Sounds like you went about that the hard way and probably the more expensive way. Also I doubt the mechanic put in metric bolts out of spite, my experience is vehicles of that vintage had a good mix of metric and standard nuts and bolts. Also it could be worse I have 3 sets of wrenches and sockets, standard, metric and whitworth (why yes I have slaughtered a chicken while troubleshooting vehicle electrical problems why do you ask?).
I had to as I was poor and couldn't afford to replace things. The 486 worked well enough for what I was doing with it at the time but it did get flaky. I am one of those really odd people who will use something until it is worn out and the repair costs exceed what it would cost to replace it. I am really not dedicated to the huge jumps it is just I grew up poor and am too cheap to replace a functional device until it becomes non functional.
Those weapons are exceedingly rare in private hands and mostly owned because they can be. Apart from a gun shop I went to when I bought my Finnish M39 have never seen a real machine gun in real life. Also I don't know what weapons you are referring to as begin low accuracy, the M4 carbine is a very accurate weapon, the M2 browning machine gun is phenomenally accurate, the M249 from my understanding is pretty accurate since the military would actually prefer that you hit your damn target. The AK has a reputation of not being accurate but that is relative, it is actually pretty good even if it does have a larger spread than the M4. They are both good out to 400 meters against a man sized target.
You will also have to excuse me as when most people complain about weapons of war being in civilian hands they are not discussing M4 carbines or full auto AKs but instead bitching about how they feel people shouldn't own an SKS, semi auto civilian AK, or AR-15. Similar discussion have been had in the past, after WWI was about if people needed magazine fed weapons (M1903 Springfield), after WWII was if people should have semi auto ones (M1 carbine, M1 Garand), all of which were actual weapons of war in their day.
That fortunately is not the case with most counterfeit bills. Most are just ones people plunked down on their scanner at home and printed on regular 20lb 90 brightness paper with their inkjet printer. They often have a wallet full of them and the usual claim is that they got them from the casino. Or at least this was the case when I worked at a gas station, where you could tell by feel that they were fake and see the problems out of the corner of your eye. I have often wanted to see if I could create a passable counterfeit bill as I think I have the knowledge on how to do it correctly so it could look real, with the proper texture, paper weight, and coloring. I would have to do it with $1 bills as they are the least secure but it really isn't worth it because it would take a lot of effort, and carries a fairly high risk.
You can already basically get a flame thrower shipped to you house for very little, and there is nothing stopping you from getting it. As far as poison gas goes it has been know for a long time that mixing bleach and ammonia is a bad idea.
You sound similar to a friend of mine. He won't sell to someone unless they have a CCW, go through a FFL holder, or he personally knows them. The first firearm I ever purchased I bought from him but we had been friends for over 10 years at the time so it wasn't like he was selling it to some random person. I still have that SKS and it makes for a fun story when you tell people that you bought it from a cop.
Not really. I have seen plenty of vehicles that people own with nothing more than a bill of sale that are not registered with the state. These vehicles are never driven on roads and are only operated on private land. Some of these vehicles were even built by the owners from various parts they purchased. I happen to own one such vehicle (it is currently in pieces in my garage), and my father owns a couple of them and is trying to sell one. It only needs to be registered and licensed to operate on the public roadways, not on a race track.
Well the 5.56x45 round, military version of.223, used in the M4 carbine and AR-15 is an effective varmint round and can be used for hunting big game in Minnesota. While people do use it for deer hunting to me it seems on the very low end of acceptable because it doesn't have the mass of larger rounds nor the energy and I personally wouldn't use it. The 7.62x39 round is a very effective round for deer hunting even though it is the SKS and AK ammunition and while being on the low end has more energy and mass in the bullet and in almost every way is comparable to the old.30-30 round that was always considered an entry level deer rifle and is effective on game up to a black bear. I have taken deer with a SKS and it isn't the spray and pray that is portrayed in the media I have even taken 2 deer one right after the other because I was hunting with an evil semi-automatic "assault weapon". It only took one shot each, they ran but only a few 10s of meters, and yes I did have tags for them, but it was a bitch to drag them both out of the woods at the same time so that the critters wouldn't get them. Also keep in mind that there aren't people going out there with full auto weapons and just pulling the trigger to mow down deer which is something that an assault rifle could do, these are not assault rifles as they are not full auto or don't have burst mode but semi-automatic weapons that are chambered in an intermediate power round, but the media calls them "assault weapons" which as far as I can tell means it is black and scary looking. How would you feel about someone hunting with an M1 Garand, or an M1 carbine as functionally they are the same as an AR-15, SKS, or semi auto AK (what most people have), just not black?
I think you may be a bit wrong with your "many gun owners are against at least making sure that new gun owners are made to learn to shoot before being allowed to own guns" statement. I have found it to be the case with the people who I know to be the exact opposite. The people I hunt with and myself really wish more people had to have at least the most basic training in how to handle a firearm. Of all of the firearm training that I have done even something as simple and trivial as the basic firearm safety course offered by the MN DNR would be a vast improvement over nothing. When it comes to what I would actually want for training I always go to the most extensive training I had which was the BSA shotgun and rifle merit badges. Granted these aren't the be all end all of training but are very good starter courses for shooting.
Klobuchar is typically one to not take a controversial stand on anything. In my book she is far worse than Franken as he at least seems a bit more willing to stand up for things he believes in and will tell you way he believes in them. For example the only response I ever got from Klobuchar on an issue was on the Syria issue where Russia stepped in to take Assad's chemical weapons. The response I got could be summarized as it was wonderful that she didn't have to decide on this highly controversial issue but wanted to thank me for my support.
Everyone who gripes about H-1B visas should look to Klobuchar as she has been the one pushing the auto increment higher limits of late. In her first term her 2 big things were getting lead out of children's toys but the legislation sucked so much it banned children's ATVs because of the exposed lead terminals on the battery. This was something that a bunch of the manufactures in Minnesota told her but she didn't listen. After a couple f years that devastated that market an exception had to be put into the law for this. Then there was the tragic incident involving a pool drain in Minnesota that Klobuchar felt required national pool drain legislation. As far as senators voting with the president you will likely find that a majority of senators voted for legislation that that the president signed, this is even more the case if the president and congress critter are of the same party.
Well I see that my freedom hating senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken voted for this bill. In looking at the rest of the votes from representatives from my state it would seem that the 2 member of the house from MN that are painted as being the most extreme on either side are the only ones who didn't vote for it. If both Keith Ellison and Tom Emmer are against it, this bill must really stink.
I tend to make major jumps in technology, my current machine is robust enough that if I want I can crank up the clock speed and ram speed a fair amount an not have to worry for some incremental gains. I buy a machine that meets my needs and has room to continue to meet my needs, use it until it becomes painfully slow or starts having hardware problems, and then replace to get the close to 10x performance improvement across the board. Hence the jump from the Athalon 64x2 to the i7. As far a GPU acceleration I don't know if Esri ArcGIS makes use of it because there is no way I could afford that but I probably should check if updated versions of the open source GIS tools can make use of it as a lot of the data is just single precision floats or ints.
The next machine I get will probably have between 256GB and 512GB ram given how things have typically progressed and I will probably pay $1200 for it as that seems to be the price point I have been stuck at for a while. The progression of my computers has been 486dx4 75 with 36MB ram -> k6 2 500 with 512MB ram -> Athalon 64x2 with 4GB ram -> i7 3770k with 32GB ram so it really has been massive jumps in performance at every stage. I don't really chase technology
By extended periods I meant 10-15 minutes, and that is with some very large data sets that will consume 24GB of the 32GB of physical RAM in the machine. I can wait that long without issue as this replaced an Athalon 64x2 with 4GB ram and I tried running some of those tasks and they would take upwards of 5 days with the CPU pegged and the disk spinning like mad paging data in and out.
At the time when I looked at a machine for what I am doing the Intel option was the cheaper one and I could have saved $20 by going with a mid range i5 which I was planning on doing but the unlocked higher end i7 was only $20 more that what I was planning on getting so it was a why not purchase.
As far as tools go, if you want to start out and play around first without getting buried under your own ignorance (I speak from experience here) try something like uDig GIS first. It isn't the most powerful, fastest, or most feature complete tool but it is easy to use and gives you good point to develop enough knowledge to know what to ask and look for. There are a number of reasonable tutorials for it as well. If you already have some GIS background just jump in and go whole hog with QGis or Grass GIS. These are compleatly different monsters and between the 2 of them you get some real power. I have friends who do GIS stuff professionally for some of the counties in MN and they use these tools. If you are on windows there is the OSGeo4Win project that will give you a bunch of stuff that just works that includes these tools as well as a bunch of other ones. I also do make use of tools like GPSBable and the MN DNR's Garmin Application for converting formats as well as GPSBable for pulling data off of some of my GPS units. Add in a smattering of RTKlib for some of my more recent dabbling with high accuracy trail mapping and some custom built GPS devices. If you need some data to play with the MN DNR has their Data Deli where you can get all sorts of stuff.
My experience would indicate this as I have an i7 3770k (I think that is what is is) and I can load all 8 virtual cores at 100% for extended periods. The biggest bottleneck I had previously was memory but having 32GB has solved that for now. I could have gotten a multi-socket Xeon but for amateur work that gets into the silly price range. As far as GPU acceleration I don't know if Esri supports it as I stick with open source tools as I can't afford the phenomenal cost and the open source tools have always gotten me what I needed, even if they don't support GPU acceleration. This may have changed as I am probably a couple of version back now.
The TSA doesn't do any real screening of people like the Israelis do (I have dealt with them and they are very professional and have their shit together). The TSA basically pick people at random give them a rub and tug and send them on their way. The ones manning the x-ray machine don't seem to know what they are looking at and can't identify a gun, knife, or bullets when someone sends a bag through, and even if someone has a large knife and walks through the old style metal detector it doesn't set it off. Elsewhere in this thread I listed some of the items I have accidentally brought through ever since they implemented their enhanced security measures, none of them were caught, no effort was made to try to sneak them past, they were as obvious as it could have been but they were missed every time. Yet if I bring my camera it will take me about 20 extra minutes to get through security.
Also if you ask the Israeli security people they will joke and tell you that they reverse profile, if you don't fit the profile then they deal with you.
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Sounds like you went about that the hard way and probably the more expensive way. Also I doubt the mechanic put in metric bolts out of spite, my experience is vehicles of that vintage had a good mix of metric and standard nuts and bolts. Also it could be worse I have 3 sets of wrenches and sockets, standard, metric and whitworth (why yes I have slaughtered a chicken while troubleshooting vehicle electrical problems why do you ask?).
I've found the Scotts to be fairly intelligible the Welsh on the other hand...
I had to as I was poor and couldn't afford to replace things. The 486 worked well enough for what I was doing with it at the time but it did get flaky. I am one of those really odd people who will use something until it is worn out and the repair costs exceed what it would cost to replace it. I am really not dedicated to the huge jumps it is just I grew up poor and am too cheap to replace a functional device until it becomes non functional.
Those weapons are exceedingly rare in private hands and mostly owned because they can be. Apart from a gun shop I went to when I bought my Finnish M39 have never seen a real machine gun in real life. Also I don't know what weapons you are referring to as begin low accuracy, the M4 carbine is a very accurate weapon, the M2 browning machine gun is phenomenally accurate, the M249 from my understanding is pretty accurate since the military would actually prefer that you hit your damn target. The AK has a reputation of not being accurate but that is relative, it is actually pretty good even if it does have a larger spread than the M4. They are both good out to 400 meters against a man sized target.
You will also have to excuse me as when most people complain about weapons of war being in civilian hands they are not discussing M4 carbines or full auto AKs but instead bitching about how they feel people shouldn't own an SKS, semi auto civilian AK, or AR-15. Similar discussion have been had in the past, after WWI was about if people needed magazine fed weapons (M1903 Springfield), after WWII was if people should have semi auto ones (M1 carbine, M1 Garand), all of which were actual weapons of war in their day.
I was going for a funny, and yes I have been to Kansas and have family who live there, but when most people hear Kansas they think the western 3/4th.
Or you live in a neighborhood that around where I live was built before about 1990.
Sounds like you have a few tens of dollars burning a hole in your pocket.
That fortunately is not the case with most counterfeit bills. Most are just ones people plunked down on their scanner at home and printed on regular 20lb 90 brightness paper with their inkjet printer. They often have a wallet full of them and the usual claim is that they got them from the casino. Or at least this was the case when I worked at a gas station, where you could tell by feel that they were fake and see the problems out of the corner of your eye. I have often wanted to see if I could create a passable counterfeit bill as I think I have the knowledge on how to do it correctly so it could look real, with the proper texture, paper weight, and coloring. I would have to do it with $1 bills as they are the least secure but it really isn't worth it because it would take a lot of effort, and carries a fairly high risk.
You can already basically get a flame thrower shipped to you house for very little, and there is nothing stopping you from getting it. As far as poison gas goes it has been know for a long time that mixing bleach and ammonia is a bad idea.
You sound similar to a friend of mine. He won't sell to someone unless they have a CCW, go through a FFL holder, or he personally knows them. The first firearm I ever purchased I bought from him but we had been friends for over 10 years at the time so it wasn't like he was selling it to some random person. I still have that SKS and it makes for a fun story when you tell people that you bought it from a cop.
Add even more letters to their TLA to justify its existence?
I thought we already did that and now it is the BATFE with explosives being the recent addition.
Not really. I have seen plenty of vehicles that people own with nothing more than a bill of sale that are not registered with the state. These vehicles are never driven on roads and are only operated on private land. Some of these vehicles were even built by the owners from various parts they purchased. I happen to own one such vehicle (it is currently in pieces in my garage), and my father owns a couple of them and is trying to sell one. It only needs to be registered and licensed to operate on the public roadways, not on a race track.
Well the 5.56x45 round, military version of .223, used in the M4 carbine and AR-15 is an effective varmint round and can be used for hunting big game in Minnesota. While people do use it for deer hunting to me it seems on the very low end of acceptable because it doesn't have the mass of larger rounds nor the energy and I personally wouldn't use it. The 7.62x39 round is a very effective round for deer hunting even though it is the SKS and AK ammunition and while being on the low end has more energy and mass in the bullet and in almost every way is comparable to the old .30-30 round that was always considered an entry level deer rifle and is effective on game up to a black bear. I have taken deer with a SKS and it isn't the spray and pray that is portrayed in the media I have even taken 2 deer one right after the other because I was hunting with an evil semi-automatic "assault weapon". It only took one shot each, they ran but only a few 10s of meters, and yes I did have tags for them, but it was a bitch to drag them both out of the woods at the same time so that the critters wouldn't get them. Also keep in mind that there aren't people going out there with full auto weapons and just pulling the trigger to mow down deer which is something that an assault rifle could do, these are not assault rifles as they are not full auto or don't have burst mode but semi-automatic weapons that are chambered in an intermediate power round, but the media calls them "assault weapons" which as far as I can tell means it is black and scary looking. How would you feel about someone hunting with an M1 Garand, or an M1 carbine as functionally they are the same as an AR-15, SKS, or semi auto AK (what most people have), just not black?
I think you may be a bit wrong with your "many gun owners are against at least making sure that new gun owners are made to learn to shoot before being allowed to own guns" statement. I have found it to be the case with the people who I know to be the exact opposite. The people I hunt with and myself really wish more people had to have at least the most basic training in how to handle a firearm. Of all of the firearm training that I have done even something as simple and trivial as the basic firearm safety course offered by the MN DNR would be a vast improvement over nothing. When it comes to what I would actually want for training I always go to the most extensive training I had which was the BSA shotgun and rifle merit badges. Granted these aren't the be all end all of training but are very good starter courses for shooting.
It's kansas... ...it is at the top of a hill
Now I know you are lying.
There are some of us who choose not to live under failed tin pot dictators.
Klobuchar is typically one to not take a controversial stand on anything. In my book she is far worse than Franken as he at least seems a bit more willing to stand up for things he believes in and will tell you way he believes in them. For example the only response I ever got from Klobuchar on an issue was on the Syria issue where Russia stepped in to take Assad's chemical weapons. The response I got could be summarized as it was wonderful that she didn't have to decide on this highly controversial issue but wanted to thank me for my support.
Everyone who gripes about H-1B visas should look to Klobuchar as she has been the one pushing the auto increment higher limits of late. In her first term her 2 big things were getting lead out of children's toys but the legislation sucked so much it banned children's ATVs because of the exposed lead terminals on the battery. This was something that a bunch of the manufactures in Minnesota told her but she didn't listen. After a couple f years that devastated that market an exception had to be put into the law for this. Then there was the tragic incident involving a pool drain in Minnesota that Klobuchar felt required national pool drain legislation. As far as senators voting with the president you will likely find that a majority of senators voted for legislation that that the president signed, this is even more the case if the president and congress critter are of the same party.
Why not? Those old diesel ones will basically run forever, or until the parts holding the engine and drive train together rust away.
Well I see that my freedom hating senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken voted for this bill. In looking at the rest of the votes from representatives from my state it would seem that the 2 member of the house from MN that are painted as being the most extreme on either side are the only ones who didn't vote for it. If both Keith Ellison and Tom Emmer are against it, this bill must really stink.
I tend to make major jumps in technology, my current machine is robust enough that if I want I can crank up the clock speed and ram speed a fair amount an not have to worry for some incremental gains. I buy a machine that meets my needs and has room to continue to meet my needs, use it until it becomes painfully slow or starts having hardware problems, and then replace to get the close to 10x performance improvement across the board. Hence the jump from the Athalon 64x2 to the i7. As far a GPU acceleration I don't know if Esri ArcGIS makes use of it because there is no way I could afford that but I probably should check if updated versions of the open source GIS tools can make use of it as a lot of the data is just single precision floats or ints.
The next machine I get will probably have between 256GB and 512GB ram given how things have typically progressed and I will probably pay $1200 for it as that seems to be the price point I have been stuck at for a while. The progression of my computers has been 486dx4 75 with 36MB ram -> k6 2 500 with 512MB ram -> Athalon 64x2 with 4GB ram -> i7 3770k with 32GB ram so it really has been massive jumps in performance at every stage. I don't really chase technology
By extended periods I meant 10-15 minutes, and that is with some very large data sets that will consume 24GB of the 32GB of physical RAM in the machine. I can wait that long without issue as this replaced an Athalon 64x2 with 4GB ram and I tried running some of those tasks and they would take upwards of 5 days with the CPU pegged and the disk spinning like mad paging data in and out.
At the time when I looked at a machine for what I am doing the Intel option was the cheaper one and I could have saved $20 by going with a mid range i5 which I was planning on doing but the unlocked higher end i7 was only $20 more that what I was planning on getting so it was a why not purchase.
As far as tools go, if you want to start out and play around first without getting buried under your own ignorance (I speak from experience here) try something like uDig GIS first. It isn't the most powerful, fastest, or most feature complete tool but it is easy to use and gives you good point to develop enough knowledge to know what to ask and look for. There are a number of reasonable tutorials for it as well. If you already have some GIS background just jump in and go whole hog with QGis or Grass GIS. These are compleatly different monsters and between the 2 of them you get some real power. I have friends who do GIS stuff professionally for some of the counties in MN and they use these tools. If you are on windows there is the OSGeo4Win project that will give you a bunch of stuff that just works that includes these tools as well as a bunch of other ones. I also do make use of tools like GPSBable and the MN DNR's Garmin Application for converting formats as well as GPSBable for pulling data off of some of my GPS units. Add in a smattering of RTKlib for some of my more recent dabbling with high accuracy trail mapping and some custom built GPS devices. If you need some data to play with the MN DNR has their Data Deli where you can get all sorts of stuff.
Seems like a great hack to me.
My experience would indicate this as I have an i7 3770k (I think that is what is is) and I can load all 8 virtual cores at 100% for extended periods. The biggest bottleneck I had previously was memory but having 32GB has solved that for now. I could have gotten a multi-socket Xeon but for amateur work that gets into the silly price range. As far as GPU acceleration I don't know if Esri supports it as I stick with open source tools as I can't afford the phenomenal cost and the open source tools have always gotten me what I needed, even if they don't support GPU acceleration. This may have changed as I am probably a couple of version back now.
The TSA doesn't do any real screening of people like the Israelis do (I have dealt with them and they are very professional and have their shit together). The TSA basically pick people at random give them a rub and tug and send them on their way. The ones manning the x-ray machine don't seem to know what they are looking at and can't identify a gun, knife, or bullets when someone sends a bag through, and even if someone has a large knife and walks through the old style metal detector it doesn't set it off. Elsewhere in this thread I listed some of the items I have accidentally brought through ever since they implemented their enhanced security measures, none of them were caught, no effort was made to try to sneak them past, they were as obvious as it could have been but they were missed every time. Yet if I bring my camera it will take me about 20 extra minutes to get through security.
Also if you ask the Israeli security people they will joke and tell you that they reverse profile, if you don't fit the profile then they deal with you.