(haven't read all the comments, sorry if this was already addressed)

How does this jive with HIPAA? My understanding is that medical info can't be given to anyone without the patient's consent, or without a valid court order.

"Civil and Criminal Penalties. Congress provided civil and criminal penalties for covered entities that misuse personal health information. For civil violations of the standards, OCR may impose monetary penalties up to $100 per violation, up to $25,000 per year, for each requirement or prohibition violated. Criminal penalties apply for certain actions such as knowingly obtaining protected health information in violation of the law. Criminal penalties can range up to $50,000 and one year in prison for certain offenses; up to $100,000 and up to five years in prison if the offenses are committed under "false pretenses"; and up to $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison if the offenses are committed with the intent to sell, transfer or use protected health information for commercial advantage, personal gain or malicious harm."

So what if my laptop has patient info on it? Like a copy of my medical history from my doctor. That's patient info, right? And I'm allowed to have it.

@ Antinous:

"How would people drive if car insurance ceased to exist? Would there be a Darwinian effect whereby all the bad drivers were avehicular within two years?"

Ummm...until a few yeas ago, some number less than 20, insurance was not required here. Sure, most people had it because it made some sense, but many did not. Hell, many still don't, even though now it's illegal to not have it (or a bond). I sure don't think all the bad drivers were wiped out before insurance became mandatory. I wish.

How very cool. I had no idea these were available outside of museums.

Do they make miniature sized jointers? We got a neat old one about a year ago that was originally line belt driven. Would be cool to have a mini version, too. :)

Antinous,

We have laws on the books already that specify how close to churches and schools and daycare centers a sex-related business or liquor stores can be located. That's not a part of the zones. I do know there is a 7-11 across from Paschal HS and they sell beer, but not the "hard" stuff.

If the state wanted to build a prison down the street from me, well, it'd be silly as the land is too expensive around me for that. They'd be better of buying land a bit further south in the middle of nowhere.

I did live across the street from the county jail for several years. It was quite nice. The inmates as a rule do not escape, and if they do they tend to go far, far away. And the police presence tends to keep thieves and other criminals away. So it was a good deal, I thought.

"The price of petrol should therefore become less relevant to Americans, as they cop on to themselves and buy more efficient cars. The Citroën C2 that I have does 70mpg! Try getting worked up putting 40 euro worth into the tank every 2.5 months – it's impossible!"

I see that a lot, or similar, but the math just does not work out.

My truck is paid for. I have no car payment. It's a 1993 Ford F150. It's 16 miles to drive to work along the freeway. It's a little less to go the back roads, but that way takes more gas because of all the red lights and stop signs. I get about 16 mpg. So it costs me a gallon of gas to get to work and a gallon to get back home. That works out to about 8,000 miles a year to get to work and back, or $3000 worth of gas at $4 per gallon.

I can't afford a home near the office. And there are no jobs in my field near where I live. :(

Buying a better gas mileage car is not an option at this point. It just does not work out financially. First of all, I need a truck. I could get by with a smaller one, and a trailer (which would be an additional cost, and would require yearly maintenance and fees and insurance, not to mention where would I store it?), but it's just so convenient to have a full eight foot bed. I prefer to be able to close the tailgate when I've got a load of plywood or sheetrock or even 2x4s. Some of the little trucks you can't even get a full sheet of plywood inside them. But like I said, I could probably get by with a little Toyota Tacoma or Ford Ranger, something like that.

Second, yes, I'd be paying less at the pump, but the car payment would be a lot more (since it's zero now). I'd need to get a relatively new car to get a big increase in gas mileage, which means not only would it be more expensive to purchase, but insurance costs would go up. I don't have theft insurance on my Ford now, but if I get a loan I'd be required to do so, for example. Also I have the minimum of liability insurance I can carry by law, again if I borrow money to get a newer car they'd require a higher amount of liability, and probably would require I carry uninsured motorist insurance, in case I'm hit by someone who does not have insurance.

And maintenance fees are not that different. A newer car will still need it's oil changed, and will need brakes occasionally, and a tune up once a year and the alignment fixed at least once a year, and every now and then it'll need tires. And then there are the "Oh Shit!" costs, the catastrophic failure of some part or another. those happen to newer cars, too. So we're realistically at a wash there.

Gas prices would be cheaper. Car payment goes waaay up. Insurance goes waaay up. Maintenance costs are roughly the same. So how am I saving money by getting a more fuel efficient car? (and I'm not "saving the environment" by getting rid of my truck, because it will not go into a black hole somewhere, it'll be sold and driven by someone else.)

I did a spreadsheet on this a few weeks ago, let me see if I still have it...well, I can't find it right now, but let's think about it. If the MPG doubles to 32mpg, then my fuel costs would go down from $3,000 to $1,500. But, a car or truck that gets 32 mpg is probably going to cost more than $1,500 a year to buy, so my existing truck "wins" . If the price of gas does go up to $10 per gallon, that' puts my yearly gas expenditure at...$7500 (assuming I don't bust out my moped or reduce drastically the non-work related driving). At that point it might be worth it to get a more fuel efficient truck, but again, it'd have to be at least 32 mpg, _and_ cost $3750 or less per year to purchase (including the increased insurance costs) for it to beat out my current truck.

Once I pay off my student loan and some other stuff, which should happen December of this year!, I'll run the numbers again. Who knows, maybe they'll come out with a Mr. Fusion by then. :)

What we need is to get rid of zoning. Residential zones, industrial zones, light business zones. Bah, scrap them all.

When my parents neighborhood was built in the 20s they didn't have that. They are within walking distance of several small stores, which back in the day were butchers and bakers and grocers, and now are dry cleaners and frame shops and antique stores. Until very recently there were three grocery stores in walking distance. Two became Walgreens or Ekkerds (or whatever they call themselves now) the other went away, but a Super Target went up a few years ago and is just out of walking distance.

Where I live now was built in the late 60s/early 70s. It was Zoned. There is a small strip of businesses along the highway, gas stations, some fast food, a Home Depot. But the closest grocery store is almost four miles away. It's three and change. And within the housing development area there are no commercial sites, so there is no place to put a donut shop or a taco place or a grocer or butcher. Because it's not zoned for that. Heck, since there was no shops or anything nearby, no place to walk too, at the time they didn't even build sidewalks. Recently they added sidewalks near the school, and along the main roads in, but it's like, why? Where are we going to walk too? And why are out tax dollars paying for this?

I really like the Montgomery Plaza near downtown Fort Worth. It's similar to the stuff I saw all over the middle east. Shops on the first two floors, then apartments above. But holy crap it was hard to get the zoning variances, and there seems to be some sort of bureaucratic holdup now to get people into the apartments. I think that simillar shops/apartments are going to go up across the street all along 7th.

We need the zoning to lighten up and we need for new developments to be built around a small commercial area. Ring the outside with shops, and then have a block or so of shops at the middle. So that people can walk to the butcher and can walk to the store. And not be forced to drive everywhere. Maybe tax breaks for certain businesses to be in there. And we need local places to sell local produce and fruit. There is not a farmers market anywhere closer to me than the one out by Ridgmar Mall, and that's over 20 miles away.

Drive around the older areas of the city and you'll see what I'm talking about. Like over by TCU, there are shops along Berry and University, then residences for the rest of the area. Till you drive in there and in the middle of all the residences will be a little one block area of shops. The Ace Hardware I go to is over in there, it's the closet one to me.

Of course there are tons of other reasons to get rid of zoning. I will not even get into how we couldn't add a music room to the front of my parents house (we'd enclose part of the porch) because we didn't have a grand piano. Or how we had to get a variance and go before all kinds of committees and crap and pay all kinds of fees just to rebuilt the porch where it had been for 80+ years. (It was built, in 1922, two feet from the property line Which! Is! Not! Done! as the new rules say it has to be five feet off, which would make it not match the house, which was also built two feet from the line!) Or how you can't have a 400 square foot car port in Fort Worth, but you can have a 400 square foot portacache (that's probably spelled wrong) which is the same damn thing but sounds better to the snobs on the un-elected, appointed, no-construction-experience-needed zoning board. Gah! But I'll not go into all that.

Well, Europe did have the advantage of being mostly destroyed about 60 years ago, so they go to rebuild a lot of it from scratch. I imagine that if the US had been bombed to hell back then that the Germans would've rebuilt it with a pretty decent public transportation infrastructure, too. Oh, well.

If you're in Texas, make sure your representatives and senators are working to add light rail up the median of all new highways. And when they fix up old highways they need to do it, too. We've already got train tracks between all the major cities, what we need is the intra city stuff.

In DFW, we need a rail that goes from Lockheed (and Ridgmar Mall) in the west, to the State Fair or into Mesquite in the east. And from UNT in the north to UTA and Parks Mall in the South. There need to be a train that goes to DFW Airport, right now you go to centerpoint then bus in. And to Six Flags, Wet N Wild, Arlington Stadium, and whatever the new Cowboys stadium is, and UTA in Arlington.

It's be awesome to live in Fort Worth, work in Dallas, and in the summer met the other spouse and kids at Six Flags or Wet N Wild, or catch a Rangers game, or the Cowboys I guess, and then head back home after that is over all with out _needing_ a car. You can't do that now.

So push for rail lines to go down 30, 35, 635, 20, 121, 183, 820, & 75.

Then if it does go up to $10 a gallon who'll care?

There is at least one "Photography is not a crime" t-shirt on Zazzle. Not to shill for it or anything. there's probably one on Cafe Press, too.

Too bad there was not a beached whale carcass that needed to be disposed of in the same area :)

Takun: Yeah, it turned out to be a radar gun.

But my first glimpse of it, with the officer hiding so that only his arm and a very little of his face, just his eyes (sunglasses) and the top of his head (no hat or helmet), and his position behind a bridge and peering out over a concrete noise barrier, and given that I was aware of something "odd" happening there because of the way other drivers were reacting , he sure did not look like a cop. And at first glance it did not look like a radar gun.

Cops used to just stand up on that bridge in plain (rear) view. The signs on one side of the bridge hid them from sight until you were past the bridge and then you saw the whole officer and his bike up there in your rear view. Much safer for everyone, I think. But I guess people leaving downtown to go out for lunch would see them on their way out and slow down on their way back in, so maybe their quotas were not met.

Ugh.

Professional courtesy should be not bitching when another agency catches a bad guy a mile into your jurisdiction, not getting away with violating the law.

Gah!

Reminds me of the cops over at cops writing cops dot com. Which I think was featured here not too long ago. If it wasn't it should've been.

Just about every day as I drive to work I am passed by a police officer going well in excess of the speed limit. It's the same car every time, so I figure it's a cop going into work or coming home from work, or maybe racing off to get to court on time. But his lights are not on, and his sirens are not blaring, so he's breaking the law, same as if I went that fast in those traffic conditions. Man it pisses me off when they get away with crap like that.

I did call 911 once on a cop running a speed trap. Driving east on I30 under the Ashland bridge, I noticed several cars in front of me acting funny, swerving and speeding up, I thought maybe there was something on the road, so I was a bit more vigilant than usual. I saw an arm and part of a head poking around the concrete traffic noise barrier thing alongside the onramp. In the hand was what looked like a large pistol pointed right at me. My first thought was "Oh shit! Freeway sniper!" and I evaded. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed 911, just about the time I was through the area and could see, now that I could see that it was, probably, a motorcycle cop (at least I could see there was a man in black next to a motorcycle, from the angle I could not tell for sure that it was a cop). Since I was on the line anyway, I reported it as a man holding what appeared to be a large pistol pointing it at traffic, and causing traffic to evade and move erratically and would likely cause a wreck soon if not stopped. "Maybe it's a kid and it's a prank since the high school is right there, but whatever it is, please put a stop to it. It's dangerous and someone is going to crash." I took the next exit and looped back around to see what happened. Several police cars swarmed in. Got a call back from 911 a few minutes later saying that it was a police officer and not to call them on cops, that they could charge me for making a false call. I said, and I was serious, that at the time I did not know that was a police officer, all I could see was the gun. And that for everyones safety, to prevent wrecks, or to prevent someone from shooting "back" at the officer, that they, the speed trap cops, need to be clearly visible. The 911 manager was pissed, but I assume she took all that down. Dunno if it did any good. Made me feel a bit better.

we already require some serious licensing for people who want to own fully automatic assault rifles, and silencers, and things like that

Actually, we don't (assuming that "we" is the USA, other countries may vary). To purchase NFA firearms (full auto or select fire, destructive devices, short barreled shotguns or rifles, Any Other Weapons, or silencers) requires the payment of a tax, $200 for everything but AOWs (they're $5). If the item is out of state you may have to pay the tax twice, as it's a "transfer" tax, and it may need to be transfered from out of state to your dealer, then from him to you. Two transfers, two taxes.

When you pay the tax, the ATF has the FBI run a pretty thorough background check on you, and if you don't pass it then you paid and don't get the tax stamp (and thus no fun gun or thing), and if you are a felon or something like that then they arrest your ass.

But there is no license to own such things, despite lots of people thinking there is. There is a federal license required to deal in such items, but not to own them.

This jackass was an idiot. He clearly broke rule four of the four rules of firearm safety.

http://www.thehighroad.org/library/rules.html

"1. All guns are always loaded (until you establish whether they are or not).
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. Keep your gun pointed in a safe direction at all times: on the range, at home, loading, or unloading.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target (and you are ready to shoot).
4. Be sure of your target. Know what it is, what is in line with it and what is behind it. Never shoot at anything that you haven't positively identified."

But do we really believe that if he'd used a 24 inch drill he wouldn't (possibly) have drilled into his wife with that? If he was dumb enough to not pay attention if she was there with a pistol, why would we think he'd check before drilling? ;)

And this is off topic, but I for one would love for firearms to be licensed like cars! You can buy as many cars as you want, you don't need a license to buy a car, you can soup up your car as much as you like, you can drive it without a license as long as it's on private property, there are no size limits on ownership: I can own a moped or an 18 wheeler or even a ginourmous dumptruck like they use at monster sized mines, you can import cars (even ones that are not allowed on the highways) from all over the world, and you only need a license if you want to drive your car(s) on public roads.

I suppose that if we did guns the same way I could buy them without a license, build my own full auto firearms with no fees or license needed, import them from wherever, import or build my own cannons, and only need a license to shoot them at publicly owned ranges. That would be quite a refreshing change. :)

Seems that #52 is correct.

http://www.crimefilenews.com/2007/12/tsa-arrogance-threatens-safety-of-air.html

Here's a picture of the holster/padlock combo the pilots are required to use. It's a Galco "Holster Vault". That is messed up to require manipulating a combination lock on a live firearm, while in flight! It's an accident waiting to happen. Oppps. Guess it just did.

Oh, and critic or opponent are what I was looking for above. ugh. Looong day, had a brain fart.

If #52 is correct, and pilots are required to manipulate trigger locks on loaded guns in the cockpit, that is fucked up.

I have long been an anti-advocate (that does not sound right) of trigger locks. They are, by design, unsafe since you're manipulating the trigger on a loaded firearm! Why people think this is ok is beyond me.

Not having the safty on was the biggest error

Ummm...no.

Having his finger on the trigger was his biggest mistake. Well, actually, it looks like he broke all four of the rules of firearm safety. So take your pick as to which one was the biggest mistake, but all four should not have been broken.

Notice that safety manipulation is not on the list. The only safety that really counts is the one between your ears. If that one is off, then the others don't matter. And likewise, if that one is on, then the others also don't really matter.

"RULE I: ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED

RULE II: NEVER LET THE MUZZLE COVER ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO KILL OR DESTROY

RULE III: KEEP YOUR FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU’RE READY TO SHOOT

RULE IV: BE SURE OF YOUR TARGET AND WHAT’S BEHIND IT"

I'm pretty sure he violated #1, else why would he have pulled the trigger?

#2 is tough to follow sometimes. For example if in a plane and he draws his weapon, I'm sure at some point the muzzle will be pointed at the floor of the cockpit, and also might temporarily be pointed at some fairly important equipment. This is okay if you are good on all the other three rules. But he definitely violated rule #3 by having his finger on the trigger. (if he didn't then the gun would not have gone bang)

#4 was broken for sure. He had no idea what was behind his target. No one knows where his bullet landed, but it hit the ground somewhere over Charlotte, so he'd luck it didn't hit anyone.

My understanding is that airline pilots who are armed are only allowed to carry 40S&W H&K USP pistols. These are very safe pistols. I am not sure what configuration they are allowed to carry, they're available in Single Action/Double Action, and Double Action Only. In Double Action mode the trigger pull is very heavy and gritty. Not something you do accidentally. Even the Single Action trigger is heavy, but not as heavy as DA, and still not light enough to go off on it's own. It requires manipulation of the trigger to go bang.

The plane was on approach to Charlotte when he fired his pistol. What the hell was he doing fiddling with this pistol then? Isn't that an important time to be umm...flying the damn plane? What was the pistol doing out of it's box? Are they required to take it out during flight then put it back on approach? That seems odd. I'd think they'd be required to just leave it alone unless it's needed.

One of my uncles taught pilots for 20 years. He has tons of stories of pilots being all arrogant and assuming that because they are pilots, which are of course, God's gift to the rest of the world, then they can do whatever. The AP article linked said that of 10,000 people that had been trained to carry in the cockpit this is the first Negligent Discharge, so that's probably a pretty good indicator that their training is decent. Most likely this was just an arrogant pilot who thought he could get away with ignoring the safety rules because, well, why couldn't he? Hopefully this will be a wake up call to any others who felt this way.

I just found out a few weeks ago that a friend of mine's father is a Guatemalan adoptee. Only he was an American who was adopted by a Guatemalan couple. I didn't even know that was an option. It's quite sad, his biological mother was raped and she for religious reasons would not terminate the child, so she gave him up for adoption and, because of the rape, wanted him out of the country. So he ended up in Guatemala.

#61, Yeah, I did read the linked article at the Advocate. And I just re-read it right now to make sure I didn't miss anything the first time. Nothing there about what's below his belt, which is why I asked.

I suppose that if you know, already, that most female to male transgendered people do not opt for having a phalloplasty added then I guess you can read between the lines in the article. But for those of us who did not know, how were we to know?

Which is why I asked for clarification and answers. Jeezzz, sorry, will not let that happen again. Sheesh.

Apparently I was misinformed because I thought that usually female to male transgenders had functioning phalli. I also thought that most male to female transgendered people had their penis' removed and/or somehow through surgery turned in a vagina. Is that also wrong? I freely admit that everything I know about transgenders, up till some point yesterday, has come from CSI, Better Than Chocolate, Grey's Anatomy/ER and maybe some other shows on tv. Oh, and talking to some people up in Trinidad, one of whom drew a truly horrifying diagram on a napkin of how a penis becomes a vagina. Yikes. That's cool if it's your thing, but it is sooo not mine.

Arronstj, I did not know that. Thank you.

How...

ummm...

Wha...

From a technical viewpoint, I thought if you changed gender from female to male that you kinda got the whole package, penis and testicles. Did this guy not get that? If not, how is he a man? Flat chest + testosterone pills = male?

And if he has a penis and testicles, then that begs the question how was he inseminated? And how the baby will be born? I assume caesarian, but is the birth canal still there?

We need diagrams and illustrations here, people! Not to be crass or a perv or anything. I draw charts and diagrams all the time to figure out how to code something, I just think better that way. And could use a bit of a hand here to figure this out.

On the contractors thing, a little, maybe, clarification.

I have no friends or relatives in the State Department, that I know of, but I do in the US Army Corps of Engineers. Assuming that they, as ginourmous faceless bureaucracies act the same way, I'd bet that most if not all of the contractors are ex-state department employees. (and I freely admit that this may be an erroneous assumption)

In the Corps, starting under Bill Clinton, a lot of people retired early (because of changes (*) brought on by Gen. Joe and Bunny) or were induced to retire early. Sadly, most of the retirees were in areas that were needed. Middle and upper management was left alone, but now the people that knew how to do stuff were gone. So, contractors were brought in for two reasons.

One was to bypass the byzantine hiring and firing processes. Once a person is a federal employee it is exceedingly hard to fire them. I have many such stories to tell, but they're all long and probably fairly boring, so I'll spare you. :) Contractors on the other hand can be fired or let go pretty easily, and even if there is red tape involved you just let the contract expire and don't hire them back. The former employees who are now back to work at the same job they just left (often times the next day after retiring) like this setup two as they can tell their new (old) boss to take a hike and not worry about losing their retirement, and they can work on interesting projects with lots of fun engineering without having to worry about if it will help or hurt their career.

Second, the money to pay contractors comes out of Some Other Fund (also known as Other People's Money), not the regular budget for an office. So an office can Save Money by getting people to retire (and thus gaining a bonus or promotion for the management for saving money and reducing expenses) and yet turn around and hire the same people right back to do the job. And still Save Money by doing it. If you look at it squint eyed enough, anyway.

In reality the newly contracted employees cost about twice what they did before, because they can't just contract to work on their own. They have to go out and get hired by a contracting company that has won the bid to provide contract employees. That company pays the salary of the newly contracted (former) employee. Usually they get a slight raise. And of course that company has to take a cut, and the employees don't want to work for less than they did, so in my experience the contracting companies charge roughly twice what the employee gets. This is chalked up to "overhead." Nice racket. But everybody is happy because it "Saves Money".

A third person was that hiring former employees as contractors meant you hired people with the proper experience and training right away. Need some people with experience in contract negotiations between Zachary and the Air Force? No problem. A new hire would not have the experience. of course, by not hiring "new" people then when everyone retires for good then you end up with no one having any idea how to do anything. And while the contract companies are, in theory, providing education and training to their employees, in reality they are not because they are just hiring employees that are already trained.

So in a few years when they start having to provide new people they'll be untrained ones because that saves them money. I believe that TXU is having issues with this right now as they laid off most of their linemen, who are now contractors, and the new hires are not trained and keep dying because well it's dangerous to work around high voltage stuff. They are losing their institutional memory and this is only a Bad Thing that will get worse. Eventually you'll have no one around who knows the Best way to keep a flat roof from leaking (in all seriousness: build a conventional roof over the existing, leaking, flat roof), or how to deal with the soil at XYZ AFB when the "book" says to do one thing but that does not work and buildings keep collapsing. Why is it a Bad Idea to route water or sewer lines under a wooden floored gym?

So, while I have no idea if the same goes on at State, I would assume that the contractors were former employees. I know of no contract employees in the Corps that were not, at least at any of the four districts that I keep in contact with through friends, former co-workers, and relatives.

* most notably:
1) removing the requirement to be a (licensed) Professional Engineer in order to advance past certain ranks (this is kinda like an accounting firm saying you don't need to be a CPA to get to the upper levels of the company)

2) the removal of hard limits on advancement to Electrical Engineers and Mechanical Engineers (as a general rule (discovered through empirical research) EEs especially, and ME as well, don't make good managers, so the rules were in place to keep them out of certain management positions. There were ways around it, so that EEs and MEs with good people skills could advance in rank, and it was kinda self selecting: good people skills would get you the exception, bad people skills would not)

Yup, here in Texas we just shoot repo men on sight. Verily doth the blood of repo men flow across our divine land. It's called the Red River for a reason, don't cha know.

Pffft!

One repo man gets shot, 14 years ago, and the whole state is forever know as repo man killers.

I don't think every young man in England is a kidnapper, sodomizer, and killer of toddlers. But kill one repo guy and you're forever branded apparently.

I know a guy who owns a used car lot and does repos. He often bemoans the good ol' days when you could jack the interest up, then snag the car when they were one hour late. He'd often, according to him, I never bought a car from him, take their phone call saying they'd be late, tell them it was alright he'd wait till Monday, then go out that night and get the car anyway. He thought it was funny to sell the same car three or four times because he kept repoing it.

My understanding is that this particular case led to a tightening up of the repo industry. Now they have to follow the rules, and if they don't they know they may get shot, which is a big incentive to do the right thing.

As to the guy here in England, if people are coming onto his property to set fire to it, then yeah, that might be justification to use force to stop them. You never know what's going to happen with fire, it might burn the whole place down, killing the guy and his family. Or spread to the neighbor's land and burn it down, or burn down his livelihood (he is a farmer, right? So he needs to grow crops to make his living. Kinda tough to do that if the fields are all burned up.)

And the guy that shot the robbbers of his neighbor's house in Texas? He told them to stop, and they didn't. He warned them he'd shoot, but they still advanced upon him, presumably to do violence to him. So he shot them. And a police officer witnessed the whole thing. And you know what? We fucking like it for the criminals in the state to be a bit uneasy when going about their jobs. We want them to think long and hard. "Is it worth my life to steal this guy's tv?" We have a lower than national average in violent crimes and robberies because of that. Yeah, we have more than the national average in burglaries, but that's because our criminals, for the most part, make damn sure no one is home when they break in. And we like it that way.

Wow. I was doing art back in 1998! :)

Working for SBIS at the time. They had a walk through on how to create a personal web page for the ISP clients. As you went through the walk through eventually you got to a sample page that included a "mail me" button, which was active. The web page sent an email from support@swbell.net to support@swbell.net. Which, when received, launched a "Your email will be responded to within 24 hours" email back to... support@swbell.net. Which, when received, launched a "Your email will be responded to within 24 hours" email back to... support@swbell.net. Which, when received, launched a "Your email will be responded to within 24 hours" email back to... support@swbell.net. Repeat, a lot. Since each reply had a copy of the email that it was replying too, the emails got larger and larger in size as it repeated.

I brought it to management's attention because we were getting hundreds of bogus emails a day to the support que. And it was bogging us down. They didn't care because it made our statistics look good. So...

Over a weekend I and several of my friends went to the walk through and clicked on "mail me" until we got carpal tunnel from all the clicking. That Monday morning we had hundreds of thousands of emails, and it crashed the mail server. :) No one got mail for a few hours. :( But, "only" two weeks later (and one more crash) the problem button on the webpage was "fixed" (they ended up just taking down the walk through).

Guess we were doing art! Cool!

Huh. I'm surprised that the cordless drill spins fast enough. I use a very high speed drill (a Dumore Sensitive drill press) for making holes in bone for knife handles, I got it for $50 used, but it's a $3,000 drill new (yay craigslist!). Using my regular drill press or hand held drills generally caused the bone to split. Of course, I was drilling in bone that's "dead" and been dried out a bit, so maybe drilling into fresh, live bone is not as tricky.

ZUZU, there is less demand for medical quality drills, so the price is higher. Bosch sells a brazillion cordless drills, so the price goes down. Can't really compare specialty tools like cranial drills to consumer grade commodities like computers. Every home and business is a potential customer of a computer, very few homes or businesses wold buy a cranial drill.

Are they told when other people drop out? Seems like it would be Extra Cruel with More Drama to let them go on for days after everyone else had dropped out, and then the last person finally gives up and drops out thinking he is a failure, only to find out he won the $50k.

I, too, think i could handle the first version, but the one with the sit &spins and the blaring alarms and crap? ugh. No way.

Dangit. Just this past year I finally got rid of several old ex-surplus, ex-Boy Scout canvas tents (no poles) that I'd been hanging on to for years figuring that eventually they'd come in handy. I never thought of making pants out of them. :(

Double dangit. I just started getting into Cowboy Action Shooting, and we are supposed to dress up in authentic(-ish) western wear. And canvas pants are certainly authentic. hmmmm...maybe I'll recall who I gave the old tents to and maybe I can get one back. 'Cause I need another project :)

Oh, and don't forget the infamous Claris Works tech support call. It sounds like one of the Jerky Boys, and is definitely a prank call, but is soooo funny. One of my managers had us all listen to it, as an example of how not to laugh or whatever even when the customer on the phone is spouting off inane gibberish.

Nah, in order Lawyers, Doctors and Teachers are the worst.

Funny warranty violator call: Working for AST computers, customer calls, wants to know what ram he has in his pc. His particular model and serial number range had two possibilities: one of which was that the ram was soldered in place. Only way to check was to pop the hood. First thing I did was ask him to turn off the pc and unplug the power cord. "I'm not stupid." was his reply. Ok. Walked him through unscrewing the case, gettting a flashlight and checking, and sure enough, he has the soldered-in, ie un-removable kind. "Just a second...random odd crunching noises...Zorch!" He decided to rip the RAM out with his needlenose pliers, and since the pc was still on at the time...

But my favorite "calls" were when I worked for SWBell Internet Services on the email team. We'd get, daily, emails that said "Hi, I can not send or receive email. Please fix!!!! -Jim" Or something like that, but rarely, insanely rarely, would anyone ever give us their full name, or their username, so we had no way of knowing who they were to call them back to fix the problem. I always emailed them back a short note that said "Yes, you can." Which would then generate nasty emails about how no, they really couldn't send OR receive emails...

Now I just deal with oil field workers who literally have mice living in their computers out in the field, and tell me that they just have a "problem with the mouse" never specifying that it's an actual live-blooded mouse that they are having a problem with. Gah!

ugh. Unicorn chaser, stat!

Seriously, surgery photos and videos (especially the ones with the jell-o sounds of squishing organs and ...stuff) really make me hurl. And get all nauseous and I turn green. Same thing with needles. Ugh. Yet oddly, in real life, that stuff does not bother me so much.

I heard from a friend that worked the ER that people were using colostomy bag holes for intercourse. She found out when a lady came in with gonorrhea in her new orifice. Apparently you can make good money, she said she got $1000 minimum, but she hadn't realized that she still needed to be practicing safe sex.

The police don't have to protect you? I find that hard to accept.

"Warren v. District of Columbia is one of the leading cases of this type. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers."

The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen."

Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981)

Do a quick Google for "Warren vs. District of Columbia" and you'll find links to the text of the decision. And people talking about its implications.

As I stated: no baggage attached, can you put your gun away for a few days?

Do it all the time. Everytime I go into a National Park for backpacking and/or camping. When I visit Washington DC. Everytime I travel abroad or for business. Those are all multi-day/week/month trips. I didn't have a CHL until bout a two years ago. Prior to that I hardly ever carried a pistol anywhere.

Closer to home most Sundays I don't carry because my suit was tailored and fits me awesome, but does not leave room for my pistol. Also, I'd have to wear my jacket all the time, and that bites in Texas pretty much year round. Too hot.

Went to court the other day, had to disarm first. That really bites because my pants and belt have all stretched out a bit and when I don't carry my pants keep slipping down. It's one of those things that people don't tell you about before you start carrying. I also had to change how I peed from unbuckle the belt, unbutton pants, unzip, to leave the belt buckled, leave the pants buttoned, and just unzip. Over a year and it still feels weird to pee that way. That's another thing they don't talk about. :)

I contend the absence of the gun will not be negative.

You are most likely right. No matter how you want to look at it, by race, sex, location, economic class, lifestyle, whatever, I'm not very likely to be the victim of violence (except when I'm in some of the places I go on business, but that's a different matter so we'll ignore that).

But.

I might be.

And as long as I'm responsible about my gun ownership, why not let me carry that four pound hunk of steel around, concealed so you don't even know it's there, if I want to, just in case? What harm does it do?

I think I mentioned here in another thread how I'd just recently had my first flat tire in 20 years or so of driving. I've stopped an help a bunch of people to change their tires, but never had a flat myself. I suppose I could've saved a lot of money by not every carrying a spare tire with me for at least 19 of those years. Would've had more room in the trunk. Would've gotten slightly better gas mileage. All kinds of benefits. But I think we all agree that it's a Good Idea to carry a spare tire. Even though you can call a tow truck, or AAA and they'll come put a tire on for you. Or the Highway Department guys that do the same thing for stranded motorists. After all, it's their job, so obviously they are more professional at tire changing, right? Or I suppose you could depend on the kindness of strangers to lend you their spare tire. Me? I'll just keep carrying one. Just to be sure.

#237 posted by elNico

Anyway, what you're saying is because Blacks were second-class citizens and denied most rights, including buying a gun, the fact that they now can makes taking away the right to buy a gun racist??

No, I don't think I said that. If I did, it's not what I meant at all.

What I meant was that, at least up until 1968, the gun control laws have been racist as they were designed to keep guns out of the hands of black people. In addition to not allowing gun sales through the mail, the 1968 Gun Control Act was also what got rid of "Saturday Night Specials." Look at the literature of the time, until they started talking about the bill in Congress, those same guns we called...anyone? ...Nigger Guns. Because they were cheap (both in price and quality) and most anyone, even a poor black man, could afford them. So they cut them off from being imported to the states. They introduced the "sporting" rule, that said guns coming in must be "sporting" and then defined what was and was not sporting. And pistols with little or no sights and short barrels are not considered sporting. Oddly, adjustable sights are sporting, so now you see small pistols, they just have adjustable sights. So the whole "sporting" thing was just a way to get around selling guns to blacks, because they bought guns for protection from The Man, not to play games. But I'm digressing.

What I meant was that well...let's look at this from another angle. It's bigoted to be against gay marriage, right? And the proper way to fix the problem is not to ban all marriage, it's to enable gays to marry, right? So looking at it from that angle, why would we ban guns from everyone, instead of just repealing the racist laws?

And the laws are still racist.

It's still difficult for a black man to buy a gun in some places, legally. 'Cause Earl down at the Gun Shack don't want to sell to none of them folk. Just like he don't sell to no flaming homo-sexiculs. (And Earl probably thinks it's funny to sell a young lady a huge .357 and a box of super hot ammo when she comes in asking for a gun and the one time she fires it it's going to hurt like hell and scare the bejezus outta her and she'll never shot it again. 'Cause Earl's an asshole, and as we all know, there are assholes in every walk of life. But I'm digressing, again)

I've been to a lot of gun shows. And a lot of gun stores. And many gun ranges. Very rarely do I see a black man at any of them. I do see Hispanic men at them, so I don't think it's racism on the part of the shows, stores or ranges, but possibly a remembered racism "Oh don't go there, they won't sell to you." even though they would, now. But I don't know, maybe the local stores and shows and ranges are racist against blacks but not Hispanics.

Or maybe it's the price of new guns that are keeping impoverished blacks (and others) from them. A new Glock is going to run at least $500, a new Smith & Wesson revolver will run about that. A "cheap" Remington shotgun runs about $250 at Walmart, so firearms may just be priced out of reach of poor folks.

#237 posted by elNico

The picture that you and your pseudo-Buddhist compadre paint here repeatedly is one of a society that is so drenched with guns that it is indeed dangerous to leave home without one

I certainly don't feel that way. And I'm sorry if my posts gave off that impression. Look, I carry a pistol for the same reason I carry a spare tire. In case something happens, and I need it, it's there.

I don't wake up in the morning thinking "Wow! I really hope I can change my tire today! Ohhh...I got a shiny new lug wrench the other day, hope i can use it!" Nor do I worry about road debris or vicious packs of roaming eco-terrorists out to slash my truck's tires (even though someone did go up my parent's street and slash the tires on every truck, suv, or gas guzzler, leaving the compact cars and mpg friendly ones untouched).

I also keep jumper cables in my truck. Mainly for if someone else needs a jump. I keep a first aid kit in there, too, because sometimes injuries happen, and it's nice to have some basic supplies when they do. But I'm not terrified of some injury happening and my first aid kit is the only thing that'll save me. Neither do I dream of driving up on some great catastrophe and only my first aid kit saves the day. I just carry all that stuff in case I need it. I keep a shovel in the back in case I get stuck in the mud, again.

I also keep a small tool box and a spare serpentine belt and I can guarandamntee you I hope to never have to put another serpentine belt on my damn truck. Holy crap that's hard to do with no one helping. But just this past Sunday my belt broke while I was going down the road. But I was able to replace it because I had the tools and a spare belt (and an extra change of clothes which was great because I didn't have to ruin my nice suit digging around in the engine).

I guess it's just hard coded in me that having the neccessary tools and whatnot available to take care of problems myself is a Good Thing. Maybe it's from my time in Boy Scouts. Our motto was Be Prepared. Or maybe it was just that my dad carried around similar tools and stuff, and he was able to fix most things in his workshop, so I kinda grew up thinking that way. Dunno.

Maybe that's just it. I'm familliar with firearms so I'm comfortable around them and don't see them as dangerous rabid dogs, straining at their leash to go out and kill. Maybe y'all just need to be introduced to them, safely, so you don't just get your info on them from movies and tv. Kinda like us homophobes (former, in my case) shouldn't be all homophobic based on what we see on tv or movies, right? Get to know some gay people and you discover they're just people. Get exposed to firearms and I think you'll find they're just a tool like any other tool. Then you'll be less hoplophobic.

So...if any of y'all are in North Texas, or are coming this way or passing through and would like to, I'd be happy to take you out shooting. It'll be with .22s, rifles and pistols. Maybe a cowboy type six-shooter in 44-40 and a lever action rifle, 'cause they're real fun and don't kick too bad. If there's something specific you want to try, let me know, maybe I have it or can borrow it.

#234 posted by Takuan

I guess some people just aren't as strong as me. Pay attention and I'll teach you how to live without fear to the point of not needing a gun.

Oh Great and Wonderous Takun, please teach me to be strong and unafraid so that I may cast off mine spare tire, mine cables of jumping, mine kit of first aid, the candles of power-outage lighting, the extra food in the pantry also for power outages and/or times of great and terrible storms or ice and/or wind. I'd also like to become strong enough to not have an eye glasses repair kit in my home and truck. I'd really like to be strong enough to not have to carry around a leatherman tool for those times when I need a screwdriver. I assume once I'm strong enough I'll be able to screw down screws using just my fingers. Also I'd like to be strong enough to not have car insurance or house insurance, heck, no insurance at all, because clearly with only enough strength and fearlessness I will become invulnerable and unable to be harmed and neither will my property be harmed.

:)

Ok, so I worked on my response for along while. I wrote, re-wrote. Deleted. Undid. 5,000 words, then down to 1,000, then back up to a lot more. Peelian Principles. Lessons learned from Boy Scouts (Why don't you have the new kid gather firewood on Friday?) So I scrapped it all and just wrote this:

First, you know my answer. If they're coming to my house, armed and willing to use force to take my firearms, then I'll use force against them to keep them. Although I'd like to think I'd be smart and not be at my house when they came for me and my guns :)

A bit less flippant: I believe that the Bill of Rights does not grant us the various rights, they're ours naturally. The Bill of Rights just enumerates them and codifies them in our law. So if the fine folk of my community decide to take away that right, which is not theirs to take, then I'll ignore that law. Hopefully that's all I'd do, but I'll not be disarmed. A friend of mine in elementary school had at least one grandparent with a tattoo on her arm. Disarmament is the first step to genocide (kinda hard to wipe out an armed populace), so I'll not permanently disarm willingly.

Second, I'll ask you a question in return:

Looking at the historical record, can you name a time and place that restricting law abiding citizen's access to hand held weapons (since guns have only been around a few hundred years) has made them safer?

I mentioned DC and how its handgun ban didn't stop it from being the murder capital of the US on and off for 30 years. Chicago, New York city, and Detroit were all vying for that title as well, and all have strict gun laws and horrible murder rates (although NYCs went down with strict enforcement of probation rules and supervision of parolees. Also lots and lots of racial profiling. I don't think their gun laws have changed since the 20s, so it's unlikely that they are the cause of the recent downturn in murders there.)

And Moon, #225, a total ban on the importation of cocaine has not stopped it from coming into the country. What makes you think a total ban of weapons coming into the US would work?

And what do you do with the 300 million, roughly, guns that are here now? Confiscate them? Do you want to volunteer to do that? How do you reimburse the owners of those 300 million guns? Or do you just steal their property? It's ok to steal their property because guns are icky, right?

Also, Federal law says that you have to be a resident of the state you buy a handgun in, but you can buy a long gun in any state, provided you purchase it from a FFL if you are not in your state (ie, no private party sales to out of state residents). State laws may be more strict here, but they can't be less strict. If they're "importing" them illegally, then bust them on that.

@#203 Yes! If it doesn't work, try it again, but this time bigger! :)

An import ban hasn't worked with illegal undocumented immigrants, cocaine, pot, heroin, lead based paint, and probably a lot of other things. Why would it work with handguns?

#201 Takuan

"In the specific case of America and guns; I think any harm that would be caused by a handgun ban would be outweighed by the good. If a democracy does things by voting, there should be a vote."

What good? Washington D.C. has had a handgun ban since the early 1970s. And yet they are constantly vying for the title of murder capital of the US. So ummm...what good did the handgun ban do?

@#185 semiotix
Let me think a bit on what to say. I'm sure you've noticed I'm not the most eloquent fellow commenting here. I haven't read any Nietzsche, and all I know of Buddhism is that the the central credo is 'Every man for himself' :) My reply may get kinda long, although I'll try and do my best to trim it down as much as possible. Boiled down to nothing, it's "No, I don't give them up" but I'd kinda like to elaborate a bit on that.

I think this guy said it a bit better than me:

Why the gun is civilization

“Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or compelling me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year-old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year-old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunken guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for an armed mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat – it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger – even an armed one – can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would “only” result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip, at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it weren’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I’m looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

Oh, and Mark? The guy in the video does not have a quick trigger finger. Technically his trigger finger is not moving at all. He's using a technique called bump firing.

You typically fire a gun by moving your trigger finger backwards, but you can also keep your trigger finger immobile and move the gun forwards. Same result.

If you do it just right the recoil will move the gun back a bit, resetting the trigger, and your continued forward motion with the other hand will move the firearm forward and the trigger will be manipulated by the immobile trigger finger, firing the gun again. This repeats till the gun is empty. This can all happen very fast.

It's a cheap, legal (in the US, no idea on other locales) way of imitating full auto fire. I have never seen anyone do it with a handgun before, I've only seen it done with rifles. As other people have said, it's not very accurate. But looks like fun.

#166 elNico

"#24 jlbraun

Gun control is fundamentally a bigoted, racist, sexist, ageist, statist idea that is *so* 20th century. Get with the program.

Wow, you pumped those out like gun guy...not really targeting, but lots of 'em..."

Gun control is bigoted and racist, at least in the US. Why? Let's look at it for a second. In 1792 blacks were excluded from serving in the militia, even though many had taken up arms to defeat the Brits. Just about every gun control law since then has been all about keeping guns out of the hands of blacks.

Prior to the passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act, firearms could be purchased through the mail with no license required. This guy has a scanned-in mail order catalog from the 60s full of all kinds of neat stuff. All available through the mail. What else was going on around 1968? Hmmm...Watts riots, MLK's assassination, Malcom X saying "By any means neccessary" Suddenly there were lots of angry blacks and a lot of them had guns. Local gun stores might refuse to sell guns to blacks (or queers, or spicks, or wops, or jews, or chinks, or whatever racial or bigoted term you can thing of) but now with mail order houses selling to anyone, and not checking to see if they were good God-Fearin' white folk first! Well! That's just down right unacceptable! So a law was passed, and now you can't buy guns through the mail, you have to go through a Federal Firearms License holder. Whew! Now if a black man wanted to buy a gun he was forced to go down to Earl's Shootin' Shack and buy from him. And Earl, being a good white man, would refuse to sell to his nigger ass.

So that's why gun control is racist and bigoted.

It's sexist because, well I'm not sure if you've noticed, but on average, the women folk are less strong than the men folk. They also tend to be shorter than men. And generally weigh a lot less. So it's easy for a man to, on average, overpower a woman. Even if a woman has a club or a knife, it's usually not too hard to take it away, or stay out of her reach and yet still be within your reach. And if she does manage to stab or hit the attacker? Due to the lack of body strength it's probably not a serious wound. But, what if the woman has a gun? That kinda puts her on the same level, power wise, as a man. Now, she's just as likely to come out ahead as the attacker, maybe more so if he has a knife or was unarmed. Prior to the invention of handguns and their widespread use, what could a woman do to prevent being raped? It seems to me that if you'd rather see a woman raped in an alley, then strangled to death with her own panty hose than a live woman explaining to the police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound, that's pretty sexist. But maybe it's just me.

Similarly, firearms in the hands of the elderly and the handicapped will keep them from being at the mercy of the strong. Aren't we all for empowering people?

So, yeah, elNico, I think jlbraun did hit the target with his earlier shot. Gun control is sexist, racist, bigoted, and ageist.

semi-related:
“Reminds me of a great quote I once read on talk.politics.guns. There was this liberal weenie whining (triple redundancy alert) about how innocent men would be mistaken for rapists and shot if women were allowed to carry concealed handguns. To which someone replied to the effect that if he didn't want to be mistaken for a rapist, he should put his knife down and pull his pants up.” - Captain Holly

Why not just let me have my guns, and if I use them in an illegal manner, like say shooting someone when non in a self defense or defense of others situation, then take them away and lock me up in jail? As long as I'm responsible with them, why not let me keep them? And even acquire more?

While trying to find a better copy of the painting (so far the best I found is this), I ran across this:

"The original piece of art is of a horse thief is fleeing a lynch mob. The Saturday Evening Post liked W.H.D. Koerner’s illustration so much it used it a year later to illustrate an a short story, “Ways that are Dark.” The caption under the illustration read: “Bandits Move About From Town to Town, Pillaging Whatever They Can Find.”
Koerner’s illustration was picked up again in 1918 by the magazine A Country Gentleman for the story, “A Charge to Keep.”

Dunno if it's true, but if correct, calling the painting "A Charge to Keep" was not Bush's invention, it'd been called that since 1918.

Looks like a nice painting. I've got several western paintings on my walls, I couldn't tell you the names or "real" stories to any of them. I made up stories to most of them. One's got a cowboy leading a horse through deep snowy woods in a storm looking for a lost cow. Does that mean I'd inevitably invade Iraq? :)

Ugh. I despise most art criticism. It always seems so full of crap. Where did they one guy get the allusions to the American Civil War from this painting? I didn't see any firearms in the painting, but maybe the displayed thumbnail is too small to see them.

"This is such an exhausted cliche of masculinity: the loner on his horse, the heroic, old-fashioned western archetype." The "loner" is like 20 feet from the other guys! Doth 20 feet a loner make? Gah!

To me it looks like three guys on horseback going up a steep trail, single file. They trail is curving because it's a switch back (hence why I think it's steep) and they are rounding the corner. I like it. If I saw it in the $5 bin o' art at WalMart I'd probably buy it for my walls.

As a side note, we know Bush's favorite painting, and I think earlier his iPod song list was published. Do we know the favorite paintings or songs of other world leaders? That might be an interesting list to look over. Maybe I can get some more ideas for my walls :)

I worked in Dubai for a little while. The architect of the boat we were working on, a Brit expat who'd been jailed in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Iran, said that the jails in Abu Dhabi were the best he'd been in, very nice and very clean. Surprisingly, the Dubai jails were rather nasty. And yes, that is surprising because Dubai is trying to outdo Abu Dhabi, and the rest of the world, in glamor and bigness and grandness. Just look at the various engineering projects they have going on. So you'd expect a really nice jail.

And yes, I'd except the Dubai authorities to behave like "monsters." There's a lot of odd, to me anyway, cultural dynamics going on over there.

Only something like 5% of the population are actually citizens. The rest are imported workers of one type or another, and it does not matter how long you live there or what, basically you can't ever become a citizen. Maybe Europeans and Americans and rich folk can, but for the vast majority of the workforce there is no way they or their kids will ever become citizens.

To open a business, any business, the business must be owned at least 51% by a citizen. And that citizen can take all the business's assets at any time (which is why the boat's architect went to jail, his citizen partner cleaned out the bank accounts and left him holding the bag). So most citizens "own" many businesses. And fill the top spaces of any company's organizational charts. And the top spaces of the governmental organization charts. But all the real "work" is done by the imported workforce, which is largely Indian or Pakistani (at least on the government side).

Now, why is it that Americans are annoyed when we can tech support and get India? Because of their cultural mores that make them less likely to deviate from a written script. There is less flexibility and initiative, as a general rule. Same over in Dubai, all the lower level, and mid level flunkys will be adhering to the letter of the law. But you also have a huge tradition of not letting the boss be embarrassed or wrong (ever), so there's that to consider, aswell. And then there is also bribery, which may be technically illegal, but is a cultural norm in the UAE. I also noticed a big problem with the Arabs I worked with with them ignoring problems hoping they'd go away or Someone Else would fix them. I also noticed a huge amount of "shooting the messenger" so lots of problems were not brought to the attention of someone who could fix them, for fear of being umm...shot.

So, you get in a situation where something is thought to be drugs, that is not. (and btw, there is a rather huge problem with drugs in Dubai) And you get this huge mishmash of cultures and crap and it's very easy for stuff to get ridiculously complicated and convoluted and nothing will get done about it because it might embarrass someone higher up who may or may not ever even know about it.

I have probably not explained this very well, but it's late so screw it.

I will leave with a short story, though.

One of the last times I was over there, I was leaving the country on the last day of my visa, to fly back home. Flying out of Abu Dhabi. My visa (already extended once) expired at midnight and my flight was at 1am. No problem, went through outbound customs, got my exit stamp with no difficulties. But then fog rolled in. And the airport was closed due to fog. So they bussed us all from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to fly out. When we get to Dubai, off the airlines bus, with customs officials from Abu Dhabi with us we had to go through the incoming side of customs first, because we'd already "left" the country, and you can't leave again till you've entered. Because you can't have an exit stamp with out first having an entrance stamp, you know. Just Not Done. But my visa was expired. By three or four hours at that point. And it had Already Been Extended Once. And Can't Be Extended Again Unless Done Before It Expires (but it had already expired!) I was literally dragged off and was headed to jail. It took a UAE citizen, who worked in customs, coming down to the customs area and saying it was alright to let me in, to let me in and then back out again and get on the flight home. Mainly because this exact situation had never come up before and they had no procedure, and everyone knew that no one gets fired for buying IBM, so to say. So yeah, I can understand them acting like "monsters."

Why is it that UFO sightings happen over desert roads in Texas, New Mexico or Nevada? Why doesn't it happen over New York, LA, London etc?

The last I heard, the thinking behind the lights in Marfa is that they are reflections off clouds (or highly reflective soil along a curve) by headlights on a highway a fairly looong way off.

from the CNN article:

"Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts."

Dude, next time shoot it! If you're close enough to see that it has no seams, nuts or bolts, then shoot that sucker down. Think of the phat lootz!

You shoot down a Gin-you-wine UFO and heck, they'll tear down Moolah to make room for it in the town square! Stephenville could become the new Marfa. Except with more dairy.

Since 1962, more than one million Americans have died in firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings (Violence Policy Center)

Ummm...I'm gonna call shenanigans on that number. I can't find anything on by firearm 1962 to the present, but I did find that the Dept of Justice says that in the five year period of 1993 to 1997 there were 78,620 homicides. If that's average then there should be less than one million gun related deaths in the 45 years from 1962 to 2007.

I did find this while wandering about the internets:

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration there were 491,200 fatalities in traffic accidents from 1994 to 2006.

How utterly illuminating!!!

Anyway, I carry a handgun for the same reason I carry a spare tire. I used my spare tire for the first time the other day in 20 years of driving. Glad I had it. I would love to carry around my pistol and never ever need it. But if I ever do, it's nice to have it as an option. As a choice.

Zak,

Check with the Single Action Shooting Society for a club in your area. I've found that Cowboy Action Shooters are very willing to loan out guns at club matches to let people try them out and get involved in the sport.

Cory,

Neat! I've never had a chance to fire an AK-47, other than semi-auto ones. I had an opportunity to fire an Uzi once, but it was broken. :( However I got to shoot a Thompson and an MP5 that day instead, so the day was far from wasted. Next time you go, see if they have suppressed firearms to rent. They're also a blast to shoot. They don't sound at all like Hollywood silencers. And the physics behind them are nice and geeky.

From time to time I've had the chance to take Brits shooting, most of them for the first time in their lives. Usually we have them shoot at white poster board with a colored paper plate stapled in the middle. Gives them a nice big target to hit. They always like to finish the day by shooting at an Osama target, though.

Equal compensation for equal labor

But it's not equal labor.

If the Indian foundry buys the same equipment that a foundry in the west uses, uses workers trained on those machines, and trained in safety, operates with the same safety record as a western foundry, and complies with the same environmental/health/safety/and whatever else regulations as a western foundry then yeah, they'd be doing equal labor. And they'd be paid about the same as a western foundry because all that stuff costs, and costs quite a bit. And if they were on par expense wise with what a foundry in the west charges, why in the world would someone in the west hire them to do the work? When they could get it for the same price locally?

The only reason the foundry is doing business in the west is because they are less expensive, and they are less expensive because they do not have the most modern equipment, are not as safe, and are not as well trained.

stressful circumstances + pepperspray = death if you have asthma

Fixed it for you.

I was peripherally hit by pepper spray several years ago when jerk set a canister off in a classroom. Very nearly died from it. Had to get rushed to the emergency room. Not fun. Now I'm more scared of it than I am of being shot, since everyone knows that shooting equals a trip to the ER, but pepper spray? He's probably just faking it.

My understanding is that signing the ticket is you agreeing to appear in court. If you don't sign, it's like telling them "I'm not going to pay for this or appear in court." So they then arrest you to make sure you show up in court.

@#24
"Kinda surprised nobody's mentioned that Japan was going to surrender w/in 6months."

Japan: "Hey Allies! We're not going to surrender now, but if you promise to lay off for like, five, no six months then we'll surrender. August, August just doesn't work for us: it's a feng shui thing. February is a much better time to surrender. We're not going to use that six months to rebuild our infrastructure or anything. Honest. Seriously this is for reals, yo'."

Somehow I don't think we would've believed them.

If Japan was going to surrender in six months, then why did it take two atomic bombings (and years of the Pacific campaign, the firebombing of Tokyo, the invasion of Okinawa, etc...) for the leadership in Japan to surrender?

that mounts to the barrel of a service revolver.

The picture shows it on a service pistol, not a revolver. Most newly manufactured service pistols have a rail under the barrel for attaching lights. I know of no revolvers that do.

I admittedly don't know much about guns, but that can't be good for your aiming ability.

Nah, it affects it somewhat, maybe, but that's what practice is for, right? I have one pistol with a rail and I noticed no difference with it on or with it off.

I'm not sure why a camera and light have to be so cumbersome on a gun when you can fit them in a pair of glasses.

Two reasons that I can think of: 1) You'd want long battery life on this (figure the average cop turns the camera on at the start of his shift and turns it off at the end, so it's gotta go for 8 hours or so "on"[otherwise they'd all just "forget" to turn on the camera]). The current bright ass lights that mount under pistols are roughly that size and have about an hours worth of super bright light before you have to swap the batteries out. And 2) it needs to be rugged enough to survive the average cops day, and an un-average day of being dropped, slammed into walls, thrown about in a car crash, etc. and still keep on tickin'.

How do you holster (and draw!) a gun like that?

There are two choices. One is to keep the light/camera in a cellphone-like holster on the belt and attach it after the pistol is drawn (although that's a bad idea). The other is to have a holster made which will fit the gun with the light/camera attached. There are several out there already which fit popular service pistol/light combos. If this catches on you can bet that the police equipment manufacturers will all come out with something soon.

I think it's a great idea, the light/camera combo. I think we all agree that the dashboard cams have been a Good Thing, I think this will be an even better thing.