GigaBuist

Somebody else in this threat brought up the CZ-75, which is a great inexpensive handgun. It's a 9mm but there's a variation out there that's in .40 that might be more to your liking. I don't know if this is common across the board for them but mine is a dead-on tack driving -- when in the hands of somebody skilled. I'm proficient with it but a retired Marine (who recommended it to me) picked it up for the first time, laid out 10 rounds, put it down and informed me my gun was "confused". "It's a combat pistol that thinks it's a target pistol. Can I buy it?" An empty mag doesn't drop right ouf the frame but there's a nice lip on the end of the mag that makes it easy to release with your right hand while your left sweeps it out which is fine since your hand is going that way anyway to grab the next mag. Best of both worlds really because if there's a time when you don't want the mag flying out and having to catch it you don't have to. It's a military weapon (in the EU) and it's damned reliable. I can get 15 round mags for about $60 bucks last I looked. I've got a Glock 21 also (full sized .45 ACP)... great gun, very reliable and plenty accurate. High-cap mags for this are friggen expensive though. I had to pay $135 each for my 13 rounders. Don't think I've ever got my hands on an H&K. If I did I didn't remember it. I've had some nice tricked out Kimber .45's lent to me for a few rounds and they were just great. Anything based off the 1911 design certainly has my approval. If you buy a ruger semi-auto you might as well just throw the damn thing at the guy and hope you clock him in the head. I've shot two different models (85D and 95D I think) which had a polymer frame and a silver-ish colored slide. Both had chambering problems and stove pipes way too often for my taste. If you have one, or get one, I'd suggest putting 500 rounds of what you'd use for "business" ammo through it. If it jams once, change ammo... they're picky. Glocks tend to eat up and spit out anything you shove into them though. Gotta love that. Has anybody here gotten their hands on a Springfield Armory XD pistol? Those have my interest right now. A polymer design (comparable to Glock I hear) with a 1911's grip angle which is much more natural to people that the steep angle Glock uses. The extra grip safety is interesting too. Remember, if you're going for concealed carry here, it's also important to find something that's not going to snag on your clothes. That's one of the reasons I see Glock as being so popular for such purposes. There's no exposed hammer, the safety isn't side mounted so there's one less thing to snag, and the slide release is a pretty small tab. I'd probably take a little sandpaper to mine to smooth that edge out a bit before I tucked it into my pants though.

No need to reinvent the wheel here. Get a Jabber server setup. The server is under the GPL and there's a number of free clients out there for Win32, Mac, Linux, and Java capable operating systems. It's actually a very good system. I set one up at work a month or two back so we could shoot IMs across our office. I'm working on setting up another one at home... I should probably just go into work to nab the configuration file I wrote there to set it up here. Works like a champ, and if Sangiro offered me access to the backend DB here I could probably hack something into it so you'd authenticate against the same user database. At the very least I could migrate all the account information into their existing system to bootstrap it. You'd have to maintain two seperate passwords for them with the latter solution though. You can check it out here: http://www.jabber.org

I'd have to take a gander at the database design and the code to make a true assement of this but I'll take a stab in the dark here. If the forum system actually tried logging which posts you have read and which one's you haven't you'd end up with a matrix that had every user on one side and every post on the other side. That'd be friggen gigantic! Well, it wouldn't be a true matrix as in a X by Y grid but instead a two column join table with a user ID in one column and a post ID in the other column. In an "all posts read by all users" situation the size of the grid would be the same though. Every time a post was brought up the system would have to do a lookup to determine if you've read this post or not. If not, insert a new "you read this" record. if you pull up 20 posts in a single view that's 20 lookups and up to 20 inserts into the table. Given the traffic load of this place -- that's a nightmare. Far far easier to just keep track of the last time user X read forum Y. I -think- that's how this works though I've never really paid attention. Once you hit a thread in talkback it flags you as having read talkback at that point in time. When you returnlater, even if you didn't touch a thread, it still figures you probably read that stuff. Optimal solution regarding usability? Nope -- but the alternative is a mess. I just realized I've had my head in way too many technical discussions today as this seems like normal stuff to talk about. Crikey.

Up to this point it sounds like you want a schitzophrenic. I might have spelled that wrong -- let me check with the other guy in my head. I can't figure it out either. Neither of us want to hit dictionary.com. It's close enough.

Technically I'm a "Tool Integration Engineer". My boss wants our department to be named "Tool Integration Technicians" though so our acronym is TIT. He'd very much like to be leader of the T.I.T. team. Nobody said he was politically correct. Basically I'm tech support for tech support. I tell them what to do, sometime they hork it up, and I tell them which instructions they forgot to follow. They then inform the users that everything is fixed now. More accurately though I'm a cog in the wheel of a giant corporation hellbent on owning as much of the world as they can without regard to anything else in the world. Wow, that's horribly depressing. I think I'll go throw myself out of a plane.

Pansy

Well, I'm glad this one got thrown out of court too. It was a rather flaky argument to begin with. A trademark on the "fair and balanced" term? Gimmie a break! Fox claimed that readers would think that Fox endorsed the book. Give me a break. Maybe, and this is a slight chance, somebody would see the book and ID it with Fox on initial glance, but we're talking about people that can read here. It's not too hard from looking at the cover to see that Al Franken is not a pro-Fox person. The word "Liar" is across the pictures of the newscasters faces for crying out loud. Would "Joe Sixpack" think this is a Fox book? Yeah, maybe... but Joe Sixpack isn't going into Barnes and Noble to buy a book on politics. This is a fair and balanced judgement. Glad to see it booted.

Soo... are you Jewish or West Michigan Dutch? Sorry, I had to

You're fucked at that point. If you wanted to get 10 miles in an hour (6 minute mile)_ but took an hour to only get 5 miles an hour you're hosed. Can't make that 6minute mile average speed unless you bump up the distance. Maybe I should read ahead to see if these are answered?

Cut once horizontally, once vertically, and another veritcally 90 degreess to the other vertical cut. You get 8 pieces then so you just have to weight the angles properly depending on the size of the bar to get 2 of them equal to 1 7th and the other pieces to be 1 7th the total weight. Seems like this has had a few comments, but I haven't read ahead yet. I'll feel like a real idiot if there's a way to get 7 pieces exactly.

The Win32:Sobig-F is unrelated to the DCOM/RPC worm running around known as "Blaster" and it's variants. The fourth variant is the self-cleansing one which starts with an N in it's name. I forget WTF they call it now. The Win32:Sobig-F isn't a worm, it's just a virus. You can't infect yourself unless you actually run the thing manually. The Blaster variety that come through the RPC services are able to worm their way in without any action on the user's part... aside from not patching in an appropriate amount of time.

I kid you not, on a camping trip I was once so drunk I could swear a mosquito fell off me after getting his fill. Then again, for all I know I could have been falling over thinking the mosquito was moving and I was stationary. Damn that was a good trip. I think.

You're right on the Uzi prices -- I must have glanced at at semi-auto knock off or something when I saw that. I'm not too into submachine guns so I couldn't tell you the difference at a glance if my life depended on it. As far as the stamp goes though on the M16 lower, what's to prevent somebody from buying M16 replacement parts and dropping them into a semi-auto AR-15? As I understand it the lowers are pretty much the same if not identical. Not that I'd do that -- nor would I suggest anybody do. Do you just present your previously paid tax stamp when purchasing replacement parts then? If this is just a one-time $200 tax per firearm I might actually consider doing it again. I was under the impression that I'd have to pay that $200 for every transaction related to any Class 3 parts for that firearm. Of course, trigger mechanisms aren't serial numbered (not that I've noticed at least) so they really can't track/tax them there. I think my bank account might be taking a sudden hit again. Haven't bought a firearm since March so I figure I'm about due

I've thought about getting into that -- I'd like a burstable M16A2 or a Mac-10 for my collection but the Class 3 tax law as I understand it would make purchase a $200 tax stamp if I had to get a replacement part for them each and every time. Maybe I'm mistaken on this though. Do you have any experience here? I could understand a $200 license fee to get one, as there must be a lot of legwork involved so it seems reasonable there (sorta... )... but $200 for a new trigger mechanism that would only run me maybe $100 to start with is a little extreme. Put a $200 charge on top of a $1200 Uzi and that's not so prohibitive though.

That would be kind of silly, don't you think? If such a thing happened you'd look less silly using something else. I suggest: - Bob: It's got the same sorta ring to it. One syllable simple word. - Fuck: A common phrase already and would probably be easy to pick up; - Justin: That's my name. .... sorry, I couldn't resist. Time for my meds.

Ok, this one is more on topic. You took a little flak for not providing possible options for some people so I'll give you a little grief too here

Well, if you take the walking on water thing at face value then I'd imagine hoofing it a few thousand miles across land is just a walk in the park. Didn't you see Dogma? "Back in the day hanging out with JC we used to walk everywhere!" -- Chris Rock's character, paraphrased because my memory isn't very uhm, what's that word? Good.

I'm a Mozilla zealot, but I think I've at least got good reasons for it. - The popup blocker, which is why we're having this thread, is just great. It's in all the Mozilla variants -except- the name branded Netscape one. I don't really care for the NS builds anymore. - The tabbed browsing. This seems trivial but it's really handy. Some of the Mozilla variants (like Galeon for GNOME/Linux) aren't quite up to par on blocking popups but at least all they get is a tab in the background that's easily closable. - You can -stop- window resizing and focus changing through JavaScript. It's just another menu item. This stops the pop-under ads. - It's great for dz.com -- when you click a link you don't get a new window coming up in your face (unless you want it) -- you just get another tab. So, you can click on 3-4 attachments and let them pull up in a window and view them once they all load. - Fewer security holes; and the ones that are found aren't as serious as IE ones. There's no built in mechanism to spawn native code from Mozilla based browsers which means ActiveX stuff can't install. This is one way to get spyware on your machine. - I don't know if this is of any use to you Skymama, but the tools built into it for developers are just great. One of the piles of crap I have to work on at work is IE only and when things go wrong I -really- miss being able to use some of my Mozilla tricks to find out what's wrong. They include: A DOM inspector which is great for finding out why something doesn't seem nested right, a plug-in that scoops up all the HTTP headers and shows them to me which is great for debugging cookie and session problems, and there's a JavaScript debugger that I've never quite gotten used to. - It does render complex stuff pretty good, much better than IE in speed at times. Opera is still king when it comes to this though which is why they're getting the embedded market. - Hey, it's cross platform. Not a big deal to most people but I like knowing that on my Linux machines at home and the Windows box at work I can use the same interfaces if I want to. I can toss Mozilla on a Mac OSX machine too and get that same comfortable feeling. I'd head over to www.mozilla.org and download the Firebird browser if I were you in a heartbeat. It'll take zero time to learn how to use it like you did IE and probably a good 20-30 minutes of play time to get into some of it's better features.

I heard today that if you type 'shutdown /a' in a command prompt it will stop the reboot and give you time to work on the problem.

Sorry, even child porn isn't a clear cut case. A picture of me at the age of 17 years 364 days running naked into a lake is child porn. One day later it's just a picture of my pale white hairy flat behind. While neither would probably be considered kiddie-porn by you one is highly illegal and the other is just evidence of me commit indecent exposure. If an 18 year old woman has a polaroid of 17 and a half year old boyfriend bucknaked she's guilty of holding child pornography. She can have sex with him, but she can't take a picture of him and keep it. Maybe the law was written with ways around this but I've never heard of it and I would doubt any politicial would take a stand to reduce the scope of what is and isn't kiddie-porn. I'm not saying I'm all for the stuff (certainly not) -- but it freaks me out to know that somebody could go to jail for posessing a picture of me naked at 17 and be labeled some type of sex offender. It's just not right.

It comes in through the Windows RPC/DCOM service. Ports 135, 137, 139, 445, and ahhh, something else are ways in. You can't turn them off. All you can do is patch things to keep them up to date and firewall those ports off from any untrusted network.

Cool and all... but how do you get him into a boxman position?

Disclaimer: I'm wearing an NRA hat right now. Literally. This alone makes me biased against Mickey Mouse... err, Moore. I had heard a bit here and there about Bowling for Columbine, most of it through my NRA magazines. A few scathing articles pointing out the sheer inaccuracies of it got my blood boiling. Somebody making a film that takes the far-left side and using shots of Heston saying things that are out of context are just fine honestly. Pieces together sentences from different speeches though to put words in the man's mouth is just wrong though. I was interested in the matter, knowing full good and well than an NRA magazine would be biased on the issue. I ran across http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html on the internet a while ago which somebody else has pointed out on here too. Here's a link for you. I don't know if the author is a right winger like me or not but he presents his argument as somebody who does documentaries who think's it's absurd that BFC got an Oscar in this category. Nothing about this film is true. It boils my blood to see a picture of that smug little man sometimes. Oh, here is another site debunking Moore's myths. I haven't read it in depth yet but it's probably worth a look. Twisting statistics to present your point of view is one thing. Sure there is an alarming rate of "child deaths" from firearms in the United States. When you define children as anybody below 21 and count gang shooting in there the numbers work out well. That's a problem, no matter which side of the bill you're on. No other nation that I know of has such an alarming homicide rate amoung young people. Heston acknowleges this I beleive during the movie. We have a race problem. There is something wrong here. However I come from an area where gun ownership is probably as high as anywhere else in the country. You walk into somebody's house and it's not uncommon to see 5-10 rifles in a cabinet for hunting. Gun violence there? Nonexistant. I move half an hour away though into a more urban area where I'm a nutjob for owning one gun, let alone 6, and gun violence is higher here. I don't know a single person that I work with here that actually owns a firearm. We have more murders in this county though. Something's wrong but it's not gun ownership. Although there's more gun violence -here- than where I grew up there are fewer guns - but there are more minorities. Well hell, it must be their fault, right?! You can use stats to show that gun ownership equals gun violence and you can use stats to show that minorities equal gun violence. Somebody saying "Gun toting rednecks are the problem with this country" is every bit as foolish as another saying "It's 'dem nigrahs cauzin trouble 'round here!". I support neither view. Moore got away with blaming this country's violence problem on people like me though. He likes to equate the NRA with the KKK in his movie but I consider his actions no more responsible, helpful, or logical than some asspuppet saying "it's the nigrah's fault!". He's free to hold whatever beleifs he wants in his head. He's free to speak them too -- but out and out propaganda is another thing. Getting award for it just drops my friggen jaw. If he wanted to stand on stage, make a movie, or writel articles explaining his point of view to the country why people like me are so darned horrible for our nation that's fine. I'll disagree with him until the day I die, but I'll let him speak. However, turning Heston, the NRA and effectively all it's members into war mongering racicists by fabricating audio and video pieces through editing is totally different. It's just plain wrong. The sheer number of people that have been sucked into his little dream world through this is just amazing. I knew he was a lefty liberal and I was okay with that until I dove down into his movie. I'm tempted to buy it just so I can point of more than what others have done already but I'm hesitant to hand over any money that would support his actions. I think it's just plain too easy to prey on the minds of people who grew up in urban environments to get them to agree with his thought process. I grew up in a small town and now I live in a big town. I have friends that moved into our small town while in high school that were initially very very uncomfortable with the idea of me owning a firearm. I work with college educated people that find it utterly foreign that a professional and intelligent human being would own a gun let alone more than one. Moore plays on this artfully. He just doesn't "get" what the men and women of the NRA are about though. We're anti crime. Hard to beleive I know. We're against murder beleive it or not. We beleive what we beleive because we think that we're honestly helping America by being prepared. We are the first to stand up and help a fellow American out. Don't beleive me? I'm driving down to the DZ on Saturday down the expressway and what do I see? Two cars hit eachother and go racing off into the median. One of them flips over, perhaps both. An SUV and a small sports coupe type car. I boogie down 200 yards, hit the breaks and check the mile markers, grab my cellphone, dial 911 and give directions as I get out of my car explaining what's going on. Cars keep flying by as I look for a spot to run across the road and see if there's anything I can do. Many could have stopped before or with me but they didn't. First on the scene? One guy with an NRA cap stuck to his head trying to calm a woman down with blood on her face as she tries to give directions to a 911 operator 3 minutes after I've already called. I stick around to see if I can do anything until the fireman and paramedics arive then quitely exit when things are known to be under control. This is what Moore doesn't get about NRA members. We are not angels of death. We hold weapons as tools and nothing more. May God help us if we ever need to use them, but we are prepared. We're the "crazy guy" with a rachet set in the trunk of his car in case he sees somebody broke down at the side of the roads. We'll change your tire if you can't on the side of the road. We'll give you a jump if you need one. We'll get down under your car in a shirt and tie to fix up a broken transmission fluid line (done that!)... oh, and we'll pull out a firearm to defend ourselves and fellow Americans if need be. We're just prepeared. We're grown up Boy Scouts. I don't see why this is so darned scarey to Moore. Who would you turn to in a desperate moment? Michael Moore on one side with a smug little I-hate-Americans smile on his face or the guy with an NRA bumper sticker?

I won't... but I would like to point out that 'Arnie' is a moderate Republican. I'm not a resident of CA (Michigan boy here), grew up in the most up-tight Republican county in the state and tend to be even -more- conservative than some folk around here. To me CA is a tree-hugging-hippy state. Heck, Arnie is a bit of a do-gooder-liberal to me. I know exactly the type of people you're speaking of but I would highly doubt that Arnold really gives a rat's behind about gays or wants to infrige on anybody's rights in a crackdown. His issue is the economy and as somebody else here pointed out he's got a BS in the matter. Maybe he'll fix it, maybe he won't but that's his goal. Heck, if he wanted the Republican vote out there he'd platform to remove some of the idiotic gun restriction laws out there; but he's not. AFAIK he's said he'll just leave them as they are. It's not an issue to him. He's a little on the right side vs. the left but he's certainly not way out there on the right like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, or me.

My left eye is worthless. Even with corrective lenses it's pointless to try and make it perform anywhere near 20/20 so glasses usually bring me up to around 20/60. Right now the lens in my glasses over the left eye is scratched to all hell and I couldn't care less. It's just there to make things look normal really. To illustrate, here's a snapshot of my browser window I took while trying to read this forum with my left eye only. I made my browser enlarge text until I could read it -- and that was still inching along trying to make the eye really work hard. It's 3.4x larger than normal. This is on a 14.1" LCD screen at 1024x768 around 2 feet from my eyes: right here Depth perception has always been difficult for me. Well, it once was. I'm now 23 and I've had this bad left eye my whole life. The right eye isn't perfect either but I'm something like 20/25 in that one with corrective lenses. You do learn how to cope with it though, although cope is the wrong word. Your brain will start using things around what you're looking at to determine distances rather than rely on that parallax thing. You need to use known points of reference to calculate distance when you operate on only one eye. I cannot tell you at all how far away a circular object is if it is not attached to something else of known size. Stop signs were hard for me to learn when I was driving. Eventually my brain worked out the height of the stop sign (which is basially fixed) vs. it's apparant size and how quickly that's changing I guess to make it work. You eventually begin to life by Pythagorean's theroem it seems. It's sort of like looking through a TV camera all the time. That's the best way I can explain it to people. Thankfully I'm not totally blind in that left eye so I still have periphial vision in it so I can tell (mostly) when objects are coming at me from the bad side. If you suddently lose one eye, or it all goes blurry, I'd expect to be out of whack for quite some time. I was never any good as a child at throwing balls around. I'm still not because I never quite adapted to the situation. Heck, at 19 if you lob a football at me and get it high enough that I have to take my eyes off the ground while catching it I'm hosed. I can't play backhand in tennis or ping-pong because when something approaches at an angle on the right my left eye has to interpret the data and it's game over for me at that point. How can I tell when I'm getting near the ground (just a wee student -- 11 jumps, but so far it hasn't been an issue) -- I use my feet. Them suckers have been the same distance from my head since I was 14, and they're the same size. I know how big they are and how far away they are. If I catch my shadow I can look at my normal feet and my shadow feet and get a little size differential there. It worked once. Other than that -- using the circle of peas in our landing area works too. I know what it looks like at my height so your brain can naturally use that to determine your height by accounting for the angle at which you look at it. Look at the near side, look at the far side, determine angle of change and assuming you can still just relative distance toward the pit based upon your surroundings (ie: buildings, bushes) you're brain will "naturally" use this to give you an idea of where you are. Given that you're coming in at a constant speed your brain can use that to adapt too instead of using it's surroundings.