DrewEckhardt

Fliteline (Reflex), Sunrise Manufacturing (Wings), Jump Shack (Racer), and Mirage have all made sensible main + reserve container combinations. Some will even do any combination but "won't promise it will look good." You just can't buy a Javelin or Vector if you want that without jumping a sail fabric cross-braced tri-cell.

No. Parachuting with a big canopy from 13,000 feet is just not that exciting after you've done it enough. If you don't want to switch hobbies you need to find ways to make it more interesting. Jumping parachutes the size of your bedsheets + duvet, starting at 200-400 feet, and tight nasty landing areas are all exciting; but adding drugs to basic skydiving could arguably be safer especially without enough experience to reduce your risk on other fun modifications.

It won't interfere with the plane, but is against FCC regulations because the phones can reach too many cells using the same frequencies/time slots/etc. In practice it works up to a few thousand feet.

Accuracy competition started long before square canopies were on the scene. Those who could not spot were 'at the mercy of the winds;" those who could spot used the winds to their advantage. And those accuracy competitions didn't put up to 22 people out on one pass.

Modern rounds are steerable, they just don't have enough forward speed to go anywhere to get you away from the forrest, gator infested swamp, or shotgun wileding farmer's field that you opened over. Your chances of a reserve malfunction that did not result from operating the canopy past its design limits (like a head-down Cypress fire in excess of 130 knots for older designs), criminal negligence packing (a molar strap around the reserve would do it), or errors in your emergency procedure execution (opening the reserve an then cutting away can lead to entanglements) are pretty much zero. Low aspect ratio rectangular seven cells with forty-five minute pack jobs are a completely different animal than high aspect ratio tapered designs with six minute pack jobs.

eh? What a load of bollocks "From each according to his ability" - Karl Marx

I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they'll do the right thing but I've found that to be too painful in terms of the effort I spend to cleanup after their messes and what's coming out of my wallet. Once you've worked for me before and done a good job, I'll assume that will continue and leave you alone. Before that happens I'm going to be proactive since the average person is incompetant regardless of education level and salary. Some people are lazy liars which is worse since you can't even tell them to do the right thing. This applies to _EVERYONE_. I've had to tell doctors who'd feed me 120mg of hydrocodone a day for nerve pain that they really should try something different, so this sort of thing just isn't limited to people in the trades. I've had to clean up after muppets with master's degrees and PhDs taking two days to two weeks of my time to redo and finish what they failed to get right in two months. Accountants have neglected one section of a unified 1099 with the time I spent seeing why their numbers didn't match my estimates being a lot more than if I'd done the returns myself for $450 less. One mechanic didn't do a pressure test when I had a coolant leak. I asked the next one to and he claimed they did but didn't find anything. The next two did pressure tests and found the same pin-hole leak (I skipped over shop number 3 because it looked like they were inflating the time estimates, which shop number 4 confirmed with real numbers from the book). Contractors have neglected to hang doors so they close (c'mon, a little time with a block plane is all you need) and bolt down toilets (I even provided longer than standard bolts to reach through the wood flooring so that wouldn't happen).

A poor person is going to get up to 4.5X the pay-out for each dollar they put into Social Security than a wealthy once the tax side effects are considered. A poor person's income taxes don't cover the government services they use. A higher tax rate on the poor is fair but arguably not just. The fairest is capitation, a flat per-head tax. You want a interstate highway system? Divide the cost by 300M and multiply by the number of people in your family. Modifications so that people aren't taxed into starvation and have an incentive to work more (why work 80 hours a week for no additional gains when 10 run you up to the poverty limit tax free?) are needed to make it practical. The biggest problem with the out of control American government is that we're an indirect democracy where the 50% of the country paying only 5% of the income tax (the average tax rate in the bottom two quintiles is actually negative) get to decide how 95% of the money not coming out of their pockets gets spent. A flat percentage tax would make it better since the bottom quintiles would feel some pain but not eliminate the problem. Where you have a simple percentage, it's still in the lower earning peoples' best interest to vote for benefits they don't bear the full burden of. Most people would vote for food subsidies if it meant sashimi grade tuna steaks and Kobe for dinner when their share of the tab was just enough for Tilapia and ground chuck.

3-5 year old Subaru wagon of your choice. Some one else has eaten the worst of the depreciation (on average, 45% in the first three yeras) for you. You can haul as much as some SUVs. Rent a pickup from Home Depot for $19.95 on the few days when you need more. High-speed handling and gas-mileage are still car-like. WRX performance is good, and the other Subarus are still sporty.

Legally, the FAA doesn't care what you do as long as you're using certified equipment. The USPA is a little more restrictive, requiring you to complete a seven level student program before jumping without an instructor. Beyond that point you're allowed to do lots of things which are likely to kill you without enough prior training and experience just like the motorcycle dealer will sell anyone with $12,000 a 400 pound bike with more horsepower than entry level German sports sedan and ski patrol won't keep a rank beginner off double black diamond slopes with signs warning of cliff bands ahead. Some drop zone operators take that into consideration. "You're not doing THAT at my dropzone." Some don't. Both activities require you to be comfortable enough with just skydiving that the added emergency procedures and restrictions (flying a wingsuit is a lot like skydiving in a straight jacket, and having your feet stuck together on a skyboard is not good for mobility) aren't a big deal. That point is generally accepted to be at 200 skydives. With the sky-board, you also need to be capable of head-up flight with complete control in all three axis. Left and right 360 degree turns, cartwheels in both directions, front and back flips ending in the same position you started with, and able to get back to a sit/stand from any orientation.

This one night I was out drinking with friends and one of them said we should go skydiving. That still seemed like a fine idea when we were sober so the two out of three of us who thought it was a good idea found a drop zone, gave up on that one when they get rescheduling us and having "airplane trouble," found another dropzone, and went skydiving.

I only scored 29.19132% - Total Geek. I don't think the test was fair, because a lot of the options just weren't geeky enough. "I turn on my computer first thing in the morning" implies that the thing was turned off which no self respecting geek would do. "I've used my computer next to a naked member of the appropriate sex" is geekier than skipping a party to play with it. There's not enough points for tool use and building things - we should get points for owning oscilloscopes, function generators, and soldering irons. Bonus points for building things with vacuum tubes in the last decade.

You need hookers present for that. Nah, just coke. I've known too many coke-heads and they didn't seem to need anything else at the time.

I've become more economically liberal since deciding that laissez-faire capitalism isn't possible with real people (they bribe the government to distort the markets) and land ownership is an unfair advantage for people who were born or immigrated first. Economic Left/Right: 4.38 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.85

1) The parachutist must know where they're going to land (including how big the plants in the landing area are and what they might hide) before they take off. 2) On classic 4 wheel drives without a safety catch on the hood, the latches on the sides are VERY important. OTOH, the hood flipping open at 60 MPH and breaking off the windshield frame is a good way to get rid of hitchikers whose conversation has gotten a bit monotonous. The dude claimed to be a writer; I wonder if that experience influenced him.

Span-wise reinforcing tapes were added in 2001.

Some co-workers are. You share more in common with them than everyone but your spouse so they can be good friends. For all the rest on good days you're a (hopefully valuable) resource. On average days you're a threat who should have read _The Art of War_ (Sun Tzu) and _The Prince_ (Machiavelli). On bad days it's personal. You'd be better off heading to a bad part of town and being mugged because it would cost you a lot less. When you're spending 38% of your waking hours (sleep 7 hours a night, only work 8 hours a day, only take a half hour break for lunch and commute fifteen minutes each way - it's a conservative lower bound) it's nice to get more than a pay check. While I'm aiming for an early (one friend just retired at 37) retirement without a pay cut, as long as I have to work to maintain an acceptable life style I wouldn't want to do it any other way. I like to invent and build complicated things. I like it a lot more than skydiving, but it's much more expensive when you want results. Fortunately there are venture capitalists who have the budget but not the aptitude.

I agree. People who can't navigate the internet safely should stick with Macs and she's since been kicked off the good computer and relegated to her Powerbook. I just still have to clean up the aftermath of letting a 20 year old drive something she wasn't good enough to handle. Blues, Dave PCs work fine and cost less than macs. You just have to remove windows and replace it with a real operating system. Fire up a virtual machine (sun's virtualbox is free) with windows when you need your favorite tax program.

There's nothing illegal about BASE jumping per-se. Moab and Twin falls are happy to have us. Other states with a libertarian live-and-let-live attitude have no restrictions surrounding their bridges and cliffs. The Royal Gorge gets extra tourist dollars when they invite us to jump off the brige and tram. Various Native American tribes welcome paying adveture tourists on their lands. The Mexican government likes adventure tourism and media exposure. Presumably the guys in Kuala Lumpor get something similar. All legal. That's B, S, E, and other. A legal antenna may be harder to come by but those are usually missing the nice nature hike in or out that goes with the geography surrounding E and S and tight landing areas that go with B in urban environments or the other two. No big loss. No reason for people not directly involved to know if you're driving to Moab, the legal earth in the state park with the gnarly landing area, or some one's antenna. Then there's illegal vs immoral.

In most states it's illegal to drive under the influence of ANY substances. If you do poorly enough on the road side sobriety tests they'll take you back to the station for a blood test which will detect marijuanna, opiates, etc. and provide more evidence for a criminal conviction. If your coordination and reaction times are good enough it doesn't matter. I've had friends convicted for driving whilst under the influence of prescribed medications. If you refuse, in most states (the feds and our highway taxes) it's an automatic license suspension. Either way, they're already looking for and busting stoned drivers.

Schizophrenia affects 1.3% of the US adult population. As of 2002, 28.7% of adult male Americans and 34.5% of adult female Americans were obese with obesity leading to 112,000 excess deaths each year some of whom were parents of minor children. If it's reasonable for the government to control everyone's behavior to help 1% of the population, it would be criminal for them not to address what's happening to nearly a third of us. They should be banning big macs, or at least have a sign like the have on roller coaters "You may weigh no more than this much to eat this food" Right. And right now teen agers have an easier time getting marijuana (the local dealer does not check IDs) than alchohol (he does and the local police run sting operations).

Over 95% of my highschool class went on to post-secondary education an a lot of my friends graduated with more than the 27 college credit hours that I had. The people who smoked pot weren't headed for college and I figured the pot and beer were the reason. After I got out into the world, the people I knew smoking pot had careers with six figure salaries, nice houses, and sometimes families. There's no connection between success and pot smoking, although successful people have more to loose if it's found out.

Before the 2001 recession, when my company was going down hill I quickly found another job with a pay raise. After when my next company crashed I spent $30,000 of my savings living until I got my next pay check doing temporary contracting work and then took an $8000 pay cut. While not entirely pleasant my living expenses were relatively low at the time and it was manageable. Now I have a disabled wife, live in a state with double the taxes, and have two step children in out of state colleges with their own apartments. The economy is in worse shape. When we had lay-offs I was a lot more concerned. I'd turn to squatting and poaching first. No point in being miserable all your waking hours.

You want your legs to break in the straight pieces of bone (which usually heal with time and a little help) instead of at the joints where bone spurs will give you arthritis. Moving the weak point away from the part that heals most easily is not a good idea.

If you want to jump both wingsuits and elliptical parachutes, you want to have two rigs. If you're jumping smaller canopies and there aren't a lot of CRW people at your DZ you might want a second rig with that which holds a lightning loaded around 1.3 pounds/square foot. If the people you jump with use packers and the lift capacity is high enough, you want to have a second rig. You don't need to have a Cypres in both of them, especially if you're jumping wingsuits (won't fire if you forget about altitude) or CRW (opening right out the door makes it harder to forget to pull).