champu

By definition when you work on risky things, sometimes it doesn't work out. That's what it means to take a risk. It sounds like engineering has worked out better for you than for shah. It doesn't necessarily follow that shah is "doing it all wrong". I've worked on more than one thing that didn't end up panning out. You spend months or however long on a team crunching the numbers on an incredible idea but sometimes the devil in the details gets the better of that idea. Maybe the project gets mothballed waiting for that one vaporware component to come along or maybe it gets shit-canned altogether. Either way, you take what you learned and you work on something else. I was responding to Shah's dismay that engineers only fiddle with the mundane, that the entire middle class is underwater on real estate, that skydiving chicks are all fat, and that engineering women are all ugly. Who knows, maybe he's just in a bad neighborhood, or maybe it doesn't matter what neighborhood he's in. There be dragons.

Very rarely. I generally just get online with a friend and goof off playing 2v2. I haven't even done 1v1 placement matches. Name is champu and cc is 550. Whenever I play SC2 it makes me feel old. I only have about 30-40 apm.

I was at an engineering career expo for a couple days at my alma mater last fall to talk with people, take resumes, socialize at an HKN dinner, and give a guest lecture (in the Siebel Center, which was awesome) about what it is I actually do with my degrees. I had a great time and I learned a lot. I'd have done it again this year but I didn't get enough notice and I couldn't get away. Some people want to tackle spectacular problems and make headlines, some people want to work on the next ultra-secret spooky program, and some people just want to stretch the capabilities in some industry that people are going to take for granted but it's okay because they see that particular challenge as interesting. And you know what? It's all great engineering. (Hey, someone had to invent the cardboard pizza box with the pop-out bit that holds the sauce off to the side.) I read about your bad experiences and I feel pity, not commiseration. I work with great minds on risky things and I have fun doing it, my place is worth double what I owe on it, and I'm dating a wonderful and gorgeous skydiver who is also an engineer. You must be doing it all wrong.

You can't have patents that you can't talk about. That doesn't even make any sense. The word "patent" literally means t- oh forget it.

4a) "Pick a lane" Landing 10-15 degrees off from the heading of the first person to land is not following the first person to land. I saw numerous close calls (and one collision, at about 10-15 ft off the ground, both landed safely) at nationals this past weekend and I would attribute them all to one or more of the people landing with a diagonal component through the landing area. Once you've turned to final, fly in a straight line parallel with the edges of the landing area. Period. If you're incapable of turning at the appropriate altitude such that you are worried about overshooting and running into obstacles, you have no business landing in said landing area.

Heh... looks like something got changed recently. I haven't developed webpages since php4 was the bees knees though so I can't provide as constructive criticism. (it's broken in Safari 5.1.1 too)

Just recently started seeing American Express ads that render in Safari vertically and seem to introduce a layer that prevents me from clicking on certain areas of the page outside the ad. I can't close or reduce the ad. I had to repeatedly reload the page until a non-amex ad loaded so I could click "post new" and report this, then I had to tab around the page to get to the fields to enter the post, then I had to click preview post so that the upload attachment button would be lower on the page so I could click on it. The site is almost unusable. I've attached a couple screenshots.

HAARP actually shot down flight 93. The Pentagon attack was filmed on a sound stage at Groom Lake.

I'm not sure which "debate" you're talking about, but whether it's people carrying around signs in a tent city, people posting photos of themselves holding up printed out letters, pundits going back and forth on TV, or heated arguments on the internet it doesn't really matter who does or doesn't shut the fuck up. Deciding on an "admission price" of $1 or any other arbitrary value is pretty silly. People vote selfishly and often without a lot of long term thinking involved. The whole point of representative government is to temper that. I'll give you that an enormous group of people with no federal income tax liability garnering a large political sway as to where federal tax dollars get spent is not a great scenario, but I don't think it's something we're teetering on the edge of simply because your number above is close to 50. As for who does wield that large political sway and what that means in terms of financial responsibility, I'll just say that I think all the congressional appropriations committees need to have their membership reviewed for conflicts of interest, and the interests of the nation as a whole need to stop taking a back seat.

A stick of dry ice in a plastic bottle with some water is not a chemical bomb attack. I guess they must have stopped reading "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" to children. I was actually fairly concerned when I read your headline, now I care that much less. The occupy movement is about sitting around and commiserating over the fact that people are stupid-meanie-heads.

LAX is ridiculous. It costs $7 just to get in a cab there, and then you get to pay the guy to crawl through traffic to get out of the airport. So the meter is anywhere from 10-14 bucks by the time you're off the airport property. There's a small Hertz location not too far from my place, heck it might be cheaper for me to rent a car to drive home.

Not having seen the segment... To wuffos "solo" just means "not tandem." So he probably did AFF and called it a solo. And he probably overhead whoever told him he jumped or was jumping from 14,000 ft and repeated it back as 40,000 ft without realizing that jumping from 40,000 ft is a whole different animal, and not a routine undertaking. Given all the stuff you get crammed in your head for your first jump I can easily see someone making one aff jump and not remembering what altitude they jumped from correctly. See, two miscommunications and we go from wuffo who made a jump, enjoyed it, probably won't continue, but is excited to share, to a loathsome bullshitting poser.

I'll try to remember to point you two out to each other. See you all next weekend (holy crap nationals snuck up fast.)

When I was in undergrad in Illinois I was pulled over after proceeding when the light turned green at a traffic signal because, "my license plate frame was partially obscuring my registration sticker"

The unnecessarily confrontational people meet the guy who wants to talk about something he did nothing but buy yet feels proud of so bad that he'll forgo his own bodily functions. Everyone in that commercial strikes me as uninteresting.

We had an incident in Tasmania, Australia a year or two back where an RSL equipped talon had the left riser break firing the reserve out and into the mess above. He got lucky! A Collins Lanyard (RSL on right riser of course then) would have made all the difference. Thanks for the info. Do you know/recall the failure mechanism of the riser? White loop ripped out? White loop broke due to wear? Failure of one of the ring attachments? Some other failure? if only we could always determine what height we were going to be at when things went wrong... Again, you don't hear about riser breaks too often so I just wanted people to speak up about instances they knew of and hopefully gather details about them. It's my theory that riser breaks/releases are caused by incorrectly manufactured risers, incorrectly assembled three rings, incorrectly routed white loops, incorrectly sized cutaway cables, and incorrectly maintained gear. Notice a pattern there? I don't like the idea of a solution to "ground problems" that has a side effect of introducing or contributing to new "air problems."

Riser broke (RSL side) on Tandem jump approx 15 years ago. Collins lanyard did its job there. Thanks for the info. Do you know/recall the failure mechanism of the riser? White loop ripped out? White loop broke due to wear? Failure of one of the ring attachments? Some other failure? /edit to add: what I'm getting at is that the collins lanyard has been involved in some real, but admittedly bizarre, failure modes and I'm trying to get a feel for what failure modes it's trying to help with. If it's solely to combat worn out or incorrectly manufactured risers and or cutaway cables then no thank you.

First off, I think people are arguing for the skyhook using the merits of RSLs. My general observation is that the number of situations where a skyhook actually made the difference over an RSL is very small (slider down demo cutaways notwithstanding) so I think your use of the term "most" above is grossly inaccurate. And of those situations I haven't heard of any where the person didn't do something demonstrably stupid to induce a cutaway of a canopy that was otherwise flying just fine. Also, and this is an honest question as accusatory as it sounds, has the collins lanyard ever helped anyone? And if it has, was it an actual riser break and not a person using cutaway cables with the incorrect lengths? Did the riser break happen on opening at an altitude where an RSL/skyhook was even "necessary" to begin with? Meanwhile, there have been at least two incidents where something went wrong and the added complexity of the skyhook/collins lanyard system made the situation much worse. One was a tandem double fatality and in the other the guy acted extremely quickly and with a lot of luck saved his ass (I'm speaking of the low-timer with the container failure at Skydive Chicago.) Note that I am not arguing one way or another regarding RSLs, and I think Bill Booth is a great designer, but I think the skyhook system complicates the failure modes on a rig too much, and when you do that you're bound to see bizarre problems as we have.

Hey now. I'll decide what is or isn't rocket science.

The "hardened"? Does that make theists the "softened"? And I wouldn't take that bet. The idea of basing your world view on an "account" or collection thereof is exactly what turns critical thinkers off to most flavors of religion in the first place. In any event, analyzing observations and getting to the bottom of them is a great way to make a living, as is selling hope to people via fanciful hypotheticals like the above. To each their own.

Wrong. This is a case of criminal activity. Yeah, I'm highly confused by claims that anyone would support this on grounds of cultural relativism. This isn't some kid in a remote pacific island tribe hiking up a volcano and jumping into the lava because the tribe has long believed this will keep it from errupting violently and destroying the village. This is people getting paid to snag kids off the street and cut their balls and heads off. The only thing they have in common is that people are superstitious morons.

Those awards were started "back in the day" when it was a Big Deal to make 1K, 2k, etc. jumps. Now, with so many skydivers jumping for so many years, out of so many turbine planes, up to 7 days a week, the USPA found itself kicking out more bling than a chain of Zale's stores. I really don't blame them for doing what they did. Besides, those wings look really cool, but I don't really wear mine. And if I really wanted some more, I could scratch up the $$. I don't blame them either for charging people if they keep ordering more and more wings as they go, I'm just curious why your first one is free, but only if it's the 1000/2000 jump wings. They actually had to go out of their way to make the form more complicated to accommodate this and it's not obvious as to why. Did they put an extra zero on an order form and now they've got boxes of 1000 and 2000 jump wings they're trying to get rid of, meanwhile they order all the other wings one-off from their supplier?

Tangentially related question... Why are your first set of jump wings and freefall badge only free if they happen to be 1000/2000 or 12/24? Are those pins somehow even more chincy than the 15 bucks the rest of them cost such that they can afford to part with them more readily? I haven't applied for any awards yet but the first ones I would go for would be the 3000 jump and 48 hour awards I'm coming up on shortly. I guess I don't get my freebies unless I go back and ask for awards that are OBE at this point.

What raised my eyebrow was the "NASA, defense satellites" in your post. Looking at the wikipedia article where you appear to have copied that list from, it seems as though you added the word "defense" there. I'm not sure why. There are several other problems with the calculations and sources referenced regarding those figures, but let me sum it up this way: If you have a problem with the $707.5B (and I know I do) then complain about that number. Bullshitting to get the number above $1T doesn't help the cause.

Trolololol...