It's well reviewed by anyone who picks one up or fires it, in spite of its looks and its all-plastic construction.
It's damned light, a minimalist approach to a utility carbine.
It's got the wrong caliber but maybe that can be corrected. Either Grendelization or conversion to a TCU caliber could get me interested.
It's no service rifle but wasn't meant to be. In the Charlie model, the SU-16 looks like a contender.
20050122
Alternatives to PayPal?
Who's using what? Who's got critical mass? Is critical mass even necessary for web-transacted minipayments? Is it safe to keep accounts at more than one of them? What features are better than others? I'm leery about having one directly access my bank account, less leery about credit card access. I guess it's a discussion of what I want it for, isn't it? Ease, anonymity, disconnection from credit card, disconnection from social security number, disconnection spender from earner?
Kurt's Kustom Firearms is using YowCow. Never heard of them until looking up alternatives to the AR-15's direct-impingement gas system---Kurt offers one, BTW.
And this, in a nutshell, is why I want something other than PayPal---it's none of their business what I buy using their service. If they want to restrict what I can buy, I won't use them. I still get their emails, and my emailed complaints about that policy go unanswered.
BitPass looks good, eGold looks even better but it's not really meant for micropayments. For cryptanarcholibertarians, eGold must be the shizzle.
Kurt's Kustom Firearms is using YowCow. Never heard of them until looking up alternatives to the AR-15's direct-impingement gas system---Kurt offers one, BTW.
And this, in a nutshell, is why I want something other than PayPal---it's none of their business what I buy using their service. If they want to restrict what I can buy, I won't use them. I still get their emails, and my emailed complaints about that policy go unanswered.
BitPass looks good, eGold looks even better but it's not really meant for micropayments. For cryptanarcholibertarians, eGold must be the shizzle.
Time again for BOD ballots
The ballots arrived again this year for NRA Board of Directors, and this year because of Neal Knox's untimely passing away, we have to evaluate the nominees without his advice.
So I'd like your help in setting criteria for who should receive gunbloggers' votes for the NRA BOD. This is especially so for fellow gunbloggers who have been disappointed (outraged?) with the NRA lately. They aren't the only game in town or even the best, but they still have pull and it's worth it to try to influence them in this new bloggy era of openness and instant communication.
Though it's way too late to seriously consider it for this year, it might be time to write-in nominate an überblogger or two to the BOD. I'd be really cool with Glenn Reynolds or Eugene Volokh. Not so cool with Hugh Hewitt.
Update: After some consideration, I think I want Glenn and Eugene right where they are, free to reason and to blog without any appearance of influence over them. Besides, we'd need different skillsets in an NRA director. What are those skillsets?
So I'd like your help in setting criteria for who should receive gunbloggers' votes for the NRA BOD. This is especially so for fellow gunbloggers who have been disappointed (outraged?) with the NRA lately. They aren't the only game in town or even the best, but they still have pull and it's worth it to try to influence them in this new bloggy era of openness and instant communication.
- Should we eschew police officers as members, and support elected sheriffs?
- Should current or past elected office matter?
- Should Hollywood celebrity matter? John Milius and Tom Selleck are both nominees.
- Should nomination by NRA's nominating committee be a plus, a minus, or irrelevant?
- I'm embarrassed to even ask this one: do we know or can we get access to the past voting records of existing Directors up for reelection? I don't know that answer and I ought to. No finding it on NRA's website, I can't even find the friggin' bylaws there. So much for blognost.
- Should political party matter? Would you rather have a blue-dog Democrat trying to soften the irrational Dem gun control stance, or a lukewarm GOPer? That's an entire other policy debate but its ripples propagate to this issue.
Though it's way too late to seriously consider it for this year, it might be time to write-in nominate an überblogger or two to the BOD. I'd be really cool with Glenn Reynolds or Eugene Volokh. Not so cool with Hugh Hewitt.
Update: After some consideration, I think I want Glenn and Eugene right where they are, free to reason and to blog without any appearance of influence over them. Besides, we'd need different skillsets in an NRA director. What are those skillsets?
20050119
We've already been here
Strategy Page's Attrition column observes:
(Link is not permanent; scroll if necessary to 19 January 05)
I might be reading a different US Constitution than this person, but mine does not stipulate that only a nation-state may be the recipient of US warmaking. I just don't see this as a problem. Declare it and get on with it.
The Department of Defense wants a change in the regulations that govern how often reservists can be called when the nation is at war, and war has not officially been declared. Why not just declare war? There are political and practical problems with that. For one thing, there's no country to declare war against.
(Link is not permanent; scroll if necessary to 19 January 05)
I might be reading a different US Constitution than this person, but mine does not stipulate that only a nation-state may be the recipient of US warmaking. I just don't see this as a problem. Declare it and get on with it.
20050118
Quote for the day
Shannon Love at ChicagoBoyz:
Too many people believe that revolutions can and do occur without somebody making a decision to use force if necessary.
Bring out your dead
Arnold Kling at TechCentralStation discusses some policy implications of American health-care quality and the underestimation of American longevity.
I hold up one cautionary finger and intone: all of that will be thrown into the bucket, temporarily, by one strong influenza epidemic. For which we are overdue.
I hold up one cautionary finger and intone: all of that will be thrown into the bucket, temporarily, by one strong influenza epidemic. For which we are overdue.
20050115
Quick hits
The in-laws made it back to Western New York safely, in spite of heavy snow the day they left.
Toad is now free to eat solid food, put things in his mouth, and otherwise return to normal infant-ness. The palate repair seems to be a success.
Anduril now wears three Millett quick-disconnect sling swivel bases and two matching loops in the Carlos Weidemann 3-point configuration. Now for a sling? Then Cabinet Man and I will see if it can hit anything.
Toad is now free to eat solid food, put things in his mouth, and otherwise return to normal infant-ness. The palate repair seems to be a success.
Anduril now wears three Millett quick-disconnect sling swivel bases and two matching loops in the Carlos Weidemann 3-point configuration. Now for a sling? Then Cabinet Man and I will see if it can hit anything.
20050112
Se permite en Tejas
Colorado and Texas announce CCW reciprocity today. No link, heard on KNUS 710 radio.
20050104
Tribute to Barbaloot's Dad
While Barbaloot's folks are staying with us, her Dad gets bored easily. When we mentioned that we wanted to wreck out the carpet in the dining room and replace it with laminate flooring, he offered his experience and his patience. He even brought some tools.
The floor went down in a day and a half, interrupted regularly with having to chase Toad back downstairs and keep Mlle Sklodovska from falling down the cold-air return register.
He is talented at "cutting in," be it paint, roofing, linoleum or tile. The plank at the kitchen door was tricky, but when he had it just as he wanted it, it slipped in like a Garand bolt. Angle it like so, twist it a bit this way, that end first, easy eeeeeeeeaaaasssssyyy, pop.
When my vacation was over and I returned to work, he kept going with the moulding to cover the expansion gap at the edges of the new floor. I tell him how I appreciate and respect his work, and he just looks at me.
Did I mention he knows how to thread blackpipe?
The floor went down in a day and a half, interrupted regularly with having to chase Toad back downstairs and keep Mlle Sklodovska from falling down the cold-air return register.
He is talented at "cutting in," be it paint, roofing, linoleum or tile. The plank at the kitchen door was tricky, but when he had it just as he wanted it, it slipped in like a Garand bolt. Angle it like so, twist it a bit this way, that end first, easy eeeeeeeeaaaasssssyyy, pop.
When my vacation was over and I returned to work, he kept going with the moulding to cover the expansion gap at the edges of the new floor. I tell him how I appreciate and respect his work, and he just looks at me.
Did I mention he knows how to thread blackpipe?
If a woman answers honestly, size does not matter
But horsepower and durability matter very much. Barbaloot mentioned in passing how she admires her sister's premium stand mixer, and how it accepts all manner of powered accessories. She would not go for a hand-operated pasta roller---gotta be Powered, man.
I took her at her word.
My God, this thing should not come with a plug, just white, black and green 12-gauge tails for its own circuit breaker.
At top, the big shield with the knob on its side is an accessory power takeoff worthy of John Deere. Hello, pasta roller.
Merry Christmas, Barbaloot.
I took her at her word.
My God, this thing should not come with a plug, just white, black and green 12-gauge tails for its own circuit breaker.
At top, the big shield with the knob on its side is an accessory power takeoff worthy of John Deere. Hello, pasta roller.
Merry Christmas, Barbaloot.
Quote for the day
This phenomenon -- legal victory that leads to cultural and political defeat -- has a long history. In the 1850s, slaveholders collected some huge legal prizes: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision. Those victories produced an anti-slavery movement powerful enough to elect Lincoln and win the Civil War. Sixty years later, the temperance movement won its long battle for national Prohibition. Within a decade, the culture was turning against temperance; Repeal came soon after. In America's culture wars, the side with the law's weaponry often manages only to wound themselves.
Could we be seeing this phenomenon at play in Britain, with respect to gun control? Is it long in coming to America? Or are we already seeing it in motion, say, in state CCW laws and reciprocity agreements, and the sunset of the AWB?
William J. Stuntz at TechCentralStation, The Academic Left and the Christian Right, Part II.
20041224
Idea number 507
The TIS-1 man-portable military laser is an interesting concept: a reservoir of helium, heated by radioactive decay, releases its helium through a vortex tube into a resonant cavity. The vortex created by the flow of helium causes a population inversion among the helium atoms, which in turn stimulates the release of photons of a common wavelength. With enough helium atoms flowing, you get enough energy resonating in the cavity to emit through one end and damage something.
When the helium flow peters out, the laser shuts down. You have to cool and recompress the helium, then reheat it, to get another blast.
It has its limitations, in that your soldiers will be humping the ruck with compressed gas tanks full of dangerous alpha emitters, and sizeable radiators that will disclose their locations to thermal imagers. There might also be a tactically intolerable delay before a discharged weapon recharges for another blast.
Regular readers of WUTT! will recall that all things weapon-y are appreciated as Things of Beauty here, but sometimes we must consider gathering stones together instead of casting them away.
We also assert that our future is in space, and we have to develop economically feasible ways to explore, exploit, and populate it. Getting out of the atmosphere is one problem to solve, moving about efficiently among the planets is another. With capitalist solutions to the first problem within our grasp, let us turn our attention to the second. We need flight times to Mars and the Asteroid belt on the order of weeks rather than months. I am told the principal means to do that is to separate the problems of power production on the one hand, and generation of thrust on the other. You'll need less thrust if you use only enough to propel your payload, rather than propel your payload plus the power plant itself. Offload the power production and achieve economies of scale with it. Send that power to ships that need only enough to push the payload.
Take that same TIS-1 weapon to the Moon and beat it into a plowshare. Use ammonia or CO2 as the working gas instead of helium. Heat the working gas in solar collectors instead of using fissionable material; we'll need that stuff for future platforms farther away from sunlight.
Make the vortex tube very big, and make a few hundred of them. Mount them on pan-tilt heads slaved to an aiming system. Connect their exhausts to a large radiator to eliminate the remaining heat. The radiators could be located at the Moon's poles or mounted at the bottom of deep narrow trenches to minimize sunlight striking them.
Build the ships to be propelled not by the impingement of photons upon their sails, but by ion motors. The sails will carry large arrays of antennas to collect the microwaves from these lasers and convert them to electricity to power the ion motors.
With a large enough reservoir of masing gas, and a large enough network of radiators and compressors, it may be possible to aim multiple masers continuously at a flight of ships, providing them with constant thrust for days or even weeks, until they are out of range. It will also be possible to beam power to ships that are approaching, to help them decelerate as they reach their destination instead of relying on the nerve-wracking technique of aerobraking. The power to create the thrust will be completely unrelated to the direction of the thrust.
There are always details to be worked out. Will the ion propulsion exhaust reflect or diffract the incoming microwave beam to the extent that range or power is impaired? Will the flow of hundreds of tons of gas through the gasdynamic maser system set up vibrations that make aiming impossible, either for a Lunar platform or a Martian-orbiting one? Will the vortex tube or the cavity wear out? How much of this system can be built from Lunar materials, or will it all have to be boosted to orbit? Can this system be used to loft an X-prize type vehicle the rest of the way to orbit, or will even that thin upper atmosphere attenuate and spread the beam too much?
Update: The massive gasdynamic maser will also come in handy for dealing with these pesky Earth-crossing roids.
When the helium flow peters out, the laser shuts down. You have to cool and recompress the helium, then reheat it, to get another blast.
It has its limitations, in that your soldiers will be humping the ruck with compressed gas tanks full of dangerous alpha emitters, and sizeable radiators that will disclose their locations to thermal imagers. There might also be a tactically intolerable delay before a discharged weapon recharges for another blast.
Regular readers of WUTT! will recall that all things weapon-y are appreciated as Things of Beauty here, but sometimes we must consider gathering stones together instead of casting them away.
We also assert that our future is in space, and we have to develop economically feasible ways to explore, exploit, and populate it. Getting out of the atmosphere is one problem to solve, moving about efficiently among the planets is another. With capitalist solutions to the first problem within our grasp, let us turn our attention to the second. We need flight times to Mars and the Asteroid belt on the order of weeks rather than months. I am told the principal means to do that is to separate the problems of power production on the one hand, and generation of thrust on the other. You'll need less thrust if you use only enough to propel your payload, rather than propel your payload plus the power plant itself. Offload the power production and achieve economies of scale with it. Send that power to ships that need only enough to push the payload.
Take that same TIS-1 weapon to the Moon and beat it into a plowshare. Use ammonia or CO2 as the working gas instead of helium. Heat the working gas in solar collectors instead of using fissionable material; we'll need that stuff for future platforms farther away from sunlight.
Make the vortex tube very big, and make a few hundred of them. Mount them on pan-tilt heads slaved to an aiming system. Connect their exhausts to a large radiator to eliminate the remaining heat. The radiators could be located at the Moon's poles or mounted at the bottom of deep narrow trenches to minimize sunlight striking them.
Build the ships to be propelled not by the impingement of photons upon their sails, but by ion motors. The sails will carry large arrays of antennas to collect the microwaves from these lasers and convert them to electricity to power the ion motors.
With a large enough reservoir of masing gas, and a large enough network of radiators and compressors, it may be possible to aim multiple masers continuously at a flight of ships, providing them with constant thrust for days or even weeks, until they are out of range. It will also be possible to beam power to ships that are approaching, to help them decelerate as they reach their destination instead of relying on the nerve-wracking technique of aerobraking. The power to create the thrust will be completely unrelated to the direction of the thrust.
There are always details to be worked out. Will the ion propulsion exhaust reflect or diffract the incoming microwave beam to the extent that range or power is impaired? Will the flow of hundreds of tons of gas through the gasdynamic maser system set up vibrations that make aiming impossible, either for a Lunar platform or a Martian-orbiting one? Will the vortex tube or the cavity wear out? How much of this system can be built from Lunar materials, or will it all have to be boosted to orbit? Can this system be used to loft an X-prize type vehicle the rest of the way to orbit, or will even that thin upper atmosphere attenuate and spread the beam too much?
Update: The massive gasdynamic maser will also come in handy for dealing with these pesky Earth-crossing roids.
20041223
We can neither confirm nor deny . . .
. . . that we may now or in the future have received our Colorado CCW, in accordance with Colorado's Revised Statutes section 18-12-201 et seq.
If we have or are about to, it will have been or will be among the low three-hundreds of those issued this year in Douglas County. That puts the per-capita of CCWs for Douglas County rather low, a totally wild-assed guess of .4 percent of total population, as Blog O'Stuff has observed (Hat tip to Renaissance man James Rummel).
The duration of such a CCW permit is five years from date of issue. The application-to-approval process can have taken 60-plus days. The permit itself is prepared on the day that that the application is submitted, and the fingerprints and photograph taken, thus it is technically "issued" on that day, but the you the applicant cannot take possession of it until the approval grinds around and you get your phone call from the Sheriff's office inviting you to come pick it up.
So the useful "life" of the permit is five years minus about 60 days. I couldn't find anything about that in the relevant CRS so I won't cry foul. Note also that the hours when applications are accepted are rather circumscribed. But overall, DCSO does not screw with applicants.
If we have or are about to, it will have been or will be among the low three-hundreds of those issued this year in Douglas County. That puts the per-capita of CCWs for Douglas County rather low, a totally wild-assed guess of .4 percent of total population, as Blog O'Stuff has observed (Hat tip to Renaissance man James Rummel).
The duration of such a CCW permit is five years from date of issue. The application-to-approval process can have taken 60-plus days. The permit itself is prepared on the day that that the application is submitted, and the fingerprints and photograph taken, thus it is technically "issued" on that day, but the you the applicant cannot take possession of it until the approval grinds around and you get your phone call from the Sheriff's office inviting you to come pick it up.
So the useful "life" of the permit is five years minus about 60 days. I couldn't find anything about that in the relevant CRS so I won't cry foul. Note also that the hours when applications are accepted are rather circumscribed. But overall, DCSO does not screw with applicants.
20041222
Toad repair
Toad, Barbaloot and I are holed up in Children's Hospital, getting Toad his palatoplasty and two tympanotomies. All went well, though Toad looks like he went through a round with Tyson, then a tequila hangover.
Much catching up to do. I have Days Off so it's worthwhile for all seven of my regular readers to start checking in again.
Much catching up to do. I have Days Off so it's worthwhile for all seven of my regular readers to start checking in again.
20041219
20041216
20041213
Quote for the day
Roughly $822 million was spent in support of President Bush in 2004, compared to $925 million spent on behalf of Sen. John Kerry.
So much for two of the fundamental lies behind campaign-finance reform. One, that McCain-Feingold, or any other piece of legislation, can "get money out of politics." Two, that "money rules." It turns out that sometimes, strangely enough, elections are decided by voters weighing the issues and making up their minds based on the candidates' positions.
Ryan Sager at Tech Central Station.
We at WUTT! have asserted the latter point for some time. Nice to be proved right in a big race that counts.
Though it certainly helps, money can't buy an election. It's necessary but not sufficient.
20041212
Addition to Wish List
One more thing I want to add to my Beggars-Would-Ride wishlist, of things that are achievable but not available for immediate purchase:
I want somebody to offer to recycle old, intermittent, half-lighting strings of Christmas lights. There's too much valuable copper in there for this sh1t to just get shlepped off to a landfill. We're about to ditch a few hundred feet of them because half of the light and they are virtually immune to troubleshooting.
The bulbs can be ground and melted into glass cullet to fill out concrete park benches. The plastic, well, it's probably as valuable as the copper, kilo for kilo, and it could make nice Tyvek envelopes for FedEx someday if it were recovered. The problem, as usual, is identifying what kind of plastic it is so it can be recycled effectively, even if in some cases recycling translates into removal of halogens prior to conversion to Number 2 Diesel fuel.
Here's your bumper sticker:
My Huge SUV burns otherwise-unusable recycled plastics
I want somebody to offer to recycle old, intermittent, half-lighting strings of Christmas lights. There's too much valuable copper in there for this sh1t to just get shlepped off to a landfill. We're about to ditch a few hundred feet of them because half of the light and they are virtually immune to troubleshooting.
The bulbs can be ground and melted into glass cullet to fill out concrete park benches. The plastic, well, it's probably as valuable as the copper, kilo for kilo, and it could make nice Tyvek envelopes for FedEx someday if it were recovered. The problem, as usual, is identifying what kind of plastic it is so it can be recycled effectively, even if in some cases recycling translates into removal of halogens prior to conversion to Number 2 Diesel fuel.
Here's your bumper sticker:
20041203
My new email signature block will read:
"This email message is certified free of slogans, quotes, special backgrounds, special stationeries, digital images, and unusual fonts, in accordance with Air Force Instruction 33-119, Air Force Messaging."
Somebody in the headshed must have objected when he saw a subordinate's email signature was neater-looking than his, and put his Corfam down hard.
Another proud tradition done in just like nose art. Bummer.
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