jaaska

No means to kid aroundwith this subject, but I'll be damned if all the licenced jumpers can do that with their own canopies ever. Never jumped outside of Finland (still a smartass lowtime student jumper ), but hearing stories about the sizes of landing areas overseas and still reading about people (with jumps counted in hundreds) not getting there, time after time, or not being able to land standing - what should those people do? Get a bigger canopy (if the WL is already under 1 or something)?

Just couple of other observations that I've made when ever I've visited a gym (no, I do not do that too often): Ladies (and some men too) using exercise cycle and reading while doing it... Then some people actually have nerves to say: "Oh, I exercise (?) 5 times a week - I cycle an hour and half but for a reason or another, there's no progress... I'm still a fat ass!" A good friend of mine was a co-owner of a gym and he put it quite nicely: a) If you feel "good" while working out, you're doing something wrong - probably not working at all. b) No matter how hard you train your muscles, if there's no good aerobic workout as well (yes, you do need to sweat and feel "not so good"

Like someone pointed out already, how exactly would a gun, let a lone a shot gun, helped that old guy in his situation? At least he's alive - he might have ended up dead if he had tried to pull out a gun in the first place... Well, nobody ever pulled a gun on me, except in the army and that's a totally different scenario (training), so I'm biased too... Like I said, things in US might have just gone too far to back off.

Well, during the last two weeks, the anti-war thinking has just boosted up in Europe - not that the war on Iraq ever had support on mainland Europe, but now even Brits are against it... Like I posted earlier, at least Britain has announced the true reason for the war - "We need that oil!", said the secretary of defense of Britain a week ago or so... This BULLSHIT that Bush's administration is feeding the American public is almost funny. Human rights IN MY **S!

Well, that was a nice story

You've got a poin there! Most of the men have, what I call, a tube brains. I'm not refering to the rape case here, but in generally men need to be told in clear, easy way. The worst thing a woman can tell to guy a is "If you don't know what's wrong with me then that's wrong with me!". It just confuses guys and makes them uncertain since THEY DO NOT know, in most of the cases, what's wrong with the woman in the first place. Any woman can tell how well most of the men can cope with uncertainty and the insecurity it causes... There's the vicious circle .

You blew it! You were not supposed to tell it out loud!

I didn't know that the site was still up - it's hilarious!

This is the reason why, basically in all the Uni's in Europe, the international coordinators tell all the male students heading to study overseas that they should avoid sexual intercourse IF NOT completely sure of the girl and her feelings. Basically what we have been told is that "you can be prosecuted of daterape if you hurt girl's feelings". There's a story of Finnish exchange student (male) sleeping with a a girl in a campus and the guy was later - when the girl wanted "more out of the relationship" than just one night thing and the guy did not - prosecuted and found guilty of rape. Most likely just a fairytale to make everybody to understand the seriousness of this issue. This whole issue is like a thing red line to me. If I was still a single and participating in an exchange program in a college somewhere in the US, I would probably confine myself to the old fashion handshake style.

Billvon, As the secretary of defense of Great Britain put it, the reason for invading Iraq is OIL - this is the first time a high rank official admits it. Unlike US the GB is not trying to come up with fake excuses for the invasion - the truth is the oil taps of Iraq must be controlled by the west. This is the official policy of GB, why won't the US admit as well? If there's going to be a war, US should bring up the real reason for it. Unfortunately N-Korea does not have oil, so at the moment US would not care less about it's threat - the missiles they are testing won't be a problem before they can actually cause some harm. Having plutonium (if NK actually gets their facility running) is a long way from functional fission bomb. Dirty bomb is a whole different thing...

I tried to find through search whether this has been discussed earlier. Sorry if it has... Finland, the great country of progressive taxing had a new law couple of years ago concerning speeding tickets... Short is pretty so: Once you get pulled over, the cop can in-real-time request your net-income with a SMS message. So you cannot lie about your income . So far the biggest speeding ticket I've heard of so far was around 50 000e (same in US$). Sooo... If you are rich and Finnish - do not exceed the speed limit... . Since I'm just a poor student, I always laugh my as off when a Mr./Ms. Big gets a new world record ticket! Kind of makes sense though... 200e is hell of a big money for me (hell, I can quite a few jumps with that money), but for a Nokia CEO or for a Finnish NHL-star that's just money for candy. I say hurt them where it hurts them most!

I searched the UN webpages and databases - I could not locate that document. Could somebody provide the actual link to the document? Thanks!

I mean - how many of those assaults were wife beatings? In my opinion they don't count as one ... Zee, I'd have to re-think were I live so that I could keep on beating my "future" wife...

Erno, I think it's about time for us to get at least a couple of semi-automatic guns... Do you have any military connections - I'd feel _much_ better if I had my RK-62 assault rifle with me all the time. . Darn, it's been too long - I can't even recall my "girlfriend's" serial number... I think it started 618... or something... No seriously - the new laws (example: If you beat up your wife and a neighbor hears it and calls the police, damn, you can't even put terror into your wife's mind and tell her that you'll beat her even worse next time if she would tell anything ... The stupid law says that the police has to investigate no matter what the couple themselves say. )

If you don't want to be flamed back then you should start with less inflammatory remarks. We can all have intelligent discussions when someone posts intelligently. Let's call it a wake up call Sometimes it's just plane boring to start: "First of all a) blah blah blah...."

Well, I did criticize quite a bit... I do believe lot's of stuff going on is good - I mean if the other choice would be that USSR would be the only superpower in the world, the choice is pretty clear. Compared to that US is doing a fairly good job. HOWEVER, there are a lot of things that are quite **cked up. My intention was not to throw a flamer, I just wanted to hear opinions, good counter criticism etc... (I don't count "ohh... Finland must be then just a perfect place - howcome you're not a superpower. I'm sure you'd do a great job!" as being neither productive nor even even real counter criticism ) If a country proclaims to be pro-WTO, pro-UN etc., but plays the game only when it suits it best it's plain arrogancy (is this a word? )and does only harm to the issues mentioned above. As Guade put it so well: "No. We have no special rights over the world, but by virtue of the power we do possess, we -must- have special responsibilities." As I've said it before - if the most powerful nation wipes it's ass with international issues, it really waters down the whole effort! Soo... If there is an agreement on something world wide, or is about to be one - US should be in the front line adapting these new pacts etc. rather than just spoil the whole thing. Good examples: Kioto - no, we do not let anything jeopardize the American way of living (in English: we are still going to keep on polluting as hell) International court - we have a perfectly good justice system of our own (in English: come on, this court is only for the baddies!) And a nice number of other "it's not in our own special interest" -type of GRAB! One of the best teaching and training methods (used e.g. in the army) is to do it and let the others learn from it... As US has so much power, they should set the example!! That was pretty much my point in this thread...

I agree! Like I said, there is no perfect nation but one can always try to reach such position...

(a) At what point exactly did I say Finland is a world leader or a very great country? (b) I just believe that if any instance (whether it is business monopoly etc.) is given too much power w/o any critique things tend develop to something not so favorable. Couple of examples: NSA (or another US agency) ear-dropped or by some other means found out about an offer a company from an EU-state was about give on a contract in Far-East. This agency past this information to a company from US and this company won that contract. Well, that's nice except this is against all the nice things US is telling about free market economy... US is one of the biggest defenders of WTO - except when this free market deal is about to put unhealthy US industry out of business (last spring US put a 30 toll on steel - nice detail is that steel industry was a big contributer on president Bush's campaign... )

OUTS! Man, that was below the belt! Sweden vs. Finland - an eternal competition on any given subject!

They make some decent vodka.... I hear you! It still gives a killer hangover though

Well, my point exactly - have you ever tried to convince a child to not to smoke while you keep on smoking yourself? Ok, really bad simile . If you want all the crook countries to open up their facilities to UN inspections you really want to show them that there is no problem of letting the same inspection team to search through your own laundry. Then again - as far as I know - US has signed some treaties concerning the development and above all, production in stock chemical and bio warware. It is totally different thing to research and even develop such substances for research purposes - totally different thing to produce them in mass quantities. Why not let the UN team to prove that this is not the case. Well, I don't want to get to details in this, but the bottom line is that US is afraid that there could be a court case agains a US citizen. Well, I'm quite sure none of the sovereign countries in the world would want that to happen. BUT how do you convince any "less democratic state" to surrender their war criminals etc. if they can always say: "Oh, well US hasn't signed that pact either - so go to hell - we don't need to do it!" The point is - most of the western civilized countries have singed it for reasons mentioned above. EVEN when there is a danger that you could see your own citizen end up in trial in the Hague. If the so called civilized countries won't sign - the treaty is just another piece of toilet paper! Well, I hear telling me that you have the best court and justice system in the world (and I don't want to start to argue about that) - we can deal with these things ourselves. Again, another country with less sophisticated justice system will claim the same in similar event. A rough estimate is that Saudi Arabia and Iraq alone sits on 1/3 of the total production of oil in near future. Of course there is the 2/3 drilled from somewhere else but still...

Soo... It's that time of year again. I need some entertainment and since I'm not going to do in jumping during x-mass, I thought I'd get myself a new game for my x-box.

LOL! I'm sorry I didn't get to read your first post... If being a bit sarcastic counts as an attack against your great country, I see where Bush gets his ideas LOL! Could you specify whether that box of hair was american origin? There are always many ways to approach any given subject. Sometimes poking with a stick might wake up a person that would not otherwise started to comment on that given subject in the first place. What I'm interested to hear is - how come you think that I attacked your country and could you give any informative comment on e.g. the weapons inspection or international court issue? If the answer is: "We are the most powerful nation in the face of the earth and this grants us special privileges!" - Don't even bother to answer... ...Oh, and Happy Thanks Giving!

I totally agree!!!

I'm not gonna argue with ya on that issue, but offer a car at that price to the general public? Hell I can probably spend enough money and make an old v-dub with 200hp -lol If it was that easy there wouldnt be so much research going into electric cars. Well I was not trying to suggest that we all should get a formula one