IMPORTANT- Seeyou V's Strepla and airspace violations.

Doug, No real anger here! Just alittle disappointment
in what started out to be fun competition turning into
a lot of work and 'Big brother' watching me. It seems
that that was done in the interest of 'protecting'
our right to fly and as such the percieved notion that
the FAA/CIA/ homeland security or any other name you
might want to put here is going to punish the entire
group for the infractions of one. This leads to the
McCarthyism and self appointed enforcer mentality that
started this thread! It Just seems pointless, and has
diminished the growth of the OLC. Had it stayed the
same as last year I would suspect that it would have
grown at a much higher rate than it did.

Interesting though that you combined posts from Kirk
and I that are from two different forum's? Mine was
posted to gliderforum and Kirks here on RAS. Although
I totally agree with my old flying buddy, I only lay
claim to the last half of the post you quote.

At 03:36 14 September 2006, Doug Haluza wrote:
Cliff, not sure who your anger is directed at. Let
me just say that the
SSA-OLC Committee is trying to provide an outlet for
resolving
disputes, without making a public circus of it on r.a.s.
Unfortunately,
some people just cant accept this.

I think your MPD on this pretty well sums up the two
sides of the
debate. Most of the posters fall into two main groups:

A) Let pilots do what they want, and post any flight,
as long as they
live to tell about it.
B) Hold pilots to some kind of reasonable standards
to keep the
competition as fair as possible, and keep the feds
as far away as
possible.

There are variations of this, for example letting people
do A until
they get caught, then make them do B, or trying to
make the standards
in B some kind of absolute, or parse them down to the
sub-atomic
particle level. Another variation says that since we
can't do B 100%,
we should do 0% and default to A.

One of the things we have been doing is trying to continue
to grow the
OLC user base. And as the user base grows, the population
will
naturally have to include a wider range of opinions
and behavior. That
means we will also have to deal with more people holding
extreme views,
who won't accept the consensus norms.

The main thing to emphasize is personal responsibility.
You hit on that
when you talked about not posting flights that most
reasonable people
would find questionable. I think most people get that
intuitively. I
think almost everyone can grasp this with a little
peer pressure. But
then there are a few people....

Unfortunately, that's just life in the big city. But
we don't have to
let them spoil the fun.

Cliff Hilty wrote:
At 13:24 11 September 2006, Kirk.Stant wrote:
I find it absolutely fascinating that pilots that
will
cheerfully
exceed the posted speed limit (along with just about
everybody else, of
course) during the drive to the gliderport will then
pontificate about
minuscule infringements of vertical and lateral airspace
bounderies.

Uh, guys, these are regulations, not laws of physics!
You are safer at
18,300' looking out the window than at 17,700' staring
at the
altimeter!

Of course, I now fully expect to be viciously flamed,
but what the
hell, it's monday and it's raining....

Kirk
66

I have pondered over this in detail after having read
most of the threads in RAS and here. And I am still
undecided.

When OLC started it was purely fun and easy, now it
has become 'the' entity for showing not only the world
but even more importantly your local flying buddies
your acheivements. For years I flew in relative obscurity
with only a few people knowing what I did, where and
how fast I went. Now with posting to OLC everyone
with
any interest in soaring knows.

The question for me now becomes; Do I have a responsibility
to my flying buddies to protect their right to fly
and not bring unwanted attention of allegded violations
of the FAR's to our club and local flying area. To
that question I have to say yes.

On the other hand it makes me angry that a once fun
and purely innocent OLC (after all we are in it for
the money and chics) has been takin over by the aviation's
version of the 'Moral Majority' and turned into the
McCarthyism of everybody looking suspicously at each
others flights and airing those suspiscions publicly
in the name of protecting their right to fly. It just
smacks of Orwell's 1984 'big brother is watching'.
Read Soarpoint's post on RAS.

Then again we don't have to post our flights that
violate
the FAR's! So now you see why I am so undecided

Cliff, I'm sorry, but this 'Big Brother' thing is a great big Red
Herring. The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested). The posted flight logs are downloadable so
people can view your flights by design, not by accident. So there
should be absolutely no expectation of privacy.

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair. And I think we
may have inadvertently hit that raw nerve by confronting people with
flights they really should not have posted in the first place. But this
is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

I also think we are getting side tracked on the regulatory issues,
which are not the main point. There is an interesting side thread on
insurance issues, which may shed a different light on this. But the
biggest issue is monkey-see monkey-do.

You should expect that other people will be studying your flight logs
to learn from your example. Some of these people may not realize that
they should not emulate your bad behavior because they are dumb like a
post. Others will do it to try to beat you because they are dumb like a
fox. Niether of these is a positive result.

You are correct that the rate of growth of the OLC has slowed, but I
think this has more to do with market saturation among the more
experienced pilots. To continue to grow the OLC, we will need to
attract less experienced pilots. Learning from other OLC participants
is probably the best selling point to this market segment. So we need
to make sure we don't have people learning bad habits.

Let me sum it up this way. If we don't discourage posting bad examples
to OLC, we will just see more bad examples, so that raises our 'Bad
Cholesterol'. At
some point, people will become disgusted, or discouraged by this, and
that will lower our 'Good Cholesterol'. So the net result is bad for
the health of the OLC. You may not like the cholesterol medicine, but
not taking it is worse.

Cliff Hilty wrote:
Doug, No real anger here! Just alittle disappointment
in what started out to be fun competition turning into
a lot of work and 'Big brother' watching me. It seems
that that was done in the interest of 'protecting'
our right to fly and as such the percieved notion that
the FAA/CIA/ homeland security or any other name you
might want to put here is going to punish the entire
group for the infractions of one. This leads to the
McCarthyism and self appointed enforcer mentality that
started this thread! It Just seems pointless, and has
diminished the growth of the OLC. Had it stayed the
same as last year I would suspect that it would have
grown at a much higher rate than it did.

Interesting though that you combined posts from Kirk
and I that are from two different forum's? Mine was
posted to gliderforum and Kirks here on RAS. Although
I totally agree with my old flying buddy, I only lay
claim to the last half of the post you quote.

At 03:36 14 September 2006, Doug Haluza wrote:
Cliff, not sure who your anger is directed at. Let
me just say that the
SSA-OLC Committee is trying to provide an outlet for
resolving
disputes, without making a public circus of it on r.a.s.
Unfortunately,
some people just cant accept this.

I think your MPD on this pretty well sums up the two
sides of the
debate. Most of the posters fall into two main groups:

A) Let pilots do what they want, and post any flight,
as long as they
live to tell about it.
B) Hold pilots to some kind of reasonable standards
to keep the
competition as fair as possible, and keep the feds
as far away as
possible.

There are variations of this, for example letting people
do A until
they get caught, then make them do B, or trying to
make the standards
in B some kind of absolute, or parse them down to the
sub-atomic
particle level. Another variation says that since we
can't do B 100%,
we should do 0% and default to A.

One of the things we have been doing is trying to continue
to grow the
OLC user base. And as the user base grows, the population
will
naturally have to include a wider range of opinions
and behavior. That
means we will also have to deal with more people holding
extreme views,
who won't accept the consensus norms.

The main thing to emphasize is personal responsibility.
You hit on that
when you talked about not posting flights that most
reasonable people
would find questionable. I think most people get that
intuitively. I
think almost everyone can grasp this with a little
peer pressure. But
then there are a few people....

Unfortunately, that's just life in the big city. But
we don't have to
let them spoil the fun.

Cliff Hilty wrote:
At 13:24 11 September 2006, Kirk.Stant wrote:
I find it absolutely fascinating that pilots that
will
cheerfully
exceed the posted speed limit (along with just about
everybody else, of
course) during the drive to the gliderport will then
pontificate about
minuscule infringements of vertical and lateral airspace
bounderies.

Uh, guys, these are regulations, not laws of physics!
You are safer at
18,300' looking out the window than at 17,700' staring
at the
altimeter!

Of course, I now fully expect to be viciously flamed,
but what the
hell, it's monday and it's raining....

Kirk
66

I have pondered over this in detail after having read
most of the threads in RAS and here. And I am still
undecided.

When OLC started it was purely fun and easy, now it
has become 'the' entity for showing not only the world
but even more importantly your local flying buddies
your acheivements. For years I flew in relative obscurity
with only a few people knowing what I did, where and
how fast I went. Now with posting to OLC everyone
with
any interest in soaring knows.

The question for me now becomes; Do I have a responsibility
to my flying buddies to protect their right to fly
and not bring unwanted attention of allegded violations
of the FAR's to our club and local flying area. To
that question I have to say yes.

On the other hand it makes me angry that a once fun
and purely innocent OLC (after all we are in it for
the money and chics) has been takin over by the aviation's
version of the 'Moral Majority' and turned into the
McCarthyism of everybody looking suspicously at each
others flights and airing those suspiscions publicly
in the name of protecting their right to fly. It just
smacks of Orwell's 1984 'big brother is watching'.
Read Soarpoint's post on RAS.

Then again we don't have to post our flights that
violate
the FAR's! So now you see why I am so undecided

I'd like to point out one self-contradiction and one outright outrageous
assumption in this post.

"Doug Haluza" wrote in message
oups.com...
The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested).

This contradicts the following:

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair.
[confronting people] is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the
individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

So is OLC a public forum, or a competition? If former, you will do the
public a huge favour if you quit "protecting" forum's integrity. If latter,
then yes, it should be controlled more strictly, but then don't call it
"public" anymore -- only a fraction of pilots are interested in real
contests.

The control that SSA began to exercise over the OLC-US (called SSA-OLC
now -- note how OLC used to come first) pushes it towards the contest side
of it. Why? Or, more relevantly, what for? If you wish to run it this way,
don't be surprised if it becomes as popular as other SSA-sanctioned contests
in this country.

Some of these people may not realize that
they should not emulate your bad behavior because they are dumb like a
post. Others will do it to try to beat you because they are dumb like a
fox.

Aside from these two groups, do you think there are any intelligent people
left around? Because for a second you sounded as if, one way or the other,
everybody is dumb around you -- like a post or like a fox. Maybe you are
spending too much effort protecting us from us.
--
Yuliy

P.S.: "This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make mistakes. We
want to help them, which means control them and their decisions, but in
doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)." -- [apparently by Ernest
Christley]

Yuliy Gerchikov schrieb:


The control that SSA began to exercise over the OLC-US (called SSA-OLC
now -- note how OLC used to come first) pushes it towards the contest side
of it. Why? Or, more relevantly, what for? If you wish to run it this way,
don't be surprised if it becomes as popular as other SSA-sanctioned contests
in this country.

The OLC puts the name of other organizations infront of the name if they
help to organize the competition, and puts just the abbreviated name of
the country after the TLC OLC, when the OLC for said country is managed
by the OLC team only.

Yuliy Gerchikov wrote:
I'd like to point out one self-contradiction and one outright outrageous
assumption in this post.

"Doug Haluza" wrote in message
oups.com...
The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested).

This contradicts the following:

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair.
[confronting people] is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the
individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

So is OLC a public forum, or a competition? If former, you will do the
public a huge favour if you quit "protecting" forum's integrity. If latter,
then yes, it should be controlled more strictly, but then don't call it
"public" anymore -- only a fraction of pilots are interested in real
contests.

I believe the Online Contest is a contest, which is the same as a
competition in my dictionary (if not it was misnamed by the
organizers). The competitors post their flight logs to a public forum
as part of the competition. There is no contradiction.

FWIW, I have no interest in organized contests either (except as a
spectator). My total contest experience conists of one day as seat
ballast in the Sport's Class Nationals last year. I prefer to use my
limited vacation days to fly in the best conditions possible, and I am
fortunate enough to be able to do this.

This is why I am such a big supporter of the OLC format. I was one of
the few participants in the old r.a.s. League organized by Guenther
Eichhorn, which never really took off. It was eventually surpassed by
the OLC, in part because OLC used an automatic scoring algorithm based
on IGC files. This was a major improvement in the decentralized
competition format, and has won worldwide acceptance (except in Britan,
where the BGC league was already well established).

But posting IGC files to the public forum of the OLC requires
responsible behavior with reasonable limits, not unlike those imposed
on otherwise "free speech" in a public forum. Yes, we have had to
confront less than 1% of the SSA-OLC participants to deliver this
message. Fortunately, most of them were reasonable, and did not try to
confuse the issue by playing attack the messenger, at least not for
this long anyway.

Doug Haluza schrieb:


This is why I am such a big supporter of the OLC format. I was one of
the few participants in the old r.a.s. League organized by Guenther
Eichhorn, which never really took off. It was eventually surpassed by
the OLC, in part because OLC used an automatic scoring algorithm based
on IGC files. This was a major improvement in the decentralized
competition format, and has won worldwide acceptance (except in Britan,
where the BGC league was already well established).

There are several countries that have elected to work together with
Segelflugszene Ltd., the company that runs the OLC. These countries are
France, Belgium and UK. Austria work together with Segelflugszene Ltd.
in the past, but has now its own system, as Segelflugszene was not able
to adopt to the needs of Austria.

Before I started the OLC together with Mr. Rose in 1998 I tried to
convince Guenther Eichhorn to change to an automatic scoring of the
r.a.s League, but for some reason we did not do it together.



But posting IGC files to the public forum of the OLC requires
responsible behavior with reasonable limits, not unlike those imposed
on otherwise "free speech" in a public forum. Yes, we have had to
confront less than 1% of the SSA-OLC participants to deliver this
message. Fortunately, most of them were reasonable, and did not try to
confuse the issue by playing attack the messenger, at least not for
this long anyway.


Attacking the messenger would be much more unlikely if the competitors
would be informed at the time of submitting the flight by an automatic
process. The process is implemented with the current software, but
disabled for unknown reasons.

"Doug Haluza" wrote in message
ps.com...
...most of them ... did not ... attack the messenger

I thought so far we were discussing the OLC and not the persons. However,
and *only* if you prefer to view it as more of a personal attack, then I
must say that you are being way too modest. Your role in SSA-OLC is more
than a messenger -- it's rather like an owner: the one who is free to
invent, change, apply, not apply or mis-apply the rules at will.

Enjoy your contest. Hope you win a big prize.