dorbie

Sigh, if they're not bitching that you're taking someone's rights away by sending them to Guantanamo, they're bitching because you're not not taking someone else's rights away by allowing them to buy a gun. Just shows you. You can't win with some people, especially if they think some rights are more important than others.

I am saying that regardless of what someone says they will or wont' do, when they do when they are actually in the situation may be different from what they said they would do. I've done a lot of things I said I would never do. Derek I agree, me too.

Is that no longer required? It's over 30 years since I was current, but that used to be a requirement when I got my license in 1969. And we had those horrible low pressure regulators on the back with long floppy tubes to the mouthpiece that held about a liter of water that had to be blown out. I just got certified last year and we had to do that in the pool but not open water. Yup, in the open water you just remove your mask, at least with the PADI training. The curriculum varies with certification organization but the equipment is a LOT better, even from when I was first diving. No more ABLJs or manual inflation and everyone has an octopus rig so they don't even teach buddy breathing. They do train you to hand your spare demand valve to another diver . I liked the PADI training, less doctrinal bullshit (that could even endanger you IMHO) than the Scottish Sub Aqua Club, and very practical. They really winnowed it down to the basics but your'e not going to be able to give your dive partner EAR as you tow him to shore for example. You'd have to progress to rescue diver for that kind of thing.

And I bet feuergnom would have bet he would not have panicked when he had to flood/remove his mask underwater. I know dozens of people that have sworn that wouldn't downize again, only to se them downsize several times. This is true, but unless you now saying that having no AAD could reduce someone's panic I don't see how that supports your earlier contention.

Does the 3 ring system & reserve give you the additional confidence you need to jump? Does the mandatory use of AADs give the USPA the confidence to let students learn using the AFF harness hold technique?

Some questions we can never hope to get the answer to no matter how often we repeat them. At least one post she made suggests she wouldn't have waited on her AAD.

Like it or not we're fallible. I can make a conscious choice ahead of time to buy and install an AAD. I can't guarantee I'll never forget to switch it on. That has never happened since I got off student status, but I accept the slim possibility that it might (I accept the greater possibility that I'll descend over terrain higher than my AAD firing altitude on many weekends). The unfortunate jumper who had her cypres set low made a mistake. She probably thought she was being dilligent and cautious turning her cypres on ahead of time, tragically the opposite was true. As you say effectively she was jumping wthout an AAD, but it wasn't a deliberate choice to do so, it was a human error. I sometimes make those, we all do, so far all of my mistakes in life have been survivable.

OK, you disagree, well said. There's no argument over how an AAD deploys reserve. The statistics over no pull fatalities means I can continue to argue the value of AADs. The rest is semantics or appeals to relegate an AAD to a second class piece of safety equipment. If I ensure I have an installed and functionaing AAD & activate it correctly & it deploys my reserve then I have helped ensure that I had a deployed parachute albeit indirectly. Conversely, if you're jumping, lose altitude awareness and you don't pull and go in, you screwed up, but you didn't just screw up by not pulling, you screwed up by not having the most obvious piece of safety equipment that would have saved your ass, an AAD. Someone who goes in these days for want of an AAD has erred gravely by not having an AAD. Note this is not someone who has an AAD in their rig and fails to operate it correctly or forgets to switch it on, any of us has a slim chance of still doing that on a bad day, I'm talking about intentionally jumping without an AAD. But it's your choice and I'm all for choice.

Sony trinitrons have a grille style mask and have two very fine horizontal wires that keep the grille in alignment with the phosphor pattern. These look like two very feing grey horizontal lines about 1/4 fromn the top and bottom of the screen. Many, many brands of monitor use these flat screen tubes so it could be that. These are always in the same place and show most against a bright background. Other causes could be unshielded cables but without a detailed description of what you see it is impossible to tell. Horizontal streaking from dark objects could be reflections from poorly terminated/shielded cables. Maybe invest in a good analog monitor cable (with the big ferrite blocks on either end). See the difference between a crappy monitor cable and a good one in this image: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/monitor/lcd/compare.jpg

As I have stated before, there are 2 things that must be done to survive a skydive. (fundamental if you will) One is to deploy a landable canopy be for impact. Two is to land that canopy safely. Anything else you do not a skydive is just fluff. You should never rely or expect anything or anyone to do these two simple tasks for you. Sparky It's an indisputable fact that an AAD increases your odds of accomplishing item one.

True Bill... There is supersaturation. As an example. One day I was breathing 100% O2 for about 4 hours straight at 25,000 feet. Decided to see how long I could hold my breathe. (Now my normal sea level ambient air breathhold is about 1 min 30 sec.) That day, due to supersat, 3 minutes easy... There ya go... Interesting, I've been trained that the impetus to breathe is actually caused by the buildup of CO2. If for example you hyperventilate & purge as much CO2 as possible from your body it's possible for someone (an active swimmer for example) to hold their breath and actually black out before they fully feel the urgent need to breathe. Holding your breath and needing to breathe indicates you have a buildup of CO2. Blacking out indicates you're low on oxygen. Quite what you demonstrated in your experiment therefore isn't as clear as you may think.

Well, yes because according to the "law" its his decision. As far as the "religious" people imposing their "values", it happens every day at least here in the US. Bwahahahah How dare he hold out hope for 7 years, wheeling her around in a wheelchair, trying to stimulate her brain hoping against all odds that she might improve, then eventually resign himself to the realization that hope had faded. Yup, it's HIS fault that Terri's folks still have hope, blame the guy no matter what, and of course according to you with his wife in a vegitative state for 15 years he's still a dirty adulterer because he has found another partner in the long lonely years since Terri became immobile. Again it's all his fault according to you! Personal comments about J removed. As always attack the idea, not the person.

You can hear one in action in this exciting video: http://www.big-boys.com/articles/hangglidefall.html

Negligible, but it depends how you burn it of course, you are allowed to use catalysts and lower temperatures.

There's no statute of limitations on treason.

Stewart has it easy in scenarios like this, he gets to snipe at pundits from their own platform and is unassailable because he anchors a comedy show, it's a gutless position. The appropriate response to his antics is to not have him on your show, I mean he's a comedian playing an anchor and they treat him like an anchor and get surprised when he burns them. Any pundit who gives Stewart a platform to attack them from is an idiot, however, I doubt he could do a fraction of the job they do if he were held to any standard. He can be funny but they brutally edit raw footage to make people they attack look like imbeciles. On the rare occasions I've seen full clips and their redacted versions and it's way beyond even what I thought they did. It's still funny but it used to be a lot better, their high point was the indecision 2000 coverage IMHO, I pretty much fast forward to see if there's a Lewis Black rant before deleting it on my TIVO now.

You can't beat the price of oil as a great motivator for alternate sources of power. As has been pointed out the issue is not the production of energy from burning Hydrogen but it's storage and distribution (although I once saw a whacky report that speculated about huge natural hydrogen deposits under North America 2H2O The appeal here is obvious, it's also readily made from water through electrolosis, this stores the energy at the point of manyfacture and you're not affecting the gasseous content of the atmosphere if you use solar, wind or wave energy to drive the electrolosis. The O2 made at the electrodes is offset when the H2O is produced at the point of consumption. Kallend's right hydrogen is volatile, but it's also friging clean and readily made. I find the claims w.r.t. the Hindenburg slightly bizzarre. I've seen the theories and the documentary on the fact that it was made of volatile coatings, but I don't fully buy it. It smacks of the scientist with a favorite bone he won't let go. Sure it had aluminum in the doping, but it wasn't rocket fuel as was claimed, it had aluminum powder, aluminum needs to get fucking hot before it burns in air, hydrogen doesn't. The hydrogen was the source of most of the energy and burning on the hindenburg, it's dangerous stuff. Some countries pump natural gas (mainly methane I think but it's a mix) all over the country into every home, and there are very occasional leaks and misshaps but it works, they add an artificial distinctive odor so you can smell a leak (that's right natural gas tends to stink because they add the smell). I've lived in several houses with piped hydrocarbon gas, it's probably not as volatile as Hydrogen but it ain't no picknick if you get a leak either. The point is you should be able to smell it before concentrations get dangerous. The whole point of a fuel cell is to store and bind the hydrogen safely with a high energy density and still catalyse or burn it efficiently. Otherwise you'd just have a tank of pressurized gas in the car and inject it / burn it in cylinders. So the H2 is dangerous is the whole point of the technology, we can burn raw H2 today, it ain't difficult, it ain't high tech. Heck they have Methand powered cars already (with a big gas cylinder in the trunk). Just ask the cops in Dallas :-).... Ironically one of the reasons I think they did this was a spate of Ford Princess vehicles exploding in rear enders. More alternates will be explored like oil from crops, wind, wave solar, but a lot of these have issues that hydrogen solves. You need some energy distribution standard, and Hydrogen might be a good efficient clean option.

Sounds about right, although your vertical component of velocity could be significant before you chop and that could affect the outcome.

I read an article only today that specifically stated the pontif had pontificated that it was OK to withdraw a tube if there was no hope of recovery. Don't have the link to hand.

I mean how would you rather be remembered. See the attachments. There's the before shot, then the after shot then the bullshit shot. Now I dunno about you but that before shot is kinda ordinary, wouldn't you rather have everyone in the world gawking at what's left of you in the after shot. Even better, you can't beat having complete strangers you've never met slapping your contorted face on a poster with their favourite quote from the Bible and a picture of Jesus. It's a wonderful way to go.

Why don't you try 15 years with a partner who's a vegetable before shooting your mouth off about someone else's conduct.

i was wondering that myself... is a 'DNR' statement in effect committing suicide from a catholic point of view? after all modern medicine may be able to save you....? No, Catholics get to refuse extreme artificial measures. And here's the best part, the Pope decides what those are. He recently decreed that even a feeding tube may be withdrawn when all hope of recovery is gone.

I think South Park said it best with the "Best Friends Forever" episode this week, Kenny's living will's missing page. To paraphrase; "...whatever you do don't show me on national TV like this." "Oh Shit!"

Well he's going to plead guilty. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20050331/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/berger_probe_3&printer=1

Wrong, this is about one administrator who made the rules up as she went along. She extrapolated zero tolerance on weapons to make pictures of armed troops serving the USA unacceptable. As for someone worried about a relative being killed by that marine's weapon, well they would be an enemy of the US for the marine to be shooting at them so tough shit. An Arab American could look at that image and imagine the freedom it brings them as citizens or imagine the liberation of their relatives so others can enjoy the freedoms that drew them to the USA so don't presume to think for them. That marine has a right not to be singled out as unacceptable for consumption in his old school. They should be thanking him for his sacrifice not letting some dumbass hypocrite at the school enjoy the freedoms he fights for on her behalf while taking away the freedoms of his family through the arbitrary application of rules that don't even exist.