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X VS Y VS Z

November 3, 2014, 6:34 am
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I don't particularly care for the M1A.

I think I've mentioned it before.

But...

Proponents of one 7.62 battle rifle or another tend to have the one we love and despise the others.

We have lists!  Lists of all the things that our bestie does that the others don't.

A few of us love one because it stood us well when it mattered.  Applied rather than theoretical.

A few of us hate one because it didn't work when it was needed.  Applied rather than theoretical.

Some of us are flat wrong because they judge an issue weapon's capabilities based on the example set by a commercial model.  Being wrong from this goes both ways.

Combat record matters to a degree, but because commercial guns are not the same as issue, it might not matter as much as some ascribe.

That my choice stood me well when it mattered, fared well for many in combat in varied environments and was widely issued matters not one whit to someone who's experience with one of the others matches mine.

In reality the M14/FAL/G3 debate is a debate about the margins.  One is not particularly more reliable than the others under real conditions.  One is not particularly more accurate than the others under real conditions with a typical infantryman on the trigger.  They are all similarly heavy and powerful.  They all have features that endear them to one individual or another.  All of them can be made to fail if you abuse them enough.  A system of abuse that lets one pass and the others fail can be devised for any of them.
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Order Of Operation Matters

November 3, 2014, 7:34 am
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The TI matches the spreadsheet in both Open Office and NeoOffice (if you put it in as =6/2*(1+2))

I think my math teacher taught me to do parenthesis first, then multiplication/division left to right.  That's six divided by two (three) then times three for nine.

I do recall seeing the order of operation that leads to the Casio answer, but I don't remember where I saw it or what circumstances they said it was the preferred method.
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Travelling

November 3, 2014, 4:22 pm
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A couple of epiphanies.

The first is my acceleration spreadsheet will also tell me how fast and how long a fall will take.

The trick to remembering what contragrav does is to remember that it nullifies the weight without affecting the mass.
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Plate

November 3, 2014, 6:56 pm
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I was behind a Mazda with a DC plate today.

The motto area said, "Taxation Without Representation."

I get it, they pay taxes and their "representation" in congress is non-voting.

I wonder if they realize that most people don't know that.

The average denizen of West Pasco is going to see that as "this is what we in DC are doing to y'all."
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How To Disassemble A Glock

November 3, 2014, 8:03 pm
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Tam has indicated that she doesn't know how after being lectured on how to clean guns.

First you need a disassembly tool.

RCBS is preferred, but Lee will do...

Then make a disassembler insert with your disassembly tool.  The manual that comes with the disassembly tool will indicate how much disassembly powder you should use.

It's full of typos, so you should use the .357 Magnum listing for .380, 9mm and .357 SIG; 10mm ACP for the .40 S&W, .41 Magnum for 10mm, and .454 Casull for .45 ACP.

Insert the disassembly insert as you would a normal round of ammunition, aim the Glock at something that can catch the bullet easily, such as a Ming Vase or Faberge Egg.

Your Glock will now take itself apart simply by pulling the trigger!

Some bruising and blood is a normal part of the disassembly procedure, but it's a sign you've performed the operation correctly.
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Voted

November 4, 2014, 8:01 am
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Got the gun vote out!

This is your most important act as a citizen.  It's a right and a duty.

I am somewhat baffled by people who don't vote.  By default a no-vote is a vote for whomever wins.
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Inconceivable!

November 4, 2014, 12:43 pm
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An F-35C made an arrested landing on Nimitz.

I read just a few months ago that this is impossible for various reasons.

I guess it's just the engineer in me that read the various reasons as making the solution more difficult than they would otherwise be, instead of making them impossible.

Over and over in the F-35 program we're encountering things that have to be the way they are for the VTOL F-35B making the other two variations harder to get finished with.

More difficult does not mean impossible.


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Funniest Two Things Today

November 4, 2014, 5:59 pm
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First is the 10 Reasons Libertarians Hate Everyone.

Second is Lyle's response:

It is a pretty arrogant list though. For one thing, if lib’tarians are the super, ultra geniuses of the world, you’d think they’d be able to come up with ways to convince more people.
One of the really big disconnects in the mind of a libertarian is the fact that liberty is a political AND moral concept and libertarians don’t believe in politics or morality. So the libertarian is a contradiction. A defeatist with a really good rationalization for it. It’s a way to go down to destruction at the hands of statists and feel good and justified while doing it.
It’s a belief system that makes you superior to everyone else around you, without your having to actually stand up for or do anything. All you have to do is talk, to anyone who’ll tolerate you, or to no one. Pretty convenient.

h/t to Uncle.

I am also fascinated that utopianists tend to self identify as smarter than everyone else.

I'd like to remind people that there's nothing in one of humanities most brutal periods of history can't be reconstructed in full compliance with libertarianism.
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Media Response

November 5, 2014, 5:03 am
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One thing that ticks me off is how the media responds to the behavior of our elected officials.

You may notice that Obama continued a lot of policy from Bush.  Or maybe you didn't because the screeching about how wrong and evil those policies were stopped the day O took the oath.

I predict that Congress will do what Congress normally does, but we're going to hear more about it because the "wrong people with the wrong party affiliation" are in the "leadership" positions.

This bugs me.

It bugs me because if doing something is wrong, then it doesn't matter who does it.

This is how we know the media are partisan cheerleaders.

Bush did it, BAD.  Obama does the same thing, meh (at best).
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Da Fuzz

November 6, 2014, 2:24 pm
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Slinking in the slime that is the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy that is ARFCOM (®Tam)...

Whenever the topic of "we the citizens don't want the cops doing x" comes up there's almost always a "when something happens you'll be on the phone begging for us to come!" response from some cop.

Well, they're right.

Should the dread moment come and I have to shoot and kill someone who's broken into my house it's illegal to NOT call the cops.  I checked.  At the very least it's illegal to dispose of the body on my own.

What our eager law enforcement apologists are missing about "we don't want you doing x" does not mean we don't want cops, that we don't like cops or want cops to do absolutely nothing.

There's gobs of things I want the cops doing.  Owning APC's isn't one.  Dressing like they're in Afghanistan isn't one.  No-knock searches isn't one.  Shooting anyone they want with impunity isn't one.

The cops who reply to these threads...  Oy gevalt!

Weer'd recently gave us a list of occupations which are more dangerous than law enforcement.  I will concede that none of the more dangerous occupations are expected to stay at work if things get lethal.  Expected.  Not required; because unlike a soldier, a cop can quit and walk off the job any time he wants with no more sanction on future employment than an accountant would encounter.

I am constantly astonished at the justifications for "officer safety" made to obtain armored vehicles, machine guns etc...  The resistance to having their activities recorded and monitored is telling in and of itself.  Aren't cops one of the first groups to tell US that if we've nothing to hide, we've nothing to fear?

Their radios are now encrypted "to prevent a criminal from listening in and avoiding arrest." Yet they resist having their comms recorded for later review, "criminals will learn our procedures".  Bull.

Some of it I get, in the PC infested waters, you don't want to get nailed for saying something you shouldn't have whether you meant ill or not.  Yet...

If the police do not answer to the communities they "serve" they aren't really serving are they?

And this is the place where citizen hostility to the police is born, nurtured and fed to hostility and obstinance.  If we can trust you, Officer, why are you so adamant about hiding so much of what you do?

There will be more.  I want to talk about the sense of entitlement and unionization next.
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Novelty Beer

November 6, 2014, 8:20 pm
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It's a gimmick, but I watch GoT, so it worked on me.

It's OK.  Nothing to write home about.  Like if Killians wasn't mass produced.
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It's Funny

November 6, 2014, 8:31 pm
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I don't particularly care for the M14.

Pic from: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Mars_Attacks#M14
But every time I watch Mars Attacks, I kind of want one.

It's amusing to me, as a retro AR person and as someone who likes historical guns that the desire to have an M14 clone isn't triggered by the same urges that made me want to make an early R604 and late R603.
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Sci Fi Vs Sci Fy

November 8, 2014, 8:01 am
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Fy isn't a thing, but I needed something...

This is science fiction vs science fantasy.

Niven and Pournelle provided the real distinction.

Science fiction is simply a fiction story with a novel setting which is internally consistent.

Science fantasy is a futuristic setting without such internal consistency.

Niven expounded on it a bit too, I'm going to paraphrase from memory about it.  The advanced technology has implications to it.  Internally consistent worlds simply allow the unwanted implications to happen and work with them.

"Safe at Any Speed" was written to express his disgust at how bad his miraculous technology had become in his "Known Space" setting.  The full implications of the autodoc were explored in the last Beowulf Schaffer story too.

Contrast with Star Trek.  How many miracles have been shown stemming from that damn transporter?  Miracles that served the plot for one episode then disappear never to be mentioned again and never affecting anything or anyone else?

Internally consistent universes have rules.  Rules that cannot be broken to serve the plot or the needs of the writers.

You can get away with a lot by simply not explaining things, but once you do you have to remember your explanation and stick to it.

This is how Traveller got its super crunchy reputation.  The universe has rules and they are adhered to, if for no other reason than players and GM's hold each other tightly to such things to prevent themselves from being screwed by the other.  Like an adversarial court system.

Things like looking at how light behaves and seeing how that limits the ranges of staple sci-fi items like lasers; then giving the weapon ranges in those limited terms.  No matter how disappointingly short they seem.

Things like there being no hiding against the back-drop of space and despite this sensors not being much more effective than "there's something there in the right temperature range to be manned" until you're disappointingly close.

Things like deciding the energy density of your battery equivalent then seeing how big that makes the power-pack then concluding that a pistol sized laser is silly.  Think Desert Eagle with a full fanny pack and a garden hose connecting them.  That was LBB Traveller.  GURPS Traveller's power cells are more dense, so the laser pistol is a thing there.  I think that Mongoose Traveller has a laser pistol as well (when the laptop croaked it took my pdf with it).

But making a pistol sized laser practical made all of the rifle sized weapons either lighter and smaller or gave them a lot more shots compared to the original material.  It's a decent example of expectation trade-off.  The stats of the man-portable lasers from LBB Traveller were designed with game balance in mind not physics (although they did back-track the physics).  GURPS had its own tech assumptions before they got the Traveller property and they hammered GDWs creation to fit.  Each is consistent with itself, so still crunchy.

Oddly, Star Wars has played a fairly decent game of being consistent with itself (mostly because Lucas had a vision of how things should look and being consistent with that vision trends towards internal consistency).  The writing hasn't always been great, but...
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History Repeating

November 8, 2014, 10:29 am
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I wrote in Nov 2006...

BAM! We have a Republican Congress.

What this does not indicate: A full-on endorsement of the American people of the Republican platform. What it probably indicates is that people were rejecting the current incarnation of the Democrat party and this was the only way to wake them up and get them to listen.

Which is a damn shitty way to make course corrections.

When you have only two viable parties, you create a situation where the rejection of A is a de facto endorsement of B. And when B acts like the got an endorsement, they tend to get nuked the next cycle.

As in 2006, people don't care who is expanding government into every aspect of their lives, but they've got so very little real choice about who gets to be in congress.
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A New Meme

November 8, 2014, 11:20 am
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Medieval Metallica!

November 8, 2014, 4:38 pm
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Former Friend

November 8, 2014, 5:57 pm
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Every once and a while I'll google people who've left my life.

Many times I am thankful they're no longer present!

Finding recent arrest records is getting to be depressingly common.
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Happy Birthday Lex!

November 9, 2014, 9:00 am
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Never let it be said that we've forgotten him.


F/A-18A from VFA-25 Fist of the Fleet, which I think was Lex's first gig.


F-16N from VF-45 Blackbirds.

I don't have a VFA-192 Golden Dragons skin for a hornet...


F/A-18C from VFA-94 Mighty Shrikes, which I think he was CO.


His last ride and the one that ultimately did him in, dammit.  Kfir C2 from the Smashing Parrots Squadron, I think this tail number becomes N404AX when ATAC puts it into service.
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Be Honest

November 9, 2014, 10:05 am
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You bought the AK because ammo was cheap.

Be honest with yourself even if you're aren't to me.
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Diatribe

November 9, 2014, 11:37 am
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The top ten reasons that Libertarians talk downaren't nice to you has really put a burr under my saddle.

I am not sure where to begin.

I guess for openers, most "libertarians" are anything but.  Most of the sites I used to read are anarchist sites (including the one linked notice the anarchy A in his tab-icon).  While there's a lot of freedom in anarchy, the day I decide to keep you distracted while Harvey shoots you in the back means the anarchy is over and the tyranny of Thag has begun.

There's a clue there.  When we band against you, we're stronger.  When they band against me, they're stronger.

Anarchy falls apart at a touch and it's a shitty way to do things because it's might makes right.

Banding together against danger is a very simian way of dealing with it.  Humans are simians.

Our tasty chess club brains and superior banding abilities allowed us to become superior tool users too.

The question I keep coming to about libertarianism is "who is the enforcer?" Who keeps me honest?  Who keeps YOU honest?  What happens when we both claim to have been cheated?  What happens when we both refuse to agree about an arbitrator?  Fight it out?

The non aggression principle is kinda neat, but...  Lets say you cheated me in a deal.  I'm pretty sure that's rated as aggression on most libertarian sites.  What recourse do I have?  What if you're too strong for me to take what is owed?  What if I convince my neighbor to help?  My neighbor you did not cheat or harm in any way.  Is my neighbor now guilty of aggression?

Look, you're claiming both that you're smarter than I am and that this is simple; why can't you explain it to me so I understand?

Then it hits me!  The person generating that ten point list is dishonest!  They're at least lying to themselves and because they are unable to be true to themselves, they cannot be true to us.

#10:  Ridicule only works if your victim is worried about what you think of them or that your words matter to someone else who matters to them.  Ridicule primarily serves to mask a lack of position or standing on the part of the person being insulting.  The main response to being ridiculed is an entrenchment of their position, not abandonment.  By mocking people you are making yourself look foolish and making it harder to convince anyone.

#9:  If you're not trying to convince anyone, why are you talking; always talking?  Why is it that you're so ineffective at convincing the people who've no ideology already if you're not trying to convince someone like me who has one?  You are literally conceding that any ideology is superior to yours by not attempting to change anyones mind.

#8:  Then stop running candidates.  Stop campaigning.  Otherwise you're lying about winning or lying about convincing people.

#7:  Back at you.  If it didn't come from your team, the "great" libertarian theorists, you reject it out of hand.  I did spend a lot more than ten minutes on this and YOU WERE FOUND WANTING!  It showed me that you haven’t taken so much as 10 minutes out of your miserable life to even make the slightest effort to understand how people really work.  I understand what you are proposing, what you're refusing to see is why it really won't work no matter how hard you wish it were otherwise.  Yes, Virginia, there is no utopia.

#6:  Why are there no answers to these questions then?  "What if" is the damn near the most paramount question a person can ask and your response is "because choices"?  Did you spend more than ten minutes on this?

#5:  I can't teach you economics in 140 characters or less either.  Oh wait, YES I CAN!  "Supply and demand, that's it." 29 characters including spaces and punctuation.  See how unsatisfying cop-out answers are?  Actually studying economics really underlined the portion that I'd seen over and over in anarchist site after libertarian site.  Libertarian economics is very selective about it, and a lie of omission is still a lie.

#4:  I refused membership in Mensa.  "Society of people who should have their IQ tattooed on their forehead" is a more apt description.  What the tests for such organizations actually test for is an ability to learn.  An ability that very few of them seem to apply to anything at all; or apply too narrowly.  What good does calculus do when you need to change a tire?  Besides, if you're smarter than me, why can't you manage to teach me?  Why can't you formulate a convincing argument to get me to abandon my ideology?  You're smart?  Start proving it.  By the way, exactly how valid is a universal moral philosophy that requires a minimum IQ that's three standard deviations above the norm?

#3:  I will agree here.  What's not justified is the smug sense of superiority.  Especially since so very few of you are willing to live your morals.  Paid any taxes once you became enlightened?  If so, you've compromised your moral principles by the mere threat of force, no real force needed to be applied to you, did it?  With all the compromises and concessions you've made, it's no wonder nobody takes you seriously.

#2:  No, you're asking for everything.  Yes you are.  What you are demanding is the abandonment of a basic structure of human interaction that has been hammered into a working system since before we had a way to store knowledge outside of living memory.  To ask people to abandon a flawed, but functioning, system requires you be very convincing.  Your arguments need to be air tight, and account for all of the variables (including "what if?").

#1:  While it's not something I'm proud of, it's human nature.  Something that libertarians flat refuse to fully take into account.  Sooner or later any system of interaction between people is going to resort to force and violence.  It's because we're people.  Divide and conquer works and if you come pre-fragemented you're not even making your conqueror work for the divide part.
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