DrewEckhardt

Tripe is pretty good in menudo and pho, although tendon might be my favorite non-steak pho beef part. It is getting to be the season for a crock pot filled with tripe, hominy, and tasty red broth. Mmmm.

I was thinking the same. If your product or idea is a good one you can market it. If you need the Govt subsidie you need to go back to the drawing board. There are lots of good ideas that take $20M+ just to bring to market and a lot more to make profitable. One of my favorites is LS9 (which seems to have raised $20M so far) which has genetically engineered bacteria and yeast that eat carbohydrates and poop oil. Obviously, bringing your idea to market on debt funding is better than venture capital since the VCs will take at least half the company. As long as the government is subsidizing environmentally sound behavior (like tax rebates for hybrid cars or solar sells) there shouldn't be a good reason some of that can't be in the form of making loans to small businesses.

Or you have the time before the demo to read the instruction manual which talks about adjusting it for higher and lower landing area elevations.

As Ron likes to say, do you have PROOF of that? The 40 year war on drugs is sufficient proof, following by England, Columbine, and common sense. OK,. so you have no proof then, just guessing. Right, no guns would get into this country illegally because guns are magic, not like marijuanna (1.5 million pounds from British Columbia alone each year), or cocaine (500,000 pounds a year) and unlike people (800,000) they don't have legs. If no guns got into this country ilegally, even though we have computer controlled CNC mills and resistance fighters made do with hand tools, we won't have home made open bolt sub-machine guns because Americans are too bloody stupid.

That's not a sensible size. It's at least 15% smaller than what accepted experts (Brian Germain) recomend. You'll probably grow into it just fine. You can usually be back in the air within 6-12 months when you don't (mostly broken tibia/fibulas and femurs which have been too numerous to count; I only know a couple guys who broke their backs and just one that got paralyzed exeeding Brian Germain's Wingloading Never Exceed formula of 1.0 + .1 for each 100 jumps with adjustments down for small canopies, currency, altitude, etc). A pound per square foot is not very exciting landing straight ahead in a wide open grassy field. The problem is that sooner or later you'll have some one "cut you off", not see an obstacle like a barbed wire fence until you're real low, have a bad spot, etc. and land some place else where you may find that it's at least a third bigger than you need to add an extra bend to your leg with an uneven landing area, 1500 jumps, and better than pro-rating accuracy skills (see attached; .75 pounds/square foot) Most containers with the closing loop mounted on the reserve container and not the bottom flap will accomodate two down sizes, but it doesn't matter. Used mains and rigs depreciate about $1/jump each. If you're patient shopping you'll spend the same money regardless of how many rigs and mains you go through getting to the smallest size you'll want to jump. If you do a better job shopping and selling you may even make a small profit. If you're one of the many people who break themselves and live in the United States, you'll be out thousands of dollars when you only have typical disability (paying 60% of wages with a 1 week exclusionary period) and health (deductable + only 80% coverage until you hit your co-insurance of a few thousand dollars) insurance. (the price tag doesn't include what you'll spend for a new harness if the paramedics have to cut you out). If you live some place with socialized medicine it might not be that bad financially but you'll need new jumpsuits after you've grown too fat from being unable to exercise with nothing better to do than drink beer.

December can be hit or miss as a snow month; things are usually best just before spring break time when there are a lot of storms but it's cold enough the snow isn't wet. You might try some of the less popular and less touristy places like Loveland Pass ski area (had a pass for a few seasons), A-basin (pass for a few seasons years), Silvercreek (never got there), Ski Cooper (never got there, although they do snow cat skiing), Wolf Creek (legendary snow, never made it). The poor snow won't get smushed as severely by hoardes of skiiers and boarders. Berthoud Pass was awesome before it closed. You can still hike it. Loveland Pass is real easy to shuttle with a car.

It's sunny and there isn't much snow until the spring storms. There are plenty of 40-50+ degree days in the winter although January is coldest. January and December are windiest and have the most chinooks which are high winds with warm temperatures (it can go from 30 to 60 degrees when a chinook starts and the air gets compressed blowing through the mountains). Note the "Number of Days with winds greater or equal to 70 MPH" and "Boulder Wind Events Above 90 MPH charts" http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/Boulder/wind.html http://www.bcna.org/winds.html

I jumped at Mile Hi for the first 10 years after it opened and I can't remember them ever being open for the holidays. A lot of the experienced jumpers head down to Eloy for the holiday boogie. You might head to the wind tunnel in Parker.

20 bucks a min. Talking about a wind tunnel right. Unless you're taking a rocket to altitude. And add the freefall and canopy ride. WAY more than a min. A wind tunnel is the cheapest way to "experience freefall" Although the scenery stinks it's about $12 a minute when you don't share, half that for two ways, and even less if you like belly flying or are proficient in other body positions. For $26 from an airplane you get 45 seconds of working time (tops) in freefall and one landing which happens pretty fast at a 50+ MPH approach speed. Some DZ may have planes that smell like roses (not farts) and have coctail service where the plane ride is actually an attraction but I haven't jumped there.

No. You want to buy your insurance from a group plan where the members only have an "average" chance of actually dying skydiving (meaning nearly 0 jumps a year, with nearly all the exceptions making at most one tandem skydive with 1/6th the statistical risk of a sport jump) and convert to an individual ppolicy when you leave the company instead of paying premiums which reflect your perceived risk increase.

But we do it entirely for a rich person's sport (over $20 a minute is way beyond even phone sex) instead of getting to important business meetings or loved ones who live far away. While cutting our fuel consumption in half through punitive taxes wouldn't do a thing for the environment, it would "send a message" to the "average American" Politics is all about "Sending messages"

GA is a rich man's hobby enjoyed by the 400,000 people who belong to AOPA and 30,000 USPA members. Few of the 300,000,000 US residents get hit along with GA. Only a couple hundred drivers (including NASCAR, Craftsman Trucks, etc) with teams actually paying for it who are in the game for advertising (unless people just put "TIDE" on their car because they like the way their clothes smell) will actually pay anything sport-related if fuel taxes go up.

As opposed to a Republican presidency that wants to control general aviation (including skydiving) so we "don't have another 9/11?" Both parties are about controlling the little people (the few flights made by McCain's 737 and Obama's 757 would not be affected). They just disagree over the reasons ("terrorists" or "the environment") and what to do first (confiscate your eyelash curlers (Republicans and the TSA) or retirement savings (Democrats with taxes "on the wealthy"). Obama will tax you more now. McCain will increase taxes less but increase the interest you have to pay on the debt in the future more. Bend over and choose a ribbed or studded condom. No matter what you're going to get screwed. Airlines are big (money loosing) businesses, and the republicans are more in bed with (corporate wellfare consuming) businesses so we'll probably get a bigger shaft from them (when the airlines claim that general aviation isn't paying for its fair share of the air traffic control system so they can keep more of their ticket revenues instead of paying for the services that they're the biggest consumers of) Politics are about appearing to do something (so you continue to feed from the public power trough) without pissing off too many people (so you get kicked out of office). Minorities like GA pilots (400,000 in AOPA) don't matter and smaller ones like Skydivers (30,000) matter less.

Being "pro-life" yet still allowing rape victims to have abortions is politically expedient but inconsistent and unprincipled. If abortion at any point after conception is murder, that trumps any inconvienence experienced by the mother carying to term. If it's not murder (I don't shed tears over the animals I eat which are a lot more developed than most human fetuses) after a rape there shouldn't be any problems in other situations.

Nope. That's far too many elections in the future to matter. Fat people like me cost more money this term.

If you do a good job with energy management you can stop most swoopy canopies (example - Samurai 105, 175 pounds exit weight, 8000 foot density altitude) in a couple of steps. You just have to finish your swoop low (your feet would be below ground level) and finish with more sudden toggle input with the pitched canopy acting as an airbrake and lifting you back up to ground level. Obviously, most skydivers do not make optimal landings and how fast you're going when things aren't optimal gets worse with smaller canopies. Accuracy canopies work land the way they do largely because of wingloading, with dropping to .65 pounds/square foot from .8 providing a nicer sink. You'd probably want something in the 280+ square foot range. While you can literally bring a big F111 seven cell straight down on soft ground (like a pea gravel pit) and get stand-up landings your vertical speed would be too high if you did so under the same canopy at contemporary wing loadings.

Sure. I've packed my Samurai 105 that way for ~300 jumps. It works well for canopies that are either slippery or small so the folds end up short and harder to control

No. Your steering lines are attached to the outside of the canopy's trailing edge. The amount of canopy distortion is intentionally limited - one company switched from 5 brake lines to 4 when customers were stalling too easily. Pulling on them works a bit like flaps on a plane which give you more lift and more drag. The added drag slows down the canopy, the jumper continues to travel forwards, and the whole system pitches as the jumper moves thus gradually changing the angle of attack (the angle between the canopy and relative wind). Your D-lines are attached some distance forwards of the trailing edge nearly always to the same risers as the C-lines. Pulling on the rear risers directly changes the angle of attack so the effect is immediate. There's not much distance between where the front and rear risers attach to the canopy (you're looking at the average of the A/B line attachments to the C/D average) so it doesn't take much. The canopy stalls when the angle of attack becomes too large causing the airflow over its top surface to separate from the canopy. This happens regardless of speed. So the risk here is that relatively little input will stall the canopy relatively quickly when it still has significant forwards and vertical speed.

Most BASE jumpers with the potential for visiting interesting landing areas are jumping wingloadings under .7 pounds/square foot. After some time in the sport lots upsize. The skydivers who listen to Brian Germain's "conservative" advice start with canopies which land with 140% of the energy they'd have at BASE wingloadings. After some time in the sport lots downsize, with experienced jumpers having 250%+ of BASE landing energy.

You could, but your canopy is going to stall much more abruptly on the rear risers. Most people don't have a lot (any) rear riser landings and will be a lot less likely to injure themselves on their reserve with intact steering lines.

A tent. You might get lucky and find a room in a house. 1/3 or 1/5 of a larger dwelling is usually a lot less expensive than even a studio apartment. In school and when I got my first few jobs I got rooms for ~$300/month when one bedroom apartments were renting for $500-$600/month. It helps a lot on utilities too, especially if you want to live in luxury with things like hot water and cable TV.

63.9 MPH average over a 70 meter curved course.

Uh, which college and what gold plated prison are you talking about? Public. How about Metro State in Denver? About $5K/year in tuition. Average jail costs non-rural places. California has exceeded $40K/year. One can attend school full-time and live on half-time semi-skilled (you're partway through a degree) wages in better than dormitory/prison conditions (room in a shared apartment or house instead of one of two or four bunks in the same sized room)

In this election. Where presidential elections are decided by less than a percent of people who chose to vote, the parties court small minorities like the Republicans with evangelical Christians. A small turnout for a third party is likely to net platform concessions in subsequent elections. When there isn't a meaningful difference between what the viable contenders will actually accomplish (Democrats lose their congressional majorities when they pass "reasonable" gun laws, and Republicans would suffer at least as much if they were stupid enough to pass significant anti-abortion legislation instead of just talking about it when they can't pass laws) those concsessions are more important than who holds office for 4 years.

I'll vote for Obama because he's least likely to create a military situation where my step kids get sent to the middle east. I'm especially excited about his plan to exempt capital gains on startup and small company stock - that could be worth millions. Being likely to create less debt that I'll have to pay for when I'm old, retired, and living on a fixed income is a bonus. His positions on gun rights disgust me (not as much as Fine Swine; I'll be voting for an electable candidate in the Republican primary and their candidate in the general election if I'm still in California as 2012 approaches). I'd prefer drastic military spending cuts (while outspending #2 might be a good idea, we don't have to outspend the rest of the world) over thousands of dollars in increased taxes (with Biden being worse) as he allows cuts to expire. The pandering (like the "windfall profits tax") is only mildly anoying. As a left-libertarian (while I agree that land doesn't become property until combined with labor, it seems a little unfair that I come out ahead because my father's mother's ancestors were here in time for the revolution while new immigrants didn't show up until yesterday. While I accept natural rights (any one should be able to build a lean-to from spare parts like they learned for their Wilderness Survival merit badge) there are better ways for that to collide with modern society than people homesteading Central Park) I wouldn't vote for Barr who wasn't a libertarian until recently. Third party presidental votes are a signal to the Democrats and Republicans that you don't like their platforms and that they should throw you a bone in the next contest because less than 1% of the people who vote prefer one over the other. Although Bob changing is not out of the question (education is a wonderful thing) I can see the Republican party taking into account Bob's voting record when tailoring their social policies to get just a bit more of the vote. Although in 2008 Bob is a lobyist for marijuanna legalization, in 1998 he wrote the Barr Amendment against medical marijuanna. I don't like creating an environment where people have good reasons to shoot each other (huge profits from the drug black market), where we're spending $40K/year (CA prison system) to take care of people who haven't done anything to people who didn't want to buy drugs, and where we've made contraband which can be used as an excuse for civil forfeiture (Ya borrowed your friends car and left a roach in it... oops!) to increase law enforcement budgets or planted on innocent people by corrupt police officers who "know" the victim is guilty of something. If I were into protecting people from themselves, I'd ban alcohol (which causes los of deaths) and high-calorie convenience foods like Big Macs (obesity is worse than alcohol) before drug use among people who aren't operating motor vehicles, caring for children, etc. Looks like we're already headed down that path, with the California ban on restaurant trans-fats and the rest of the country following within a decade on similar health issues like public smoking and motor vehicle emissions...