champu

This is why partisan politics is idiotic. It's because of shit like this. Sensible people aren't supposed to be having conversations about which political party has it worse when the media reports on one of its members doing something despicable. Political parties, in general, are indefensible. Don't let them take you for a ride.

Everyone makes mistakes under canopy. Everyone. The more jumps you have, the better you will be at identifying the kinds of funky situations that bring out mistakes before they unfold and you find yourself between a rock and a hard place. The more current you are, the more in touch you will be with your canopy, and the better off you will be when you first encounter one of these situations and have to do damage control. Now imagine a matrix of all the possible mistakes you could make under canopy, listed from the most egregious to the most benign vs. wing-loading from the lowest to the highest showing the consequence of that mistake. It might look something like this... 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2.0 2.2 2.4 ... obstacle induced D/I D/I I/X I/X I/X X X X X X low turn Inacccuracy during D D D/I D/I D/I I/X I/X I/X I/X I/X off-DZ landing mis-timed flare D D D D/I D/I D/I D/I I/X I/X I/X (straight-in) ... Legend: D - You get your jumpsuit dirty I - Serious Injury X - Death You need to ask yourself how sure you are that you aren't going to make mistakes that, at the wing loading you've selected, have I's and X's as a consequence. Simply put, 164 is not a lot of jumps, and a couple jumps a week is not very current if you are thinking about moving beyond a 1.2 wing loading.

This was really screwy to me too. I love how in the voter information guide it says "Argument in favor of prop 91: VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 91. IT'S NO LONGER NEEDED.... etc..." and then on the following page it says, "Argument against prop 91: No argument against prop 91 was submitted." I read that the first time and thought, "uh-what?"

One of the parameters that we use to define our spacecraft orbits is called the Right Ascension of the Ascending Node, and is defined as the longitude where the spacecraft crosses from the southern hemisphere into the northern hemisphere referenced to the first point of Aries. But since this point no longer has any sidereal meaning, the continued use of the name is mostly a novelty. That's about the extent to which I pay attention to astrology.

My first logbook held 15 jumps. My second was one of those two-per-page ones that said "precision freefall" or something like that on the cover, and held about 300 jumps. At that point I switched over to the smaller "SkyLog" teal-covered ones that held five per page or about 500 total, and went through a couple of those. My current logbook is still one of those SkyLog books but I log days of jumping now. I put the date, the place, the jump number range, and a sentence or two about the jumps that day including at least everyone's first names that I jump with. If it was a day of fs4 or vrw training I'll put the team name and the jumps we did. I also log tunnel time in the book. I started the book almost a year ago now and I have 549 jumps and 6:30:00 of tunnel time in it, and it's less than 1/4 full.

Sorry, It's neither. FCC says that broadcasters are responsible for governing what they put out, not receivers. With Wi-Fi networks, you're both broadcasting, so that standpoint doesn't really mean much. That said, people... secure your networks. And if you run across a network that isn't secure, well... If the person doesn't know enough about a wireless router to setup WPA2, they probably don't know enough about their internet connection and/or the workings of their computer to notice you using it to check e-mail or browse the web for a bit. But remember to at least be courteous about it, and use application-layer security to protect your own information as applicable. (this holds true for any communication over the internet though)

I can't comment on his math skills, but he does have a killer jumpsuit.

Saturday evening? I will more than likely be there also. Should be interesting, I haven't flown in a tunnel since August.

I will be around Sat/Sun at Elsinore, however I'll be anti-socially training with my 4-way team. You have my permission to gaze upon me, but no photos.

Probably less a capability problem and more a licensing one. I think Research In Motion (Blackberry) may have dibs on connections to Microsoft Exchange servers.

That's actually incorrect. It doesn't matter what the speed of the treadmill is, the plane will still move forward. Whether the treadmill matches the speed of the "wheels" or the "plane" doesn't really mean anything. The wheels will just spin faster is all. Ah, but you're actually incorrect. If the plane is moving forward (and again, I don't care why it's moving forward) then the wheels are moving faster than the conveyer, and you've violated your ground rules. Period. It is very important to define problems correctly before you attempt to solve them. That's the message I've been trying to get across by participating in these threads. /edited to add: Ah, see? Now we're getting somewhere.

I saw it. Mythbusters is one of the few television shows I watch these days. I'm sure several people remember this thread where the two versions of the myth were hashed out a couple years ago. It boils down to two scenarios: 1) The one first stated in the thread linked above where the conveyor matches the speed of the wheels - No the plane won't take off, and furthermore it's not possible to actually realize a conveyer that can do this. 2) The one linked to in post #37 of that thread, and the one tested on mythbusters, where the conveyer matches the speed of the plane - Of course it can take off, much the same way a plane with a strong tailwind can.

My first rig was a used G3 that had about 400 jumps on it and it looked new when I got it. I put about 900 jumps on it and it looked the same when I sold it as when I bought it. My current rig is a G4 I bought new about a year and a half ago and I got it in 3 weeks. I've put almost 1000 jumps on it out in the desert and aside from the white parts being a bit dirty it's in great shape. (I bought a rig with white all over it that I jump in the southwest because sometimes I have trouble controlling my inner imbecile.) It's a very comfortable rig and the flaps and main handle are bulletproof. I would buy another one, I just don't have much need for another rig right now.

1) No comment here... 2) I'm not very familiar with genome sequencing, but could a reliable hashing algorithm be developed to uniquely identify someone with reduced computational complexity? (I feel like some geneticist is going to smack me in the back of the head for asking that question.) 3) Does anyone actually read the Federal Acquisition Regulations? I know it's dry, but there's some good stuff in there to prevent this kinda crap. 4) Does the FBI, in taking on something like this, have to respond to NSA directives regarding information assurance? Hey, if we're lucky they consult the NSA and get told that such an aggregation of information is a national security concern, must be classified, and the FBI has to shit-can the idea because it becomes cost prohibitive.

The guys at Penny-Arcade have a charity that does exactly that.

Roger that. B-wings are nonsense, don't even bother. I had a B-wing suit made because I'm fairly lanky, but in trying to shoot 4-way I found the wings were laughably small and didn't really help at all. I had the suit modified by a friend to be more like the A-wing suit, with RSL-style clips that connect to rings on my leg straps and they work great.

I have a jury duty summons for about 3 weeks from now. I do not intend to make any attempts to "get out of it", but at the same time I have absolutely zero expectations of making it through voir dire. So while calling phone numbers, driving to the other side of town, and waiting around in rooms only to be told to go home by whichever lawyer has the worst case may be your idea of what my "civic duty" entails, I'd rather be getting work done at my job.

Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment, nothing about how the special outfit performs its function of allowing her to conform to her faith makes it violate the rules, it's simply the color scheme. And if the rules about uniform color schemes have been around and available for viewing the entire time she's been doing this then it was only a matter of time before some automaton in the school / district administration blew dust off his copy of the rule book and picked a few to randomly enforce. I had to deal with this kind of inconsistency in high school as well (having things nonsensically confiscated, being made to turn t-shirts inside out because apparently the dozenth time I wore them over a year they were suddenly offensive, etc.) and by claiming that this had to do with her faith, the media is attributing to religious intolerance that which can be adequately explained by complete incompetence.

This warrants repeating. For reference (although obviously not the same canopy) I've attached what my control lines look like while my canopy is in full flight and my hands are in the front dive loops. Note that there is no pressure on the tail, and there's a fairly significant amount of line bowing behind the canopy.

after reading this thread...

Wow... yeah... that... I don't think that could be less sexy. /edited to add: ...I was wrong... you could add sound... ...definitely less sexy with the sound.

Skymaster 290 @0.6 (6 jumps; static lines) Skymaster 230 @0.75 (14 jumps) Sabre 170 @1.1 (8 jumps) Sabre 135 @1.25 (~600 jumps) Stiletto 135 @1.25 (~350 jumps) Katana 120 @1.5 (~20 jumps) Stiletto 107 @1.65 (~150 jumps) Katana 107 @ 1.65 (~630 jumps) Velo 103 @ 1.75 (~15 jumps) Velo 96 @ 1.85 (~15 jumps) Velo 90 @ 2.0 (~60 jumps and counting) Definitely aggressive going to a Sabre 135 with 28 jumps, and I wouldn't recommend it. (Brian Germain all but called me a nutbar when I took his canopy control course at 40 jumps) but I hung on to that canopy for quite a while and made all my "learning to swoop mistakes" with it. I got dirty every once in a while, but never hurt myself. From that point on I'd say I've had a pretty reasonable progression considering I've been doing about 500 jumps a years since I've had ~170 jumps.

V-band is tricky to use terrestrially, but I like their approach. It would be interesting to see demonstrations of how well their beam steering technology handles cluttered and/or dynamic environments like those found at a dropzone.

This reminds me of the [not necessarily so] pathological scenario created by the DMCA a while back, whereby if you had a Sharpie(tm) in your drawer that you used to mark up a CD before putting it in your computer (so it wouldn't break your computer, and so you could even listen to it at all... not even rip it or anything) then you were breaking the law, the guy who posted the website explaining how to do it was breaking the law, and continued possession of the Sharpie(tm) was illegal as well as it was a "tool used to circumvent copyright protection on a recorded medium." Stopping copyright infringement is a difficult task just like, by your analogy, getting everyone to drive the speed limit would be a difficult task. Large record companies want a "speeding tax" included in the price of all gasoline, tires, windshield washer fluid, motor oil, air filters, and car washing services. They want cars implanted with an additional computer that runs off the engine eating 50 horsepower that measures the speed at all times, and looks back into the history of the car to see if it ever was ever speeding, and to send all that information back to their privately owned servers. (and occasionally the computer crashes rendering the car inoperable.) They want the act of tampering with the computer (as one might be tempted to do because it's an enormous pain in the ass, and was terribly thought out) to be illegal, even if you don't speed after doing so.

I simply don't feel that within the foreseeable evolution of 3d printing (barring a seriously non-trivial revolution in the technology rendering it all but incomparable to today's technology) a threat is posed to physical object producers that compares to the threat the proliferation of medium to high-bandwidth internet connections has posed to copyright holders. As I said from my first reply, by the time we reach a point where a machine can reproduce something as complicated as a candy bar (which is much more complicated than a mere skydiving rig from a "how do you print it?" stand point) for less than the cost of a candy bar, we will be a society that probably doesn't care much about how anyone is monetarily compensated for anything they do.