DrewEckhardt

The one which fits and comfortably holds safe-sized main and reserve canopies. A reasonable price tag, decent customer service if you have problems, and short ordering backlog are all nice too. Rigs which fit are more comfortable. Unfashionably large (by just a size) rigs don't have the fabric stretched to tight so they can fold to fit your body better in the plane while fashionably small rigs can pack like bricks that aren't comfortable. Unfashionably large rigs (with reserve containers a few sizes bigger than main) let you pair fun-sized mains with more forgiving reserves that are less likely to lead to landing injuries when combining an incapacitated jumper and off-DZ landing.

Jumping F111 seven cells at .7 pounds/square foot you might develop tastes for classic accuracy and BASE jumping into tight landing areas.

While engineers working for the government in New Jersey don't too too well, looking at national averages they do better than MBAs. Average salaries off indeed.com show $81K for an MBA $93K for a software engineer with $99K for senior engineers $86K for an electrical engineer with $98K for senior engineers $82K for a mechanical engineer with $93K for senior engineers

It doesn't matter what you do after pitching. The body position, bag extraction angle and how it interacts with the bottom of the container, and burbles are all different on wing suit jumps. You want to consider yourself a canopy test jumper when using a wing suit and avoid any canopies that are going to behave poorly when things go weird, notably elliptical ones. People who had no issues for hundreds of elliptical non-wing suit jumps have a disproportionate number of problems once they add wing suits and it's been my experience that this is more common than not. A Stiletto may be worse than other ellipticals (newer PD designs were made less sensitive to control inputs because John LeBlanc observed too many jumpers having roll-axis stability issues on landing). For example, [url]http://www.justskydivers.com/videos/1/210/wingsuit-malfunction-w-stilletto-135-2nd-in-2-jump[/urL] In practice it doesn't work that way. I figured that out with my Batwing 134 and pulled a Monarch 135 out of my gear closet after the first cutaway. A friend didn't take my advice until he chopped a few Samurais and got a Spectre. Another friend chopped a Vengeance. I lost count after a while. Some elliptical/suit/pilot combinations seem to work but the odds are not in favor of ellipticals and wing suits at the same time.

You are probably going to have a weird opening which leads to a spinning malfunction.

[QUOTE] Social Security issues are easy to resolve. Remove the income cap completely, and there are no further issues at all with the system. Fair is fair. Most people pay SS taxes on 100% of their income. Those withhigh incomes pay les and less, the more they make. That is a regressive system that is unfair to the majority of taxpayers. [/QUOTE] Social security benefits are extremely progressive. It replaces 75% of pre-retirement income for low income single earner couples but only 30% of pre-retirement income up to the cap for higher income single earners.

North by Northwest, Vertigo, or Rear Window. Pretty much everything he made around 1940 and later is good. Before that his style hadn't fully materialized (The Man Who Knew Too Much from 1956 is better than the 1934 original).

It's a non-monotonic function of to whom they're attached. As a tangent the angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat.

Nah. Lots of 'Christians' are closeted homosexuals who fear leaving their wife for a man and loosing half their assets in the following divorce if their government approves of gay marriage. If they disliked gays merely because of Leviticus they'd be out protesting pig roasts (pigs are cloven footed but don't cheweth the cud), Red Lobster (lobsters haven't fins or scales), department stores (cotton/polyester blends), etc.

A charcoal chimney eliminates the need for lighter fluid regardless of what you're using - lump or briquette.

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/599266/us_has_fourth-highest_income_inequality_rate_in_the_world/#paragraph2 and now....rank the conditions of the "poor" across the world, see how the poor Americans stack up the rest. Horribly. Only 98.9% of Americans own a color television. Only 64% of American families earning less than $15,000 a year and 71% earning $15,000-29,999 have satellite or cable to watch on theirs.

On my last office move we went from having private offices with sunlight to one big loud open space where conference rooms and executive offices go the sunlight. It was next door to the golf course.

Unless your instructors/experts have seen you landing up-wind, down-wind, cross-wind, up-hill, down-hill, on concrete, off the drop-zone, and making turns at tree-top and ground level they haven't seen enough to make that call so you shouldn't jump a smaller canopy even if they say it's OK. If they have seen all that it's probably because you have bad judgement and shouldn't be down sizing in order to limit the damage you do when you screw up. Landing canopies straight ahead into a wide open grassy field with limited distractions is not a big deal even when they're getting small although you can't guarantee that every landing will be like that - people get bad spots, people don't see obstacles on the sunset load, people either make low turns to get back into the wind or land cross/down-wind, etc. Right.

Living in the bay area I pay some attention to prices. The least unreasonably priced properties someplace I'd want to live cost about 50% more to rent the money (assuming a 20% down payment and fully deductible interest) to buy than to rent an equivalent property. The most unreasonably priced properties still cost 100% more to rent the money than to rent a similar property. I can't decide whether that's unreasonable (places where people rely on salaries to buy homes the market wouldn't support such prices) or not (perhaps instant IPO millions are what buy the homes here) The property I bought at the peak of the market in 2006 outside Seattle ran 0-20% more to rent the money than to rent a similar property (ignoring opportunity cost on the down payment when CDs still yielded 5%). The property I bought in Boulder, CO circa 1999 cost less to rent the money than to rent a similar property.

Engineers who do not live in New Jersey and do not work for the government are able to leverage their experience into $100-$200K annual compensation packages without certifications or attending executive MBA programs. While the titans of Wall Street do much better, 2-4X median household income on just one salary is a pretty good deal especially when it only takes 3 (a motivated student with opportunity can leave high school with their first year of an engineering degree done) - 5 years of college education to get there. Especially when the work is fun, the companies can be fun, and you don't need to live someplace like New York.

Americans as a whole would rather live in McMansions, drive new cars, and hang big screen TVs on their walls instead of saving for retirement and leaving something for the tax man. Since they won't be affected by inheritance taxes they won't oppose them while alive. Higher taxes without negative political ramifications are a reasonable way for legislators to raise revenues.

So again, a fair comparison: Two jumpers with exactly the same experience One, the POVer, does it just to document his jump. The other, a camera flyer, jumps with an inherent obligation to get good footage. Both take the addition of the camera very seriously. Both seek out advice and instruction. Both prepare accordingly. The POVer has a higher potential to hurt himself or others? You can honestly, without assuming there are personality differences in the two, allege that? Yes, assuming that he's not jumping by himself (in which case the camera isn't going to see anything useful or help). The distraction from a camera means you don't fly as well. Not flying as well means the new sit flyer is more likely to cork from a bad dock or something else which can injure any one above him. The camera flyer already familiar with his chosen body position and not trying to touch the people he's filming isn't going to have the same problems.

Market size. Costs are higher for smaller markets since you're amortizing capital costs over fewer units, getting less in the way of quantity discounts, and are less likely to be able to save money through off-shoring. There are fewer than 30,000 recreational skydivers in America since most drop zones are USPA group members and won't let you jump without a membership. In 2006 there were 6,400,000 skiers who made more than one visit to the slopes. In 2006 there were 6,634,506 registered motorcycles and they sold 1,190,000 new ones. Market demographics. If I ride my motorcycle over the weekend I only need to spend $30 to fill the tank if I'm going to ride 250 miles. Skiing with a season pass isn't much more expensive. If I go skydiving one day I'm probably spending $75-$125 on lift tickets. Obviously more expensive sports imply people spending more money on their hobbies. The market has also demonstrated that it will bear $200 helmet prices. You'd be stupid to charge less.

Except compared to the British, Belgians, Germans, and the other people who were previously believed to understand the brewing arts. Those guys' beer styles were so weak we needed to improve on them (like the American India Pale Ale) and invent our own (like the American Strong Ale).

Eating and drinking beer (I've spent a few years off after breaking my leg waiting for things to heal, getting a bone graft for the hole which wouldn't close, waiting for things to heal, getting hardware removed, waiting for things to heal)

No. The same potential snag issues and distractions from the things you should be doing exist in both cases. Yup. A fun jumper with a camera needs to pay for his own ticket, while a camera flyer may have his slot and pack job covered. When the video isn't very good the fun jumper probably won't even get comments and the camera flyer may get fired.

All else equal it should do as well as it would have done before the financial industry comprised its current 8% share (holding 4% through the 1970s) of the GDP which is to say that as a middle class guy saving for retirement I'd have a few million in current dollars set aside by the time I got to 65 and living a more lavish lifestyle than I did while working. Obviously some things will put a damper on that like medical costs increasing radically faster than inflation and reform aimed at maximizing health care industry profits instead of lowering costs for consumers .

No, we're just a few years ahead of the rest of the country. California first mandated emissions controls on cars in 1961. The Feds decided to start establishing national standards in 1965 and by 1968 Federal standards matched California's. Roberti-Roos went after black guns in California in 1989; Clinton followed it up nationally with HR 3355 in 1994. California is essentially a trial for what will fly in the rest of the country. Things which pass muster with 1/8 the US population will probably be tried on the other 7/8ths. People elsewhere shouldn't be dismissing this as something that's just happening in California because if it flies here they'll be seeing it soon too.

It suits some people's interests + aptitudes very well and still pays relatively well because it doesn't suit a lot of people's interests + aptitudes and willingness to clear the educational hurdles compared to the demand. I really like it (software), as did my father (chemical), grand father (electrical), and great grandfather (technically a geophysicist but he applied it to finding oil which is engineering). I'm surprised your school had so many women for so few guys. There were three (four if you count the woman studying for a BFA in piano performance who decided it'd be fun to also study computer science) of them for a few hundred of us in the undergraduate computer science program in the college of engineering although it didn't matter because we could hang out with women from other colleges (notably Arts and Sciences which we referred to as Arts and Parties). The University even had clubs (like ski/snowboard) which went on co-ed trips and didn't bar engineers from non-engineering courses (there were lots of women in my Contemporary International Film course in the film school and creative writing course in the English department of the school of arts and science) which would even provide elective credits towards a degree. Instead of slacking in highschool I got the introductory engineering curriculum generally taught in big lecture halls out of the way apart from third semester calculus with Professor Chakavarty who was so bad his TA quit and third semester physics where I had an American professor. I avoided the last of those messes by taking my final math class in the arts and sciences math department where we had 30 something people instead of 300 in the college of engineering; that professor was American too. All of them were taught by at least associate professors apart from multi-variable calculus where Dr. Chakavarty was technically the instructor but we learned more from our original and replacement TAs at the recitations. That's paying too much since after your first job it doesn't matter where you went to school and you're not going to make an extra $75-$100K in the first few years because of it (unless you meet a co-founder at school, do something entrepeneurial, and manage to hit a home run in spite of limited experience but that's unlikely enough I wouldn't plan on it. You're better off getting out into industry, gaining some experience, and joining people who've built businesses before and aren't going to make rookie mistakes that lead to smoking craters). My alma matter still charges state residents only $7700 a year and they're free to pickup the introductory courses at community colleges for thousands less than that. I learned a lot that I use frequently. Your problem comes from working for the government and is not universal. Google had enough problems hiring new graduates that their starting salary is now $90,000 - $105,000 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/technology/26recruit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss. The raises aren't bad either - I've worked for a couple of companies where the CEO called me into his office, said "You're doing a great job!" and gave me a 7-10% salary bump plus more stock. Because I have a long history of doing things for them that engineers earning lower salaries don't. I married a sexy wife who's also an engineer (a Bell Labs alumni no less). My engineering friends all did well too, although lots married non-technical people.

I'd been meaning too and have moved it to the top of my Netflix queue.