costard

You don't shoot low, Battlefront. We appreciate the effort.

Thanks Kuniworth, great stuff.

As for dancing for the Senile Chai's entertainment, I give you this vignette: A flatulent elephant, knee high boots and bloodstains on the floor. The Gnome giggling on his throne, his tonsure misplaced and his eyes bloodshot. Vassals and chain pullers wringing their hands as they try to take the whip from their master, a miasma of fear wafting from their persons and threatening to engulf the dancers. Sword wielding dervishes enter - they begin to carve up the dancers. The elephant scents the fear of the slaves, smells the taste of the whip. Trumpets, pirouettes and reaches. The chain is pulled: the Gnome transmogrifies into a busted flush.

Damned with faint praise - who would want to be liked by Michael? And you can keep your criminal elements, thankyou, we want no part of you at all. We're trying to maintain a standard (why, every other week we arrange for Stuka to be out of the country, spreading his version of goodwill amongst our undeserving neighbours). There's no place like Oz. And if you arrive here via tornado, wearing red high heels, well, you'll fit right in. In Sydney, at least. Good luck to you.

Here's a good example of what you're up against in the market. Note the use of early glimpses of trading prices and volumes given out for a "small" fee, and the payment of further fees for the largest volume of trades. The game is rigged. Forget about the fundamentals of investment and capital, this is a casino, pure and simple. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Is that Bubbles?

It's going to be a bugger to use. Take a sight, get a range, offset for range (presumably automatic), offset for airburst (mostly vertical, but a horizontal offset would be handy to get someone just around a corner), allow for windage...

Yup. About the only advice I can give is avoid mention of spots on your dick. Didn't work for me. Hang on, you say he is very sure - then why does he need assistance?

So we can turn a "hull down" tank into a fully exposed one!? BF, you need to model this one! Scenario designers will need to include jump ramps, tho'.

You pullin' my prawn, mate? Stone the flamin' crows, they call him Lightning Boo, famed for the alacrity of his wit. Maybe he needs to be well oiled to rise to his past best - drier than a dead dingo's Derrick, are ya?

I know I have little credibility for analysis of this set of circumstances, and a penchant for exaggeration and drama in my writing (I should have gone for a job writing scurrilous pamphlets) - but here's an example of what gets me ranting: from the New York Times, a "liberal" rag as far as I can tell: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/business/19dimon.html?partner=rss&emc=rss followed by And I'm the ****ing tooth fairy. He either asks us to believe that he's stupid, in which case why would we show any interest in what he says, or he honestly believes we're stupid - which is probably the case, but hardly likely to be better received for being so carefully pointed out. It could be that the NYT editors are cleverer than I give them credit for, and that this is just the American version of irony, extremely deep and quite, quite black, but somehow I doubt it.

Boo Radley, I bask in your praise. Such a compliment you pay to class me with such wit as your own, and other contributors to this here Peng Challenge. Else none of you have any excuse whatsoever for the tripe that gets posted here. 'cept for lobotomies - now there I might cross the bounds of good taste: I apologise to those of you suffering from having had most of your grey matter removed (Michael, Stuka et al.) Look on the bright side, you can't suffer any more for having read this.

Oh Gnome, thou knowest for certain that my ability lacks, yet only in stifling the menstrual flow of woman, the only proof of God's exercise in art, his every attempt at the creation of beauty. For if that be my failing, then I must be the most virile example of a man to walk this circling rock; and if it be my only failing thus described, why then, should I do other than return praise to him owning to such perspicacity and wisdom, such elegant turn of inadequate phrase? You are the Prune, oh Gnome: it is thanks to you and your like that we eat of the leafy green vegetables grown in the veriest muck, barren soils given richness through your existence and, thus, the need to defecate. Indeed, were you to die, your remains would be properly encased in gold and shot into outer space, lest the earth be forever poisoned with your presence. As it is, we give thanks to the good Lord that Death stalks this world, it will release us, eventually.

Reserve Capital Lending has been around for ages, true, but it was Lehmann Bros (not GS, my error) who took the accounting of it to a new level with the bundling of loans and selling them as assets in the late eighties/early nineties. The authorities (the gummint, god bless it, which was following the line of the voting members of the legislature, true capitalists to a pig) were convinced that these new instruments were kosher, and it followed that the derivatives of these were kosher too. Being *new*, there was no data for insurance companies to calculate risk with - unsurprisingly, they followed the line that everyone else was taking and decided they were a good thing, low risk. Unsurprisingly because 1. they were collecting premiums for the policies, a new and expanding market in its own right and 2. because the insurance companies were either owned outright by the banks using the instruments or were comfortable with the normal practice of insurers caught with large policies to pay out on: discovering they were based overseas and declaring bankruptcy. When time came to pay out on the insurance policies (see AIG), lo and behold, the state had to step in and refinance the loans, else the whole kit and kaboodle would have gone into shutdown. Sure, the banks with their post-modern philosophic interpretation of wealth ("Its there because I say it is.") would have gone down, but the rest of us would have gone with them. The way it has been engineered, the next ten to fifteen years of corporate profits have been taken out of the market over the last five years and pissed up against the wall, and the successful businesses will be those that can operate at zero profit for that time. Or screw their labour into paying their profit for them by negotiating deteriorating conditions of employment - static wages and rising prices. Given that most management has become used to getting easy money and murky accounting practices to cover for their inefficiencies over the last decade, I'm thinking that it will be a combination of the two for most corporations. Welcome to the world of the wage slave. SO, you're right when you say that returning to the gold standard won't work, but you can see Russia's and China's point about not being too confident in the US dollar standard either. This is why they're asking for something to replace the $US as the global, and this is the price the ruling capitalists in the US and Europe were prepared to pay (actually, they're still confident it won't happen). In the meantime, I expect the old staple, food, to bring currency valuation back into line (that's Adam Smith's reasoning, anyway), with energy as a significant modifier. With increased interest payments on state loans leading to higher unemployment and further reduced tax revenues, labour will be a glut on the market. Unless we can keep the illusion of market growth alive: that's where we're at.

Someone is probing the Gnome. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/17/2628375.htm

SO, I don't think you're old fashioned, just expecting more of people than they're willing to give. One of the telling sound bites I heard a couple of months ago was the description of investors (by a banker) as "punters". Whilst the market ignores it's fundament as a means of bringing investment capital to ideas and works in need of that capital, it will continue to be seen as a get rich quick scam by those on the inside and a get poor quick scam by the suckers silly enough to believe that trustworthiness is something you can ascribe to anyone who works in that industry. It's worth doing a little research into "reserve capital lending" - where a loan of, say $100 can be turned into ~$400 by counting that loan as an asset and, in turn, lending on it. It's pretty much what GS set up back in the late eighties, and the paper wealth created thereby is mostly what has disappeared in the last couple of years. The ex-rich who swapped their understanding of the fundamentals of capitalism for a chance to splash around in the new pool of dollars deserve no sympathy, but those who have quite cynically engineered circumstances so that the taxpayers are left with the mess deserve little more than a wall to stand up against and a hole to go into. For the rest of us, we find the cost of living soaring as the value of excess number of dollars in the world catches up with the relative lack of energy and food. I know my wage hasn't risen in real terms for the last eighteen years, and it it looks like I'll be going significantly backward this year (if I manage to remain employed). As to the "profits" being made at the moment by investment banks - I suspect that the markets are being played, bounced by planned, strategic buying and selling (with a little help from well placed press articles and some funded rebellions, notably Nigeria). Certainly there is no investment in anything other than speculative stocks. It's probably been going on for half a decade now, and the legislature is still a ways off catching up with the perpetrators. History would suggest that it never will - oh, except for Mao and Lenin and Robespierre: they got a few.

Maybe he wants to blow down the wall? The success of the mission requires sacrifice, after all.

Should be a cover modifier in the negative for this situation - I think soldiers avoid being outlined against the sky for good reason.

I'm confused (no surprise there, its my base state) - a vehicle made of white gold claiming top-fuel performance?!? Quad turbo I get - low and high speed turbos for each bank of cylinders, bio-fuel I get - alcohol engines do get this sort of performance, once or twice, before they disappear in a cloud of smoke and flying engine parts, but making a car out of a high density/low low tensile strength material I don't get: generally you'd make a car lighter to make it go faster.

kipanderson wrote: What end-state constitutes a win for NATO? Serious question here. Spending treasure and lives on foreign nations and nationals is not a sustainable political policy position. If the voting populace doesn't understand what the sacrifice is about, or understands that the reasoning behind it's implementation is, at best, doublethink, their votes will go to the first bloke to stand up and say "This is crap." BD6 - money isn't the root of the problem, it is hard to see how money can solve it. Paying farmers to not grow poppy is a waste of time - to balance the equation and prevent the behaviours associated with drug production you have to pay the drug overlords and their thuggish minions their share of the processing and supply profits and you have to supply the end user of the drug with the means of satisfying whatever it is that they manage to satisfy with drugs. Better to legalise the drug and collect the taxes with which to fund the infrastructure development of the growing nation - provide them with the cash to pay members of their police force something like a real salary. Genuine interest by traders needing to satisfy supply contracts would further push the development and investment in a legitimate business. (Interestingly, a large proportion of the worlds legally grown opium comes from Tasmania - or so it has been reported in the BBC recently.) On the home politics front - how do you get a (largely) law abiding populace that votes for its leaders to agree to spending "their" money on foreign nationals of dubious character? And how, if you decide to go ahead and do it anyway, do you get returned at the next vote? I see your point about the dollars being spent in Afghanistan and the possibility of a better way to do it - I don't see the point of any of it (the idea that I need to be afraid of wild Afghanis wielding weapons of mass destruction in my city is the construct of a bunch of stupid and greedy political advisers in my own hemisphere - where the **** do they get off telling me what to think or fear?) so I can't agree.

Break a leg.

G'day A co. I find that if I go anywhere high and open I'll generally get snotted unless I use 'slow' and 'hide'. With modern weapons modeled the way they are here, I'm punished for making tactical mistakes - like choosing the wrong place to go - severely. This gets to be frustrating, granted, but we're capable of learning, no? I have found balconies with solid walls effective ambush positions (though I'll still lose men when they open fire) - so a slow and hidden setup isn't too far fetched. I admit that this means that certain places are pretty much "out of bounds" - if the enemy has a fire team in position capable of taking advantage of my blunder - but minefields are much the same (worse, much, much worse and see "Operation Pooh", where they're used with skill by the scenario designer) so I'm used to having to go out of my way to avoid stuff. Good luck helps.

Booster rockets so's to follow the pesky Nazis into outer space. Re-entry is optional, and not covered by the warranty.

Yup - Afghanistan, the place where major powers go to be humiliated (I seem to remember that comment is from the Pentagon in 2001). Maybe we should leave it to the Chinese and let the Afghanis claim a clean sweep.

Affentitten, The kinetic energy of the reaction mass is 1/2*m*v^2 - so any increase in the velocity of the escaping water/soap mix gives an exponential increase in the KE, whereas an increase in the mass gives a linear increase in the KE. This is why you noticed such a difference when you added the soap. Given that the walls of the rocket are holding the air in (at increased pressure), would it be fair to say that the energy of the rocket is stored in the walls? I've forgotten my spring equations - something about the modulus of elasticity of PET, etc?