dorbie

You don't even need to be in the door to get yelled at. If you're not hovering over the group exiting in front of you some people will start yelling at you. Pretty sad really. I like to give them a bit of space and immediately move up as the leave, just what I was encouraged to do when I was learning (emphasizing gc on some aircraft for students) The guys in front of you are saying "give us plenty of separation, at least each 8 seconds" almost invariably at some DZs, and the guys after you are yelling at you to get in the door before the first group has exited. Thanks to this thread I'll be feeling a lot less pressue to do something I'm not happy doing. P.S. and my last glance at the green light before I exit on solos also really gets some people animated.

Not really most of not all popular video codecs are based on spatial blocks of data, when the data rate can't represent all the information in the video you start to see block noise, i.e. the high frequency information needed to make adjacent blocks merge into eachother tends to get dropped leaving visible blocks of color or visible edges in a block structure. The more motion and changing information in the video the greater the required data rate for good picture quality. When the video stops changing (the camera & picture stops moving) even with a slow data rate a codec can 'catch up' and fill in the high frequency information. All sorts of stuff can cause this at many points in your workflow, a crappy codec, poor codec encoding w.r.t. motion vectors etc, low quality settings, connection integrity, data corruption, but when shit happens it's likely you'll see blockiness. Figuring out why is another story. P.S. it's definitely true that even with the same codec the quality of the compression software matters a lot. There's a lot of on the fly analysis with video that goes into encoding it well, one software product will not perform the same as another even at the same data rate, there's a real art to encoding video well. Decoding is pretty much set (although again if there isn't enough horsepower to decode shortcuts can be made but that's purely a performance/optimization issue).

You may be better buying it the airport if you can.

Your tax dollars at work: http://www.fema.gov/kids/games/tsunami/

All part of the training, you can mix them just make sure you do the skydiving first.

Souls have mass?

if you are colorblind it does not mean you can not see the light...just means you dont know if it is a red light...or a green light. I have had increasing difficulty with this as years go on. not a big deal, they just tend to blend some times with lighter shades of both colors. Yup, but red-green color blindness is only the most common type. There are other types of color blindness. There's even a rare enhanced color vision posessed by some females where they can tell more colors that normal because they have cones that sense an additional spectral band (no I'm not making this up).

Sounded like it had motivational potential right up to the irrelevant physics factoids. At that point it went downhill fast, then it picked up a bit but not enough. I feel demotivated after wasting 4 minutes of my life listening... only kidding

I agree but she was playing to a different audience. Her target constituency was thinking "At last someone finally asking the tough questions.", when of course she was just belching rhetorical accusations she knew the answers to anyway. These committee public sesisons are like Soviet show trials.

You're funny, dude! The French were indeed the only ones in the world trying to avoid the war. Actually, i suspect a good number of the insurgents are French. Probably the same ones who shot Kennedy! Well the TotalFinaElf oil concessions gave them a good reason to avoid war at any cost because they stood to lose a lot. As for your bizarre connections it's difficult to tell where your comments stop and your sarcasm begins. You're the guy who thinks Saddam was starting a subterranian submarine fleet when he burried the MiGs so I know exactly how to rate your opinion on serious issues.

Yea frustrating and unbelievable, but if you drove down your highstreet tomorrow and some troops with guns shone spotlights on your car and started gesturing at you what would you do? Let's say you watch al Jazeera and are scared by the propaganda or maybe you think they're insurgents. Stressed people don't have an understanding of the dangers of not stopping for guys with assault rifles.

Are you saying that the missiles weren't found before the invasion? They were mentioned in Hans Blix's report to the UN before the invasion. I specifically remember the news reports and video of tours of additional missiles (and their manufacturing facilities - form memory) as Saddam & the French scrambled to avert an invasion. The whole thing rang hollow for me because it was a smoking gun with no way of telling if there were more. What issue do you have with this? It was all over the news at the time. As for the ends justifying the means, the means were justified and the ends are good.

Ahhh so according to you Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9-11 or the Taliban harboring al Qaida and it was all just a cynical attempt to build a pipeline. When it's not about oil it's about moving oil LOL. So again by your reckoning their leader is a puppet we managed to persuade the Afghan people to vote for!!

Come on, Kerry or Boxer will have better soundbites when running against Rice for prez when they can say they opposed her nomination. It's all preamble for when they attack her performance in 4 years time.

You're very confused about covert ops. Since our enemy has repeatedly committed war crimes (that you preffer to ignore or even justify) to attack our troops, I don't expect any man to stand at a checkpoint for me and let anyone drive up ignoring commands to halt. That would be an unreasonable expectation and would lead to many casualties, and inevitably result in American orphans that are just as tragic as Iraqi orphans when it comes to missing their parents.

The underlying point here is the reason you attacked this guy was to discredit his report and the only reason you wanted to discredit that report was it disagrees with your armchair thesis of Iraq = Vietnam. Because I pointed this out and supported him you implied that I support torture which even goes beyond the coverup you accused this guy of with no evidence. Your whole approach here is to throw enough mud and hope that it will stick so we'll just ignore the first hand account from a commander in the theatre & just watch the blow dried naysaying pundits on the gogglebox.

Yep this is tragic, but I know why this happens. It happens because illegal combatants drive up to checkpoints disguised as civilians and detonate explosives killing and maiming our troops. It's tragic that our soldiers must use extreme caution and resort to measures like shooting the occupants of an approaching car in a split second decision between life and death.

Eh? I'm just fine, here's the quote in context (should have really said quoted out of context not edited my post):

I refuse to get distracted by non sequiturs. If you want to discuss torture then start a thread on it, if you want to redefine torture you can try there. Implying that you have the moral high ground in attacking a serviceman because he disagrees on the success of the campaign by equating pointing out your unreasonable attacks to supporting torture is disgraceful. Yes you did and the post is there to prove it. Here you repeat the same accusation while denying that it impugns his character, I read your post and I read this one and you arguing that black is white doesn't alter your attempt to impugn this guy's character. Your conduct is shameful and pointing that out doesn't mean I support torture. Dude I know, you edited my post to delete the CBS reference again.

So I guess when all those other jumpers saw the first guy land one way then everyone land the other they were supposed to land flying into traffic or get a demerit

Whether I support them or not and what constitutes torture and whether we should line illegal combatants up against a wall and shoot them has nothing to do with you impugning the character of this soldier because his first hand account of the war disagrees with your armchair theories. At the very least I'd give him the benefit of the doubt, all you have even as you try to implicate him is some conjecture about flying someone out of the country that you're not even sure about. You should be proud. It was a partial reference to CBS, w.r.t. what you've been posting we've had exchanges on this very issue so of course I know what you've been posting.

Great! Can't wait to see the Iraqi Navy's flying submarines. But what about the Iraqi detainees' boobies? Since, as you knowingly claimed, that's what I'd rather be staring at. Yea right they were dirt submarines, not MiGs buried for concealment and waiting to be unearthed and used in the future

Ahh good one, impugn the character of someone over there fighting for us because he wrote an article that disagrees with your Iraq = Vietnam thesis. We should just ignore all information we receive that isn't from CBS and we can live in absolute assurance that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket and we should get out now because it's hopeless.

Unfortunately SH was allowed these Migs. What he wasn't allowed was set out by UNSCOM. Specifically: (http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/General/basicfacts.html) The only 'smoking gun' I could find were the missiles that in tests went 114 miles which is over the 94 mile range limit. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2755851.stm That's a mandate for WMD inspections. They were buried because they were in contravention of the ceasefire agreement. I know about the missiles, but these were actually discovered before the invasion at the 11th hour. Saddam made some show of disclosing them after they were found but I like this new concept of being in marginal violation what a joke. He was making missiles that could deliver warheads to other nation's cities, that's the point and it's why the limits were imposed. You don't make a missile by accident, it's a weapons delivery system and one which Saddam had a penchant for using against innocent populations both in Iran and Israel. This gets back to the central issue of hindsight. When you find a bunch of missiles at the last minute in treaty violation after years of denials and lengthy frustrated searches it's not prudent to walk away and assume there are no more. It conforms to a pattern of behavior, as do the buried aircraft wrapped in preserving plastic. It's also telling the way you split hairs to defend Saddam's actions even when theyre' no hairs to be split, the missiles were illegal, yet you stretch legal definitions in an attempt to indict Bush, for example w.r.t (and it's just one of many instances) illegal combatants and the Geneva Convention.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/tblankley.htm Where's the outrage at this leak? We had hysteria over the outing of the fact that one woman was a CIA operative, here we have the endangerment of an entire operation as it happens (by the reporter's own account) risking their lives and undermining the effort in the process.