Comments on: Morning Links

By: Light

Light — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:36:55 +0000

What about the Dead Puppy Cam?

By: OneByTheCee

OneByTheCee — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:59:22 +0000

Thanks to you, Mr. Balko, I have spent entirely too much time looking at the puppycam.

I can’t stop!

By: Mattocracy

Mattocracy — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:32:17 +0000

Snoop and Martha Stewart.

Can you imagine going back in time and telling people…”you know, in the future snoop will be on martha stewart one day and ice-t will play a cop on tv.”

By: Spleen

Spleen — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:24:11 +0000

Uh oh, I bet the SWAT team is already suiting up…

By: Brad Warbiany

Brad Warbiany — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:56:35 +0000

I had set up a puppy cam a few years ago… We had bought a Yorkie puppy, and my wife and I wondered what he did every day. So I hooked it up and set up a little web server to watch it while I was at work.

It turns out he mostly slept… Not nearly as exciting as I would have hoped…

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:47:09 +0000

The snoop clip was awesome. Especially the part about chicken at the very end.

By: Will Grigg

Will Grigg — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:32:55 +0000

Mr. Schofield, you’re entirely correct.

I still want one anyway.

And I want it to play the theme to “Johnny Quest” every time I use it.

By: C. S. P. Schofield

C. S. P. Schofield — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:31:54 +0000

About the jetpack:

About time? This is pretty old stuff. The Jetpack used in the James Bond film Thunderball was quite real (no, Connery didn’t fly it). They’ve been around since then and it doesn’t look like they’ve changed much either. I suspect that video is about the limit of the thing’s flight time, which would tend to explain why they aren’t more common.

The US military did look at them at one time, but concluded that as a means of achieving “vertical envelopment” they would have all the problems of parachutes, as well as some all their own – and you’ll notice that after WWII the next time anybody dropped a large group a paratroopers was when we used some to seize an outlying airport in the opening stages of the Iraq war. Paratroops just can’t carry enough supplies to support themselves for long enough to link up with ground forces under most circumstances. From what I’ve seen the jetpacks would be worse that way.

It frankly doesn’t even look to me like it lasts long enough to be a fun toy.