Dolph

Spotting is pretty easy when the pilots guess of uppers is fairly accurate. It gets more difficult when it's off by a wide margin and he's late in giving permission for the door to be opened. And then there is the Great Temptation. Your pilot has made a bad guess and a late "open door" call. Ya order a 90 right, fly for a bit, then a sharp 90 degree left. Now you're on the line you want to be, but ahead of your perfect spot. You look down, there are good outs. At this point, my head goes "Aeeeh oohmmm eeeh well it is...hmmmm YAH F*CK IT" Some impressive cow swooping has come from such situations.

A "safety tax". Takes a Dane to come up with a tax solution

That's my thinking too. Now the Syrians have burned our embassy there (and that of Chile and Sweden as a byproduct). What'd the US do if one of their embassies were burned? What'd the Syrians do if we burned theirs? We're still sending these people money through foreign aid, hoping that the moderates will eventually prevail. If that doesn't happen, a counter-boycott is in order.

Hey I did dude. I am just having problems finding pictures of the stuff I described. Only found one so far, of Iraqi victims of a suicide bomber. Men with half their upper head blown off. Burned bodies, almost unrecognisable inside a car that burned after an attack. I doubt most people would be ok with me having that on my car as I drive by their kids every day even though I do have a political point after all - this is reality, this happens in war, this is why we don't want war. I could go further into other topics. In fact, I could take it so far into bad taste I'd probably not be able to live with myself if it was carried out in real life. The question is whether it's ok, that was the original point. My response is: yes, as long as we allow for other political causes to be illustrated and campaigned for in the same manner. Somehow, I think that the majority of people don't have the stomach for that. If people want to see the ugly side of life - it is not hard to find. We collectively walk around with our eyes closed most of the time.

I'll direct you to a quote in my post: Directly affect vs affect by proxy. The man doesn't have anything happen physically to him, to his body. He is affected indirectly through the woman. Whuffos may want influence on skydiving since it interferes with their bubble of reality - noise, relative going in and so forth. As I said, I believe both whuffos and men have valuable input and should not be disregarded. Also, it was a starting point to operate from. I'm not saying whhat I posted was the end argument.

I gather you'd have to look for the hardcore jumpers. To get something out of exercise, it needs to be regular and frequent. No question that doing say 10-14 jumps a day is physically and mentall exhausting. If you only do it once a month, I doubt it does much for your overall fitness. Mental health is a whole other dimension. I think skydiving does a lot of good there.

I really dislike not being able to see traffic below. At our club, there's a lot of motor- and glider traffic. Gliders, just to piss skydivers off, are white. To further infuriate us, they seem to like to stick around clouds. I think it's effort enough to spot 'em on climbout. If there is glider traffic and "industrial haze", if you choose to jump, you've really increased the risks of something bad happening. I'm guilty of jumping through clouds too. Some experiences have left me less than enthusiastic about it. Once got out into a hail/rain cloud in Russia. Was very painful and just as dangerous. Been too close to other groups on another occasion or two - no one could tell line of flight and tracked the "wrong way". I'll admit that on hop 'n pops here in the winter where there is little or no other traffic, I'll jump if I can get a glimpse of the ground, the cloud layer is thin and relatively high.

Mm. Trucks full of dead children with their limbs hacked off. People with craniums leaking, punctured by shrapnel from a suicide bomb. A picture of a man being executed while he watches his pre-teen daughter is dragged away. Hey - it's anti-war. We should all have stuff like that on our cars. Some people have no taste.

One way to go about this business as a man is to think in the following terms: Imagine if whuffo's would have a say on skydiving matters. They'd be given the power to legislate and dictate terms. They'd never skydive but still get a big piece of the decision pie. Skydivers would be directly affected. Now apply this to abortion. Men will never have babies, yet they want a substantial part of the decision pie. It can never personally apply directly to a man's body - only by proxy, through a woman. Both whuffos and men will have valuable input. Their opinion should be heard. But how 'bout letting those directly affected make the very hard choices? Just a starting point.

L&B are very nice. My sis lent her hemlet and Pro-Track to a another jumper. Jumper has a hard landing on asphalt and the dytter (outside of helmet) is smashed. So a mail to L&B "hi look what happened - can you fix it?" resulted in a fix. She got a new one, with two extra batteries. No charge.

They're important in the sense that they provide a service. They're unimportant in the sense that the service provided is unnecessary for any licensed skydiver who doesn't have medical problems or doesn't have a very tight jump schedule. For these people, they're very valuable. My experience is that the majority of people who use packers do so because it's a pain in the ass to pack and that time could be spent chillin' with the dudes instead. The vast majority of jumpers could jump without packers. Gotta agree with you though that they don't seem to be appreciated by the people who use them and some treat them as personal slaves. I caved in on my last Russia trip and got a packer. Personally, I was extremely appreciative of his work and the conditions he was working under - and indicated my thankfulness by a rather large tip.

Yup. Should we back down? Nope. They're threatening us. The Turkish government, a nation that wants to join the EU, is saying "this shows that freedom of the press *must* be restricted". I refuse to let the religion of others dictate how I should live my life. The caricatures were in bad taste. It was known they were gonna inflame a lot of people. It was to test self censorship - and tested it it has. What the outcome will be is not to say - our prime minister doesn't seem to want to budge. No matter that I think it's pretty dumb to publish such caricatures, I also think they were pretty funny. More importantly, it was done in the FREE DEMOCRATIC Denmark, and no religio-fascist from a tyrannical theocracy should decide whether we should be allowed to publish caricatures or just how our freedoms should be limited. People have rights. There just isn't a right to not be offended. At least not here.

This is great. I asked for exactly that in another thread. Thanks dudes.

Speedracer, the issue of self censorship is the exact reason the caricatures were printed. The newspaper felt that there was a great deal of it and that it was threatening freedom of speech. There's a lot of debate (or has been) in Denmark about whether we're doing too little, just enough or too much "accomodation" of other cultures. In other words, if we let the values of other cultures override our own and to what degree. For a good number of Danes this is for various reasons a big deal. Which, I suppose, is illustrated by the fact that the vast majority of Danes do not feel an apology is warranted, even though the pictures may be degrading and blasphemous. And here's the kicker; like most countries, we have laws that are old, outdated and aren't being enforced. One such law is the blasphemy law. It basically states that anyone who publicly mocks or ridicules any of the legally established dogmas or god-worships can be punished with fines of jail by up to four months. So in theory they can take this whol deal to court. Of course the law is likely to be repealed. Any political party opposing that, given the current climate, risk losing a good deal of power. Very interesting all this. It's been long since I've been able to have free speech discussions with a broad range of people in "real life".

Heh Pirana, I'm 145 pounds as it is. Don't need to lose more. Having said that, my assumption was an average exercise - not a strenous daily 12 hour day full of manual labour. Put people in concentration camps and stop feeding them and the distribution will be towards the slim end after a while.

That's pretty funny dude :D. We'll see where this goes. The Muslim community now wants a UN resolution forbidding basically defamation of religions. The EU has stepped in too, saying a boycott against Denmark is a boycott against the EU. This is gonna be interesting.

Vote with your money. Go somewhere where smoking isn't allowed. Not so many of such places? The it might be because those who spend lots of money at pool halls like a cig. As far as outside, I hate it when shallow people walk by. Or beautiful people. Or ugly people. Fucking people ruin my day. I fucking hate it when I have to wait to get on a lift. It's fucking annoying and really, like totally, bums me off and threatens to destroy the world as we know it. Like the people wearing excessive amounts of deodorant or other smelly stuff. That fucking ticks me off (really!). That should be illegal, too. What right do they have to piss me off in that way? People are allergic to that stuff, too. Ban it all. Start with humans.

Ya'know, it many ways, this is a non issue. At least to me. Let people talk, cast nasty looks and so forth. As long as they don't get in my way I won't fault them for being who they are. That may be arrogant, superficious and judgemental - fine for me if they're happy with it and don't get in my way. Such people cannot be entirely avoided. They can however become a very small part of your life, one handed with a shrug and a "whatever". I'll let them abuse and poison their own minds and bodies as long as they're not affecting mine. Not a big deal - they're just assholes. Some of them are even nice assholes and some of them I call friends. It's weird. We have the most capable brain nature has ever come up with but our reproductive "instincts" are so easily screwed with and intertwined with norms, perceptions and behaviour. And there are far, far more interesting things to spend all that brain power on. Like, if this dude, right, jumps off a plane, it would be like REALLY cool if there were smoke and fireworks and stuff....and then like he landed in the middle of the swooop pond and totally almost drowned LOLLLL!!1!1!! The above happens to my intelligence when I go to a DZ. It sure as hell beats your ass is bigger than mine though

Thanks. This is really good stuff.

Hey dude! I was born in Aalborg, used to live there til recently. Am a member of the local skydiving club, too :D. Ya like Jomfru Ane gade? :D

Yes, the Gates Foundation have around $25 billion available. You may hate his business practises, but I'd rather see my money go to such an individual than to some grubby little want-it-all.

Hey Michele. I'm as lazy as they get. My only exercise is running landings out and running to the plane. I eat crap junk food and don't have an ounce of self discipline when it comes to exercise. So, if laziness and bad diet was the sole factor here, I think my wingload would be significantly higher than it is. I'm a skinny fuck despite my bad eating/exercise habits. My feeling is that if you take a group of 100 people, give them the same amount of food and the same amount of exercise, you'll have 100 overweight, normal weight and skinny bastards. And you can bet your ass the normals will call people lazy fatsos and skeletons. Both overweight and underweight will have to put in more effort to get "normal" weight. Given an average group of people with an average amount of self discipline towards food and exercise, the comparison of body fat ain't particularly fair. Having said that, those outside the normal weight range will just have to work a little harder or accept things as they are.

The latest poll I saw showed that a good majority of those polled felt Denmark should not apologize. Of course the industry is going to object and whine, because they lose money. Fortunately, big business do not have as much influence on politics here as in the US.

I think the regret part was a cave-in to Danish Industry. Food producer Arla expects to lose about 800 million Danish crowns a year on this boycott. The industry group of course first voiced their opinions *after* the boycott had started. It's a bit telling that by using our freedom of speech, we have now become an explicit target for Jihad and terrorism. People have received threats to their lives. Our flag is being burned and our soldiers in Iraq can expect the insurgency to attack them more frequently. In this case, Bush is actually right - "they hate our freedoms". It's such a lame comment in general, but here it's right on. I fear the Danish Muslims will get slapped over the fingers by this. They're the largest minority group in Denmark and their culture isn't regarded highly as it is due to what is perceived as discrimination of women (Denmark is a very egalitarian-minded state) and problems with integration. My impression of Danish culture is that a *lot* of things can be accepted, if not tolerated, but there are some things you just don't mess with. Despite having a state religion, it's a very secular society and attempts to impose religious boundaries generally are not accepted well by the population. Big mess out of nothing. Just found out Denmark donates 13.2 billion Danish crowns in foreign aid in 2007 - or at least 0.8% of the GNP. A good portion of it goes to the Middle East. Boycotts can go both ways, I suppose.

A link to give a little background: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4660796.stm The basic thing behind this is that one of our newspapers made caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. They defend it by saying that they wished to prove there was a lot of "self censorship" regarding the handling of other cultures and that this self censorship threatened freedom of speech and expression. Immediately after the publication there were loud objections (understandably) from Muslim Danes. A few days later, the condemnations spread to the entire world. Our prime minister has stated that he cannot control what the newspapers can print as long as it is within the law. The Saudi regime has responded that he should be able to, because he is in power. Tripoli now says this: Our government has responded with: The boycott of Danish goods is, I think, fair enough - their prerogative. Sure, they'll hit people unrelated to the incident, but at least it's an action taken within each respective country. The repeated calls for our prime minister to step in is way out of line. The recalling of ambassadors, while a symbolic gesture, is a bit worrying. Doesn't seem to be a "work with us" atmosphere. Should a sovereign democratic nation restrict free speech because it could piss off other nations? Should the people of a nation refrain from doing stuff that in other nations with other religious and moral values, would not be permitted? There's gotta be a fuzzy line somewhere. Gimme a hand at finding it?