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Agree with you 100%, man. Sad thing is, if I were approached by redbull and offered a spot as a sponsored athlete with them, most likely I'd take it despite my distaste for the whole concept. I love to fly wingsuits more than anything else, and being paid to fly around the world and do my thing would be the ultimate. As it stands now, I've been in all kinds of cool events and records, for which I paid a small fortune. I might even have enough distinction myself to have something of value to offer the redbull people... I've taken the long-flight thing to such an extreme I recently pulled a 4 minute skydive from standard altitude in an ordinary production-model S-Bird suit, and so far as I know I'm the first and only to be able to do that, rumors of Tony's exotic prototypes notwithstanding. If theres anyone else out there who can do that I haven't heard of em and I figure theres a good chance I quietly set a new world record with that flight. But I don't really know how to exploit that and I'd feel a bit foolish if I tried to make a big deal out of it, so chances are it will pass completely unnoticed by the wingsuit community, the skydiving community and the public at large, and I'm ok with that. As achievements go, its a triviality, and in 5 more years there'll be dozens of wingsuit people doing it. I specifically do not seek publicity for the stuff I've done in skydiving because I don't want to be one of THOSE guys. I'm more interested in DOING it than I am in being famous for it. I've sometimes considered a career change, trying to get into advertising specifically so I could make deliberately NOT-obnoxious commercials. These days marketing people have become so extremely hyperfocused on pounding their products into our faces I refuse to watch TV or listen to the radio because I can't stand either, anymore. The focus on using the medium not for entertainment but as a vehicle for pushing their products drives me batshit. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

??? I'm curious, what do you mean? Was he self-promoting in some way I hadn't noticed? Or was it like a french nationalism thing? I only ask that because it was being publicized as "le grand saut", and given that the majority of people hearing about it are not likely to speak french, I figured maybe he was trying to make some kind of point... on the other hand, he IS french, perfectly natural to title your effort in your native language. Given how much effort he sank into trying to make it happen, I got the impression it was all about the jump and nothing else. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Perhaps I am. I said what I said because to me their approach to the whole thing highlights what I see as being wrong with excessive branding and marketing. Their priority is that people's awareness of whatever event they've attached their name to should be dominated by awareness of redbull. The insistent, constant pushing of the name brand itself makes me think that they do not care about the achievement, or the athletes or the people who helped make it happen or the passion involved, what they care about is that it makes you more aware of redbull. In this case the spacejump itself again comes secondary to how important it is to them that everybody knows redbull is doing a spacejump. When Cheryl's effort was in the news, I couldn't have told you who or what was backing her without looking it up. Coverage of the effort was focused on the jump, the achievement. Mention of corporate sponsors, if any, was fairly discrete. If I wanted to know, I could know by looking, but it wasn't being shoved in my face every time I heard about it. What I heard was that a spacejump was (hopefully) being done. Same goes for Fournier. I'm sure if he had sponsors their logos would be displayed on his gear but again, any and all information I encountered about it was focused on the jump itself, the priority was making people aware of the JUMP, not the name brand. But this effort, look at the top of this page, it proves my point. The jump comes secondary to making sure everyone knows its the REDBULL spacejump. The focus isn't "There's another spacejump attempt in progress, historic new record effort, *sponsored by redbull* The focus is "Its the REDBULL spacejump" with getting the damn namebrand itself in our faces as the first, foremost and dominant priority. They have been so successful at making that clear that I'd bet you can't find one mention of this effort, anywhere in global media or topical discussion like this one in which REDBULL isn't the single biggest theme attached to it and mentioned first, before anything else about it is said. I'm sure they show a lot about it, because the more it is mentioned in the media the more opportunities are created to shove the name REDBULL in your face yet again. I'd love to see this or any such effort succeed, I just wish they'd do it without taking such obnoxious advantage of maximum possible opportunity for intrusive and aggressive marketing. They're not doing this for the achievement and hoping by backing it people will happen to also drink more redbull cause they're cool enough to be doing this, they're doing this because the specific intention is to exploit people's excitement about a spacejump and transfer that to making them excited about redbull. To me, wicked cool things like spacejumps should be about the achievement, not about the name brand thats promoting it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

DAMN, lady! 325? Holy crap. Thats FAAAAAAAST! There aren't any speed skydivers in these parts that I know of. I'm a WS freak specializing in ultralow speeds. If I tried to go that fast I'd never make it... you'd just hear a quiet *pop* and thered be nothing left but a cloud of feathers. People staring up, going "whoa". This is a pity. I root for any new high alti effort, out of the three in recent years my favorite had been Cheryl Stearns. In fact about the only reason my least favorite was this one is purely because I hate marketing and I am absolutely SICK of being beaten about the head with the words redbull redbull redbull redbull redbull and if they do it, I'd have to deal with being bombarded with mention of the name of the damn drink 800 times a day for as long as they're current news. It'd be inescapable for months, and making it worse would be knowing the redbull marketing guys are coming in their pants about that fact. I'm the kind of guy that strips the logos off his clothes or buys em without in the first place... insistent marketing jamming their names and logos in our faces just annoys the hell out of me. I had to look for quite awhile to find a quality pair of shoes that did NOT have gigantic glossy plastic logos stuck all over em. I've taken brand new pairs of shoes and blacked out the logos with a sharpie before, just because the shoes were great but I couldn't stand being forced to be a walking billboard for a shoe brand the entire damn planet already knows about anyway as a condition of wearing the nice shoes. With Cheryl, it was about the jump. With Fournier, it was about the jump. With Baumgartner, its about promoting himself and redbull. Ugh. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Room temp superconductors, definitely. RTS would be great for cutting losses if they ever get it sorted to the point you can build motors and transformers out of it. But I'm not seeing much of a way to use aerogel with this stuff. They've already made the tech work fine without either. Whatcha got in mind for the stuff here? Anything specific? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

So far as I know, very little of it actually. You can charge em fast or you can trickle charge em slow, and tap as much juice to charge it as the situation demands. Wind is low but still producing juice today? Fine, feed each flywheel only 1kw and the speed builds up gradually. More efficient that way anyway since you lose less power as waste heat warming the wiring, hysteresis losses in the coils, resistance of the wiring, Ohm's law and all that. You got high winds today but they're gusting 10-35 mph? Your storage plant is working like hell, then. One minute the wind dies off and the rotors are dumping megawatts into the grid to keep the output the same and decelerating at a rate of 100rpm/minute. Then you get 5 minutes of high wind and you stash half that juice back into the flywheels feeding em 10KW each and accelerating em back up to speed at 10rpm/minute or whatever. The whole point is, they aren't an energy source themselves. They just make renewable energy sources which are often irregular, able to produce power consistently over time and thus far more practical and usable. Their website details using it for solar and wind the same way I've described here. Right now wind and solar are more of a trendy "green" publicity stunt than anything else and cannot be relied on for more than a fraction of a percent of power needs. These things will keep the juice coming in between gusts or clouds, and suddenly your renewable solar or windfarm is RELIABLE. So this is an enabling technology that will in turn make wind and solar become worthwhile investments. Instead of the pitiful few hundred megawatts of wind and solar in existence, it becomes practical to build gigawatts worth of it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

No power to recharge it? You missed the relevant fact that the whole point of scaling it up would be to combine these puppies with a wind farm or solar station. These things are nothing more than gigantic kinetic batteries. Wind farm makes juice. Juice is stored kinetically in a rotating mass. I don't have the figures for this but I can take a pretty good wild-ass-guess based on what I've seen. I'm guessing that much like a battery, it is considered "dead" or fully discharged long before it has stopped and can produce no output voltage. So "Full" probably means full-spec max speed 16000 rpm. You tap the power off the rotating mass by inductive coupling. "dead" probably means after x number of minutes of magnetic loading, the thing has slowed down to maybe 14000-12000 rpm. Wind blows, flywheels speed up. Wind stops, flywheels begin to dump juice into grid and there is no interruption in power. Wind comes up again, you start feeding the juice back into the slowest flywheels. My guess is, for best energy capture you'd actually need a lot more of these units than the minimum, so that you could keep a few deliberately at less-than-max state. It can't store energy if its already fully spun up. So if you wanted to do this on a REALLY major scale, 500+ MW, it would certainly get big. But I'd far rather see a vast patch of empty desert with a grid of 4 or even 100,000 of these puppies storing enough juice to run NY and Chicago for a day or a week, than the continued wholesale destruction of entire regions you get with "mountaintop removal" coal mining. I've seen pics of this and its appalling... They are manufacturing Mordor as a side effect of power production, destroying vast swaths of terrain and leaving blasted wasteland behind them. It is madness and it cannot last forever but if the practice is not halted and replaced with something sustainable, by the time they're done half the appalacians will have been reduced to rubble. Its an ongoing environmental crime on the scale of anything the soviets did, and once those mountains are gone they are gone forever. How long your stored flywheel juice lasts is exactly like any battery technology. How big do you want it to be? How long do you want it to last? Their 4th generation standard unit is the one in production right now, 25kwh. Compared to how big they are the energy density isn't all that high really. A 25kw generator is a fraction of the size. But space is cheap, the world is not short of places people don't live and land that can't be used for anything. Heres a little napkin math. I'm bad at math and have to make a bunch of assumptions but I'll probably be in the ballpark here so bear with me. Each gen4 unit stores 25kwh. So 25,000 watts for 1 hour before the mass has slowed down to the point of uselessness. Thats enough to run a couple houses for a little while...couple hours maybe. It ain't much... a pinprick of juice, really, up until you start ganging these suckers together by the dozens and hundreds. 25kwh also=5kw x5 hours, or 2.5x10h, or 1.25kw x 20 hours meaning roughly enough juice in that silo to run a single space heater for 20 hours give or take a couple hundred watts. I haven't seen their fullscale plant. Its in NY. Since its being used for frequency stabilization, I.E. evening out short term spikes in grid loading, fast capacity matters more than storage time. Thus each unit is also good for 100kw/15 minutes, 200kw/7.5, 400,000 watts for 3:15. Their strategy for this is very smart actually. Their proof plant doesn't need to be huge to perform its function since if you're not relying on it to power a town for a day you can suck megawatts out of just a handful of silos for just the few minutes you need it to absorb the load at 4:15 PM when half of the state gets home from work and turns on their TVs and air conditioners all at once. Their info says the station under construction in NY which I may actually be sent to work at as a fab rat if I land the job is 20MW but doesn't say how long it can sustain it so I can't judge how big it actually is. Lets say you want to get rid of a 400MW standby natural gas station. You've got this gigantic station whose only purpose in life is to sit idle till 4:05 PM and fire up and run so its got juice on tap for the period from 4:15 to 4:30 during which all those commuters are turning on TVs and stuff. Lets pretend we only need to sustain the added load on the grid for 15 minutes. so 1 silo=100kw, 10=1MW, 100=10 MW, which is a 10x10 grid of these things maybe the size of a soccer field and means your 400MW megastation can be replaced by a BIG grid of 4000 of these suckers stashed out in the desert somewhere, a few hundred acres 40 silos wide and 100 silos long. Probably not economic, but if you just keep making them and adding to it over a decade or two at a few million bucks a year its not all that bad. And all this is assuming it was done with their "itty bitty" 25 kwh units. They're only on gen4. I'd imagine their engineers are hard at work on the gen5 50KWH unit... twice the mass but the silo doesn't get THAT much bigger. Gen6 might be a 100kwh unit with a 10,000lb rotating mass and a silo only twice the size and suddenly your 400MW surge plant gets much smaller. I'd be interested to know the physical limits of just how big can you make each unit? How bout a single 1MWH unit with a 50-ton rotating mass, or a 2MWH 100-ton version? Heavy industry is HUGE... the big stuff for manipulating energies on that scale can weigh thousands of tons. Keep scaling it up... how bout a single 20MWH, 1000-ton rotor unit? NOW we're talking. Compared to doing it with a zillion little ones, such a storage plant would be quite compact, each silo probably about the size of your typical farm silo and your 400MW plant occupies a space the size of a small to medium New England farm. By that point, your station could store the entire days' output of a wind farm by increasing a couple dozen rotors' speed by 30 rpm or something. You want to scale it up that size it'll be big, it'll be bulky and it won't be cheap, but I bet it can be done easier and cheaper than building a nuke plant. http://www.beaconpower.com/ Check out the links at their site for construction pics of the first gridscale plant. Its modest, but its a start. I'd like to ask Billvon to weigh in on this topic because frankly when it comes to these things I'm fuckin' ignorant and I'd imagine he could tell far more about this just from deduction based on the information available than I could. If I get a job with these people its because they have plenty of engineers but they're short of hands-on fab rats that can grind, weld, use a crane, run wire, operate the gear they're making the flywheels with and come up with practical ideas for upgrading it and do all that sort of thing, which is where I come in. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Not all that big, actually. A few acres. Smaller than the footprint of the gas or coal plant it is replacing, and MUCH smaller than the scale of the destroyed terrain required to stripmine that coal. Plus which if you build it on a large scale and integrate these things into the solar or wind farm it serves you can do a distributed version with a couple flywheel silos living at the base of each wind tower, or an array of them underneath the solar collectors in a solar plant using the otherwise wasted space there. Each silo once completed is nothing but a 10-foot circular concrete cap sticking maybe 2 feet out of the ground and one small support structure for the control room, the version I saw had the control room built into a totally anonymous-looking white cargo container just sitting on the ground. Step inside and its packed full of rectifier and power management gear and an array of flatscreens that looked like the dashboard for the Starship Enterprise monitoring flywheel status... RPM, axis drift, power factor, whether or not its currently dumping power or spinning back up. Its actually a rather small, unobtrusive and tidy technology. Its also very quiet. The flywheels themselves do not waste energy making any noise, they're completely silent, the single loudest part of the whole thing was the fans cooling the power handling equipment. This is not a distant future technology. If the first full scale version proves out well there could be a 200-500 MW version within 10 years and gigawatts worth of it within 15. Then the only limit is how fast can you scale up the facilities needed to build these things. They could be very widespread within 15-20 years easily I should think, once they finish working out an efficient way of mass-producing them. And compared with the cost of a single massive nuke plant or coal plant these things are dirt cheap to make. The plant they're building now is being backed by the Department of Energy and the Massachusetts government and they are quite serious about making this happen. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I can answer that for him: Yes. Right now wind power is nearly useless for that reason. If you deleted all fossil and nuke plants and ran the entire grid on wind, it'd be flickering like a continent-sized candle because every time the wind dies off so does the juice, and there is... there WAS no way to store power on a scale big enough to power cities. Same goes for solar. You can't have the power grid going limpdicked every time a cloud crosses the sun or a nice weeklong weather system passes through. Batteries are horribly inefficient and wear out in just a few cycles plus they're insanely expensive per kilowatt and have a tendency to explode rather violently if and when they go bad. Imagine the spontaneous combustion/exploding laptop battery problem happening on a scale approximately 200 million times larger in just one small powerplant. The expansion involved with unleashing a few megawatts of stored chemical energy makes containment difficult and iffy. However the new flywheel tech has effectively no cycle limit. Their current estimates put the lifespan of any given flywheel of roughly 20 years. There is very little comparative hazard- if a flywheel develops a crack and goes boom, all that'll happen is you'll feel a godalmighty THUMP underfoot, you get a cloud of redhot carbon out the containment vents and one wrecked silo. (this is because you're talking about over 1 ton of carbon fiber spinning at 16,000 rpm. The outer edge of the flywheel is travelling in a circle at just over mach 2 so if it goes, all the energy is released in an instant and its like a tiny little plane crash in a box. There aren't even any pieces left... the flywheel turns to dust in a microsecond.) The rest of the plant will keep right on happily spinning and dumping juice back into the grid every time the wind slows down. Neat trick, eh? As failure modes go, it beats the crap out of having your nuke plant go Chernobyl on you in your backyard. Hell, the local wildlife would barely even notice beyond startling the shit out of nearby birds. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"Every megawatt of wind power needs to have a matching megawatt of that consists of coal, gas, or nuke power. This is a fact you cant change" Not true. Check out Beacon Power. They are developing flywheel-based energy storage utility substations on a heavy-industrial scale. They have taken the concept from a NASA prototype pipedream, made a practical, useful, doable technology out of it and built a prototype substation in Massachusetts which is already plugged into the grid and operating. I've toured the facility and its for real. They build flywheels in the form of huge 2500-lb cylinders of carbon fiber, spin them in vacuum chambers on frictionless magnetic bearings, put em in concrete silos buried in the ground in case the flywheel lets go. Each stores 25kwh, (or, say, 100kw for 15 minutes of spindown time) and they just gang em together in tens and twenties like gigantic kinetic batteries. While its still small they're marketing the technology for grid frequency stabilization, and they're building the first utility scale 20MW substation in NY state. On an even larger scale you could build a 500 MW or even 1-2 GW storage station, combine it with a wind/solar farm and have a viable replacement for burning dinosaurs. I know all this because I spent a few hours hanging out in that facility talking to their people and if I land the job I'll be working with these people very soon, hopefully. Their one of a kind demo facility happens to be a few miles from my door. Coolest thing I have ever seen. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ya know, Skwrl, so long as nobody gets hurt I kinda dig it, hearing about delightfully hilarious misadventures such as these. Winding up in a tree is just a perfect example of the kinds of stuff that can happen to you when you're new, overwhelmed and don't really know what you're doing yet. It helps me remember and recapture that wonderfully exhilarating, breathtaking state of mind you get when its all still new to you, you get this sense of being waaay out of control and not quite sure what to do about it, coupled with an overwhelming awareness that you're way the hell up here, totally on your own, on your way to somewhere else real fast knowing you're not where you're supposed to be but only having the vaguest idea how to get there, and that you almost certainly won't if you don't figure this out in the next few seconds, everything you try only seems to make it worse, the wind is carrying you to somewhere you don't want to be and you wish it would stop, but one way or another you're going to wind up somewhere really interesting real soon whether you do anything successfully about it or not, and when all is said and done you and all your friends are probably going to think the whole thing was awesome, anyway. God, I love this sport. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Not quite, Matt. Mike actually uses a combination of devices... number of cameras, and how long it took for his tongue to dry out. I still have him on tape in what has got to be the longest camera-geek on record. 37 seconds after exit, he was still geeking my camera. Most people's tongues dry out in about 5. I don't know how he does it. He's just got Jedi Ninja camerageek skills. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, lets go back in time to the earliest humans... say, just before we developed speech. Take into account the things we know about them... they were social creatures. They didn't have money but they did have artifacts. Since not every single protohuman would have had the same skills, they had various roles. Some hunted and fought. Some made weapons... stone knives and such. Older ones who could not hunt assisted the females, helped raise and teach the kids artifact-making skills, did food prep. So we know there was exchange. I offer you this, I get that. Not hard to realize a young awkward protohuman, without much else to offer and not as attractive as, say, the number-two muscular alphadog hunter in the tribe, figures out that being badass isn't the only way to get laid. He takes a liking to a particular girl who isn't all that interested in him. The need to get laid causes creative thinking and a bit of empathy and he figures out maybe the girl likes him if he brings her something she might want. Comes back with some flowers and maybe some natural mineral coloring agents dug up from riverbank deposits he figures the girl can use to decorate the walls of the tent/cave/whatever. Otherwise useless objects except they please the female. Female is pleased. Cuddling follows. Guy goes away happy, girl's got more stuff. Can't really see anything wrong with this. Basic human behavior. Although I understand in the modern world there has evolved a certain cultural element surrounding the behavior that sometimes involves desperation, degradation, compulsion, none of which is tolerable, if its just a couple of consenting adults trading for mutual benefit and mutual gain, where's the problem? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I had to save this to my computer and play it back in slowmo just to properly appreciate all the detail and effort the author put into this tiny little video clip. And I do mean tiny. I gotta hand it to whoever made this... this is awesomeness x100. The creativity that went into this blows my mind. Its a stop motion animation made of a girl 1/4 of an inch tall fleeing, fighting and defeating the end of the world, shot with a cellphone. Amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD7eagLl5c4 -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

One of two. First was family trip with cheap-ass stepdad who didn't believe in intelligent planning when I was 12. He was also in a habit of A: trying to go to as many free places as possible and B: Taking the kids to places that served his obsessions regardless of whether kids would actually like that sort of thing. So we went to see Amish, civil war paintings and battlefields and other boring shit. After arriving in Toronto and discovering that hotels actually cost money he finally found one whose price was to his liking. Nice, family place. The room stank of sex, had menstrual stains on the mattresses and mirrors on the ceiling. Best part is, like a true religious freak he was convinced he had successfully kept us kids totally ignorant of all matters sexual, so us kids were simultaneously gagging on the smell while laughing our asses off at the obvious nature and purpose of the place, and enjoying watching the stepdad freak out about the fact that somehow despite his best efforts we totally understood what went on in this room. Second worst had to be an expat hotel I stayed at once in Angeles City near Clark airbase in the Philippines. Place was clean and dry, good service, no bugs. What earns it a spot in the "worst" list was the shower. Demand water heaters are popular there. At this place I encountered a type built into the showerhead itself. So I look and theres an ungrounded 2-wire 220V power cord emerging from the showerhead with bare wires stuck into an outlet, said outlet located IN the shower next to the showerhead. I turned on the water while standing outside the shower and saw blue sparks zapping around inside the showerhead. Needless to say I unplugged it. I'd love to know what electrical genius thought it'd be a good idea to put an outlet in the shower, and combine a 220 volt heater with a plumbing fixture that leaks and sprays water... Kind of a do-it-yourself electrocution booth. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I just got oneupped with STYLE. Epic, Bill. Thats exactly the effect I'd be going for. Laughing my ass off. Flawless governmentspeak. Normally I don't consider it polite or ethical to derive pleasure from the frustration of others. But for these arrogant pricks, I'd make an exception. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Now that thing is awesome. Fastest lunchbox in the universe. I think it makes the best sleeper imaginable because of how unlikely it is. With enough power and a good suspension to overcome how high and draggy it is, just makes it all the cooler. What a wonderful toy. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Rather than throwing a temper tantrum actually I thought of a far more amusing way to deal with this: Treat them the exact same way government treats people. When they come and demand the device back, tell em "I'm sorry, your tracking device has been confiscated." Or "Since you are under suspicion of violating the civil rights of citizens you have forfeited that asset." Then make sure the expense of legally forcing you to return it costs more than the value of the device. That way when they inevitably win its a pyrrhic victory all the same. The evolution of authority of unlimited power has resulted in a lose/lose legal system where even if you win and are found innocent, you still lose anyway because defending yourself cost you everything. It'd be nice to turn the tables for once. Payback's a bitch. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Holy shit. If this story is true and accurate it fulfills the wildest dreams of the tinfoil-hat crowd. Normally I choose to be as rational and level headed as possible. Under this circumstance, I would choose to go OFF. Oh, what I wouldn't give to have been the guy they were tracking... to be the guy finding THAT on MY car... When they demanded it back and threatened me my response would have been an enthusiastic FUCK You, BRING IT ON! My tolerance for Authority and its arrogance has always been thin. This would have snapped it. I'd take it personal. Real personal. At least he did one thing right and splattered it all over the media. I'd have taken the pics he did, then taken it apart and photographed it all, dispersed every bit of data about the specs of the device to everywhere I could, then smashed it to bits, and photographed the bits just to drive the point home thoroughly. Then mailed it back to em. C.O.D. I could have sworn these guys were supposed to be defending this country from other foreign countries that would do this kind of thing. There is only one appropriate response to this kind of shit... laughing public defiance. This is one case where rage, and outrage are entirely appropriate and justified. National Security, my ASS. Humiliate the ever living SHIT out of them. They want to play draconian Stasi games, force them out into the open. Who the fuck do these pricks think they are? Make damn sure everyone sees it. If they actually try to follow through on any threats, sue the FUCK out of em. The ACLU would fall all over themselves to represent the victim for free. Make as big a deal out of it as possible. Grind it into their faces that this is fucking AMERICA and we do NOT tolerate that shit and if they want to play those kinds of games we, the free public will knock them on their ASSES. We are still a free people. Fuck that digital leash shit. Do NOT. Fuck. With US. Sometimes authority steps way over the line. The arrogance on display here is just astounding beyond belief... This guy totally blew the most effective opportunity to serve this country and defend freedom he will ever, ever have. What a shame. Done right, he could have kicked our police state in the face and knocked it back half a decade and maybe much more. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

M R Puppies. M Rnt. M R2! C M P N? L I B! M R Puppies! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Although as you might have guessed, I tend to be critical enough of authority that I could not function well in the military unless it was an emergency, I hold those of our citizens who can, in the highest respect. If you ever wind up at my home dropzone, look me up... I'm Pepperell's resident wingsuit geek, technical freak, and all-around fix-it guy. Introduce yourself, and you'll have that beer. Many of our citizens take what you do for granted. Although it may seem paradoxical given what I've had to say in this forum, I am not one of them. Thank you. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I voted "Other". My own personal standard is that a wingsuit instructor ought to be able to safely stay with a student no matter what they do. If you cannot stay with a student under all circumstances, or at least respond and catch them within a few seconds if they go head down or spiral, then you can't effectively observe, video or debrief them afterward let alone help them navigate. There has to be a certain gray area in that standard since students can easily go headdown and achieve accelerations it can take a few seconds to meet and exceed enough to close on them again, but the ability to catch them quickly when they do strikes me as fairly mandatory. My $.02 -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Video. Beyond certain fallrates and durations none of the devices I've tried worked worth a damn. A Neptune is ok up till about the 3 minute range, after that it gets more and more unreliable. I test flew the new Altitron to see if it was something I'd buy. With a big speedometer display option I'd been hoping to use it to calibrate flight technique. Turned out to be completely useless. An all-out flight can easily be mostly low-30's and below, and its minimum detectable fallrate is 37. I had it mounted on my mudflap and spent much of the flight watching it. The display was blank almost all the way down. At one point I banked a bit steeply and the display briefly woke up and said, "37", then went blank again. I returned it to its owner. I've heard good things about the altitrack but haven't jumped one, although I've watched the playback mode used by another wingsuiter and it looks like a good recording function with the unfortunate limitation, as with all the others, that you only get to see it after the fact. And its ability to discriminate between wingsuit flight and canopy flight and pin down the transition point from one to the other is still somewhat erratic. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"Freedom isn't free" is a self contradictory statement. The military is fond of self-evidently false statements such as this..."army of one" is another. Originally intended to express the fact that sacrifices had to be made and lives put on the line and often lost to preserve that freedom, it is more often used by people charging for it, to justify charging for it. And it is this usage, the usage to which you have put it, that I will address here. If it is not free, it is not freedom. That is what freedom actually means. To say "freedom isn't free" is to say that freedom does not in fact exist, and what freedom I have, is only by the leave of those charging for it. Freedom as a commodity, subject to revocation at the whim of those charging for it and setting the price at whatever rate they see fit- and I do not buy it. The Native Americans were free and it did not cost them anything. Freedom most certainly -was- free. When exactly did that change, and by what right did our ancestors begin to charge them for it? After they had been subjugated and brought into line, do you think they were any more free than they had been before? The more I hear about how free I am, the less free I actually am. Strange. This is why I do not expect you to understand. Your entire reply was addressing things I have not said and demands I have not made. Most people are not able to tell the difference between ideological conditioning and patriotism. Your angry response to me which has nothing to do with anything I've said, except by being angry because I do not adhere to the same rigid ideology you feel is the only permissible one, is the same reason I do not adhere to it. It inhibits reason and replaces it with emotional opinions stated as if they were facts. This nation owes me nothing. Nor I, it. I started life as a feral street kid, and everything I have, I have earned. I consider myself entitled to nothing more than the air I breathe. I neither want nor demand anything from this country. The only thing I want from my country is that it stay out of my way and leave me alone to live my life and earn my living any way I can in peace provided I harm none. The perspective you hold seems to assume I owe it something, in the specific form of a type of indentured servitude to its administration which may or may not actually be in the best interests of the nation, because it did me the favor of existing before I was born, and that the fact of my own existence automatically obligates me to serve the administrative interests currently running it. This is a secular ideological version of the concept of "original sin" and just as flawed. I do not recognize a debt written for me arbitrarily by people supposedly acting on my behalf before I existed, any more than I grant recognition to the christian notion that I am automatically guilty just because I exist. I serve my country by adhering to the social compact that logically follows from the fact that this civilization does exist... by fulfilling a productive role in it, working to earn my living and creating larger benefits for that society by that choice. I have not been given anything by this country nor have I taken anything from it. I contribute to it voluntarily by my own free will by choosing a productive role in it, in the exact way that the men and women who gave their lives to defend that freedom, intended that I should be free to choose to do. Conscription or forced "service" makes a sick mockery of the same freedom it is supposed to be defending while simultaneously revoking it, enslaving some for the benefit of others. As a free man I cannot condone it. If the day ever comes when I become aware that America is actually in danger... of being invaded, conquered, or defeated, they would not need to draft me. As a free man I would feel it my moral obligation to stand in between that force, and the society of which I am a part. They would not have time to draft me. I would be beating down their door to get into the military in any capacity I was allowed... "Use me for whatever you think appropriate, but for gods sake let me help!" Anything less would be cowardice, a state I am not capable of. But if I am told "You will serve", that same morality would compel me to fight against THAT. To defend freedom. And THAT, is the philosophy you have endorsed, Amazon. That is not patriotism... it is a betrayal of it, and of everything this nation is supposed to stand for. Consider that, if you will. -B I -am- curious as to how you will respond to this. You do tend to be fond of flaming anger, and if you wish to respond to what I've said here in any meaningful way you will need to do it rationally. What say you, Maam? Agree? Disagree? And why? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Let me ask you another question that may answer yours, rather than step into the usual logical boobytraps people tend to set for each other in this forum. Such as the rather crude one you have attempted to lay for me here. No offense, but I've been observing the behavior of individuals here for quite some time... including yours... and although some of the time I agree with your positions, you are no more immune to ideological fanaticism than anyone else here, Maam. My question is this: What makes you think you have the the right to dispose of the lives and time of any and all citizens as you see fit? To dictate, who and what they will serve? To decide, how several years of their lives should be spent? And to have it enforced for you, by politicians, at the point of a gun? America, I love. People who claim the right to take control of the lives of others... to force them to serve the current reigning interests... not so much. I told you. I do not expect you to understand why. I could continue to explain... but you still won't. However I can sum it up in one word... Freedom. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.