Well, that was sort of why I said "perhaps to a fault." The problem was that, after the Erie canal became wildly profitable (and it was almost ridiculously so; it paid off its initial investments far earlier than expected), people started building canals willy-nilly, without realizing that they were building the 19th century equivalent of dark fiber. They were too late, and competition by the railroads bankrupted most of the canal companies.
However, what's important to note, is that the Erie Canal happened quite late: people had been pushing for it for almost a hundred years by the time they finally got around to opening the thing, so when it became profitable and others tried to copy the idea, they were really copying an idea that had been state-of-the-art almost a century before. They were too late. Had N.Y. State gone ahead with the canal a few decades earlier -- and had it not been for the usual internecine politics, they might have -- people might have realized the profitability of canals and some of the follow-on projects might have been completed in time to make money before the railroads moved in. But, it's a moot point: the problem with most of the canal-building projects immediately after the Erie, was that they were trying to cash in on what they perceived the Erie's success to be, without really understanding why it had succeeded. It was, basically, a bubble; and just like any other bubble, it eventually popped -- but that doesn't mean that what originally sparked the bubble was devoid of merit.
And it wasn't just the Erie Canal that made money; the Champlain Canal and some of the other ones in the system also were profitable (mostly because they were part of the Erie System). But most of the smaller canals that were built afterwards never were, because frankly, none of them were big enough in scope -- compared to the Erie, they were just moats and ditches. Other big projects -- the St. Lawrence Seaway project, the Welland Canal, the Panama Canal, etc. -- were all accomplished with public funds, and were and still are huge positive economic contributors.
But just looking at the Erie, we have an abject example of a situation where the scope of the project was just too massive and too risky for private partnerships to accomplish, although quite a few tried, and there wasn't real success until the government stepped in. But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that a government agency didn't do the work directly, there was a quasi-private Canal Commission that was slightly insulated from day-to-day politics and which had the construction (and later, operation) of the Canal as its primary goal. The public provided the funding, owned the result, and took the profits (and the risk), but it wasn't run by politicians.
It's too easy to get tied up in polemics and extreme positions. Obviously, politicians are, by and large, idiots, and unfit to manage their way out of a paper bag. However, the resources that Government can put to a task, have traditionally dwarfed what Industry can, and sometimes, it's you need those resources in order to work on a scale that's required to produce the desired outcome. There is more than just two ways, with hardcore free-market capitalism on one hand, and Marxist commu/socialism on the other; history has demonstrated over and over that it's possible for government and industry to cooperate and do things that neither could do independently, to great public benefit.
I'm with you, although I have seen FedEx and UPS both damage a lot of packages. I think that their automated systems are a lot rougher on packages than AirBorne Express / DHL or the USPS's Parcel Post. But if you don't insure it, you're accepting that risk when you give them the goods.
A while back I bought a radio-controlled airplane, pre-assembled. It came in a big box, most of which contained the wing. So it was fairly fragile, but well packed, in tri-wall. Got it sent UPS, with insurance for the full value.
They ran it over with a forklift.
To their credit, they called me right away and basically said "uh, so we may have damaged your package a little bit, you might want to look it over." So I went and took a look at it, and it was mangled pretty much beyond recognition. I was a little surprised they had actually bothered to deliver it. But I called them up, told them the stuff inside was ruined, and they sent me a check. (I think that if they hadn't been aware that it was broken already, they might have come and picked it back up, but as it was, they didn't.)
The only problem I have with the way they do insurance, is that they always want the SHIPPER of the goods to file the insurance claim, rather than the receiver. So if you ship something to me, and it arrives to me basically destroyed, and I call UPS, they're going to say "hey, we can't do anything except ship it back, and that guy has to file the claim." It takes a lot of arguing and escalation in order to explain to them, that sometimes things just don't work that way.
I think this is because they're used to working with big businesses and retailers that want to get damaged goods back, and then send out new ones, but for eBay and private shipments, where the RECEIVER is absorbing the transit risk, and the shipper is just basically saying "hey, I'm selling this to you FOB, whatever arrives at your door is your problem" (which is the eBay standard), it creates a big problem. The last thing the shipper wants is for the damaged goods to come back at him, because from his perspective, he washed his hands of the whole business when he dropped it off at UPS.
So overall, I'm not hugely dissatisfied with them, they just need to get through their heads that it's not always the shipper who's going to initiate a claim, and that in many cases, it's going to be the receiver of a shipment who is purchasing the insurance and who is the one at risk if something gets damaged, and it's going to be them who's filing a claim for loss.
Now, when I have fragile stuff that I want to send, I pretty much always use DHL, because I haven't had them mangle anything yet, but you can't beat FedEx Ground for being dirt cheap. You just have to be prepared for a lot of bureaucratic hassle when they drive over it.
The other thing I learned, is to always take a photo of the shipping label, or note the tracking number, on everything. Both UPS and FedEx are absolutely worthless unless you have a tracking or waybill number, and oftentimes, shippers won't bother to keep records of that on their outbound stuff. (Which means if it gets lost, everybody's hosed.)
I don't think that anyone is realistically advocating free internet service for anyone. If they are, then I'll join you in calling them a bunch of twits.
However, what there are some decent proposals for, would be systems where municipalities pay for, and thus own, and absorb the risk of, actually laying the bare infrastructure. So the muni lays the fiber, or pays for the APs, or whatever. Then the municipality, in turn, sells capacity on that network to third parties, who actually provide service to customers. Now, it could be that there are multiple third-parties on the network at once, which IMO would be the best arrangement, because it ensures some customer choice, but practically it might be that there is some sort of selection process and then a recompete or review periodically, which is far less ideal, but better than being stuck with that company forever because they own the only fiber running to your house.
Certainly I don't want my ISP to be the same bunch of numbskulls who operate the DMV (although, they may actually be better than Comcast, it's sort of a tossup). However, I don't think that municipalities have a terrible history when it comes to the deployment and maintenance of infrastructure. While there are indeed potholes in my road, there is also a road there, and there are roads on each side of it, and there are quite a lot of roads elsewhere, which as a network, are in pretty good shape. (As in, I can pretty much get from any point to any other point without being accosted by bandits or falling into crevasses, or going through a lot of tollbooths, etc.) Looking around, I don't think there are a whole lot of other entities who I'd really trust to take over from them.
While I normally consider myself pretty far to the Right on the economic scale, I think there are certainly some areas where there are bona fide public interests, and where government is the most capable agency of completing a project (or is the only one you'd want to own and monopolize the finished product); in these areas it doesn't make sense to not do it within the public sector.
But just because the public owns the infrastructure doesn't mean they have to operate it. Think of the fiber as a canal. Just because the government paid for the canal, doesn't mean that they run the freight companies that ship stuff on it. As a consumer, you can ship goods on the canal using any number of companies, without any contact with the government. The government just extracts their pound of flesh from the companies who ply the canal -- taking the same from each, based on a standard metric -- in order to recoup the investment and do maintenance. The public benefit is in having the canal there in the first place, and in not having it monopolized by one company who is going to maximize profit rather than public utility. (The individual canal boats, in this example, will all seek to maximize profit, but since none of them own the canal proper, they can't monopolize things in the way that a single owner could.)
The U.S. has a long history of successful heavy-infrastructure projects that were initially funded with public monies, and which paid huge dividends in terms of direct tolls (the canals were huge cash cows, almost to a fault) and economic growth. There's no reason why modern informational infrastructure is any different, inherently, from transportation infrastructure 150-200 years ago. The same trade-offs exist, and the same risk, but also the potential for the same rewards.
Why should it be? People are still willing to pay the full price.
Some people, sure. But how many people? The theaters have pretty much saturated their current market, which seems to be kids, parents of kids, and teenagers / young-adults. There's no expansion there, and even within those demographics, I think that their marketshare is shrinking, lost to DVDs and other entertainment activities.
The theaters are desperate for some way to recapture some of the market that they've lost over the years to home viewing, but I think they realize they're not going to do it without some pretty big changes in how movies are marketed and delivered.
Older audiences want more selection, rather than the same 8-10 movies at a time, but that's a huge expense for a theater, because each additional film costs thousands of dollars in reels, plus the projectionist time to load and manage them, plus storage, and that's all on top of the fees to the studio for showing them movie itself. The current system is all set up to discourage a deep catalog and encourage fairly long runs of a select hit movies, and that's it.
A digital distribution network might lower costs enough to encourage theaters to gamble more on the movies they show; it would make a movie profitable to them, even if it attracted fewer people. So instead of just leaving a theater dark, because it wouldn't bring in enough people to cover overhead, they could run a more niche movie there.
It probably wouldn't lower ticket prices, but as you and others have pointed out, the problem isn't that it costs $9.50 to go to a movie, it's that the selection of movies you can see for that $9.50 sucks.
Well, there's a solution to that, it's called payment up front.
Just because the municipalities haven't figured out how much this stuff actually costs, doesn't mean the whole concept is flawed. They're politicians, remember -- and therefore, things take a while to sink in. Of course they're going to start off by making ridiculous demands. When nobody responds, they'll either get serious or move along. Eventually, some city is going to make a serious effort, which means paying for the infrastructure if you want to end up owning it.
It's not complicated, just expensive. It'll find its way through eventually.
Maybe the French will allow bloggers to qualify as journalists. Let me rephrase, hopefully France will allow bloggers to qualify as journalists. They can create a system based on posts, RSS feeds, etc., in order to determine qualification. - Ayal Rosenthal
Oh, great. So now, instead of just whoring for Google advertisement clickthrus, we're going to have bloggers whoring their pages so they can avoid going to La Pounde Mi En Du Asse Prison. Brilliant.
Actually, professionalism is defined by (1) education and (2) expertise. In many cases, (2) is more than sufficient if in large enough amount.
Feel free to define your own language as it suits you, but to the rest of us, a "professional" is someone who does a particular thing as their "profession," that is, how they make a living, or at least how they occupy themselves. It is to say, that you are in that particular line of work, most usually for profit of some sort or another.
If you change oil all day and people pay you for it, you're a professional oil-changer. If you eat hot dogs all day, and people pay you for it, you're a professional hot-dog-eater. You may not think that either one really requires much in the way of skill, however, the people who pay them money to do their respective things, demonstrate otherwise. If they didn't have skills, they wouldn't be paid (either money, or attention).
Was it around also before they decided not to support Bush's little adventure in Iraq?
Oh, heavens yes. I suspect it was around from the moment the War ended, although I think it got its biggest boost during the De Gaulle years, when many Americans felt that they were basically being snubbed by a people they had just spent a whole lot of blood and treasure to first liberate, and then subsequently rebuild. (Nonwithstanding that the Russians did also spend a lot of blood and treasure, I think most Americans felt that there was some kinship between France and the U.S., and so when De Gaulle basically spurned the West in favor of playing each side against the other, it was taken a lot worse than had, say, Turkey done the same thing.)
I don't know what the general zeitgeist was in the U.S. regarding France, prior to WWII (I think it was rather favorable, though), but it definitely turned sour during the Cold War.
The recent political situation has certainly exacerbated the situation, but it didn't just start yesterday, or with Bush. (In fact, the Simpsons quote in my Subject, you'll find, predates Bush -- it was from 1995.)
There seems to be a way on that site, although I don't really want to try it myself, to sign up to receive the daily Table of Contents via email. That's about as close to `tail -f` as you can get to it, I think.
The other problem is that I'm not sure the Federal Register carries much that would help you track particular bills as they make their way through the Belly of the Beast -- for that, you'd need to be looking at the Congressional Record, which seems to be online here: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecord/
It seems to also have daily updates. However -- there's a catch: the Record doesn't contain verbatim texts of everything that goes on in the Debates in Congress, even though it would be technically possible (bordering on trivial) for them to do this, if they wanted to. Instead, it's more of a heavily-edited Minutes, where various people can go in and edit what they said ex post facto (although WP claims they now print these edits in a different typeface). But even it doesn't, I don't think anyway, give you copies of draft legislation as it goes through Committee, or if it was voted on but never read on the floor; I think it would just contain the record of the vote itself.
But there's certainly the infrastructure there. All that you would need to do, would be to specify that the Congressional Record would need to contain more information -- like all the floor speeches, draft legislation, and text of bills regardless of whether they were read on the floor or not -- and then make sure that the output was in some type of standardized, machine-parsable format, with a lot of metadata. Plain text would be fine as long as you did the metadata consistently.
Then, the GPO could just expose the raw records, and let other people do the work of producing fancy frontends to manipulate the data and track particular pieces of legislation across the lifecycle.
Well, that would be a start, but I still don't think that it obviates the sort of version-control system that the GP is talking about.
Just think: if you were working on a big software or documentation project, would you want your QA process to involve nothing but some guy standing up and reading the source code out loud? No way -- everyone would be asleep or bored to tears (well, unless it was Perl, then they'd probably be waiting for his face to just fall off).
There's a reason that change management is a big issue, in addition to peer review and transparency. In fact, they compliment each other. When you can produce a list of what each person has changed, you have a basis for what you want to concentrate your reviewing efforts on.
Now, change-management isn't a cureall -- anyone in software knows that just because something hasn't changed, doesn't mean it's not buggy. You could change something that causes something that hasn't been changed to break, or you could just discover a bug later; either of those things are possible with laws as well as software. Unless you also have some way of tracking dependencies within the bills (cross references, etc.), it might be possible to "break" the law (make it internally inconsistent) with a minor change somewhere else. So that would still require full readings.
Still, it's ridiculous that there isn't something in place right now, to prevent some staffer from just sneaking language into a bill that's a surefire pass, without anyone noticing until it gets printed up in the Congressional Record.
On the whole, maybe Congress needs to hire some QA people? I mean, it's obvious they have a "client satisfaction" (voters) issue, and that the "deliverables" (laws) really suck... maybe it's because they're pushing half-baked, half-assed stuff out the door to the "users" (citizens)?
That's not really true. If I show you a few Lego bricks, and maybe snap them together for you once, you basically ought to be able to grasp the concept of putting them together into arbitrary configurations in order to make anything you desire. Strength of material and molecular dynamics are not required in order to understand the key principles of operation, namely, that the bumps on top of the bricks stick into the bottoms of other bricks and they hold themselves together.
However, if I were to give you a simple electronic circuit, particularly one made with active components, it wouldn't be obvious in the slightest what was going on. Even an AM crystal radio receiver, for instance, requires at least a basic understanding of electricity and electromagnetism in order to grasp at all. (And if you replace the crystal with a transistor, it's even harder.) Otherwise, it's just a magic bunch of junk that makes funny noises out of the air. While someone without any understanding may be able to put together a radio, they're just following a recipe and trusting that someone smarter than them has got the details worked out. As an instructional tool, such "cookbooks" are dangerous, because they teach students to be passive.
Teaching about electricity is fundamentally more difficult than teaching about other basic sciences, because it's one of the first things students run into which can only be measured indirectly (well, for the most part -- I guess you can experience some electricity directly, e.g. Van de Graaf generators or sticking a 9V battery to one's tongue, or unfortunate accidents involving wall plugs and hairpins, but none of these demonstrations really give that much insight into the nature of the beast: they're not like looking at a Lego). It can really only be understood through abstract models and analogies, which can be occasionally confirmed by observation via equipment. Making that jump, from direct observation and understanding, to observation -> model -> prediction -> testing -> understanding, is pretty huge.
Of course, it's possible to go too far to the other end of the spectrum, too. It's a common problem in physics (probably common elsewhere, but my field in school was physics) for people to believe that their understanding of certain mathematical models has given them insight into how the Universe actually operates, when in reality this is almost certainly not so; the models are just that, models, which happen to be good at predicting things under certain conditions, and therefore must have some relation to objective truth, but they are not it. A ball doesn't sit there calculating x(t)=(1/2)at^2+vt+x_0 before it falls to the ground; the equation is just a way of predicting reality. If you ask a physicist "why does a ball fall towards the ground," and they start writing that on a chalkboard, they've drunk the Kool-aid. (Not that you can really fault them; the 'real' answer to that question is ridiculously complex, and would open up the subject of subatomic particles and gravitons, and probably lead directly into a lot of questions that don't have satisfactory answers to the best of our current knowledge. So in a way, one might argue that the physicist only starts to lie and give their pat algebraic answer, because it's what everyone wants to hear, the truth -- that we don't and may never know what is objectively true on a fundamental level -- being so disconcerting.) But the point is that there is some physical reality underlying the equations, and the equations themselves aren't it. Sometimes, students are presented with equations as if they are reality itself, and this is at best lazy, and at worst intellectually dishonest.
The segments would have to air between 6 a.m. and midnight.
So, 11:30PM to 12:00AM on Monday night it is, then! (Seriously, that's not much of a requirement; after 8PM or so, radio listnership absolutely plummets because the rush hour drive is done and practically everyone is home. I can't tell you what's on then, because I never hear it, but on the local rock station where I used to live, they used to run this Lovelines-type call-in-about-your-penile-boils show from like 11PM on.)
If I were you, I'd be buying lotto tickets. I have a box going somewhere of WiFi cards that I've ripped out of systems because I couldn't get them working on Linux. It's not full, but there are a bunch in there, plus a bunch in systems that just don't work and I've not bothered to pull, plus a lot more that I've tried to get working and returned. They tend to be a combination of Marvell and Texas Instrument ACX chipsets, neither of which I've ever gotten to work successfully (and by "work," I mean natively, without Windows-driver hacks, and will work with WPA-PSK AES, and without installing anything alpha-quality or destabilizing). The TI ones are particularly awful, because they're the kind that require firmware blobs to be loaded at startup, so they'll pretty much never be supported in the hardcore FOSS distros (although I heard a rumor that Mepis may support them).
I have only ever gotten lucky with one wireless card on a Linux machine, and that was a DWL-650 and Ubuntu Dapper, a combination which (naturally) you can't buy anymore, because the DWL-650 has been replaced by the DWL-650+, which has a completely different (ACX!) chipset.
My plan is to dump the crate out every few years and see if the situation has changed, but after buying and returning pretty much every card at all of the local stores which even seemed to be distantly or possibly related to anything that might have out-of-the-box Linux drivers, I decided to can the whole endeavor.
It's easier, IMO, (and cheaper, if you look at the prices for "real" Linux-compatible WiFi cards from Orinoco/Cisco/etc. -- notwithstanding the fact that they need to be ordered a week in advance of when you need them) to buy routers that will work in bridge mode (aka "game adapters", or a WRT54GL with DD-WRT if you can find one), and can just be attached to any type of box via Ethernet, than to actually mess around with getting a card working natively on anything except Windows and MacOS. (And it's not like Windows is necessarily any picnic, either, particularly when you start talking about WPA. MacOS only avoids it by only having a handful of cards.)
Does anyone remember a Mac utility that came out a while back (by which I mean, maybe 5 or so years ago), that would put an Airport into promiscuous mode, and sniff for traffic, and then decode and display any images that it sniffed? It was a pretty amusing little program; I think I remember reading that it was thrown together at MacHack and won best of show, or some other honor.
Basically you could run it, and it would give you an idea of what everyone on the wireless network was browsing, in the clear, at that moment, all sort of jumbled together.
I've always wanted something like that, to use as a demonstration of how insecure most wireless APs (unencrypted ones) are, for nontechnical people, but I've never been able to find it, or any record of it. Sometimes I wonder if I just hallucinated the whole story.
It would be a heck of a demo to just run something like that, particularly if you could target a particular connection, and then tell someone to load a web page, and be able to instantly display some or all of the page, or at least its images, in real time, to prove that you really were listening in on what they were doing. Most packet sniffers don't provide any direct, obvious, graphical output of stuff they sniff, and that's frankly just not dramatic enough to make an impression.
Broadcom chipsets are absolute and utter crap. DO NOT USE THEM.
The problem is that you could toss out your crappy, but admittedly working, Broadcom-based card, and inadvertently pick up a Marvell one instead, or one of the newer ones that have some sort of proprietary binary blob firmware that gets loaded by the driver, and will probably never, ever have legitimate Linux drivers.
If you have a wireless card that actually works on Linux, here's a piece of advice: get on your knees and thank the diety of your choice for smiling on you, and not leading you astray into the Purgatory of identical-model-number-but-different-chipsets, or the Hell of alpha-quality drivers. And then, don't mess with anything.
The entertainment industry is huge in CA, of course. A Senator's job is to represent her (or his) state.... How long do you think a Senator would last who didn't represent their constituents?
I can guarantee you that the entertainment industry doesn't employ anywhere near the majority of the people in California. In fact, I rather suspect that many industries which are hurt by Feinstein, et al's, stance on intellectual property issues, which are not only pro-DMCA, but also pro-copyright-extension and mostly pro-broad-patents, vastly exceed the number of people employed by the few big studios that benefit mostly from the legislation.
In short, Feinstein, and most other Senators, do not represent their constituents, they represent their donors. A Senator who actually represented his or her constituents would probably quickly find himself outspent, and consequently out of office. That is one of the key failings of our current system. It's not really worth running for office in the United States unless you are either independently wealthy (on a multi-million scale for heavily contested state offices, and multi-billion for heavily contested Federal ones), or have donors with deep pockets (and, who are going to expect a quid pro quo in return for their lucre -- remember, there are no political donations, only investments).
There's no tzdata available for stable; I think that's a testing and unstable creation.
After some poking around, I realized that my version of libc6 is somehow newer than what's available in stable, but older than unstable and testing, and I have no idea how it got there. This makes me think that it's probably something that's depended on by other things, meaning that it's probably better left alone.
Rather than poke at anything, I think I may just switch it over to UTC and forget about this timezone business. Rewriting some crontabs seems vastly easier than the Bad Things that might happen if I either upgrade libc6 to what's included in testing or unstable, or force a downgrade to what's packaged in stable.
It's a backup server; it shouldn't care what the local time is, anyway. If I'd been thinking when I set it up, I should have just kept it set to Zulu time and wrote my crontabs accordingly.
Aiming for center of mass, this is quite true; a.22LR might not do that much (immediate) damage in the torso. However, at most close ranges, a.22 has more than enough energy to poke a hole in the human skull if it doesn't hit obliquely, which is probably going to be fatal. (Particularly if it enters but doesn't exit, and dissipates all of its energy into the brain by bouncing around in there.)
So, I suppose if you were going to try and use one, you'd best be aiming for the head; while a difficult shot, certainly not impossible if you were an assassin who'd spent a lot of time training with a particular weapon. (A head-sized target at 50' with a.22 isn't that much of a stretch, if the target is stationary.) But with a moving target, or someone who isn't intimately familiar with the weapon, or has years of conventional shoot-for-CoM training, forget it.
OT: Interestingly, at least when loaded "hot," a.22LR isn't the lowest-energy cartridge commonly found in handguns, IIRC that dubious honor goes to the.32 Auto -- which is particularly interesting, because it was the gun of choice for Ian Fleming's original James Bond. The 32 Auto also has a bigger cross-sectional area, so its penetration is lower, so given the choice between a hot 22LR and a standard 32 Auto, you might be better with the 22. (Unless you're James Bond, in which case you can just shoot people in the eye.)
I think the ammo you're talking about is not jacketed in steel, but cased in steel. And yes, some people believe it to be significant rougher on guns than conventional copper-cased stuff, but not because of the bullet going down the barrel proper, but due to the damage that the steel case may be doing to the chamber during loading and extraction.
Should read: I think the ammo you're talking about is not jacketed in steel, but cased in steel. And yes, some people believe it to be significantly rougher on guns than conventional brass-cased stuff, but not because of the bullet going down the barrel proper, but due to the damage that the steel case may be doing to the chamber during loading and extraction.
My bad; I edited and didn't proofread. Modern fixed ammunition usually has bullets made of lead, jacketed in copper, with cases made of brass. Duh.
I think the ammo you're talking about is not jacketed in steel, but cased in steel. And yes, some people believe it to be significant rougher on guns than conventional copper-cased stuff, but not because of the bullet going down the barrel proper, but due to the damage that the steel case may be doing to the chamber during loading and extraction.
You used to find this stuff under the "Wolf" brand name, and it was mostly made in Russia and some other ex-WP countries. I think Wolf may be trying to move upmarket and has ditched the steel-cased stuff, recently though.
At any rate, the bullets in that stuff were pretty standard at least that I ever saw, but instead of using a brass case, as is used in most Western countries' ammunition, they went with steel cases, covered in some sort of paint and lacquer (assumedly for rust-proofing). There were a number of issues with it, particularly in close-tolerance weapons. First was just the threat of damage to the chamber because it's a harder metal (although I have doubts about this), more significantly was that if you blasted a bunch of it off rapidly, you could get the gun's chamber hot enough to start melting the lacquer off of the cartridges, and over time, build up a layer of lacquer inside the chamber, that would change its dimensions, and lead to feed problems, particularly if you switched back to other types of ammo.
I know a number of people who got burned by the lacquer-buildup problems, because they had AR-15 style rifles with tight-tolerance chambers (the.223 Remington chamber, as opposed to the 5.56mm "NATO Chamber" or the compromise "Wylde Chamber").
Unless something is really wrong with the powder charge you're using in the gun, there shouldn't really be any "sparks" coming out of the end of the barrel, at least with modern smokeless powder.
The muzzle flash that comes out of a gun is superheated gas, the product of the powder's rapid combustion; a "spark" would indicate some form of burning / incandescently-hot large particles, and there really shouldn't be anything that big left after combustion. If there are big (enough to be visible) chunks of burning powder coming out the muzzle of your (modern) gun, you have some sort of problem. I'm not sure whether you'd even technically call a real muzzle flash a "flame," since it's not really burning anymore; the majority of the chemical reaction that launched the bullet, ran to completion in the first few fractions of a second after the primer detonated. On weapons with short barrels, the muzzle flash is visible because the exhaust gases exit the muzzle out into the atmosphere before they've had a chance to cool below the point of incandescence. I don't think there's really anything in the way of actual 'combustion' still going on.
Muzzle flash is another thing that Hollywood tends to exaggerate; although it's definitely an issue in real life, it's more difficult to see on a bright, sunny day than you'd expect from watching action flicks. FWIW, I think that they simulate muzzle flashes by using propane or methane, particularly for automatic weapons, in movies.
Tis nice to see valuable return on money invested in political "leaders"
It's Dianne Feinstein --- proof that everyone in California is either on drugs or insane. What did you expect?
Personally I think the problem has mostly to do (aside from general human stupidity-in-groups) with how Congressional committee chairmanships are handed out, based on seniority. That's what lets some of the complete numbskulls, like Feinstein, and her equally-obnoxious colleague on the other side of the aisle, Ted Stephens, remain in power: even people that can't stand them, still vote for them, because it would be damaging to their respective constituencies to lose their influence in key (read: "cash cow") committees.
Humm, not having such luck here. On Debian Stable (aka "Sarge") I'm still getting the old DST settings even with the allegedly up-to-date versions of libc6.
Running an "apt-get update", followed by "apt-get install libc6", yields an "already the installed version" message, and "dpkg -l libc6" says that I have 2.3.5-13 installed. But the date and zdump commands still give the old DST settings.
And this is with all the official Sarge repos, including stable and stable/updates on mirrors.kernel.org and security.debian.org.
Did they not push the timezone update out to Debian Stable, or what?
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Well, that was sort of why I said "perhaps to a fault." The problem was that, after the Erie canal became wildly profitable (and it was almost ridiculously so; it paid off its initial investments far earlier than expected), people started building canals willy-nilly, without realizing that they were building the 19th century equivalent of dark fiber. They were too late, and competition by the railroads bankrupted most of the canal companies.
However, what's important to note, is that the Erie Canal happened quite late: people had been pushing for it for almost a hundred years by the time they finally got around to opening the thing, so when it became profitable and others tried to copy the idea, they were really copying an idea that had been state-of-the-art almost a century before. They were too late. Had N.Y. State gone ahead with the canal a few decades earlier -- and had it not been for the usual internecine politics, they might have -- people might have realized the profitability of canals and some of the follow-on projects might have been completed in time to make money before the railroads moved in. But, it's a moot point: the problem with most of the canal-building projects immediately after the Erie, was that they were trying to cash in on what they perceived the Erie's success to be, without really understanding why it had succeeded. It was, basically, a bubble; and just like any other bubble, it eventually popped -- but that doesn't mean that what originally sparked the bubble was devoid of merit.
And it wasn't just the Erie Canal that made money; the Champlain Canal and some of the other ones in the system also were profitable (mostly because they were part of the Erie System). But most of the smaller canals that were built afterwards never were, because frankly, none of them were big enough in scope -- compared to the Erie, they were just moats and ditches. Other big projects -- the St. Lawrence Seaway project, the Welland Canal, the Panama Canal, etc. -- were all accomplished with public funds, and were and still are huge positive economic contributors.
But just looking at the Erie, we have an abject example of a situation where the scope of the project was just too massive and too risky for private partnerships to accomplish, although quite a few tried, and there wasn't real success until the government stepped in. But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that a government agency didn't do the work directly, there was a quasi-private Canal Commission that was slightly insulated from day-to-day politics and which had the construction (and later, operation) of the Canal as its primary goal. The public provided the funding, owned the result, and took the profits (and the risk), but it wasn't run by politicians.
It's too easy to get tied up in polemics and extreme positions. Obviously, politicians are, by and large, idiots, and unfit to manage their way out of a paper bag. However, the resources that Government can put to a task, have traditionally dwarfed what Industry can, and sometimes, it's you need those resources in order to work on a scale that's required to produce the desired outcome. There is more than just two ways, with hardcore free-market capitalism on one hand, and Marxist commu/socialism on the other; history has demonstrated over and over that it's possible for government and industry to cooperate and do things that neither could do independently, to great public benefit.
I'm with you, although I have seen FedEx and UPS both damage a lot of packages. I think that their automated systems are a lot rougher on packages than AirBorne Express / DHL or the USPS's Parcel Post. But if you don't insure it, you're accepting that risk when you give them the goods.
A while back I bought a radio-controlled airplane, pre-assembled. It came in a big box, most of which contained the wing. So it was fairly fragile, but well packed, in tri-wall. Got it sent UPS, with insurance for the full value.
They ran it over with a forklift.
To their credit, they called me right away and basically said "uh, so we may have damaged your package a little bit, you might want to look it over." So I went and took a look at it, and it was mangled pretty much beyond recognition. I was a little surprised they had actually bothered to deliver it. But I called them up, told them the stuff inside was ruined, and they sent me a check. (I think that if they hadn't been aware that it was broken already, they might have come and picked it back up, but as it was, they didn't.)
The only problem I have with the way they do insurance, is that they always want the SHIPPER of the goods to file the insurance claim, rather than the receiver. So if you ship something to me, and it arrives to me basically destroyed, and I call UPS, they're going to say "hey, we can't do anything except ship it back, and that guy has to file the claim." It takes a lot of arguing and escalation in order to explain to them, that sometimes things just don't work that way.
I think this is because they're used to working with big businesses and retailers that want to get damaged goods back, and then send out new ones, but for eBay and private shipments, where the RECEIVER is absorbing the transit risk, and the shipper is just basically saying "hey, I'm selling this to you FOB, whatever arrives at your door is your problem" (which is the eBay standard), it creates a big problem. The last thing the shipper wants is for the damaged goods to come back at him, because from his perspective, he washed his hands of the whole business when he dropped it off at UPS.
So overall, I'm not hugely dissatisfied with them, they just need to get through their heads that it's not always the shipper who's going to initiate a claim, and that in many cases, it's going to be the receiver of a shipment who is purchasing the insurance and who is the one at risk if something gets damaged, and it's going to be them who's filing a claim for loss.
Now, when I have fragile stuff that I want to send, I pretty much always use DHL, because I haven't had them mangle anything yet, but you can't beat FedEx Ground for being dirt cheap. You just have to be prepared for a lot of bureaucratic hassle when they drive over it.
The other thing I learned, is to always take a photo of the shipping label, or note the tracking number, on everything. Both UPS and FedEx are absolutely worthless unless you have a tracking or waybill number, and oftentimes, shippers won't bother to keep records of that on their outbound stuff. (Which means if it gets lost, everybody's hosed.)
I don't think that anyone is realistically advocating free internet service for anyone. If they are, then I'll join you in calling them a bunch of twits.
However, what there are some decent proposals for, would be systems where municipalities pay for, and thus own, and absorb the risk of, actually laying the bare infrastructure. So the muni lays the fiber, or pays for the APs, or whatever. Then the municipality, in turn, sells capacity on that network to third parties, who actually provide service to customers. Now, it could be that there are multiple third-parties on the network at once, which IMO would be the best arrangement, because it ensures some customer choice, but practically it might be that there is some sort of selection process and then a recompete or review periodically, which is far less ideal, but better than being stuck with that company forever because they own the only fiber running to your house.
Certainly I don't want my ISP to be the same bunch of numbskulls who operate the DMV (although, they may actually be better than Comcast, it's sort of a tossup). However, I don't think that municipalities have a terrible history when it comes to the deployment and maintenance of infrastructure. While there are indeed potholes in my road, there is also a road there, and there are roads on each side of it, and there are quite a lot of roads elsewhere, which as a network, are in pretty good shape. (As in, I can pretty much get from any point to any other point without being accosted by bandits or falling into crevasses, or going through a lot of tollbooths, etc.) Looking around, I don't think there are a whole lot of other entities who I'd really trust to take over from them.
While I normally consider myself pretty far to the Right on the economic scale, I think there are certainly some areas where there are bona fide public interests, and where government is the most capable agency of completing a project (or is the only one you'd want to own and monopolize the finished product); in these areas it doesn't make sense to not do it within the public sector.
But just because the public owns the infrastructure doesn't mean they have to operate it. Think of the fiber as a canal. Just because the government paid for the canal, doesn't mean that they run the freight companies that ship stuff on it. As a consumer, you can ship goods on the canal using any number of companies, without any contact with the government. The government just extracts their pound of flesh from the companies who ply the canal -- taking the same from each, based on a standard metric -- in order to recoup the investment and do maintenance. The public benefit is in having the canal there in the first place, and in not having it monopolized by one company who is going to maximize profit rather than public utility. (The individual canal boats, in this example, will all seek to maximize profit, but since none of them own the canal proper, they can't monopolize things in the way that a single owner could.)
The U.S. has a long history of successful heavy-infrastructure projects that were initially funded with public monies, and which paid huge dividends in terms of direct tolls (the canals were huge cash cows, almost to a fault) and economic growth. There's no reason why modern informational infrastructure is any different, inherently, from transportation infrastructure 150-200 years ago. The same trade-offs exist, and the same risk, but also the potential for the same rewards.
Why should it be? People are still willing to pay the full price.
Some people, sure. But how many people? The theaters have pretty much saturated their current market, which seems to be kids, parents of kids, and teenagers / young-adults. There's no expansion there, and even within those demographics, I think that their marketshare is shrinking, lost to DVDs and other entertainment activities.
The theaters are desperate for some way to recapture some of the market that they've lost over the years to home viewing, but I think they realize they're not going to do it without some pretty big changes in how movies are marketed and delivered.
Older audiences want more selection, rather than the same 8-10 movies at a time, but that's a huge expense for a theater, because each additional film costs thousands of dollars in reels, plus the projectionist time to load and manage them, plus storage, and that's all on top of the fees to the studio for showing them movie itself. The current system is all set up to discourage a deep catalog and encourage fairly long runs of a select hit movies, and that's it.
A digital distribution network might lower costs enough to encourage theaters to gamble more on the movies they show; it would make a movie profitable to them, even if it attracted fewer people. So instead of just leaving a theater dark, because it wouldn't bring in enough people to cover overhead, they could run a more niche movie there.
It probably wouldn't lower ticket prices, but as you and others have pointed out, the problem isn't that it costs $9.50 to go to a movie, it's that the selection of movies you can see for that $9.50 sucks.
Well, there's a solution to that, it's called payment up front.
Just because the municipalities haven't figured out how much this stuff actually costs, doesn't mean the whole concept is flawed. They're politicians, remember -- and therefore, things take a while to sink in. Of course they're going to start off by making ridiculous demands. When nobody responds, they'll either get serious or move along. Eventually, some city is going to make a serious effort, which means paying for the infrastructure if you want to end up owning it.
It's not complicated, just expensive. It'll find its way through eventually.
Maybe the French will allow bloggers to qualify as journalists. Let me rephrase, hopefully France will allow bloggers to qualify as journalists. They can create a system based on posts, RSS feeds, etc., in order to determine qualification. - Ayal Rosenthal
Oh, great. So now, instead of just whoring for Google advertisement clickthrus, we're going to have bloggers whoring their pages so they can avoid going to La Pounde Mi En Du Asse Prison. Brilliant.
Actually, professionalism is defined by (1) education and (2) expertise. In many cases, (2) is more than sufficient if in large enough amount.
Feel free to define your own language as it suits you, but to the rest of us, a "professional" is someone who does a particular thing as their "profession," that is, how they make a living, or at least how they occupy themselves. It is to say, that you are in that particular line of work, most usually for profit of some sort or another.
If you change oil all day and people pay you for it, you're a professional oil-changer. If you eat hot dogs all day, and people pay you for it, you're a professional hot-dog-eater. You may not think that either one really requires much in the way of skill, however, the people who pay them money to do their respective things, demonstrate otherwise. If they didn't have skills, they wouldn't be paid (either money, or attention).
Was it around also before they decided not to support Bush's little adventure in Iraq?
Oh, heavens yes. I suspect it was around from the moment the War ended, although I think it got its biggest boost during the De Gaulle years, when many Americans felt that they were basically being snubbed by a people they had just spent a whole lot of blood and treasure to first liberate, and then subsequently rebuild. (Nonwithstanding that the Russians did also spend a lot of blood and treasure, I think most Americans felt that there was some kinship between France and the U.S., and so when De Gaulle basically spurned the West in favor of playing each side against the other, it was taken a lot worse than had, say, Turkey done the same thing.)
I don't know what the general zeitgeist was in the U.S. regarding France, prior to WWII (I think it was rather favorable, though), but it definitely turned sour during the Cold War.
The recent political situation has certainly exacerbated the situation, but it didn't just start yesterday, or with Bush. (In fact, the Simpsons quote in my Subject, you'll find, predates Bush -- it was from 1995.)
Well, it does seem to come out online, and in plaintext format, too.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html
There seems to be a way on that site, although I don't really want to try it myself, to sign up to receive the daily Table of Contents via email. That's about as close to `tail -f` as you can get to it, I think.
The other problem is that I'm not sure the Federal Register carries much that would help you track particular bills as they make their way through the Belly of the Beast -- for that, you'd need to be looking at the Congressional Record, which seems to be online here:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecord/
It seems to also have daily updates. However -- there's a catch: the Record doesn't contain verbatim texts of everything that goes on in the Debates in Congress, even though it would be technically possible (bordering on trivial) for them to do this, if they wanted to. Instead, it's more of a heavily-edited Minutes, where various people can go in and edit what they said ex post facto (although WP claims they now print these edits in a different typeface). But even it doesn't, I don't think anyway, give you copies of draft legislation as it goes through Committee, or if it was voted on but never read on the floor; I think it would just contain the record of the vote itself.
But there's certainly the infrastructure there. All that you would need to do, would be to specify that the Congressional Record would need to contain more information -- like all the floor speeches, draft legislation, and text of bills regardless of whether they were read on the floor or not -- and then make sure that the output was in some type of standardized, machine-parsable format, with a lot of metadata. Plain text would be fine as long as you did the metadata consistently.
Then, the GPO could just expose the raw records, and let other people do the work of producing fancy frontends to manipulate the data and track particular pieces of legislation across the lifecycle.
Well, that would be a start, but I still don't think that it obviates the sort of version-control system that the GP is talking about.
... maybe it's because they're pushing half-baked, half-assed stuff out the door to the "users" (citizens)?
Just think: if you were working on a big software or documentation project, would you want your QA process to involve nothing but some guy standing up and reading the source code out loud? No way -- everyone would be asleep or bored to tears (well, unless it was Perl, then they'd probably be waiting for his face to just fall off).
There's a reason that change management is a big issue, in addition to peer review and transparency. In fact, they compliment each other. When you can produce a list of what each person has changed, you have a basis for what you want to concentrate your reviewing efforts on.
Now, change-management isn't a cureall -- anyone in software knows that just because something hasn't changed, doesn't mean it's not buggy. You could change something that causes something that hasn't been changed to break, or you could just discover a bug later; either of those things are possible with laws as well as software. Unless you also have some way of tracking dependencies within the bills (cross references, etc.), it might be possible to "break" the law (make it internally inconsistent) with a minor change somewhere else. So that would still require full readings.
Still, it's ridiculous that there isn't something in place right now, to prevent some staffer from just sneaking language into a bill that's a surefire pass, without anyone noticing until it gets printed up in the Congressional Record.
On the whole, maybe Congress needs to hire some QA people? I mean, it's obvious they have a "client satisfaction" (voters) issue, and that the "deliverables" (laws) really suck
The legal system on an index card, volume 1:
1) Don't be a twit.
Sincerely,
Congress
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
That's not really true. If I show you a few Lego bricks, and maybe snap them together for you once, you basically ought to be able to grasp the concept of putting them together into arbitrary configurations in order to make anything you desire. Strength of material and molecular dynamics are not required in order to understand the key principles of operation, namely, that the bumps on top of the bricks stick into the bottoms of other bricks and they hold themselves together.
However, if I were to give you a simple electronic circuit, particularly one made with active components, it wouldn't be obvious in the slightest what was going on. Even an AM crystal radio receiver, for instance, requires at least a basic understanding of electricity and electromagnetism in order to grasp at all. (And if you replace the crystal with a transistor, it's even harder.) Otherwise, it's just a magic bunch of junk that makes funny noises out of the air. While someone without any understanding may be able to put together a radio, they're just following a recipe and trusting that someone smarter than them has got the details worked out. As an instructional tool, such "cookbooks" are dangerous, because they teach students to be passive.
Teaching about electricity is fundamentally more difficult than teaching about other basic sciences, because it's one of the first things students run into which can only be measured indirectly (well, for the most part -- I guess you can experience some electricity directly, e.g. Van de Graaf generators or sticking a 9V battery to one's tongue, or unfortunate accidents involving wall plugs and hairpins, but none of these demonstrations really give that much insight into the nature of the beast: they're not like looking at a Lego). It can really only be understood through abstract models and analogies, which can be occasionally confirmed by observation via equipment. Making that jump, from direct observation and understanding, to observation -> model -> prediction -> testing -> understanding, is pretty huge.
Of course, it's possible to go too far to the other end of the spectrum, too. It's a common problem in physics (probably common elsewhere, but my field in school was physics) for people to believe that their understanding of certain mathematical models has given them insight into how the Universe actually operates, when in reality this is almost certainly not so; the models are just that, models, which happen to be good at predicting things under certain conditions, and therefore must have some relation to objective truth, but they are not it. A ball doesn't sit there calculating x(t)=(1/2)at^2+vt+x_0 before it falls to the ground; the equation is just a way of predicting reality. If you ask a physicist "why does a ball fall towards the ground," and they start writing that on a chalkboard, they've drunk the Kool-aid. (Not that you can really fault them; the 'real' answer to that question is ridiculously complex, and would open up the subject of subatomic particles and gravitons, and probably lead directly into a lot of questions that don't have satisfactory answers to the best of our current knowledge. So in a way, one might argue that the physicist only starts to lie and give their pat algebraic answer, because it's what everyone wants to hear, the truth -- that we don't and may never know what is objectively true on a fundamental level -- being so disconcerting.) But the point is that there is some physical reality underlying the equations, and the equations themselves aren't it. Sometimes, students are presented with equations as if they are reality itself, and this is at best lazy, and at worst intellectually dishonest.
Shouldn't she be out banning scary looking guns or something?
Banning guns seems to be her hobby, but being a corporate shill is apparently how she pays the bills.
The segments would have to air between 6 a.m. and midnight.
So, 11:30PM to 12:00AM on Monday night it is, then! (Seriously, that's not much of a requirement; after 8PM or so, radio listnership absolutely plummets because the rush hour drive is done and practically everyone is home. I can't tell you what's on then, because I never hear it, but on the local rock station where I used to live, they used to run this Lovelines-type call-in-about-your-penile-boils show from like 11PM on.)
If I were you, I'd be buying lotto tickets. I have a box going somewhere of WiFi cards that I've ripped out of systems because I couldn't get them working on Linux. It's not full, but there are a bunch in there, plus a bunch in systems that just don't work and I've not bothered to pull, plus a lot more that I've tried to get working and returned. They tend to be a combination of Marvell and Texas Instrument ACX chipsets, neither of which I've ever gotten to work successfully (and by "work," I mean natively, without Windows-driver hacks, and will work with WPA-PSK AES, and without installing anything alpha-quality or destabilizing). The TI ones are particularly awful, because they're the kind that require firmware blobs to be loaded at startup, so they'll pretty much never be supported in the hardcore FOSS distros (although I heard a rumor that Mepis may support them).
I have only ever gotten lucky with one wireless card on a Linux machine, and that was a DWL-650 and Ubuntu Dapper, a combination which (naturally) you can't buy anymore, because the DWL-650 has been replaced by the DWL-650+, which has a completely different (ACX!) chipset.
My plan is to dump the crate out every few years and see if the situation has changed, but after buying and returning pretty much every card at all of the local stores which even seemed to be distantly or possibly related to anything that might have out-of-the-box Linux drivers, I decided to can the whole endeavor.
It's easier, IMO, (and cheaper, if you look at the prices for "real" Linux-compatible WiFi cards from Orinoco/Cisco/etc. -- notwithstanding the fact that they need to be ordered a week in advance of when you need them) to buy routers that will work in bridge mode (aka "game adapters", or a WRT54GL with DD-WRT if you can find one), and can just be attached to any type of box via Ethernet, than to actually mess around with getting a card working natively on anything except Windows and MacOS. (And it's not like Windows is necessarily any picnic, either, particularly when you start talking about WPA. MacOS only avoids it by only having a handful of cards.)
Does anyone remember a Mac utility that came out a while back (by which I mean, maybe 5 or so years ago), that would put an Airport into promiscuous mode, and sniff for traffic, and then decode and display any images that it sniffed? It was a pretty amusing little program; I think I remember reading that it was thrown together at MacHack and won best of show, or some other honor.
Basically you could run it, and it would give you an idea of what everyone on the wireless network was browsing, in the clear, at that moment, all sort of jumbled together.
I've always wanted something like that, to use as a demonstration of how insecure most wireless APs (unencrypted ones) are, for nontechnical people, but I've never been able to find it, or any record of it. Sometimes I wonder if I just hallucinated the whole story.
It would be a heck of a demo to just run something like that, particularly if you could target a particular connection, and then tell someone to load a web page, and be able to instantly display some or all of the page, or at least its images, in real time, to prove that you really were listening in on what they were doing. Most packet sniffers don't provide any direct, obvious, graphical output of stuff they sniff, and that's frankly just not dramatic enough to make an impression.
Broadcom chipsets are absolute and utter crap. DO NOT USE THEM.
The problem is that you could toss out your crappy, but admittedly working, Broadcom-based card, and inadvertently pick up a Marvell one instead, or one of the newer ones that have some sort of proprietary binary blob firmware that gets loaded by the driver, and will probably never, ever have legitimate Linux drivers.
If you have a wireless card that actually works on Linux, here's a piece of advice: get on your knees and thank the diety of your choice for smiling on you, and not leading you astray into the Purgatory of identical-model-number-but-different-chipsets, or the Hell of alpha-quality drivers. And then, don't mess with anything.
And if you got AES working, sacrifice a goat.
The entertainment industry is huge in CA, of course. A Senator's job is to represent her (or his) state. ... How long do you think a Senator would last who didn't represent their constituents?
I can guarantee you that the entertainment industry doesn't employ anywhere near the majority of the people in California. In fact, I rather suspect that many industries which are hurt by Feinstein, et al's, stance on intellectual property issues, which are not only pro-DMCA, but also pro-copyright-extension and mostly pro-broad-patents, vastly exceed the number of people employed by the few big studios that benefit mostly from the legislation.
In short, Feinstein, and most other Senators, do not represent their constituents, they represent their donors. A Senator who actually represented his or her constituents would probably quickly find himself outspent, and consequently out of office. That is one of the key failings of our current system. It's not really worth running for office in the United States unless you are either independently wealthy (on a multi-million scale for heavily contested state offices, and multi-billion for heavily contested Federal ones), or have donors with deep pockets (and, who are going to expect a quid pro quo in return for their lucre -- remember, there are no political donations, only investments).
There's no tzdata available for stable; I think that's a testing and unstable creation.
After some poking around, I realized that my version of libc6 is somehow newer than what's available in stable, but older than unstable and testing, and I have no idea how it got there. This makes me think that it's probably something that's depended on by other things, meaning that it's probably better left alone.
Rather than poke at anything, I think I may just switch it over to UTC and forget about this timezone business. Rewriting some crontabs seems vastly easier than the Bad Things that might happen if I either upgrade libc6 to what's included in testing or unstable, or force a downgrade to what's packaged in stable.
It's a backup server; it shouldn't care what the local time is, anyway. If I'd been thinking when I set it up, I should have just kept it set to Zulu time and wrote my crontabs accordingly.
Aiming for center of mass, this is quite true; a .22LR might not do that much (immediate) damage in the torso. However, at most close ranges, a .22 has more than enough energy to poke a hole in the human skull if it doesn't hit obliquely, which is probably going to be fatal. (Particularly if it enters but doesn't exit, and dissipates all of its energy into the brain by bouncing around in there.)
.22 isn't that much of a stretch, if the target is stationary.) But with a moving target, or someone who isn't intimately familiar with the weapon, or has years of conventional shoot-for-CoM training, forget it.
.22LR isn't the lowest-energy cartridge commonly found in handguns, IIRC that dubious honor goes to the .32 Auto -- which is particularly interesting, because it was the gun of choice for Ian Fleming's original James Bond. The 32 Auto also has a bigger cross-sectional area, so its penetration is lower, so given the choice between a hot 22LR and a standard 32 Auto, you might be better with the 22. (Unless you're James Bond, in which case you can just shoot people in the eye.)
So, I suppose if you were going to try and use one, you'd best be aiming for the head; while a difficult shot, certainly not impossible if you were an assassin who'd spent a lot of time training with a particular weapon. (A head-sized target at 50' with a
OT: Interestingly, at least when loaded "hot," a
Should read:
I think the ammo you're talking about is not jacketed in steel, but cased in steel. And yes, some people believe it to be significantly rougher on guns than conventional brass-cased stuff, but not because of the bullet going down the barrel proper, but due to the damage that the steel case may be doing to the chamber during loading and extraction.
My bad; I edited and didn't proofread. Modern fixed ammunition usually has bullets made of lead, jacketed in copper, with cases made of brass. Duh.
I think the ammo you're talking about is not jacketed in steel, but cased in steel. And yes, some people believe it to be significant rougher on guns than conventional copper-cased stuff, but not because of the bullet going down the barrel proper, but due to the damage that the steel case may be doing to the chamber during loading and extraction.
.223 Remington chamber, as opposed to the 5.56mm "NATO Chamber" or the compromise "Wylde Chamber").
You used to find this stuff under the "Wolf" brand name, and it was mostly made in Russia and some other ex-WP countries. I think Wolf may be trying to move upmarket and has ditched the steel-cased stuff, recently though.
At any rate, the bullets in that stuff were pretty standard at least that I ever saw, but instead of using a brass case, as is used in most Western countries' ammunition, they went with steel cases, covered in some sort of paint and lacquer (assumedly for rust-proofing). There were a number of issues with it, particularly in close-tolerance weapons. First was just the threat of damage to the chamber because it's a harder metal (although I have doubts about this), more significantly was that if you blasted a bunch of it off rapidly, you could get the gun's chamber hot enough to start melting the lacquer off of the cartridges, and over time, build up a layer of lacquer inside the chamber, that would change its dimensions, and lead to feed problems, particularly if you switched back to other types of ammo.
I know a number of people who got burned by the lacquer-buildup problems, because they had AR-15 style rifles with tight-tolerance chambers (the
Unless something is really wrong with the powder charge you're using in the gun, there shouldn't really be any "sparks" coming out of the end of the barrel, at least with modern smokeless powder.
The muzzle flash that comes out of a gun is superheated gas, the product of the powder's rapid combustion; a "spark" would indicate some form of burning / incandescently-hot large particles, and there really shouldn't be anything that big left after combustion. If there are big (enough to be visible) chunks of burning powder coming out the muzzle of your (modern) gun, you have some sort of problem. I'm not sure whether you'd even technically call a real muzzle flash a "flame," since it's not really burning anymore; the majority of the chemical reaction that launched the bullet, ran to completion in the first few fractions of a second after the primer detonated. On weapons with short barrels, the muzzle flash is visible because the exhaust gases exit the muzzle out into the atmosphere before they've had a chance to cool below the point of incandescence. I don't think there's really anything in the way of actual 'combustion' still going on.
Muzzle flash is another thing that Hollywood tends to exaggerate; although it's definitely an issue in real life, it's more difficult to see on a bright, sunny day than you'd expect from watching action flicks. FWIW, I think that they simulate muzzle flashes by using propane or methane, particularly for automatic weapons, in movies.
Tis nice to see valuable return on money invested in political "leaders"
It's Dianne Feinstein --- proof that everyone in California is either on drugs or insane. What did you expect?
Personally I think the problem has mostly to do (aside from general human stupidity-in-groups) with how Congressional committee chairmanships are handed out, based on seniority. That's what lets some of the complete numbskulls, like Feinstein, and her equally-obnoxious colleague on the other side of the aisle, Ted Stephens, remain in power: even people that can't stand them, still vote for them, because it would be damaging to their respective constituencies to lose their influence in key (read: "cash cow") committees.
Humm, not having such luck here. On Debian Stable (aka "Sarge") I'm still getting the old DST settings even with the allegedly up-to-date versions of libc6.
Running an "apt-get update", followed by "apt-get install libc6", yields an "already the installed version" message, and "dpkg -l libc6" says that I have 2.3.5-13 installed. But the date and zdump commands still give the old DST settings.
And this is with all the official Sarge repos, including stable and stable/updates on mirrors.kernel.org and security.debian.org.
Did they not push the timezone update out to Debian Stable, or what?