champu

...not from a rotary phone. 20-something here and here is what virtually all of my text exchanges look like: - I text someone with a question or brief statement of fact - they respond with something other than the one sentence response I was looking for - I call them - someone texts me something - I answer their question or try to respond in a way that warrants no further conversation - they text anything back - I call them

If the hare had half the mental stamina of some of the female athletes I've known the tortoise would have gotten it's ass handed to it and we'd all be out a fable. So to answer your question, no.

Agreed! Unfortunately the rest of your post is a little wonky, so let me give it a shot. I'll give an example of something, aside from abortion, that also wouldn't bother me (even if I'm not thrilled about the idea.) Not because I feel it's a particularly persuasive analogy, but because I think it more clearly communicates just how far I take the concept of "a life" vs "a potential life." It's important to note that I don't subscribe to the concept of "souls" or "after-lifes" or "before-lifes" or anything of that supernature. Life is a continuous process and procreation is a cog in the machine that makes it thus. The individual (you, me, anybody) develops over time and is little more than a collection of your memories and other people's memories of you stored amidst a distributed array of gray matter (or, if you do something cool, maybe you get into the history books for a couple hundred years until the libraries are all burned in a war or something.) This is really what makes you a person, what gives you an identity, what makes you a "life", and where the idea of "rights" becomes meaningful. Okay, on to the example... You take a sperm and an egg. Doesn't matter where you got them. In fact, I don't want to know. All that matters is the woman and man in question aren't aware you have them. You fertilize the egg and you gestate the zygote into a fetus into a baby and grow the thing all the way into a 20 year old while keeping it the entire time under sedation in a sensory deprivation chamber on ivs, etc. Now, without stopping the sedation or opening the chamber, you take a gun, and you put it up against the chamber, and you blow its brains out. Other than thinking that it's a little strange for someone to go that far just to prove a point, I really wouldn't care. It never met anybody, it never learned anything, I didn't even assign it a hypothetical sex. It wasn't an individual, it wasn't a life.

Conspicuously absent from the Delta IV Heavy, Saturn V, Falcon 9, and Soyuz are solid fuel boosters and hypergolic fuels which is why they lumber off the pad as compared to the space shuttle, Atlas V, or the old Titan IV. But what they lack in liftoff thrust to weight they make up for in efficiency and environmental friendliness.

Thanks for the well thought out post. It can be rough sometimes when people don't appreciate that just maybe they're talking to people that the topic is fairly close to. It's the couple tactical changes that you mention that I was getting at with my questions. All the way from tasers and better gear to protect against melee weapons to not breaching the premises in the first place, favoring an extended stakeout or something of that nature. No argument there.

T-2 minutes

Kounotori 2 will be making its way to the ISS from Tanegashima in about 15 minutes. Live Video: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=public

I watched it from the MB pier. It was actually a fairly dry day so it didn't leave much of a contrail above 30 Kft making it pretty hard to follow. Still... have to love a launch vehicle that lights itself on fire prior to leaving the pad.

6/10 Fairly well executed. People love jumping on hypocrisy. The "+" was lame though and the jump number comparison wasn't as indirect/subtle as it could have been.

Pretending, for a moment, that the victim's actions were understandable if not advisable, do you feel there are any lessons to be learned on the side of the LEOs? Obviously the officers didn't get into their cruisers/van that evening hoping to shoot a guy, and I don't envy either the second guessing of oneself or the rationalization required to avoid the second guessing of oneself that Sgt. Burnett has to go through. It goes without saying, though, that Blair has it worse. So other than suggesting that people not be defensive when their front door is kicked in, how else might the outcome of this raid been improved?

I don't really give a shit what happens in Alabama.

such a pity - one of these posts cancels out 10 of those quality postings. You're now at -9. -9? Really? I got nothing banked? ...this place is bullshit [storms off]

I don't normally do this, but for some reason I feel compelled to state for the record that my last post was not actually serious.

But I don't like people hence the guns.

Nutter. Sitting down and making a list of 137 anything makes you at least a little crazy. am I nutters for sitting down and making a prep list for 38 things? (22 blocks, 16 randoms) If you sit alone in a room engineering every permutation... ...then no, that's just serious dedication to 4-way. By the way, it's worth noting that there's a whole gamut of possibilities between "no guns" and "stockpiles that draw attention from LE or Stinger missiles" One worth considering might be "a couple guns"

Nutter. Sitting down and making a list of 137 anything makes you at least a little crazy.

Reminds me of a joke I heard the other day... "So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor..."

I got tired of having a webpage where I blogged, posted photos, and had friends comment on things before it became popular. Took me about 8 years, we'll see how all these facebook users do.

A+ Not if you have Jim Raynor as your avatar though... ...unfortunately...

Schools are buildings. Buildings have pre-defined locations. Government officials are people. People have legs and other means locomotion. This idea is intellectually bankrupt.

Let me suggest to you that cutaways, while undesirable, aren't as big a deal as you're making them out to be. You listed them along side broken bones as reasons people should be ignored regarding safety issues. Do you really mean that?

I'm apparently married and in my 50s with a father in his 60s that I've lived with in IL for 25 years. I also have a brother but my mother is "N/A". I like travel and cooking. One thing that was interesting is that I looked up the name of the person whom creditors have been calling my number trying to track down for the past few years and sure enough my number is somehow associated with her in this database. And here I thought I had low respect for collection agencies before...

I've had four reserve rides... I'm useless... Oh well. Depends on why you had them. If a single one was due to your carelessness in packing or gear maintenance, I think it does count as a strike against you. Ok, maybe you learned from that mistake, but what about the other three? Like I said, it all depends, but people just don't put up the kinds of numbers I'm talking about on average and I think most of us would agree we should strive for better than average and not the 200 jump wonders. That's the point I was trying to make. I know what you were getting at Paul, I was just giving you a hard time because you threw cutaways in there and sometimes cutaways happen. If you want my two cents regarding safety and how it relates to my cutaways I'll share this... If you're doing four-way and breaking off at 4500 or 4000 ft, and you jump a sub-100 cross-braced canopy, it doesn't really matter how good you are at getting out of line-twists, you will find yourself at your hard deck cutting away when eeeeeh another 500 ft and you would've gotten out of them. But that's why they're called hard decks.

Pain comes in many flavors. I've long been unable to think someone a wimp over physical pain. When I was in high school I suffered a lower back injury while wrestling. Had shooting pains down my leg for months while I got that sorted out with doctors and physical therapists. Falling down in pain mid stride in the hallway between classes is not something I'd wish on a 15 year old. More recently, a few years ago, I had a runaway fever that doctors feared was meningitis. They did an LP to rule it out and while it came back okay the LP didn't heal properly. The next day when I tried to go back to work I discovered that sitting up resulted in headaches so bad my vision blacked out and I collapsed out of my chair.

I've had four reserve rides... I'm useless... Oh well.