MarkM

Do you think you might be sabotaging your own landings? I had a nasty spill a month or so back and afterwards my landings really sucked. After thinking about it I realized a lot of it was mental, at some point in the landing I would stop flying my canopy and start prepping for a crash.

Nice, have you owned a rig before?

Slept in late and by the time I woke / finished showering / would've driven to the DZ, I wouldn't have gotten much jumping in(they tend to be done around 5 or 6). I miss the 7-8pm sunset loads at Pahokee.

People once believed in pixies, dragons, vampires and unicorns, people today just believe in aliens. It's the same thing.

I was a student at a total of 5 different dropzones over the course of 4 years and never ran into a DZ that wasn't glad to see me as a student. All of them moved me backwards in training and put me through some level of ground school though. I think it mostly comes down to how confident the instructor feels about you during retraining. But to Ryan, I don't know if any DZ in Florida does IAD or SL, which means you'd have to train for AFF(full ground school) and start with an AFF level 1 jump. If you plan on going back up to KY to finish your student status, SL to AFF to SL might not transition very well so any jumps you did down here might not count towards your student progression(your instructors at home would be the ones to ask about this). If you only want to make 1 or 2 jumps you might look into doing tandems, it'd be cheaper than AFF, would require no training, and I found doing a tandem after being a former SL student to help my freefall awareness.

Well obviously then we should just outsource our healthcare to India to bring the prices down

It's really hard to compare "rates" from one country to another because there are so many variables involved. Does that country accurately report every incident? Do they count suicides with guns as a gun murder? What about a self defense incident? But to answer the first post, if I ever moved to a country that didn't allow hand guns, I'd give my Glocks to my brother and keep at my new home any sort of weapon that was allowable. If I could own a shotgun I'd keep one of those. Worst case, I'd probably just get a short bladed katana and brush up on my training with that. The lack of gun ownership would factor into my decision to live there, but so would other issues like the overall crime rate, health care, social programs and so on. They may be worse(in my opinion) than the US on the self defense issue, but better in other areas(our health care system blows).

I don't know. I remember seeing some full page ads for SOBE in parachutist and they seemed to do a pretty good job at hosting an event pretty much every other month. I think SOBE going under had more to do with money issues up north than those at the DZ itself.

Huh, I'd head to dropzone B, plop down a couple hundred bucks for some Jet-A, load everyone up and do a buzz pass over dropzone A with me and my friends' bare asses hanging out the door of the Cessna. Then fly back to B in time for a sunset jump.

Is this situation supposed to be unusual? If so, I've been living in Florida for too long.

If it bugs you that much, send it back to them and I'm sure they'll fix it free of charge.

Oh yeah? Well, I personally knew Wyle E. Coyote who's far smarter than Hawkings ever was on the Simpsons, and I can assure you he would've thought ruling based on brain power was a good idea. Though sadly, since his ACME atomic scooter malfunctioned and slammed him into a cliff, he can't be here to state that opinion. But RR would back me up on that.

I voted "270 under something bigger", because you may end up needing those 270 skills some day if you're in a bad situation. But if you're always flying in straight on a small canopy, you'll probably get into trouble if you ever end up in a landing situation that requires you really pushing your canopy to its limits.

Ditto for me, except I would go outside, look at the wind sock and then pick a point on the ground. I'd pretend that point was my landing area and then "fly" the pattern down to it by walking around on the ground, pretending I was under canopy. I've always found that physically going through the motions of what I need to do later on helps me to polish off any mental practicing.

I think they call that Federalism

What about in state? And can all LEOs carry off duty in their own state? If so, then you have a class of citizens universal in the US that can CCW in their own state. It makes sense to allow them to do so across state lines. The diff with non-LEO CCW is that not all states allow it. So if the same ruling applied to non-LEO's that would mean that me, being from Florida, could CCW in Illinois while Illinois citizens couldn't. And that would be wrong.

Except that in many states it isn't a matter of qualifications, it's a matter of the entire practice being unlawful. Also, some states allow for gay marriages but that doesn't mean those marriages will be honored in other states. It's not quite so black and white. What about the drinking age or age of consent? Those "qualifications" vary from state to state.

Well, when my uncle was a sheriff he always had to carry off duty because he made a lot of enemies while being a cop. Also, I don't know whether a cop's duty extends to them even if they're not on the clock. If a cop witnesses a robbery on the way home from work while stopping in to buy a pack of cigarettes should his response really be, "fuck that dude, I'm off duty". If that is his proper response, then no I don't believe they should be carrying off duty(unless they have a visible job that requires the protection). But if they still are oblidged to intervene(provided they aren't putting their family at risk or something), then yeah, they should be allowed to carry off duty as a defacto.

Yeah, the idea is so funny the UK has already tested the idea and the top cops in that country want to expand it. http://www.swcp.com/proabqnet/features/feature_12.15.01.html http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/288/ukheroin.shtml

The difference between these two issues is: In every state police officers carry weapons. Privite citizens can't carry weapons in every state. So by allowing US-wide reciprocity for non-LE you would be forcing certain states to give people a right they wouldn't normally have in that state. And the training for a LEO can be much more intense than a private citizen. In Indiana there is no training, seminars or ANY requirements other than a clean background check for obtaining a permit. You walk into the police station, fill out a form, pay 15 dollars and they'll mail you a pink sheet of paper that allows you to carry concealed. It's very open and the permit was good for I think 4 years(unless I moved) and allowed me to purchase any handgun without the need for a background check(though a background check only took a few mins in Indiana anyway). And many states already do reciprocite. My Indiana CCW permit was recognized in Florida and the Florida permits are recognized in Indiana. There are a lot of states that will recognize each other. But take a state like Illinois where CCW is a friggen felony(!), and they'll never recognize a citizens right for CCW nor respect any other states CCW laws. And really, I don't believe states should try to force other states to follow their own laws.

Don't forget we'd be taxing the drugs that are sold. So not only would we not be spending 60 billion a year on the war, but we'd be earning tax money off the sale of the drugs just like we do with tobacco and alcohol. As for really hard drugs, it might be best to have the government sell them directly through a supervised program. The program should be structured to either get the addicts off of hard drugs or work to prevent as much harm as possible these people will do to others through their use of drugs.

What I don't understand is that tobacco and alchohol are much more destructive than pot, yet pot it illeagal and they're not. For anyone that says out current drug policy isn't political BS, would you please care to explain the above to me??

Yeah, and we all know skydivers aren't anything like that. Heck, the WFFC is also the annual church social, square dance and bingo competition.

Yeah, I was hanging out at the wrong clubs. If anyone spots Jolene Blalock in a kinky club, give me a call.

Yeah, it's going to be unfair. It's also really unfair people have to have 200 jumps before they can start jumping wingsuits under a BMI's supervision. Someone who's been doing belly for 200 jumps won't have the same wingsuit skills as someone who's spent 100 jumps carving tracks through the sky. So why should they have the same restrictions? Because simple, easy to understand, universal and set in stone rules are easier to accept than complex ones. That's why so many people still use and even teach the 45 degree rule for exit seperation. It's easy to remember, so people use it, even though it can be inaccurate.