base698

I removed mine from the goggles and am looking for other spots to mount it in my helmet. Anyone else do this? When it works it works super well. The peripheral below does suck a lot.

It's really not an absolute trade as you claim. You can force a single group to take longer in the door, which fixes both issues--you get two distinct landing groups and have extra horizontal separation. People are going to continue to make bad decisions under canopy. If you can solve both problems that seems best. All this is even sillier when considering the winds have to be just right for it to even be an issue.

I'm using the data from the fatality database for United States. Would like to have all the data further back, if you have a link let me know.

Ok, so you didn't read anything else I said, but I'll address this first. You're essentially saying that vertical separation is meaningless and then attributing horizontal separation to a single variable of which there are at least a dozen: Upper wind speed, how much movement the group makes, the direction of tracking the groups pick, how long they track, how much time they give between groups, time under canopy before the next group opens. Everything has to go completely wrong for there to be even a chance of collision. My fear is that this was adopted with little actual reason and caused a much larger risk in it's place. Yes and instead of using AADs people could just open higher. I frequently land out and doing it every jump when I was on a highly loaded canopy sucked. I am in the process of upsizing because of it, but tell that to the new swooper with 500 jumps while he takes out a canopy he didn't see due to high congestion.

Collision is the 30 column. I left unlabeled ones in of which there are three. After 2004 the total fatals go down but collisions go up. I wish the data went back further. Changed the alignment so that is clearer.

I'm not sure what you're saying. The data says to me total fatalities went down and collisions went up. Roughly in the same time frame free fliers out first started to become the norm. Using a flash movie that only takes into account one variable of the whole issue seems shortsighted. To boot I don't remember a rash of freefall/canopy collisions to spur the change. For the sake of this argument it's only wind drift that matters.

It's somewhat meaningless by itself and there doesn't seem to be enough data further back, but using the fatality database there seems to be many more collisions after 2004 as a proportion of fatalities. There is also limited data as to what the parties involved in the collision were doing. I would attribute it more to the jumper in question moving around the whole jump than freefall drift.

At the expense of how many canopy collisions because free fliers on their new hot cross braced canopies zoom through all the belly fliers?

Except for all those other variables like unintentional horizontal movement, picking the same line tracking and getting out at the exact wrong time. The risk of collision is easily mitigated by adding more time at the transition.

^ My argument is that doing it this way increases traffic, not that it prevents freefall collisions. The freefall collision risk can be circumvented by just adding a longer time between the transition.

I did most of my jumping at a drop zone with free fliers out first, and I never saw a problem either. I think this was a solution in search of a problem and more importantly I believe it to be such a gross oversimplification as to be useless at best. Most importantly I think it congests the landing area by causing the transition groups to open at the same time. If freefliers are out first then they have the exit separation + the extra time created by moving at a higher speed to move out of the way of the next group both vertically and horizontally. I've had a belief for some time that the increase in canopy collisions incidents are at least in part due to mass adoption of free fliers out last. It congests the landing area by having the transition groups in both belly and freefly opening at almost exactly the same time. Too bad you can't tag posts as controversial :) There are other reasons I believed it to be silly, but they dwarf the main reason.

http://guardiannews.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

I think that's where we disagree. If it's actively used for money laundering or illicit things it will always have some value if the volume is high enough to offload. The biggest positive use is transmitting money to the third world without getting screwed by Western Union or warlords.

I don't understand why people keep saying you can't do anything with them.... https://bitcoin.it/wiki/trade + Silk Road, Word Press, and Reddit. Only the investment side. Sending money anywhere without an intermediary, to my knowledge, has never been tried. This is the closest thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

The Fed didn't, but FinCen did a couple of weeks back: http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G001.pdf

Right now they are divisible to 8 decimal places and the code allows for more if needed in the future. You can send as little as 0.00000001.

The "article" compares 5 years lawn expenses to 1 year military expenses. The $700K dollar figure is supposed to get a reaction. Being intentionally misleading is usually a bad sign.

$203 bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

Not to mention the motor in the Model S is the size of a medium sized watermelon, giving you TWO internal combustion-engine sized spaces for storage. Two trunks, how is that not awesome?

Like cash? Is cash to be hated because it's used by street gangs and in weapons traffic? A lot of the miners are open source as is the standard bitcoin client. Both have been mulled over by countless people. Most of the concerns you've outlined are basic computer security. Everyone should know you should never open executables in email, fall back on skepticism when opening links etc. The network posts how many G/Hash/second it's currently running at, so you could calculate if it's being used for nefarious purposes. I was accusing you of conflating a single persons computer security with the security of bitcoin. A lot of people in the media make the mistake of implying bitcoin is insecure because exchanges or online services are hacked. It's kind of like saying cash is insecure because a bank is robbed or a person is mugged in walking through a bad neighborhood.

That's like saying cash is stupid because people steal ATMs. Bitcoin is something specific. It isn't the exchanges that sell them or the hackers that try to steal bitcoins.

As an idea it's pretty fucking brilliant. The most world changing ideas usually aren't understood at first. Think about when the internet started gaining traction and you'd hear pundits saying it was a fad that would be gone by 2004. Tech dot coms survived their bubble and generated quite a few billion dollar businesses that immense practical value. From the NY Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/business/media/bubble-or-no-virtual-bitcoins-show-real-worth.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Here are a couple of things that made me realize it had immense practical value. An acquaintance was recently selling a software library online. He was accepting PayPal, and had made about $200K in short order. PayPal froze the account and made him jump through a ton of hoops to get it back, which took him months. He was terrified as it was to be his money to live off on. This can't happen with Bitcoin. You can send and receive with no risk of chargeback or account freeze. Taking more than $10,000 in and out of the country requires red tape, not so with this. If you want to buy prescription drugs or illicit drugs through the mail you can do that to. Visa wants to say you can't donate to Wikileaks? Tough shit. Want to send a donation to a war torn village in Africa but the transfer fees eat up all the money? bitcoin to the rescue. Granted it's highly probably this is all speculation and could be another dutch tulip, but the use case and the tech is compelling. Shorting would be good as a hedge for those who already made a lot of money with it and are afraid of the tax implications of selling off half a million in bitcoin, but given that there isn't much history for how to set the options it would be a wash. There are however exchanges that you can short.

It isn't just regs... http://www.kivasystems.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car Not to mention Dropbox, Automated Call Routing, Gmail, and similar systems eliminate the need for IT in most businesses... Spend a small monthly fee and eliminate a $50K office worker

I still don't know how to rectify the fact that there are huge economic opportunities to be had, but a lot fewer of the slots. IE, Google and Apple employ far fewer workers than a similar size company would have in the past. This air of hand waving in the face of permanently losing a whole class of blue collar jobs is pretty striking. Our society has not transitioned into a creator economy and there are millions that are waiting for the non-thinking jobs to come back. In 10 years we'll lose a whole other class of blue collar jobs and probably start in on the white collar jobs. Those people can't all be drug dealers or prostitutes.

When I lived and worked in the city this year it was common for 23 year olds with little experience to ask for 130k. The tech scene is booming.