nathaniel

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Posts posted by nathaniel

  1. Yes, I concede point #1 was the Straw Man tactic. Good on you for catching me :P

    About bombs / parachutes the best reference I've found so far is http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/index.html . It's not complete but it has lots of information there. It shows submunitions that have something that I'm not sure I would call a parachute on the back, could reasonably be described as such. I don't dispute that the US has used cluster bombs in Iraq--it surely has--I dispute that the display of a used cluster bomblet implies it was used against civilians, and I dispute that it adds credibility to this guy's account.

    In the section about apache helicopters, the author is using his own words to describe the scene. Either the words were not his and he should have used a quote, or they were his and he is wrong. Journalism aside, my point is that the story is dubious whether they are the author's words or the deputy's.

    When you say you couldn't tell one helicopter from another, does that mean you would therefore feel comfortable describing one as an Apache? Of course not, and that's part of the problem imo.

    I think we agree that pro- or anti- much of what has been written so far about this conflict should be read with a generous serving of skepticism.

    nathaniel

    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  2. One of the easiest ways to pass off false statements is to intermingle them with true statements and observations.

    Fortunately in this case the author makes some specious claims that are easy to catch:

    1. helicopters in general dont usually drop bombs, they're too slow and dont fly high enough to safely overfly targets. they shoot rockets and guns laterally instead.

    2. apache helicopters don't disgorge troops, they're 2-seaters

    3. you don't have to be very resourceful to come across US-made bomb fragments in baghdad these days, or to transport them from where they were used to other locations

    4. when US operations go "spectacularly wrong" the iraqi military has been desperate to put them on TV, witness POWs and that downed helicopter from last week

    5. the us military has cited cases of short flights of iraqi aircraft. even had they not, it is a positivist fallacy to assert absence of evidence implies evidence of absence ( edit: like point #4 :ph34r:)

    nathaniel

    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  3. brand new! new to me, anyway =)

    sabre 150
    pd r 143
    javelin

    nathaniel

    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

    PC030179-sm.JPG

  5. cough cough *hillside strangler*

    right on the way to Chicagoland skydiving...and even at 8:00AM on sunday morning 290 slows down on this strip

    Quote


    "Consider the onramps coming onto the eastbound lanes of I-290 from the West. IL-38 is a short expressway (unmarked as such on many maps, trust me, it exists) that runs from IL-83 till this interchange. At the end of this short spur, the left hand lane becomes a 2 lane ramp, the right hand lane once again roosevelt road, with access to I-294 S (there is no northbound access here, from any direction, for at least 3 miles, with no signs directing you how to get there... Go figure. There is also no westbound access to I-290).
    "This 2 lane ramp drops one lane (-1 lane for the interchange) and 250 yards later picks up a lane from I-294 Northbound. This lane drops shortly before joining the remnant of I-88 (-2 lanes for the interchange) After merging with I-88, this lane too leaves, and 100 yards later, one of I-88's lanes inexplicably leaves as well (-4 lanes for the interchange) leaving a 2 1/2 car wide shoulder on the right, a 1 car wide shoulder on the left and a single travel lane. This last lane is dumped unceromoniously onto the LEFT lane of I-290 with no acceleration zone (-5 lanes for the interchange).
    "Did I mention that I-290 East is 2 lanes here? Also, this interchange is only about 1 mile long, meaning that some how, SEVEN lanes of traffic must reduce itself to TWO lanes in less than 1 mile? " [7Remy, Jason. More Highway Stuff. Personal email, March 26, 1999.]



    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  6. Found this image from a link on usenet...

    Quote


    > the classic method (red adair style) is using a lot of water and dynamite,
    > but is pretty slow. a hungarian team has developed a better and cheaper
    > method: they mounted two mig(jet)-engines on a t34 chassis and used them to
    > blow out the fire with a special water/foam mixture. proved to be a very
    > good method in kuwait.


    Its inherent fault was that, IIRC, they could only operate both engines
    together at about 30% thrust. Any attempt to increase the thrust usually
    resulted in it burning out the brakes and taking off down the road at
    considerable speed. Its nickname was 'Saddam Husseins Getaway Car'


    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

    firefighting_001.jpg

  7. not a runner anymore, but used to be... trying to gain weight to improve my freefall =)

    it depends on what you want to focus on, sprinting or endurance.

    for endurance training anytime is a good time for an 8mi run, if you are well hydrated and it's not too hot / cold. don't do it every day in a row of course... and don't feel like you have to go the whole way if you twist your ankle or get a cramp or something. no point in turning a small injury into a big one.

    shoes will last several months...maybe a whole year but that's probably pushing it as far as the stink factor is concerned. after 9 months or so go to the shoe store and try on a new pair. when you put your old shoes back on if they feel like cardboard it's probably time =) some people (myself included) prefer to run with stiffer shoes, if you count yourself in this group then you can probably go a little longer

    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  8. nonono...there's more calories in the buns than in the beef.

    no joke

    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  9. OK I'm this ---> <--- close to buying a used rig, but the seller has asked for payment in the form of a cashier's check drawn on a local bank (local to him).

    Can you order a cashier's check by phone or do banks make you show up in person? Since the seller is in a different state I don't think we have any banks in common... the national ones all seem to have their branches > 100 mi away from his zip code. d'oh!

    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  10. I don't want to antagonize anyone, but I think your comment "i shudder to think what may happen one day when all of the drug users are in office" is a bit out of line...it seems to me a an appeal to consequences with insults up its sleeve.

    Intoxicants like any other good have positive and negative qualities. I mean good in the economic sense and positive and negative in the in the moral sense.

    The threshold at which you decide the negative qualities outweigh the positive qualities is ultimately a personal decision, though it may be shaped by family, religion, society, etc as are most personal decisions...it sounds like most intoxicants are not a good to you at all...

    But that does not mean that people renounce their citizenship when they consume intoxicants, legal or illegal. The notion that they do is absurd.

    I think that to rationally pursue this debate we must accept that intoxication (or abstinence) does not fundamentally alter a person's humanity.

    Nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  11. Hold on a minute. That's a tautology.

    drugs are illegal because they are dangerous
    drugs are dangerous because they are illegal

    The black market is a rough place. Open, regulated markets are not. Alcohol was once illegal and controlled by violent gangs, now it is legal and controlled by govenments and industries (ie, with a minimum of killing).

    What reason can you give that pot, opium, cocaine, heroin, etc would be any different from alcohol?

    The US has the best agriculture in the world, we could give any 3rd world drug baron a run for his money when it comes to farming. Pure economics.

    The same way that state lotteries have by and large made Numbers rackets a thing of the past...give the customer a better deal and you'll drive the competition out of business. No need to encourage the cycle of violence and put people in jail (and in hospitals and cemetaries), just make them unemployed.

    Nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  12. It's amusing to me when legislators frame their laws in a vacuum, like when Indiana tried to make it state law that pi = 3.2 . (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html)

    Cannabis plants don't care about rights, they don't care about human interference, they are weeds...

    I can understand regulating consumption, even if I don't agree with it...but cultivation? That's vain.

    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  13. Amen.

    A coworker of mine likes to say, "don't shit where you eat". If you want to smoke, ingest, snort, inject or whatever, be courteous and do it in a way that minimizes the adverse effects on your neighbors.

    That means off the DZ until it's legal [:/]

    nathaniel

    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  15. when I was in college (egad, junior year 4 years ago) a bunch of guys in my dorm and I scrounged up our old 386's and 486's and brought them into the lounge and set them up in front of the couch. they made perfect nintendo and super nintendo emulators...so we could all sit on the couch watch tv and play super mario world all at onceB|

    nathaniel

    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  16. Like he said, if you could somehow convince people to use more descriptive titles maybe when you first search you get a list of titles and then you can pick which ones to display in full all at once with a check list or something...

    Nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  17. oh...I'm in the final stages of making a purchase...ie, no. I'm this --> <-- close to ordering a rig but I'm waffling on what main to put in it. I'm between hornet (new), safire-2 (new, but getting less likely) and sabre (used) all in the 150 ft variety. I'm settled on a new container due to my shape (tall and thin). I plan on getting my act together by the end of the month.

    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  21. I think I'd be looking at a Honda 250 or something simple like that.

    Up here in Chicago there's a bit of a chill in the winter, and in the spring and fall too :|...how much stuff do you have to put on to ride in 40-50 F mornings? It's ~ 60 mi to the nearest DZ from me.

    Nathaniel

    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  23. Do you ride your motorcycle to the DZ? How do you carry your rig? What kind of bike? How far is it to the DZ?

    Never rode a motorcycle myself...but curious.

    nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

  25. It seems impossible to talk about racial discrimination without making all kinds of prejudicial assumptions... I am amused by the way people (eg Bush) get sucked into racist terms, tho in this case my perception is with yours, Bushie seems to have gotten this one right on principle.

    IMNSHO admission should be merit-based and correlated only with academic factors...introducing artificial bias into a system to correct for errors is by essence prejudicial and hypocritical. Race, date of birth, sex, religion, etc are factors determined entirely or almost entirely at birth...it is just not fair to take from people in one category to give to people in another.

    Isn't it obvious that adding racial bias to a system won't decrease the amount of racial bias in the system? The way to address racial bias is to remove it at the source, ie, not to jimmy the numbers until it looks ok.

    Nathaniel
    My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?