JDBoston

A few suggestions: Get Yahoo email. Hotmail just blows, period. I get 3-4 spam messages a day on Yahoo, and those get delivered to a special "Bulk Mail" folder. Get a personal firewall on your computer like Zone Alarm. These can block pop-up ads. Get a freeware program called AdAware to make sure there is no spyware installed on your computer. Get on the Federal (and your state's if they have one) "do not call" registry for telemarketers. Request that any banks, credit cards, phone companies, etc. you have accounts with do not send you ANY mail except for the bill and NEVER call you. If you call them and request this they have to honor it. With many of them you can change these preferences online too. It sucks that you have to go through all this. In the meantime, just keep hanging up on those fuckers. Or maybe just put the phone down and see how long it takes for THEM to hang up. Joe

True, but do you think people SHOULD become proficient at sitflying before they try HD? I can't think of any people I know who are good HD flyers but can't sitfly at least reasonably well. Joe

Sounds like an excellent idea to me... maybe DZs that have more than a few freefliers could have a "freefly LO" or some other designated person to kind of shepherd the low-timers, and make sure no one's doing anything that might endanger other people on the load. Peer pressure may be a good tool too - if people want to try HD before they're ready, just rag on them about how their sitflying sucks and they shouldn't be doing HD yet. Or require a minimum # of HD coach jumps (and maybe a sign-off) before they can practice it solo? Joe

I agree with you there may be a trend out there, but it sounds like this guy is just a good old garden variety fucking idiot. Personally, I spent probably 100-120 of my 180+ jumps freeflying, and am now going back to RW for a bit... but it was all sitflying, and I wasn't going to try going headdown until I got the cartwheels and other transitions down, which was what I was working on when I was most current at sitflying a couple months ago. I had an audible virtually from the start, and my jumping partners were people who all had at least several times my freefly jumps. I think people like your guy should get the bowling talk. It's nothing to do with freeflying, he's just a moron. Joe

Hmm - maybe he should. Hahahaha. What, does he do CRW or something? Joe

That's great to hear - my thoughts are with you guys and Eric. Joe

I think maybe you're referring to Sikhs? Might want to watch out a *little* bit more for the Saudis. And guess what... they don't wear turbans. Anyway...... TROLL..... Joe

IMHO: xenophobia is thinking bad things about someone just because they're not from where you live. It's very broad. Racism is thinking bad things about someone just because they're a specific race. Joe

There we go. That's all I was asking for. Thanks, Joe

Not as hard as it is to get a straight answer out of your buddy, unfortunately. If you'd read my first couple posts in response to his, you would notice a very simple question: *******QUESTION: On what SOURCE(S) is he basing his assertion that: "Left wingers who want gun control are basically people who are adversaries to Christianity, they want this kind of disarmement so that it will be easier to persecute anyone with Christian beliefs, eliminating any way for them to fight back and survive the outcome. This is what gun control is all about..." ? Nowhere do I put forth any views on gun control, or the UN. Just that one simple question. But the straight answer... oops, sorry, I guess we're still waiting for the straight answer. We do have lots of name-calling and subject-changing and angry ranting, but gosh, no answer yet to that simple little question. What happened to the Jews in WWII is interesting history, but it does not in and of itself prove that CHRISTIANS are now the "targeted group." And while Aaron Zelman may have some valid opinions, they are valid because they're logical, not because he was in a concentration camp. I'm sure everyone here understands that distinction. THAT is what I want sources on. Not Jews, CHRISTIANS. Not WWII Germany, TODAY in the US. So it's one of two things. Either: 1) He has sources to back up the paragraph I quoted above, since he's such an educated guy with so many facts to offer, and he can share them with the group, or 2) He doesn't, and it's time to hit up the local drugstore for some Thorazine. One or the other. It's very simple... but I get the feeling I'm still not going to get a straight answer. Disappointing, because I really am curious.

You know, just yesterday I had this problem where the other 3 people on the 4-way all floated on me. I guess life's a bitch sometimes, even when you do everything right. Joe

Yep, and don't forget Japanese. Russian and Japanese are probably the two most difficult major languages for English speakers to learn. Japanese is a real outlier as far as syntax (subject-verb-object order, etc.) and overall language structure go - it's a pretty unusual system. Joe

And really, what more could you want out of life? Joe

In the context of this thread, it strikes me as ironic that one reason some people have some ill will towards France is that it is markedly xenophobic itself. Hmmm. I haven't read the other thread being referenced, so perhaps I'm just repeating someone else's observation, I don't know. Joe

Uh... yeah. I'm done with this one. Not even worth responding to. Joe

Your reply tells me all I need to know. Instead of giving me legit sources for the connection between gun control and persecution of Christians, which was the ONLY thing my post talked about, and a MAJOR point in your previous post, you change the subject 100% and jump over to a bunch of totally unsubstantiated conclusions about what my views on gun control as a whole must be. Clever. Uhhh, straw man? Kind of like your other posts - take 1 gram of information, and then just assume from there. And by the way, what's all that shit about Nazi death camps? I actually lost relatives in those camps. Did you? I'm sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of those comments. Are you suggesting that the government is going to do mass arrests of gun owners and start interning them in work camps and killing them with poison gas? If so, maybe you need to visit a psychiatrist. Joe

Uhhhh... I hope this is a troll. It looks like it got copied off some kind of conspiracy theory parody Website. I'd be interested to hear you cite some sources and figures to back up the assertions in your post. Curious where you get this stuff. Gun control is all about persecuting Christians? Huh? Well I'll give you this, at least I haven't heard that one before. Beer! Joe

Yeah, I could end up like the BASE jumper that didn't attach his bridle/PC to the top of his canopy, but just looped it through the ring. Earlier this year I believe. No disrespect meant to that jumper or his friends/family. But that incident and ones like this should definitely make people focus on their pack jobs a bit better and not get complacent.... Joe

176: 1 Floating handle on a pull-out in cold weather with leather gloves. Hadn't thought to spend 5 minutes drilling how/where to find the bridle. I can handle those fine now, but at the time, I didn't feel it would be beneficial to me to keep groping around blindly behind my back. Joe

Exactly... that's what I do now too. The bitch of it when I packed myself the twist was that I noticed something seemed fucked up with the line groups, but someone was talking to me while I was packing and I spaced out and forgot about it. Oops. Joe

I have a Racer/Elite that's velcroless and have had it for about 1.5 years. Tuck tab riser covers and walrus teeth on the top flap. Joe

Yeah, I did that once. It looked funky and I felt stupid but it flew fine. Joe

You need to read my post again. What I actually said was that the number of incidents where we would (even in an ideal world) be able to GET more than just a few of the relevant "facts" is statistically insignificant, NOT the total number of incidents. You definitely don't need incident reports or stats to know that wing loading affects the difficulty of canopy flight and the margin for error, that higher wing loadings have more potential to break you than lower ones, or that wing loadings BELOW a certain level give you an inadequate amount of forward speed/penetration and flare power in average conditions. You just need experience and common sense - things, incidentally, that some people possess more of than others. Joe

I understand your affinity for figures, but the fact of the matter is that you can't always get them and, like Bill says, you can't let that stop you from acting. Skydiving is not an academic exercise or a computer simulation. It's an imprecisely understood, real-world activity, and real live people are dying in very messy ways over and over from the same shit. With fatalities, people often don't even 100% agree on the jumper's exact position in the sky when things went bad, let alone the relative position of obstacles, or the speed of their canopy as they hit, much less other numbers like how many times someone dug themselves out of the corner and got lucky before they finally pounded in. This info's interesting when you can get it, but we need to get back to the real world here and admit that we will never have it for any but a very small (and statistically insignificant) number of incidents. IMHO, judgment develops (albeit at different rates in different people) along with experience. Judgment is why my boss makes more money than me - it's not because he's gathered a bunch of data that he uses to exactly model successful moves in his job. People make millions of hugely important decisions every day in their personal and professional lives that are based on their judgment and experience, not tables and figures. You may not like it, or trust it, but it's how the world works. The "facts" in skydiving incidents are basically second-hand unless the whole thing's on video. Relying exclusively on these, and convincing yourself that possession of more "facts" is the ONLY way to make a useful decision is, to me, missing the forest for the trees. Joe

I doubt any of those established rules were established on the basis of precise, long-term statistical studies - rather, they were probably simple judgment calls made by very experienced skydivers as a best-guess starting point. Like some of the WL proposals here. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the WL proposals are "arbitrary." If that were the case, there might be a wider range of proposed wingloadings, no? I would imagine that there was disagreement about those other rules when they first came out too. I would be surprised to hear that all USPA members stood up simultaneously way back when and said, "ya know, we NEED minimum pull altitudes." Don't know though. IMHO, in most things in life, consensus is the quick road to mediocrity. Some people actually do know better than others. Joe