nathaniel

I've heard it several times over the last year, tbh. I think there's more of a case for it when I hear it from wingsuit jumpers who rig up snappy openings than from freefallers. Not too keen on it myself tho--I've got a C lic and I get ansy right around 2500 ft even when I'm current. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I could do that, and I don't smoke

One difference is that nobody can test out of the minimum pull BSR, and no number of jumps can get you beneath 2000' as a required minimum. Are we now proposing a hard maximum WL? My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

no kidding. tho, if you phone in your CC# it'll probably wind up on the same computer My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I've done it three times, twice successfully. Once out of a skyvan, which is nearly trivial IMO if you're comfortable flying your suit. Twice out of an otter, which was a bit more challenging. What ended up working was for the rider to take grips on the shoulder straps and crouch right on top of the bird, facing the prop naturally. The rider gave the count and launched the thing, immediately placing ankles around the bird's hips and leaning forward till reaching controlled terminal flight. The successful launches almost felt like nothing to me (the bird), just extra fast for some reason. Once you're in controlled flight the rider can sit up and pilot the bird by leaning on the shoulders and upper arm. From my perspective it felt easy to bank too much & turtle, so gentle inputs should be used, at least at first, and preferably with some sort of communication--maybe tap a few times to indicate that the rider wants to pilot for a while--so that the bird doesn't instinctively counteract the arm inputs with the legs. On all 3 attempts I felt in control the whole time, after all I had most direct control of the control surfaces. If I want the rider off I can take in a wing and 1/2 second later she'll be hanging on for dear life

Well that seems a bit misplaced. The whole idea behind science is that you scrutinize as much of it as you can. Which is apposite in contrast to the ID credo, "God did it, let's move on". It's why we teach the scientific method to begin with. Otherwise we'd just teach the outcomes of science. Tho it's not accurate to characterize it as a controversy or to suggest that it's invalid...unless you can come up with an alternate theory of course...which ID is not. Any more than it's controversy that the Earth rotates duh revolves around the Sun, or that the Sun has been "burning" for millenia without consuming all of its hydrogen via combustion. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Not myself. I've seen & heard about several nasty wrecks on rt 30 near hinckley...which is odd because it's just a straight 2 lane highway. And about 50% of the time driving back to the city on 88 or 290 on Saturday nights I've seen wrecks. Once there was a car *stopped* in the right lane in a construction zone on 88 where there was no shoulder, in the dead of night. I was in the middle lane and there was a car driving in my blind spot that afaik didn't stop in time. It was out of my field of vision tho...and there was no place for me to go to stop and look back. Saw the immediate aftermath of a pickup truck that encroached into rt 30 and got smashed, looked like no serious injuries fortunately. Heard about, and saw the passing emergency vehicle flashing lights when a pair of people were killed by a drunk driver that vaulted the train tracks parallel t rt 30 and tboned a car this last year. Drunk driver did not die, but presumably had her life ruined. One of the packers IIRC was the first one to come across the scene.... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Depending on the chipset, some of the Realtek stuff actually has nice hardware equalizer features that, if you get the right drivers for it, you can actually do fairly well for yourself. Probably not in a laptop tho. Wouldn't hurt to look at both realtek's website if they have a reference driver implementation for your chipset with any software bundle, and also to check with your laptop manufacturer in case they offer a different driver / software bundle. In my desktop system I've found for both video and audio the chipset reference drivers & bundled software are nicer than the vendor's. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Make what happen? I'm not making fun of the Euros, but they have a long and sordid history of overregulating themselves. They nearly destroyed their insurance industry in the late 20th Century with bad laws. In the USA our culture is to do things differently, to hold off on massive overregulation until someone gets put in charge who wants a legacy. And then to bicker about it endlessly. Short of dedicating a wing to ourselves in the USPA museum, we should focus on effective & appropriate regulations. That means gathering data on subjects we don't know enough about. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Woohoo, just bought my ticket. A steal for $7.50. Praise the lawd for air miles My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Likewise, "somebody got injured or died" is neither proof that it's unreasonable. It seems like there's no easy way to plot a line between certain death and certain success a priori for the choices that people are making today. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I saw that, and I like the style of it better than an all or nothing proposal, but I still don't want to commit to a quantification yet. Although the second one definitely has an African feel to it

I do and I don't. I hear what you are trying to say, but I don't think it matters with respect to physics much whether newer jumpers take more risk due to preference or ignorance. I do think there's ample reason to believe new jumpers are more likely to be both less risk averse (I bet newer jumpers tend to be younger than experienced jumpers--I actually don't know this as fact but it's easy for me to believe) AND less knowledgeable about their risks. So to address the unknown, is there any information on whether the demographic of skydivers has been aging, or growing among the middle aged or older at the expense of the young? I think that having multiple charts would accommodate some of both. I don't want to get into the particulars of exact numbers yet. I think we have greater opportunity that it may seem to gather raw data if we would only pool & coordinate our resources. See the note I had about anemometers and such. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Aha, now we are getting somewhere

We solved the exit separation problem in a data-driven fashion without collecting elaborate statistics. The plane moves at velocity X, an open canopy moves at or below velocity Y, you need 3-5 seconds to detect and react to a potential collision, etc... Like others have posted recently, a first step to understanding the nature of canopy flight would be to identify isolines of a particular level of performance. Say canopy speed on a well trimmed canopy of a particular make, with various weights and with no control input, with 25% input, 50% input, etc. at known density altitudes. How about this next year we all resolve to buy a portable anemometer (froogle search has them for between $50 and $300) and put together our measurements for the canopies we have. Get a few people from each of our dropzones to do a few test runs on as many different combinations of people canopy as is safe / reasonable. I don't have the answer for you. The absence of a clear recourse does not justify any. From time to time I've posted ideas, and they've been shot down duly. You're free to draw any conclusion you want from that... I draw none. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

There's some risk inherent in jumping out of airplanes. Where do we draw the line between acceptable & unacceptable risk? I'm not looking for an empirical answer, a chart was already used to start this thread. What I'm asking is what basis do we use to decide where the threshold should be. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Without wanting to sidetrack this thread, I came across this SCUBA site which has this SCUBA safety forum. I think it makes for a remarkable case of comparative literature. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Zero in Chicago. The rental market is so topsy turvy here that you can easily find places to rent with heat included. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Seems like the White House knows all about illegal disclosures of confidential information. hehe that was too easy My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That is a false choice. Several of us posting in this very thread have exceeded this proposal and haven't been killed or injured. Some of us were being conservative, and acting with the advice of our instructors when we did it. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I wasn't thinking so much about grandfathering so much as the cost of overregulation on people who have yet to join the sport. At least three people I can think of in the last 5 years have told me they abandoned SCUBA (in the US) at least in part due to the hassles of upgrading and keeping their licenses current. It's by no means a scientific measure, but it inspires me to think of how we could avoid overregulating this sport. I did a cursory search on the internet for facts & figures about the SCUBA business, unfortunately I found nothing...would you happen to know if there are any good references, online or off? My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I only wish I could be as funny as these FBI agents I guess they weren't kidding about obtaining library records. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

On Jan 1 we will be at the Quakers' mercy! Bow to their will or they'll, umm, offer us tea and talk to us about the virtue of inner spirituality or something equally heinous! My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Of course, you can turn that around. A lot of people do not trifle with things that don't impact them. It's particularly evident to me when people propose greasing this one through by grandfathering people under their current licenses or canopies, and screwing up only those people who aren't around to express their displeasure--and who may not stay around long enough to reverse it. Several people have independently told me this is a problem that plagues SCUBA divers in the US. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Ahh yes, like the infamous case of the Florida Quakers, a notoriously violent group, and the case of the San Jose Putt Putt facilities that would clearly have been destroyed by the stinking anti-american forces of evil, if it hadn't been for the "not technically illegal" acts of the executive branch. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?