dorbie

Yea but only in relation to Armitage downplaying this active intent to disclose this and get it published. It absolutely damns Armitage, wtf was he doing both then and all this time in the interim. It's just perplexing. What was he thinking while the investigation was in full force and did Fitzgerald really tell him to stay quiet, and why did he in fact stay quiet until now (oh.. and wtf was Fitzgerald thinking? I mean Geeze!!). This could have all blown over in a week if Armitage had said it was him from the start, and he could have done that before Fitzgerald was even appointed. It's totally FUBAR on so many levels. I wonder when he's going to announce his run for the Democratic nomination. . Fitzgerald is a REPUBLICAN. I don't see how he could have done anything different even if Armitage confessed, because A. could have been the fall guy for someone else (still could be). False confessions are not at all unusual. So? Armitage is supposed to be one too, but he's opposed to Bush policies. My comment about running for the Dem nomination was in relation to Armitage. Keeping this investigation going over the possibility that Armitage made a false confession is bollocks. It was trivial to corroborate with Novak and it looks like that was done. Is he merely playing the fall guy now? What's the difference? This whole thing is just incredible, made doubly so by the fact that the original alleged crime was complete bullshit all along. Only in America.

Don't hijack the thread, this isn't about the democratic primaries.

From the end of that article: "The Americans have become harder to target domestically, so they are trying to widen the field of action and strike their allies," Now that's not something you hear every day. I thought we were supposed to be endangered by Bush Jr's war. I guess that quote won't make it into the Times or air on CNN. Heck, if we're endangering the French let's invade a few more countries.

Yea but only in relation to Armitage downplaying this active intent to disclose this and get it published. It absolutely damns Armitage, wtf was he doing both then and all this time in the interim. It's just perplexing. What was he thinking while the investigation was in full force and did Fitzgerald really tell him to stay quiet, and why did he in fact stay quiet until now (oh.. and wtf was Fitzgerald thinking? I mean Geeze!!). This could have all blown over in a week if Armitage had said it was him from the start, and he could have done that before Fitzgerald was even appointed. It's totally FUBAR on so many levels. I wonder when he's going to announce his run for the Democratic nomination. One thing has emerged, Plame & hubby are disgracefully politicized and it affected their judgement in looking for the yellowcake connection. This was never JUST about Joe going over and having tea, no analysis uses a single data point and Christopher Hitchens has absolutely eviscerated their bogus position and established for all but the most myopic that Saddam was shopping for ore. At lease Armitage is gettind sued by Plame too, as if they have any real complaint, they're shot from obscurity and have milked it ever since.

http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/

You're certainly blind to the crimes of Hezbollah.

Showing your true colours Darius?

Wire brush & detol!

WASHINGTON D.C., Sept 12 (Reuters) - (Tuesday, September 12, 2006) during a press conference, several members of the house select committee on gluteus maximus announced that after lengthy investigations, congress had finally found it's ass with both hands and a map, however in an embarrassing turnaround the committee chairman had to later withdraw the claim. They will resume their investigations on Wednesday in closed session and hope that a newly acquired flashlight will aid them in their quest.

I suspect you're thinking of the B-25 that struck the Empire State building in 1945. I don't think thermite would blow so much as burn unless it was confined. It's highly exothermic, so it'd melt steel it came in contact with, it's used in welding. You'd need a lot of it piled in strategic points above beams and of course the beams are coated in fire resistant foam. Someone looking at the twin towers and saying they've found traces of thermite and it's evidence of sabotage is a retard. It's typically an aluminium and rust mix and it burns to produce iron and aluminium oxide. There's no mystery, we saw the planes, we saw the fire, heck the architect was watching the TV waiting for them to fall.

Get back to us in a couple of years and we'll see what you think then. It wouldn't do your newfound love much good if a whole bunch of safe paying veteran customers quit because they couldn't enjoy their sport.

A fun movie but it really screwed with the history of the original gunpowder plot, which was underpinned by ambitions/fantasies of a Catholic sectarian coup. Interestingly the explosion would almost certainly have happened if one of the conspirators hadn't tried to warn a friend, but the subsequent uprising seems like a silly pipedream that was never going to materialize. Kinda invocative of the The Turner Diaries and the derranged notions of McVeigh types who think that a revolution can be precipitated by an action like the Oklahoma City bombing. The comments in some of the supplementary materials on the DVD in particular those of John Hurt were quite brainless and disgusting.

It all fits in with current events. When they switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN it'll start spitting out black holes at a rate of about one a second. If they don't evaporate into Hawking radiation they will start to orbit inside the Earth gaining mass, if they do we'll only have to worry about the exposed singularities. It could take the intervening 6 years for the orbiting miniblack holes to gain enough mass to runaway, in the mean time we'll all be on borrowed time and just not know it. Quick call Art Bell. I'm sure it'll all work out for the best. P.S. I sure hope Hawking doesn't have to give back his playboy collection.

Don't be too woried about your final choice you won't go wrong with either of these. With what should be a light wing loading your experience with these canopies will be different from some of the posters. After jumping each of these as rentals I had a preference for a safire 2 but a used pilot became available and I got that instead and I'm happy with it. The only issue I have getting new from Aerodyne is resale, I purchased a new triathlon from them and a year later they dumped a load of brand new triathlons on the market for $750 with a lot of publicity just before I wanted to sell mine. I'd be very reluctant to buy new from Aerodyne again after that, although there's a lot of happy Triathlon owners out there now.

Hopefully you'll learn not to equate worry with curiosity & getting input from more experienced jumpers, which is all I was doing.

Why does being a physics prof lend any extra credibility to his opinions on structural engineering and demolition? Science != engineering. I think I answered that at the end of the same sentence you quoted. Maybe it doesn't seem like it to you given your own position & specialties but you're in a small minority. Personally I'd expect at least some trained objectivity and better judgement from a physics professor. The true impact though comes from the perception of people who listen to his bullshit and aren't equipped to really understand the distinction and get sucked into his reality warp field. I'd personally hope and expect that the average physics professor would in fact be more capable than most of commenting rationally on a collapse like this. My own training is in architecture which included structural engineering and a lot of the calculations w.r.t loading, moments on beams and failure was pretty well physics based, with most of the non-physics engineering coming from knowledge based tables & safety margins (design aside).

In the context of my question I don't really consider 1 & 2 failures and most of 3 wouldn't be either. I'm really just looking for opinions on the reliability of the system in an unimpeded stable deployment vs. a main. Hence my question about reserves and base. I guess it's practically impossible to get these numbers because of 1, 2 & 3 and the low statistical sampling & reportage. Maybe it doesn't much matter since these other factors dominate.

Eye of the beholder, there's nothing wrong with any of the stuff in those videos. That was Najaf during combat and all I see are guys fighting and risking their lives. The only shots fired from the helo were at dirt in the middle of nowhere. Seems like a lot of ignorant people want to project their issues and assumptions on what guys risking their lives do for training, on patrol and in combat even when there's absolutely nothing to suggest any wrongdoing anywhere in those videos.

The loudest one?

The problem is it's just a string of ill-founded assertions, it's pure bunk. The most serious problem here is unfortunately that he's a professor of physics and that lends credibility to his bullshit for no reason that an appeal to his own authority. There are teams of structural engineers including the original architect (who I've seen discuss the design limits of the fire control system and why it couldn't cope) that believe they understand the nature of the collapse and there's nothing much mysterious about it. For example after the metal weakened and the collapse was initiated the impact loads would have been absolutely massive inside the building. The sheer impracticality of planting explosives alone is a far bigger disconnect from reality with the conspiracy nuts that any of the alleged inconsistencies with his flawed views on what the collapse should have looked like. It's depressing to see how cynical peopel can be and how wilfully idiotic they will be to support that cynicism. For me this professor and others like him represent the epitome of how low the intellectual mind can sink and it's a disgrace that the guy can call himself a physicist or a scientist.

So is there an estimate for the reserve malfunction rate, not counting entanglements from horseshoes, PITs & bad chops? If it's about 1/750 to 1/1000 for a main what is it for a reserve with a clean pull. What's the safety benefit from all that extra care & rigging regulation? Also, can anyone guesstimate the malfunction rate on BASE jumps not counting off headings & problems that would be less critical on a skydive?

He shoulda spent $10 on ebay before running his mouth off.

Well said, this really is a spectacularly lucid summary of the mess that everyone outside Northern Irelend should read before spouting off about freedom fighters peace or any of the other bollocks you hear. You have no idea of the number of Americans who have (or had) bullshit romantic notions of freedom fighters in Northern Ireland fighting oppression from the English, as if England wants anything to do with the millstone that NI is. Some Yanks used to have no trouble funding terrorism when it was murdering innocents in NI and the UK. Did they know that they were in the same camp as Ghadaffi who after Reagan bombed Tripoli with England based bombers sent ship loads of weapons including large quantities of semtex to NI as a reprisal. PanAm 103 was just the tip of the iceberg. I've got a peace plan; GIVE Northern Irelend to America! When both sides start bombing the stock exchanges and subways in NY at least they'll finally be able to find the place on a map.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=476951

That looks like it is in reference to canopies which are made from very thin material. Webbing is thick and of a different construction so the material is not exposed to sunlight in the same way. You cannot take that information and apply it to harnesses.