Mugabe and all the other third world despots were the *darlings* of the left back when they were leading "people's revolutions" against the big bad colonial governments.
Now that Muegabe et al have settled into plain-old authoritarian behavior, the left wants to pretend that they don't exist and continue blaming Western governments and policies for the "failure" of Africa and other third world regions.
Does this do something to actually improve RF systems (eg, testing new antennas, filters, etc etc), or is it merely a dumb stunt of only interest to guys who have a lot of empty Pringles cans around?
I'm guessing the latter, since other RF technologies and systems exist for reliably bridging these kinds of distances, although I suspect the left wing of Slashdot might chime in about its applicability for solving all the problems of Mugabe's Zimbabwe, etc.
I suspect there's many risk factors. Think of smaller companies with field offices -- often the bills for field office services go to the home office, and the person paying the invoice has little idea what the services are but knows the risk of not paying them may be disruption to the field office.
It also helps to keep the amounts small as well as perhaps add a late payment charge, so the person getting the bill is worried they might be in trouble if they make the bill late.
Many companies have good controls, but many have loose controls on paying invoices. If you used a reasonable database and chose businesses who might get a lot of bills but have a weak grasp on them, you could probably come up with a formula that would correlate highly with having randomly mailed invoices get paid.
What you leave out in your analogy is that bots are the result of third-party malicious action.
In your car analogy, the owner reasonably believed that when the car wasn't running, it wouldn't go anywhere and a THIRD PARTY pushed the car such that it rolled down the hill.
Ordinary users THINK that their machines aren't vulnerable and thus do nothing, which in and of itself isn't a problem until someone else breaks in and turns them into bots.
Are you one of those eco-puritans who has managed to eliminate all the hazardous materials out of your entire life? Including, of course, refusing all medical treatment if the materials, machines or medicines involve the use or production of heavy metals?
Or is it just about striking the appropriate pose at your local free-wifi free-trade-coffee hangout?
Hustler was at its peak in the late 70s/early 80s. I can remember getting ahold of them in that era and it was sublimely raunchy -- Chester The Molester, racist sex cartoons and real beaver shots. Most important were the groundbreaking amateur shots, Huslter's Honeys. Pretty hard core nudies of blue collar tarts from all over; if you ever had a fantasy about the girl who worked in the factory office, this would satisfy it.
Playboy was dull by comparison -- no beaver shots and too many articles about stereos. Penthouse was the compromise -- beaver shots, but with B-grade attempts at serious journalism, but never quite hard core enough to qualify as raunchy.
I hate touch-sensative surfaces. While they're nice in theory and in some limited situations, they are nearly impossible to use without looking at them, there's no tactile feedback and they often promote mistouching.
Its the one thing (besides the built-in obsolescence) that would totally keep me away from an iPhone. I want my buttons.
Might keep the water out, but more importantly it'll help keep stray rounds out and provide a more secure firing position when you defend it after the next hurricane.
My technique for getting keys was to come up with a legitimate need to get into a space and then bug whoever had keys continuously to open the door until they got around to getting me my own set.
For those doors where no key would ever be issued (electrical vaults, restricted building spaces) we would occasionally put a thin metal sheet over the part of the doorjam where the lock went in. Door looked locked from the outside, but actually wasn't. It usually kept the doors available for a while.
The ONE door I could never reliably get access into was the return air shaft off the data center. Freaky room, it went up 20+ floors to the main ventilation room.
If there's that much organization involved, why not a RICO prosecution?
I'm always surprised that they go after these so-called "spam kings" as if they were committing their crimes in a vacuum without the help of other people or other institutions.
As much as spam seems linked to a much larger world of theft, fraud, money laundering, stock manipulation, and more well-known organized crime I would think that a RICO investigation would be a big help.
I would also think it would go a long way towards ending the tacit involvement of the legitimate financial and IT community in spam if a few well-placed execs in those industries got nailed along with the rest of them.
I think the issue that most militaries have faced is that unlike our forbears, *most* fighting isn't being done at ranges where full-power rifle rounds get their advantage. We're not dug into trenches sniping each other at a half mile, it's a lot of urban fighting and ranges under 300 yards. Plus the vast majority of your guys are city kids who couldn't hit anything with an iron-sighted rifle at 300+ yards if they wanted to.
I haven't heard of the.50 Fat Mac, just the.50 Beowolf and I think they're kind of onto something for close-in fighting -- big bullets with good short-range power (under 200 yards). It overcomes the little.223 disadvantage of lack of bullet mass for shooting through physical obstacles and relying solely on velocity for kills.
5.56 gets bad press. 934 ft-lbs of energy is a point-blank shot from reasonable.44 Magnum ammo, and I don't think anyone's signing up for getting shot with that. The.223 lives and dies on velocity -- at high velocities the bullet fragments dramatically and creates an awesome wound channel.
I think the big issue is that the muzzles are getting cut too short and losing too much velocity. 16" M4 barrels are about as short as anyone should go, but you get all these guys who think they are go-fast, low-drag operators with 14.5s and shorter and then wondering why their 62 grain bullets suck at 2500fps yet are mini-grenades @ 3300 fps.
There's so many guns in the field with varying barrel lengths that the ammo has to work well with all of them, and it works best with longer barreled guns. The shorter barreled guys should be carrying 1:7 barrels with some of the big 70+ grain bullets.
You can keep your M14 -- great long-range round, but if I was in the field I'd want to carry more rounds for the same weight in.223, plus all the other advantages -- faster second shot, higher mag capacity, etc.
What might be the best compromise would be upgrading to.243. Real fun would be.223 WSSM with your lighter bullets stepping out over 4000 fps.
Maybe its good for street cops facing handgun fire, but its not really helpful until it can stop rifle rounds, ideally.308 energy levels although AK or.223 levels might have some virtues.
You have to remember that the grandstanding is part of the process. The goal is larger behavior change and greater amount of trepidation on the part of other organizations, knowing that they could be next and that while the fines or investigations may not ruin them financially, they often endure weeks or months of humiliating press coverage.
And lots of AGs take on consumer/public interest crusader roles. I think generally they're smart enough to pick issues they can win on (which implies that they're reasonable and not too political, unless you find lying and stealing to be political) and they're usually directly elected.
Plus, if they weren't pursuing some of these issues, how would they ever get fixed or changed? I'm thinking of our own AG's work with a large HMO that was officially "non-profit" but was blowing millions on executive perks. Kind of harsh to be told you can't have that drug/transplant/treatment but the HMO can rent a luxury suite for sporting events.
I'm all in favor of free markets when they're actually free, but ours aren't and we need to do SOMETHING to prevent the financial elite from cornering the market.
I've used the latter; running Firefox and Thunderbird off of flash is usable, but kind of pokey so now I mostly just use PortaPutty to ssh to my home network and RDP to my actual desktop.
The problem with most people who have a mid-life crisis and go searching for happiness is that they seldom find it -- they toss out the things in life that are more scarce than they think (careers, family stability, etc) in search of some euphoria that doesn't exist, and even if they think they know what it is (car/job/girl/location/etc), eventually they end up back where they started emotionally.
I think a lot of this reinforces "the set point theory of happiness" -- basically the idea that people largely have a happiness set point they return to regardless of their life events. What this says to me is that people who are unhappy and want something else and actually choose something else usually end up unhappy again, not because they lost X or gained Y or didn't gain Y, but because they're just not happy to begin with.
You so obviously get that open resistance, while providing a satisfying emotional catharsis, is SO MUCH less effective in the long run than this kind of high-level monkeywrenching of the system.
You got it right. The doctors have established what amounts to a state-sponsored cartel that prevents anyone from practicing medicine who isn't a member of their cartel, even well-trained people like nurses or patients themselves who may be much better in tune with their health than they're given credit for.
Oddly enough, one part of the "health care" system that's ignored is the war on drugs. I include it since its ostensible mission is the public health goal of preventing addiction and substance abuse. The DEA alone spends $2.5 billion (up from $1 billion from 1995!); add in the total expenditures of all state and local drug enforcement efforts and you have probably something on the order of $40 billion spent on an effort that obviously doesn't work well if at all.
$40 billion in spending would go a long way towards dealing with some of the skyrocketing costs.
It's a nonsense statement, then, since with modification most guns can fire pretty much any ammo.
Saying an AK-74 fires NATO standard rounds with modification is really like saying AK-74 doesn't fire NATO rounds without modification, and with modification it can fire pretty much any round.
The AK-74 and its variants fire 5.45x39. "NATO ammo" would be 5.56x45, so, no, an AK-74 wouldn't be able to chamber let alone safely fire NATO ammo. I've heard some 74s were converted by former east bloc countries to shoot 5.56 once they joined NATO.
You can also get 7.62x39 AK uppers for AR-type rifles and I guess Alexander Arms made 5.45x39 uppers as well, but still, box stock AK-74s and M16s and variants are not capable of shooting each other's ammo.
What's ironic about it is that people advocating naughty behavior in the name of PC/left-wing causes are the ones most likely to use it; what I find amusing is that they invoke a rule prohibiting the Nazis to suppress discussion!
They have been pissing on their channel for a long time with online sales; this is just them dropping drawers and shitting on the channel, too.
HP just realizes that they participate in a functional duopoly with a direct-sales competitor who doesn't really have a channel and that they don't need to be slaves to theirs.
I'm surprised that they would approach this printing market, though. One of the advantages owning your own printer has is that its much cheaper to own than any of the "managed services" pay-per-page copiers already in the market.
Slashdot Mirror
...then make her a planning cunt?
Ha!
Mugabe and all the other third world despots were the *darlings* of the left back when they were leading "people's revolutions" against the big bad colonial governments.
Now that Muegabe et al have settled into plain-old authoritarian behavior, the left wants to pretend that they don't exist and continue blaming Western governments and policies for the "failure" of Africa and other third world regions.
Does this do something to actually improve RF systems (eg, testing new antennas, filters, etc etc), or is it merely a dumb stunt of only interest to guys who have a lot of empty Pringles cans around?
I'm guessing the latter, since other RF technologies and systems exist for reliably bridging these kinds of distances, although I suspect the left wing of Slashdot might chime in about its applicability for solving all the problems of Mugabe's Zimbabwe, etc.
our schools do not have the ability to generate new dollars to fund projects or pay for employees
Gee, why do my taxes go up whenever the school board wants my money?
Not only does the school district have the ability to raise new money, they have the ability to do so with the full force of the law.
I suspect there's many risk factors. Think of smaller companies with field offices -- often the bills for field office services go to the home office, and the person paying the invoice has little idea what the services are but knows the risk of not paying them may be disruption to the field office.
It also helps to keep the amounts small as well as perhaps add a late payment charge, so the person getting the bill is worried they might be in trouble if they make the bill late.
Many companies have good controls, but many have loose controls on paying invoices. If you used a reasonable database and chose businesses who might get a lot of bills but have a weak grasp on them, you could probably come up with a formula that would correlate highly with having randomly mailed invoices get paid.
What you leave out in your analogy is that bots are the result of third-party malicious action.
In your car analogy, the owner reasonably believed that when the car wasn't running, it wouldn't go anywhere and a THIRD PARTY pushed the car such that it rolled down the hill.
Ordinary users THINK that their machines aren't vulnerable and thus do nothing, which in and of itself isn't a problem until someone else breaks in and turns them into bots.
Are you one of those eco-puritans who has managed to eliminate all the hazardous materials out of your entire life? Including, of course, refusing all medical treatment if the materials, machines or medicines involve the use or production of heavy metals?
Or is it just about striking the appropriate pose at your local free-wifi free-trade-coffee hangout?
Hustler was at its peak in the late 70s/early 80s. I can remember getting ahold of them in that era and it was sublimely raunchy -- Chester The Molester, racist sex cartoons and real beaver shots. Most important were the groundbreaking amateur shots, Huslter's Honeys. Pretty hard core nudies of blue collar tarts from all over; if you ever had a fantasy about the girl who worked in the factory office, this would satisfy it.
Playboy was dull by comparison -- no beaver shots and too many articles about stereos. Penthouse was the compromise -- beaver shots, but with B-grade attempts at serious journalism, but never quite hard core enough to qualify as raunchy.
I hate touch-sensative surfaces. While they're nice in theory and in some limited situations, they are nearly impossible to use without looking at them, there's no tactile feedback and they often promote mistouching.
Its the one thing (besides the built-in obsolescence) that would totally keep me away from an iPhone. I want my buttons.
Might keep the water out, but more importantly it'll help keep stray rounds out and provide a more secure firing position when you defend it after the next hurricane.
My technique for getting keys was to come up with a legitimate need to get into a space and then bug whoever had keys continuously to open the door until they got around to getting me my own set.
For those doors where no key would ever be issued (electrical vaults, restricted building spaces) we would occasionally put a thin metal sheet over the part of the doorjam where the lock went in. Door looked locked from the outside, but actually wasn't. It usually kept the doors available for a while.
The ONE door I could never reliably get access into was the return air shaft off the data center. Freaky room, it went up 20+ floors to the main ventilation room.
If there's that much organization involved, why not a RICO prosecution?
I'm always surprised that they go after these so-called "spam kings" as if they were committing their crimes in a vacuum without the help of other people or other institutions.
As much as spam seems linked to a much larger world of theft, fraud, money laundering, stock manipulation, and more well-known organized crime I would think that a RICO investigation would be a big help.
I would also think it would go a long way towards ending the tacit involvement of the legitimate financial and IT community in spam if a few well-placed execs in those industries got nailed along with the rest of them.
I think the issue that most militaries have faced is that unlike our forbears, *most* fighting isn't being done at ranges where full-power rifle rounds get their advantage. We're not dug into trenches sniping each other at a half mile, it's a lot of urban fighting and ranges under 300 yards. Plus the vast majority of your guys are city kids who couldn't hit anything with an iron-sighted rifle at 300+ yards if they wanted to.
.50 Fat Mac, just the .50 Beowolf and I think they're kind of onto something for close-in fighting -- big bullets with good short-range power (under 200 yards). It overcomes the little .223 disadvantage of lack of bullet mass for shooting through physical obstacles and relying solely on velocity for kills.
I haven't heard of the
5.56 gets bad press. 934 ft-lbs of energy is a point-blank shot from reasonable .44 Magnum ammo, and I don't think anyone's signing up for getting shot with that. The .223 lives and dies on velocity -- at high velocities the bullet fragments dramatically and creates an awesome wound channel.
.223, plus all the other advantages -- faster second shot, higher mag capacity, etc.
.243. Real fun would be .223 WSSM with your lighter bullets stepping out over 4000 fps.
I think the big issue is that the muzzles are getting cut too short and losing too much velocity. 16" M4 barrels are about as short as anyone should go, but you get all these guys who think they are go-fast, low-drag operators with 14.5s and shorter and then wondering why their 62 grain bullets suck at 2500fps yet are mini-grenades @ 3300 fps.
There's so many guns in the field with varying barrel lengths that the ammo has to work well with all of them, and it works best with longer barreled guns. The shorter barreled guys should be carrying 1:7 barrels with some of the big 70+ grain bullets.
You can keep your M14 -- great long-range round, but if I was in the field I'd want to carry more rounds for the same weight in
What might be the best compromise would be upgrading to
Maybe its good for street cops facing handgun fire, but its not really helpful until it can stop rifle rounds, ideally .308 energy levels although AK or .223 levels might have some virtues.
You have to remember that the grandstanding is part of the process. The goal is larger behavior change and greater amount of trepidation on the part of other organizations, knowing that they could be next and that while the fines or investigations may not ruin them financially, they often endure weeks or months of humiliating press coverage.
And lots of AGs take on consumer/public interest crusader roles. I think generally they're smart enough to pick issues they can win on (which implies that they're reasonable and not too political, unless you find lying and stealing to be political) and they're usually directly elected.
Plus, if they weren't pursuing some of these issues, how would they ever get fixed or changed? I'm thinking of our own AG's work with a large HMO that was officially "non-profit" but was blowing millions on executive perks. Kind of harsh to be told you can't have that drug/transplant/treatment but the HMO can rent a luxury suite for sporting events.
I'm all in favor of free markets when they're actually free, but ours aren't and we need to do SOMETHING to prevent the financial elite from cornering the market.
I've used the latter; running Firefox and Thunderbird off of flash is usable, but kind of pokey so now I mostly just use PortaPutty to ssh to my home network and RDP to my actual desktop.
The problem with most people who have a mid-life crisis and go searching for happiness is that they seldom find it -- they toss out the things in life that are more scarce than they think (careers, family stability, etc) in search of some euphoria that doesn't exist, and even if they think they know what it is (car/job/girl/location/etc), eventually they end up back where they started emotionally.
I think a lot of this reinforces "the set point theory of happiness" -- basically the idea that people largely have a happiness set point they return to regardless of their life events. What this says to me is that people who are unhappy and want something else and actually choose something else usually end up unhappy again, not because they lost X or gained Y or didn't gain Y, but because they're just not happy to begin with.
You so obviously get that open resistance, while providing a satisfying emotional catharsis, is SO MUCH less effective in the long run than this kind of high-level monkeywrenching of the system.
I tip my hat to you!
You got it right. The doctors have established what amounts to a state-sponsored cartel that prevents anyone from practicing medicine who isn't a member of their cartel, even well-trained people like nurses or patients themselves who may be much better in tune with their health than they're given credit for.
Oddly enough, one part of the "health care" system that's ignored is the war on drugs. I include it since its ostensible mission is the public health goal of preventing addiction and substance abuse. The DEA alone spends $2.5 billion (up from $1 billion from 1995!); add in the total expenditures of all state and local drug enforcement efforts and you have probably something on the order of $40 billion spent on an effort that obviously doesn't work well if at all.
$40 billion in spending would go a long way towards dealing with some of the skyrocketing costs.
It's a nonsense statement, then, since with modification most guns can fire pretty much any ammo.
Saying an AK-74 fires NATO standard rounds with modification is really like saying AK-74 doesn't fire NATO rounds without modification, and with modification it can fire pretty much any round.
The AK-74 and its variants fire 5.45x39. "NATO ammo" would be 5.56x45, so, no, an AK-74 wouldn't be able to chamber let alone safely fire NATO ammo. I've heard some 74s were converted by former east bloc countries to shoot 5.56 once they joined NATO.
You can also get 7.62x39 AK uppers for AR-type rifles and I guess Alexander Arms made 5.45x39 uppers as well, but still, box stock AK-74s and M16s and variants are not capable of shooting each other's ammo.
What's ironic about it is that people advocating naughty behavior in the name of PC/left-wing causes are the ones most likely to use it; what I find amusing is that they invoke a rule prohibiting the Nazis to suppress discussion!
They have been pissing on their channel for a long time with online sales; this is just them dropping drawers and shitting on the channel, too.
HP just realizes that they participate in a functional duopoly with a direct-sales competitor who doesn't really have a channel and that they don't need to be slaves to theirs.
I'm surprised that they would approach this printing market, though. One of the advantages owning your own printer has is that its much cheaper to own than any of the "managed services" pay-per-page copiers already in the market.