Major company? If you say so.

Meanwhile, visit their site and let them know what you think about them.

I told them they are a bunch of goober smooching douches, and left the link to this discussion.

You are correct, that the evidence is rather flimsy. Hence, my decision that we need conclusive evidence. All we have is an accumulation of circumstantial evidence so far, and that provided by "our side" is no better than that provided by "their side".

But, in all of this, I keep coming back to the fact that a president was deposed, and another president installed - that president largely relying on some "irregular" forces who keep order in the realm. And, everywhere you look, are western investors who have financial interest in the region.

I remain quite suspicious of Kiev - although I'm not yet willing to state anything like "Kiev did it in an attempt to gain world support for a genocidal campaign in the east of the country." Not willing to commit myself to such a statement yet, but I'm leaning that way.

I'll match American propaganda with some Russian propaganda. Please, actually READ IT? Huh? Willya please?

http://21stcenturywire.com/201...

I can't say WHO shot that airliner out of the sky, because there is no CONCLUSIVE evidence yet. But, there's a helluva lot of circumstantial evidence that points at Kiev.

Do you have any idea why Kiev had fighter jets shadowing that airliner? Neither do I, but that's a question that needs to be answered. And, why did Kiev order the airliner to alter it's filed flight plan, flying a couple hundred miles north of the normal flight path?

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, and I'm pretty sure that some of those answers will be "Well, we've invested so much money into the Ukraine, we can't abandon the plan!"

Unfortunately not. What is going to happen is, a bunch of marketing clowns are going to latch onto that term, and publicize it far and wide before the year is out.

On this subject, you and I are in complete agreement. If I want an "experience", I'll put some music on, or a video, or a game. Almost nothing else on my computer should be an "experience" at all. Just serve up the information, and let me get to it, thank you very much. Didn't the world almost unanimously reject Clippy? Someone should have learned from Microsoft's mistake.

In fact, all of my posts that I have ever made on any Google service has been pseudonymous. I had an exchange of messages with Google over my names. They really, really, REALLY wanted to know my real name, and for me to use it on Google. I hemmed, and hawed, made some excuses, told a couple lies, and they weren't buying. My final message on the subject flat out stated that I've lived a long life, and in that time, I have made a lot of friends, and some enemies. Stated that I had NO INTENTION of putting my real identity online for those enemies to find. SOME OF THEM might just show up at my door, loaded for bear.

They stopped bothering me, and they never deleted my account - so, I guess that one or more decision makers decided I had given a pretty good excuse.

Never mind that the excuse is 80% or more bullshit. Of course I've made some enemies. But I don't really think that any of them would come shoot me. Or - - - - would they?

http://www.surfline.com/surf-s...

Two somewhat informative videos here - it's the best I got in a quick google.

The US was beginning to move in that direction several years back. My memory is a bit foggy - it seems like California was leading the way, and maybe a couple of New England states. Time frame would have been the latter half of the '90's. Then, 9/11/01 happened, and cops were given carte blanche. At some point, fleeing and evading the police was made a felony, so that a cop could just shoot to kill anyone who attempted to flee.

IMHO, giving chase is often justified - but no one can justify chasing a bad guy into and through a school zone, or a hospital zone at insane speeds.

The cop decided to take the risk of exceeding any given speed, not you. YOU are only guilty of the speed at which you were driving. The cop is entirely responsible for his own actions.

Question - have you never witnessed police speeding for mundane reasons? No siren, no lights flashing, they're just driving along. I've seen them fly through villages with speed limits of 35, doing double the speed limit.

Cops routinely break the law in most of the US, all on their own initiative.

You ain't very bright. I stated that they gave chase, not that you were running. I used 80 or 90 mph as an example, precisely because those speeds are only a little bit over the legal speed limits in many places. So, you meet a cop on the interstate, doing around 80 - in many places that is just ten mile over the speed limit. The cop drives across the median, does his U-turn, and gives chase. HE EXCEEDS 100 MPH, so he tells the judge that the "chase" exceeded 100 mph, in an effort to make the arrest sound much more serious than a similar arrest in a 35 mph zone.

As for "running away from the cops" - well, maybe I have done that. You don't do it in the family car though. And, "speeds over 100 mph" are meaningless terms on/in any vehicle capable of outrunning a police car. The term "speeds in excess of 175" might make sense then, except very, very, VERY few police cars are capable of that.

Youtube has a number of videos attributed to "Ghost Rider". You might find them interesting. Note that not all of those videos are of the "real" Ghost Rider, but some of the false attributions are as good as the real ones.

*sigh* I just wasted moderator points - just posting to negate the effects . . . .

Since I'm here, I'll point out that cops do the same thing on the ground. They chase you, maybe you're doing 80 or 90, but the cop exceeds 100 mph catching up to you. The police report states that the chase exceeded 100 mph, and the judge looks at that, and throws several books at you.

It would be great if cops were trustworthy.

"Did you consider the possibility that there really is something wrong with the part? Not everything is a false positive."

"So what? It isn't hard nor a skilled task. Train people to do it."

Well, DUHHHH! Maintenance and tooling has so many manhours available each week. They have so much work to do that they never catch up. You are suggesting that they have the added responsibility of TRAINING some clown off of the street how to do a moderately complex job? What world do you live in? It is the job of MANAGEMENT to hire and/or to train QUALIFIED PERSONNEL to perform QC tasks.

It is never the responsibility of tooling to fix the fool who cannot read a caliper - that is the job of either HR or the clowns in charge of QC.

No, none were making parts for us. The plant in Mississippi was kind of a sister plant to us - they made similar products, many of them going to the same customers. When that plant finally closed, their tools and equipment came to us, and we took over their production, in addition to our own. The products made on those machines weren't especially profitable, but we made some profit on them, whereas the management in Miss. consistently lost money on the same tools.

The plant in St. Louis was intended to feed us metal parts, but it never did. Damned near half of everything they sent us was out of spec, we rejected the stuff, and bought from another supplier instead. That plant was a money hemorrhage. The other plants were totally unrelated to our production, and I can't really say what they did, how, or why - all I know is that every time anyone mentioned money, or raises, we got speeches about all the plants always losing money, blah blah blah.

The discussion seemed to me to involve the concept of destroying an aircraft with a quadracopter. The idea was pooh-poohed because jets have multiple engines. I proved that not all jets have multiple engines.

If someone were intent on destroying an aircraft, why would he necessarily restrict himself to large commercial aircraft? I could easily set up a command post near an airport, put my copter in the air, and wait for a single engine craft to make a flyby, or try to land. If I'm really good, and really lucky, I crash the small jet, and it goes into another, larger jet, or into a fuel depot, or even into the boarding lobbies.

OR, I can hover around, waiting for an aircraft to take off, and nail it when it is pointed in the direction of a downtown area. Even a small jet can cause considerable damage if it crashes into a high rise office building.

OR, I can hang around a military base, and crash a jet taking off, bringing it down in rush hour traffic, similar to what happened outside Oceania Airbase in Virginia several years ago.

In the hands of an imaginative terrorist who thinks outside the box, this could be a very useful tool.

That is a common problem, nationwide today. When companies go bankrupt, it seldom has anything to do with the employees. That is especially true when there is no union to protect incompetent or lazy employees. Companies tank every day it seems - and management always cites problems caused by employees. That is true in high tech, low tech, and everything in between.

We just experienced a takeover. Call it hostile, or not - fact is, management ran the company into the ground in a number of ways. A decade of neglect in maintenance resulted in a number of machines that require overhauls costing nearly half of their new purchase price. The new owners certainly don't WANT to spend that money, but they are spending.

Quality control? The company's weakest point - we simply don't have people qualified to read micrometers or calipers. They find parts that don't guage, and immediately QC calls on maintenance and tooling to "fix it". Well - fuck me running - I can't fix an incompetent fool who can't read a precision measuring instrument! But, the new owners are almost as bad as the old - they won't HIRE qualified personnel to read those instruments! They seem to believe that a ten dollar employee off of the street can do the job of a thirty or fifty dollar trained and experienced person! The QC people aren't even the best of the people available - the jobs are put up for bid, and the people with the flappiest gums get the job. Bidding? Might as well just admit that nepotism rules, and not bother with the bidding process.

To put things in perspective - the old owners had plants in 5 different states. Each of the other plants consistently lost money. Our plant consistently MADE MONEY, despite mismanagement. Quarter after quarter, the accountants posted profits from our plant. In effect, we carried four other money losing plants for years. The owners could never bring themselves to unload the money losers, instead taking the profits we earned to shore up the other plants. They followed that policy until bankruptcy put them out of the game completely.

How much more incompetent can any group of managers be?