Gopro has one if you're into that sort of thing. It's essentially just two gopros stuck together and synchronizing their video. That might work reasonably well if you don't mind dropping $800+ on Gopro equipment. That's tiny compared to what some A/V dudes spend, but our Gopros are much more likely to not come back from any given excursion. I've lost one already, in the air over a couple miles of farmer fields and golf courses.

There are some projects underway to adapt Gopro and other cameras to record 360 degree video for Occulus Rift users. I'm keeping an eye on those as a way to fulfill my lifelong dream of making someone wearing a VR Headset vomit. Heh heh heh.

Laying claim to all our copyrights. Rumor has it he was killed by a pack of rabid raccoons back in '06.

So you couldn't sue them for doing it to you, but they could sue you? Seems like a pretty one-sided law.

So then someone with an axe to grind and a bit of perl programming know-how could pretty much remove a porn studio from the internet using the same DMCA scorched-earth tactic that these studios are, getting links to all their pages removed from all the major search engines?

The contracts for those houses typically state that you can't sell the house unless the buyer agrees to be in the HOA, so you'd just not be buying that house. But it's not such a problem -- the real estate web sites list whether they're in HOAs or not, so you can just exclude the ones that are. There are plenty of good houses out there without having to get involved with the crab people.

Couple years ago when I was in the market, I looked at 11 houses in one day. Funnily, not a single one of them was in an HOA. I made sure of that. I got an awesome house in an awesome neighborhood -- there's a guy a block away who painted his house purple, and has a car that matches the color. Part of what gives the neighborhood its character is that we don't have to worry about a bunch of fucking crab people getting up in our shit. Maybe they should build a bunch of fucking crab people next to their tardis.

If enough people were to infiltrate the HOA, could the HOA vote to disband itself? That might be a fun hobby...

He would endorse that. In the movie Water World, Bill Gates pees into what appears to be a Mr. Coffee, gets what appears to be water out of it and drinks it.

:-P

They've got Master of Orion. Ok I'm just going to close up this story, walk away and pretend I didn't see it, before I go looking for Star Control and lose the next 4 months of my life to those games again.

Gadget wanted an upgrade anyway and it failing is just a convenient excuse. My current TV's a good example. It's a 42" CRT I got with a tax refund back in '99. It's an early HDTV that doesn't have HDMI connectors. I'm just waiting for it to die for the excuse to upgrade to a larger 1080p flat panel. The only reason I haven't already is I'd want to do my entire media platform in the living room, which is really more effort than I care to put in until I have to.

Oh, I totally agree. Maybe I didn't make that clear. I'm pretty sure Comcast would send a mail to my Comcast E-mail address, which I never check. There could be a dozen such notices in there right now for all I know. I'm pretty sure the court must feel the same way -- the notice from Comcast is not sufficient notification of a lawsuit. If they felt otherwise, they might then have dinged this guy. He had the drive recycled a couple months before receiving what the court considered to be an official notification.

The reason I thought he probably had evidence backing up the dates is the court seemed to accept them without a whole lot of argument. *shrug*

Basically it works out that he'd recycled the drive prior to being aware that he personally was being sued for copyright infringement. He also didn't run out and recycle all his drives as soon as he got a letter from Comcast saying that some sort of lawsuit was in progress. I assume the guy had some evidence to back up the dates in his claims. There's no discussion about whether they asked him for the backups he had or anything. In a nutshell, I wouldn't want to have to bet my ass on the court coming to the conclusion it did in any particular case.

Opportunistic end-to-end encryption was originally in the IPv6 Sec. Somewhere along the way it went missing. Along with the FreeSwan project which had it working pretty well for IPV4 a decade and a half ago.

They've made some decisions recently that have surprised me. The whole letting the gays get married thing, I didn't really see that coming. IIRC they've also consistently said that police can't stop private citizens from taking video of them in public places. But I still hold the cynical view that they'll always come down on the side of law enforcement, even if the decision is in blatant contradiction to the constitution and standing law. I guess we'll see.

Yeah, I've heard other people recommend the crossfire/2 for people looking to move from a Sabre1/150 to a Cross-braced 150 performance canopy. At those wing loadings even harness input is significant and you need to fly your openings. I might never get there. I seem to be happy enough with a slow ride on a Safire/2 230. I could see jumping this canopy until it falls apart and then possibly getting another 230. I kind of like being able to go to brakes and watch all the other canopies sink under me.

Dead air exits out of hot air balloons are a blast. Did it once and I'm hooked. I can see why the base jumpers like that. I'm trying to avoid getting into base, though. Seems like everyone at the dropzone knows someone who died, and the story almost always starts "Yeah, he was a great guy. He went off to do a base jump..." There are a more ways to die doing a base jump. Off heading opening into a cliff seems to be the big one.

I've done 300 jumps now and I'm still happy to fly a Safire2/230 loaded at 1.1 to 1. For folks who've never jumped out of a plane, you divide your exit weight by the square footage of the parachute for your wing loading. The larger that number is, the faster and more responsive the parachute will be. Wing loading neighborhood of 1 to 1 is like driving a schoolbus. Getting up to the 1.3 - 1.5 range is much more sporty and allows for more... extreme... maneuvers. I've been keeping my wing loading less sporty. Initially that was because I wanted to focus on wingsuiting more than canopy flight. Later on I realized I just love to be in the air no matter how I'm doing it, and the slower canopy gives me more hang time. There's no need to be in a big hurry to downsize unless you really want to. I met a guy the other day who's had his front riser loops modified so he can get more leverage on them, and who swoops a 280 square foot canopy that way.

Eloy is freaking awesome. You'll like it. I want to head down there soon again. Maybe in March, when Team Fly Like Brick will be down there.

Wingsuiting's an interesting discipline. At 0-100 jumps I was all gung ho about it. At 160 jumps when I was ordering my wingsuit (A Phoenix-Fly phantom 3) the reality of it started to kick in and I started to get nervous. I realized I was really going to do this. On my first Wingsuit jump, it was like being in AFF all over again. Here I was, flying to altitude, sitting right next to the plane's pilot in a goddamn STRAIGHT JACKET. Heh heh heh. That first flight felt remarkably natural but when I went to do my practice pulls I got unstable. I was dipping my left shoulder a bit when I was collapsing my wings. Being perfectly symmetrical is key. So come pull time (at about 5500 feet,) I do it again and my fingers slip off my hackey because I was trying to hold onto the wing, too. I spread my wings, got stable, let go of the wing and tried again and got it. But I dipped my shoulder again and found myself under canopy, spinning around and watching more line twists than I'd ever had before taking place. I had 12 or 13 by the time I stopped spinning. Checked my altitude, saw I was still at 4500 and the canopy was flying straight, so I unzipped my arms and started kicking to un-twist my lines. Checked again, found myself at 3000, looked around for the airport and realized I wasn't making it back. So I set up my pattern one field back and landed out. In other words, a very successful first jump on it!

No matter how your skydiving career goes, it will always be awesome! Enjoy the ride! Blue skies!