champu

"It is realized that changes in fundamental constants, and also greatly accelerated nuclear decay, are radical suggestions." Translation: "we just fucking made them up." I have another radical suggestion for you: The Bible is not the word of any god.

I have a natural gas Weber grill because I don't like buying supplies and I grew up in Palatine respectively. Foods: burgers, brats, ribeyes, filet mignon, rack of lamb, salmon, tilapia, kabobs, pork shoulder (takes like 8 hours though), chicken breasts wrapped in bacon, asparagus, bell peppers, and corn on the cob. Latest Kick: havarti or monterey jack cheese with fresh tomato and basil on sourdough coated with either butter or olive oil. Optional addition is some thinly sliced turkey from the deli. I use the stainless steel press that came with my panini pan (attached.)

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

Actually.....I am the same. Some just read a bit too deep into what I write. What can I say? How does a guy get into the fashion industry? I think it would be a breath of fresh air to be the one using charm to dig out of a hole. I wasn't suggesting it would be entertaining in a "that'll teach the bastard" kinda way, I was just thinking it'd be fun to see you pleasantly surprised.

I think it would be entertaining if Shah went to the Chicks Rock Boogie. ...not that he's invited.

So, if I am following this correctly, if rejected, it is teaching. If followed or accepted, it it indoctrination? No, teaching is presenting both a subject matter, and the critical thinking skills to examine it and understand it. Whatever they go on to believe or conclude as a result is theirs. Indoctrination is taking a product of believing something (like prayer) and subjecting someone to it while they are (or for all intents and purposes are) a captive audience (such as graduation or optional-daily-morning-prayer-time at public schools.) Don't pretend that sticking people in a room where 95% of others all recite scripture either aloud or with their heads down mouthing the words is teaching them anything other than that they will be singled out if they don't make with the praying. If a student is given the stage during graduation for some other reason and he or she wants to include a prayer to whoever or whatever, I don't care. If the school gives a student the stage so that they can lead a prayer then it crosses the line.

I was at a new dropzone when I had around 30 jumps. They didn't have many people there so they really needed everyone to be able to send the plane. When asked how long it took me to pack I said [proudly] "It only takes me 20 minutes!"

I - Introduction by District Superintendent II - Processional III - Student Lead Prayer Totally Not a Student Lead Prayer IV - Valedictorian Speech V - Presentation of Diplomas VI - Performance of School Song VII - Recessional

So can you go by yourself now?

I'm going to be a PITA and latch onto this last bit here. Being off by 100 ft while flying in the pattern is not harmless. That can mean overshooting your intended point of landing by a couple hundred feet (or more, especially if there's no wind or a slight downwind.) That's exactly the kind of crap that leads to S-turning or low turns to avoid obstacles at the end of the landing area and either royally screwing up the stack of canopies behind you or thumping yourself into the ground. This is an even larger risk if jumpers are at a new dropzone or wind conditions change unexpectedly. You mention the solution to this is to "be a skilled canopy pilot." Okay... great... Are audible canopy alerts sufficient or even necessary to achieve this? No. Can they be used effectively to improve consistency in everyday pattern flying just like in pro-level swooping? Yes. I don't understand the concern about canopy audibles being another nail in the coffin of the good ol' days of skydiving. What I can understand is the concern about new jumpers adding "things" to their skydive without getting proper guidance on how to do so effectively and safely. But that concern encompasses a lot more than just canopy beeps.

A good explanation from the horse's mouth. One thing that's not stated in those descriptions is when they say things like, "haven't had a whole lot of experience with certain situations" or "Experience and practice will have taught him or her how to deal effectively with unexpected situations" there's an implied, "...on a canopy no more than about 10-15% larger than the one in question." By which I mean that every time you downsize you take a step back down the "novice -> intermediate -> advanced -> expert" ladder. I could toss out what I consider reasonable ballpark numbers of jumps it takes to climb a rung but I'm not sure there's much point in doing so. How exactly do you calculate the average number of jumps it takes someone to reach a subjective level of skill that any given jumper may or may not be actively trying to achieve? What would those numbers even mean?

Rocket surgery isn't so bad. Unless you have to remove their asteroids. You can tell when you and your friends have grown up into adulthood when you pass the check around, everyone throws in, and you start ending up with the right amount or a little too much rather than too little.

I have one in my kitchen on its second season and it's going berserk this year.

the numbers are a bit different in San Francisco, and for those at the early part of their 30 year loan. It would be paying $1000 to get a $900 deduction, would might translate to $700 if and only if they can actually itemize. Odds are this isn't enough, though, and they end up using the standard deduction or just a bit more, and get the $100 deduction as you suggest. The California state income tax is high enough that if you're buying a place as a single filer, you're probably paying enough in CA income tax to get you close to the federal itemizing threshold just by itself. So you should be able to deduct almost all of the resulting interest and property taxes associated with the purchase. But you're spot on in your other post. You don't keep a mortgage around (or do anything else for that matter) just so that you get a deduction. You just factor the deduction into your decision. Making additional payments or not is a similar question as, "How much do I put down?" The answer depends on a lot of variables and is not always, "As much as you possibly can."

No, he's after the Paris Hiltons. The term "Rich" will be redefined to suit whatever point is trying to be made, but the image of Parris Hilton never goes away. Getting yourself nice and riled up by picking a person you despise to represent a group you're about to talk about is a great way to stay objective on the matter. I already responded a few times on the last lap through this topic so I'll try not to just repeat myself. Whatever revenue system the government chooses, it should be sustainable in the long term. You decide what the government should provide, and you take a cut of the economic activity that those provisions help generate in order to pay for it. If that includes things like socialized health care and robust unemployment safety nets, then so it does. If that means a combination of highly progressive income taxes, capital gains taxes, VAT and/or sales tax then so it does. Estate taxes are something different. Estate taxes are just saying, "I want pressure to exist on all wealth that is generated that pushes it into the government's hands." I think that explains why you'd have to imagine all "rich people" to be Paris Hiltons, because that's the only way you can make this sound like a good idea.

Optionally, you can call the EPA and have them red tag your house. It all comes down to personal preferences and risk management.

From the webpage: The model needs to include capacitive touch sensitive models of normal sized people in the adjacent seats and if you touch them a red light and buzzer goes off like the game "Operation." Great, now overweight people going to want special "fat hoops" that are easier to jump through when dealing with airline customer service.

With only a couple brief exceptions (which I blame myself for in terms of how I stacked my classes) I didn't find getting my engineering degrees as painful or overbearing in terms of time as you are making it out to be. So while I don't mean to defend the intentionally discouraging practices you felt you encountered, I think you're painting with an overly broad brush. I don't wish to make the same mistake, so I'll recognize there were a few things that made it easier for me and helped keep me interested along the way. The rest of this post will probably come off like a CV, but I'm just throwing this out there as something to maybe emulate. First off, I went to a very good high school. It was public, but my parents specifically researched high schools and intentionally moved across suburbs when my oldest sister was in 7th grade so that we could all go to this high school. The science and math teachers were very good, and my AP physics teacher is actually one of the first people to really spark my interest in being an engineer. I graduated with 10 AP classes worth of credit. This meant I didn't have to take 18 hours a semester, I could take 14, and still graduate in 4 years. When in the program I felt like I was always in at least one hands on lab course. In your very first semester they have you building circuits for robotic cars to navigate obstacle courses. In physics classes you're cooling slugs of metal down to a known temperature and then seeing how much water they can freeze to calculate their heat capacity or using a voice coil to excite resonant modes in strings. I coded an FPGA to drive a working whack-a-mole game, wrote a surround sound processor in assembly, wrote a 3D tank battle video game in C, controlled two-axis inverted pendulums using simulink, and created a child seat with a microcontroller that could crack the windows of the car and/or phone for help if it got too hot. Lots of interesting stuff. Thirdly, uiuc got recruited pretty heavily for EE internships so I got to work each summer in places around the country making really good money for a college student. I had a rig, A-license, and a couple hundred skydives by the time I graduated. So yeah. I didn't really find it to be too much of a struggle and if I had questions in a class I went to the professor's office hours and asked them. I was never told to "sink or swim" or given the whole "look left, look right" spiel. I only have a couple complaints (that I hang on to anyway.) 1) My advisor apparently didn't know how pre-reqs and graduation requirements worked. He was good at explaining the scope of courses when asked but he recommended changes to my plan of study that would have prevented me from graduating on time had I heeded. 2) I understand that materials and semiconductors are a big deal at uiuc, but they made the required chain of classes on those topics too long. To this day I don't have any interest in what I learned in those classes; I would have much rather taken more EM and antenna courses which, instead, had to wait until grad school.

have my views ever done a 180 from reading a thread? no. Have they changed slightly? Sure... all the time. I have learned things, I have modified my positions, and I have had some threads where I've considered them a complete waste of time. This has been my experience as well, and I feel as though there are definitely cycles of interesting threads and droughts. There are a few topics I obviously chime in on more than others but I think the main reason I stick around is because this is my version of "people watching." It's interesting to see how and how willing people are to present / clarify their position vs. just assuming the other person holds an imaginary, unreasonable, and diametrically opposed viewpoint. Ah, this is where I think I was trying to go with the poll. How often do people assume others are trying to "make" them see viewpoints their way vs. just "sharing" their opinion. If someone assumes that everyone responding to them is trying to shove their stance down their throat then yeah, there's really no point in responding to them regardless of whether you are a) actually trying to shove your opinion down their throat b) trying to share your viewpoint or c) just trying to be a little light-hearted or silly.

On the contrary, I don't think he's posting enough. I took the liberty of creating a custom search that Shah can save as his homepage so that if there's so much as a whisper of women on this site he can chime in (assuming he doesn't already do something similar.)

We all know that "obvious troll is obvious" but that's not really what I'm getting at. This is sort of an extention to the question that JohnnyMarko posted a month ago about whether peoples' views had changed at all from discussing things here. I see a lot of posts where people say something, and then when someone responds to them they really mangle the hell out of the response with selective quoting, and then reply to that. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who freak the hell out if the whitespace of their post isn't maintained when quoted and yell at the person for not responding to them in bullet-point format. It's probably a combination of legitimate misunderstanding, trolling, and stubborness; I'm wondering if people feel like they're willing to hear others out and, even if they don't change their view point, maybe change the way they present it.

Take a minute to think about it, and be honest.

I actually wrote my response and then read the article, disappointed to find I had been scooped on the Easy-Bake Oven joke. And yeah, CFLs aren't perfect, but I use them most places in my house and they work well. Notable exceptions are chandeliers and ceiling fans that dim, in which case I use the 40W candle-style incandescent bulbs... ...oh, and the 1000W halogen work lights for home improvement projects.

Sorry, I didn't see this reply until the thread was re-bumped. The best you can do is insults? That wasn't meant as an insult, hence the clarification. Or trying to discount something as your only defenses shows how weak your position is.... Remember, not long ago people wanted to discount a black man by claiming he was not a "full" person. You are doing the same type of thing here. Fact is a embryo is alive. Embryos are literally not a full person. About of quarter of embryos don't even make it to week six, and most of the time no one even knows they ever existed. Trying to define and protect rights of something at that stage of life is absurd. In that case you claim it would be fine to kill something that was 20 years old. So now you claim that only a person with *experiences* should be protected... Next you will try to limit WHAT experiences should provide protection. This is the road that takes us to killing mentally ill people just because they are not 'real' humans. I explicitly said that example was contrived. Nobody can make it through birth and still meet the "no information" criterion. I'll thank you not to make predictions about what I will next try to do or my opinions on the mentally ill as you're not very good at it. Yes, having a tooth pulled is less mentally damaging than having an abortion.... Yet you don't think a child should have to notify a parent to get an abortion. Don't get me wrong, I think they should discuss it with their parents and I hope most would, but my concern about this law is one of unintended consequences of making it illegal not to. You ostensibly want to make sure the parents have a chance to either talk her out of it or otherwise prevent her from having the procedure. Unfortunately, there are even worse situations a girl can get herself into trying to avoid that whether there's a real or perceived reason to do so. As I've said before, if you want your daughter to come to you if she's pregnant, all you need is her respect, not a law mandating it. Yes, I think a life is a life. Yes, I think that if it requires parental consent to get a tooth pulled, then other medical procedures should as well. It is called CONSISTENCY. You have none. I would gain no satisfaction from having both abortions and tooth extractions treated with a blanket policy despite their differences. I don't think the unborn have added or consumed any information to the universe but I don't wish to kill the mentally ill. I don't consider an embryo to have human rights, but I think black people are whole people. By those measures you're right, I have no consistency. By those measures I'm okay with that.

Cheapskates should learn how to leave a tip... Also, what does the physical beating of the rich guy represent in this analogy? I've never understood that.