Free Republic

Likely stolen for parts or sale. Engines and drives are what are so expensive on these things, don’t see any terrorist angle here.

so the economy is tanking, IRS scandal is blowing up, VA is a disgrace, obama’s numbers are tanking, republicans have a good shot at taking senate back, a lock on the house and hillary is imploding. Republicans are about to cross the finish line in a marathon, just 1 block away, what should they do ?

I know lets stop the race, go down a side street for a protest that will have zero effect on anything. Brilliant!

correct, japan lost the war the second they decided to wage it against the united states. They were never going to win, getting the carriers would just have made it take a little longer.

the death of net neutrality just means higher prices for internet access. It would be fine if there was true competition for internet access but there isn’t. Essentially in the US a handful of companies are monopolies that provide internet access. Your options are telephone monopoly, or cable monopoly and that’s about it. So the monopolies who are not satisfied with a locked in customer base that has little to no choice on their provider now want to charge the companies that their customers visit on the web. Next up TWC and other monopolies will probably want to charge banks for allowing internet access to online banking accounts.

I’m all for a truly free market but pretending that companies like TWC, ATT, Verizon are all about preserving the free market system is laughable.

people who commit suicide are not generally in a rational state of mind. If he crashed the plane into Malaysia then it would clearly be an act of terrorism and the pilot would be blamed. But if it simply disappeared without a trace it would be more embarrassing to the country than the pilot. The government would look totally inept which has happened. The only glitch was the acars system that the pilot didn’t fully understand would still send out a ping on occasion.

The data shows that the plane went south based on satellite analysis. They have detected the ping from the FDR or CVR, they will soon find the actual plane on the bottom of the ocean. Once they plane is found at the bottom of the ocean there will still be conspiracy theorists saying oh that was a replacement 777 and not the original, they “faked it”, the original is in pakistan, etc.

generally go with the simplest explanation. The pilot was upset with his government about the jailed opposition leader, apparently having marital issues and probably decided to hijack the plane and ditch it in the Indian ocean so nobody would find it and it would be a great embarrassment to his government. If that was his goal, mission accomplished. It all seems to fit, he turned off the transponder at just the right time, turned off the acars system, flew around Indonesia and ran into a deep part of the ocean and ditched the plane. He made one mistake though, the acars system was only partially disabled and they got a periodic ping from it that allowed them to figure out where it went. If it wasn’t for that ping there would be no hope of ever finding that plane which was the hijackers obvious intent.

say what you want, I’m still going to buy thin mints and shortbread girl scout cookies

check out shatner's raw nerve interview of Gene Simmons for more info on gene's background and upbringing, he if a fascinating guy.

I guess I will post a different point of view. I don’t think he should be charged or punished at all. The guard left his post for a minute and this guy walked by. The TSA is just upset because this exposed their incompetence. If they would spend half the time they did tracking down this guy on questioning and investigating jihadi’s boarding airplanes we would be much safer. But as usual the TSA allows jihadi’s to board planes at will and spends their resources tracking down non terrorists.

I fly airbus on jetblue I didn’t know they had to enter proper weight in order to take off that’s crazy. If the pilot gives full throttle it should go full throttle, why put a govenor on a plane ? To save some fuel mileage ? I believe there was an earlier incident where the airbus wouldn’t let the pilot fly the plane properly and crashed. Taking control away from the pilot and giving it to greenpeace carbon counters is a bad idea.

that will buff right out

hannity has been bad since he ditched alan who made the show entertaining. Sean has a list of talking points or 3 word phrases that he repeats ad-nausea, it gets old. Beck is a real entertaining show except when he cries. Sean needs to beg Alan to come back.

He should apologize on the floor, it would get serious coverage by all the media and give him a great platform to point out all the lies in detailed fashion in a very long speech and then at the end say something like “but instead of shouting you lie which is rude I should have been more politically correct and shouted you are truth challenged”. What a great opportunity to pass up.

This is huge news if true. Why ? Clinton is in mexico saying how the U.S. is responsible for the drug violence in mexico. The VP’s own family is funding the drug violence by using cocaine. That is the angle that will really hurt, not any moral argument, that would be easily explained away by libs and their coherts in the media. They can’t explain away this angle. The vice president’s family is funding drug murders (indirectly of course) but none the less this is the angle of attack to use on the VP and the administration.

the funny thing about this unhinged rant is when he goes off on mccain for saying he will go after bin laden and get him. Obamma said the same thing a few months ago about how obama would get out of iraq and that would allow him to go get bin laden. Obama was criticizing bush for not getting bin laden and that he would get the job done. Why wasn't keith outraged at that ? Because he knows obama wasn't serious.

actually this doesn’t really prove anything

>There is only ONE way for the lack of any green-shaded >pixels to occur on the image.

There are so many variables you haven’t mentioned including how the original was scanned, under what settings the scanner was at, the condition of the CCD, was it sent through an ADF, was it skewed, was it deskewed with software, was it scanned in a non lossy format and then converted later to JPG, if so how many times, what software did that conversion, and not to mention the original document and it’s condition.

You also talk about converting JPG to 8 bit using an editor and this is the reason for the green missing. The green could be missing for many reasons including the scanner and it’s settings, the settings when the document was originally converted into JPG and how many times that was done. Just converting to 8 bit doesn’t mean you lose green anyways. That process is called color quantization where you are going from say 24 bit to some more limited palette, 16 or 8 bit or whatever. If green is a predominant color in the image it would not be lost when going to 8 bit if the color quantization software is any good, that’s the whole idea behind color quantization. You generate a histogram of colors and use the most prevelant along with a small subset of general paleete colors. Sure doing this step is not as good as staying in 24 bit but certainly can’t be construed as the ONLY reason green was lost in this JPG scanned image.

JPG is a lossy algorithm in the first place and once the image was scanned it was converted from spatial domian into the frequency domain and the compression process was done. Not all JPG compression/decompression software is exactly the same and can produce different results. This was not mentioned. Do they have a non lossy format for the scanned document ? That would still be subject to limitations of the scanning device but certainly WAY better than lossy JPG that may have been scaled and compressed several times before hitting the website.

I worked in the document scanning industry as a software developer and have written JPG compression/decompression software and image viewing software and also worked on hardware for scanners. There are simply WAY too many variables you have not mentioned to draw any conclusions from these images. For all anybody knows these JPG images could have gone through several compression steps, and even some scaling. You would need to look at the original document because what we have here is not compelling evidence.

Also if they were going to fake it why not just fake the entire certificate rather than try photoshop trickery ? That’s a very simple looking certificate that could be easily duplicated.