Crash test standards add weight. Power windows, power-adjustable seating, 6-disc in-dash CD changers, power moonroof, they all add weight.
Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, pointed out that "Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." He was going for speed, but the same thing applies to fuel economy.
Consider a car that's a lot newer than those you mention: the 1985 Honda CRX. It had a 76-horsepower engine, and it had a 9.1-second 0-60, and 32 miles to the gallon. It was able to do that because it only weighed 1860 pounds.
1860's unthinkably light by current standards. I drive a Mustang GT that has a curb weight of something like 3860 pounds, so that's more than two tons with a driver and a tank of gas. You want a performance car that's even close to that 1860lbs, you end up with...a Lotus Exige, which is about 2000 lbs. And costs a hell of a lot more than an '85 CRX.
Enh. We could already be energy independent. We have all the uranium we need. It's not a lack of oil that's preventing us from being energy independent, it's a lack of will.
Gamma ray bursts emit a *lot* of light at longer wavelengths than gammas. Actually, they spend more time emitting longer-wave light than they do emitting gammas. The gamma pulse is very brief, but the other forms of radiation last a lot longer.
A study in the Wednesday edition of the Journal of the American Socialist Party reports that 31% of antidepressant trials were not published, and almost all of the unpublished basically showed negative results.
This is bad, obviously, which is why we need a website for all raw data. But let's be clear: this was a review of studies found in the FDA registry. The FDA had this data, and used it to evaluate the meds. No one hid the data-- they gave the data to the FDA, all of it. What didn't happen was publication.
So the real question is why didn't they get published.
Certainly, Pharma doesn't want negative studies published. But these are Phase 2 and 3 clincial trials. They're not done down at Lilly HQ-- these are done at universities. Pharma didn't block their publication-- they were blocked by the academics who did them, and the journals themselves.
What the hell are you on about? This had nothing to do with the reactor, or fission fragment poisons accumulating in the fuel, or xenon transients. Says right in the FA that
"We understand the initiating event was a malfunctioning disconnect switch" at a substation near Miami, the head of the local utility company Florida Power and Light (FPL), Armando Olivera, said Tuesday evening....
"There is no evacuation plan taking place around the area because it's a power problem caused from mechanical failure in the Florida Power and Light system," Mike Stone from the state's emergency department told AFP.
A substation. Not the reactor. Then the reactor went offline because of the undervoltage condition caused by that power outage. Neutron-absorbers in the fuel had *nothing* to do with this.
Everyone needs to read the Last Psychiatrist's article on this study. He's a forensic psychiatrist, and a great blogger, and he makes some very interesting points:
It's the exact same data they had 10 years ago, the exact same data. This isn't a discovery, this isn't Woodward and Bernstein, this is a bunch of academics who are no longer on Pharma payrolls who have now decided that they have nothing further to gain from pushing antidepressants.
Now they can pretend to be on the side of science. We reviewed the data, and found some of it was not published.
You knew that already. You were the ones who didn't publish it -- it's your journal. Turner worked for 3 years as an NIH reviewer. He just notices this now?
Is no one wondering how it is that this study comes out now, when all antidepressants but two are generic?
As suspicious of Pharma as everyone is, no one seems to see that they are no longer getting Pharma money, they are now getting government money-- NIH-- so they're going to push the government line. No one finds it at all suspicious that the two biggest NIH studies in the past two years both found the generic to be the best?
You think that in 2000 those studies would have been published? But now-- 2007, 2008, if they'd found Cymbalta to be the best on the NIH's dime, you think that they'd get re-funded? What's the difference? Same authors, same studies, same data. All that's changed is the climate.
People want a direct financial link to show bias, not realizing that bias is much more prevalent and more powerful elsewhere.
The fact that most of your money disappears into NPC shops with set prices keeps inflation from happening.
Um...what? Aside from minor spending on regents, food, water, repairs, and crafting materials, there's nothing in NPC shops worth buying. Only a vanishingly small percentage of the money in the economy disappears into NPC shops.
There are far, far more gold sources than gold sinks. There are a few significant gold sinks, namely epic mounts (epic flying mount = 5,000 gold), but that's it. Sure, you'll spend hundreds or thousands of gold enchanting your gear, but that gold stays in the economy, going to the enchanters or the folks who put the raw materials up on the auction house.
WoW is very inflationary. It was inflationary before the expansion, and it's moreso now, given that any level 70 can go and knock out enough daily quests in 15 minutes to get 50 gold. Hardly any money at all "disappears into NPC shops."
If your CDs sound like shit because all the dynamic range has been destroyed by the loudness war.
This has even been covered on slashdot recently. Don't pretend that CDs represent some pristine sound quality, when they've been sounding worse and worse as the years go by solely because of the boneheaded decisions of the producers and recording engineers.
I don't see the sin in emitting carbon if you are sequestering just as much somewhere else.
Because you're making the problem worse, not better.
Consider what happens. You consume power in your home market, and pay for 'carbon offsets' to encourage the construction of a windfarm or solar plant in some other market.
What price signal is your consumption sending in your home market? You're consuming more power, and you're sending the message "Demand is increasing! Build more dirty power plants!" Meanwhile, in the foreign market, the construction of a wind or solar plant is sending another message: "Supply is abundant! Consume more power!"
If you want to pollute less, pollute less. Don't pollute more and then pretend buying offsets actually mean you're polluting less.
That's not quite true either. I can take photos, put them up on a web page, and offer them for sale, and that's still not "commercial publication" that would require a model release.
The other problem is the issue of model release, and I agree that a lot of people who CC license their work don't know about that.
They don't have to know about that, unless they're publishers as well. Heller himself will tell you that the responsibility of obtaining a release rests with the publisher of a photograph, not with the photographer:
It may surprise you to know that the photographer isn't ultimately culpable for images that are published without a release. It's the publisher of an image that carries all the liability. Yes, whoever it is that puts the image into use needs to have the photo released. Who puts the photo into use? The user of the photo. The photographer is usually not that person. That the photographer sells the photo (or licenses it) is not what triggers the need for a model release. It's how the photo is ultimately put into print (or on display to the world) that matters.
This, as you indicated, is a matter of due diligence on the part of the publisher. If they're publishing images, they have legal obligations to fulfill, regardless of under what license they're granted use of the picture.
A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing.
Your example has nothing to do with such a situation. I don't need to obtain a model release when I take a picture. An eventual *publisher* of that photograph needs to obtain a model release prior to publication. The photographer is typically the one who does this because, hey, he's there, and he might have problems selling his photos to someone who wants to publish them if he can't give them the signed release form along with the photograph, but fundamentally the requirement to have a release rests on the publisher, not the photographer.
If I, as a photographer, leave a stack of photos on a table and say "Here, take one, do what you want with it," then as far as I'm concerned, a publisher can take one and do what he wants with it. But *my* generosity in regards to the license of the photo doesn't absolve the publisher of his legal requirements to obtain a license from the depicted model. That's a matter of law that has *nothing to do* with a relationship between the photographer and the publisher; the photographer can't absolve the publisher of that responsibility, and it's the publisher's duty to know that.
Why? Is there a professional body that oversees stands of ethics and practices for PIs? I think you could make a better case for requiring licensing of software programmers than for PIs.
Right. Because those are the only two options. Every time a gun exists, either the attacker dies, or some innocent person dies. Nobody ever successfully uses a gun in self-defense without firing a shot.
Stop being such a moron. Stop parroting misinformation you've heard because you're too lazy to verify it. Stop passing judgement on matters you clearly have no familiarity with.
If the point is that Britney/Paris/Nicole aren't "real" news compared to actual events in Iraq/Afghanistan/RonPaul then why is Kurt Cobain somehow so important to deserve mention in the headline?
NB: I don't really give a shit about Cobain. This post is intended solely to explain why his suicide is "real" news.
1. Cobain was the frontman for an extremely influential rock group that, rightly or wrongly, was credited by many with revitalizing a stagnant music industry and birthing a new genre of music. Rightly or wrongly, the band was seen as the flagship for a generation of youth in a way that whoever the trendy socialite-of-the-month isn't. 2. A suicide is a rather more final, and newsworthy event than Paris or Britney or Nicole or Lohan has done so far. If Paris Hilton or Britney Spears were to kill herself, then I submit that *would* be a newsworthy death, and Cobain's suicide even moreso than that.
No, it didn't. It used air as the coolant, passing it through the core to superheat it and then ejecting it aft to produce thrust. All three design candidates were direct-cycle air-cooled reactors.
The reason we didn't go with liquid-metal cooled reactors isn't because of what happens if that liquid metal gets wet, it's because of what happens when that liquid-metal cools off: you have one hunk of solidified reactor vessel.
The Soviets included liquid-metal cooled designs on a number of their submarines; you can get a higher power density with metal-cooled plant than with a water-cooled one, which means it can be smaller for a given power level, which means your submarine can be smaller and less massive, which in turn means better performance. The Alfa-class was small, titanium-hulled, and very fast, something like 45-50 knots at depth.
But the reliability turned out to be a nightmare. The coolant was a lead-bismuth alloy with a freezing point only a little hotter than boiling water. At pierside, the coolant had to be warmed via a superheated steam connection from the shore, and the coolant pumps had to keep turning; if the steam or electrical connections were to be interrupted, the coolant would freeze solid inside the reactor vessel, ruining it. This in fact happened during the 80s, so the subs just kept their reactors running all the time, which makes it hard to do certain maintenance tasks. And god help you if you get a SCRAM situation at sea; one Alfa in fact did suffer a frozen reactor at sea, and several others froze up pierside. Plus, there was no way to refuel those particular reactors, the design didn't allow for it and there was no way to do it without the coolant freezing.
The French, who have come the farthest in reprocessing, are finding out it's not as simple to reprocess as many would have you believe. IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" has a good article on this: "Nuclear Wasteland"
That article doesn't support what you claim.
The French experience clearly does show that reprocessing need not be the dangerous mess that other countries, including the United States, have made of it [see photo, "Blue Glow of Success"]. The U.S. military used reprocessing for several decades to separate plutonium from spent fuels, providing fissionable material for bombs. The result was widespread contamination--which has been in some cases irremediable--in the central Washington desert and the South Carolina coastal plain.
France, in contrast, now reprocesses well over 1000 metric tons of spent fuel every year without incident at the La Hague chemical complex, at the head of Normandy's wind-blasted Cotentin peninsula. La Hague receives all the spent fuel rods from France's 59 reactors. The sprawling facility, operated by the state-controlled nuclear giant Areva, has racked up a good, if not unblemished, environmental record.
[...]
Nevertheless, although it may be safe to proceed with reprocessing, France's experience suggests that reprocessing as done now is not ready to catalyze a full-blown nuclear renaissance. The problem in a nutshell is that without breeder reactors, which can break down the most long-lived elements in nuclear waste, reprocessing comes nowhere near achieving Finck's 100-fold reduction in that waste.
It's not the reprocessing that's the problem, it's the lack of economical breeders. More research into things like the IFR is most definitely called for.
One fairly common dream that people in the self-defense community have is the one where you come under sudden attack and your gun malfunctions, or is out of ammunition, or for whatever reason you can't fire it at your dream-attacker.
I didn't have this dream *until* I started training with a handgun for self-defense purposes. I grew up hunting, with rifles and shotguns, and didn't have this dream. Not until I incorporated the self-defense aspects into my identity. Then my brain started to throw that dream at me.
That said, the magazine in my home defense weapon is loaded with Glaser safety slugs, a "slug" that basically contains a pellet load.
Yeah, good luck with that. The tiny birdshot in the cup of a Glaser will produce a wide, shallow wound cavity that has no physiological reason whatsoever to disable an attacker. The way you stop people with bullets is by either a) penetrating vital organs and making them stop working or b) causing massive exsanguination. Glasers can't reliably penetrate enough to be counted on doing either; they can't reach organs, or major blood vessels. So your attacker will be left with a wide, bloody wound that will only stop him the same way pepper spray would stop him: by discouraging him, not by actually rendering him incapable of continuing. There are cases of Glasers being ineffective on people wearing heavy winter clothing. I would never rely on such a round in a self-defense situation.
Generally it is best to avoid any kind of pellet/shot loads, also you absolutely must avoid hollow points
This is completely untrue. Completely and thoroughly. Police departments, almost to a man, issue hollowpointed ammunition. Why? Because it has the highest chance of stopping the threat in the event lethal force is necessary. If you end up on the stand, yes, the prosecutor's going to ask why you were using hollowpointed ammunition. Then, since you've been prepared by your own defense, you're going to be able to say that you use them for the same reason 99% of police, including the police from the largest departments in the country such as the NYPD and LAPD, walk around with hollowpoints loaded: because they have the highest chance of stopping the threat and the lowest chance of penetrating to where they're not supposed to and hit an innocent person inadvertently. The cops aren't out there trying to be cruel, and neither are you.
What you want to avoid are hand-loads. You want to use factory ammunition.
Personally I would go with a 357magnum over a 44mag for home defense
ObJeffCooper:
The difference between any two handguns is this much: (holds fingers up about a half-inch apart)
The difference between a handgun and a longarm is this much: (stretches arms apart)
Handguns are marginal against human targets. If you're going to use one for self-defense, then arguing over things like "stopping power" and so forth is just so much intellectual masturbation. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't use a.25ACP for home defense either, but worrying about.357 vs..44 is just silly. You want a handgun that is
a. reliable b. reliable c. isn't so expensive or unpleasant to shoot that you won't practice with it. d. isn't so inaccurate that you'll get discouraged and stop practicing with it.
If you're defending your *home*, the only reason you should be carrying a handgun is to let you fight your way to your long arm. A shotgun or something like an 1892 chambered in something ridiculously potent like.454 Casull or.480 Ruger puts you in an entirely different realm of energy, and the carbine will give you more rounds than the shotgun does. Fundamentally, it's up to what the individual feels comfortable with, but *anything* is better than nothing, and quibbling about.357 vs.44 or 9mm vs..45 is just silly. Your standard AK/AR15/HK91 clone isn't a bad idea, either.
S&W sells a 5-shot revolver w/ 2" barrel that fires.500S&W (that's a half-inch diameter bullet). It's too much for carry, but home defense it would do well (of course like a 44, there will be no follow up shot). I think it is probably best for shooting a bear/lion/tiger when he starts eating your face though
This is nonsense. What that will generate is an enormous muzzle flash as the majority of unburned powder rapidly combusts upon leaving the barrel and a mind-boggling amount of felt recoil. The internal ballistics of the.500S&W are completely ill-suited to that sort of barrel length. And it's not a surprise to me that I can't find this weapon in any of S&W's sales ads. It's not even on their homepage. There is a 2.75" barreled version, but even that's completely ridiculous and there's no *way* I'd rely on that in a bear-defense situation.
is a pretty serious cartridge, might even stop a rhino. (nobody has tried)
Nobody has tried, because it'd be just as much suicide as putting the thing to your head and pulling the trigger. In the full-length barrel, it develops just a hair over 3000 ft-lbs at the muzzle. That is indeed an enormous quantity of energy for a handgun, and compares to a.308 out of a rifle. But compared to cartridges used for dangerous big game, it's puny..460 Weatherby Magnum is over 7000 ft
The article doesn't give direct numbers about the size. It says:
Because of the additional energy transported toward the surface by the fireball, what scientists had thought to be an explosion between 10 and 20 megatons was more likely only three to five megatons. The physical size of the asteroid, says Boslough, depends upon its speed and whether it is porous or nonporous, icy or waterless, and other material characteristics.
Let's pick the middle ground and say four megatons, that's 1.67E16 joules. From what I can see, non-metallic asteroids really aren't all that dense because they tend to be very porous, and it seems likely that a metal asteroid wouldn't explode in this manner but would instead impact and bury itself. So call it 2600 kg/m^3. Assuming Earth escape velocity is probably a safe bet as well; it's possible the thing was an extra-solar object but not likely. So that's 11km/sec. Unless I'm screwing something up, I get a mass of 276,000,000 kg, and a spherical asteroid 30 meters in diameter.
I am on firm ground there? I mean, the only source of energy driving the explosion is the kinetic energy of the asteroid, it's just heating the thing up and making it go boom.
Solar irradiation at the Earth's surface is approximately 150,000 TW.
No, it's not. You just used the figure for insolation at 1AU and multiplied by the Earth's cross-sectional area. You ignored all the atmosphere in between 1 AU and the Earth's surface. You ignored seasonal variation. It doesn't take into account weather, seasonal falloff, and so forth. At the earth's surface, the *average* insolation over the course of a year (and this figure doesn't take clouds into effect) is 250 watts per square meter. You're off by a factor of 5.
Slashdot Mirror
Weight.
Crash test standards add weight. Power windows, power-adjustable seating, 6-disc in-dash CD changers, power moonroof, they all add weight.
Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, pointed out that "Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." He was going for speed, but the same thing applies to fuel economy.
Consider a car that's a lot newer than those you mention: the 1985 Honda CRX. It had a 76-horsepower engine, and it had a 9.1-second 0-60, and 32 miles to the gallon. It was able to do that because it only weighed 1860 pounds.
1860's unthinkably light by current standards. I drive a Mustang GT that has a curb weight of something like 3860 pounds, so that's more than two tons with a driver and a tank of gas. You want a performance car that's even close to that 1860lbs, you end up with...a Lotus Exige, which is about 2000 lbs. And costs a hell of a lot more than an '85 CRX.
Enh. We could already be energy independent. We have all the uranium we need. It's not a lack of oil that's preventing us from being energy independent, it's a lack of will.
Gamma ray bursts emit a *lot* of light at longer wavelengths than gammas. Actually, they spend more time emitting longer-wave light than they do emitting gammas. The gamma pulse is very brief, but the other forms of radiation last a lot longer.
There's no "outside" the Earth's gravity field; the entire universe lies within it. So that volume's pretty damned large.
No it hasn't:
A substation. Not the reactor. Then the reactor went offline because of the undervoltage condition caused by that power outage. Neutron-absorbers in the fuel had *nothing* to do with this.
The fact that most of your money disappears into NPC shops with set prices keeps inflation from happening.
Um...what? Aside from minor spending on regents, food, water, repairs, and crafting materials, there's nothing in NPC shops worth buying. Only a vanishingly small percentage of the money in the economy disappears into NPC shops.
There are far, far more gold sources than gold sinks. There are a few significant gold sinks, namely epic mounts (epic flying mount = 5,000 gold), but that's it. Sure, you'll spend hundreds or thousands of gold enchanting your gear, but that gold stays in the economy, going to the enchanters or the folks who put the raw materials up on the auction house.
WoW is very inflationary. It was inflationary before the expansion, and it's moreso now, given that any level 70 can go and knock out enough daily quests in 15 minutes to get 50 gold. Hardly any money at all "disappears into NPC shops."
They can sound better if
If your CDs sound like shit because all the dynamic range has been destroyed by the loudness war.
This has even been covered on slashdot recently. Don't pretend that CDs represent some pristine sound quality, when they've been sounding worse and worse as the years go by solely because of the boneheaded decisions of the producers and recording engineers.
I don't see the sin in emitting carbon if you are sequestering just as much somewhere else.
Because you're making the problem worse, not better.
Consider what happens. You consume power in your home market, and pay for 'carbon offsets' to encourage the construction of a windfarm or solar plant in some other market.
What price signal is your consumption sending in your home market? You're consuming more power, and you're sending the message "Demand is increasing! Build more dirty power plants!" Meanwhile, in the foreign market, the construction of a wind or solar plant is sending another message: "Supply is abundant! Consume more power!"
If you want to pollute less, pollute less. Don't pollute more and then pretend buying offsets actually mean you're polluting less.
That's not quite true either. I can take photos, put them up on a web page, and offer them for sale, and that's still not "commercial publication" that would require a model release.
They don't have to know about that, unless they're publishers as well. Heller himself will tell you that the responsibility of obtaining a release rests with the publisher of a photograph, not with the photographer:
This, as you indicated, is a matter of due diligence on the part of the publisher. If they're publishing images, they have legal obligations to fulfill, regardless of under what license they're granted use of the picture.
A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing.
Your example has nothing to do with such a situation. I don't need to obtain a model release when I take a picture. An eventual *publisher* of that photograph needs to obtain a model release prior to publication. The photographer is typically the one who does this because, hey, he's there, and he might have problems selling his photos to someone who wants to publish them if he can't give them the signed release form along with the photograph, but fundamentally the requirement to have a release rests on the publisher, not the photographer.
If I, as a photographer, leave a stack of photos on a table and say "Here, take one, do what you want with it," then as far as I'm concerned, a publisher can take one and do what he wants with it. But *my* generosity in regards to the license of the photo doesn't absolve the publisher of his legal requirements to obtain a license from the depicted model. That's a matter of law that has *nothing to do* with a relationship between the photographer and the publisher; the photographer can't absolve the publisher of that responsibility, and it's the publisher's duty to know that.
your last sentence reveals an alarming lack of either scruples or thought.
All analogies between rival goods and non-rival goods reveal an alarming lack of thought, but that doesn't prevent people from making them.
Why? Is there a professional body that oversees stands of ethics and practices for PIs? I think you could make a better case for requiring licensing of software programmers than for PIs.
Because this is what MOSTLY happen with such guns
Except that it's not.
More than you shooting an attacker.
Right. Because those are the only two options. Every time a gun exists, either the attacker dies, or some innocent person dies. Nobody ever successfully uses a gun in self-defense without firing a shot.
Stop being such a moron. Stop parroting misinformation you've heard because you're too lazy to verify it. Stop passing judgement on matters you clearly have no familiarity with.
If the point is that Britney/Paris/Nicole aren't "real" news compared to actual events in Iraq/Afghanistan/RonPaul then why is Kurt Cobain somehow so important to deserve mention in the headline?
NB: I don't really give a shit about Cobain. This post is intended solely to explain why his suicide is "real" news.
1. Cobain was the frontman for an extremely influential rock group that, rightly or wrongly, was credited by many with revitalizing a stagnant music industry and birthing a new genre of music. Rightly or wrongly, the band was seen as the flagship for a generation of youth in a way that whoever the trendy socialite-of-the-month isn't.
2. A suicide is a rather more final, and newsworthy event than Paris or Britney or Nicole or Lohan has done so far. If Paris Hilton or Britney Spears were to kill herself, then I submit that *would* be a newsworthy death, and Cobain's suicide even moreso than that.
No, it didn't. It used air as the coolant, passing it through the core to superheat it and then ejecting it aft to produce thrust. All three design candidates were direct-cycle air-cooled reactors.
The reason we didn't go with liquid-metal cooled reactors isn't because of what happens if that liquid metal gets wet, it's because of what happens when that liquid-metal cools off: you have one hunk of solidified reactor vessel.
The Soviets included liquid-metal cooled designs on a number of their submarines; you can get a higher power density with metal-cooled plant than with a water-cooled one, which means it can be smaller for a given power level, which means your submarine can be smaller and less massive, which in turn means better performance. The Alfa-class was small, titanium-hulled, and very fast, something like 45-50 knots at depth.
But the reliability turned out to be a nightmare. The coolant was a lead-bismuth alloy with a freezing point only a little hotter than boiling water. At pierside, the coolant had to be warmed via a superheated steam connection from the shore, and the coolant pumps had to keep turning; if the steam or electrical connections were to be interrupted, the coolant would freeze solid inside the reactor vessel, ruining it. This in fact happened during the 80s, so the subs just kept their reactors running all the time, which makes it hard to do certain maintenance tasks. And god help you if you get a SCRAM situation at sea; one Alfa in fact did suffer a frozen reactor at sea, and several others froze up pierside. Plus, there was no way to refuel those particular reactors, the design didn't allow for it and there was no way to do it without the coolant freezing.
That article doesn't support what you claim.
It's not the reprocessing that's the problem, it's the lack of economical breeders. More research into things like the IFR is most definitely called for.
One fairly common dream that people in the self-defense community have is the one where you come under sudden attack and your gun malfunctions, or is out of ammunition, or for whatever reason you can't fire it at your dream-attacker.
I didn't have this dream *until* I started training with a handgun for self-defense purposes. I grew up hunting, with rifles and shotguns, and didn't have this dream. Not until I incorporated the self-defense aspects into my identity. Then my brain started to throw that dream at me.
So, yeah, I can buy this idea.
That said, the magazine in my home defense weapon is loaded with Glaser safety slugs, a "slug" that basically contains a pellet load.
Yeah, good luck with that. The tiny birdshot in the cup of a Glaser will produce a wide, shallow wound cavity that has no physiological reason whatsoever to disable an attacker. The way you stop people with bullets is by either a) penetrating vital organs and making them stop working or b) causing massive exsanguination. Glasers can't reliably penetrate enough to be counted on doing either; they can't reach organs, or major blood vessels. So your attacker will be left with a wide, bloody wound that will only stop him the same way pepper spray would stop him: by discouraging him, not by actually rendering him incapable of continuing. There are cases of Glasers being ineffective on people wearing heavy winter clothing. I would never rely on such a round in a self-defense situation.
Generally it is best to avoid any kind of pellet/shot loads, also you absolutely must avoid hollow points
.25ACP for home defense either, but worrying about .357 vs. .44 is just silly. You want a handgun that is
.454 Casull or .480 Ruger puts you in an entirely different realm of energy, and the carbine will give you more rounds than the shotgun does. Fundamentally, it's up to what the individual feels comfortable with, but *anything* is better than nothing, and quibbling about .357 vs .44 or 9mm vs. .45 is just silly. Your standard AK/AR15/HK91 clone isn't a bad idea, either.
.500S&W (that's a half-inch diameter bullet). It's too much for carry, but home defense it would do well (of course like a 44, there will be no follow up shot). I think it is probably best for shooting a bear/lion/tiger when he starts eating your face though
.500S&W are completely ill-suited to that sort of barrel length. And it's not a surprise to me that I can't find this weapon in any of S&W's sales ads. It's not even on their homepage. There is a 2.75" barreled version, but even that's completely ridiculous and there's no *way* I'd rely on that in a bear-defense situation.
.308 out of a rifle. But compared to cartridges used for dangerous big game, it's puny. .460 Weatherby Magnum is over 7000 ft
This is completely untrue. Completely and thoroughly. Police departments, almost to a man, issue hollowpointed ammunition. Why? Because it has the highest chance of stopping the threat in the event lethal force is necessary. If you end up on the stand, yes, the prosecutor's going to ask why you were using hollowpointed ammunition. Then, since you've been prepared by your own defense, you're going to be able to say that you use them for the same reason 99% of police, including the police from the largest departments in the country such as the NYPD and LAPD, walk around with hollowpoints loaded: because they have the highest chance of stopping the threat and the lowest chance of penetrating to where they're not supposed to and hit an innocent person inadvertently. The cops aren't out there trying to be cruel, and neither are you.
What you want to avoid are hand-loads. You want to use factory ammunition.
Personally I would go with a 357magnum over a 44mag for home defense
ObJeffCooper:
The difference between any two handguns is this much: (holds fingers up about a half-inch apart)
The difference between a handgun and a longarm is this much: (stretches arms apart)
Handguns are marginal against human targets. If you're going to use one for self-defense, then arguing over things like "stopping power" and so forth is just so much intellectual masturbation. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't use a
a. reliable
b. reliable
c. isn't so expensive or unpleasant to shoot that you won't practice with it.
d. isn't so inaccurate that you'll get discouraged and stop practicing with it.
If you're defending your *home*, the only reason you should be carrying a handgun is to let you fight your way to your long arm. A shotgun or something like an 1892 chambered in something ridiculously potent like
S&W sells a 5-shot revolver w/ 2" barrel that fires
This is nonsense. What that will generate is an enormous muzzle flash as the majority of unburned powder rapidly combusts upon leaving the barrel and a mind-boggling amount of felt recoil. The internal ballistics of the
is a pretty serious cartridge, might even stop a rhino. (nobody has tried)
Nobody has tried, because it'd be just as much suicide as putting the thing to your head and pulling the trigger. In the full-length barrel, it develops just a hair over 3000 ft-lbs at the muzzle. That is indeed an enormous quantity of energy for a handgun, and compares to a
Let's pick the middle ground and say four megatons, that's 1.67E16 joules. From what I can see, non-metallic asteroids really aren't all that dense because they tend to be very porous, and it seems likely that a metal asteroid wouldn't explode in this manner but would instead impact and bury itself. So call it 2600 kg/m^3. Assuming Earth escape velocity is probably a safe bet as well; it's possible the thing was an extra-solar object but not likely. So that's 11km/sec. Unless I'm screwing something up, I get a mass of 276,000,000 kg, and a spherical asteroid 30 meters in diameter.
I am on firm ground there? I mean, the only source of energy driving the explosion is the kinetic energy of the asteroid, it's just heating the thing up and making it go boom.
Solar irradiation at the Earth's surface is approximately 150,000 TW.
No, it's not. You just used the figure for insolation at 1AU and multiplied by the Earth's cross-sectional area. You ignored all the atmosphere in between 1 AU and the Earth's surface. You ignored seasonal variation. It doesn't take into account weather, seasonal falloff, and so forth. At the earth's surface, the *average* insolation over the course of a year (and this figure doesn't take clouds into effect) is 250 watts per square meter. You're off by a factor of 5.