champu

Definitely not forgotten. Here's a video from March '08 of a friend of mine doing a tandem with Shindig as the primary videographer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YjxrsLr0IY

It might be possible to design the cutter/loop so that the unit could be supplied with the part of the loop to be cut already installed. If the cutter unit had the part of the loop to be cut as an integral part of the cutter unit . ie the loop section to be cut is always in the cutter , it wouldn't have to be placed there by the rigger . The loop sections outside the cutter could still be easily replaceable and open to rigging errors, but the bit to be cut would remain inside . Because a loop would have to be attached both sides of the cutter the loop would become a chain , A missing link in this chain may be easier to pick up than a misrouted loop. Hope we get better AAD's out of cases like this. Sooo..... what happens when you just pull your reserve handle?

For your first rig: Whatever you can find used that fits you, holds good beginner canopies, and that you can put several hundred jumps on. For your second rig: Whatever the coolest person on your dropzone is jumping. For your third rig and beyond: By now you should be a badass and you'll be jumping the rig of whatever manufacturer will sponsor you.

Wrong - properly designed it would yield a safer rig, albeit a more expensive one that may falsely identify a problem thus grounding a perfectly good rig. "Properly designed" is a circularly defined term in this argument. Wanting to add consequence-free features does not make it so. What I have a feeling you are picturing is a cutter that detects that something is routed through it. There's no reasonable way for an AAD to tell that that something is a properly routed closing loop. And setting aside monetary costs of doing this incomplete check you have the safety cost of a bulkier cutter that interferes more with the packjob/closing of the container, has more potential hang ups, and has a more complicated wiring harness. You're saying the dollar cost and perhaps hassle is too high. I'm saying an event involving this added feature causing a problem with the safe operation of the rig is more likely than an event involving a rigger misrouting a closing loop and this added feature correctly detecting it.

I love dropzone.com

The added complexity associated with any number of methods of attempting to verify with varying degrees of certainty that a closing loop was present and properly routed would not yield a safer skydiving rig.

I think Stewart shares a similar concern about Fox News as his critics share about him: that audience members are "getting their news" from clowns. It may just be that both concerns are well-warranted. Stewart preaches about responsibility other programs/people have while at the same time divesting himself of any as he's openly "A comedian first," which apparently pisses some people off. But there's no reason to get frustrated with this defense as everyone's free to ignore people when they're not being funny. If someone actually is funny you have to laugh, however, because if you don't the terrorists win.

#23: Probably an export variant taken off an Mi-24. #6: SA-14s (as see on TV.)

I didn't jump it as a main.

There are two kinds of riggers: those who have made a mistake, and those who will. We're all regular people, sometimes shit happens. I still don't agree with the DZ being sued, IMHO it looks like they're going after the deep pockets of the business. Agreed. People can argue about how difficult or easy a mistake it was to have made, but I don't think portraying it as anything but that is reasonable. Also, it's unfortunate that "net casting" lawsuits can't be more effectively discouraged by the legal system. It would be nice if the act of suing the guy who worked at the gas station where you filled up the morning before driving to the dropzone could be held against you in the lawsuit you filled against the rigger. I don't know that there's a good/fair way to make that work.

I can't say I agree with that. Perhaps if the mechanic was performing maintainence on the airbag and miswired it when reinstalling it such that it didn't go off in an accident, that would be "equivalent." It's difficult to argue that the rigger stood anything to gain from misrouting a closing loop, or that doing so indicated he was unscrupulous in any way. It doesn't save you time to perform that step incorrectly and, as I believe this was a Wings with the cutter at the bottom, misrouting the loop means you were inspecting/replacing it and not skimping on materials. Suppose you had an independent rigger go through his logbook and open and inspect all the other rigs in service with his seal on them and everything looked good?

Yeah I've seen the guys walk right past a girl beautiful woman and go for the toy make-up canvas. Sad but it's true. Consider the above revisions to your statement. By the way I've never played World of Warcraft or drempt of anime characters... ...but I did name my velo-90 "Kaori." I blame this indiscretion on getting a minor in CS during undergrad.

Both of you cut it out... ...oh wait I'm not a moderator.

I'm actually... uh... wearing a one-way pager right now. (though it is alphanumeric!) I still have an old Sears pong game from the 70s, an Atari 2600, Lincoln logs, and an Erector set. I remember a "game" with little racehorse figurines on slats that would shake back and forth and the horses would race. My first computer only had a single 5.25" floppy so you had to load the OS into memory, take the disk out, and load your program from another disk. Also, I remember riding my bicycle to the hobby shop to see the latest model train scene they had built and to buy matchbox cars to play with in the sandbox. More recently I remember: Car phones, 2400 baud modems, 640K of main memory, and the headache it took to deconflict IRQs, DMA channels, and memory ranges on every. single. program. you. installed. so that you could have music, sound effects, and a joystick (if you were lucky) all working at the same time.

Training for VFS we'd do 3-day camps 10/day, 2-rigs, packing for ourselves (done around 1pm). We tried 12/day for one camp but we were worn out for the last couple jumps and they weren't worth it. Training for FS we'd do 2-day camps 8/day, 1-rig, packing for ourselves, and a half hour of tunnel time. Fun jumping and screwing around I'll do between 3-8/day. I've found being tired / losing focus is as much a function of how many hours you're on the dropzone than how many jumps you've done.

I don't have a rooftop bag, but I've had a Yakima bike rack for a couple years now that I've been happy with. I think their bags are a little cheaper than Thule.

yeah, but the ones with the shame tend to hide it. give me the shameless ones with nothing to hide - "yeah, I did it, but I admit it and it can't be used to leverage me because you all know it already." "laying it all out there for the public to see" means exposing your real self and character so you don't have to hide anything. that's character to the public, not your junk to 20 somethings Agreed completely.

The only consistent bias in the media is towards an inability to accurately deliver information because journalists are experts at absolutely nothing and because that would get in the way of fickle pandering to attract as big an audience as they can. Some politicians have more shame than others and some politicians have better public relations skills than others. Who resigns over what is decided by what politicians can get away with amongst their constituency, not any "left/right bias" in the media.

Sounds like a financial engineer to me. Yes, that was part of the joke.

I was thinking more about the term "financial engineering" that sounds like a euphemism for money laundering. The moral of the story is that it's better to have a fancy title for an ordinary job that you aren't embarrased about (or hell maybe even enjoy) than it is to immediately append defensive and/or apologetic language when asked what you do. You could be a "cash tester" where all you do is take cash and spend it on whatever you want day in and day out and report back to your boss on how well it worked as money, and if you answered the question of what you did like you did above you'd start losing the interest of the woman you were talking to.

I don't know what the overall job scene for mechanical engineers is like in NJ, but one of the [many] reasons I took my job here out of college as opposed to accepting a job offer to work in Plantation FL was that there are a ton of companies to potentially work for out here as an EE. Does their hiring ebb and flow together to some extent? Sure. Do I like the idea of hopping around between companies to get ahead? No, and I haven't had to. But having more than one dog in town prevents you from getting "stuck" somewhere. And I've got another answer to your original question about where we'll get engineers. It's simple really, and has nothing to do with promoting certain degrees, we'll just start calling every job there is " engineering" to make people feel more technical and skilled at what they do.

Nice grammar, you godless commie.

The most intensely argued stuff doesn't even actually contrast personal preferences. As noted in 4) from your list above, people usually argue against ridiculous extrapolations. Where it becomes particularly hilarious is when people don't even notice or pay attention to what or with whom they're arguing. It's like watching that one really unpopular and short tempered kid play dodgeball.

which has nothing to do with Speaker's Corner which is: 1 - comprised of insulting delivery of 2 - one indoctrinated and subjective belief system vs other indoctrinated and subjective belief systems 3 - usually devoid of supporting evidence for the first rather 4 - comprised of juvenile bashing of the others based on outlyer anecdotes and extrapolation of each's true position to the ridiculous 5 - and occasionally reference diarhhea from biased sources 6 - spattered with non sequitor nonsense and vitriol which usually moves from a sprinkling to 95% of the discourse other than that, sure, it's great

Yeah, but it STILL looks like a pantomime horse. I'll admit that when I first saw his avatar years back I thought it was a pantomime horse wearing overalls.