Nope. Within a couple of weeks he'd picked up a replacement at a junkyard and installed it. Took a couple of months before he got around to having it painted to match the truck though.
I would, just as a conversation starter.
He has a better conversation starter. He only has one arm. Lost the other in an accident when he was 18 (he's 85 now).
But the question is - which woke you up? The big-ass freaking BOOM or the mangled shreds of pickup tailgate bits poking holes in the side of your house?:)
Hehe. The back of the truck was pointed down the driveway. The neighbor's house across the street (quite a ways away -- it's a long driveway and a wide road) didn't appear to have taken any damage.
What a BS story. It did NOT blow a hole in the tailgate.
Yes, it did. I'll see if my wife still has the pictures on her phone. It blew a roughly circular hole right through both pieces of sheet metal. It also bent the latch on one side but both of the latches and the hinges held.
My wife's uncle builds and shoots them. Years ago, he competed with his cannon, in both round shot and rifled competitions, with self-cast balls and "bullets" (I forget the correct name for them). These days he just does it for fun.
You do have to be careful with them, though. Last year (2008) on the fourth of July, he took his small (2.5") cannon down to the city park like every year, to fire it as part of the city's early morning festivities. That went well, and on the way back he decided to stop off at my house and wake us all up, since my kids usually go down to the park. Unfortunately, he forgot to lower the tailgate of his pickup truck before touching off the powder. It blew an 8-inch hole through his tailgate. The cannon didn't have a projectile loaded, just gunpowder and a wad, but the force mangled his tailgate.
This isn't completely on-topic, but it's something I've been wanting to say for a while, and this is as good a time as any.
The discussion in this area is so polarized on both sides it's almost impossible to talk about rationally. On the one hand, there certainly are some self-professed Christians, including prominent ones, who are unabashed gay bashers. They're wrong, and God will correct them in due time. I'll correct them to their faces, given a chance. On the other hand, there are some homosexuals, including prominent ones, who see anything that is less than 100% supportive of homosexuality as "homophobia".
From where I, a Christian, sit, both extremes are wrong. Homosexuality is contrary to God's commandments (i.e. a sin), but so are a heck of a lot of other things people do -- including being hateful towards people who commit some particular sin, like homosexuality.
True Christians shouldn't hate anyone, whether as a group or as individuals. I certainly don't hate gays or lesbians, either collectively or as individuals. The homosexuals I know are pretty much just people like any other. Some I really like, others... not so much. I'm not concerned about "catching" the "gay disease" from them, or about them influencing or "recruiting" my children, etc.
That said, if asked I make no bones about saying that their homosexual acts are sinful. I don't volunteer this opinion, but if it comes up I don't try to hide, which tends to get me labeled as a "gay basher" and a "homophobe". Not in real-life discussions, where people are more civil, but in online fora like this one suggesting that there may be something sinful about homosexuality is guaranteed to elicit such responses. Undoubtedly, this post will trigger a few.
From a doctrinal perspective, homosexuality is a serious sin, at the same level as fornication. It's not as serious as adultery, since that involves not just sexual sin but also breaking a solemn vow and most likely injuring a spouse. Adultery is itself less serious than pedophilia or rape, since those are non-consensual and generally very harmful. It makes no sense in general to be abusive to sinners of any sort, but it's absolutely ludicrous to heap greater abuse on those who commit lesser sins.
My point here is just to try to make clear that, per Christian doctrine, Christians should accept gays as valid and valuable people, who have the same rights as all other children of God. Homosexuals should, in their turn, accept that Christians believe homosexuality is wrong, and not demonize Christians for their beliefs.
There is a middle ground that doesn't demand that people give up their right to conduct their private relationships however they want, doesn't demean or disadvantage people for making unpopular choices, and doesn't demand that people give up their closely-held religious beliefs.
It's called tolerance, and it's really not that hard.
An aside about marriage: IMO, the solution to the marriage "problem" is to get the government out of the business of formalizing or solemnizing personal relationships at all. The fundamental problem here is an inappropriate mixing of issues. Most of the practical concerns around gay marriage are related to financial issues, like insurance and taxes. Most of the opposition to gay marriage is due to religious/moral issues. There are two separate things, and they should be handled separately.
From a financial perspective, it makes sense for an employer to provide insurance to its employees and their "dependents", meaning those who depend upon them financially. Likewise, the government should assess taxes to such financial groupings, in order to be fair about it. So, IMO, people should be able to arrange contractual sharing of assets with whomever they wish (regardless of gender, or even number), and employers and insurers should recognize those relationships.
"Marriage" then becomes a purely personal/philosophical/religious issue, not a financial one that is of any
I prefer approval voting, actually. It's basically range voting with less flexibility, but I think the simplicity makes it very easy for people to understand. "Vote for every candidate you find acceptable."
A more comprehensive study would grab a frequency weighted sample that looked at a larger number of students at large public universities, as well as a significant number of students from community colleges.
Don't forget to sample those who don't attend traditional universities at all. Vocational schools and trade apprenticeships are less used than in the past, but they haven't disappeared by any means.
Consider the evolution of transportation, which started in the industrial revolution with the invention of a practical steam engine and continued unabated thereafter. First steam engines went in to large, heavy vehicles -- ships, then trains. The internal combustion engine made smaller engines more practical, enabling the development of automobiles and, in the early 20th century, aircraft. Along the way were many advancements in rail and road systems, and air traffic control.
The big wars did briefly (but hugely) accelerate advancements in these fields, but steady progress was made in peace time as well.
It's not like they are funded entirely by penalties... if they were, they would come down hard on every robocaller they could find and there likely wouldn't be any robocallers left to bother anyone.
No, if they were funded entirely by penalties, they'd be motivated to set the fines at a level that keeps the robocallers in business. You don't kill the golden goose.
WE NEED AUSTRALIAN BALLOTING. Then we could pass votes like this, without feeling like we "wasted" our vote on no-name politicians:
With instant runoff voting, you can only safely vote for third party candidates if those candidates have no chance of winning. If one of them gets enough support to garner, say, 30% of the vote, he'll have drawn most of his support from the major candidate to whom he is ideologically closest, giving the election to the major candidate from whom he is ideologically furthest.
So IRV still requires voters to vote "strategically", unless the third party candidates are all too weak to have a chance at wining.
Better options are approval voting, Condorcet voting, or range voting. None of these are strategy-free, but none of them create situations where it makes sense to vote for a less-preferred candidate over your most-preferred candidate, unlike IRV or (much, much worse, plurality rules, the system we use).
The credit card companies totally control what their merchants sell, how they sell it, etc. and could stop spam on 30 seconds if the US authorities went after them.
You don't understand the business model of most spam.
See, spammers don't care if the products being advertised are actually purchased because of the spam. It's irrelevant to them, because that's not how they get paid. They get paid by the guy who wants to sell the products. Sure, if he doesn't make any money (and almost none of them do), then eventually he'll give up and stop paying the spammer. But there's a nearly limitless supply of suckers willing to pay the spammer.
Beyond that, there are also large classes of spam where the guy paying for the spam does make money, and can't be traced. Stock spams, for example. Unless the pump-n-dump spammer is stupid, there will be no way to identify which of the lucky bastards that bought a few days or weeks before the stock jumped is the one that paid the spammer. And as another poster mentioned, what about spam that advertises products sold through major retailers, like Amazon? Or spam that advertises web sites that advertise other web sites? This is the modus operandi for most porn spam. They want you to click the link because then you'll see ads for other porn sites. Those ads may not even be paid ads, but the sites they link to may be full of paid ads.
Stopping spam is a HARD PROBLEM. There's no doubt that the government could do more, but I am very skeptical that there's anything they could do which would be very effective.
it was actually 14 years + 14 years extension by application originally, by the way - but let's stick to just 14 years)
Well, if you want to start with US history, it was. The Statute of Anne fixed it at 14 years, total.:-)
So you're saying that this happens as a form of protest to the break of social contract, and not just because people simply can do it and get away?
No.
I'm saying that most people are completely unaware of the social contract and of the value that copyright is intended to bring to them. They rightly, if not consciously, recognize that copyright in its current form is a one-sided trade and a bad deal. I'm saying that if copyright terms were appropriate in duration (and there's a very strong argument to be made that even 14 years is too long), then people would see the value in copyright and it would have moral force that it does not presently have.
Would there still be infringers? Certainly. There is always a segment of society who will do whatever they think they can get away with, regardless of morality. But that's not true of most people.
And when all of the botnet operators are in Eastern Europe and China, then what? The problem here is that the law has national boundaries but the Internet does not. International law is more of a concept than a reality.
Even within your own borders, it can be difficult to find botnet operators.
Pirating is so easy and does so little damage to the media companies that people don't even feel remorse for doing it.
I think it's a little deeper than that.
See, there used to be a notion of a "social contract" underlying copyright. The idea was that by enforcing copyright restrictions for a limited (fairly short) period of time, we could encourage the production and publication of works which would soon enrich us all by falling into the public domain. The existence of a rich public domain both acted as a constraint on the price of new works by giving people a less costly alternative and as a reminder to everyone of the benefits of honoring the social contract.
In a world where copyright expired after 14 years, the average college student would be very familiar with the theory underlying copyright, and why it's morally wrong to ignore it -- because the average college student would already have seen works fall into the public domain in his or her lifetime. A favorite childhood movie would have been freed, and others would be close.
But now, copyright has become perpetual, and the social contract broken.
Oh, sure, technically copyrights still expire, but that's only if they don't get retroactively extended again, and they already last longer than most lifetimes. The result is that Joe Sixpack thinks it's a legitimate (if obscure and trivial) question to ask "Who owns the copyright on Shakespeare's plays?". Most people don't realize that copyrights are even supposed to expire, and feel that the only moral force behind copyright is that an author, musician, etc., has a moral "right" to control his or her work. Even the ones who don't bother wondering why this is true for authors but not true for, say, plumbers, still recognize that this is a weak moral force, especially when it's clear that the creator is already very well paid for his or her work.
Thus, the extension of copyright terms has sucked all moral force out of copyright. People don't feel remorse because there's really no significant reason to feel remorse.
And the sad and delicious irony here, is that the very people who decry piracy the loudest are the same people who lobbied for term extension.
They did it to themselves. As far as I'm concerned, that removes what remaining moral force there might be. I don't pirate stuff myself, but I don't really consider it a moral issue. I do want to see that creators of good stuff get paid, not so much to pay for the work they have done as to encourage them to do some more, but that's it.
Spam isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. EVERY communication channel that gets created, gets abused by people like this until the law comes down on them to stop it. Whether it's email spam or loudspeaker trucks, it's the same problem.
The technical part of the problem is that there's no way to enforce a legal solution.
Finally, RSA SecurID is actually *not* vulnerable because the passwords it generates are *one time* passwords.
If the attacker has trojaned your machine, he just needs to arrange for his software to block your submission of the one-time password so that he can use it. If he gives you an error page, or even what looks like a functional page, then he can proceed to drain your bank account and leave you completely unsuspecting.
The M16s? The grenades? Those aren't being smuggled across the border unless the government is doing it -- actually the mexican goverment doesn't have that kind of firepower
The standard-issue duty weapon for Mexican soldiers is an M-16 rifle manufactured in Belgium.
Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States)
The rest of your post is spot on, but this part isn't correct.
Very little of the Mexican drug cartel's weaponry is from the US, and what weapons they do get from the US are the least effective parts of their arsenal. They've been fighting the Mexican army with fully automatic weapons, grenade launchers and RPGs, none of which can be obtained in the US unless you get them from US military and police forces. Civilians cannot possess grenades or RPGs and the 1987 ban on introduction of new fully automatic weapons into the civilian market means that those guns are hard to get in the US and very, very expensive (up to 50 times their nominal value).
Most of the misunderstanding in this area stems from an ATF report that stated that 90% of weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the US. The full report gives the details that show that the correct number is around 18%, but the summaries generally omit the details -- probably for political reasons. What the report shows is that 90% of the weapons recovered at Mexican crime scenes that are submitted to the US for tracing and can be traced come from the US.
Most of the weapons recovered at Mexican crime scenes can't be traced because they're black market guns manufactured in South America, Asia and Eastern Europe, many manufactured entirely without serial numbers or other identifiable markings, and the rest marked, but with shipments never tracked from the factories.
Even more importantly, many recovered weapons are not submitted to the ATF for tracing, because the Mexican officials know they didn't come from the US. A large portion of these weapons are Mexican military weapons, taken over to the drug cartels by deserting soldiers.
In 2007 and 2008, 29,000 firearms were recovered at Mexican crime scenes. Of these, only 11,000 were submitted to the US for tracing. Of those, only 6,000 were traceable. Of those, 90% came from the US, but they represent less than 18% of the total recovered.
That's what I figured, and contracting it to "huevodoce" or (nearly equivalently) "huevosadoce" would make sense. But it seemed odd that the 'h' turned to a 'g' (even though a 'g' at the beginning of a word in most spanish dialects tends to get voiced so lightly it's almost ignored) and that the 'c' turned to a 'ch'. Sibilants tend to fade, rather than being strengthened.
Right? Look at any NBA center. Shaq, for example, has a rare genetic condition causing him to be a fucking giant and giving him an unfair advantage over me, a 6'1" 190 lb. dude. Should he be allowed to play professional basketball? Of course.
The NBA considered denying him permission to play, but the decision fell apart when it was realized that no one had the balls to tell Shaq about it.
Slashdot Mirror
$5 says he's still driving around like that.
Nope. Within a couple of weeks he'd picked up a replacement at a junkyard and installed it. Took a couple of months before he got around to having it painted to match the truck though.
I would, just as a conversation starter.
He has a better conversation starter. He only has one arm. Lost the other in an accident when he was 18 (he's 85 now).
But the question is - which woke you up? The big-ass freaking BOOM or the mangled shreds of pickup tailgate bits poking holes in the side of your house? :)
Hehe. The back of the truck was pointed down the driveway. The neighbor's house across the street (quite a ways away -- it's a long driveway and a wide road) didn't appear to have taken any damage.
What a BS story. It did NOT blow a hole in the tailgate.
Yes, it did. I'll see if my wife still has the pictures on her phone. It blew a roughly circular hole right through both pieces of sheet metal. It also bent the latch on one side but both of the latches and the hinges held.
My wife's uncle builds and shoots them. Years ago, he competed with his cannon, in both round shot and rifled competitions, with self-cast balls and "bullets" (I forget the correct name for them). These days he just does it for fun.
You do have to be careful with them, though. Last year (2008) on the fourth of July, he took his small (2.5") cannon down to the city park like every year, to fire it as part of the city's early morning festivities. That went well, and on the way back he decided to stop off at my house and wake us all up, since my kids usually go down to the park. Unfortunately, he forgot to lower the tailgate of his pickup truck before touching off the powder. It blew an 8-inch hole through his tailgate. The cannon didn't have a projectile loaded, just gunpowder and a wad, but the force mangled his tailgate.
This isn't completely on-topic, but it's something I've been wanting to say for a while, and this is as good a time as any.
The discussion in this area is so polarized on both sides it's almost impossible to talk about rationally. On the one hand, there certainly are some self-professed Christians, including prominent ones, who are unabashed gay bashers. They're wrong, and God will correct them in due time. I'll correct them to their faces, given a chance. On the other hand, there are some homosexuals, including prominent ones, who see anything that is less than 100% supportive of homosexuality as "homophobia".
From where I, a Christian, sit, both extremes are wrong. Homosexuality is contrary to God's commandments (i.e. a sin), but so are a heck of a lot of other things people do -- including being hateful towards people who commit some particular sin, like homosexuality.
True Christians shouldn't hate anyone, whether as a group or as individuals. I certainly don't hate gays or lesbians, either collectively or as individuals. The homosexuals I know are pretty much just people like any other. Some I really like, others... not so much. I'm not concerned about "catching" the "gay disease" from them, or about them influencing or "recruiting" my children, etc.
That said, if asked I make no bones about saying that their homosexual acts are sinful. I don't volunteer this opinion, but if it comes up I don't try to hide, which tends to get me labeled as a "gay basher" and a "homophobe". Not in real-life discussions, where people are more civil, but in online fora like this one suggesting that there may be something sinful about homosexuality is guaranteed to elicit such responses. Undoubtedly, this post will trigger a few.
From a doctrinal perspective, homosexuality is a serious sin, at the same level as fornication. It's not as serious as adultery, since that involves not just sexual sin but also breaking a solemn vow and most likely injuring a spouse. Adultery is itself less serious than pedophilia or rape, since those are non-consensual and generally very harmful. It makes no sense in general to be abusive to sinners of any sort, but it's absolutely ludicrous to heap greater abuse on those who commit lesser sins.
My point here is just to try to make clear that, per Christian doctrine, Christians should accept gays as valid and valuable people, who have the same rights as all other children of God. Homosexuals should, in their turn, accept that Christians believe homosexuality is wrong, and not demonize Christians for their beliefs.
There is a middle ground that doesn't demand that people give up their right to conduct their private relationships however they want, doesn't demean or disadvantage people for making unpopular choices, and doesn't demand that people give up their closely-held religious beliefs.
It's called tolerance, and it's really not that hard.
An aside about marriage: IMO, the solution to the marriage "problem" is to get the government out of the business of formalizing or solemnizing personal relationships at all. The fundamental problem here is an inappropriate mixing of issues. Most of the practical concerns around gay marriage are related to financial issues, like insurance and taxes. Most of the opposition to gay marriage is due to religious/moral issues. There are two separate things, and they should be handled separately.
From a financial perspective, it makes sense for an employer to provide insurance to its employees and their "dependents", meaning those who depend upon them financially. Likewise, the government should assess taxes to such financial groupings, in order to be fair about it. So, IMO, people should be able to arrange contractual sharing of assets with whomever they wish (regardless of gender, or even number), and employers and insurers should recognize those relationships.
"Marriage" then becomes a purely personal/philosophical/religious issue, not a financial one that is of any
I prefer approval voting, actually. It's basically range voting with less flexibility, but I think the simplicity makes it very easy for people to understand. "Vote for every candidate you find acceptable."
A more comprehensive study would grab a frequency weighted sample that looked at a larger number of students at large public universities, as well as a significant number of students from community colleges.
Don't forget to sample those who don't attend traditional universities at all. Vocational schools and trade apprenticeships are less used than in the past, but they haven't disappeared by any means.
Consider the evolution of transportation, which started in the industrial revolution with the invention of a practical steam engine and continued unabated thereafter. First steam engines went in to large, heavy vehicles -- ships, then trains. The internal combustion engine made smaller engines more practical, enabling the development of automobiles and, in the early 20th century, aircraft. Along the way were many advancements in rail and road systems, and air traffic control.
The big wars did briefly (but hugely) accelerate advancements in these fields, but steady progress was made in peace time as well.
It's not like they are funded entirely by penalties... if they were, they would come down hard on every robocaller they could find and there likely wouldn't be any robocallers left to bother anyone.
No, if they were funded entirely by penalties, they'd be motivated to set the fines at a level that keeps the robocallers in business. You don't kill the golden goose.
WE NEED AUSTRALIAN BALLOTING. Then we could pass votes like this, without feeling like we "wasted" our vote on no-name politicians:
With instant runoff voting, you can only safely vote for third party candidates if those candidates have no chance of winning. If one of them gets enough support to garner, say, 30% of the vote, he'll have drawn most of his support from the major candidate to whom he is ideologically closest, giving the election to the major candidate from whom he is ideologically furthest.
So IRV still requires voters to vote "strategically", unless the third party candidates are all too weak to have a chance at wining.
Better options are approval voting, Condorcet voting, or range voting. None of these are strategy-free, but none of them create situations where it makes sense to vote for a less-preferred candidate over your most-preferred candidate, unlike IRV or (much, much worse, plurality rules, the system we use).
I agree that not having a perfect solution doesn't mean there's no point in doing something. But I disagree that you can achieve anything substantial.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1345993&cid=29196811.
The credit card companies totally control what their merchants sell, how they sell it, etc. and could stop spam on 30 seconds if the US authorities went after them.
You don't understand the business model of most spam.
See, spammers don't care if the products being advertised are actually purchased because of the spam. It's irrelevant to them, because that's not how they get paid. They get paid by the guy who wants to sell the products. Sure, if he doesn't make any money (and almost none of them do), then eventually he'll give up and stop paying the spammer. But there's a nearly limitless supply of suckers willing to pay the spammer.
Beyond that, there are also large classes of spam where the guy paying for the spam does make money, and can't be traced. Stock spams, for example. Unless the pump-n-dump spammer is stupid, there will be no way to identify which of the lucky bastards that bought a few days or weeks before the stock jumped is the one that paid the spammer. And as another poster mentioned, what about spam that advertises products sold through major retailers, like Amazon? Or spam that advertises web sites that advertise other web sites? This is the modus operandi for most porn spam. They want you to click the link because then you'll see ads for other porn sites. Those ads may not even be paid ads, but the sites they link to may be full of paid ads.
Stopping spam is a HARD PROBLEM. There's no doubt that the government could do more, but I am very skeptical that there's anything they could do which would be very effective.
it was actually 14 years + 14 years extension by application originally, by the way - but let's stick to just 14 years)
Well, if you want to start with US history, it was. The Statute of Anne fixed it at 14 years, total. :-)
So you're saying that this happens as a form of protest to the break of social contract, and not just because people simply can do it and get away?
No.
I'm saying that most people are completely unaware of the social contract and of the value that copyright is intended to bring to them. They rightly, if not consciously, recognize that copyright in its current form is a one-sided trade and a bad deal. I'm saying that if copyright terms were appropriate in duration (and there's a very strong argument to be made that even 14 years is too long), then people would see the value in copyright and it would have moral force that it does not presently have.
Would there still be infringers? Certainly. There is always a segment of society who will do whatever they think they can get away with, regardless of morality. But that's not true of most people.
I'm not. If spam is the price we have to pay for sovereignty, I'm okay with that.
The e-mail doesn't come from those countries. The botnets are in your country, but operated by people from those countries.
And when all of the botnet operators are in Eastern Europe and China, then what? The problem here is that the law has national boundaries but the Internet does not. International law is more of a concept than a reality.
Even within your own borders, it can be difficult to find botnet operators.
Pirating is so easy and does so little damage to the media companies that people don't even feel remorse for doing it.
I think it's a little deeper than that.
See, there used to be a notion of a "social contract" underlying copyright. The idea was that by enforcing copyright restrictions for a limited (fairly short) period of time, we could encourage the production and publication of works which would soon enrich us all by falling into the public domain. The existence of a rich public domain both acted as a constraint on the price of new works by giving people a less costly alternative and as a reminder to everyone of the benefits of honoring the social contract.
In a world where copyright expired after 14 years, the average college student would be very familiar with the theory underlying copyright, and why it's morally wrong to ignore it -- because the average college student would already have seen works fall into the public domain in his or her lifetime. A favorite childhood movie would have been freed, and others would be close.
But now, copyright has become perpetual, and the social contract broken.
Oh, sure, technically copyrights still expire, but that's only if they don't get retroactively extended again, and they already last longer than most lifetimes. The result is that Joe Sixpack thinks it's a legitimate (if obscure and trivial) question to ask "Who owns the copyright on Shakespeare's plays?". Most people don't realize that copyrights are even supposed to expire, and feel that the only moral force behind copyright is that an author, musician, etc., has a moral "right" to control his or her work. Even the ones who don't bother wondering why this is true for authors but not true for, say, plumbers, still recognize that this is a weak moral force, especially when it's clear that the creator is already very well paid for his or her work.
Thus, the extension of copyright terms has sucked all moral force out of copyright. People don't feel remorse because there's really no significant reason to feel remorse.
And the sad and delicious irony here, is that the very people who decry piracy the loudest are the same people who lobbied for term extension.
They did it to themselves. As far as I'm concerned, that removes what remaining moral force there might be. I don't pirate stuff myself, but I don't really consider it a moral issue. I do want to see that creators of good stuff get paid, not so much to pay for the work they have done as to encourage them to do some more, but that's it.
Spam isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. EVERY communication channel that gets created, gets abused by people like this until the law comes down on them to stop it. Whether it's email spam or loudspeaker trucks, it's the same problem.
The technical part of the problem is that there's no way to enforce a legal solution.
Thanks for the correction. I'm not sure where I picked that incorrect information up, but a little research shows that you're right.
Finally, RSA SecurID is actually *not* vulnerable because the passwords it generates are *one time* passwords.
If the attacker has trojaned your machine, he just needs to arrange for his software to block your submission of the one-time password so that he can use it. If he gives you an error page, or even what looks like a functional page, then he can proceed to drain your bank account and leave you completely unsuspecting.
The M16s? The grenades? Those aren't being smuggled across the border unless the government is doing it -- actually the mexican goverment doesn't have that kind of firepower
The standard-issue duty weapon for Mexican soldiers is an M-16 rifle manufactured in Belgium.
Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States)
The rest of your post is spot on, but this part isn't correct.
Very little of the Mexican drug cartel's weaponry is from the US, and what weapons they do get from the US are the least effective parts of their arsenal. They've been fighting the Mexican army with fully automatic weapons, grenade launchers and RPGs, none of which can be obtained in the US unless you get them from US military and police forces. Civilians cannot possess grenades or RPGs and the 1987 ban on introduction of new fully automatic weapons into the civilian market means that those guns are hard to get in the US and very, very expensive (up to 50 times their nominal value).
Most of the misunderstanding in this area stems from an ATF report that stated that 90% of weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the US. The full report gives the details that show that the correct number is around 18%, but the summaries generally omit the details -- probably for political reasons. What the report shows is that 90% of the weapons recovered at Mexican crime scenes that are submitted to the US for tracing and can be traced come from the US.
Most of the weapons recovered at Mexican crime scenes can't be traced because they're black market guns manufactured in South America, Asia and Eastern Europe, many manufactured entirely without serial numbers or other identifiable markings, and the rest marked, but with shipments never tracked from the factories.
Even more importantly, many recovered weapons are not submitted to the ATF for tracing, because the Mexican officials know they didn't come from the US. A large portion of these weapons are Mexican military weapons, taken over to the drug cartels by deserting soldiers.
In 2007 and 2008, 29,000 firearms were recovered at Mexican crime scenes. Of these, only 11,000 were submitted to the US for tracing. Of those, only 6,000 were traceable. Of those, 90% came from the US, but they represent less than 18% of the total recovered.
In most spanish dialects a 'g' in the beggining of a word isn't really pronounced like a hard 'g'.
I believe I said that.
It's short for "huevos a los doce".
That's what I figured, and contracting it to "huevodoce" or (nearly equivalently) "huevosadoce" would make sense. But it seemed odd that the 'h' turned to a 'g' (even though a 'g' at the beginning of a word in most spanish dialects tends to get voiced so lightly it's almost ignored) and that the 'c' turned to a 'ch'. Sibilants tend to fade, rather than being strengthened.
Right? Look at any NBA center. Shaq, for example, has a rare genetic condition causing him to be a fucking giant and giving him an unfair advantage over me, a 6'1" 190 lb. dude. Should he be allowed to play professional basketball? Of course.
The NBA considered denying him permission to play, but the decision fell apart when it was realized that no one had the balls to tell Shaq about it.