Mythbusters tried this. Pretty much any high-velocity (supersonic) round is going to disintegrate when it hits water.
I've watched mythbusters (including that episode) and they can be pretty amusing, but please don't confuse them with actual evidence. It is a TV show mostly about making stuff blow up. I know from personal experience that bullets do not "disintegrate" on contact with water from normal firearms. You can watch incendiary rounds as they go through the water (although they are probably subsonic). I had a friend accidentally shoot himself in the foot with a.22 when he fell through the ice on a pond and the bullet certainly went through quite a bit of water. I once saw a jackass shoot a carp with a shotgun, while it was under about 24 inches of water, and the rounds certainly reached it.
You'd have to have a VERY low angle to the water to suffer a richocet.
As young kids we routinely used an old gravel quarry as a shooting range and it was mostly full of water. Someone standing on a typical shoreline and firing at someone or something maybe 20 feet out would experience rounds deflecting off the surface and hitting things on the other side. It is one reason hunters are cautioned about shooting rifles towards water. A rifle round can hit the water and skip half a mile across to the far shore and kill someone.
Again, mythbusters is TV, do not try to take anything they "prove" as some sort of fact. Half the time, they don't seem to have any real intention of finding out if something can happen, just making a big mess and some explosions. It is entertainment, not science.
Out of curiosity, what is your concern with firing guns into water? There is a danger of ricochet, but that may not be a significant risk depending upon the location/circumstances/angle. There is a possible environmental risk, but not any serious one I know of with incendiary rounds (no lead).
Oh, you leave out the alternative, what goes on today: "This is wacky bob and the fizz signing off - up next, it's a half-hour of the same goddamn song over and over and over again."
As I understand as part of one of their settlements the RIAA had to provide a certain value worth of music to public institutions like libraries, so they took the settlement as an opportunity to unload and write off a lot of junk they had in warehouses. One library reported receiving twelve copies of Will Smith's abortive attempt to have a music career. If the RIAA is so unconcerned about their image that they will do things that blatant I think we can look forward to radio stations playing a half hour of the the worst drek they they can find, over and over and over again, so it does not drive people to better music.
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.
Note, for a suppressed round, usually it is subsonic and has a lot less energy. I also saw an interesting x-ray of a guy shot in the forehead with a.22 where the bullet put a groove into his skull as it moved all the way around the outside somewhat contained and directed by his scalp to exit at the back of the head, resulting in an entry wound at the front and an exit wound at the back, but no actual penetration of the skull. Finally, for short range I'd like to mention mercury rounds, which are copper jacketed rounds with mercury inside and result in a splatter effect, rather than just fragmentation (as well as being toxic). They have been used in a few, rare assassinations.
Actually, I have a punching bag in my living room that sees a lot of use both from myself and random visitors. I've seen a number of flying kicks that resulting the bag moving and the person landing right where they hit the bag. This is because the transferred energy to the bag cancels the forward momentum of the attacker and most of the rest of the force is redirected as angular momentum to them (in the case of a circular kick). This is not to say that hollywood does not get the physics wrong, just that it is not wrong in that the attacker will go flying in the opposite direction.
Try firing an incendiary tracer into water (at night). I don't understand the physics of it, but you can see the round move in a spiral like some sort of futuristic rail gun from the movies.
It's been a while since I was in a physics class, but how would you explain those executive desktop toys that have the set of 5 steel balls that go klick klack.
I've trained in various martial arts all my life. At one point in my life I was at an engineering school and I trained briefly with a class run by two physics professors. It really changes your perspective on some aspects of sparring when the instructor starts the class with, "you all know that f=ma, so let me show you haw to add the ground to your 'm' and increase your 'a' so the resulting 'f' sends your opponent flying."
That said, if you're not in contact with the ground, you will we recoiling when you hit an opponent and no they are not likely to go flying through the air when you strike them unless you are specifically throwing them or you are an idiot. The amount of force needed to move a person a significant distance is much, much, much greater than the amount of force needed to disable or kill a person if directed more effectively. I've seen video of Bruce Lee and he was amazingly fast and as a result transferred a lot of force because of the acceleration involved, but I never saw him hit someone and send them flying across a room.
read somewhere that they were really 30-shooters. Supposedly the blanks loaded were good for 5 shots each.
I've never heard such a thing, but I find that highly unlikely. How would one go about making such a blank? They have to work in existing firearms. A typical blank is basically a normal cartridge with the bullet and some of the powder removed. The pin hits the primer on the back of the cartridge which explodes lighting the remaining powder. Making one that explodes five times in a row when struck sounds very, very hard and expensive, let alone somehow segregating the powder and causing 1/5 of the powder to burn at a time. I'm very doubtful.
There are, however, revolvers chambered for a lot more than 6 rounds. My brother has a.22 caliber revolver he uses for target practice that holds 10 or 12 rounds I think. Perhaps that is what you were thinking of?
They are called Sound Suppressors not "silencers". They do not "silence" the sound just diminish it.
Yeah, and they're called "automobiles" not "cars." The term "silencer" may not be as precise as you like but it is just as valid a term as "suppressor."
They do not really suppress the sound the way movies put it (I am looking at you Mr. Bauer).
There are a lot more variables here than you are implying. I have some first hand experience with home-made silencers from my nonstandard youth. A.22 caliber is the most commonly suppressed round historically and used for assassinations. With a dry suppressor made in the basement, a.22 semi-auto will make the typical action noise and you can hear the bullet hit the target, but the sound of the bullet leaving the barrel is negligible. With a bolt action, you hear a sound like a pebble being thrown against your target and that is about it.
They are good just for a small number of shots
This is true with some sound suppressors, but not all. There are a variety of home made one shot suppressors you can build yourself and there are commercial, "wet" suppressors that have a limited number of effective uses. There are also traditional baffle suppressors that are just as effective for 100 shots as for 2. The relative size of the suppressor is dependent upon many factors, but you can certainly build a dry suppressor about 8 inches long that would make a.22 caliber pistol with subsonic rounds pretty darn quiet.
Because Microsoft obviously has nobody who understands GUIs and Apple is the God of GUIs.
I know you meant this as sarcasm, but in truth to those of us with formal training in human-computer interactions, sometimes that is the way it really seems. MS consistently releases products with very basic usability flaws that have been in textbooks as examples of what not to do for decades. They do produce the occasional well designed UI, but on the whole they are terrible. It is hard to say what is going on at MS. Either they have somehow managed to hire some of the worst UI people in the world who now run the show and are very hands on, or it could be they have very good UI people who have no real power and who have their good designs rejected by marketing in favor of a repeat of a bad design but in cornflower blue.
On the other hand, Apple's UI guidelines are used as a teaching resource by universities and in industry workshops around the world. The truth of the matter is, Apple consistently produces very usable UIs and frequently that is a competitive advantage they exploit.
Hey guess what? I don't like a lot of Apple's GUIs. Their OS and software offers very little customizations compared to others
Ahh, but the test of a usable interface is not whether or not you like it. If you don't like the iPod interface does that mean is is a lousy UI? For the most part Apple's UIs are far from perfect, but still better from a usability standpoint than most anything else in mainstream use. The ability to customize a UI, by the way, generally decreases overall usability. This is not true in every case, but for a significant number of them it is. For example, a lot of people want to set their background to a picture of their kids and almost every OS lets you do that, but from a usability perspective most of the backgrounds people pick make it harder to find their icons than the default background. Just because people like it, does not make it a better UI.
Because Microsoft made it, it must be bad!
I haven't installed a copy of the new version of office, nor have I evaluated the UI choices in it. I don't know if it is a good UI or a poor one, but I also don't trust your opinion on the subject because you don't seem to know what you're talking about. It is not necessarily a poor UI because MS made it, but it would ot surprise me either, given their history of poor UIs.
I certainly don't find...
I'm not sure I care what you find superior for your tasks and I don't see how it relates to whether or not Apple is capable of releasing an office suite that would be considered superior to MS's offerings by OS X users.
MS settled the patent infringement lawsuit Apple was about to win and included in that bargain was a guarantee to continue Office for the Mac for several years, the purchase of non-voting stock, and Apple gaining perpetual rights to the Windows APIs of the time. Of course as this reveals the threat to cancel Office for the Mac was probably illegal in the first place, so they just opened themselves up to more litigation, but MS's modus operandi for a long time has been to blatantly break the law and worry about settling lawsuits long after the damage to the market has been done.
How do you install Word? Open it? Save documents? Search? Replace? etc... see I can ask stupid questions too.
Your question is incorrect. Word is not cross platform either and suffers from the same problem to a lesser degree. Assuming IT installs Word, the rest is the same on Linux (under WINE), Windows, and OS X, thus the training costs need only cover one method and users can help one another. The same is not true of users editing LaTeX documents on Windows, Linux, and OS X. That was the difference in training costs I was pointing out.
First off, why are you install LaTeX tools on random platforms? If you had people writing TeX documents you'd just get them a Linux distro workstation, save on the license fees for Windows and use a common set of tools.
So you're advocating a single platform lock-in for all users of your content management and editing system? That's a pretty serious negative, especially when that lock in is Windows. What about the sales guys that need to be able to create sales materials and also need to access the Windows-only sharepoint database? What about the Graphic design department that also does layout for marketing materials and who have thousands invested in Macs and professional graphics tools that run on the Macs? You assume that all users can just use Linux terminals, but often that is not the case, especially for people that have more than one duty. What if the technical documentation they're creating is for software that only runs on Windows?
But anyone stupid enough, or incapable of being train on the use of a text editor, probably shouldn't be a technical writer/editor. I'm sorry, but the job has requirements and responsibilities and thinking for your god damn self is one of them.
It is a common conceit to think that one's own skills and aptitudes are the measure of intelligence. It is not so. I know a man who can correct your grammar in six languages and take muddled engineer speak and translate it into common language accessible to normal people. He cannot, however, figure out how to use LaTeX and does not care to. Your writers and editors should be hired based upon their writing and editing skills, not their ability to make software with poor usability work for them. Calling a person who is not a computer expert "stupid" because they are not a computer expert simply demonstrates your clear lack of perspective.
Your middle paragraph sounds like you are authoring a website not a printed document. Maybe you should re-think your goals in life first? If your plan is to embed videos (wtf?), vector graphics, and whatever other multi-media, you are not producing something meant for TeX.
Or to put it another way, LaTeX sucks at those tasks because it was designed with certain, very limited situations in mind that do not include a wide range of capabilities used in common technical documents and LaTeX is not flexible enough to make those tasks easy. LaTeX is very structured, which can be useful, but it also makes if very brittle, which makes it much less useful if your tasks are not within a tiny subset.
If you are writing a journal, book, paper, thesis, article, or slides, sheet music, etc., then TeX is for you.
You persist in insisting that LaTeX is the right tool for all people trying to do these tasks? How can you be so blind? LaTeX is for people doing those tasks who also don't want a whole slew of features available in other, more comprehensive tools. What if I want animations and video in my sales slides? What if I want my sheet music to include sample audio? What if my book has a lot of pictures that I want placed precisely and artistically, and which is not going to be the same on every page? LaTeX is fine for some tasks, not for all tasks.
How is it better tham FrameMaker or Indesign? Well first, tetex is free.
The software licensing costs are usually a very small part of the
What training do you need to use a text editor like textpad, gedit, kate, or nedit?
How do you open it, how do you save it, how does it integrate with the versioning system or CMS, how do you search and replace, how do you define macros, how does it integrate with my spell checker and grammar checker, how do you define colors for different types of text, how do you change the display fonts, how do you install the editor in the first place. Have you ever worked with a medium sized group of people and tried training them all in this stuff?
My problem is that this "oh it takes effort" issue being a problem. YES, it takes effort to learn LaTeX, but you'd learn it because it serves a purpose.
More effort equals increased training costs. Just because you don't care, does not mean it is not a real criteria on which LaTeX should be evaluated.
LaTeX doesn't change because you're running a different OS.
No, but the workflow and toolset does change on different OS's because there is no one standard interface and toolset that works across all the platforms and lets the average person do everything they need.
The trick you're missing, is once you figure out your layout style, you do things as macros.
Macros only work if your document is consistently structured and fairly repetitive, like a math book. A math book is not the norm for technical documents. You completely ignored my comments about recreating a national geographic magazine. Can you see how hard it would be? Can you see the tasks that are difficult with LaTeX that this is a demonstration of?
I think the problem with you is you don't really understand what TeX is about, nor how it is meant to be used.
I've probably used LaTeX more than you have and for more tasks. I attended a workshop on it once on my company's dime and ended up half teaching the session because I knew more about applying it to normal documentation tasks than the professor who only used it for a very narrow endeavor.
If used correctly, once setup, the majority of your time is spent on the content and not the look.
The tool should not define what output you can manage, rather it should enable what users want to output. The problem with LaTeX is that it is not easy to do many types of documents that are not super structured in a pre-definable way. What you need a graphic that spans three pages, time to write a new macro. Oh you need multiple overlapping, vector graphics with transparency, time to define a new macro. Oh you need to scale down a particular image in one place and not in another, time to define a new macro. Oh you need to embed a PDF form with editable fields, time to define a new macro. Oh you need to embed a video and controls for it, time to define a new macro. 90% of the time when I see a document created by LaTeX I can tell that without looking to see what document created it because the document avoids doing all sorts of things that are hard in LaTeX but easy using other tools.
For my math book, I know from experience that I spent the vast majority of the time (say high 80 percent) worrying about content and grammar.
Good for you. Now try that national geographic magazine I mentioned. (Don't you think it is funny that you just happen to have used it for a math book, one of the few technical documents where LaTeX is appropriate and which I mentioned before you told me what you used it for.)
Point is, yes, LaTeX is harder than point-click Word. But it also is portable and properly sets the document.
If you're looking for is portability and proper typesetting then tell me, exactly, how is LaTeX a better solution than one built around something like FrameMaker or InDesign? InDesign even uses the same exact layout engine. I think your problem is that you have never tried using the real tools on the market and are
To be fair, communism is an economic system. The term "democratic republic" refers to a governmental system. It is quite possible to have both. In recent history, conquering powers often used the promise of communist economic reform to gain support for their dictatorship.
Actually, to be even more clear, they used the promise of socialism, not communism. Both communism and socialism are economic systems, but the US government brainwashing conflates the two. For true government recognized communism, you must look elsewhere than the former soviet states, to places like Madagascar.
It is possible to democratically elect leaders in a republican government that implement communist economic policies.
I think it is important to note that some economic systems are more prone to certain types of government systems. Increasing levels of socialism, for example, concentrate power to a degree that lends itself to a takeover by an authoritarian regime, whereas economies with less centralized decision making are less prone to such a takeover. It is possible to have extreme socialism or extreme capitalism without the government being authoritarian, but it is much less likely to remain that way than a more moderate, balanced economic system.
Saying that "LaTeX fails because it lacks common tools" is very naive and ignorant.
Sigh. I wish you could objectively see your writing from an outside perspective. I write that the lack of common tools makes training hard and you come back with a bunch of comments that are irrelevant or which actually support my conclusion. Training people to use different editors and GUIs makes training people harder because they can't as easily teach one another and because the trainer has to be familiar with all the tools. You even talk about using MikTeX which is a non-starter if you're on OS X. You write "And for the occasional 'how do I do this' layout question, it's usually answered somewhere on the net." and think that is acceptable from a training perspective?
Look I know how LaTeX works, and I've used it on multiple projects. It is great for some uses, but in fails hugely in the ways I described. Just because you might only need to look up a layout question occasionally, does not make that the common case for most people using a layout program today. Here's an exercise for you: go try to recreate the exact layout of the latest issue of National Geographic using LateX, but do 1/3 of it using Windows, 1/3 using Linux, and 1/3 using OS X. In a few years when you're finished, send me a note apologizing for your lack of understanding. I'm not saying laying out national geographic is the common case, but the common case I've seen for professional technical documents is usually somewhere in between that and writing your physics thesis or a book on mathematics, which is mostly what LaTeX is useful for. LaTeX is fine if your writers and editors already know it and/or if you're not on lots of platforms and if the document you are writing is very structured and repetitive in its layout and does not have a lot of different sizes and types of graphics. For the general case of creating lots of technical documents, however, it is rarely a good solution.
I guess it depends on the legal definition of "input" that the law has. I haven't read the law, so I don't know.
I believe the law called for a well defined process by which multiple parties determined the evolution of the standard, or some similar text. So, no, I'm not sure what you describe above would meet those requirements although MS might convince government agencies otherwise with enough cash.
As far as multiple implementations... Corel has already announced support for OOXML in Word Perfect. Novel has announced an OOXML filter for OpenOffice.org suite.
Again, they have announced they will "support" the format, but not if they will have a complete implementation of the "standard" which seems unlikely and perhaps impossible given the ambiguous nature of the the "Open"XML specification. I'm not sure anyone will convinced that those implementations qualify.
...people will continue buying their software in large numbers because it simply works better than the OSS/Free alternatives out there.
You have to be very careful with making implicit statements like this. Do you have proof that MS's software works better and do you have proof that is why people buy it more commonly in general? I have no doubt that for some people it does work better, but to claim that that is the common case requires evidence. You do base your opinions on evidence right? Lets see it.
People have been saying the same thing about Linux for more than a decade, and Linux hasn't taken more than a negligible chunk of the small to medium server from MS...
And where is your evidence of the causality? Do you understand what a monopoly is and what it does to a market? The reason monopolies are regulated is because they allow a company that does not have the best offering in a market to gain or maintain market share through artificially introduced problems with their competitors. MS is a monopoly both legally and practically if you speak to any competent economist. Further that have been found to be abusing that monopoly with regard to the server market for many years. What is your evidence that it is the quality of their products and not the abuse that is responsible for the market share numbers? Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. The courts in both the US and EU have disagreed with your opinion.
People *may*, if this thing actually has any legs to it, end up continuing to use Office and saving docs as "ODF", which won't impact MS...
Here's the thing. Simply having an open format prevents lock in and forces a competitive venue by removing the major transitional barrier. Just having ODF as a standard does several things. It invigorates the market and encourages investment by reassuring investors that the market is competitive so investing money in a competitor to MSOffice is not a lost cause and a better product can win the market. It also tells MS they cannot rely upon lock in so they have to have the best product to maintain market share, encouraging MS to both make MSOffice better and cheaper.
By making ODF a real standard and demanding compliance these state governments are doing a lot more than you think. They aren't insuring either they or anyone else will move away from MSOffice, they're making sure both MSOffice and other products are both cheaper and better. It's called "the capitalist free market" and it works really well when a monopoly does not intervene. Expect a new era of innovation in office products if this works.
Why people write technical documents in anything else is really beyond me. With a proper macro package you can make LaTeX very simple to use, even with fancy letterheads and the like.
Allow me to enlighten you. I've chosen the formats, tools, and built work flows for creation, editing, and maintenance of technical documents for multiple companies. So I'll tell you exactly why LaTeX is rarely part of the solutions. While there are reasonable packages for LateX creation on all platforms, there does not seem to be a single set of tools that works on Windows, Linux, and OS X complicating training and deployment in cross platform environments. There is a serious learning curve to LaTeX especially for professional editors and writers who rarely have as much expertise in markup, making it more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to hire people to fill these roles. The learning curve is enough so that some highly technical people (think multiple PhDs and lecturing at computing conferences) sometimes don't feel like dealing with it, necessitating the development of more import tool creation/customization in order to avoid adding extra work to content managers. Finally, some technical documents (more and more of them) rely heavily upon graphics and video and LateX is terrible at dealing with graphics and video that are not predefined and recurring. Graphics really work best when you have a graphical tool instead of a text based markup that implements color and graphics as a nasty hack.
Now don't get me wrong. LaTeX is a powerful tool and very useful in certain instances. When I'm building automated single sourcing solutions it is a great tool. It is reliable and plays well with machines. It just is not the best solution by a long shot for most of the projects I've done.
Sounds like LaTeX... only that LaTeX has been around a lot longer.
LaTeX is different and used so little because it is inflexible. The "X" in "XML" stands for "eXtensible." Things like color and graphics in LaTeX are implemented as hacks. LaTeX is nice in that it is so precise and unchanging, but that also makes it unsuitable for an ongoing standard.
The main difference is that XML has been elevated to buzzword status so it gets lots of attention.
XML is not used just because it is a buzzword. It is used because it is common and standard and easy and there are a billion choices of tools and libraries already in existence to make using it painless. Why wouldn't someone use XML if they were creating a new word processing document format unless they did not care about interoperability?
Open source, like socialism, is often appropriate, like for public roads and schools. You, however, seem to be confusing open source with open standards. Not all the software that uses the ODF format is open source.
The revenue model for most open source software, is to give the software away and provide support at a premium price, or place ads in the software.
As someone who has worked his entire life at companies that worked on open source software, but who never worked at one that tried to survive on support revenue from them I find your comment to be misinformed. Support is not the most common revenue model for open source software. Are you sure you understand how most open source software is developed?
Who thinks a government agency can create software that will be reusable, upgradeable and secure?
What does the government have to do with it? The whole point of the open source model is that companies and governnments and organizations pay only for what they need and that no one else has needed. Assuming my company were to standardize on OpenOffice at work, but we needed it to be able to import one of our proprietary XML report formats, we might make some improvements to the import routines, maybe building a plug-in system so we did not clutter up the main product. We could do this using our own employees if we had the time and expertise or we could hire someone else. Our company is only acting in our own self interests, but at the same time our work benefits others. A thousand companies all doing this same thing and a hundred thousand using it and just reporting bugs and that is the common open source business model. Most open source is not developed by one dedicated company that is trying to make money off the software itself, rather it is created by the community who are trying to make money doing business which that software happens to facilitate. The only problem is when someone who does not understand this model starts calling it "socialism" and confuses people even more. The confusion is understandable because it is an application of common property, but it is very much part of capitalism, developed and shared for profit by the users, not out of some sort of selfless hippy idealism.
If Microsoft is successful in getting ISO approval, this California law will essentially get read in as a "Thou shalt use Microsoft Office" law.
When last I read of this law it included two provisions that seemed to indicate otherwise. One provision was a requirement that the standard be maintained by a third party with a process for altering and improving the standard that allowed input from multiple parties. The second provision was a requirement of several, independent implementations. Regardless of MS's shenanigans I don't see how they would meet either criteria. MS completely controls "Open"XML and third parties are not allowed to make changes or legally implement them. No one but MS has a complete implementation due to the nature of the so called standard.
Has the proposed California legislation changed greatly?
One of the main reasons is web applications that have been developed for IE6 don't work in IE7 because IE7 is better at standards compliance. So many hacks were made to get things to work in IE6 that many applications that were developed during IE6's reign refuse to work in anything but IE6.
My experience is somewhat different. I help develop a couple of really expensive devices with Web interfaces. When IE7 came out, I took a look to see how bad it would be and, unsurprisingly IE7 broke a lot of things. So here's what's interesting. We test in Firefox, and unofficially support Safari, Opera, and whatever else. They all work just fine sans the occasional rare bug because they all adhere reasonably well to standards. IE7 and IE6 are both in the same category for us, they break standards so badly they each have to be a special case. Maybe IE7 is twice as compliant as IE6, but given how bad IE6 was, that really doesn't matter that much. They are both so broken they cannot be expected to work, unlike every other browser made by anyone but MS.
So besides the old argument of "I have legacy systems / applications which rely on telnet and other outdated modes of communication", why would people use telnet? Laziness? Ignorance? What else am I missing here?
People who use telnet on a large scale that I know of include:
European financial companies who are not allowed to use encryption while trading stock for regulatory reasons (on a private network).
South and Central American ISPs who provide shell accounts as part of internet access and who have to support the lowest common denominator.
Major network operators in Asia and China who run telnet on their control networks.
New hardware appliances that are configured once from telnet or console and for whom SSH provides only added complexity since they would be transferring the keys at the same time as their only connection.
Telnet is not dead and in some cases is appropriate. Those cases are just fairly limited and are less likely to be a problem than someone who just stick a box on the net with telnet enabled because they are lazy/ignorant (which also happens).
Although most use Microsoft Word, the California CMAS master contract that State Agencies use to buy their software has Word, WordPerfect and other word processing packages on it. Which means that agencies can pick and choose what they think that they need. Now the Legislature wants to set one..
They are proposing to set one format, not one word processor. Agencies can still choose among software packages, just with noncompliant packages removed from the bidding. I think there are a dozen products now with ODF support.
If the bill is passed, agencies will need to convert already existing processes and applications to use the new format. With no new staff nor new money to hire someone else to do it.
There are now free software solutions that read both MSWord and ODF files, including Google's Web based offering. When departments start budgeting for next year they will have to take these rules into account and it will probably end up saving them money from their budgets within a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
I've watched mythbusters (including that episode) and they can be pretty amusing, but please don't confuse them with actual evidence. It is a TV show mostly about making stuff blow up. I know from personal experience that bullets do not "disintegrate" on contact with water from normal firearms. You can watch incendiary rounds as they go through the water (although they are probably subsonic). I had a friend accidentally shoot himself in the foot with a .22 when he fell through the ice on a pond and the bullet certainly went through quite a bit of water. I once saw a jackass shoot a carp with a shotgun, while it was under about 24 inches of water, and the rounds certainly reached it.
You'd have to have a VERY low angle to the water to suffer a richocet.As young kids we routinely used an old gravel quarry as a shooting range and it was mostly full of water. Someone standing on a typical shoreline and firing at someone or something maybe 20 feet out would experience rounds deflecting off the surface and hitting things on the other side. It is one reason hunters are cautioned about shooting rifles towards water. A rifle round can hit the water and skip half a mile across to the far shore and kill someone.
Again, mythbusters is TV, do not try to take anything they "prove" as some sort of fact. Half the time, they don't seem to have any real intention of finding out if something can happen, just making a big mess and some explosions. It is entertainment, not science.
Out of curiosity, what is your concern with firing guns into water? There is a danger of ricochet, but that may not be a significant risk depending upon the location/circumstances/angle. There is a possible environmental risk, but not any serious one I know of with incendiary rounds (no lead).
As I understand as part of one of their settlements the RIAA had to provide a certain value worth of music to public institutions like libraries, so they took the settlement as an opportunity to unload and write off a lot of junk they had in warehouses. One library reported receiving twelve copies of Will Smith's abortive attempt to have a music career. If the RIAA is so unconcerned about their image that they will do things that blatant I think we can look forward to radio stations playing a half hour of the the worst drek they they can find, over and over and over again, so it does not drive people to better music.
Note, for a suppressed round, usually it is subsonic and has a lot less energy. I also saw an interesting x-ray of a guy shot in the forehead with a .22 where the bullet put a groove into his skull as it moved all the way around the outside somewhat contained and directed by his scalp to exit at the back of the head, resulting in an entry wound at the front and an exit wound at the back, but no actual penetration of the skull. Finally, for short range I'd like to mention mercury rounds, which are copper jacketed rounds with mercury inside and result in a splatter effect, rather than just fragmentation (as well as being toxic). They have been used in a few, rare assassinations.
Actually, I have a punching bag in my living room that sees a lot of use both from myself and random visitors. I've seen a number of flying kicks that resulting the bag moving and the person landing right where they hit the bag. This is because the transferred energy to the bag cancels the forward momentum of the attacker and most of the rest of the force is redirected as angular momentum to them (in the case of a circular kick). This is not to say that hollywood does not get the physics wrong, just that it is not wrong in that the attacker will go flying in the opposite direction.
Try firing an incendiary tracer into water (at night). I don't understand the physics of it, but you can see the round move in a spiral like some sort of futuristic rail gun from the movies.
I've trained in various martial arts all my life. At one point in my life I was at an engineering school and I trained briefly with a class run by two physics professors. It really changes your perspective on some aspects of sparring when the instructor starts the class with, "you all know that f=ma, so let me show you haw to add the ground to your 'm' and increase your 'a' so the resulting 'f' sends your opponent flying."
That said, if you're not in contact with the ground, you will we recoiling when you hit an opponent and no they are not likely to go flying through the air when you strike them unless you are specifically throwing them or you are an idiot. The amount of force needed to move a person a significant distance is much, much, much greater than the amount of force needed to disable or kill a person if directed more effectively. I've seen video of Bruce Lee and he was amazingly fast and as a result transferred a lot of force because of the acceleration involved, but I never saw him hit someone and send them flying across a room.
I've never heard such a thing, but I find that highly unlikely. How would one go about making such a blank? They have to work in existing firearms. A typical blank is basically a normal cartridge with the bullet and some of the powder removed. The pin hits the primer on the back of the cartridge which explodes lighting the remaining powder. Making one that explodes five times in a row when struck sounds very, very hard and expensive, let alone somehow segregating the powder and causing 1/5 of the powder to burn at a time. I'm very doubtful.
There are, however, revolvers chambered for a lot more than 6 rounds. My brother has a .22 caliber revolver he uses for target practice that holds 10 or 12 rounds I think. Perhaps that is what you were thinking of?
Yeah, and they're called "automobiles" not "cars." The term "silencer" may not be as precise as you like but it is just as valid a term as "suppressor."
They do not really suppress the sound the way movies put it (I am looking at you Mr. Bauer).There are a lot more variables here than you are implying. I have some first hand experience with home-made silencers from my nonstandard youth. A .22 caliber is the most commonly suppressed round historically and used for assassinations. With a dry suppressor made in the basement, a .22 semi-auto will make the typical action noise and you can hear the bullet hit the target, but the sound of the bullet leaving the barrel is negligible. With a bolt action, you hear a sound like a pebble being thrown against your target and that is about it.
They are good just for a small number of shotsThis is true with some sound suppressors, but not all. There are a variety of home made one shot suppressors you can build yourself and there are commercial, "wet" suppressors that have a limited number of effective uses. There are also traditional baffle suppressors that are just as effective for 100 shots as for 2. The relative size of the suppressor is dependent upon many factors, but you can certainly build a dry suppressor about 8 inches long that would make a .22 caliber pistol with subsonic rounds pretty darn quiet.
I know you meant this as sarcasm, but in truth to those of us with formal training in human-computer interactions, sometimes that is the way it really seems. MS consistently releases products with very basic usability flaws that have been in textbooks as examples of what not to do for decades. They do produce the occasional well designed UI, but on the whole they are terrible. It is hard to say what is going on at MS. Either they have somehow managed to hire some of the worst UI people in the world who now run the show and are very hands on, or it could be they have very good UI people who have no real power and who have their good designs rejected by marketing in favor of a repeat of a bad design but in cornflower blue.
On the other hand, Apple's UI guidelines are used as a teaching resource by universities and in industry workshops around the world. The truth of the matter is, Apple consistently produces very usable UIs and frequently that is a competitive advantage they exploit.
Hey guess what? I don't like a lot of Apple's GUIs. Their OS and software offers very little customizations compared to othersAhh, but the test of a usable interface is not whether or not you like it. If you don't like the iPod interface does that mean is is a lousy UI? For the most part Apple's UIs are far from perfect, but still better from a usability standpoint than most anything else in mainstream use. The ability to customize a UI, by the way, generally decreases overall usability. This is not true in every case, but for a significant number of them it is. For example, a lot of people want to set their background to a picture of their kids and almost every OS lets you do that, but from a usability perspective most of the backgrounds people pick make it harder to find their icons than the default background. Just because people like it, does not make it a better UI.
Because Microsoft made it, it must be bad!I haven't installed a copy of the new version of office, nor have I evaluated the UI choices in it. I don't know if it is a good UI or a poor one, but I also don't trust your opinion on the subject because you don't seem to know what you're talking about. It is not necessarily a poor UI because MS made it, but it would ot surprise me either, given their history of poor UIs.
I certainly don't find...I'm not sure I care what you find superior for your tasks and I don't see how it relates to whether or not Apple is capable of releasing an office suite that would be considered superior to MS's offerings by OS X users.
Whatever moron modded this up, please stop. This factually incorrect troll has been circulating way to long, fooling the gullible.
MS settled the patent infringement lawsuit Apple was about to win and included in that bargain was a guarantee to continue Office for the Mac for several years, the purchase of non-voting stock, and Apple gaining perpetual rights to the Windows APIs of the time. Of course as this reveals the threat to cancel Office for the Mac was probably illegal in the first place, so they just opened themselves up to more litigation, but MS's modus operandi for a long time has been to blatantly break the law and worry about settling lawsuits long after the damage to the market has been done.
How do you install Word? Open it? Save documents? Search? Replace? etc... see I can ask stupid questions too.
Your question is incorrect. Word is not cross platform either and suffers from the same problem to a lesser degree. Assuming IT installs Word, the rest is the same on Linux (under WINE), Windows, and OS X, thus the training costs need only cover one method and users can help one another. The same is not true of users editing LaTeX documents on Windows, Linux, and OS X. That was the difference in training costs I was pointing out.
First off, why are you install LaTeX tools on random platforms? If you had people writing TeX documents you'd just get them a Linux distro workstation, save on the license fees for Windows and use a common set of tools.
So you're advocating a single platform lock-in for all users of your content management and editing system? That's a pretty serious negative, especially when that lock in is Windows. What about the sales guys that need to be able to create sales materials and also need to access the Windows-only sharepoint database? What about the Graphic design department that also does layout for marketing materials and who have thousands invested in Macs and professional graphics tools that run on the Macs? You assume that all users can just use Linux terminals, but often that is not the case, especially for people that have more than one duty. What if the technical documentation they're creating is for software that only runs on Windows?
But anyone stupid enough, or incapable of being train on the use of a text editor, probably shouldn't be a technical writer/editor. I'm sorry, but the job has requirements and responsibilities and thinking for your god damn self is one of them.
It is a common conceit to think that one's own skills and aptitudes are the measure of intelligence. It is not so. I know a man who can correct your grammar in six languages and take muddled engineer speak and translate it into common language accessible to normal people. He cannot, however, figure out how to use LaTeX and does not care to. Your writers and editors should be hired based upon their writing and editing skills, not their ability to make software with poor usability work for them. Calling a person who is not a computer expert "stupid" because they are not a computer expert simply demonstrates your clear lack of perspective.
Your middle paragraph sounds like you are authoring a website not a printed document. Maybe you should re-think your goals in life first? If your plan is to embed videos (wtf?), vector graphics, and whatever other multi-media, you are not producing something meant for TeX.
Or to put it another way, LaTeX sucks at those tasks because it was designed with certain, very limited situations in mind that do not include a wide range of capabilities used in common technical documents and LaTeX is not flexible enough to make those tasks easy. LaTeX is very structured, which can be useful, but it also makes if very brittle, which makes it much less useful if your tasks are not within a tiny subset.
If you are writing a journal, book, paper, thesis, article, or slides, sheet music, etc., then TeX is for you.
You persist in insisting that LaTeX is the right tool for all people trying to do these tasks? How can you be so blind? LaTeX is for people doing those tasks who also don't want a whole slew of features available in other, more comprehensive tools. What if I want animations and video in my sales slides? What if I want my sheet music to include sample audio? What if my book has a lot of pictures that I want placed precisely and artistically, and which is not going to be the same on every page? LaTeX is fine for some tasks, not for all tasks.
How is it better tham FrameMaker or Indesign? Well first, tetex is free.
The software licensing costs are usually a very small part of the
What training do you need to use a text editor like textpad, gedit, kate, or nedit?
How do you open it, how do you save it, how does it integrate with the versioning system or CMS, how do you search and replace, how do you define macros, how does it integrate with my spell checker and grammar checker, how do you define colors for different types of text, how do you change the display fonts, how do you install the editor in the first place. Have you ever worked with a medium sized group of people and tried training them all in this stuff?
My problem is that this "oh it takes effort" issue being a problem. YES, it takes effort to learn LaTeX, but you'd learn it because it serves a purpose.
More effort equals increased training costs. Just because you don't care, does not mean it is not a real criteria on which LaTeX should be evaluated.
LaTeX doesn't change because you're running a different OS.
No, but the workflow and toolset does change on different OS's because there is no one standard interface and toolset that works across all the platforms and lets the average person do everything they need.
The trick you're missing, is once you figure out your layout style, you do things as macros.
Macros only work if your document is consistently structured and fairly repetitive, like a math book. A math book is not the norm for technical documents. You completely ignored my comments about recreating a national geographic magazine. Can you see how hard it would be? Can you see the tasks that are difficult with LaTeX that this is a demonstration of?
I think the problem with you is you don't really understand what TeX is about, nor how it is meant to be used.
I've probably used LaTeX more than you have and for more tasks. I attended a workshop on it once on my company's dime and ended up half teaching the session because I knew more about applying it to normal documentation tasks than the professor who only used it for a very narrow endeavor.
If used correctly, once setup, the majority of your time is spent on the content and not the look.
The tool should not define what output you can manage, rather it should enable what users want to output. The problem with LaTeX is that it is not easy to do many types of documents that are not super structured in a pre-definable way. What you need a graphic that spans three pages, time to write a new macro. Oh you need multiple overlapping, vector graphics with transparency, time to define a new macro. Oh you need to scale down a particular image in one place and not in another, time to define a new macro. Oh you need to embed a PDF form with editable fields, time to define a new macro. Oh you need to embed a video and controls for it, time to define a new macro. 90% of the time when I see a document created by LaTeX I can tell that without looking to see what document created it because the document avoids doing all sorts of things that are hard in LaTeX but easy using other tools.
For my math book, I know from experience that I spent the vast majority of the time (say high 80 percent) worrying about content and grammar.
Good for you. Now try that national geographic magazine I mentioned. (Don't you think it is funny that you just happen to have used it for a math book, one of the few technical documents where LaTeX is appropriate and which I mentioned before you told me what you used it for.)
Point is, yes, LaTeX is harder than point-click Word. But it also is portable and properly sets the document.
If you're looking for is portability and proper typesetting then tell me, exactly, how is LaTeX a better solution than one built around something like FrameMaker or InDesign? InDesign even uses the same exact layout engine. I think your problem is that you have never tried using the real tools on the market and are
Actually, to be even more clear, they used the promise of socialism, not communism. Both communism and socialism are economic systems, but the US government brainwashing conflates the two. For true government recognized communism, you must look elsewhere than the former soviet states, to places like Madagascar.
It is possible to democratically elect leaders in a republican government that implement communist economic policies.I think it is important to note that some economic systems are more prone to certain types of government systems. Increasing levels of socialism, for example, concentrate power to a degree that lends itself to a takeover by an authoritarian regime, whereas economies with less centralized decision making are less prone to such a takeover. It is possible to have extreme socialism or extreme capitalism without the government being authoritarian, but it is much less likely to remain that way than a more moderate, balanced economic system.
Sigh. I wish you could objectively see your writing from an outside perspective. I write that the lack of common tools makes training hard and you come back with a bunch of comments that are irrelevant or which actually support my conclusion. Training people to use different editors and GUIs makes training people harder because they can't as easily teach one another and because the trainer has to be familiar with all the tools. You even talk about using MikTeX which is a non-starter if you're on OS X. You write "And for the occasional 'how do I do this' layout question, it's usually answered somewhere on the net." and think that is acceptable from a training perspective?
Look I know how LaTeX works, and I've used it on multiple projects. It is great for some uses, but in fails hugely in the ways I described. Just because you might only need to look up a layout question occasionally, does not make that the common case for most people using a layout program today. Here's an exercise for you: go try to recreate the exact layout of the latest issue of National Geographic using LateX, but do 1/3 of it using Windows, 1/3 using Linux, and 1/3 using OS X. In a few years when you're finished, send me a note apologizing for your lack of understanding. I'm not saying laying out national geographic is the common case, but the common case I've seen for professional technical documents is usually somewhere in between that and writing your physics thesis or a book on mathematics, which is mostly what LaTeX is useful for. LaTeX is fine if your writers and editors already know it and/or if you're not on lots of platforms and if the document you are writing is very structured and repetitive in its layout and does not have a lot of different sizes and types of graphics. For the general case of creating lots of technical documents, however, it is rarely a good solution.
I believe the law called for a well defined process by which multiple parties determined the evolution of the standard, or some similar text. So, no, I'm not sure what you describe above would meet those requirements although MS might convince government agencies otherwise with enough cash.
As far as multiple implementations... Corel has already announced support for OOXML in Word Perfect. Novel has announced an OOXML filter for OpenOffice.org suite.Again, they have announced they will "support" the format, but not if they will have a complete implementation of the "standard" which seems unlikely and perhaps impossible given the ambiguous nature of the the "Open"XML specification. I'm not sure anyone will convinced that those implementations qualify.
...people will continue buying their software in large numbers because it simply works better than the OSS/Free alternatives out there.You have to be very careful with making implicit statements like this. Do you have proof that MS's software works better and do you have proof that is why people buy it more commonly in general? I have no doubt that for some people it does work better, but to claim that that is the common case requires evidence. You do base your opinions on evidence right? Lets see it.
People have been saying the same thing about Linux for more than a decade, and Linux hasn't taken more than a negligible chunk of the small to medium server from MS...And where is your evidence of the causality? Do you understand what a monopoly is and what it does to a market? The reason monopolies are regulated is because they allow a company that does not have the best offering in a market to gain or maintain market share through artificially introduced problems with their competitors. MS is a monopoly both legally and practically if you speak to any competent economist. Further that have been found to be abusing that monopoly with regard to the server market for many years. What is your evidence that it is the quality of their products and not the abuse that is responsible for the market share numbers? Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. The courts in both the US and EU have disagreed with your opinion.
People *may*, if this thing actually has any legs to it, end up continuing to use Office and saving docs as "ODF", which won't impact MS...Here's the thing. Simply having an open format prevents lock in and forces a competitive venue by removing the major transitional barrier. Just having ODF as a standard does several things. It invigorates the market and encourages investment by reassuring investors that the market is competitive so investing money in a competitor to MSOffice is not a lost cause and a better product can win the market. It also tells MS they cannot rely upon lock in so they have to have the best product to maintain market share, encouraging MS to both make MSOffice better and cheaper.
By making ODF a real standard and demanding compliance these state governments are doing a lot more than you think. They aren't insuring either they or anyone else will move away from MSOffice, they're making sure both MSOffice and other products are both cheaper and better. It's called "the capitalist free market" and it works really well when a monopoly does not intervene. Expect a new era of innovation in office products if this works.
Allow me to enlighten you. I've chosen the formats, tools, and built work flows for creation, editing, and maintenance of technical documents for multiple companies. So I'll tell you exactly why LaTeX is rarely part of the solutions. While there are reasonable packages for LateX creation on all platforms, there does not seem to be a single set of tools that works on Windows, Linux, and OS X complicating training and deployment in cross platform environments. There is a serious learning curve to LaTeX especially for professional editors and writers who rarely have as much expertise in markup, making it more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to hire people to fill these roles. The learning curve is enough so that some highly technical people (think multiple PhDs and lecturing at computing conferences) sometimes don't feel like dealing with it, necessitating the development of more import tool creation/customization in order to avoid adding extra work to content managers. Finally, some technical documents (more and more of them) rely heavily upon graphics and video and LateX is terrible at dealing with graphics and video that are not predefined and recurring. Graphics really work best when you have a graphical tool instead of a text based markup that implements color and graphics as a nasty hack.
Now don't get me wrong. LaTeX is a powerful tool and very useful in certain instances. When I'm building automated single sourcing solutions it is a great tool. It is reliable and plays well with machines. It just is not the best solution by a long shot for most of the projects I've done.
LaTeX is different and used so little because it is inflexible. The "X" in "XML" stands for "eXtensible." Things like color and graphics in LaTeX are implemented as hacks. LaTeX is nice in that it is so precise and unchanging, but that also makes it unsuitable for an ongoing standard.
The main difference is that XML has been elevated to buzzword status so it gets lots of attention.XML is not used just because it is a buzzword. It is used because it is common and standard and easy and there are a billion choices of tools and libraries already in existence to make using it painless. Why wouldn't someone use XML if they were creating a new word processing document format unless they did not care about interoperability?
Open source, like socialism, is often appropriate, like for public roads and schools. You, however, seem to be confusing open source with open standards. Not all the software that uses the ODF format is open source.
The revenue model for most open source software, is to give the software away and provide support at a premium price, or place ads in the software.As someone who has worked his entire life at companies that worked on open source software, but who never worked at one that tried to survive on support revenue from them I find your comment to be misinformed. Support is not the most common revenue model for open source software. Are you sure you understand how most open source software is developed?
Who thinks a government agency can create software that will be reusable, upgradeable and secure?What does the government have to do with it? The whole point of the open source model is that companies and governnments and organizations pay only for what they need and that no one else has needed. Assuming my company were to standardize on OpenOffice at work, but we needed it to be able to import one of our proprietary XML report formats, we might make some improvements to the import routines, maybe building a plug-in system so we did not clutter up the main product. We could do this using our own employees if we had the time and expertise or we could hire someone else. Our company is only acting in our own self interests, but at the same time our work benefits others. A thousand companies all doing this same thing and a hundred thousand using it and just reporting bugs and that is the common open source business model. Most open source is not developed by one dedicated company that is trying to make money off the software itself, rather it is created by the community who are trying to make money doing business which that software happens to facilitate. The only problem is when someone who does not understand this model starts calling it "socialism" and confuses people even more. The confusion is understandable because it is an application of common property, but it is very much part of capitalism, developed and shared for profit by the users, not out of some sort of selfless hippy idealism.
When last I read of this law it included two provisions that seemed to indicate otherwise. One provision was a requirement that the standard be maintained by a third party with a process for altering and improving the standard that allowed input from multiple parties. The second provision was a requirement of several, independent implementations. Regardless of MS's shenanigans I don't see how they would meet either criteria. MS completely controls "Open"XML and third parties are not allowed to make changes or legally implement them. No one but MS has a complete implementation due to the nature of the so called standard.
Has the proposed California legislation changed greatly?
My experience is somewhat different. I help develop a couple of really expensive devices with Web interfaces. When IE7 came out, I took a look to see how bad it would be and, unsurprisingly IE7 broke a lot of things. So here's what's interesting. We test in Firefox, and unofficially support Safari, Opera, and whatever else. They all work just fine sans the occasional rare bug because they all adhere reasonably well to standards. IE7 and IE6 are both in the same category for us, they break standards so badly they each have to be a special case. Maybe IE7 is twice as compliant as IE6, but given how bad IE6 was, that really doesn't matter that much. They are both so broken they cannot be expected to work, unlike every other browser made by anyone but MS.
People who use telnet on a large scale that I know of include:
Telnet is not dead and in some cases is appropriate. Those cases are just fairly limited and are less likely to be a problem than someone who just stick a box on the net with telnet enabled because they are lazy/ignorant (which also happens).
They are proposing to set one format, not one word processor. Agencies can still choose among software packages, just with noncompliant packages removed from the bidding. I think there are a dozen products now with ODF support.
If the bill is passed, agencies will need to convert already existing processes and applications to use the new format. With no new staff nor new money to hire someone else to do it.There are now free software solutions that read both MSWord and ODF files, including Google's Web based offering. When departments start budgeting for next year they will have to take these rules into account and it will probably end up saving them money from their budgets within a few years.