champu

Strictly speaking, it's the other way around. My "caused by the creation of" language was pretty terrible, sorry about that.

I've used soft links like this for quite a while (several hundred jumps) and haven't noticed any unusual wear on the webbing. The movement is largely confined to the shackle/ring interface.

You're on the right track for most of your posts, but if you're going to go into that much detail, you can't expect to get away with statements like the above. Drag is not the same thing as friction and drag is the dominant resistive force given the airspeeds and object shapes we're talking about. Drag is caused by the creation of high pressure and low pressure zones around a body as it passes through a medium. Any vessel filled with fluid/objects of varying density can act as a g-meter so whether your stomach or bladder dominates the sensations in your abdomen depends on how recently you've eaten and how dehydrated you are. But neither is as sensitive to fluid movement as your cochlea, that's its whole purpose.

Bottom of my wing has an extension that wraps tight around the leg strap above the friction buckles. We really tried to minimize the blow hole as you note. I have the brass releases - same as what you have on your RSL. I use the bronze fixed-bail snap shackles as well, but I attach them using an old pair of PdF soft links routed through the type-8 / type-12 above the friction adapter (see attached.) Keeps the wings nice and snug, no sewing, and it's easily removable.

Which brings us to the next point, don't pick a career based solely on where it falls on that list. It's not a good idea to get good at something you don't enjoy.

Maybe spelling it the same way every time gets boaring. How boorish. I assumed he meant Democrates, the philosopher.

Oh, okay. Everyone has a right to their religious symbols, and if you display certain "religious symbols" while running for an elected office then everyone else has the right to assume the worst about what you espouse, and hopefully not elect you. If you get elected anyway, that's still okay until you do something illegal or unconstitutional whether it has anything to do with your religion or not. "Religious freedom" seems to be the euphemism de jour for imposing beliefs on others. If you have a religious belief and you are prevented from enacting a law that would codify that belief and force the general populace to act according to that belief, that is not an infringement of your "religious freedom." It is a classic example of the old adage that your right to swing your fist stops where my nose starts. It works in as many directions as there are religions of course, but with one caveat: you don't get to automatically combine lack of support for any religion with active support for atheism. That is to say, religious folks are right to scream if a science class teaches that there is no god, and atheists are right to scream if religious folks try to force science classes to teach conjecture that's scientifically unsupportable, but if you keep both of those things out of science class (as we should) then everyone needs to shut the hell up. Next time anyone here is worried about their "religious freedom" being trampled, ask yourself honestly if the opposition is truly trying to promote some other religion over yours, or if the opposition is trying to mute the government on the issue altogether.

This one I found interesting. There's been plenty done what I'll boldly call "incorrectly" in the fight of terrorism over the last few decades, but using races, ethnicities, or social ideologies as a scapegoat for problems and identifying terrorists (not "brown people" but rather terrorists) as enemies are not two concepts you can successfully link merely with the creative use of forward slashes and commas.

Carrier groups have been in and out of the gulf several times uneventfully since Iran made the threat as CVN-74 left in January. Do you know something I don't? ...An Israeli attack on Iran could occur in the crucial weeks leading up to the US presidential election this fall, according to a report from an Israeli newspaper. The paper, Maariv, a daily Hebrew language newspaper based in Tel Aviv, quotes anonymous officials who said that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has assured the United States that it would hold off on an attack on Iran until at least the fall. Netanyahu, however, would not promise US officials he would hold off on a strike until after the November elections, the article reports. Due to weather that would complicate air strikes in Iran, this gives Israel a small window of time to make an attack, and could result in such a bombing campaign occuring right before the elections... Well, I guess that answers my question. The people out there in media land, big and small, have certainly taken a liking to the role of amateur analyst regarding political and kinetic affairs in the Middle East and Northern Africa these days. I find it amusing how much contempt some profess to have for saber rattling on the part of nations while at the same time spewing all sorts about how close one side is to doing this or that, and how ruinous it will be for so and so, and going on and on with their brinkmanship nonsense.

This reminds me of an Onion headline about how there are already no electable candidates for 2036 thanks to facebook.

"Just fine" is an interesting metric to use here. Not one I'd use, but then I suppose I should leave it up to the internet trolling experts. In the meantime, see attached. Then tell me the car is driving at a reasonable speed.

It's actually not. JPSS is what is left of what was at one point going to be an all-in-one. It's a long story. Regarding polar vs GEO, there's the usual trade offs of persistence, revisit time, path losses, and latency but some of the missions of NPP/JPSS (and the EOS satellites before them, and some ESA missions currently in polar orbits) make use of the unique geometry into the atmosphere available in LEO and would not be possible to accomplish from GEO. Also, aside from model data for tornados, hurricanes, dust storms and other wind related weather phenomenon, LEO observations play a major part in UV indexes and wildfire mapping.

You don't improve your tax liability by way of how you prepare your return at the end of the year (at least not leagally). By the time you're filing it's all water under the bridge. If you give all your information to two accountants and they come up with different numbers then at least one of them is simply wrong. What you do with your money during the year, however, can have a large impact on your tax liability. There are simple measures that you'd rightly call someone a fool for not taking advantage of all the way to legal gray areas that many choose not to venture into. Given two people with very-high incomes paying disparate tax rates it's wrong to automatically conclude that one, "needs a better accountant." My accountant helps prepare in advance by employing tax strategies that defer tax liabilities. Apparently you missed the intent of the reference to HR Block as they simply prepare taxes (for the most part. Although they do have a Premier Service for coprporations). My point is that the disparity between Romney's rate and Obama's might be due to tax planning. Ah, it would have been more clear if you had originally said, "H&R Block isn't the best at complex tax planning." In any event I think we're on the same page regarding that issue. An additional point I was trying to make was that there are straight-forward tax planning measures to be able to do things like own a home, save for retirement/kids education/medical expenses, or pass money on to your kids that it's silly not to take advantage of, and these are the sorts of things that I don't think anyone faults others for doing. There are also "black-hat" tax planning things that technically fall under the category of "taking advantage of every possible way to lower your tax liability" that people have more of a problem with.

You don't improve your tax liability by way of how you prepare your return at the end of the year (at least not leagally). By the time you're filing it's all water under the bridge. If you give all your information to two accountants and they come up with different numbers then at least one of them is simply wrong. What you do with your money during the year, however, can have a large impact on your tax liability. There are simple measures that you'd rightly call someone a fool for not taking advantage of all the way to legal gray areas that many choose not to venture into. Given two people with very-high incomes paying disparate tax rates it's wrong to automatically conclude that one, "needs a better accountant."

Carrier groups have been in and out of the gulf several times uneventfully since Iran made the threat as CVN-74 left in January. Do you know something I don't?

I don't think Nancy Reagan has done anything aside from "be a first lady to a republican governor and president" such that having Jane Fonda portray her would be especially offensive. So getting worked up beyond Fonda appearing as any non-fictional character is pretty silly.

Part of that is true and part of it isn't. The military has vilified her, but she wasn't against the US, she was against the war and the people in power who perpetuated it. The problem comes, as it always does, when people can't separate the two. The issue I have with Fonda is that she let what I'm sure started as a stance against war in general and our country's involvement in it turn into a distrust of anything "our side" said and an accepting of what the opponents said. Being "against the war" stops short of actively feeding the opponent's propaganda machine, and she crossed the line on a number of occasions. I don't go so far as to call her a traitor or to buy into the exaggerated stories about her, but I think service members past and present are right to have contempt for her considering some of the things she's said about them in a general way. You hear the statement all the time these days that you can be against the war and still support the troops, and that's absolutely true. But guess what, you can think Vietnam was a bad idea and that we shouldn't have gotten involved and still think Jane Fonda was a useful idiot to the NVA and is a thoughtless and self-centered person. I think it's the people that defend her that have a hard time separating things. I see the same thing in the Af/Pak war when the Taliban claims that there were mostly women and children killed in every airstrike that occurs and people that are "just against war" eat it up. And when our government says, "there's actually been very few civilian casualties." people call bullshit. Because the line appears thin to some I'll give an illustrative example. In response to the recent civilian shootings in Kandahar you can argue, "Look, our soldiers are stretched thin over multiple deployments, we're not achieving anything or at least not anything that's going to last at this point, and soldiers snapping and doing things like this is just going to get worse and is just going to make it worse." or you can argue, "We don't belong over there and our soldiers are just butchering civilians anyway."

I have a feeling it has more to do with a few big names in canopy piloting leaving socal and a lack of interest in attracting anyone to replace them. It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to champion a discipline such that a DZO will actually promote it or spend money on it, and it's not an especially thankful undertaking. When it comes to experienced jumpers at Elsinore the only thing you're going to find natural support for year after year is an FS team because that's the discipline that Hammo has always had a soft spot for. Right now the hot disciplines at Elsinore are wingsuiting and CRW because that's what the jumpers that currently have the energy to promote things are into. A few years ago it was VFS and canopy piloting and a few years before that it was 4-way FS and artistic freeflying. IMO the pond at Elsinore is too small anyway, and it could stand to be drained and enlarged / redesigned.

...because satellites are expensive. Mind you, that's independent of whether any given satellite or system thereof is a good investment, but it should come as no surprise that if you're in the business of buying satellites with low TRL (i.e. new technology) payloads, you're going to be spending a lot on them.

Ahhhh... I love speakers corner...

You call that news?

You get out what you put in. If you'd said something serious, you might have got a serious response. Since you lead in with bullshit, you shouldn't be surprised at what was thrown back at you. You get out what comes out, sometimes negatively correlated with what you put in. Depends on who stumbles into the thread, or whether you post something too late in a thread for people to care. I've written many posts here that I've put a fair amount of thought into trying to be balanced and making sure my thoughts come out clear. A handful of times it has sparked interesting discussion but more often than not these posts just get lost in the noise. Hopefully someone found them interesting and they weren't a complete waste of time. I don't as much anymore simply because I feel like I've said what I have to say regarding most of the recurring topics that come up. Negative attention reigns supreme though if all you're looking for is "Re: [your name]". If you want to make sure you get people responding to you just make short, sarcastic, accusatory, or otherwise inflammatory comments.

Well that's a touch melodramatic.

Consumer electronics technology has been ahead of the vast majority of people's ability to use it effectively or productively for quite a while now. You can buy a 3D, high-definition video camera for $200 and most people can't even compose a decent looking photograph to save their life. It's not good to be automatically adverse to things that are new but, just the same, you can't engross yourself in every gizmo that comes along and lie to yourself that's it's completely changed the way you live and always for the better.

Because the hole is round.