Just perhaps to add a bit, but if you take at the training manuals for snipers (I have a couple older ones), they include a section on how to construct several types of concealed "shelters" from which the sniper can take multiple shots while remaining concealed.
Not only that, but after the first shot, someone walks out to within 20 or so feet of the sniper's position (to give the observers a rough idea of where the sniper is) and the sniper must fire the second shot without being detected.
They actually just fire blanks now and read numbers off cards that the graders are holding. I suppose the "metal plate" method had some drawbacks.
That said, I read a story on the net once where Charles Hathcock was at a test of a brand spanking new multi million dollar infra-red based sniper detection system. Some time during the demonstration, he snuck away and stalked toward the observers until he was 20 or so feet from them. He stood up and showed them what defeated their system - a $10 plastic umbrella.
I suppose, but gee, the earth must of have heated up a bunch in the last year, after all, this is the year of "Global warming is causing all these hurricanes". Last year there was virtually no outcry of "global warming causes hurricanes" yet this year something magical happened.
Perhaps the advocates of global warming should realize people saying "OH NOS TEH GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES TEH HURRICANES!!111" just makes them look well.... unscientific.
The differences between analog and digital can seem numerous and great - especially if you get a couple thousand on the side from the people presenting these "facts" to you.
I got to the point a little while ago where I'm not completely blaming the RIAA etc for pushing stupid legislation but for the politicians in accepting it. If stupid legislation gets passed, we really only have a small group of people to blame.
The next step, after the "Oh, I've been so civil and intellectual lately, look at my current post" is "I fought in the great usenet wars while you were still in diapers! Don't mess with me child!"
And you're deliberately being a douchebag. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I can't tolerate idiots.
I imagine because you can find a black and white TV for $10, that I shouldn't be suspicious when I find someone selling a big screen for $5?
And you accuse me of using strawmans. ooh kay... Can you even consider it a strawman if it is so blindlingly stupid?
Is the guy who bought it an idiot, he paid 4x as much as the fence bought it for! uhh, yeah. $1200 for a 6 month old (at least) X40, off ebay at that. Dur Cletus, lets buy Anna-May-Beth a laptop for school!
Fuck off moron, take your condescending, insulting bullshit Heheh, that would be more amusing if you ended that with "you fucking stupid cocksucking son of a cum guzzling whore" or something. Nice try though.
Or are you so sensitive because you sell stolen goods online too? Ooh. Good one. I guess you read ignoramusmaximus's posts and picked up one of his lines. Long live YUO STOLZORZ TEH LAPTOPS AND $ELL$ DEM ON TEH INTARWEB!
And you're a fucking idiot. There have been several times in the last couple of months where you could buy modern laptops (new, from retail stores) for as cheap as $300. Even so, the price on laptops has dropped quite a bit and you really don't even have to look around very long to find a laptop for $600 and change. In fact, here is one for $674. It took me all of 15 fucking seconds to find it (literally). Had I wanted to find something better, I easily could of have. Sadly, Dell got anally raped last quarter, so it will be a bit harder to find something for 5 and change, but during the past couple of months, I don't believe that there was one day without a $500-$600 dell laptop deal. This totally ignores government auctions and the fact that some people need to sell their shit "now" to pay for rent or so that Guido won't break his legs, etc. So, really, $300 isn't completely off the wall when it comes to someone selling a used laptop and is a perfectly reasonable price unless you're a mouthbreathing redneck who goes to "Best Buy" to decide what laptop prices are. Feel free to yell "fence, fence!" and apply that label to everyone who sells "hi tech" stuff online, but perhaps you should Try Thinking (TM).
Not to rain on your point, but "printed lots" on a Laserjet 4000 is around 65,000 pages a month. If you've printed more than two or 3 times that since '97, I'd be surprised. They were designed to last a long time, but most people tossed them because they didn't want to buy the $40 paper pickup, etc, rollers. That said, starting from the 4100, HP's printers are built to... shall we say... less exacting standards and have been having more and more issues (4100 was plagued with fuser issues). Now that Carly is gone, perhaps something will change in the high-er end printer division, but low end will always be low end printers.
For private pilots USA - 2-5k, although it can be a bit less. Depends how good you are at it, the cost of the aircraft rental, instructor rental, etc. You need 40 hours of flight time (30 with instructor, 10 solo IIRC) in order to get the license, although you might want to take more. Plan on spending at least $20 an hour for the instructor and $35 for the aircraft. At least.
Canada, 7-15k-ish. I think $40/$35 an hour and up and 40 hours are required.
None of the above includes ground school - you usually have to pay for that seperately, although some flight schools will bundle it into a package.
Depending on the school, most will let you double up with another student in the cockpit and split the instructor cost. Or you can find a flying club that owns a plane and joins in. Or if you have a rich uncle with a plane and mechanic, that works well too;)
Oh, last I checked AOPA was sending out a free half year sub to its Flight Training magazine. 1-800-USA-AOPA and beg;) They cost a bit to join (you don't need to join to get the magazine) but you get a bunch of discounts, swag, etc, so it is worth it in the long run.
In the USA, if you're under 21, consider the Civil Air Patrol. They will help you with paying for the classes - or pay for everything in some cases - and the "volunteer work" (i.e. stuff you do so they send you to flight school) looks great on resumes, college aps etc. Free / cheap to join - like $25 a year for CAP and you might need to buy a uniform and some small stuff. They will often help with ground school and while they are supposed to teach stuff, the squadron I went to was pretty disorganized and nothing really got taught. Still, show up and they would send you to a camp for the summer (parachuting, gliding, flying, survival, etc)
In Canada, you have the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, which is also free / cheap and they basically give you a uniform for free (you're supposed to return it, but lets just say a certain cold weather gortex parka got lost along the way). The squadron where I was at also paid for the medical certificate (including exam, which cost $200 or so, a nice chunk of change in a country where a doctors visit is free) and the ground school was taught free of charge by good instructors. Books, etc, also free. If you wanted to get a full scholarship, you had to apply, pass the written exam with good marks (not terribly difficult, mind you) and write an essay or something. Usually one or two cadets went every summer to get their pilots license and one or two went to get their glider license. Other camps included survival, leadership, music, physical fitness (for the nutcases who like to run 4 marathons in a row), first aid, etc, etc.
Don't let the military structure, etc, scare you - it isn't like you'll be press ganged into shooting drug runners or anything like that, CAP does a lot of SAR work and RCAC doesn't really do anything except for going flying / gliding / camping / shooting every month or so in addition to the weekly meetings. I don't think CAP Cadets can take part in SAR missions directly, but can do a ride-along type thing, which is pretty cool as well. But do realize that if you're going to get them to pay for everything, you're going to have to suck up a fair bit in order to get a scholarship and do a lot of grunt work like showing up for meetings, controlling parking at airshows and basically showing them that you're disciplined and dedicated.
From my experience, the RCAC had a lot more attendance, etc, than CAP - the RCAC squadron had usually around 100 people show up weekly (I think 140 was the most one day) when I was in this small town up in Canada (200,000 people), while the CAP squadron that covered all of Portland, Oregon and the surrounding cities (3.5 million+) had maybe 25 on a good day, including all the people whose job it was to be there. That might of have had something to do with the way it was run, but a small squadron can work to your advant
Actually did that on a machine just yesterday after spending 2 hours cleaning out the viruses, spyware, porn dialers et al. Doesn't look exactly like ie, but close enough for these users...
Same. Quite a few years ago (when our apartment didn't offer anything better than 56k), we signed up with a free CD and I think we dragged it along for just over a year and a bit that way. Just had to write down a reminder on the calendar every month or two. So I guess you could say that they don't allow their customers to cancel;) All in all though, they only got fined a million and change. Their own legal fees were probably 4-5x that.
At the same time, you have to admit that it isn't something that someone can do in their garage on a small budget. You need a fair bit of processing power and moderately expensive equipment to be able to do it.
Perhaps licensing terms that prohibit the manufacturer from creating any products that use the alternate format (a la Coke / Pepsi in schools)? Or prohibitively expensive licensing fees that preclude a company from being able to license both "technologies" Make no mistake about it; this is the ultimate form of petty bullshit and both sides win while the consumer ultimately loses.
Slashdot Mirror
Just perhaps to add a bit, but if you take at the training manuals for snipers (I have a couple older ones), they include a section on how to construct several types of concealed "shelters" from which the sniper can take multiple shots while remaining concealed.
Not only that, but after the first shot, someone walks out to within 20 or so feet of the sniper's position (to give the observers a rough idea of where the sniper is) and the sniper must fire the second shot without being detected.
They actually just fire blanks now and read numbers off cards that the graders are holding. I suppose the "metal plate" method had some drawbacks.
That said, I read a story on the net once where Charles Hathcock was at a test of a brand spanking new multi million dollar infra-red based sniper detection system. Some time during the demonstration, he snuck away and stalked toward the observers until he was 20 or so feet from them. He stood up and showed them what defeated their system - a $10 plastic umbrella.
Snipercountry has some excellent articles and some touch on Infra-Red detection.
http://snipercountry.com/Articles/IRDetection.asp
Too late...
Seriously.
Linky
Or anything off suprnova... Ahh the days of 35k leeches in a .torrent...
IIRC DNA collected from the military is only supposed to be used in the identification of bodies. Of course, I'm sure it has been abused.
Nah, they would never break the fingers - slows productivity because they can't type as fast, you understand.
Legs on the otherhand...
If you believe what this guy is saying. $0.30 a song. Labels take 53 cents and musicians get 11.
I suppose, but gee, the earth must of have heated up a bunch in the last year, after all, this is the year of "Global warming is causing all these hurricanes". Last year there was virtually no outcry of "global warming causes hurricanes" yet this year something magical happened.
Perhaps the advocates of global warming should realize people saying "OH NOS TEH GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES TEH HURRICANES!!111" just makes them look well.... unscientific.
The differences between analog and digital can seem numerous and great - especially if you get a couple thousand on the side from the people presenting these "facts" to you.
I got to the point a little while ago where I'm not completely blaming the RIAA etc for pushing stupid legislation but for the politicians in accepting it. If stupid legislation gets passed, we really only have a small group of people to blame.
The next step, after the "Oh, I've been so civil and intellectual lately, look at my current post" is
"I fought in the great usenet wars while you were still in diapers! Don't mess with me child!"
Carry on mensa master.
And you're deliberately being a douchebag.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. I can't tolerate idiots.
I imagine because you can find a black and white TV for $10, that I shouldn't be suspicious when I find someone selling a big screen for $5?
And you accuse me of using strawmans.
ooh kay... Can you even consider it a strawman if it is so blindlingly stupid?
Is the guy who bought it an idiot, he paid 4x as much as the fence bought it for!
uhh, yeah. $1200 for a 6 month old (at least) X40, off ebay at that. Dur Cletus, lets buy Anna-May-Beth a laptop for school!
Fuck off moron, take your condescending, insulting bullshit
Heheh, that would be more amusing if you ended that with "you fucking stupid cocksucking son of a cum guzzling whore" or something. Nice try though.
Or are you so sensitive because you sell stolen goods online too?
Ooh. Good one. I guess you read ignoramusmaximus's posts and picked up one of his lines. Long live YUO STOLZORZ TEH LAPTOPS AND $ELL$ DEM ON TEH INTARWEB!
That and a good chunk of the math teachers hate the fact that they were assigned to teach the class.
A bad combination.
And you're a fucking idiot.
There have been several times in the last couple of months where you could buy modern laptops (new, from retail stores) for as cheap as $300. Even so, the price on laptops has dropped quite a bit and you really don't even have to look around very long to find a laptop for $600 and change.
In fact, here is one for $674.
It took me all of 15 fucking seconds to find it (literally). Had I wanted to find something better, I easily could of have. Sadly, Dell got anally raped last quarter, so it will be a bit harder to find something for 5 and change, but during the past couple of months, I don't believe that there was one day without a $500-$600 dell laptop deal.
This totally ignores government auctions and the fact that some people need to sell their shit "now" to pay for rent or so that Guido won't break his legs, etc.
So, really, $300 isn't completely off the wall when it comes to someone selling a used laptop and is a perfectly reasonable price unless you're a mouthbreathing redneck who goes to "Best Buy" to decide what laptop prices are.
Feel free to yell "fence, fence!" and apply that label to everyone who sells "hi tech" stuff online, but perhaps you should Try Thinking (TM).
Really? someeone should tell GM to update their website then...
Doesn't really matter, both make shitty cars.
Of course, if it breaks out of warranty... /wave lifetime subscription?
I'd just start playing Counterstrike again.
There are other games? What?
There were RSS feeds for a couple of the good TV episode bittorrent sites a while back. Not quite the same thing, but it worked.
Duty cycle of the 5L is 4k pages per month. That said, most of the 5L's out there haven't done so well.
Not to rain on your point, but "printed lots" on a Laserjet 4000 is around 65,000 pages a month.
If you've printed more than two or 3 times that since '97, I'd be surprised.
They were designed to last a long time, but most people tossed them because they didn't want to buy the $40 paper pickup, etc, rollers.
That said, starting from the 4100, HP's printers are built to... shall we say... less exacting standards and have been having more and more issues (4100 was plagued with fuser issues). Now that Carly is gone, perhaps something will change in the high-er end printer division, but low end will always be low end printers.
5. Be dragged out of their offices by a mob and hanged from lamp posts.
Well... one can hope.
For private pilots
;)
;) They cost a bit to join (you don't need to join to get the magazine) but you get a bunch of discounts, swag, etc, so it is worth it in the long run.
USA - 2-5k, although it can be a bit less.
Depends how good you are at it, the cost of the aircraft rental, instructor rental, etc.
You need 40 hours of flight time (30 with instructor, 10 solo IIRC) in order to get the license, although you might want to take more.
Plan on spending at least $20 an hour for the instructor and $35 for the aircraft. At least.
Canada, 7-15k-ish. I think $40/$35 an hour and up and 40 hours are required.
None of the above includes ground school - you usually have to pay for that seperately, although some flight schools will bundle it into a package.
Depending on the school, most will let you double up with another student in the cockpit and split the instructor cost. Or you can find a flying club that owns a plane and joins in. Or if you have a rich uncle with a plane and mechanic, that works well too
Oh, last I checked AOPA was sending out a free half year sub to its Flight Training magazine. 1-800-USA-AOPA and beg
In the USA, if you're under 21, consider the Civil Air Patrol. They will help you with paying for the classes - or pay for everything in some cases - and the "volunteer work" (i.e. stuff you do so they send you to flight school) looks great on resumes, college aps etc. Free / cheap to join - like $25 a year for CAP and you might need to buy a uniform and some small stuff.
They will often help with ground school and while they are supposed to teach stuff, the squadron I went to was pretty disorganized and nothing really got taught. Still, show up and they would send you to a camp for the summer (parachuting, gliding, flying, survival, etc)
In Canada, you have the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, which is also free / cheap and they basically give you a uniform for free (you're supposed to return it, but lets just say a certain cold weather gortex parka got lost along the way).
The squadron where I was at also paid for the medical certificate (including exam, which cost $200 or so, a nice chunk of change in a country where a doctors visit is free) and the ground school was taught free of charge by good instructors. Books, etc, also free. If you wanted to get a full scholarship, you had to apply, pass the written exam with good marks (not terribly difficult, mind you) and write an essay or something. Usually one or two cadets went every summer to get their pilots license and one or two went to get their glider license. Other camps included survival, leadership, music, physical fitness (for the nutcases who like to run 4 marathons in a row), first aid, etc, etc.
Don't let the military structure, etc, scare you - it isn't like you'll be press ganged into shooting drug runners or anything like that, CAP does a lot of SAR work and RCAC doesn't really do anything except for going flying / gliding / camping / shooting every month or so in addition to the weekly meetings.
I don't think CAP Cadets can take part in SAR missions directly, but can do a ride-along type thing, which is pretty cool as well.
But do realize that if you're going to get them to pay for everything, you're going to have to suck up a fair bit in order to get a scholarship and do a lot of grunt work like showing up for meetings, controlling parking at airshows and basically showing them that you're disciplined and dedicated.
From my experience, the RCAC had a lot more attendance, etc, than CAP - the RCAC squadron had usually around 100 people show up weekly (I think 140 was the most one day) when I was in this small town up in Canada (200,000 people), while the CAP squadron that covered all of Portland, Oregon and the surrounding cities (3.5 million+) had maybe 25 on a good day, including all the people whose job it was to be there.
That might of have had something to do with the way it was run, but a small squadron can work to your advant
Actually did that on a machine just yesterday after spending 2 hours cleaning out the viruses, spyware, porn dialers et al. Doesn't look exactly like ie, but close enough for these users...
Same. Quite a few years ago (when our apartment didn't offer anything better than 56k), we signed up with a free CD and I think we dragged it along for just over a year and a bit that way. Just had to write down a reminder on the calendar every month or two. ;)
So I guess you could say that they don't allow their customers to cancel
All in all though, they only got fined a million and change. Their own legal fees were probably 4-5x that.
At the same time, you have to admit that it isn't something that someone can do in their garage on a small budget. You need a fair bit of processing power and moderately expensive equipment to be able to do it.
Perhaps licensing terms that prohibit the manufacturer from creating any products that use the alternate format (a la Coke / Pepsi in schools)?
Or prohibitively expensive licensing fees that preclude a company from being able to license both "technologies"
Make no mistake about it; this is the ultimate form of petty bullshit and both sides win while the consumer ultimately loses.