DrewEckhardt

The issue boils down to security vs. privacy/liberty. The issue boils down to the illusion of security and more budget/money for certain government agencies/private companies vs. privacy/liberty. Terrorists willing to die for their cause should not care too much about working for a while as baggage people or airline janitors until they strike. Terrorists planning to die for their cause should not care too much about smuggling explosives in body cavities or having them surgically implanted where they won't be picked up by the scanners. Or they could just skip the whole plane thing and detonate their explosives in the security lines (which the Israelis don't allow to form for that reason).

No sooner than the night before. And not much - my wife and I shared one airline-sized roll-aboard plus a tiny back pack for our 10 day honeymoon in Europe and the Canary Islands. When you really need something (we ended up getting warmer jackets in Madrid) debit cards work all over the world.

Military spending is MOST of the problem. $700,000,000,000 a year in military budget (Afghanistan and Iraq are off-budget) is over HALF the deficit. It's more than the rest of the world spends put together on their militaries. It's THIRTY times what other countries our size spend (Canada has a $21.8B budget). It's TEN times what #2 spends. I'm surprised so-called "conservatives" put up with such an enormous socialist employment program.

They're horribly underpaid. Any executive controlling $7,000,000,000 (Congressmen) to $30,000,000,000 (Senators) of revenues each year would be getting tens of millions in the private sector in salary, stock, and other benefits.

Because the stealer needs time to squeeze every last dime of profit out of you, culminating in their financing and extended warranty full-court press after you've agreed on price (and the disposition of any trade-in). It takes far less time to buy (after you've found one you want) or sell a home for over 10X the car price since there isn't any up-sell involved and you can do any needed negotiation with brief E-mails or phone calls in the background instead of sitting throw a stage show.

QuoteDealing with a 1996 Stiletto and looking for opinions of whether to repair it, or replace it. This canopy has been well used and if the line set is replaced, this will be the third, or forth set. We have no way of knowing how many total jumps it has? This is the third owner of said canopy. Repair totals: $550.00 [/QUOTE] Buy a new to me Stiletto with fewer jumps and a fresh line set for about the same money.

If you've been doing other "dangerous" sports for a while you might have a good orthopedic surgeon on speed dial but otherwise it's not going to help. Sure, related experience helps. Landing planes will teach you about flying patterns and landing where you want. Air sports will teach you about weather. But just going fast or being dangerous don't relate to the skills that make you more likely to survive skydiving, especially after your inclination to go fast and be dangerous carry over.

Rugby. No pads and play doesn't stop after a tackle since the game wasn't built around commercial breaks.

Never bring a handgun to a yogurt fight. Right. A 16 ton weight is the proper defence against fruit.

No. A first past the post electoral system results in two viable political parties with just minor differences between the two. At best both candidates are electable in your district and one of the minor differences matters to you personally (like on gun laws). Generally that's not the case with the incumbent party holding a strong majority that you can't overcome in the general election and can't address in a primary. This situation is exacerbated by most districts being defined by party members. Most voting in America won't represent a real choice until we get proportional representation which seems extremely unlikely. We're also in a post literate age where it's all about the demagogues and their sound bites.

I disagreed with: "Dave ... you know I am far from being anti gun but I am thinking there needs to be some serrious thought put into who is allowed to carry considering the amount of alcohol consumption there is on a college campus. Partying and binge drinking and guns.... BAD IDEA. " Young women walking home alone unarmed after a late night at the campus library... BAD IDEA.

Sine you still can't blow through the fabric I assume it's the stitching holes opening up.

It is a little strange to see one with no floats (I briefly lived in a high-rise apartment within the Seattle Lake Union landing pattern).

Denver IS the "Mile High" city with plenty of "Medical" cannabis to go around. OTOH, it's also close to an airport purported to contain secret government facilities. Maybe some one knows something they're not yet sharing?

Accepted practice is 1.0 + .1/100 jumps. You're trying for 1.1 at 30 jumps. There are more prudent things to do. It's really easy to land parachutes straight ahead into a wide open field, even small ones but that's not the right way to judge things. You need to be choosing your canopy for what happens when cute girls flash the pilot on sunset load so you have extra altitude, your climbout is delayed because your buddy got hypoxic and got his foot stuck on a seat belt, you have a bad spot, land out, don't see an obstacle in the low light until the last instant, and turn 90 degrees at 50 feet for a down-wind landing on an asphalt road. Some people point out that canopy piloting skills vary; although unless you've made a habit out of out landings in bad conditions (in which case you should not be down-sizing due to poor judgement) no one can know whether you have mad skillz. Being able to land up-hill, down-hill, cross-wind, and down-wind would be a start. Being able to make turns from 50 feet off the ground are important. Being able to land on hard pavement is important. Being able to land with some induced speed from front risers is important (you might unintentionally add speed because a flat turn isn't flat enough). You're not ready to down-size until you're comfortable doing all that.

Sounds good to me. While some one experienced can chase two newbies, it's a lot slower than one since you have to drag the first one across the sky. He'll get less done on the jump, the second new guy will dock less, and everyone will have less fun except you,

If I'm going to have a meth-head as a neighbor, I'd rather he be buying his product cheap at the corner 7-11 instead of risking explosions and toxic contaminations next to my property cooking it himself. If I'm going to pay for my crack smoking neighbor's habit indirectly, I'd rather it be through an inexpensive out-patient program than $43,000 a year (unless he's a juvenile in which case was $216,000 as of 2008) for incarceration. If those sorts of people are going to be in my neighborhood, I'd rather they have cheap product they can afford with whatever job they keep or even a government handout that costs less than prison rather than turn to burglary and robbery to pay for their fix. If those sorts of people are going to be doing those drugs, I'd rather they be getting consistent, controlled doses of unadulterated drugs so they're less likely to end up dead on my door step. This is also assuming that the numbers of addicts would increase which has not been proven. Use of _every_ drug was down in Portugal in the five years following decriminalization although it was up in the rest of the EU. The worst social effects come from the drugs being illegal. British boffins would also disagree, recently finding "While heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine were all found to be more dangerous to individuals, alcohol was largely shown to be more dangerous to others. This seemed to be due to the fact that the drug is often the source of automobile accidents and violent incidents." Heroin is only a significant safety problem because it's illegal. The illicit sales channels don't tell addicts how much the product has been cut (leading to accidental over-doses), addicts use dirty needles because they can't buy clean ones, and the product is sometimes cut with more dangerous substances.

Some of the reasons the general populace has bought into anti-marijuanna laws are that Marijuana turns Mexicans crazy, makes black men rape white women, and turns kids into pacifists who won't fight for our great country. More plausible reasons are that hemp threatened DuPont's paper market revenues, InBev does not want the competition (Anheuser-Busch was a Partnership for a Drug Free America contributor), and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association prison guards' union wants full employment. It's political and all makes perfect sense once you look at who benefits.

I pull low because I can't afford the ride to altitude. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZXcn67Ej4&p=73B43AB1A40A5BE7&playnext=1&index=54 To the OP: Tell that wanker to mind her own business. Or, I can come to your DZ, pull below 500 feet, and that way you will look like a conservative jumper. jumping from bridges is even cheaper. I don't like hiking back up. A ride on Don's pontoon boat is way cheaper than any plane ride.

Back in the early to mid 1990s AADs were for students and Airtec needed to make the Cypres concealable so experienced jumpers could consider buying one. We jumped big square canopies that might turn lazily if things went wrong. We jumped Sabres and Monarchs that would send today's skydivers crying to their mommies about the openings being too fast and hard. There weren't radical differences in parachute speeds. Today going through 1000 feet of pressure altitude will open your reserve. Big square canopies are only for students with tapered wings that spin up recommended for everyone else. People like canopies that snivel for 800' which is out of line with the 200' implied by the USPA 2000' minimum pack opening altitude and 1800' cutaway decision altitude. Canopy speed through the pattern varies radically. You have to pick altitudes appropriate for the equipment in question. I'm pretty happy opening a big F111 seven cell with a nice .7 pound per square foot wing loading for accuracy and no AAD below 1000'. It's not going to malfunction, malfunction quickly, or take too long to open. It'll fly as slow as walking speed and still produce a soft landing. It doesn't take much space to land (out or in) - a packing mat will do without obstacles, or 5000 square feet surrounded by trees like a back yard. With a Cypres that will open on a snivel through 1000 feet, 105 square feet of elliptical where spinning malfunctions mean when you cutaway you're already going fast enough for free-fall maneuvers, slow openings, landing speeds of 50-60 MPH with slow moving traffic sharing the same field, and needing a runway to land I want 3000' to have time to deal with problems, not be landing in traffic, and fly to a long smooth surface.

smaller DZs require higher pulls... No, you just need to spot well and track in the right direction.

752 and counting. What about this one? 65536. It bugs me on a regular basis. 2^16 is one too big for a 16 bit unsigned value and wraps to zero.

If you knew planned formations were beyond your ability pack your bags and go home. Otherwise it happens. Learn from it and screw up some other way next time.

Do you have enough savings to last six months without any pay check? It'd suck to have to sell that ring for $2000. Have you both put $13,750 into your 401Ks (I'm assuming you'll get to the $16,500 total) so you can probably enjoy a long retirement together with a high standard of living starting at 59 1/2? Have you paid off your cars and student loans so you're debt-free (other than mortgage debt) and have more income free for discretionary spending on doing things together like travel? Do you guys own a house yet so you have a nice place to nest and potentially raise micro people (now is not the time to buy) or have a 20% down-payment in the bank (some time will be good)? There are lots of ways to spend $6000 on your wife to be which will improve the quality of her life and yours together.

LISBON, N.D. (AP)  Butch and Deb Dicks lifelong dream was to open a big game hunting preserve and after years of preparation, they expected to welcome the first customers to their southeastern North Dakota ranch this month. Voters will decide next month whether to shut them down. It seems that free-range boutique fenced farming with a lot of space per animal and individual harvesting by bow or gun is a lot more humane than mass market fenced farming in dense feed lots that you can smell a mile away with mass processing at the end. Are they going to ban other sorts of fenced farming including feed lots too?