And exactly how often do you think that chain of events will occur in the next thousand years?
Do you know how many atomic bombs the US military has lost? Look it up someday if you want to lose some sleep. The NFA registry is a mess; they've already lost thousands of machine guns; when the legally-compliant, registered owners are discovered, they're going to be up to their armpits in lawyers, subject to spending most of their net worth mounting a defense or spending the rest of their life in prison because someone in the registration department fucked up. You have your papers and they don't? You're still kinda liable. (Also, boned) Also, a distressing number of NFA weapons are double registered.
Implies that the market for new guns crashes. So bargain.
I certainly wouldn't call them "regular", for one.
Second, I'm struck by the intellectual dishonesty of distinguishing "gun crime" from whatever else. Like it or not, force is fungible and dead is dead. I'd much rather face off with a large angry man who wants to kill me in a situation in which both of us have a handgun than both of us have sticks, knives, or fists for I'm not exactly built like a linebacker, and in pretty much every (fair) circumstance except "We both have guns" I will die and he will live.
It's an ugly calculus, but if you can solve it otherwise I think you have a future in domestic policy.
I'm sorry, but an altered firing pin is incredibly easy to conceal. Unless all 300 million civilian weapons are marked, filing the tip of a firing pin will simply make it look like a firing pin from Brownell's, a cheap repair job, or a weapon made before the bill was imposed. Also, how many digits can dance on the head of a pin? You'll need a large enough address space for serial numbers up to at least a billion, accounting for old guns, new guns (sales are increasing as crime is decreasing - all those people who thought Obama was going to ban new gun sales bought one "Just In Case" and discovered they actually enjoyed the shooting sports caused the market to balloon), and repairs, as well as stamping military weapons - which you need to do, or stealing guns from the Army suddenly becomes the Mexican cartels' priority.
Some firing pins are terribly brittle, and dry-firing even 10 or 20 times will destroy your firing pin.
Some firing pins are no longer made; it stands to reason that in the future, spare parts will be discontinued again. If they're expensive to make, they're more likely to be discontinued (or the company eating the cost will go bankrupt or whatever).
So when my several hundred dollar weapon breaks a $5 part that silly laws have made into a $250 replacement part that I can't even get unless a gunsmith machines a new one from bar stock at a cost of several times a brand new gun...
Imagine if they proposed a protesting license that cost you $250 per participating protestor? The courts would bitchslap the legislation into orbit. This seems like a questionable idea, poorly implemented, and then exploited by opportunists to sabotage people they don't particularly like.
Dragonskin was even heavier than the Interceptor, and while it offered much better coverage, the junction between the scales could be blown straight through by an AK, if it hit at just the right angle. However, it was a lot more flexible.
The Army didn't think the weight penalty was worth it, but some soldiers disagreed.
And when it was Dragonskin or PASGT, the Dragonskin vest won hands-down. PASGT was roughly equivalent to NIJ level 2A, (rated for light sidearms) but Interceptor is somewhere around NIJ level 4 - enough to stop armor-piercing slugs fired from a battle rifle at close range.
True story: Marine shot in the face with a 9mm, spits out the bullet (and a few teeth). One taliban soldier renounces violence forevermore, throws down his sidearm, and surrenders.
There's not much that's vital to immediate survival in the facial area. Unless a brain-leading blood vessel or the spinal column is severed, that's the sort of wound you can recover from.
And in some cases, a round expends all its kinetic energy destroying fat which you don't care much about, since it's not a vital organ, and doesn't have enough vascularization to bleed quickly.
No it doesn't. I went through a couple headline Android devices before I switched to an iPhone 4, and neither lasted a whole day without an afternoon top-up.
While I am both a fan and a happy iPhone user, the recent versions of AIM for iPhone are terribly unreliable, and have a habit of dumping messages people send me if they're the first few in a conversation, or I don't view them immediately. Either situation eats messages. AIM is no longer capable of being a useful asynchronous communication method, and the version they rolled out to fix the problem, did not.
The way I hear it, spy satellites have (or at one point, had) trouble focusing at infinity - they wanted that capability, they lost resolution, so they did without.
Maybe newer spysats have the ability to scan the sky for engine burns in deep space, but old ones couldn't. Of course, if you're building an all-new instrument package, that is a complete non-problem. They can just order two more of the last set, bolt them to the chassis, and hang them up in the sky way ahead of schedule.
Oh, if we could have launched that last Shuttle stack with a SpaceX Dragon for rescue...
We could have swapped the Hubbles around, got the really interesting one down and put the completely functional one up in its place. I believe - I heard it at a NASA event - the first cancelled Shuttle mission, the one that would have flown immediately after what became the last flight, was the one to retrieve the first Hubble for the Smithstonian institution.
I'm a university student studying biology, and we spent a lot of time discussing micro- vs. macroevolution, and the California salamander ring-species that demonstrates both. Perhaps creationists use the concept, but they are demonstrably not the only ones that find it a useful phenomenon.
I don't want to go collect signed affidavits from professors, but if I must...
As the Hubble approaches it's end of life and no possibility for refurbishment from the shuttle, seems that NASA should offer an X-prize to companies that can viably offer and execute a mission for unmanned or manned refurbishment of the Hubble. $500M would make an interesting prize and be only a fraction of what a servicing mission from the shuttles cost. Even if the mission just replaced consumables such as fuels, coolant and failing gyros, keeping the Hubble going for a few more years would be worth it. Such a prize could help fund SpaceX developing EVA capabilities from the Dragon and such.
Quoted for truth; this is one of the most interesting Anonymous Coward posts I've read all year, and if I can get it read at +2 karma, maybe a NASA administrator or rich "adventure capitalist" type will read it.
More to the point, call them Hubble-2 and Hubble-3 - And instead of the Hubble telescope, call it the Hubble mission. Call telescopes with that mirror size and configuration "Hubble class", like we have Iowa-class battleships and Arleigh Burke class destroyers, all named after the first ship of its type. This way, the Hubble mission of visible-light astronomy doesn't end with the service life of the first Hubble. On a tangent, maybe SpaceX can build a Dragon with an airlock and send people up for another servicing mission on the Mark 1, or maybe they can bring it back intact for display at the Smithstonian. Failing that, boost it into a "museum orbit" (polite term for "graveyard orbit", like is usually done with nuclear powered satellites) until it can be repaired (let's face it, space launch is getting cheap these days) or its mirrors harvested, or it can be displayed somewhere. Maybe on the first lunar Smithstonian branch, which will be built around the Apollo 11 site?
2007 Macbook Pro, identification string "MacBookPro3,1". Four logic board replacements, one borderline.
When I was in college I worked two summers and sold my old Macbook to pay for this beast; I also bought AppleCare. It was an expensive laptop, but it performed admirably; it was basically top of the line in its time. Then things in Half-Life 2 started turning purple randomly. It didn't take much longer until trying to play Team Fortress caused BSoDs once the GPU had a chance to heat up. Then it got worse - I could boot up, but the screen was dead. They ordered me a new logic board, and the champ was back in business. Fast forward about three months, and the game I was playing had random horizontal lines on the screen. New logic board, no problem. Actually, there was a problem - the first replacement didn't finish booting once before the GPU failed; this one could at this point give me a text terminal, but any graphics were right out. Fortunately, the shop was booting it up on their bench to demonstrate their repair, so they had a new board overnighted in the next ten minutes, and the next afternoon I had another new board.
The next time it gave out - three months and a week, like clockwork, I escalated my tech support call. I got a department Apple will deny existing, called something to the effect of "Customer Solutions". These exist above first-line tech support (who are fairly knowledgeable and very useful), and above the engineers that they turn to when first-line efforts fail. They offered me a new laptop, with "like for like" - nothing worse than my old machine, except I lost the ExpressCard|34 slot on the 2009 model they gave me; while I'd like a USB 3.0 port, I must admit the ExpressCard slot mostly held an SD card adapter.
After that, I tried to get them to take the aftermarket hard drive out of my defective machine and put it in the new unit. They wanted to charge me $150 for the privilege of doing the deed without voiding my warranty at the local Apple store, and (remember: college!) I didn't have the money. I was about to leave with a broken computer in the hopes that I could work something out with phone support, but as I was packing my computer to go, the third-line person escalated my case. Again. I gave them the name of the store manager, and they hung up. She disappeared a few moments later after taking a call on her two-way radio. Ten minutes later, she came back looking rather startlingly meek - having started this day long escapade being painfully stubborn about this "nominal" charge that was nothing of the sort in my collegiate financial condition. She also had a laptop box in her hand, and told me she would have my hard drive in my hands more or less "immediately".
My takeaways?
Apple corporate was willing to grab the manager of their flagship store (at the time) by the (metaphorical) balls, shake briefly, and tell her to sit down and shut upor else. Apple corporate was willing to face this problem head-on, and stands behind their products.
Apple has some bad apples at the local level (and it came out that this apple store was known as the least friendly in town, when I spoke to an Apple employee).
The unibody Macbook Pro is a downright pleasure to work on, once you get past the Loctite Blue.
The 2007 Macbook Pro used Kapton "space tape" to keep some internal parts in place.
AppleCare is worth its weight in gold.
The 2009 model really should be considered to have a user serviceable battery, as it's an easier swap than the hard drive; I just think they didn't want people trying to change their batteries on an airplane, or something similarly stupid.
Carrying around an unprotected MBP battery now is something similarly stupid, as they're almost as fragile as bare cells.
While talking to the Apple rep who specced out my replacement system, it came out that only 15% of users used the ExpressCard slot, and around 90% of them used it for a memory card reader, but I still want USB 3.0 now.
Unlike other laptops, the unibody Macbook Pro has easily cleaned fans.
MTBE moved faster through groundwater than gasoline, and was detective long before it reached toxic levels.
Now as I understand it, leaks are harder to detect at the tap, and toxic levels can be reached without any obvious taste being imparted. Detecting leaks is now solely the purview of those who would have to pay to replace their underground tanks, or municipal water treatment facilities.
It can actually be argued that they outlawed a reporter chemical, not a poison.
Japan, VCRs, 80s(?). However, as I understand it, they didn't have to jack up the prices, as economies of scale had just pushed their costs through the floor.
Slashdot Mirror
I could make quite a case, given Android's fragmentation, as to why they need to specify down to the make, model, and revision number.
That's frequently proved, and their response rarely goes beyond "We're really sorry, ma'am."
Do you know how many atomic bombs the US military has lost? Look it up someday if you want to lose some sleep. The NFA registry is a mess; they've already lost thousands of machine guns; when the legally-compliant, registered owners are discovered, they're going to be up to their armpits in lawyers, subject to spending most of their net worth mounting a defense or spending the rest of their life in prison because someone in the registration department fucked up. You have your papers and they don't? You're still kinda liable. (Also, boned) Also, a distressing number of NFA weapons are double registered.
Right up until the gunmakers go out of business.
Being attacked with a gun != being shot to death.
Firearms, when used in crime, are more frequently used as intimidation tools or to coerce compliance rather than to kill people.
I certainly wouldn't call them "regular", for one.
Second, I'm struck by the intellectual dishonesty of distinguishing "gun crime" from whatever else. Like it or not, force is fungible and dead is dead. I'd much rather face off with a large angry man who wants to kill me in a situation in which both of us have a handgun than both of us have sticks, knives, or fists for I'm not exactly built like a linebacker, and in pretty much every (fair) circumstance except "We both have guns" I will die and he will live.
It's an ugly calculus, but if you can solve it otherwise I think you have a future in domestic policy.
Also, ever consider that this may be a de facto ban on making your own ammunition?
A lot of people do it, primarily because it is cheap and also because factory loads aren't always that reliable.
I'm sorry, but an altered firing pin is incredibly easy to conceal. Unless all 300 million civilian weapons are marked, filing the tip of a firing pin will simply make it look like a firing pin from Brownell's, a cheap repair job, or a weapon made before the bill was imposed. Also, how many digits can dance on the head of a pin? You'll need a large enough address space for serial numbers up to at least a billion, accounting for old guns, new guns (sales are increasing as crime is decreasing - all those people who thought Obama was going to ban new gun sales bought one "Just In Case" and discovered they actually enjoyed the shooting sports caused the market to balloon), and repairs, as well as stamping military weapons - which you need to do, or stealing guns from the Army suddenly becomes the Mexican cartels' priority.
Some firing pins are terribly brittle, and dry-firing even 10 or 20 times will destroy your firing pin.
Some firing pins are no longer made; it stands to reason that in the future, spare parts will be discontinued again. If they're expensive to make, they're more likely to be discontinued (or the company eating the cost will go bankrupt or whatever).
So when my several hundred dollar weapon breaks a $5 part that silly laws have made into a $250 replacement part that I can't even get unless a gunsmith machines a new one from bar stock at a cost of several times a brand new gun...
Imagine if they proposed a protesting license that cost you $250 per participating protestor? The courts would bitchslap the legislation into orbit. This seems like a questionable idea, poorly implemented, and then exploited by opportunists to sabotage people they don't particularly like.
Dragonskin was even heavier than the Interceptor, and while it offered much better coverage, the junction between the scales could be blown straight through by an AK, if it hit at just the right angle. However, it was a lot more flexible.
The Army didn't think the weight penalty was worth it, but some soldiers disagreed.
And when it was Dragonskin or PASGT, the Dragonskin vest won hands-down. PASGT was roughly equivalent to NIJ level 2A, (rated for light sidearms) but Interceptor is somewhere around NIJ level 4 - enough to stop armor-piercing slugs fired from a battle rifle at close range.
True story: Marine shot in the face with a 9mm, spits out the bullet (and a few teeth). One taliban soldier renounces violence forevermore, throws down his sidearm, and surrenders.
There's not much that's vital to immediate survival in the facial area. Unless a brain-leading blood vessel or the spinal column is severed, that's the sort of wound you can recover from.
But four-inch-thick hardened steel similar to nails is used in armor. Just not the kind you wear.
And in some cases, a round expends all its kinetic energy destroying fat which you don't care much about, since it's not a vital organ, and doesn't have enough vascularization to bleed quickly.
Bwahahaha.
No it doesn't. I went through a couple headline Android devices before I switched to an iPhone 4, and neither lasted a whole day without an afternoon top-up.
While I am both a fan and a happy iPhone user, the recent versions of AIM for iPhone are terribly unreliable, and have a habit of dumping messages people send me if they're the first few in a conversation, or I don't view them immediately. Either situation eats messages. AIM is no longer capable of being a useful asynchronous communication method, and the version they rolled out to fix the problem, did not.
A wider field of view? How much wider? Wide enough to complete a complete sky survey every three hours or so?
That would be pretty awesome for promptly spotting supernovae and incoming death-rocks.
The way I hear it, spy satellites have (or at one point, had) trouble focusing at infinity - they wanted that capability, they lost resolution, so they did without.
Maybe newer spysats have the ability to scan the sky for engine burns in deep space, but old ones couldn't. Of course, if you're building an all-new instrument package, that is a complete non-problem. They can just order two more of the last set, bolt them to the chassis, and hang them up in the sky way ahead of schedule.
Oh, if we could have launched that last Shuttle stack with a SpaceX Dragon for rescue...
We could have swapped the Hubbles around, got the really interesting one down and put the completely functional one up in its place. I believe - I heard it at a NASA event - the first cancelled Shuttle mission, the one that would have flown immediately after what became the last flight, was the one to retrieve the first Hubble for the Smithstonian institution.
I take offense at this remark.
I'm a university student studying biology, and we spent a lot of time discussing micro- vs. macroevolution, and the California salamander ring-species that demonstrates both. Perhaps creationists use the concept, but they are demonstrably not the only ones that find it a useful phenomenon.
I don't want to go collect signed affidavits from professors, but if I must...
Protip: It's a koan. Whether or not it was intended, it is one.
;)
As the Hubble approaches it's end of life and no possibility for refurbishment from the shuttle, seems that NASA should offer an X-prize to companies that can viably offer and execute a mission for unmanned or manned refurbishment of the Hubble. $500M would make an interesting prize and be only a fraction of what a servicing mission from the shuttles cost. Even if the mission just replaced consumables such as fuels, coolant and failing gyros, keeping the Hubble going for a few more years would be worth it. Such a prize could help fund SpaceX developing EVA capabilities from the Dragon and such.
Quoted for truth; this is one of the most interesting Anonymous Coward posts I've read all year, and if I can get it read at +2 karma, maybe a NASA administrator or rich "adventure capitalist" type will read it.
More to the point, call them Hubble-2 and Hubble-3 - And instead of the Hubble telescope, call it the Hubble mission. Call telescopes with that mirror size and configuration "Hubble class", like we have Iowa-class battleships and Arleigh Burke class destroyers, all named after the first ship of its type. This way, the Hubble mission of visible-light astronomy doesn't end with the service life of the first Hubble. On a tangent, maybe SpaceX can build a Dragon with an airlock and send people up for another servicing mission on the Mark 1, or maybe they can bring it back intact for display at the Smithstonian. Failing that, boost it into a "museum orbit" (polite term for "graveyard orbit", like is usually done with nuclear powered satellites) until it can be repaired (let's face it, space launch is getting cheap these days) or its mirrors harvested, or it can be displayed somewhere. Maybe on the first lunar Smithstonian branch, which will be built around the Apollo 11 site?
I should point out that they pretty much dumped Nvidia after this fiasco. What's left to protect?
2007 Macbook Pro, identification string "MacBookPro3,1". Four logic board replacements, one borderline.
When I was in college I worked two summers and sold my old Macbook to pay for this beast; I also bought AppleCare. It was an expensive laptop, but it performed admirably; it was basically top of the line in its time. Then things in Half-Life 2 started turning purple randomly. It didn't take much longer until trying to play Team Fortress caused BSoDs once the GPU had a chance to heat up. Then it got worse - I could boot up, but the screen was dead. They ordered me a new logic board, and the champ was back in business. Fast forward about three months, and the game I was playing had random horizontal lines on the screen. New logic board, no problem. Actually, there was a problem - the first replacement didn't finish booting once before the GPU failed; this one could at this point give me a text terminal, but any graphics were right out. Fortunately, the shop was booting it up on their bench to demonstrate their repair, so they had a new board overnighted in the next ten minutes, and the next afternoon I had another new board.
The next time it gave out - three months and a week, like clockwork, I escalated my tech support call. I got a department Apple will deny existing, called something to the effect of "Customer Solutions". These exist above first-line tech support (who are fairly knowledgeable and very useful), and above the engineers that they turn to when first-line efforts fail. They offered me a new laptop, with "like for like" - nothing worse than my old machine, except I lost the ExpressCard|34 slot on the 2009 model they gave me; while I'd like a USB 3.0 port, I must admit the ExpressCard slot mostly held an SD card adapter.
After that, I tried to get them to take the aftermarket hard drive out of my defective machine and put it in the new unit. They wanted to charge me $150 for the privilege of doing the deed without voiding my warranty at the local Apple store, and (remember: college!) I didn't have the money. I was about to leave with a broken computer in the hopes that I could work something out with phone support, but as I was packing my computer to go, the third-line person escalated my case. Again. I gave them the name of the store manager, and they hung up. She disappeared a few moments later after taking a call on her two-way radio. Ten minutes later, she came back looking rather startlingly meek - having started this day long escapade being painfully stubborn about this "nominal" charge that was nothing of the sort in my collegiate financial condition. She also had a laptop box in her hand, and told me she would have my hard drive in my hands more or less "immediately".
My takeaways?
Apple corporate was willing to grab the manager of their flagship store (at the time) by the (metaphorical) balls, shake briefly, and tell her to sit down and shut up or else.
Apple corporate was willing to face this problem head-on, and stands behind their products.
Apple has some bad apples at the local level (and it came out that this apple store was known as the least friendly in town, when I spoke to an Apple employee).
The unibody Macbook Pro is a downright pleasure to work on, once you get past the Loctite Blue.
The 2007 Macbook Pro used Kapton "space tape" to keep some internal parts in place.
AppleCare is worth its weight in gold.
The 2009 model really should be considered to have a user serviceable battery, as it's an easier swap than the hard drive; I just think they didn't want people trying to change their batteries on an airplane, or something similarly stupid.
Carrying around an unprotected MBP battery now is something similarly stupid, as they're almost as fragile as bare cells.
While talking to the Apple rep who specced out my replacement system, it came out that only 15% of users used the ExpressCard slot, and around 90% of them used it for a memory card reader, but I still want USB 3.0 now.
Unlike other laptops, the unibody Macbook Pro has easily cleaned fans.
MTBE moved faster through groundwater than gasoline, and was detective long before it reached toxic levels.
Now as I understand it, leaks are harder to detect at the tap, and toxic levels can be reached without any obvious taste being imparted. Detecting leaks is now solely the purview of those who would have to pay to replace their underground tanks, or municipal water treatment facilities.
It can actually be argued that they outlawed a reporter chemical, not a poison.
Japan, VCRs, 80s(?). However, as I understand it, they didn't have to jack up the prices, as economies of scale had just pushed their costs through the floor.