"However, while the metric system is many things, 'awkward and unnatural' isn't one of them. You look up 'awkward' in the dictionary and there's the Imperial system. 5280 feet in a mile? 16 ounces in a pound? Water freezes at 32 degrees?"
But then the metric people blew it with 101300 pascals to make atmospheric pressure at sea level. Fortunately, most of the time people use bars instead.
Pascal, either a computer language or a unit of measure that was logical, consistent, but just didn't work out when it met the real world.
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Congress probably needs to fix that last clause, but it's very straightforward.
"There are guns in England, despite what many Americans seem to think,"
Which is why the English Olympic pistol team has to practice in Switzerland. If they are denied the right to practice an Olympic sport in their own country, then certainly so are you. And if memory serves, the English subjects (and that is the correct word) who own a firearm are required to let the police into their house on demand to inspect weapon and ammunition storage at any time. Which leads to another amendment.
Experience with the pointy end of the monarchy is the reason for several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights.
The recipe for black powder is on wikipedia, and smokeless powder is only one step beyond Mythbusters level kitchen chemistry.
The government can't reliably stop people from making their own methamphetamine; this chemistry is much simpler. Making it in ton lots consistently time after time is the hard part, not the making it in the first place. It's similar to beer or wine. A batch of home brew is no big deal. Making it by thousand barrel lots and getting it to come out the same every time is the hard part.
"Since 'most' people work 9-5, significant daylight time after 5pm is a pretty attractive concept"
Who is this mysterious 9-5 worker? It's never been me. 7:30 to 4:00 at two different jobs. 7:00 to 3:30. 8:00 to 5:00 (that one is close) And certainly the Navy never worked 9:00 to 5:00.
With 8.5 hours of day light in the winter, there is no significant time with the sun up while not at work in any case. With 15.5 hours of daylight in the summer it's still light while I'm trying to go to bed in either case.
Interestingly enough, if there was no daylight savings time the sun would be up an hour earlier before work started, so it would be warmer, so I could ride the motorcycle more. The temperature of the morning commute is the controlling factor. This would reduce my CO2 production, and therefore reduce global warming.
"but it seems not unreasonable to regulate the bits that explode, e.g. gunpowder and the bullets that contain it."
First, smokeless gunpowder is not an explosive, it's a propellant. Black powder is an explosive, but is largely replaced by alternatives like Pyrodex. The difference was such that when I was 19 I could go buy smokeless powder to reload the 30-30, but I could not buy black powder to load the.50 caliber muzzle-loader, since pyrodex and friends did not exist yet.
Exploding bullets are illegal. But I think you meant cartridges, which contain powder and a bullet (or shot) as a unit.
Daniel Patrick Moynahan made that same suggestion long ago, guns don't kill people, bullets do, so let's regulate the ammunition. It never caught on then either. The people who reload their own ammunition are profoundly unlikely to be career criminals. So regulating the powder/primers only afflicts the honest people, while creating another profitable black market for organized crime.
Now I will submit you have the germ of an interesting idea there. Ban the sale of loaded ammunition in military calibers. So you want an AR? Fine. Buy that and the reloading press and the brass, primers, powder, bullets and support equipment and roll your own.223 ammo. I don't claim it would stop for anyone determined, as it's not hard to load ammunition. I've been doing it since I was about 15. But it would make buying a thousand rounds at the store for a spontaneous crime spree difficult. Speaking only for myself, as a handloader I do NOT like semi-autos as they spew my brass all over and collecting it is nuisance. I expect my brass to hold together at least 10 reloads. Brass is an capital asset.
Would the AR makers rechamber their products to 222 Remington or 22-250 to avoid the 223 caliber? Would the cartels ship in loaded ammo? Probably in both cases. So you have still have only inconvenienced the honest. Which is all any of these laws seem to do. (See 19 year old kid with 50 caliber hawken replica, and no way to buy the powder to use it.)
That is not always true, especially in this case; check your state's laws on the subject. For example, in Washington State:
RCW 50.20.050 Disqualification for leaving work voluntarily without good cause
2(b) An individual is not disqualified from benefits under (a) of this subsection when:
[assorted other stuff]
(vii) The individual's worksite changed, such change caused a material increase in distance or difficulty of travel, and, after the change, the commute was greater than is customary for workers in the individual's job classification and labor market;
Consider too, now single men can "have" a kid without having to deal with the entanglements of marriage. Even better, the courts won't be able to automatically give such a child to it's mother. As the courts still refuse to award custody to men anywhere near 50% of the time, this might help pry them into at least the 20th century, maybe even the 21st.
"Who, precisely, was elected to determine how much I need, I still havent heard."
That has always been the problem. Who determines how much I need, and what the definition of 'need' is anyway, and who determines my ability. Who is more qualified than I am to make those decisions as they apply to me?
My argument is no one.
There is a lot to like in the Green platform, but they have a serious issue with "free" health care, education, and so on. There is no free. Some one has to pay for all the goodies, and they are being as cagey as Romney in not saying who is picking up the tab.
"Worse will be when a false positive will induce an accident"
That was my first thought too. Car sees a monster tumbleweed coming and swerves me into the other lane (boom) or the ditch trying to dodge it, not realizing that Ramming Speed is fully authorized with tumbleweeds.
Even worse would be the car dodging a big dog and hitting a small kid instead.
" What am I missing - how can it go "really wrong"?"
From the wikipedia article.
" Later Prime Minister Naoto Kan issued instructions that people within a 20 km (12 mi) zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant must leave, and urged that those living between 20 km and 30 km from the site to stay indoors.[402][403] The latter groups were also urged to evacuate on 25 March.[404]"
So they had to evacuate a semicircle with a 30 Km radius. This is is 1414 sq km, or 546 sq miles. That sounds "really wrong" to me. Now I could find places in Nevada where there is no more than a handful of people in 546 sq miles, but this was in Japan.
More importantly, nuclear power's economics have fallen apart. Until the natural gas runs out, that is the preferred energy choice for anyone that can get it. Ottherwise, even with a below average 33% capacity factor, wind is now cheaper than nuclear. (It looks like a draw until you remember that nuclear's capacity factor is 92% (refueling outages count) or lower, (Crystal River in FL, San Onofre in CA, Trojan in OR.)
The cost of PV is not done dropping yet. If the sodium sulfur battery installed at Presidio TX works out, then storage in flat or dry places is feasible. Pumped storage is already feasible in hilly places with water.
I am an ex-Navy Nuke. It sounds odd to say it, but in the US there is no point to nuclear power. In Japan they have wind in Hokkaido, and there are some rain shadowed areas on the southern two islands for PV. Honshu has water power available in small scale locations, (And I wouldn't build a really big dam in that earthquake-prone area anyway.)
Japan has made huge cultural changes in the past, and they have the industrial and technical skills they would need. They can certainly make a national policy change to go all out on PV/wind/tidal/geothermal etc. They seem to be hung up on saving face for the existing leadership at the moment. They shouldn't foreign battleships in the harbor to change their minds.
And especially we non-custodial parents. It's hard enough trying to fit visits with outdoor activities into summer now. The usual winter weekends provide plenty of time to stare outside at the cold and snow, then watch a movie.
Year-round school probably does make more sense down south. And this is still a heavily agricultural area. The kids do still work on the farms.
True enough. My employer is trying to switch to Windows 7 again. The first attempt failed when some app in bean-counter land failed to function. So after a three month delay, they are trying again.
The prepare for migration instructions this time are much more alarming. Instead of instead of "expect a few hours of minor disruption," It's "Make multiple full back ups of all important data, and we will be wiping your photos and music directories, and if you have applications we did not install through the software management system, you had better have the install disks, and by the way make sure you have a back up of all critical data."
Fine message to send. "My Party is an obsolete old rustbucket that went aground so hard it was laid up for years as they patched it together again. Oh by the way, it uses so much oil to get anywhere we can't afford to run it anymore."
On the other hand, maybe it is an appropriate message after all. And I say this as a Navy veteran and former resident of Wisconsin.
"But please bear your arms only when you're properly organized in a militia "
I am, and so are you if you are male, the law is still a bit sexist;
"10 USC 311 - MILITIA: COMPOSITION AND CLASSES"
"(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard."
The natural gas is for reheating the air before it decompresses. Otherwise they will be blowing near-liquid air through the turbine blades. Not a good idea.
See Diabatic storage.
"Upon removal from storage, the air must be re-heated prior to expansion in the turbine to power a generator which can be accomplished with a natural gas fired burner for utility grade storage "
What? Damn. I had my heart set on the "if the freeway part of your rush hour commute takes 60 minutes, it will drop to 38." part of the summary. Since I can drive at 65 on the highway now, that means I would be able to drive 102 with the computer.
I take it it gets to pay the fines as well? And the computer would have the points docked from it's license, and when it gets suspended, I just plop in a new computer with a new license and start all over.
The migration to Windows 7 hit a wall when something in bean-counter land did not want to play nice. And I don't think it was the AS400. That seems to be happy to talk to anything that looks like a terminal.
IT isn't returning calls lately, so no idea what is really happening up there.
Slashdot Mirror
"However, while the metric system is many things, 'awkward and unnatural' isn't one of them. You look up 'awkward' in the dictionary and there's the Imperial system. 5280 feet in a mile? 16 ounces in a pound? Water freezes at 32 degrees?"
But then the metric people blew it with 101300 pascals to make atmospheric pressure at sea level. Fortunately, most of the time people use bars instead.
Pascal, either a computer language or a unit of measure that was logical, consistent, but just didn't work out when it met the real world.
And direct from that hot-bed of NRA activism, Cornell Law School;
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311
10 USC 311 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Congress probably needs to fix that last clause, but it's very straightforward.
"There are guns in England, despite what many Americans seem to think,"
Which is why the English Olympic pistol team has to practice in Switzerland. If they are denied the right to practice an Olympic sport in their own country, then certainly so are you. And if memory serves, the English subjects (and that is the correct word) who own a firearm are required to let the police into their house on demand to inspect weapon and ammunition storage at any time. Which leads to another amendment.
Experience with the pointy end of the monarchy is the reason for several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights.
"Umm you do realize that bullets have changed in the past 200 years and aren't a simple round ball anymore, right?"
Like this not simple round ball?
http://www.lymanproducts.com/lyman/bullet-casting/mould-details-rifles.php?entryID=53
or this one, for the traditional AK?
http://www.lymanproducts.com/lyman/bullet-casting/mould-details-rifles.php?entryID=45
or this one?
http://www.lymanproducts.com/lyman/bullet-casting/mould-details-rifles.php?entryID=72
Or this classic?
http://www.lymanproducts.com/lyman/bullet-casting/mould-details-rifles.php?entryID=79
But not to fear, they make round ball moulds too:
http://www.lymanproducts.com/lyman/bullet-casting/round-ball-moulds.php
"but when you think about it, you can turn most every day objects into weapons."
You've been watching Jackie Chan movies, haven't you?
I was amazed what he can do with a common stepladder.
" I doubt that anyone would be able to 3D-print a bullet and its charge for many years to come."
Way, way too late. Just one source is here;
http://www.lymanproducts.com/lyman/bullet-casting/
The recipe for black powder is on wikipedia, and smokeless powder is only one step beyond Mythbusters level kitchen chemistry.
The government can't reliably stop people from making their own methamphetamine; this chemistry is much simpler. Making it in ton lots consistently time after time is the hard part, not the making it in the first place. It's similar to beer or wine. A batch of home brew is no big deal. Making it by thousand barrel lots and getting it to come out the same every time is the hard part.
"Because most people can't afford a CNC mill and you can now buy a 3-D printer at Staples?"
You don't need a CNC mill unless you want to build several copies of the same thing quickly. Milling machines are not that expensive.
http://www.harborfreight.com/1-1-2-half-horsepower-heavy-duty-milling-drilling-machine-33686.html
it's not the greatest, but it will work.
"Since 'most' people work 9-5, significant daylight time after 5pm is a pretty attractive concept"
Who is this mysterious 9-5 worker? It's never been me. 7:30 to 4:00 at two different jobs. 7:00 to 3:30. 8:00 to 5:00 (that one is close) And certainly the Navy never worked 9:00 to 5:00.
With 8.5 hours of day light in the winter, there is no significant time with the sun up while not at work in any case. With 15.5 hours of daylight in the summer it's still light while I'm trying to go to bed in either case.
Interestingly enough, if there was no daylight savings time the sun would be up an hour earlier before work started, so it would be warmer, so I could ride the motorcycle more. The temperature of the morning commute is the controlling factor. This would reduce my CO2 production, and therefore reduce global warming.
"but it seems not unreasonable to regulate the bits that explode, e.g. gunpowder and the bullets that contain it."
First, smokeless gunpowder is not an explosive, it's a propellant. Black powder is an explosive, but is largely replaced by alternatives like Pyrodex. The difference was such that when I was 19 I could go buy smokeless powder to reload the 30-30, but I could not buy black powder to load the .50 caliber muzzle-loader, since pyrodex and friends did not exist yet.
Exploding bullets are illegal. But I think you meant cartridges, which contain powder and a bullet (or shot) as a unit.
Daniel Patrick Moynahan made that same suggestion long ago, guns don't kill people, bullets do, so let's regulate the ammunition. It never caught on then either. The people who reload their own ammunition are profoundly unlikely to be career criminals. So regulating the powder/primers only afflicts the honest people, while creating another profitable black market for organized crime.
Now I will submit you have the germ of an interesting idea there. Ban the sale of loaded ammunition in military calibers. So you want an AR? Fine. Buy that and the reloading press and the brass, primers, powder, bullets and support equipment and roll your own .223 ammo. I don't claim it would stop for anyone determined, as it's not hard to load ammunition. I've been doing it since I was about 15. But it would make buying a thousand rounds at the store for a spontaneous crime spree difficult. Speaking only for myself, as a handloader I do NOT like semi-autos as they spew my brass all over and collecting it is nuisance. I expect my brass to hold together at least 10 reloads. Brass is an capital asset.
Would the AR makers rechamber their products to 222 Remington or 22-250 to avoid the 223 caliber? Would the cartels ship in loaded ammo? Probably in both cases. So you have still have only inconvenienced the honest. Which is all any of these laws seem to do. (See 19 year old kid with 50 caliber hawken replica, and no way to buy the powder to use it.)
"If you resign- no unemployment benefits."
That is not always true, especially in this case; check your state's laws on the subject. For example, in Washington State:
RCW 50.20.050
Disqualification for leaving work voluntarily without good cause
2(b) An individual is not disqualified from benefits under (a) of this subsection when:
[assorted other stuff]
(vii) The individual's worksite changed, such change caused a material increase in distance or difficulty of travel, and, after the change, the commute was greater than is customary for workers in the individual's job classification and labor market;
Is this had been a motorcycle, one flick of the red switch on the handlebar and end of story.
Cars need an emergency shutdown if the key does not have a direct connection to the ignition circuit.
Consider too, now single men can "have" a kid without having to deal with the entanglements of marriage. Even better, the courts won't be able to automatically give such a child to it's mother. As the courts still refuse to award custody to men anywhere near 50% of the time, this might help pry them into at least the 20th century, maybe even the 21st.
Lois Mcmaster Bujold called them 'uterine replicators'.
See anything from the Vorkosigan Universe. Looks like we will get them before FTL travel, where in her stories they came later.
Even easier;
Obama refuses to enforce the law. (John Corzine is still not in jail, etc, etc)
Romney wants to continue to monger war.
Neither is fit for the job.
"Who, precisely, was elected to determine how much I need, I still havent heard."
That has always been the problem. Who determines how much I need, and what the definition of 'need' is anyway, and who determines my ability. Who is more qualified than I am to make those decisions as they apply to me?
My argument is no one.
There is a lot to like in the Green platform, but they have a serious issue with "free" health care, education, and so on. There is no free. Some one has to pay for all the goodies, and they are being as cagey as Romney in not saying who is picking up the tab.
"Worse will be when a false positive will induce an accident"
That was my first thought too. Car sees a monster tumbleweed coming and swerves me into the other lane (boom) or the ditch trying to dodge it, not realizing that Ramming Speed is fully authorized with tumbleweeds.
Even worse would be the car dodging a big dog and hitting a small kid instead.
" What am I missing - how can it go "really wrong"?"
From the wikipedia article.
" Later Prime Minister Naoto Kan issued instructions that people within a 20 km (12 mi) zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant must leave, and urged that those living between 20 km and 30 km from the site to stay indoors.[402][403] The latter groups were also urged to evacuate on 25 March.[404]"
So they had to evacuate a semicircle with a 30 Km radius. This is is 1414 sq km, or 546 sq miles. That sounds "really wrong" to me. Now I could find places in Nevada where there is no more than a handful of people in 546 sq miles, but this was in Japan.
More importantly, nuclear power's economics have fallen apart. Until the natural gas runs out, that is the preferred energy choice for anyone that can get it. Ottherwise, even with a below average 33% capacity factor, wind is now cheaper than nuclear. (It looks like a draw until you remember that nuclear's capacity factor is 92% (refueling outages count) or lower, (Crystal River in FL, San Onofre in CA, Trojan in OR.)
And in prime sites, solar is now cheaper than nuclear. In fact, it apparently can tie gas.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/PV-Project-SunPowers-Henrietta-Plant-With-a-PPA-Price-Below-0.104-/
The cost of PV is not done dropping yet. If the sodium sulfur battery installed at Presidio TX works out, then storage in flat or dry places is feasible. Pumped storage is already feasible in hilly places with water.
I am an ex-Navy Nuke. It sounds odd to say it, but in the US there is no point to nuclear power. In Japan they have wind in Hokkaido, and there are some rain shadowed areas on the southern two islands for PV. Honshu has water power available in small scale locations, (And I wouldn't build a really big dam in that earthquake-prone area anyway.)
Japan has made huge cultural changes in the past, and they have the industrial and technical skills they would need. They can certainly make a national policy change to go all out on PV/wind/tidal/geothermal etc. They seem to be hung up on saving face for the existing leadership at the moment. They shouldn't foreign battleships in the harbor to change their minds.
"The one missing part is the family of the kids."
And especially we non-custodial parents. It's hard enough trying to fit visits with outdoor activities into summer now. The usual winter weekends provide plenty of time to stare outside at the cold and snow, then watch a movie.
Year-round school probably does make more sense down south. And this is still a heavily agricultural area. The kids do still work on the farms.
True enough. My employer is trying to switch to Windows 7 again. The first attempt failed when some app in bean-counter land failed to function. So after a three month delay, they are trying again.
The prepare for migration instructions this time are much more alarming. Instead of instead of "expect a few hours of minor disruption," It's "Make multiple full back ups of all important data, and we will be wiping your photos and music directories, and if you have applications we did not install through the software management system, you had better have the install disks, and by the way make sure you have a back up of all critical data."
A definite change in tone :-)
http://www.kleinbottle.com/drinking_mug_klein_bottle.htm
These can make you drink to excess too.
aka a Klein Stein
Fine message to send. "My Party is an obsolete old rustbucket that went aground so hard it was laid up for years as they patched it together again. Oh by the way, it uses so much oil to get anywhere we can't afford to run it anymore."
On the other hand, maybe it is an appropriate message after all. And I say this as a Navy veteran and former resident of Wisconsin.
"But please bear your arms only when you're properly organized in a militia "
I am, and so are you if you are male, the law is still a bit sexist;
"10 USC 311 - MILITIA: COMPOSITION AND CLASSES"
"(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard."
The natural gas is for reheating the air before it decompresses. Otherwise they will be blowing near-liquid air through the turbine blades. Not a good idea.
See Diabatic storage.
"Upon removal from storage, the air must be re-heated prior to expansion in the turbine to power a generator which can be accomplished with a natural gas fired burner for utility grade storage "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
"2. Usable only at slow speeds (traffic jams)"
What? Damn. I had my heart set on the "if the freeway part of your rush hour commute takes 60 minutes, it will drop to 38." part of the summary. Since I can drive at 65 on the highway now, that means I would be able to drive 102 with the computer.
I take it it gets to pay the fines as well? And the computer would have the points docked from it's license, and when it gets suspended, I just plop in a new computer with a new license and start all over.
And now you tell me it's not so. Heavy Sigh.
"We're running XP SP3 here."
Ditto.
The migration to Windows 7 hit a wall when something in bean-counter land did not want to play nice. And I don't think it was the AS400. That seems to be happy to talk to anything that looks like a terminal.
IT isn't returning calls lately, so no idea what is really happening up there.