GigaBuist

I'll contest that statement. I worked with a man in IT (age 28) who decided that after 10 years of programming he wanted to try law enforcement. He'd be taking around a 60% pay cut but the job sounded more redeeming to him. He's an intelligent man, level headed, and already skilled with a firearm. He failed the psyche evaluation though where they asked him moral questions and such. He figures he was rejected because he didn't morally considered use of marijuana a crime worth reporting unless something else was going on at the time. In my opinion, the state police turned down a very good candidate. I've done firearms training with the same guy, so I sure as heck don't think he's mentally unstable. I wouldn't get near a nutball with a 9mm if I thought he was out to lunch.

You're mistaken on that one. Basic combat handgunning manuals of all sorts (I'm a fan of Chuck Taylor's teachings) state that upon draw you shoot -twice- at center mass in rapid succession. The idea being here that you may miss the first one, so you might as well take a second shot. Even if you land the 1st shot the 2nd one, being that it's in rapid succession, will likely land a decent distance (4-6 inches) off the first shot and provide additional damange to the central nervous system. if the 2nd shot misses, oh well. At this point you lower your weapon to the "ready" state which is basically a 45 degree angle toward the ground and assess the situation. If the target is still posing a threat (ie: they have a weapon and are in striking distance, or they have a firearm and they can still point it at you) -THEN- you take a 3rd shot at the "cranial-occular" region which is the technical term for "between the eyes". Assuming you've slowed your target this is supposed to be a fairly easy shot. You take your shot, lower weapon and re-assess situation. I'm unable to watch the video as a codec doesn't exist on my Linux machine right now so I can't comment on the situation at hand. However, if a single person rattles 8 shot into a threat they're not acting in accordance with anything I've ever read. For a common citizen, under stress, I would somewhat understand this, but for a police officer -- no. They are (supposed to be) well trained for such situations, and should be able to handle them under stress.

I prefer the Pheonix/Firebird version of Mozilla when I'm stuck on Win32 platforms. The direct url is: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/releases/0.6/MozillaFirebird-0.6-win32.zip For those of you who don't know what it is, it's an "alternative" browser that's the source of Netscape. Netscape doesn't (or hasn't) incorporated the built in pop-up stopper that Mozilla's project has had for a while though. The very -worst- that happens with it is that if you do get a pop-up it opens up a new "tab" which stays out of your way. Yes, I'm an IT nerd. In general, if you're putting a Windows machine on the internet you're best off blocking all incoming connections to anything below port 1023. No built-in service will be running on anything higher. If you want to be selective though just block ports 135, 137, 139 and 435 incoming. That should shutdown all of the built in MS Lanmanager hangover stuff. I'm not a windows admin though, so I may be missing a couple there.

I think the question's been answered, but I got into a conversation about this stuff with a jumper before I had even thought about leaving a perfectly good airplane. We're both technical/math (read: geek) kind of guys, so I found it quite interesting. It's true, the ant's TV is much slower than ours. We're just too dense. What I found funny is that this guy has heard that a cat's chance of surviving decreases as it falls from 0-80 ft (8 stories). Once it's above 80 ft it's chances start increasing. The cat reaches TV at around 80 ft and it stops accelerating. The cat then relaxes as that feeling of 9.8m/s^2 isn't affecting it anymore and it prepares for a solid landing. The cat is prefectly capable of surviving a 70 ft drop, but it's freaking out so bad on the way down failiing it's limbs that it won't hold still long enough to prepare for a good landing. I guess there's enough data gathered from cats falling from high-rise apartment buildings to back this up. I hope so at least -- I'd hate to think we know this due to drunken physics students running amok in the biology department. Although, given that buttered bread always lands butter side down, and cats always land on their feet, the question of what lands on bottom when you tape buttered bread to a cat's back still remains to be answered.

I learned that we static line numbers (read: me) should be smiling outwardly when we release. I'll be working on that one this weekend.

I've been lurking for a few days now, trying to suck up as much info as I can on this sport. I'm totally hooked. This might be a bit drawn out for an introduction, but well, here goes. Two weeks ago (late May) I'm flying home from Oralndo (Grand Rapids MI based) and think to myself that it'd be fun to be -outside- the plane. I've never really given skydiving a real serious thought until this point and sort of shrugged it off[*. Well, as luck has it a week later a buddy calls up and says that he's got a group reserved to take a dump and I say I'm all for it. This coming from a guy who gets uneasy on a 10 foot ladder. So, we show up on a Saturday morning, do the class and I'm feeling oddly easy with the whole situation. I'm skittish, there's no doubt about that. I'm sure my jumpmaster will confirm to that one. Long story short, we climb to altitude, I climb on out and hang. I look back, she says "Go!" and I take another second to look around thinking she said "Ok?" which is certainly not what she said. A quick look (or maybe longer -- you'd have to ask her!) I look back, she says "Go!" again and I drop. About a half second later I'm wondering if my static line is still really attached. I think I lost my arch here, as I remember looking at the ground at one point during the very short freefall and finally letting out a roller-coster style gut yell. Apparently I can be heard from 3500 feet away. Canopy ride was great. I really didn't think I'd ever enjoy that; but, I did. I'd try and elaborate here but frankly it'd just be preaching to the choir. I landed safely (I dumped to be honest. My feet hit and I'm suddently not used to my own weight so I took it safe and just rolled with it.). Half an hour later (or less... I'm not sure) I'm wondering if anybody else from my group is ready to go a 2nd time that day. The guy that set the whole deal up is ready to go again, so we sign up. I'd say at this point I already know I'm hooked. My 2nd jump is horrid. I lose my arch almost immediatley as I let my feet drop under me and I'm sitting flat on my back in a reverse-arch type deal thinking "fuck... this will be a hard yank.". Not too bad, probably due to the adreneline. I get down (landed on my feet this time, thankfully) and start looking around the DZ a bit more; realizing that I'll be spending many many weekends there. I'm sold. Lock stock and barrel. I'm headed right back to the DZ this weekend with my brother (and if my JM reads this, she'll think it's probably quite funny that he's coming back. Apparently he was rather hesitant about letting go of the strut) and I'm planning on getting off student status ASAP so I can jump with a former co-worker who's a bit more into this than me. Of course I plan to learn as much as I possibly can to stay safe while doing this. I don't think there's a single thing I've thought more about this entire week than getting back down there and out of the plane. I'm sold. *: Yep. I was a 'whuffo'. The entire idea of getting outside of a perfectly good airplane was so far out there to me I couldn't understand it.