Piddle packs and packed lunches. Port-o-john & shower curtain for sit-down work. If we as a society require the kind of security that our leaders profess we need, then our airframe designers must make room for accommodating these features. They are good enough for C-130 aircrew.

Maybe not many are familiar with the 70V audio systems. Don't mod parent down or freak out about using 24AWG speaker line (phone, Cat 5, etc) without doing some research.

Check out 70V systems: hook up loads of speakers, no problem. Think drive-in movie theater, Navy 1MC, etc.

iTunes, Airport Express, and iPod Touch with (free) Remote app here. Works great, not particularly expensive. I'm not really contributing anything other than giving one more bit of anecdotal evidence that Apple delivers on usability.

I have been a subscriber to Armstrong OneWire for cable internet for the last 5 years and the bandwidth has not changed at all. You would think that the price would drop, but it has remained constant, too.

Where I live in Ohio there is no incentive to invest in BB networks. There is no real competition.

I was a language instructor as a SSgt in the USAF at the defense language institute Korean school in Monterey, CA. One of my students, an Army Special Forces SFC with Thai language experience (I have none), was participating in a creative role play involving numbers and vocabulary commonly used with numbers.

He put on his army trench coat (class b uniform day) stood in front of the class, and proceeded to act like a guy who sells watches on the street. His sales pitch (for a tv commercial, I guess) went fairly well until he started to give his 555-nnnn phone number in Thai rather than Korean.

The other students an I who had been concentrating keenly to figure out just what the hell the student SFC had been saying were totally taken by surprise by what we heard and a good laugh was had by all. The SFC was clearly working hard to communicate his free-form message (compared to many other lessons which concentrate on formatted language transactions such as greetings, weather reports, etc.), and it was quite a scene when he slipped into another language.

Good times.

According to TFA, Brown has been employed as a screener since 2002. How much has he already sold?

Are there more sophisticated screeners in organized crime?

I'm so disgusted we pay people to waste our time, harass us, and steal from us. I'm looking at you, dept. of homeland security and TSA. Go out and get productive jobs, you leaches.

Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

I recently build myself a new box with a 3000+ coupled with 1Gb Ram and a Radeon 9600 pro (i am a severe cheapskate). I am not a serious gamer and the standard performance is great and it ran HL2 flawlessly. It is truely a cheapskates delight.

Thanks for thinking of me, first. Have a great day.