Fun fact: many, (most?) ceramic knife manufacturers install enough magnetic material into their knives to set off metal detectors... That certainly applies to the better mass produced blades, but must admit that I have no idea about the recent crop of el-cheapo Chinese knives.
Still... I'd almost feel bad for the nutzo who successfully brought on and tried to use one of those on board an airliner. He might get one or two people, but he's in for some pain unless the plane is full of sheeple.
I Dunno. I think something along the lines of "Orbital laser probes plants for peckers" would have been more technically descriptive, more provocative and therefore more hilarious. C'mon editors, how can you possibly miss an opportunity like this?
Hell, I know that some pilots preformed a successful landing and take-off off with a Marine Corps C-130 from the deck of a carrier. Those things weigh 76,000 lbs empty! No way that's going to work with a ramp. It's conceivable that a full-up KC-130 could be serviceable from a carrier with JATO and catapult assist. Not that it's likely this will ever be common practice, but it could be handy.
Many police officers have a trying, stressful job, they get to deal with assholes and crazies and people who are generally hostile to their presence, day in and day out. Sure enough. But, I can't help to think that some of their actions, as a whole profession, might not be responsible for some of this hostility.
Sure, you have the semi-rare high profile police brutality cases where several cops pound the shit out of some helpless person for no apparent reason. Sometimes they beg for the abuse to stop, sometimes they're already unconscious, so they can't. You have the likewise rare cases where cops shoot people for no apparent justified reason. Sometimes these things are swept aside behind the closed doors of an internal affairs commission, seemingly in the face of all logic known to mankind. But, I think it goes much deeper than that.
I think most people just don't respect the police anymore, because in our mass subconscious, the police themselves have become undeserving of respect. I my self have had a negative encounter, consisting of verbal abuse and unwarranted physical contact/shoving precipitated by a policeman--a true example of the little-man's complex by the way, only this stature-deprived sociopath had a badge, and authoritah to hide behind.
He was fully aware that if he was another person in another place and time acting in this way, he would have been stomped into the pavement. To this day, I'm not sure what caused it, other than he just wanted to fuck around with someone. I can't even begin to imagine what minorities go through, especially in regard to illegal searches.
It's these little misconducts, these little abuses which are turning people against the police. Good folks just can't know whether a cop is be on their side, or whether he's going to help ruin their day. Here's another thing: we constantly hear about police having this dangerous job, and how we should kiss their asses because they put their lives on the line; and sure, a hundred and some change will die on the job every year, nationwide. But when you consider just how many police officers we have, the numbers tell a different story:
Occupation: Annual deaths per 100,000 workers
Commercial Fishing: 129 Timber Industry: 116 Active Military: 86 Structural Iron and Steel: 76 Aircraft Pilots: 72 Farmer/Rancher: 40 Sanitation/Garbage: 37 Roofers: 34 Power Line Installer: 30 Oil/Gas Crew: 24 Merchant Mariner: 23 Truck Drivers/Movers: 22 Taxi Driver/Chauffer: 21 Construction Equipment Operator: 16 Police Officer: 16 Cement Maker: 13 Miller: 12 Security Guard: 8 Fireman: 7 Slaughterhouse: 2
See, that's the idiocy of the system. The Expedited Funds Act requires for deposits over $5,000 availability of $5000 2nd Business Day Following Deposit, Remainder 7th Business Day, and payments between financial institutions get preferential treatment above and beyond. You could deposit some insane check, and have the funds available on the 8th business day.
You would think with an account who had no history of moving such large sums of money, that someone from the bank would have called the other bank to verify--but checks like these to accounts like these are routinely delivered by third party underwriters.
The bottom line: the financial system needs a gigantic enema, and needs to be rebuilt anew, with modern behavior in mind, from the ground up. If large sum paper checks, cashiers checks or money orders exist at all, they should be effectively treated as an instant transfer of funds when they hit a depositing bank, and they should be cryptographically signed by the issuing party, along with a routing numbers and verification of the amount issued, encoded into something like a data matrix or aztec code.
The difference is, if you go mucking with the ECU, you don't expect Ford or anyone else to honor any sort of warranty or provide service to your additions--especially for engine related parts (you might expect them to honor warranties to other parts, if you haven't messed with them) Can you do it? Hell yes. There tons of ECU programs and complete replacements which are useful if you want to add superchargers or turbos or whatever your heart desires.
Similarly, you wouldn't expect MS to support modded xboxes or or any un-certified software, but if you use the same analogy, you wouldn't expect them to prohibit doing these things, either. So, someone comes up with a porno title. Why can't you run it? Because they prohibit the running of un-certified software, cryptographically, or otherwise! To go one step further, they also use the government to arrest people who mod xboxes because that also allows the use of illegitimately copied software. Make sense?
One reason this scam works is a federal law (Expedited Funds Availability Act) which forces banks to make some amount or all of the funds available the first day, and all within two business days--as long the deposit is not over $5k--which makes it follow different rules. The funds magically appear in your bank account, ready for you to spend--giving you the false impression that the check actually cleared. You see, even in this electronic age of instantaneous information, checks clear at a snail's pace. Even electronic checks take 5-10 days to truly clear the clearing house, regular checks can take remarkably longer.
So, you write a check which comes from a legitimate account, and it has money, it clears, the money is moved around. The clearing house rejects the check you deposited, your bank takes the money back out of your account, and you're either hurting or worse yet, you've gone into overdraft mode, so the bank can kick you while you're down. The whole thing is, the financial system still works like it did back when horses and carriages roamed streets. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I want to find the stupid bastard who first thought shaky camera and short-take editing are valid cinematographic techniques to purposefully apply to an entire film/tv show/whatever... I'd kick him in the nuts so hard that his testes would make like pinballs whilst traveling up his digestive tract (complete with sound effects) before exiting through his ears at some incredible velocity.
Yeah...the very thought makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy on the inside.
It's obvious that what he considers damaged goods are those who share the all-too-common traits of Womanii Needicusmoniescus, also known as Ninjacus Bitchicus, i.e. selfishness, neediness, superficiality, a tendency to manipulate, etc. Someone, strike that, anyone from Jersey Shore could be the ultimate example of this subspecies. This disease comes in various strengths, and it's rare to find someone naturally immune to it. Maybe he figures political turmoil and other adversities act as an inoculation?
The very fact that you consider a woman from a country undergoing/emergent from political turmoil "damaged goods"--well, it really says more about you and your world view than it does about any of Assanges' proclivities. When I see that profile, I see someone who knows what he likes, and is looking for a partner, someone with whom he can share mutual respect, someone with whom he can see himself growing old.
You used the word "partner"...that word doesn't often have have the same meaning to a western woman that it does to a woman from an eastern European culture. The Russian equivalent to partner truly has the connotation of partner, someone with equal stake in a relationship. In the US, it has degenerated to "spouse" and even now it's hanging on the precipice to becoming little more than "roommate". No, strike that as well... This quality is in fact not limited women at all.
Really, how can you care so strongly about what people find attractive in their mates? To me, this is a much more interesting neurosis. If someone really digs transgendered Inuit-Filipinos, fictional though they (probably) are...How can that possibly be such a big deal to you?
IIRC (and it's been many years ago now) it just says something to the effect of "unable to find matches at this time, yadda yadda"... They are/were nice enough to do this before you subscribe to the service--which is something I haven't done.
Also, I'm relatively sure that I did not change the question set. A positive thing is they let you see pictures and so fourth, along with some of their matchs' traits during the free-eval period, they just don't let you communicate.
Did you stop to think that perhaps he's not specifically looking for someone who has seen adversity, but he is instead looking for the qualities that adversity instills into a person? I for one, think that is rather insightful.
When I had an eharmony profile, it at first rejected me as well. When I tried a couple years later out of curiosity, it only matched me with single mothers, and not the kind who are attractive in the least. Furthermore, save one individual, it was pretty clear the rest were lacking in even basic intelligence; i.e. the sort of people who have few redeeming qualities, if any.
Either eharmony is ripe with witless, ogreish single mothers, or I should feel very insulted. And I'm not knocking all single moms, but you should have seen these...People? Eek. If these are the kinds of matches it gives out, I'm not surprised to know they have at least an 80% 'match rate'
Completely ridiculous. This is more or less a high-tech version of the Maginot Line, and even then, not as capable... It's a last measure against infantry/infiltrators who can move through dense forest, unknown to the defenders (South Korea), as the attackers (North Korea) have been known to employ. It doesn't move, it doesn't actively seek or engage targets. i.e. by any rational definition, it's a defensive weapon. Even if there isn't a clear distinction between defensive and offensive weapons as you hold, there is a difference between defensive and offensive strategy; and as such, there are weapons which are suited to a particular strategy, and typically a weapon which is exceedingly useful for one strategy is totally ill-suited for the other.
Example: stationary, small caliber, unarmored turret robots pretty much suck for offense. Even a minimally capable 1930's army wouldn't have much issue defeating such a system (once they knew where it was.) Strap an autocannon (or mortar), some armor and tracks on it--then we can talk about an offensive weapon.
Well, no, you can't bear a cannon under that one specific connotation (to physically carry) of the verb bear, due to the obvious size and weight of said item. But that's that's a bit myopic, isn't it? Depending on the context, to bear may also mean to bring, to transmit, to be entitled to, to render or even as in bring to bear--to put into effect.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Any one of those contexts would be logically and lexically sound, when applied to that sentence, especially considering the relations as used by the men who wrote and ratified it:
the right of the people to keep and to bring Arms (with them), shall not be infringed.
the right of the people to keep and to trade in Arms, shall not be infringed.
the right of the people to keep and to display Arms, shall not be infringed.
the right of the people to keep and put Arms into effect, shall not be infringed.
Actually, it's totally about the maximum diameter of the bore i.e. from groove to groove (since most barrels have an even quantity of rifling), which is codified in law as 0.500+-0.0000 inches.
There is tale from ye-old long range and machine-gun shooters of ATF suits stopping by to measure their bores with calipers--which actually could be a problem with.50 BMG barrels, in the sense that most old MG barrels were made with quite a bit of variance, which is compounded by the fact that these old barrels tend to be softer and can erode significantly and still be usable--this is one reason why.50 BMG projectiles are a full one hundredth of an inch larger than the nominal bore specification.
Few shells designed for non-auto-cannon use share that feature, by the way--most firearms designed to use jacketed bullets are built so the bullet is only swaged about 1/1000th of an inch or so, rifling excepted. Some firearms apocrypha for ya. Anyway, apparently, the ATF finally realized they were barking up the wrong tree, and it's become a non-issue.
It all boils down to crazy fucking nutjobs. You don't want them to have weapons, because they don't even have a pretense of rationality, which is by the way, the backbone to the utopia in Heinlein's much quoted polite society. In Beyond This Horizon, insanity, along with most other human ailments has all but been weeded out through genetic engineering. It assumes that people perform a cost-benefit analysis of their potential actions, and that is something you might say is markedly lacking amongst insane people.
Hell, you don't even want crazy people to be part of society, so you put them in places called psychiatric hospitals. They can be observed and cared for by professionals, but most importantly, they don't pose a threat to the people outside. North Korea, for example... If a psychiatrist diagnosed the country as a whole, it might read something like "Suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by aggressive delusions and degenerative megalomania"... We can't put a country into an asylum--but we can disassociate from it, and that is exactly what every other sane country did.
Why worry about proliferation? Would you give a highly-functioning, but criminally insane person the tools and materials to build a weapon, knowing full well that they're likely to do that, and then use it against someone?
That means abiogenesis (the spontaneous generation of life from precursor non-living materials) happened at least TWICE on just this one planet....So while this isn't extra-terrestrial life....
I don't know why you jump to that conclusion when it's not possible to concede that either mode of lifeforms came from abiogenesis on this Earth, or that either couldn't be extraterrestrial in origin... It's just as likely that our phosphate based life and this arsenic based life hitchhiked to this rock on other rocks.
Let's face it, it's highly unlikely we'll ever have a hint as to our genesis. Concluding we know anything about the beginning of the story when we know virtually nothing about the rest; well, it's about as silly as the tenants intelligent-design believers hold to be true.
Actually, I was thinking of something like a Barret M95 (or M82) loaded with something like Mk 211. Comparable weight to the (X)M25 launcher, and likewise field-able by an individual soldier. In a cold war assault scenario where the bad guys like to hide behind real hard cover material like a proper berm, sandbag wall or reinforced concrete, the.50 would obviously suck compared to the M25.
However, due to their nature, our current enemy is rarely so fortunate. The best they have is typically masonry block, brick, etc. If you know they're behind a wall, they're easy pickins for.50; the KE impact and explosive effect of Mk 211 make a serious mess of things behind such barriers. They'd probably wish they took a grenade instead.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a cool fucking tool. If it can be fielded widely enough to make a difference, that is! It's kind of useless if you don't have one to use when you need to use it.
You don't get me. You set up a thin gasket of it on one side and use something like vasoline on the other side as a release agent (ala the dust cover). Wait for it to cure and you have a perfect little gasket molded perfectly to the contour, and the parts are free to move.
You're not sealing it up for good, just making it harder for airborne dust to migrate in. Example: gasketing the charging handle is a well known trick amongst citizens who use a suppressor on their ARs. The back pressure created by the suppressor can push gas and crud out of that area and into your face/nose/eyes--it's an inexpensive alternative to shelling out a hundred bucks for the Gas Buster charging handle
The tax is a whopping $200 bucks, very little by today's standards--but it would have been like $3000 in today's dollars to a family living in 1934, when the tax/regulation went into effect... In other words, effectively banning such firearms from all but the wealthy.
No, the only thing which makes the price so high is the fact that demand is very high, and supply is very low--since it was unconstitutionally limited by an underhanded, 11th hour amendment which was illegally added (against house vote) to an otherwise reasonable bill.
I don't know how the senate can possibly vote on a bill which isn't in congruence with the version that passed the house--but it happened here. From what I can tell, that is a major subversion of proper legislative procedure. I can't believe nobody has taken this illegal addition to task--probably because it's not politically correct.
Fun idea: if they replicated that test with an AK, due to the AK's legendary looseness, chances are the trigger action would lock up just from sand getting in through the dust cover and receiver cover.
I have a home on a sand dune. I can't imagine what it's like in Iraq or Afghanistan, probably ten times worse--I know sand manages to get in everything. I have had handfuls of sand pour out of electrical boxes on the exterior walls--I don't even know how the fuck it gets in there. But I also know the tighter something is sealed, the better.
If I were an infantryman over there, I'd take RTV silicone along the space between the lower and upper receiver on the M-16/M4. I'd seal up the gap where the trigger meets the receiver, leaving enough space for it to work, and I'd gasket the charging handle. I'd even take some RTV and make a gasket to help the dust cover seal up better.
I wonder if anyone has tried and tested that simple $5 solution. I bet things would looks a lot different in the extreme dust test.
I, for one, am not convinced that it solves anything the.50 BMG didn't solve almost a hundred years ago, or indeed that it could accomplish most anything that grandpa's old 40mm grenade launcher couldn't do with the help of a relatively simple computer-aided ranging and aiming solution...
Other than rake in metric assload of cash for H&K and ATK, of course! "Counter Defilade Target Engagement System"... Whoever came up with that was really reaching for the moon. How about "Bunkered Baddie Blaster"? Short sweet, to the point, TLA compliant and alliterative all at the same time. Bonus.
On second thought, it probably would have knocked $10k off the price simply because some Washington bureaucrat wouldn't have been impressed with a word he's never heard before.
Agreed, that would be ideal, if only to keep link spam from fudging your own sites' rating. AFAIK most forum packages don't nofollow external links, and either require the admin *cough* to modify some code or install an add-on (and indeed know to look for it in the first place)
Only users in the mod, admin groups should be able to share link love, by default. Dunno why they haven't figured that out yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Fun fact: many, (most?) ceramic knife manufacturers install enough magnetic material into their knives to set off metal detectors... That certainly applies to the better mass produced blades, but must admit that I have no idea about the recent crop of el-cheapo Chinese knives.
Still... I'd almost feel bad for the nutzo who successfully brought on and tried to use one of those on board an airliner. He might get one or two people, but he's in for some pain unless the plane is full of sheeple.
I Dunno. I think something along the lines of "Orbital laser probes plants for peckers" would have been more technically descriptive, more provocative and therefore more hilarious. C'mon editors, how can you possibly miss an opportunity like this?
Hell, I know that some pilots preformed a successful landing and take-off off with a Marine Corps C-130 from the deck of a carrier. Those things weigh 76,000 lbs empty! No way that's going to work with a ramp. It's conceivable that a full-up KC-130 could be serviceable from a carrier with JATO and catapult assist. Not that it's likely this will ever be common practice, but it could be handy.
Many police officers have a trying, stressful job, they get to deal with assholes and crazies and people who are generally hostile to their presence, day in and day out. Sure enough. But, I can't help to think that some of their actions, as a whole profession, might not be responsible for some of this hostility.
Sure, you have the semi-rare high profile police brutality cases where several cops pound the shit out of some helpless person for no apparent reason. Sometimes they beg for the abuse to stop, sometimes they're already unconscious, so they can't. You have the likewise rare cases where cops shoot people for no apparent justified reason. Sometimes these things are swept aside behind the closed doors of an internal affairs commission, seemingly in the face of all logic known to mankind. But, I think it goes much deeper than that.
I think most people just don't respect the police anymore, because in our mass subconscious, the police themselves have become undeserving of respect. I my self have had a negative encounter, consisting of verbal abuse and unwarranted physical contact/shoving precipitated by a policeman--a true example of the little-man's complex by the way, only this stature-deprived sociopath had a badge, and authoritah to hide behind.
He was fully aware that if he was another person in another place and time acting in this way, he would have been stomped into the pavement. To this day, I'm not sure what caused it, other than he just wanted to fuck around with someone. I can't even begin to imagine what minorities go through, especially in regard to illegal searches.
It's these little misconducts, these little abuses which are turning people against the police. Good folks just can't know whether a cop is be on their side, or whether he's going to help ruin their day. Here's another thing: we constantly hear about police having this dangerous job, and how we should kiss their asses because they put their lives on the line; and sure, a hundred and some change will die on the job every year, nationwide. But when you consider just how many police officers we have, the numbers tell a different story:
source
It does not meet the criteria for making sense
Couldn't have said it better, and I was going to say the same thing, unfortunately I have a problem with ADH...ooh shiny!
See, that's the idiocy of the system. The Expedited Funds Act requires for deposits over $5,000 availability of $5000 2nd Business Day Following Deposit, Remainder 7th Business Day, and payments between financial institutions get preferential treatment above and beyond. You could deposit some insane check, and have the funds available on the 8th business day.
You would think with an account who had no history of moving such large sums of money, that someone from the bank would have called the other bank to verify--but checks like these to accounts like these are routinely delivered by third party underwriters.
The bottom line: the financial system needs a gigantic enema, and needs to be rebuilt anew, with modern behavior in mind, from the ground up. If large sum paper checks, cashiers checks or money orders exist at all, they should be effectively treated as an instant transfer of funds when they hit a depositing bank, and they should be cryptographically signed by the issuing party, along with a routing numbers and verification of the amount issued, encoded into something like a data matrix or aztec code.
The difference is, if you go mucking with the ECU, you don't expect Ford or anyone else to honor any sort of warranty or provide service to your additions--especially for engine related parts (you might expect them to honor warranties to other parts, if you haven't messed with them) Can you do it? Hell yes. There tons of ECU programs and complete replacements which are useful if you want to add superchargers or turbos or whatever your heart desires.
Similarly, you wouldn't expect MS to support modded xboxes or or any un-certified software, but if you use the same analogy, you wouldn't expect them to prohibit doing these things, either. So, someone comes up with a porno title. Why can't you run it? Because they prohibit the running of un-certified software, cryptographically, or otherwise! To go one step further, they also use the government to arrest people who mod xboxes because that also allows the use of illegitimately copied software. Make sense?
One reason this scam works is a federal law (Expedited Funds Availability Act) which forces banks to make some amount or all of the funds available the first day, and all within two business days--as long the deposit is not over $5k--which makes it follow different rules. The funds magically appear in your bank account, ready for you to spend--giving you the false impression that the check actually cleared. You see, even in this electronic age of instantaneous information, checks clear at a snail's pace. Even electronic checks take 5-10 days to truly clear the clearing house, regular checks can take remarkably longer.
So, you write a check which comes from a legitimate account, and it has money, it clears, the money is moved around. The clearing house rejects the check you deposited, your bank takes the money back out of your account, and you're either hurting or worse yet, you've gone into overdraft mode, so the bank can kick you while you're down. The whole thing is, the financial system still works like it did back when horses and carriages roamed streets. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
shaky cameras
I want to find the stupid bastard who first thought shaky camera and short-take editing are valid cinematographic techniques to purposefully apply to an entire film/tv show/whatever... I'd kick him in the nuts so hard that his testes would make like pinballs whilst traveling up his digestive tract (complete with sound effects) before exiting through his ears at some incredible velocity.
Yeah...the very thought makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy on the inside.
It's obvious that what he considers damaged goods are those who share the all-too-common traits of Womanii Needicusmoniescus, also known as Ninjacus Bitchicus, i.e. selfishness, neediness, superficiality, a tendency to manipulate, etc. Someone, strike that, anyone from Jersey Shore could be the ultimate example of this subspecies. This disease comes in various strengths, and it's rare to find someone naturally immune to it. Maybe he figures political turmoil and other adversities act as an inoculation?
The very fact that you consider a woman from a country undergoing/emergent from political turmoil "damaged goods"--well, it really says more about you and your world view than it does about any of Assanges' proclivities. When I see that profile, I see someone who knows what he likes, and is looking for a partner, someone with whom he can share mutual respect, someone with whom he can see himself growing old.
You used the word "partner"...that word doesn't often have have the same meaning to a western woman that it does to a woman from an eastern European culture. The Russian equivalent to partner truly has the connotation of partner, someone with equal stake in a relationship. In the US, it has degenerated to "spouse" and even now it's hanging on the precipice to becoming little more than "roommate". No, strike that as well... This quality is in fact not limited women at all.
Really, how can you care so strongly about what people find attractive in their mates? To me, this is a much more interesting neurosis. If someone really digs transgendered Inuit-Filipinos, fictional though they (probably) are...How can that possibly be such a big deal to you?
IIRC (and it's been many years ago now) it just says something to the effect of "unable to find matches at this time, yadda yadda"... They are/were nice enough to do this before you subscribe to the service--which is something I haven't done.
Also, I'm relatively sure that I did not change the question set. A positive thing is they let you see pictures and so fourth, along with some of their matchs' traits during the free-eval period, they just don't let you communicate.
Did you stop to think that perhaps he's not specifically looking for someone who has seen adversity, but he is instead looking for the qualities that adversity instills into a person? I for one, think that is rather insightful.
When I had an eharmony profile, it at first rejected me as well. When I tried a couple years later out of curiosity, it only matched me with single mothers, and not the kind who are attractive in the least. Furthermore, save one individual, it was pretty clear the rest were lacking in even basic intelligence; i.e. the sort of people who have few redeeming qualities, if any.
Either eharmony is ripe with witless, ogreish single mothers, or I should feel very insulted. And I'm not knocking all single moms, but you should have seen these...People? Eek. If these are the kinds of matches it gives out, I'm not surprised to know they have at least an 80% 'match rate'
Completely ridiculous. This is more or less a high-tech version of the Maginot Line, and even then, not as capable... It's a last measure against infantry/infiltrators who can move through dense forest, unknown to the defenders (South Korea), as the attackers (North Korea) have been known to employ. It doesn't move, it doesn't actively seek or engage targets. i.e. by any rational definition, it's a defensive weapon. Even if there isn't a clear distinction between defensive and offensive weapons as you hold, there is a difference between defensive and offensive strategy; and as such, there are weapons which are suited to a particular strategy, and typically a weapon which is exceedingly useful for one strategy is totally ill-suited for the other.
Example: stationary, small caliber, unarmored turret robots pretty much suck for offense. Even a minimally capable 1930's army wouldn't have much issue defeating such a system (once they knew where it was.) Strap an autocannon (or mortar), some armor and tracks on it--then we can talk about an offensive weapon.
Well, no, you can't bear a cannon under that one specific connotation (to physically carry) of the verb bear, due to the obvious size and weight of said item. But that's that's a bit myopic, isn't it? Depending on the context, to bear may also mean to bring, to transmit, to be entitled to, to render or even as in bring to bear--to put into effect.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Any one of those contexts would be logically and lexically sound, when applied to that sentence, especially considering the relations as used by the men who wrote and ratified it:
Actually, it's totally about the maximum diameter of the bore i.e. from groove to groove (since most barrels have an even quantity of rifling), which is codified in law as 0.500+-0.0000 inches.
There is tale from ye-old long range and machine-gun shooters of ATF suits stopping by to measure their bores with calipers--which actually could be a problem with .50 BMG barrels, in the sense that most old MG barrels were made with quite a bit of variance, which is compounded by the fact that these old barrels tend to be softer and can erode significantly and still be usable--this is one reason why .50 BMG projectiles are a full one hundredth of an inch larger than the nominal bore specification.
Few shells designed for non-auto-cannon use share that feature, by the way--most firearms designed to use jacketed bullets are built so the bullet is only swaged about 1/1000th of an inch or so, rifling excepted. Some firearms apocrypha for ya. Anyway, apparently, the ATF finally realized they were barking up the wrong tree, and it's become a non-issue.
It all boils down to crazy fucking nutjobs. You don't want them to have weapons, because they don't even have a pretense of rationality, which is by the way, the backbone to the utopia in Heinlein's much quoted polite society. In Beyond This Horizon, insanity, along with most other human ailments has all but been weeded out through genetic engineering. It assumes that people perform a cost-benefit analysis of their potential actions, and that is something you might say is markedly lacking amongst insane people.
Hell, you don't even want crazy people to be part of society, so you put them in places called psychiatric hospitals. They can be observed and cared for by professionals, but most importantly, they don't pose a threat to the people outside. North Korea, for example... If a psychiatrist diagnosed the country as a whole, it might read something like "Suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by aggressive delusions and degenerative megalomania"... We can't put a country into an asylum--but we can disassociate from it, and that is exactly what every other sane country did.
Why worry about proliferation? Would you give a highly-functioning, but criminally insane person the tools and materials to build a weapon, knowing full well that they're likely to do that, and then use it against someone?
That means abiogenesis (the spontaneous generation of life from precursor non-living materials) happened at least TWICE on just this one planet....So while this isn't extra-terrestrial life....
I don't know why you jump to that conclusion when it's not possible to concede that either mode of lifeforms came from abiogenesis on this Earth, or that either couldn't be extraterrestrial in origin... It's just as likely that our phosphate based life and this arsenic based life hitchhiked to this rock on other rocks.
Let's face it, it's highly unlikely we'll ever have a hint as to our genesis. Concluding we know anything about the beginning of the story when we know virtually nothing about the rest; well, it's about as silly as the tenants intelligent-design believers hold to be true.
Yeah, that thing is a monster. I was thinking Barrett M95--about 10 lbs lighter, and probably much more fun to shoot despite the lower weight.
Hope that hernia isn't too bad :D
Actually, I was thinking of something like a Barret M95 (or M82) loaded with something like Mk 211. Comparable weight to the (X)M25 launcher, and likewise field-able by an individual soldier. In a cold war assault scenario where the bad guys like to hide behind real hard cover material like a proper berm, sandbag wall or reinforced concrete, the .50 would obviously suck compared to the M25.
However, due to their nature, our current enemy is rarely so fortunate. The best they have is typically masonry block, brick, etc. If you know they're behind a wall, they're easy pickins for .50; the KE impact and explosive effect of Mk 211 make a serious mess of things behind such barriers. They'd probably wish they took a grenade instead.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a cool fucking tool. If it can be fielded widely enough to make a difference, that is! It's kind of useless if you don't have one to use when you need to use it.
You don't get me. You set up a thin gasket of it on one side and use something like vasoline on the other side as a release agent (ala the dust cover). Wait for it to cure and you have a perfect little gasket molded perfectly to the contour, and the parts are free to move.
You're not sealing it up for good, just making it harder for airborne dust to migrate in. Example: gasketing the charging handle is a well known trick amongst citizens who use a suppressor on their ARs. The back pressure created by the suppressor can push gas and crud out of that area and into your face/nose/eyes--it's an inexpensive alternative to shelling out a hundred bucks for the Gas Buster charging handle
The tax is a whopping $200 bucks, very little by today's standards--but it would have been like $3000 in today's dollars to a family living in 1934, when the tax/regulation went into effect... In other words, effectively banning such firearms from all but the wealthy.
No, the only thing which makes the price so high is the fact that demand is very high, and supply is very low--since it was unconstitutionally limited by an underhanded, 11th hour amendment which was illegally added (against house vote) to an otherwise reasonable bill.
I don't know how the senate can possibly vote on a bill which isn't in congruence with the version that passed the house--but it happened here. From what I can tell, that is a major subversion of proper legislative procedure. I can't believe nobody has taken this illegal addition to task--probably because it's not politically correct.
Fun idea: if they replicated that test with an AK, due to the AK's legendary looseness, chances are the trigger action would lock up just from sand getting in through the dust cover and receiver cover.
I have a home on a sand dune. I can't imagine what it's like in Iraq or Afghanistan, probably ten times worse--I know sand manages to get in everything. I have had handfuls of sand pour out of electrical boxes on the exterior walls--I don't even know how the fuck it gets in there. But I also know the tighter something is sealed, the better.
If I were an infantryman over there, I'd take RTV silicone along the space between the lower and upper receiver on the M-16/M4. I'd seal up the gap where the trigger meets the receiver, leaving enough space for it to work, and I'd gasket the charging handle. I'd even take some RTV and make a gasket to help the dust cover seal up better.
I wonder if anyone has tried and tested that simple $5 solution. I bet things would looks a lot different in the extreme dust test.
I, for one, am not convinced that it solves anything the .50 BMG didn't solve almost a hundred years ago, or indeed that it could accomplish most anything that grandpa's old 40mm grenade launcher couldn't do with the help of a relatively simple computer-aided ranging and aiming solution...
Other than rake in metric assload of cash for H&K and ATK, of course! "Counter Defilade Target Engagement System"... Whoever came up with that was really reaching for the moon. How about "Bunkered Baddie Blaster"? Short sweet, to the point, TLA compliant and alliterative all at the same time. Bonus.
On second thought, it probably would have knocked $10k off the price simply because some Washington bureaucrat wouldn't have been impressed with a word he's never heard before.
Agreed, that would be ideal, if only to keep link spam from fudging your own sites' rating. AFAIK most forum packages don't nofollow external links, and either require the admin *cough* to modify some code or install an add-on (and indeed know to look for it in the first place)
Only users in the mod, admin groups should be able to share link love, by default. Dunno why they haven't figured that out yet.