Close on your full auto front. Yes, I have fired an AK but I do not own one. I owned an AR-15 at one point. Both examples were semi-auto.
Yes, the operating principle behind the AK can be used for much heavier ammunition just as the principle behind the Stoner rifles can be used for.308 and the action from a BAR can be used to build a.22. It's all a matter of modification, but with an off-the-shelf AK it'd obviously never happen.
Also, it is possible to get a legal fully automatic AK in the United States, but it's tricky and very expensive. Since the end of prohibition and the Gun Control Act, various types of firearm including full auto have been restricted but not outlawed. To wit, it's a matter of submitting a form to the ATF to register the gun and paying a 200 dollar tax stamp which is applied to the transfer of the full auto firearm in question. Back in the '30's, 200 dollars was a lot of money so this law effectively outlawed full auto firearms (as well as short barreled rifles and shotguns, and so forth) to all but the wealthy elite. Well, inflation caught up with the law and eventually it became feasible for the average joe to buy a machine gun again, so in the 1986 Firearm Owner's Protection Act a little rider was added that outlaws the civilian transfer of any firearm not registered in the way detailed above before May 19, 1986. This froze the entire market for machine guns in the United States - what was here then is all that will ever be here now, forever. Repealing the law is, obviously, unlikely. The net effect of all of this is that all civilian ownable full auto guns are limited in supply, extremely expensive, and require jumping through hoops to get. And there are several examples of AK-47's out there, if you feel like shelling out an upwards of 10,000 dollars for one plus the tax stamp.
Also, if you are a class 2 Special Occupational Taxpayer (essentially, a firearm manufacturer) it is perfectly legal for you to build or 'rig' an AK or any gun into full auto, however the gun will be owned by your corporation or company and not you personally, and it'll go with the business if the business ever folds. And the ATF frowns very strongly on people who try to gain SOT status without running a legitimate business just to play with machine guns in their spare time.
I suggest you brush up on your firearm facts before you try to rent an AK at the range. The AK-47 is 7.62x39. 7.62x54R is a full sized, rimmed rifle round chambered in the likes of heavy war rifles like the Mosin-Nagant, Dragunov, some variants of Mauser rifle, and so forth. Not only is a x54R ludicrously overpowered for the AK's operating mechanism, the case of the x54R is longer than a complete 7.62x39 cartridge. The two calibers aren't even close in terms of powder charge, bullet mass, or ballistics. The only thing 'similar' about them is that both will fit bullets down a 7.62mm bore and both are used by Russians.
It is of note that 7.62x51 NATO will not chamber and fire in an AK (x39) or any x54R chambered firearm - The former because the NATO round is way too long to even remotely safely chamber, and the latter because the NATO round is shorter and not rimmed and will swim around in the x54R chamber, probably rupturing the case on ignition if the firing pin reaches the primer at all.
Long rant made short: Don't try to sound smart on topics about which you know nothing. Check your facts; Hollywood isn't a source.
"Why else do you think the military makes people practice shooting targets over and over again?"
Uh. Because a large part of what the military does involves making you shoot at things? Notice that as part of your training the military does not make you play a bunch of Unreal Tournament. If you were becoming a truck driver they'd make you drive a lot of trucks. If you were becoming a pilot they'd make you fly a lot of planes, &c.
I didn't say it wasn't. I was just pointing out the double standard in a way I figured other people might find as humorous as I did.
(For reference, the PowerPad was probably pretty good exercise in the same way DDR was, except for the long jump event where we'd run really fast, barely lifting our feet, and then step off the pad for a good couple seconds before hopping back on for the 'jump.' Memories.)
When I was a kid, we had the NES PowerPad. It came with this lame-o track and field game that basically involved running in place real fast and jumping up and down on the pad. When our parents told us to get some exercise instead of playing that damned Nintendo, we got out the PowerPad and they wailed and moaned at us that "it's still a video game, it doesn't stimulate everything real exercise would, blah, blah, blah." Basically, "it doesn't count."
So now our lard-ass youth gets DDR machines installed paid for by your tax dollars and because our stupid, fucked up, lazybones, blameless society has slid so far it counts as "exercise" when these kids... Jump up and down and run in place on a pad in time to a video game.
Uh huh. Suuuuure. I want my money back, and my youth while you're at it, god damn it.
When I buy an album or a movie, I am not buying a "license." I am not agreeing to anything. I am not bending to the will of anyone's "license," I am not signing anything, I am not entering a contract, I am not forfeiting anything, waiving anything, and I am not compromising anything. I am buying a copy of some physical medium for my own enjoyment, and at that point I own that copy of that medium. I have already entered into a "license" for this media through a little thing called copyright law. Anything beyond the application of this copyright law, which includes fair use clauses for a very good reason, is bullshit. Pure and simple.
...Is re-evaluate what the true purpose of the operating system is, and stick to it instead of tacking so much nonsense to the abomination that today we call Windows.
Microsoft made a big to-do about "focusing on security" in the development of Windows Vista, but instead spent all this time A) spackling over the screwball security holes that the superfluous bits of the last version of the operating system created, and B) bolting on more superfluous bullshit.
The pattern of flagrant Windows/Microsoft security breaches has traditionally involved the fracal-like fuzz of superfluous features surrounding Windows. It simply tries to be too much. How many times have we heard about some hole in Internet Explorer that lets l33t h4xx0rs walk in and screw with your OS? Animated cursors opening security holes. ET-phone-home Windows Media player opening security holes. IIS subsystems on home user's computers opening security holes... Ad infinitum.
You want a web browser on your PC? Install a web browser. It shouldn't be your OS'es job. You want animated cursors? Install a cursor manager. It shouldn't be the OS'es job. You want media players? Install a media player. It shouldn't be the OS'es job. Are we seeing the fucking pattern here, yet? If Microsoft could focus on the core of the operating system, making it the platform and the framework that the rest of your computing experience happens on instead of trying to make it the damn "multimedia/computing experience" itself I'll wager a significant portion of these stupid, smack-on-the-forehead sort of problems would go away. And if and when they did crop up, users affected could just patch or uninstall the affected browser/media player/cursor manager/whatever instead of having it permanently tied into their OS for the rest of time (heaven forbid, for example, users reinstalling Windows into it's stock, unpatched state).
NPR had an extensive piece on this parasitic fungus a number of weeks ago and its effects on the overall bee population. As I remember, they had a lot of detailed coverage on the scientists who discovered the phenomenon and have been monitoring/tracking it ever since.
I guess the crowd of shrill criers never miss a chance for bullshit sensationalism over thinking things through. Or, you know, looking at the rest of the news.
It's very easy to leap to the Isle of Conclusions, but it's a long swim back...
I know I'm being sarcastic and sophomoric, here, but jesus. Why is it news to anyone, especially scientists, that if you compress a liquid as far as it'll compress it won't compress any more? I mean, this is a scientific "breakthrough" Yogi Berra could have told you.
Digital Camera: Larger image sensor, space and engineering for proper optics, removable storage, zoom lens(es), a dedicated interface, auto/manual focus, et. all.
Phone Camera: Tiny webcamish image sensor, tiny fixed pinhole lens that can't be focused in most cases, hampered by whatever storage is available in your phone since most don't have card slots, and an interface that's meant to be a phone and not a camera. And your phone camera is tied into your phone, which is in turn tied to the service contract from your cell provider. I dunno about you, but my phone won't let me do anything let alone get at the camera with no SIM or an invalid SIM.
The problem here is we're talking phones with lousy excuses for cameras tacked to them. The only way a "cell phone camera" is ever going to outstrip a proper digital camera is if we start developing cameras with lousy excuses for telephones tacked to them.
Yes, via cell phones connected to ground towers. But a fat lot of good that does you over the Pacific, aye? But allowing voice calls (or at least 911 voice calls) might be a step in the right direction.
Then again, if terrorists hijack your plane over the Pacific for a suicide mission you're probably screwed anyway.
This sounds like butter to me, especially since most manufacturers are running away very fast from the PDA market and just building stupid smartphones and crippled pieces of garbage instead of real PDA's. Dell quit making the x50v and x51v, HP/Compaq are producing nothing but crap QVGA "media companions," and nobody else makes a decent PDA that doesn't have a damn cell phone built into it. But first we have to see if this gizmo ever makes it to market.
I wouldn't point all the fingers at MMO's quite so hastily. There's more to consider than just crying shrill "MMO games are evil, regulate, infringe, ban!" and then calling it a day.
(We tried that with 'politically incorrect' looking guns during the Clinton administration, remember? How much did that accomplish?)
The root of the cause is the fact that MMO's are generally pay-to-play games, and the authors want you to keep playing so you keep paying. So they design things so it takes ages to get anywhere, tons of time to level, plenty of need for grinding, and always dangle the carrot of all the cool shiny armor and mounts and kickass swords and dragonslaying and shit way out there towards the tail end of the level cap, so you have to invest a shitload of time (and therefore money) to get to all the "good stuff."
This problem isn't confined strictly to MMO games. Diablo 2, anyone? It's also not relegated strictly to pay-to-play MMO's, either, as most of the knockoffs strive to emulate the big boys; the ones you have to pay for - EverQuest, World of Warcraft, et. all.
Now that "online delivery" is becoming a viable platform for gaming in all sorts of places - On PC, the original Xbox, and all three of the current gen consoles - the concept of hooking players as recurring revenue sources suddenly makes a lot of sense. So we're seeing the model applied in new ways: Episodic gaming, where you get little half-baked nuggets of games for slightly less than you'd pay retail, but to get the whole experience you have to keep buying the next one. Subscription gaming a la Gametap, Xbox Live, and similar where you have to pay or your game library goes poof and disappears. Then users are pushed into playing almost compulsively to get their "money's worth" out of this service.
Did we just not have a whole debacle (thrice!) over the ICANN rejecting the.xxx domain because they're "not in the business of content regulation?" I seem to remember a flurry of articles on Slashdot about this. Isn't allowing only banks and other "official" entities to use the.safe domain put the ICANN in exactly the same "business?" The only difference here is they're replacing porn sites with banks.
Let's think about this. It resulted in no actual, meaningful decrease in energy use. It pissed off absolutely everyone in the country with any kind of electronic device that keeps time. And if you have an 'old' electronic device (Palm 3 among scads of others in my case) there was no patch or update for you anyway. Then factor all the people in who didn't patch because they're Joe User consumer types and don't know how or care. Then factor in all those poor slobs running Win2k server who had to pay however many thousands of dollars for the patch, but couldn't justify the expense.
This is a simple matter of Congress' petty ego, and now it's obvious to the whole word. "Well, we had to begrudgingly admit that we really were wrong, just playing bullshit feel-good politics and not actually doing any real work, but the Federal government is infallible and therefore we're going to stick our thumbs up our asses and pretend that there's no going back. And as usual you slobs will get the shaft, not us. By the way, re-elect all of us in '08."
So buy one used. The retail price drop will almost immediately correlate to a used unit price drop (Gamestop, et. all) just like it always has with Gameboys. I bought my DS new. I bought my PS2 used. Nintendo got the usual cut of my DS, and for my PS2 Sony got the shaft... Which is exactly how I like it.
(To be fair, I've hated Sony ever since their campaign of lying about their NetMD MiniDisc players. But that's just me.)
I'll be much more impressed when I can actually buy a damned copy of Episode 2. I don't give two farts through a tin whistle (or something to that effect) what kind of zooty-ass technology it has embedded in it when I can't play the damn game already. I already don't have a graphics card powerful enough to do HDR and some of this other folderol; I, like most of the gaming populace (I'll wager) would rather be shooting zombies than waiting even longer for my promised "quickly developed" episodic gaming and whacking off over the technical specs in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
Close on your full auto front. Yes, I have fired an AK but I do not own one. I owned an AR-15 at one point. Both examples were semi-auto.
.308 and the action from a BAR can be used to build a .22. It's all a matter of modification, but with an off-the-shelf AK it'd obviously never happen.
Yes, the operating principle behind the AK can be used for much heavier ammunition just as the principle behind the Stoner rifles can be used for
Also, it is possible to get a legal fully automatic AK in the United States, but it's tricky and very expensive. Since the end of prohibition and the Gun Control Act, various types of firearm including full auto have been restricted but not outlawed. To wit, it's a matter of submitting a form to the ATF to register the gun and paying a 200 dollar tax stamp which is applied to the transfer of the full auto firearm in question. Back in the '30's, 200 dollars was a lot of money so this law effectively outlawed full auto firearms (as well as short barreled rifles and shotguns, and so forth) to all but the wealthy elite. Well, inflation caught up with the law and eventually it became feasible for the average joe to buy a machine gun again, so in the 1986 Firearm Owner's Protection Act a little rider was added that outlaws the civilian transfer of any firearm not registered in the way detailed above before May 19, 1986. This froze the entire market for machine guns in the United States - what was here then is all that will ever be here now, forever. Repealing the law is, obviously, unlikely. The net effect of all of this is that all civilian ownable full auto guns are limited in supply, extremely expensive, and require jumping through hoops to get. And there are several examples of AK-47's out there, if you feel like shelling out an upwards of 10,000 dollars for one plus the tax stamp.
Also, if you are a class 2 Special Occupational Taxpayer (essentially, a firearm manufacturer) it is perfectly legal for you to build or 'rig' an AK or any gun into full auto, however the gun will be owned by your corporation or company and not you personally, and it'll go with the business if the business ever folds. And the ATF frowns very strongly on people who try to gain SOT status without running a legitimate business just to play with machine guns in their spare time.
I suggest you brush up on your firearm facts before you try to rent an AK at the range. The AK-47 is 7.62x39. 7.62x54R is a full sized, rimmed rifle round chambered in the likes of heavy war rifles like the Mosin-Nagant, Dragunov, some variants of Mauser rifle, and so forth. Not only is a x54R ludicrously overpowered for the AK's operating mechanism, the case of the x54R is longer than a complete 7.62x39 cartridge. The two calibers aren't even close in terms of powder charge, bullet mass, or ballistics. The only thing 'similar' about them is that both will fit bullets down a 7.62mm bore and both are used by Russians.
It is of note that 7.62x51 NATO will not chamber and fire in an AK (x39) or any x54R chambered firearm - The former because the NATO round is way too long to even remotely safely chamber, and the latter because the NATO round is shorter and not rimmed and will swim around in the x54R chamber, probably rupturing the case on ignition if the firing pin reaches the primer at all.
Long rant made short: Don't try to sound smart on topics about which you know nothing. Check your facts; Hollywood isn't a source.
.22 Internets: Rimfire serious business.
...Entire Florida population last seen flocking for Bittorrent, Limewire, and points north.
Why not have it encoded into a necklace? Let's see them try to censor that.
"Why else do you think the military makes people practice shooting targets over and over again?"
Uh. Because a large part of what the military does involves making you shoot at things? Notice that as part of your training the military does not make you play a bunch of Unreal Tournament. If you were becoming a truck driver they'd make you drive a lot of trucks. If you were becoming a pilot they'd make you fly a lot of planes, &c.
I didn't say it wasn't. I was just pointing out the double standard in a way I figured other people might find as humorous as I did. (For reference, the PowerPad was probably pretty good exercise in the same way DDR was, except for the long jump event where we'd run really fast, barely lifting our feet, and then step off the pad for a good couple seconds before hopping back on for the 'jump.' Memories.)
When I was a kid, we had the NES PowerPad. It came with this lame-o track and field game that basically involved running in place real fast and jumping up and down on the pad. When our parents told us to get some exercise instead of playing that damned Nintendo, we got out the PowerPad and they wailed and moaned at us that "it's still a video game, it doesn't stimulate everything real exercise would, blah, blah, blah." Basically, "it doesn't count."
So now our lard-ass youth gets DDR machines installed paid for by your tax dollars and because our stupid, fucked up, lazybones, blameless society has slid so far it counts as "exercise" when these kids... Jump up and down and run in place on a pad in time to a video game.
Uh huh. Suuuuure. I want my money back, and my youth while you're at it, god damn it.
When I buy an album or a movie, I am not buying a "license." I am not agreeing to anything. I am not bending to the will of anyone's "license," I am not signing anything, I am not entering a contract, I am not forfeiting anything, waiving anything, and I am not compromising anything. I am buying a copy of some physical medium for my own enjoyment, and at that point I own that copy of that medium. I have already entered into a "license" for this media through a little thing called copyright law. Anything beyond the application of this copyright law, which includes fair use clauses for a very good reason, is bullshit. Pure and simple.
...Is re-evaluate what the true purpose of the operating system is, and stick to it instead of tacking so much nonsense to the abomination that today we call Windows.
Microsoft made a big to-do about "focusing on security" in the development of Windows Vista, but instead spent all this time A) spackling over the screwball security holes that the superfluous bits of the last version of the operating system created, and B) bolting on more superfluous bullshit.
The pattern of flagrant Windows/Microsoft security breaches has traditionally involved the fracal-like fuzz of superfluous features surrounding Windows. It simply tries to be too much. How many times have we heard about some hole in Internet Explorer that lets l33t h4xx0rs walk in and screw with your OS? Animated cursors opening security holes. ET-phone-home Windows Media player opening security holes. IIS subsystems on home user's computers opening security holes... Ad infinitum.
You want a web browser on your PC? Install a web browser. It shouldn't be your OS'es job. You want animated cursors? Install a cursor manager. It shouldn't be the OS'es job. You want media players? Install a media player. It shouldn't be the OS'es job. Are we seeing the fucking pattern here, yet? If Microsoft could focus on the core of the operating system, making it the platform and the framework that the rest of your computing experience happens on instead of trying to make it the damn "multimedia/computing experience" itself I'll wager a significant portion of these stupid, smack-on-the-forehead sort of problems would go away. And if and when they did crop up, users affected could just patch or uninstall the affected browser/media player/cursor manager/whatever instead of having it permanently tied into their OS for the rest of time (heaven forbid, for example, users reinstalling Windows into it's stock, unpatched state).
NPR had an extensive piece on this parasitic fungus a number of weeks ago and its effects on the overall bee population. As I remember, they had a lot of detailed coverage on the scientists who discovered the phenomenon and have been monitoring/tracking it ever since.
I guess the crowd of shrill criers never miss a chance for bullshit sensationalism over thinking things through. Or, you know, looking at the rest of the news.
It's very easy to leap to the Isle of Conclusions, but it's a long swim back...
I know I'm being sarcastic and sophomoric, here, but jesus. Why is it news to anyone, especially scientists, that if you compress a liquid as far as it'll compress it won't compress any more? I mean, this is a scientific "breakthrough" Yogi Berra could have told you.
Digital Camera: Larger image sensor, space and engineering for proper optics, removable storage, zoom lens(es), a dedicated interface, auto/manual focus, et. all.
Phone Camera: Tiny webcamish image sensor, tiny fixed pinhole lens that can't be focused in most cases, hampered by whatever storage is available in your phone since most don't have card slots, and an interface that's meant to be a phone and not a camera. And your phone camera is tied into your phone, which is in turn tied to the service contract from your cell provider. I dunno about you, but my phone won't let me do anything let alone get at the camera with no SIM or an invalid SIM.
The problem here is we're talking phones with lousy excuses for cameras tacked to them. The only way a "cell phone camera" is ever going to outstrip a proper digital camera is if we start developing cameras with lousy excuses for telephones tacked to them.
Yes, via cell phones connected to ground towers. But a fat lot of good that does you over the Pacific, aye? But allowing voice calls (or at least 911 voice calls) might be a step in the right direction.
Then again, if terrorists hijack your plane over the Pacific for a suicide mission you're probably screwed anyway.
So nobody can call authorities during a 9/11 style emergency. They just have to text it out.
hlp flt 423 they r in r plane kling r dudes
What's wrong with that, eh?
So sayeth someone who never used an early Pentium processor.
This sounds like butter to me, especially since most manufacturers are running away very fast from the PDA market and just building stupid smartphones and crippled pieces of garbage instead of real PDA's. Dell quit making the x50v and x51v, HP/Compaq are producing nothing but crap QVGA "media companions," and nobody else makes a decent PDA that doesn't have a damn cell phone built into it. But first we have to see if this gizmo ever makes it to market.
I wouldn't point all the fingers at MMO's quite so hastily. There's more to consider than just crying shrill "MMO games are evil, regulate, infringe, ban!" and then calling it a day.
(We tried that with 'politically incorrect' looking guns during the Clinton administration, remember? How much did that accomplish?)
The root of the cause is the fact that MMO's are generally pay-to-play games, and the authors want you to keep playing so you keep paying. So they design things so it takes ages to get anywhere, tons of time to level, plenty of need for grinding, and always dangle the carrot of all the cool shiny armor and mounts and kickass swords and dragonslaying and shit way out there towards the tail end of the level cap, so you have to invest a shitload of time (and therefore money) to get to all the "good stuff."
This problem isn't confined strictly to MMO games. Diablo 2, anyone? It's also not relegated strictly to pay-to-play MMO's, either, as most of the knockoffs strive to emulate the big boys; the ones you have to pay for - EverQuest, World of Warcraft, et. all.
Now that "online delivery" is becoming a viable platform for gaming in all sorts of places - On PC, the original Xbox, and all three of the current gen consoles - the concept of hooking players as recurring revenue sources suddenly makes a lot of sense. So we're seeing the model applied in new ways: Episodic gaming, where you get little half-baked nuggets of games for slightly less than you'd pay retail, but to get the whole experience you have to keep buying the next one. Subscription gaming a la Gametap, Xbox Live, and similar where you have to pay or your game library goes poof and disappears. Then users are pushed into playing almost compulsively to get their "money's worth" out of this service.
Did we just not have a whole debacle (thrice!) over the ICANN rejecting the .xxx domain because they're "not in the business of content regulation?" I seem to remember a flurry of articles on Slashdot about this. Isn't allowing only banks and other "official" entities to use the .safe domain put the ICANN in exactly the same "business?" The only difference here is they're replacing porn sites with banks.
Let's think about this. It resulted in no actual, meaningful decrease in energy use. It pissed off absolutely everyone in the country with any kind of electronic device that keeps time. And if you have an 'old' electronic device (Palm 3 among scads of others in my case) there was no patch or update for you anyway. Then factor all the people in who didn't patch because they're Joe User consumer types and don't know how or care. Then factor in all those poor slobs running Win2k server who had to pay however many thousands of dollars for the patch, but couldn't justify the expense.
This is a simple matter of Congress' petty ego, and now it's obvious to the whole word. "Well, we had to begrudgingly admit that we really were wrong, just playing bullshit feel-good politics and not actually doing any real work, but the Federal government is infallible and therefore we're going to stick our thumbs up our asses and pretend that there's no going back. And as usual you slobs will get the shaft, not us. By the way, re-elect all of us in '08."
Feh.
So buy one used. The retail price drop will almost immediately correlate to a used unit price drop (Gamestop, et. all) just like it always has with Gameboys. I bought my DS new. I bought my PS2 used. Nintendo got the usual cut of my DS, and for my PS2 Sony got the shaft... Which is exactly how I like it. (To be fair, I've hated Sony ever since their campaign of lying about their NetMD MiniDisc players. But that's just me.)
I'll be much more impressed when I can actually buy a damned copy of Episode 2. I don't give two farts through a tin whistle (or something to that effect) what kind of zooty-ass technology it has embedded in it when I can't play the damn game already. I already don't have a graphics card powerful enough to do HDR and some of this other folderol; I, like most of the gaming populace (I'll wager) would rather be shooting zombies than waiting even longer for my promised "quickly developed" episodic gaming and whacking off over the technical specs in the meantime.
Q: "How much authority does a school have to monitor, regulate and punish activities occurring inside a student's home?"
A: ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NONE!
Next question.
...And not "try and."