The Local Puppy Trainer reports that a CV-22 Osprey crashes near Navarre, airmen injured

HURLBURT FIELD — An Air Force CV-22 Osprey assigned to the 1st Special Operations Wing crashed Wednesday evening.

All five airmen aboard were injured, said Master Sgt. Kristina Newton, a spokeswoman for Hurlburt Field. Three of the airmen were flown to local hospitals and two were taken by ambulance, Newton said.

That’s $70 million we won’t see again, enough to cover the costs of the wildfires in New Mexico and Colorado.

As the crew didn’t bail out, I have to assume it was flying below the minimum altitude for a safe deployment of a parachute, which is normal for Spec Ops missions, as was flying in the late evening to just before dawn. There is a major range north of Navarre which is about 20 miles west of me.

They should have stayed with the Blackhawk variant/AC-130 combination that has worked well for decades. I get nervous when I hear the Ospreys fly over my house at night on their way to the range at Eglin. After decades of development and tens of billions in cost, they just don’t want to stay in the air.

Update from the Local Puppy Trainer 6/15:

The Osprey assigned to the 1st Special Operations Wing crashed during a routine training mission about 6:45 p.m. Wednesday. The aircraft was found upside down and on fire just off Eglin Air Force Base’s A-78 gunnery range about seven miles northwest of Hurlburt Field.

Sounds like they were flying too low or lost power and flipped when the props hit the dirt.

The BBC reports on a solution to a web designer problem:
World’s first ‘tax’ on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7

The Australian online retailer Kogan.com has introduced the world’s first “tax” on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser.

Customers who use IE7 will have to pay an extra surcharge on online purchases made through the firm’s site.

Chief executive Ruslan Kogan told the BBC he wanted to recoup the time and costs involved in “rendering the website into a antique browser”.

The charge is set to 6.8% – 0.1% for every month since the IE7 launch.
…

Mr Kogan said that even though only 3% of his customers used the old version of the browser, his IT team had become pre-occupied with making adaptations to make pages display properly on IE 7.

“I was constantly on the line to my web team. The amount of work and effort involved in making our website look normal on IE7 equalled the combined time of designing for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.”

If you look at the source code for any fairly complex site you will see all sorts of references to IE7 because it was and is a known violator of multiple standards. People need to move on, to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or even IE9. Even Micro$oft occasionally upgrades products because the existing version really Zucks.

Should you receive a phone call telling you that you have been awarded a ‘government grant’ of thousands of dollars, you might want to hang up if:

The person on the other end of the line sounds like they are calling from Asia;

The caller ID begins +75;

And, most importantly, you haven’t applied for a grant.

Most people probably don’t know that +7 is the country code for Russia, and fewer know that there is no Russian area code that begins with 5, so the number is bogus.

I didn’t hang around for the whole spiel, but I assume I would have been asked for bank codes and my Social Security number to ‘expedite processing’ [i.e. their removing all of my money from the bank.]

Having dealt with the grant process, I can tell you that you have to apply, and everything is on paper, or it doesn’t exist. [It may not exist even if it is on paper, but that’s another story.]

Adopted as the flag of the United States of America by the Flag Resolution of 1777 enacted on 14 June, 1777.

The flag was first flown from Fort Stanwix, on the site of the present city of Rome, New York, on August 3, 1777. It was first under fire three days later in the Battle of Oriskany, August 6, 1777.

An official flag has a rise to run ratio of 1 to 1.9 [the flag should be 1.9 times as long as it is high] with the canton [the dark blue part] that rises over the top seven stripes with a run of 40% of the flag’s run.

The only time you will see a “correct” US Flag is if you see the official colors of a military unit. Most flags are 3’X5′ or 4’X6′ instead of 3’X5.7′ or 4’X7.6′.

Frances Bellamy, the Baptist minister and socialist who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance was from Rome, New York.