DrewEckhardt

I got line twists under my Turbo Z 205 with a wing loading of .9 pounds per square foot when I yanked on a toggle too quickly. After that I stopped yanking; where Brian Germain's "It's ballet, not boxing" is an appropriate analogy.

If one of the following applies 1. Graduating from a top-7 law school and therefore headed for a good firm 2. Graduating from a ROTC program and becoming active-duty military eligible for a good discount 3. Graduating to satisfy the conditions of your trust fund and you don't care about $6000 coming out of your pocket, 6 months of gear rental, and thousands of dollars you loose in depreciation you might buy new. In all other cases USED. For most degrees, WELL-USED. Saving an emergency fund so you don't have to go home to mom & dad when you loose your job, saving a down payment on a house, or saving 20% of your income so you can retire in 21 years should all be higher priorities than looking good. AADs should be priced on time-remaining on their life time, batteries, and inspection cycle. Some people are overly optimistic on that and your total cost of ownership will be lower over the next 12 years if you buy a new one. Unless you get a package deal, in which case the whole rig might be $2500-$3000.

When you figure out how a 200-kt drone is going to intercept, much less dogfight a Mach 3 warplane, let me know. While a 200-kt drone isn't going to do anything, a Mach 4 one which doesn't have to loiter or travel far to its target can.

In economic terms, the second one is called a poll tax. It's actually the most efficient (meaning having the least distortion on human behavior) tax possible. Through weird (and inaccurate) teaching in our public schools, it's generally thought to be a racist method of taxation. I like the flat fee tax too, but prefer the term "capitation" since it carries less historical baggage to upset the unwashed masses. Obviously it's not a realistic possibility any where outside a newly incorporated town or a wealthy area looking to keep the riff-raff out.

You think we have fully automated UAV's capable of aerial intercepts and fights? I'm an engineer. I know other engineers. I know we could build one.

With given numeric relationships between equipment, head count, and roles it's a reasonable approximation. Fighters hold one pilot, take some number of mechanics to maintain, some fraction of a person to fuel, some fraction of an air-traffic controller, etc. The point is that countries with our land mass, more coastline, same labor costs, and similar level of technology make do with 1/30th of what we do. We outspend #2 by nearly 10X. We won the Cold war by spending more than a communist second world economy could sustain. Now that's done we need to come to grips with reality for the future of America instead of taking out a sub-prime Chinese mortgage to support tradition.

What happens if your computer dies, or gets stolen? Do you have a backup of the data? Is there a way for a regional USPA official to review it for granting awards? I don't care about getting my octa-nona-hepta-dodeca-diamond-wings award, and have enough jumps logged on paper for the ratings I might want (I'd have gotten a pro-rating if the city let me jump into my wedding, or if I kept living in the same town as my demo jumping friends).

My pro-track gives (gave, I need to get it fixed) me a count. Manifest printouts are a lame fallback. Logging doesn't really seem worth the effort. Tracking jump numbers is a good idea - disregarding the need to be legal on original CYPRES AADs, it's a nice reminder to inspect gear for wear and trim changes. Partial logging including canopy type+size makes being accurate easier when you're still in the gear selling phase. I still remember interesting jumps and people 15 years later and don't recall being reminded of anything when I dug through my logbooks when I decided to move and get a license prior to moving 11 years after I should have.

A redneck or a yankee is more of a geographical slur as to where you live in American than calling someone a "Kiwi". . Right. Merkin is the correct slur for Americans. NSFW URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

I'd suggest votes proportional to taxes paid as more fair and in-line with corporate governance, with the US being the largest corporation in the world for practical purposes.

Yeah, that's nonsense, all right. UAV's are recon assets, not interceptors. Now. UAV interceptors have superior performance potential since no pilot to pass out leads to better maneuverability, computer control of one takes human reaction time out of the equation, and multiples can coordinate. UAVs moving from recon + ground attack to aerial interception is a big marketing hurdle but reasonable technically. For that matter, great stuff has been done with robotic submarines. The pollution monitoring artificial fish project could be re-factored into finding ships+subs that shouldn't be there. Larger armed versions could intercept or call for reinforcement. With a $29K per unit CAPEX and low TCO due to staff multiplexed among multiples on an as-needed you can put a LOT in the water compared to manned vessels. More forces at lower cost are just the thing to keep terrorists at bay and the budget balanced (for the sake of argument I'll ignore that they'd be tasked with drug interdiction in that lost war)

We don't need our own aircraft carriers. We can carrier-pool with the rest of NATO (especially) and our neighbors to the North and South. Canada has ten times our coastline at 202,080 km versus a mere 19,924 in America. They have 9,984,670 km^2 of air space to protect versus 9,629,091 km^2 in the US. They're even bigger but do fine on far less. Sounds good to me. Each country should be supporting itself, with some of that coming from foreign investments in natural resources and/or their labor pool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_armed_forces Canada is my favorite comparable example because it's a first world country with similar labor costs, land mass, and allies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces World wide cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_federations_by_military_expenditures My spending proposal with $5,000,000,000,000 10-year savings means we're still #1, outspending China at #2 by a factor of 2. People counts are here, where it's interesting to note that we're right up there with countries where people are expendable and equipment is out of reach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_active_troops

I want a military that's sized for defense instead of empire building. We should downsize our 1,473,900 active personel and 1,458,500 reserves to the 65, 890 and 53,398 (23,401 of whom are unpaid) needed in first-world countries with our land-mass and border length like Canada. In 2008 we spent $651,000,000,000 on budget, or $441,685 per full-time military employee. Assuming we're content saving a mere $5,000,000,000,000 per decade (while billions are pocket change, trillions do add up), after right-sizing our military we can increase per-solider spending 540% to $2,827,821 a year. That should provide exceptional equipment. We could even boost deployed soldier salaries to the same comfortable six figure range demanded by private contractors who work in the same conditions. We'd still be spending 750% of what a comparable country does.

Yes. The pro-track has an infra-red LED on back which lines up with an IR receiver in the cradle with a standard serial connection on the other end. It's not a standard IR protocol. There are other recording altimeter devices that have mini-USB or standard IR interfaces.

The human society often neuters them when they're just eight weeks old, before they get the hormones and develop the spraying problem.

You can pay enough on your credit card to make a negative balance if you want. I've encountered only one bank which didn't have debit cards that can be used everywhere credit cards can (Countrywide used to have ATM cards only; real PITA). Most people will take a certified check from the same country. You can buy multiple postal money orders to get around the limit. I used three for cash-on-delivery with my first rig. As noted above Paypal is an option even between countries (I've sold stuff to people in Europe and Australia, and bought from Australia). The seller pays 3% of the transaction and I think the cross-border and currency conversion fees so this may affect your price.

You need to be proficient (but not competitive) at flat RW. When the body position itself is hard isn't the time to be learning how to approach and dock on formations. Flat is the greatest common denominator for sunset/birthday/X00 jump/pickup loads and you don't want to be left out of the fun. Maybe that's a hundred jumps. Now days tunnel time would substitute. You also need enough time so that free fall isn't overwhelming so you can notice when you didn't hear your audible and the ground has snuck up on you. 200 jumps is the wing-suit numbers. There's less to deal with when freeflying.

Over-the-glasses goggles. You only have to keep them tight for a few minutes. Prescription goggles are another option.

Eric the ammo man rocks with competitive pricing and great service http://www.ammoman.com Charges everything as Discount Distributors in case you have to hide it from some one.

Right. You have better dexterity in your right hand, braking forces go up when the rims get wet, and it's consistent with motorcycles.

Most of the broken and dead people get there by not recognizing incorrect attitude soon enough and/or failing to instinctively apply the right control inputs. Not taking the time to learn that with a larger canopy increases your chances of visiting the orthopedic surgeon because it's harder to get right on smaller canopies and the penalties for mistakes goes up with your energy. Experience as a fixed wing pilot has no effect on that. Perfect straight-in landings on your 170 have done nothing to teach you low altitude turns, cross and down-wind landings, and landings with induced speed all of which will get combined to save your butt 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. The 170 would be a better second canopy at 100 jumps, and 150 third at 250 jumps because that plus practice and training are what it takes to learn those survival skills and instinctively apply them without being in sensory overload once things go wrong. Here's where you want to start http://www.bigairsportz.com/pdf/bas-sizingchart.pdf Your local instructors may accept that 1 in 4 of us with testosterone go to the hospital or don't get the canopy size connection. Brian knows more than your instructors with over 10,000 jumps, a bunch of parachute designs under his belt, lots of canopy flight seminars taught, university training in psychology, and books written on parachutes + sports psychology. I told this guy that a wing loading of 1.3 was a bad idea and he didn't listen. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3610363;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread Other guys have died at that wing loading avoiding unseen obstacles but I don't care enough to look one up since you're probably not going to listen. After a thousand jumps you'll think the same things, either because you got lucky on a few close calls or learned the hard way.

It's a horrible deal because MSRP means a new car. Disregarding interest costs you're likely to eat 30-40% of the value in depreciation in the first three years which is $6-$7K on a cheap car. A 20% value loss is possible with just driving off the lot. Until I've made my first five million and can be retired I'm sticking with 3-year old cars which can even be had in warrantied, factory-certified form since that helps the car makers dispose of 3-year old cars that spent time in their leasing departments. Driven into the ground for a decade plus.

It's not dead yet, although we've been in decline for over a century. 1861 was a big blow for state's rights when we decided that secession was not part of the rights reserved for the people and states. In 1913 we got the federal income tax to feed unlimited government growth, with payroll withholding introduced in 1943 sealing the deal with tax rolls growing-ten fold. In 1934 we got the National Firearms Act, the first significant infringement on white people's right to keep and bear arms. In 1937 we got the Marijuana Tax act. So much for everything else being reserved for the people and states. In 1942 we got Wickard v. Filburn where SCOTUS stamped their seal of approval on commerce clause abuse thus granting the government law making ability far beyond what was otherwise allowed in the constitution. In 1970 we got the RICO act where property could be confiscated without due process. etc. Some where along the way Congress gave executive branch appointees de-facto legislative abilities by delegating rule writing to their agencies with criminal and civil penalties assessed by courts. There are also more practical matters like the artificial increase in education and home prices due to government loans, and US Military which is the biggest Socialist program the world has ever seen.

I don't care, because even with the American firearm murder rate and average chances of being black, in a street gang, and involved in the drug trade my chances of being killed with a gun are far lower than things like being in a fatal car accident. As a white guy with average chances of street gang and drug trade involvement I was safer in Seattle where any one can buy a handgun than across the border in Vancouver. I worry more about being mugged than being shot and I worry more about getting run down by a car. That would be a brilliant idea. It would be nice to see England embrace its bill of rights which allows states that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions.