I have some experience with these barriers- Every American base in Iraq uses thousands of them for building fortification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

You'd usually find a ring of them around a building, two deep, with an additional course laid on top of that. They are, as the wiki article mentions, "one of the less heralded life- and labor-saving devices of war" (among other uses).

I felt pretty safe having them around.

-b

You're kidding, right? You can't turn on the tv without seeing stories and ads about investing in gold. Even glen beck is hawking gold and you cam hardly call him obscure.

This aircraft will not be man-rated. That shaves off years. Then consider that Boeing has decades of cutting-edge research already done and ready to apply.

I work in aerospace. Give me four years and I'll build you an airplane myself. Give me four years and a team of some of the finest engineers on the planet and I'll give you an aircraft that can stay aloft for five years.

This thing will not be another f-22. Even if it was, those problems are solved now anyways. This project is simply a matter of optimizing certain parameters well beyond what is considered typical. Just like the sr71, the a380, or the f-22.

-b

You're not the first person to equate 'permit' with 'bribe'.

I'm not a big fan of paying for permits, but I understand why they exist.

You're a poacher unless you buy a hunting/fishing/trapping license.
You're in violation of most city ordinances unless you purchase a building permit to work on your house.
Where I live you need to purchase a license to buy handguns and 'assault rifles'.
Want to camp in a state/national park? Need to buy a permit.

Those are just a few examples I can think of where you need to pay officials for the privilege of doing something. Are you seriously saying that you consider a camping permit a bribe?

The logic behind this guy's proposal seems shaky, but the issuance of permits for privileges is not a new thing.

-b

I have had to go through that process as well, and it was incredibly frustrating. People get tagged in photos they aren't actually in all the time. So I had to pass the test by guessing which friend was tagged in a picture of a snowmobile or an infant.

I don't know if it's just my friends or if it's commonplace- either way, the system is broken.

-b

This whole story reminds me of a dirty campaign trick from a few years back- I'm not going to figure out which campaign or which election, since that's not important to this example.

Basically what happened was that someone went around stapling up fliers all over poor/wrong color/undesirable neighborhoods exhorting them to vote- but the date on the flier was the day after the real election. When I read about this, the events in question were recent enough to make me pretty angry, and I brought it up at the break table one day. Someone said, "If a person can't figure out what day the election is on, do you really want them voting?"

Someone had the humorous idea of redirecting visitors to a violent DC neighborhood. Probably thinking, "If someone can't figure out the difference between a violent neighborhood and the lincoln memorial, do you want them rallying?" I think in Beck's case the answer would be YES, YES that is exactly who we want, so I can see this being turned into a HUGE national news story as FOX uses this for free advertising and for the sympathy angle. The other networks will pick it up as 'Beck accuses liberals of trying to trick his fans' and that the pure-as-the-driven-snow liberals are shocked- SHOCKED- that anyone would accuse them of underhanded tactics (at least tactics that aren't embarrassingly obvious and transparent from the beginning).

This situation is breaking right as I plan a vacation to europe, and that process is beginning to take on a somewhat frantic flavor...

-b

I have found the ideal way to learn geography (besides going to war*):

At work we have a sealant mixing table where you'll have a captive set of eyes for at least five minutes while the machine does its thing. Someone decided to put up a 3x4 world map directly in front of the worker's station.

So now, for five minutes, 3 or 4 times a day, I get to stare at the world. You start kind of centered in front of Cape Goodenough, from which point you can sort of wander north and east looking for interesting names. At some point we'll have to shift the map to the right a bit, since the neck can get sore from staring towards the americas.

*Oh and I feel I should point out, despite chagrin, that a few of my brothers-in-arms couldn't find themselves on a map when they're deployed. I work with one guy who- in the same breath- talked about deploying to Curaçao where he drank, yes, Curaçao (but pronounced curakow). He couldn't make the connection that the country he was in was spelled the same way as the drink he was ordering. And no one had corrected him in ~10 years.

-b

For the record, the game- and it is a standalone game, not an expansion- is called Fallout: New Vegas.

And if Bethesda was behind it, the radio signal would be Chinese, not Russian.

I'll go away now.

-b

While there are several versions throughout the history of radio, the most common phonetic/spelling alphabet these days is the NATO phonetic alphabet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAO_spelling_alphabet

We still use it in the military for standardized communications. For more specialized applications, you might hear the letter 'A' as 'acer' or 'T' as 'talon' to let the listener know that you are using a specific identifier (bay A, truck T, etc.) instead of spelling a word.

The transmission seems to follow the standard russian spelling template. Make of that what you will; I just thought I'd get you started.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_spelling_alphabet

-b

I had to read this a few times before I figured out that you *weren't* talking about sex drive and childmaking.

You want zombies, you should check out your local dive bar around closing time.

That would explain why it seemed so easy to jump *out* of the airplane at that altitude.

You are right on. Wikipedia confirms this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization

Although to be honest, altitudes around 7,000' aren't that bad. I've been in aircraft with the doors open above 15,000' without noticing anything except my ears popping. I'm not sure I could comfortably jog at that altitude but then again that's not something you typically do on an airplane.

I've spent countless hours on military cargo aircraft (that were sealed like a screen door), flying at cruising altitude, without noticing anything. The only weird part is walking around a compartment that's twice as big as my house and few miles over the atlantic.

-b

You could do a study of files hosted on Rapidshare and conclude that Rapidshare is primarily used for piracy.

-b

That article is old. The dutch ships have been working in the gulf for a while now.

http://www.examiner.com/x-325-Global-Warming-Examiner~y2010m6d15-Dutch-Skimmers-now-working-in-Gulf

-b

fwiw, the case in question only covers the circumference of the phone. It adds a few mm to the x and y measurements, nothing to the z. So your thin phone is still thin.

-b