Jumpah

Scheduled for August 16th, 3PM ET http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA Note: While this one will be tame, there are other threads in the IAmA that are NSFW If you are unfamiliar with these "I am , ask me anything", it is a forum where people can ask the original poster anything. Other readers of the forum can up-vote or down-vote your post. Posts that do not add to the discussion tend to get down-voted by many, and at a certain threshold it stops being displayed to others. Posts with the most up-votes tend to be the most interesting. IAmA's are not usually celebrities...because it can be done quite anonymously you get quite an array of subjects.

Jason, We gathered around your camper last night and had a good time remembering you and all that you brought with you. You are missed by many. Blue skies!

Instead of polling the anonymous Internet, contact PD and ask them what they think.

Look for other traffic

Not disagreeing with you, just adding that I think forward penetration is often misused as an excuse to downsize. Skydivers need to think locally...a jumper on a square with a 1:1 loading at a DZ with 15 - 20mph and surrounded by soy beans is one thing...going backwards and landing off is not likely to be a big deal. That same jumper and conditions at a DZ surrounded by trees, buildings, powerlines, and bull fields with only a couple of outs is where more penetration can be helpful to give the jumper more options of where they can land. ....and there is always the option to stay on the ground. People often discuss the merits of downsizing or not, but rarely do I see it summed up as "a smaller canopy gives the pilot a smaller margin for error". To me that is what it comes down to. Whether we are talking about being able to fly a precise pattern, get enough landing separation or to survive a low turn or a no-flare landing, it's all going to be easier on a larger, slower canopy. Just this weekend I saw a whole bunch of landings where jumpers flared asymmetrically. No great problem on a Navigator loaded at 0.75, but potentially career ending on a Velocity @ 2.7. Smaller canopies can be more fun, but they bite much harder and faster. Absolutely! When I say downsize, I mean a sensible downsize.

The jumper that is in a bad area needs to stay on the ground, not get a higher performance canopy. Not necessarily...someone with 1,000 jumps is likely capable of a downsize for this sort of situation.

Not disagreeing with you, just adding that I think forward penetration is often misused as an excuse to downsize. Skydivers need to think locally...a jumper on a square with a 1:1 loading at a DZ with 15 - 20mph and surrounded by soy beans is one thing...going backwards and landing off is not likely to be a big deal. That same jumper and conditions at a DZ surrounded by trees, buildings, powerlines, and bull fields with only a couple of outs is where more penetration can be helpful to give the jumper more options of where they can land.

Not so huge. In fact, barest tip of the iceberg. While true that it is the barest tip of the iceberg, accomplishments are relative, someone going from nothing to an A has often just completed something extradinary, relative to their life up to that point.

I'm with you on this one... I'm certain many children could learn to skydive and do it safely, but skydiving has unknowns that no amount of skill can prevent, and those unknowns present liability issues to other people. We never skydive alone. Skydiving requires pilots, instructors, ground crew, investors, private businesses. Can laws in the US truly protect everyone involved in a child skydiving fatality to the same degree they would protect them if that child were an adult? My understanding is No, they do not. Sure...we deal with children doing dangerous things all the time...playing football, driving cars, joining the military. My issue is one of liability.

You don't need shelves of ammo for it to be useful.

Deland is a good place to go...don't wait until you go to California. You'll get world-class instruction there. However, once you get to California, be sure to be humble and take time to learn any differences between the two DZs.

My grandmother's neighbor would walk their dog in her yard. For a while I cleaned it up when I mowed and figured they'd stop, but it continued. Finally after stepping in it that last time, I collected what was there and left a good sized pile on their front porch. Never happened again.

In addition, YouTube uses services from Akamai to spread the distribution of videos out to a massive network of servers that are dispersed world-wide. Content is moved and cached between servers so that the consumer (you) are watching the video from the best source possible relative to where you are. There is probably much more to their formula, but thats the gist of what they do. Dropzone.com is probably hosted at a single location, so everyone goes to that one location to watch videos hosted on the site. This can cause issues for streaming quality if a lot of folks are watching, or if there is a bottleneck between you and dropzone.com. Akamai/YouTube reduces some of those risks by eliminating some amount of distance and hops. Also, using YouTube to distribute the videos vs. hosting them locally probably reduces the overall costs for running dropzone.com as they aren't paying the bandwidth to stream all those videos. Or maybe their ISP costs are fixed, in which case its just a matter of performance.

It is also written as a banner and hanging in a cubicle in the movie Tron

Thanks JohnRich, was about to post the same thing