>> ^nanrod:

Duh! I was kinda thinking about the reaction when this shows up fully assembled on an X-ray>> ^heathen:
>> ^nanrod:
OK. Who wants to be first to try and board a plane with this in their carry on?

Would be pretty easy, disassembled, just some Lego bricks and elastic bands.



In that case, no chance. These days a picture of a gun on your T-shirt is enough to stop you boarding a flight.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1234193.ece

Ummmmh, okay....? I bet next thing you'll tell me is that you can bend a light beam?????!?!?!?

In all seriousness,

"The concert was held at Foro Sol stadium, a baseball stadium with a distance of 125m from home plate to the centre field wall.

I counted 14 waves in 10 seconds, with about 0.3s between waves, so about 0.41 seconds for a wave to travel the length of the field. Speed of the wave is therefore 305m/s. The speed of sound in air at 2240m is actually 343m/s... so... it's sorta close."

>> ^spaceman:

First, sound waves do not "expand" and second they travel at ~343 at sea level in our particular atmosphere/medium.

I know this is a mood kill...but in hind sight...I wonder why the 911 people didn't hit the SOL? In my mind, nothing is more iconic to the US (except maybe McDonald).

>> ^dag:

I've never had a problem with the quoting. I'm wondering what happens to mess it up for people. Are you editing the tags after pressing the quote button? I'll withhold my vote till then.


I've only had actual bugs on rare occasions until recently. Sometimes deleting the comment body and re-copying the quoted text would fix it, but it doesn't seem to be doing any good lately. I did no editing to the quoted text here or here.

It's also worth noting there are two types of problems here: bugs and undesirable features. These two examples are bugs. The fact that quotes are forced to the bottom is not a bug but an undesirable feature (at least for some of us).

Like @gwiz665 I also like the appearance of quotes. It does get a little bulky, though, even when it works right. I'm a fan of simple systems in general. The old system was simple but visually unappealing. It was fairly easy to work with, though. If you wanted to hack a quote up into pieces or put it at the top, middle or bottom of your comment, it was trivial to do so. The new one is pretty but it only works one way and if you want something else, you're SOL. Kinda like a Mac.

"So, let me get this straight.. You wake up, you're tired because you're halfway through your sleep cycle, so instead of a melee weapon where you can see what you'll be swinging at, you instead grab a gun? Yeah, have fun shooting a loved one."

No, you identify the person first in either case. It's easier to shoot someone while tired than it is to get involved in a melee. You're more likely to win in other words. You can id someone within seconds of waking up, but only sleep will give you the alertness needed to fight a brawl.

"It doesn't matter if they bring a friend, the first thing you SHOULD be doing when you hear people in your house is calling the cops (hey look, that statement wasn't actually irrelevant after all!)."

Yes, that is the first thing you do if you aren't armed. If you are armed, you arm yourself, then you call the cops and hide.

The reason it wasn't relevant is because the police will take enough time to arrive that you may very well be dead by the time they get there.

"The only time you should be engaging them anyway is if they come after you."

Yes. And if they come after you, they are most likely to win, provided you don't have a gun. If you do, the odds are about 50/50 or better in your favor.

"And saner people realise that they'll be breaking into the house and getting the jump on you, hmm? So..What the fuck good does it do you then? Neither the bat OR the gun is any use because you're now either dead, or locked in a closet. Oh, and if they continue to search after that's happened, they get to steal your gun. yay."

Except as a matter of fact, break-ins do occur when the owner has a firearm, and when the owner is not expecting it, and even though the break in itself was a surprise, it's almost always the firearm toting homeowner that wins. Your hypothetical scenario logically supports your conclusion, but it is not representative of reality.

"Strength in combat is usually not a deciding factor, if you're not as strong as some, pick a lighter bat. You don't need to be sleeping beside a 32 oz. home run machine, a 24-26 ounce metal softball bat is less then 2 pounds and longer then a knife."

No seriously, how much experience do you have fighting with a baseball bat vs someone with a knife?

I contend that
A) A knife, even a short one is much more dangerous than a baseball bat (getting hit with a bat is painful and can break bones, but being stabbed is much worse).
B) Even a short knife has a longer reach than a baseball bat (because of the thrusting motion with arm vs swing motion).

The above isn't to invite discussion on what people should arm themselves with, it's to demonstrate that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

"He brings friends, you're probably SOL in the first place, but seriously.. "

If he brings friends you can easily bring them down if you're armed with a gun and they aren't, they will be the people who are SOL. If they are armed with guns (which is very rare), then you are much better off armed yourself.

"do you think that no burglars can be stopped without a gun? I'm genuinely curious now, because if the answer is yes, then what do you think they do in..say..Canada?"

I do think burglars can be stopped without a gun. It's just that keeping guns legal helps you a lot more than it helps them. As for Canada, I believe guns are legal there. As for what they do in any given place where it is not legal to own a firearm, for the most part they deal with whatever the perps want to do with them and then file a police report after the fact. Sometimes letting the police deal with it is the correct state of affairs (robbery), and sometimes barring citizens to the means of self defense is a terribly unjust state of affairs (rape, murder).

"a decent mugger/rapist/murder/gang, which again will have the advantage of surprise."
..so, how exactly do you draw and fire a gun if you've been taken by surprise? a "decent" any one of those would have a weapon pointed at you, and have your arms either up, or somewhere away from where a concealed weapon could be. And you call my logic flawed.

Your logic is perfect. If it were true that muggings worked like that, then a concealed weapon would do you no good.

Your facts however, are wrong.

Like your previous example, you constructed a hypothetical scenario, then force it to work out like you want it to, rather than looking at what actually happens in reality.

This is the typical (real) case: someone carrying a (concealed) firearm is mugged or otherwise held up while doing something else (so as a matter of course, they were taken by surprise). The usual result of this scenario is the perpetrator running away, rarely being shot, rarer still winning a confrontation. On the other hand, if you are not armed and the perpetrator wants more than your money, then all you can do is file a police report afterward, assuming he has no interest in killing you.

P.S. My last post wasn't meant to be laughed at. Neither is this one.

@Lowen: Long comment trying to be funny is long...and really not funny.

So, let me get this straight.. You wake up, you're tired because you're halfway through your sleep cycle, so instead of a melee weapon where you can see what you'll be swinging at, you instead grab a gun? Yeah, have fun shooting a loved one.

It doesn't matter if they bring a friend, the first thing you SHOULD be doing when you hear people in your house is calling the cops (hey look, that statement wasn't actually irrelevant after all!). The only time you should be engaging them anyway is if they come after you.

And saner people realise that they'll be breaking into the house and getting the jump on you, hmm? So..What the fuck good does it do you then? Neither the bat OR the gun is any use because you're now either dead, or locked in a closet. Oh, and if they continue to search after that's happened, they get to steal your gun. yay.

Strength in combat is usually not a deciding factor, if you're not as strong as some, pick a lighter bat. You don't need to be sleeping beside a 32 oz. home run machine, a 24-26 ounce metal softball bat is less then 2 pounds and longer then a knife.

He brings friends, you're probably SOL in the first place, but seriously.. do you think that no burglars can be stopped without a gun? I'm genuinely curious now, because if the answer is yes, then what do you think they do in..say..Canada?

"a decent mugger/rapist/murder/gang, which again will have the advantage of surprise."

..so, how exactly do you draw and fire a gun if you've been taken by surprise? a "decent" any one of those would have a weapon pointed at you, and have your arms either up, or somewhere away from where a concealed weapon could be. And you call my logic flawed.

The idea that banning guns to make the country safer is NOT laughable when you have a civil society that enjoys its freedoms and doesn't have guerilla forces as part of a rebellion. The reason those people exist is basically to "Fight the Man" and last time I checked, the U.S.A. doesn't exactly have that problem.

Hi Shepppard! Thanks for completely ignoring the factual basis of my post. Here it is for you AGAIN, stated more simply for you:

1: Firearms have been smuggled into prisons. They can be smuggled into a country. If they are illegal then by definition the only private citizens that can get their hands on them are criminals.

(hurp hurp, it's the old "if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns" bit.)

2: Weapons are assembled in the middle of nowhere (jungle camps, Pakistani villages, etc) and do not require extremely specialized machinery to make. Even if they could not be manufactured openly, and even if they could not be smuggled in, criminals would still have no trouble manufacturing firearms and ammunition. To put a stop to this, you'd have to ban or regulate a lot of tools and materials that have many constructive uses.

This is why it's vital that private citizens retain the right to carry firearms. Because you can't stop them from getting them.

Private citizens require firearms to make sure they can defend themselves against criminals? Seriously? you don't think people carry guns when they break into peoples houses? That's just naive.

Where did you get the idea that most break-ins are committed by people packing heat? I don't doubt it happens that some do have guns, but from all the break-in cases I've heard, the usual burlger/rapist is armed with something that's less obviously a weapon (and not as expensive as a gun), like a heavy pipe, wrench, or a knife.

If you're that worried that someone's gonna break into your house, sleep next to a bat. If neither side has a gun, it's basically which ever one has the bigger melee weapon wins, and last time I checked, if you're breaking into someones house, you don't take a claymore, They draw a knife, you pick up the bat. Problem solved.

Well, I guess we'll all have to yield to your vast experience and/or research in the field of "home defense melee combat".

1: Failing that, saner people will realize that someone breaking into your house is going to have the advantage of surprise and will probably be stronger than you (as an expert in this field I'm surprised you didn't mention strength as a deciding factor in melee combat). Making you SOL.

It's much less of a problem if you have a gun though. You might be terrible at baseball bat fencing after being woken up midway through your sleep cycle and fighting someone on nocturnal sleep cycle, but that is less of an issue with a gun, nor do guns care how strong you are.

2. If he brings friends, then you're almost certainly SOL.

A gun solves the issue of being outnumbered nicely, since fights end sooner it's less likely you'll end up fighting two people at the same instant, and makes you more or less immune to being immobilized by one while the other attacks (because you can kill them before they get that close).

Last but not least this has nothing to do with someone "breaking into our house". The chances of someone being a victim of any kind of robbery are very low, and in any case it's not robbery that's the problem.

This has to do with your personal safety wherever you are. If there was a way to tell a burglar from a rapist or murderer, I'd be all for letting them take whatever they want and letting the police sort things out, or not. Even if I don't get my stuff back, it's not worth killing someone over. Unfortunately, the only way to tell ahead of time is let them rape or murder you.

In addition to all the other terrible flaws with your "baseball bat" idea, it's utterly useless when you're anywhere other than at home or home base. Last I checked, people also get mugged, and you'll get funny looks carrying a baseball bat around, in addition to it being completely ineffective against a decent mugger/rapist/murder/gang, which again will have the advantage of surprise.

Again, this has nothing to do with my personal worries. The chances that any of this happens to anyone are very low, but should it happen you're completely utterly fucked without a gun.

I contend that passing a law forbidding private citizens from carrying firearms leads to situations where one person can kill many, with the many helpless. This is unconscionable.

oh, and as for your "Extra lols", Really? Do you think that the secret service doesn't care that there's loaded firearms at a rally for the president?
are you THAT naive? your country has a bit of a track record for assassinations and attempted assassinations. If there's ANY person carrying a weapon at a rally, you can bet your ass they're being watched like a hawk.

Yeah, except if you read the article you'd know the secret service wasn't worried because
A) the rallies took place well away from where the president was and they of course had that area secured (no firearms are allowed in a federal venue). As for our track record for assassinations, I can't recall one that had the assassin carrying openly while loudly demonstrating. Assassins like to keep a low profile, but I guess you wouldn't know that since you majored in "home defense melee combat" and not "underhanded techniques of murder for hire".

"There's a reason that the police force was invented, and contrary to common belief, no, it was not to go around tazing people."

Not relevant, even if true.

The police can't protect you unless they're aware that you're in danger, and they're near enough to help. Those two facts mean there would have be many, many more police to make them an effective means of self defense. As it is, they are not an effective means for the defense of your person.

Fun fact: retired police officers and military love carrying and owning firearms. I wonder why?

Really, your post shows that you're about as in touch with reality as the right wing idiots that watch fox news.

>> ^dag:
^with these kinds of comments I fear the US will once again get the healthcare it deserves. Now is not the time for quoting Locke. And if you disparage the elderly getting quality healthcare- I'd say your heart is two sizes too small. There should be a "common good" and care for the elderly falls into it.


I'm not disparaging the elderly, I'm telling you straight up that there is a larger dynamic here than what you are suggesting. If given the choice between no SS/Medicare taxes throughout life or a million dollars worth of procedures when I'm 85, brother, I'm choosing the less taxes. That's an even easier choice for my generation than ones before it since SS/Medicare will implode long before we retire. But even if those were sustainable systems, the point is that some people would rather live a better life than a longer life. In the old days, people made these kinds of decisions and accepted the tradeoff. Now we run a giant ponzi scheme called Social Security (of which Medicare is a part) where the choice is made for us to live a longer life at the expense of a better one. Even that is debatable since a prudent investor would be able to get both. SS/Medicare intake isn't invested at all, just transferred from one generation to another, with a "trust fund" spent by congress decades ago and replaced with IOU bonds.

We don't have a 100% private system, far from it. The high prices are because of government involvement interfering with the market's pricing mechanism. What I fear most is idealist people like you who have zero understanding of what costs are incurred by such systems despite the fixed prices. The costs in the quality of life, the costs on your currency's value, the cost in being unable to compete with foreign production whose employers aren't strapped with paying for the abuse and fraud borne by a system in which people are spending other people's money on services. Like I said before, our economic wellbeing has changed dramatically since leaving the gold standard and borrowing at interest well in excess of our productive capacity. People like you don't understand how ugly our bond market looks, how it went from a normal mortgage to an ARM equivalent. You can't even figure out how to fix Medicare without cutting into some other socialist program you want, and you want more? Figure out how to pay for all the imports, interest obligations, military empire, and socialist services you currently have before dreaming up new ones and adding to the deficit. You think you can add to it in perpetuity, but one day foreigners really will scoff at the notion of buying our debt and we'll be SOL.

Would you trade your current public health care for the American one?

This is exactly the mentality I am talking about. You act as though health care systems exist in a vacuum. In reality, every country that has socialized medicine has to try and budget it AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHER THINGS. And each country has different OTHER THINGS. We have a shitload of OTHER THINGS we already have to borrow trillions year over year for. I blame our socialist education system if people spent all those years in school and can't figure out basic economics. Sure, Cuba spends a shitload on socialized medicine and manages to achieve a lower infant mortality rate, BUT AT WHAT COST ELSEWHERE? Cuba has little else to spend on other things and has a relatively poor standard of living compared to America. That's why people die on banana boats trying to get here, not the other way around. They don't have the privilege of being the reserve currency of the world where central banks will buy their debt in the most absurd circumstances.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2508560/OAP-gives-burglar-two-powerful-right-hooks-to-the-face.html

Black Castro up on me, Fidel Negro

King terrific can't be hit

You're wastin' time, spendin' ammo

Scientists balance pol-ar

Digital mic throw chips in your moolah

Hardcore nucle-ar

Ain't the devil happy? Har-har

Rich rap star keep the sol-ar manifestation

And the stars succeed to the sun in this mathematical equation

Police still on my dick like an invasion

Lock me up, snatch up the transportation

Went to in New York, South Pacific migration

Wack emcee's watch this nigga's frustration

Believe me when I tell you that I dictate the mic like Fidel does his nation

Keep it flowin' like libation

Big heads the perfect for decapitation

Cook rhymes 'till they el dente

Lock down the mic like El Presidente


Conquer more dips than the late Hannibal

Terrain gets too rough, I ride the beats like wooly mammals

Smokin' shit like Joe Camel

Fatally inhale

Double-0-seven but you still got tail

Q's scrambling device must have failed

Spies, thick thighs, and mics get mil, lies

Deception, military prowess

Fat bitches, tours, and microphone powers

Chemical warfare and mortar showers

Once again blowin' up shit like the Twin Towers

Poison miles for enemies or whoever devours

Holdin' shit down until the last hours


El Presidente

Fidel Negro

DJ Honda

Black Castro

Musashi be doin' it like that

Lyrical sword style, you know what I'm sayin'?

Puttin' all emcees out on they back

Can't handle it

You don't know it hits you 'till it hits you

That's it

We done, finished

Peace

Sol. The giant flaming washing machine.

Seriously cool video though. It's nice to think of the sun as something that's actually active on the inside, and not simply a homogeneous sphere of plasma.

i was just about to promote this but the embed's dead, zed.

any chance you can reacquire that? if so, ping me.

>> ^ponceleon:
Oh guy richie, I cannot but help wonder what horrors you've seen in your life...


You mean like this?

All. Bets. Are. Off.

"where every person's vote counts equally"

Unless you're from a large state that votes overwhelmingly for one party every time, in which case you're just SOL.