we're back to post #5 where we started...
  3. champu
    I acutally did look it up before I said anything... It's more likely than not that they're replacing Sid Bobb and what they meant was !raceOf("Patty Sullivan"). It's still a fine line, though, and I feel like you're brushing it off as "eh, that's show business."
  4. champu
    It would appear there are deeper differences in our personalities than I had imagined. Pastimes aside, I agree with your general premise that casting for parts can result in decision making about applicants based on what would normally be considered "protected classes," but this does not issue carte blanche. Once you've decided the roles, casting is casting, but if you decided the roles with a rather arbitrary racial bias (on camera positions for newsrooms, show hosts), all you've done is thinly abstract the discrimination. You can't favor an applicant for an office job because they are white, and that naturally extends to exclude favoring them because, "they would perform best on an all-white team." That's not fooling anybody.
  5. champu
    I think there's a bit of a difference between saying, "We need a black guy to play the part of a black character in a movie." and saying, "We need a host for a children's show who isn't white."
  6. champu
    Was that you first 18 year relationship?
  7. champu
    1) Nobody makes money by putting it into a savings account. 2) Losing money over 30 years in an IRA can be done, but it would take active, foolish management of the account to pull off.
  8. champu
    Black helicopters don't make noise buddy, but you might want to check your brake lines every so often when I rent a car the side view mirrors are pointed up into the sky and inward directly behind the car which tells me that the people who had the car before me were being chased by black helicopters so I pull out a socket set and a box cutter and I remove all the interior door panels and cut open the upholstery in the seats to find whatever they were being chased to recover but the rental car people get to it first which is why they always walk around the car when you bring it back and why the cars are always wet when you pick them up and they make sure that you have to bring the car back full of fuel so that you pull into a gas station and they can watch where you hide things on the cameras that all gas stations have they are all in on it
  9. champu
    The republican efforts to keep people in demographics that don't vote for them from voting sucks. It's a great example of raising a banner of something like "voter fraud" which nobody likes, and then doing a bunch of underhanded shit that isn't really about voter fraud. Not to mention, voter fraud in the methods the republicans have been "cracking down on" is not nearly as big a problem as they make it out to be. /edited: oops, missed a conjunction...
  10. champu
    This is the problem with the information age. Chaff.
  11. champu
    Oh, how I love speakers corner...
  12. champu
    It's not legal to abort a six month old baby. Nobody's "9 months old" at the time of birth. Emotional misuse of words is silly when people freak out about someone else having a black rifle and it's silly when people freak out about someone, somewhere having an abortion. And men talking about how evil abortion is reminds me of people who have no interest in ever owning a rifle saying they can't imagine a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds being used for anything other than mass murder.
  13. champu
    Irrelevant. So when you refer to the "rich" in the context of complaining, suggesting policy, or, as I'll refer to posts like the OP in this thread, disapproving gesticulation, we shouldn't presume to have any idea who the hell you're talking about, got it.
  14. champu
    When you have to pretend to think that the only common usage of the word 'sick' in English is as a medical term in order to support your point, you may want to consider the wisdom of continuing with that point. In fact, given the author of the comments in question, one could pretty safely rule out all medical, legal, and/or technical definitions of any words used. Going further... if you ever find yourself taken aback by something anyone writes in Speakers corner, just replace the adjectives they used with "bad" or the noun with "bad things", "bad people", or "bad places" and you'll better understand the viewpoint you're arguing with.
  15. champu
    Again, with the theme of creative language use, cough, to sell people things or sell them against things, everything is "spending." See: "Tax expenditures."
  16. champu
    ...or just don't spend it... I think we're largely on the same page, but for me, the buck stops with the politician who can't see past his or her next reelection. It's really the heart of why I don't like the, rather dismissive, "military-industrial complex" term. Industry and the military can get together and do exactly squat, productive or otherwise. And so, when you implement something like sequester you have no shortage of programs/capabilities that the military wants and congresspeople see as a good taxpayer investment, but they go unfunded because some short-sighted assholes aren't creative enough to give people who build tanks another reason to vote for them, and whine louder about it on the floor.
  17. champu
    .2%... 1%... 7%... What certainly is experiencing solid growth is the size of the group of people you'll call "rich" at any given moment.
  18. champu
    *sigh* Typical. Wha's so "sick" about Turtle's post? What assumption did he make? I missed it. A piece of what appears to be one of the two planes flown into towers is wedged in an 18 inch gap between two buildings. One of the two buildings is a muslim community center. The thread title implies, occam's razor be damned, that muslims had kept the part there as a trophy.
  19. champu
    I was unaware that when two satellites collided all their pieces stayed clumped together. It depends on what you mean by "clumped together." And depending on what orbit your two objects started in, the debris may scatter into a collection of orbits that does look an awful lot like a clump. Satellites will encounter problems on orbit. It's not a friendly place for electronics. Some orbits are worse than others. When you design your system you have to pay very close attention to all those states you don't normally care about or that you didn't think had a logical path into them, and make sure you have logical (and in some cases autonomous) paths out of them. Some designers are still learning the lesson the hard way (see Phobos Grunt) but I'd compare the challenge to trying to make a consumer device that's impossible to brick. Non-trivial, certainly.
  20. champu
    Spacecraft, manned or not, hitting each other or debris is not good because spacecraft and astronauts aren't cheap, and because it compounds the problem. Her point was that a lot of the discussion in this thread is wonky. You need to understand orbits, orbital dynamics, launch vehicle staging, etc. to understand the problem, and to understand the implications for each of the various popular orbital regimes.
  21. champu
    Comedy third option... Use this to get Iran and Al Qaeda fighting each other, then just leave.
  22. champu
    You can do a search for "Mir Deorbit" or "Columbia Disaster" or "Hayabusa Reentry" to get an idea of what a massive spacecraft doing an uncontrolled reentry looks like. ISS is a few times more massive than Mir was.
  23. champu
    I appreciate what you're trying to do, but your approach to this is flawed. Satellites (both useful ones and junk) are not spread out all over the place going every which way, they are in orbits. Two objects in stable orbits with different elements but that overlap in altitude will eventually cross paths. In most cases, "big space" theory prevails because for most orbital planes, there's only one or a few things in that plane, and so the chances of the two objects being phased correctly when their paths cross is very low... However... A sizable percentage (probably around 10%) of those 29,000 objects you're talking about are in just a couple of orbital planes. Those planes correspond to the Chinese ASAT test in 2007 and the Iridium-Kosmos conjunction in 2009. So it's less like wandering around Wyoming and more like running intersections without stopping because, "eh, the streets aren't that busy" ...except that there are two streets that are actually quite busy.
  24. champu
    I think you misunderstood the tone/implication of my comment.
  25. champu
    He said passing laws won't make criminals (people who break or have broken laws) more likely to obey them. He didn't say nothing will make people obey passed laws. So... induce yourself up something else. Just apply some recursion void stupid_argument() stupid_argument();