that our Homeland Security Overlords are probably working on a human version of. It's ZigBeef an RFID solution for tracking cattle. Right now it requires ear tags, but it will either get smaller or TSA will just require everyone flying on a plane to have a non-removable tag stapled to their ear.
for those of us with borderline OCD. A
keychain monitor that tells you if the lights are off, doors locked, windows closed, etcetera. Now if they could just add a module to let you know that the stove was turned off and the iron unplugged I'd be able to relax when I left the house.
Have you heard Steve Jobs whining about the The PortalPlayer Tax? I didn't think so.
Because PortalPlayer knows that if they piss Apple off bad enough Apple can either buy them or develop their own in house solution. And if you don't think Apple has this kind of software talent then you haven't been paying attention to the fact that they've been keeping MacOSX running on multiple hardware platforms for years in case they wanted to change.
The biggest reason that Linux is going to take over in the embedded space is because you don't have to pay the Microsoft Tax. If you license WinCE (who
the fuck came up with that acronym? Are they still employed?) you get to pay Microsoft for every device you ship, which means that Microsoft gets much richer if you develop the next iPod. There's also the fact that WinCE is huge compared to Linux. Strip out the bloat and crap of modern distributions and you get a product that's small and efficient in a way that Windows will never be.
by DISCO, the Defense Indusrial Security Clearance Office or (yes, they are referred to as "DISCO", yes it is an incredibly contrived acronym, no I am not making this up) and one of the things the instructor discussed was a case where the Department of Justice had surplussed some PCs to various local law enforcement agenties back in the late 1980s. The PCs had not been wiped and a tech savvy cop in Virginia started going through one of them and lo and behold he found the DoJs witness protection program list, unencrypted, just waiting there for sale to the highest bidder.
Fortunately he was an honest man and didn't sell the list, rather he contacted the DoJ and DoJ contacted DISCO to help get their shit together. The instructor was making the point that when you surplus equipment that you really need to make sure that you wipe the drives and any other storage media. His bias was that the easiest way to do this was to physically remove and destroy the media because you could never really be sure if a wipe program had worked (well you could go over the drive to make sure that it had been erased, but who's going to do this?).
When I don't want to physically destroy a drive but want to make sure that it's gone I either wipe it with a low-level hardware format utility such as the one built into Adaptec SCSI cards, or I use a program such as autoclave
by Josh Larios (which he isn't supporting any more outside of the University of Washington community) although now I guess I'll have to try the recommended replacement Darik's Boot and Nuke. A side benefit of programs such as this one is that they really exercise the Hell out of your disks, which is great to smoke out any potential failures.
I'll give you improving the up and down bit, but they aren't playing with crystals because someone accidentally left the legos back at Cape Kennedy. Whatever you want to see done in space, low-G research and an orbital platform are a necessary step to getting there.
Amen brutha man. You're preachin to the choir. Yes, we need a way into space and an orbital laboratory and a moon base and extended unmanned missions to all of the planets with large nuclear powered probes and solar power satellites and the SOLARES system and lots of other good stuff. The problem is that the Shuttle and ISS are not the way to get those things or even progress on the way to getting those things. They are dead end toys which have taken too much time, too much money and in the case of the Shuttle, too many lives.
stick a goddamned fork in the Shuttle program already and terminate the fucking thing. There is no scientific value in launching astronauts up to ISS. None whatsoever, it's an orbiting boondoggle that exists to give the Shuttle somewhere to go. Hire the Russians to boost ISS into a higher orbit and then mothball it. Then cancel the Shuttle program, fire everyone who works for it and let out bids for a new manned spacecraft. I know that there are some shittleheads who will cry and whine about this and about how wonderful ISS is because the astronauts do experiments with crystals up there, but it's a waste of money and for those of us who actually want to see the US doing something in space an insult to boot.
I'd like to take some Windows courses to broaden my knowledge but from what I've seen the best way to administer Windows is to be totally fascistic and not change anything unless you absolutely have to. At the company I work for we have systems running Windows 95 that are hooked up to pieces of lab equipment. Those systems are going to be running until we retire the equipment they control. Similarly we have a bunch of NT 4 boxen running SQL server, and they're going to run it until we create a new environment and redo all the schemas.
Looking at some of the MCSEs I've worked with (who are probably similar to the admins you deal with) I'm reminded, bitterly, of when Microsoft claimed that the MCSE was going to be a gold standard for certifications. It wasn't going to be a lame-ass piece of paper like the CNE or CNA.
This isn't a problem with Windows, it's a problem with your AD servers and by extension with your AD administrators who have fucked up the domain so that users have to deal with shit like this.
I'm a UNIX guy who works in a largely Windows shop and I've been working with some really sharp Windows guys who know their stuff and know how to use the goodies that Microsoft is putting into the operating system and as a result I'm getting a new respect for a lot of MS stuff.
They weren't available for work, they weren't disabled or otherwise unable to work. They made a lifestyle choice to not work, why should they get any money for it?
You don't understand, there is a certain class of British leftist to whom coal mining is every bit as sacrosanct as the image of family farming in the US and France. Something about nationalised collierys really makes these guys spooge. It's some weird Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin/mass collectivization/5 year plan thing that's wormed its way into their political DNA.
As for the reservations, they pretty much do whatever they want within reason, and if they want to screw around with daylight savings time we're not going to stop them.
Yeah, we've stolen all of their land, broken all of the treaties we signed with them and gave them blankets loaded with smallpox, least we can let them do is play with the clock.
Boy I'm running it at full frame rates. Thanks. Apple PowerMac G5, dual 2.7Ghz CPUs, 4Gb RAM,
6800 video card. Dude, gotta get rid of that suck
ass WinXP environment.
That's beautiful. I would love to have one of those on my wall. I wonder where I can get one. Didn't R. Buckminster Fuller also have a periodic table that he did that was all triangles or some kind of interesting polyhedron?
Of course I want to see the Roger Penrose periodic table, once you understand tiling theory you can figure out why hydrogen and uranium should be next
to each other.
The title should have been "Billionaire College Dropout Accountant Encourages Students To Go To College, Major In Computer Science"
No kidding, you could have a similar headline for Steve Jobs. I loved seeing this story in the Seattle Times this morning. The headline was "Gates Stresses Need for Qualified CS Grads", the headline underneath it was "Hewlett-Packard to cut 14,500 jobs in restructuring plan". Do they put these things together deliberately to fuck with us, or is it just an accident?
(which he'd been predicting for the last decade
or so) he's just been so full of himself. But you have to love Dvorak, despite the numerous bitch-slappings the tech industry has handed him for his wildly inaccurate predictions he keeps on soldiering along. You have to admire that dedication, even as it's annoying the fuck out of you.
Dude. Everything produces greenhouse gases. Did you somehow think that the materials used in windmills or solar cells were magically deposited on earth by generous, eco-friendly aliens? Hate to bum your eco-high, they were dug out of the ground and refined the same damned sources of energy used to refine uranium.
As far as there having been plenty of nuclear accidents so fucking what. We've had plenty of airplane accidents, including a non-accident that killed 2752 people, more people than killed in every nuclear accident that ever happened, yet despite that people still fly, including the eco-weasels who bitch about nuclear power and greenhouse warming, flying to their international conferences on greenhouse gas spewing jet aircraft.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal,
How to dispose of nuclear waste. Reprocess waste to recover long lived fissionable isotopes that can be used in power reactors. Take shorter lived, hotter isotopes and bury underground for 1000 years (which is manageable with today's technology, the fucking pyramids have lasted for 5000 years) and let it cool down. Problem solved.
the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables),
Factored in all of the subsidies renewables receive? No, you haven't. If you did they come off much worse and nuclear comes off much better.
nuclear weapons proliferation,
Bad guys are going to get WMDs regardless of whether or not nuclear power is used.
and of course apart from the Three Mile Island meltdown (26 years ago) and the criticality accident at the uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura (just 6 years ago), there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents.
Plenty of plane accidents too, yet despite that people are still flying, including environmentalists.
Oh, and as far as uranium running out, yeah right. Fuel costs are a minor cost in the cost of a nuclear plant, increase the fuel cost by a factor of 10 and you still aren't impacting operations.
on/. It's so fucking great. I have to do this at my house. Seriously though I think that this guy is onto something. If you had some kind of standardized panel you could build the CTs right into the circuit panel. Then you could hook them up to a dedicated controller to give you the information. Or perhaps you could build smart outlets that had a built in TCs in them like a smarter X10 outlet. I think people would buy this, energy consumption is becoming more of a concern for many homeowners.
I can tell from your post you're citing military "made for public consumption" uniformed propaganda about how nice our bullets are.
Well let's see, you're posting as AC, which means that there's a 99 percent probability that you're full of shit. I'm speaking from experience, I have a Bushmaster sitting in a gun safe not 20 feet away from me. I fired the M-16 in basic training at Fort Knox and for weapons qualifications every other year in the National Guard and at various NCO academies. Not once were we ever issued magick bullets that would knock a man off his feet, spin through his body and then, upon exit, turn to seek another target.
I can tell from your post you're citing military "made for public consumption" uniformed propaganda about how nice our bullets are.
I can tell from your post that you're full of shit, because you're posting as AC, I can also tell from your total ignorance that you're probably some sort of left wing dickhead who gets all his news from IndyMedia and who wanks himself to sleep every night over a semen stained picture of Noam Chomsky. Why don't you cite some links to these studies?
It doesn't take any "voodoo" to make a bullet tumble or fragment at the speeds they're traveling. "FMJ" and "ball" are terms you seem stuck on, ascribing some magical quality to.
I'd suggest that you're the one who's stuck on these. FMJ means "full metal jacket" "ball" means a solid round, these are about as cheap and simple as you can get in ammunition, a good thing if you're planning on firing off millions of rounds. I would suggest that you're the kind of left wing crackhead whose tiny brain shuts down when he hears the word "military". News flash crackhead, if you're so inclined you can get ammunition that's much more lethal than standard miltary rounds at any store that sells reloading supplies. There's nothing special about military bullets, there doesn't need to be and the military, with the exception of a few special forces units that might have such ammunition (I don't know anything about this and you don't either) can't afford special ammunition.
They're MEANINGLESS in regards to tumble and shatter in designed military rounds, because a "FMJ" "ball" round can easilly be designed to tumble and fragment. Slightly altering the center of mass, such as in AK rounds, or the addition of slight designs such as the rings on M16 rounds, do the trick.
What fucking rings are you talking about, there are no rings on an M16 round, have you ever seen one, held one, loaded several hundred of them into magazines on a rifle range? There aren't any magickal voodoo rings on them. If you'd ever handled a few thousand of them you'd know this.
Get a clue already. Nothing is more iritating than some goon who thinks a "good source" of information is propaganda that he and all his buddies agree on. You sound like the type of person that wouldn't know a scientific study and a truly reliable source of information if it fell on you.
No, I'd have to say that AC's whose firearms knowledge has come from playing Doom III are pretty damned irritating.
Get a clue already. Nothing is more iritating than some goon who thinks a "good source" of information is propaganda that he and all his buddies agree on. You sound like the type of person that wouldn't know a scientific study and a truly reliable source of information if it fell on you.
You have never fired a gun before have you. I can tell from this that you've never fired a gun before, you've probably never even touched one. You say that morons should not try to explain physics, well you shouldn't, and you shouldn't try to explain firearms design or ballistics. Yeah, you can dissipate some energy with springs, and the like but not all of it, and a significant portion of it is still transferred to your body. Spend a day at the range some time firing a.30.06 or a shotgun and then tell me how your shoulder feels at the end of
From your posting I can tell that you've never been in the military, fired an M-16 or even seen one in real life. So let's go down the line:
I'm not sure I believe that - the rounds currently deployed to the US Army for their M16s are intended to tear an opponent apart, since an opponent who dies instantly can't continue to fight injured, or worse, charge and set off a bomb. They're also built to knock the target off their feet to prevent a charging enemy
OK, the rounds used in the average M16 rifle are a 5.56x45mm (.223 calibre) ball. Ball means solid, no magic hollowpoint, no poison, no voodoo, it's an upscaled.22 bullet, you can buy similar ammo at any gun store.
As far as the M16 knocking someone off their feet have you ever heard of a little thing called "Newton's third law of motion" you know, that one that says something like "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". OK, if you fire a bullet at someone that has enough power to knock them off their feet then guess what: you as the shooter will also be knocked off your feet. MV=MV and in all of my years of firing M-16s, (and M-60s and M-2s, and M-85s, M-240s and M68E2s) I never noticed any magic inertialess compensators that eliminated the recoil.
The recoil on the M-16 is pretty minimal compared to that of a rifle firing a heavier cartridge such as the 7.62x51 (.308) or 7.62x63 (30.06). If I spend a few hours at the range blasting away at targets with my.308 Vepr, or my Ruger.44 magnum carbine or my.308 M77 Mark II I'll end up with a bruised shoulder. On the other hand I can fire an M-16 all day long (and have done so) without any damage.
M-16 rounds are nasty - they have a hollowed out section on one side so that upon a collision, they drastically change shape. This causes them to travel through the body with an increased angular velocity spinning the way though the targets internals. If you've ever seen a target dummy shot with an M-16 round, the hole going in is the size you'd expect it to be - you can fit your hand in the hole on the other side. People who get shot in the arms with an M-16 will lose the arm, go into shock (and thus completely exit the battle) and almost certainly die shortly thereafter.
Dude, it's a fucking ball round, despite what you might have read somewhere on the internet the US Army was not able to duplicate any magic bullet technology that might have been used in the Kennedy assassination to produce a wonder bullet. IF they had we probably would have won the Vietnam war. "Wow Sarge, I fired ten rounds through my M16 and killed 300 VC and wounded 250 others!." "Yep,
that's the magic bullet technology son, we'll be in Hanoi by Christmas. God bless the magic bullet!". I've blasted plenty of things with standard M16 ammo and haven't noticed any magical spinning mushroom effect. I've met and served with a bunch of Vietnam vets who hated the M16 not because of the early design problems (lack of a forward assist, standard barrel and chamber not chrome plated) but because the round didn't have any stopping power, that whole MV=MV thing again, it doesn't hurt you as much when you fire your M16, guess what, that means it doesn't hurt the enemy as much when it hits him. "Damn you Sir Isaac Newton!". Shotguns and Tommy guns were very highly thought of because someone hit with a shotgun or with a.45 round fired from a short distance generally stops what they're doing (trying to kill you) and focuses on something else (bleeding).
The big advantage of the M16 is that it's a lot lighter than an M14 or an M1, it's shorter, so less likely to get caught on things when you're charging through the brush, and you can carry more ammo for it. Given that a lot of the shooting you do in the military isn't aimed at the other guy as much as it is fired at him to keep his head down (so he can't shoot at you) this is a useful feature.
On the opposite side of the coin, does that mean that future Mac OS can run on any Intel (and AMD?) machine? Or will it only run on an Intel specifically built for Mac?
No, and you're missing the point. Apple is not a hardware company, nor are they a software company, the reason why Macs work so well is that Apple is a platform company. I wouldn't want to run MacOS on standard Intel motherboards because standard Intel motherboards are loaded with obsolete crap (floppy controllers, parallel ports, RS-232 serial, etc, etc, etc). I don't mind an Intel processor based system as long as we can leave behind all of the cruft and crap that has been dragging down the PC for the last 10 years or so. In fact it will be interesting to see what Intel can do on a more restricted platform.
Similarly I'm not interested in running Windows XP on a intel system designed for MacOS. The ability to do so via RedBox or dualboot is a nice feature and might help Apple get into some corporate environments but I already have an Intel box to run Windows XP and I can't see how putting it on the Mac would make the experience any better as the lame OS architecture and compromises driven by the MS marketing department would still be there.
are going to go the way of DVD-Audio and SACD. Despite the fact that Sony has made almost every one of their DVD players capable of playing SACD and the large number of DVD-Audio players available most artists and labels are shunning these formats. One reason, despite their higher quality, has to be the onerous copy protection attached to each format, including such idiocy as disabling digital bass management at the player level thus requiring users to run six analog connections between their SACD/DVD players and their home theater receivers. Most consumers looked at this and said "fuck this higher quality multi-channel noise". And now labels are releasing their titles on the increasingly popular DualDisc format, which combines a standard CD with a DVD with Dolby 5.1 sound. Thus allowing you to play this in your car or on a home theater system and which doesn't require running a bunch of extra cables and purchasing an analog bass management system for those receivers that don't have analog bass management capabilities.
What does HD-DVD offer the average user? Most people like DVDs not only because they have better image quality than VHS, even if you connect to your TV with an RF cable or RCA composite jack and also because they're smaller than VHS tapes, more durable and easier to fast forward and frame by frame. Exactly what does HD-DVD add to this? Well, you get more data storage, so if you wanted to have a bunch of movies on one disc you could, but I don't think Hollywood is going to go for that. Or you can have super duper high definition movies, which most users don't have the equipment to take advantage of anyways. Cripple it with idiot DRM schemes and you make it even less attractive.
politicians such as LeLand Yee (Dickhead, San Francisco) can find the time to bloviate about non-issues such as this while everything else goes to Hell around them. California has huge problems, the educational system is shot, high-tech companies are moving jobs out of the state as fast as they can, it's difficult to start a business there due to the regulatory environment, the infrastructure is decaying and this useless fucktard is whining about a hack to GTA III, a game which isn't exactly kid-friendly to begin with, that allows you to see some pixellated titties.
Now, perhaps if this was the My Little Pony game and there was an easy hack to allow my little pony to join a donkey show in Tijuana and violate the PowerPuff girls in graphic detail with animations of horse-jism and blood squirting out of Buttercup as she's bent over the back of a chair and held down by the Mario Brothers and introduced to the animal kingdom then I could see some cause for concern. But for fuck's sake, it's GTA III. Leland Yee is a worthless, grandstanding sack of shit and what's amazing is that with this tantrum of his he manages to stand out from the other worthless, grandstanding sacks of shit that comprise the state government of California.
The granddaddy of them all is Vernor Vinge's True Names which was out of print for years unfortunately due to some stupid legal squabble with his publishers.
but I want to use a RAIF, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Fingers, so I'd use my 10 fingers for a RAID 1+0 and then use my 5 toenails (I had my left foot cut off) as nearline storage. This way if you lose a finger you still have access to all of your data, plus you'll get better througput.
Slashdot Mirror
Because PortalPlayer knows that if they piss Apple off bad enough Apple can either buy them or develop their own in house solution. And if you don't think Apple has this kind of software talent then you haven't been paying attention to the fact that they've been keeping MacOSX running on multiple hardware platforms for years in case they wanted to change.
Fortunately he was an honest man and didn't sell the list, rather he contacted the DoJ and DoJ contacted DISCO to help get their shit together. The instructor was making the point that when you surplus equipment that you really need to make sure that you wipe the drives and any other storage media. His bias was that the easiest way to do this was to physically remove and destroy the media because you could never really be sure if a wipe program had worked (well you could go over the drive to make sure that it had been erased, but who's going to do this?).
When I don't want to physically destroy a drive but want to make sure that it's gone I either wipe it with a low-level hardware format utility such as the one built into Adaptec SCSI cards, or I use a program such as autoclave by Josh Larios (which he isn't supporting any more outside of the University of Washington community) although now I guess I'll have to try the recommended replacement Darik's Boot and Nuke. A side benefit of programs such as this one is that they really exercise the Hell out of your disks, which is great to smoke out any potential failures.
Amen brutha man. You're preachin to the choir. Yes, we need a way into space and an orbital laboratory and a moon base and extended unmanned missions to all of the planets with large nuclear powered probes and solar power satellites and the SOLARES system and lots of other good stuff. The problem is that the Shuttle and ISS are not the way to get those things or even progress on the way to getting those things. They are dead end toys which have taken too much time, too much money and in the case of the Shuttle, too many lives.
Looking at some of the MCSEs I've worked with (who are probably similar to the admins you deal with) I'm reminded, bitterly, of when Microsoft claimed that the MCSE was going to be a gold standard for certifications. It wasn't going to be a lame-ass piece of paper like the CNE or CNA.
I'm a UNIX guy who works in a largely Windows shop and I've been working with some really sharp Windows guys who know their stuff and know how to use the goodies that Microsoft is putting into the operating system and as a result I'm getting a new respect for a lot of MS stuff.
You don't understand, there is a certain class of British leftist to whom coal mining is every bit as sacrosanct as the image of family farming in the US and France. Something about nationalised collierys really makes these guys spooge. It's some weird Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin/mass collectivization/5 year plan thing that's wormed its way into their political DNA.
Yeah, we've stolen all of their land, broken all of the treaties we signed with them and gave them blankets loaded with smallpox, least we can let them do is play with the clock.
Thank you, thank you.
I'm an amputee, you insensitive clod! No! Really, I am, look, I've even got a handicapped parking permit. Bastards.
Of course I want to see the Roger Penrose periodic table, once you understand tiling theory you can figure out why hydrogen and uranium should be next to each other.
No kidding, you could have a similar headline for Steve Jobs. I loved seeing this story in the Seattle Times this morning. The headline was "Gates Stresses Need for Qualified CS Grads", the headline underneath it was "Hewlett-Packard to cut 14,500 jobs in restructuring plan". Do they put these things together deliberately to fuck with us, or is it just an accident?
As far as there having been plenty of nuclear accidents so fucking what. We've had plenty of airplane accidents, including a non-accident that killed 2752 people, more people than killed in every nuclear accident that ever happened, yet despite that people still fly, including the eco-weasels who bitch about nuclear power and greenhouse warming, flying to their international conferences on greenhouse gas spewing jet aircraft.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal,
How to dispose of nuclear waste. Reprocess waste to recover long lived fissionable isotopes that can be used in power reactors. Take shorter lived, hotter isotopes and bury underground for 1000 years (which is manageable with today's technology, the fucking pyramids have lasted for 5000 years) and let it cool down. Problem solved.
the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables),
Factored in all of the subsidies renewables receive? No, you haven't. If you did they come off much worse and nuclear comes off much better.
nuclear weapons proliferation,
Bad guys are going to get WMDs regardless of whether or not nuclear power is used.
and of course apart from the Three Mile Island meltdown (26 years ago) and the criticality accident at the uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura (just 6 years ago), there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents.
Plenty of plane accidents too, yet despite that people are still flying, including environmentalists.
Oh, and as far as uranium running out, yeah right. Fuel costs are a minor cost in the cost of a nuclear plant, increase the fuel cost by a factor of 10 and you still aren't impacting operations.
Well let's see, you're posting as AC, which means that there's a 99 percent probability that you're full of shit. I'm speaking from experience, I have a Bushmaster sitting in a gun safe not 20 feet away from me. I fired the M-16 in basic training at Fort Knox and for weapons qualifications every other year in the National Guard and at various NCO academies. Not once were we ever issued magick bullets that would knock a man off his feet, spin through his body and then, upon exit, turn to seek another target.
I can tell from your post you're citing military "made for public consumption" uniformed propaganda about how nice our bullets are.
I can tell from your post that you're full of shit, because you're posting as AC, I can also tell from your total ignorance that you're probably some sort of left wing dickhead who gets all his news from IndyMedia and who wanks himself to sleep every night over a semen stained picture of Noam Chomsky. Why don't you cite some links to these studies?
It doesn't take any "voodoo" to make a bullet tumble or fragment at the speeds they're traveling. "FMJ" and "ball" are terms you seem stuck on, ascribing some magical quality to.
I'd suggest that you're the one who's stuck on these. FMJ means "full metal jacket" "ball" means a solid round, these are about as cheap and simple as you can get in ammunition, a good thing if you're planning on firing off millions of rounds. I would suggest that you're the kind of left wing crackhead whose tiny brain shuts down when he hears the word "military". News flash crackhead, if you're so inclined you can get ammunition that's much more lethal than standard miltary rounds at any store that sells reloading supplies. There's nothing special about military bullets, there doesn't need to be and the military, with the exception of a few special forces units that might have such ammunition (I don't know anything about this and you don't either) can't afford special ammunition.
They're MEANINGLESS in regards to tumble and shatter in designed military rounds, because a "FMJ" "ball" round can easilly be designed to tumble and fragment. Slightly altering the center of mass, such as in AK rounds, or the addition of slight designs such as the rings on M16 rounds, do the trick.
What fucking rings are you talking about, there are no rings on an M16 round, have you ever seen one, held one, loaded several hundred of them into magazines on a rifle range? There aren't any magickal voodoo rings on them. If you'd ever handled a few thousand of them you'd know this.
Get a clue already. Nothing is more iritating than some goon who thinks a "good source" of information is propaganda that he and all his buddies agree on. You sound like the type of person that wouldn't know a scientific study and a truly reliable source of information if it fell on you.
No, I'd have to say that AC's whose firearms knowledge has come from playing Doom III are pretty damned irritating.
Get a clue already. Nothing is more iritating than some goon who thinks a "good source" of information is propaganda that he and all his buddies agree on. You sound like the type of person that wouldn't know a scientific study and a truly reliable source of information if it fell on you.
You have never fired a gun before have you. I can tell from this that you've never fired a gun before, you've probably never even touched one. You say that morons should not try to explain physics, well you shouldn't, and you shouldn't try to explain firearms design or ballistics. Yeah, you can dissipate some energy with springs, and the like but not all of it, and a significant portion of it is still transferred to your body. Spend a day at the range some time firing a .30.06 or a shotgun and then tell me how your shoulder feels at the end of
I'm not sure I believe that - the rounds currently deployed to the US Army for their M16s are intended to tear an opponent apart, since an opponent who dies instantly can't continue to fight injured, or worse, charge and set off a bomb. They're also built to knock the target off their feet to prevent a charging enemy
OK, the rounds used in the average M16 rifle are a 5.56x45mm (.223 calibre) ball. Ball means solid, no magic hollowpoint, no poison, no voodoo, it's an upscaled .22 bullet, you can buy similar ammo at any gun store.
As far as the M16 knocking someone off their feet have you ever heard of a little thing called "Newton's third law of motion" you know, that one that says something like "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". OK, if you fire a bullet at someone that has enough power to knock them off their feet then guess what: you as the shooter will also be knocked off your feet. MV=MV and in all of my years of firing M-16s, (and M-60s and M-2s, and M-85s, M-240s and M68E2s) I never noticed any magic inertialess compensators that eliminated the recoil.
The recoil on the M-16 is pretty minimal compared to that of a rifle firing a heavier cartridge such as the 7.62x51 (.308) or 7.62x63 (30.06). If I spend a few hours at the range blasting away at targets with my .308 Vepr, or my Ruger .44 magnum carbine or my .308 M77 Mark II I'll end up with a bruised shoulder. On the other hand I can fire an M-16 all day long (and have done so) without any damage.
M-16 rounds are nasty - they have a hollowed out section on one side so that upon a collision, they drastically change shape. This causes them to travel through the body with an increased angular velocity spinning the way though the targets internals. If you've ever seen a target dummy shot with an M-16 round, the hole going in is the size you'd expect it to be - you can fit your hand in the hole on the other side. People who get shot in the arms with an M-16 will lose the arm, go into shock (and thus completely exit the battle) and almost certainly die shortly thereafter.
Dude, it's a fucking ball round, despite what you might have read somewhere on the internet the US Army was not able to duplicate any magic bullet technology that might have been used in the Kennedy assassination to produce a wonder bullet. IF they had we probably would have won the Vietnam war. "Wow Sarge, I fired ten rounds through my M16 and killed 300 VC and wounded 250 others!." "Yep, that's the magic bullet technology son, we'll be in Hanoi by Christmas. God bless the magic bullet!". I've blasted plenty of things with standard M16 ammo and haven't noticed any magical spinning mushroom effect. I've met and served with a bunch of Vietnam vets who hated the M16 not because of the early design problems (lack of a forward assist, standard barrel and chamber not chrome plated) but because the round didn't have any stopping power, that whole MV=MV thing again, it doesn't hurt you as much when you fire your M16, guess what, that means it doesn't hurt the enemy as much when it hits him. "Damn you Sir Isaac Newton!". Shotguns and Tommy guns were very highly thought of because someone hit with a shotgun or with a .45 round fired from a short distance generally stops what they're doing (trying to kill you) and focuses on something else (bleeding).
The big advantage of the M16 is that it's a lot lighter than an M14 or an M1, it's shorter, so less likely to get caught on things when you're charging through the brush, and you can carry more ammo for it. Given that a lot of the shooting you do in the military isn't aimed at the other guy as much as it is fired at him to keep his head down (so he can't shoot at you) this is a useful feature.
I suggest you stop watching crap
No, and you're missing the point. Apple is not a hardware company, nor are they a software company, the reason why Macs work so well is that Apple is a platform company. I wouldn't want to run MacOS on standard Intel motherboards because standard Intel motherboards are loaded with obsolete crap (floppy controllers, parallel ports, RS-232 serial, etc, etc, etc). I don't mind an Intel processor based system as long as we can leave behind all of the cruft and crap that has been dragging down the PC for the last 10 years or so. In fact it will be interesting to see what Intel can do on a more restricted platform.
Similarly I'm not interested in running Windows XP on a intel system designed for MacOS. The ability to do so via RedBox or dualboot is a nice feature and might help Apple get into some corporate environments but I already have an Intel box to run Windows XP and I can't see how putting it on the Mac would make the experience any better as the lame OS architecture and compromises driven by the MS marketing department would still be there.
What does HD-DVD offer the average user? Most people like DVDs not only because they have better image quality than VHS, even if you connect to your TV with an RF cable or RCA composite jack and also because they're smaller than VHS tapes, more durable and easier to fast forward and frame by frame. Exactly what does HD-DVD add to this? Well, you get more data storage, so if you wanted to have a bunch of movies on one disc you could, but I don't think Hollywood is going to go for that. Or you can have super duper high definition movies, which most users don't have the equipment to take advantage of anyways. Cripple it with idiot DRM schemes and you make it even less attractive.
Now, perhaps if this was the My Little Pony game and there was an easy hack to allow my little pony to join a donkey show in Tijuana and violate the PowerPuff girls in graphic detail with animations of horse-jism and blood squirting out of Buttercup as she's bent over the back of a chair and held down by the Mario Brothers and introduced to the animal kingdom then I could see some cause for concern. But for fuck's sake, it's GTA III. Leland Yee is a worthless, grandstanding sack of shit and what's amazing is that with this tantrum of his he manages to stand out from the other worthless, grandstanding sacks of shit that comprise the state government of California.