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Ivanhoe

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Everything posted by Ivanhoe

  1. Along with the mob witness in police protective custody who sneaks out and calls granny on Sunday night. This is why flicks like the Scary Movie series do so well. Even the most simpleminded moviegoer gets tired of the same old tired tropes getting recycled year after year. I love that Michael York's character in the Austin Powers movie was "Sir Basil Exposition".
  2. http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2014/01/01/police-indy-man-stole-brains-from-museum-sold-them-for-cash/4281433/
  3. As for unwelcome GUI designs, its amusing to watch the parallels between Metro and the alterna-GUIs in the Linux world. Along with the old-school alternatives of xfce and LXDE, we now have Mate, Cinnamon, Trinity, and who knows how many others.
  4. At this point I'd believe the National Enquirer before the NY Times. FIFY
  5. That's actually a logical outcome of the whole snafu. Turn Win8.2 into a skeletonized Type I hypervisor for running user-friendly VMs (such as Win7). The core kernel seems to be a major improvement on the old code base, its the UI that is hosed. So have 8 run the hardware and let users choose their OS "skin". I have an old laptop that I used to run with Linux Mint as the host OS, and ran various VMs under VMware Player. Mostly Win7 Home, but also a couple of Linux VMs and a Windows Server 2003 appliance. Win 7 Home was my "working" environment; aside from running Player I mostly used Mint for web surfing. That machine didn't have enough CPU, and RAM maxed out at 4 GB, but I got a lot of work done on it. I sort of plan to go that route again on my next laptop, next time I will forgo long battery life and get CPU and video that benchmarks out closer to ultrabook standards.
  6. https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/7865039360/h6D6F1FCB/
  7. http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2014/01/01/Man-Stabbed-By-Girlfriend-With-Knife-He-Gave-Her-For-Christmas http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/region_phoenix_metro/central_phoenix/pd-phoenix-man-confesses-to-killing-son-with-axe#ixzz2pBbxcaws
  8. I use GParted Live pretty frequently, for partitioning and resizing partitions. Generally it works very well. Occasionally I'll have a drive or partition table that GParted can't quite grasp, in which case I'll use Parted Magic. Both come as ISOs that I install onto a USB flash drive, using Unetbootin. CCleaner is good stuff, as is Eraser. I'm currently using Avast as my boot-and-stay-resident antivirus. I also use Malwarebytes and Superantispyware for manual scans. I use Super Finder rather than Windows Search. IMGburn for burning CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. If one wanted to download a 1024p video from Youtube, rumor has it that ChrisPC Video Downloader might do the trick. KeyFinder is handy for figuring out what the Product Key was that you used to activate Windows on some home-built machine. MozBackup can be used to backup and restore one's Thunderbird data. VirtualBox (now by Oracle) is a nice free Type II hypervisor. Good enough for home use, I think. VMware Workstation is still the gold standard for professional use. WinDirStat is great for presenting a easily understood table of disk usage by folder. WinMerge is great for comparing two files (its a Windows analog to xdiff on Unix/Linux). 7-Zip, ZipGenius, and Rarzilla for de-archiving. NetTime for synching the system clock to an online NTP server.
  9. Somewhere I read a great quote from a military dude, paraphrased due to senility; I'm not worried about the bullet with my name on it, I'm worried about the bullet addressed to "To Whom It May Concern."
  10. Look at a B-52 from the viewpoint of an asset manager. Costs tens of thousands to fly it somewhere else, way too big to truck or train it, nobody wants to buy it for service use, few museums have the acreage for one, USAF bases can't even consider a static display/gate guard without a multi-year bureaucratic blitz, even cutting it up requires big honkin' tools from the private sector (again, renting/hiring means another procurement exercise). So you do what property custodians have been doing since Hammurabi; park it, tag it, forget it. Let someone else risk their promotion trying to deal with it.
  11. Don't expect critical thinking from the agency that uses the movie "Dumb and Dumber" as a training film. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars screwing around with Thompson/Center over the legalities of their Contender single-shot pistol/rifle family.
  12. I recall reading pretty fond mention of the Stoner in one of the Vietnam era SEAL memoirs. Main gripe was the difficulty in getting linked 5.56. They'd try to save their spent links and hand-link new belts when lounging around base.
  13. A comparison not made is the 105 versus the squidly attack jets. Look at what the 105s were doing versus the A-7s and A-6s. If nothing else, the carrier-based aircraft had infinitely better OPSec. When 105s cranked up and flew north, more enemies probably knew they were coming than friendlies knew they were going. If one is to critique the 105's loss rate, it would be nice to acknowledge the context thereof. Imagine critiquing Allied medium bombers in northern Europe in the alt-history scenario of the Germans having a half-million agents in southern Blighty, and 10% of the pressies passing info to the enemy.
  14. Garand 1:5 - Holiness travels along thine op rod. Kalashnikov 4:8 - A righteous op rod should be stout enough to serve as an impact weapon. Stoner 10:5 - Blow it out your ass. Archie got 2 of the 3 critical parameters, the third being a good trigger. In an era of excellent issue ammo (in terms of reliability and accuracy) and nearly universal optics, there's no excuse for issuing rifles with 9 pound Grit-O-Matic triggers. If a particular mope can't shoot, no harm no foul. But for that 10% who can hit what they aim at, a good trigger can be the difference between a hit and a miss in a dynamic two-way engagement.
  15. I hold no strong opinions in general about the author or site, but that particular article has weaknesses. The 105 was designed as a "nuclear kamikazi" and was used as a "tactical kamikazi" in RVN. Based on the continued loss rates, the USAF was pretty comfortable with high loss rates, which had to have influenced tactics. From a purely machiavellian standpoint, makes sense; with the advent of effective ICBMs and IRBMs, using an airplane to make a long flight in theater to deliver a single nuke is senseless, so you might as well use 'em up in high-threat tactical bombing. OTOH, I've seen no evidence that the 35 is to be sacrificial in any way. Also, the article alludes to the F-4/F-105 relationship as being parallel to the F-22/F-35 relationship. One problem with that is that the 105 was a previous generation to the 4, and was designed around a narrower mission portfolio. Its somewhat the reverse in the F-22/F-35 era, IMHO. And if the 105s managed a 1.25:1 kill ratio in ACM, given that they were penetrating enemy airspace while rigged for strike and battling dedicated interceptors, that's what I'd call "praising with faint damns".
  16. I've run one of my Glocks on Mobil 1 synthetic, as far as I can tell as a lube its as good as any gun-labeled lube in my conditions. Lots and lots of people run their AR-15s on Mobil 1, with nary a complaint. I can see a strong argument for storing an AR with a high-performance grease, and squirting the BCG down with Mobil 1 periodically when blowing through a lot of ammo. Pat Rogers, the training guy, has been known to run an AR on Vagisil during his classes. ARs are like college coeds; they should be run dirty and wet. I think where the road forks is corrosion protection. A gun that is both shot a lot and exposed to a lot of weather and/or salt air needs a lube that also protects well. CLP does very well for that, and there are some wax-based lubes like Eezox that seem to perform very well as protectant. I suspect that a good quality synthetic grease will do as well or better than high-dollar oils, but I have not seen a careful test thereof.
  17. The story of what happens when you forget an anniversary?
  18. nota bene; just ran across mention of Dupont Krytox GPL lubricant, both oil and grease. The "GPL 200 grade" grease is claimed to be functional down to -94F. Of course, it also seems to retail at $25/oz.
  19. http://www.usarak.army.mil/publications/PDF_Pubs/USARAK_Regulations/Regulation%20750-4.pdf Dunno if anybody actually follows it, but Table A-3 sez to use LAW (MIL-L-14107C-AM.2) below -10F, implied for all weapons. Just for fun I tried to find an online retailer so I could play around with a small bottle, but no joy. Mobil claims a pour point of -58F for Mobil 1 Synthetic ATF. If I can't get that stuff to come out of the bottle, I'm running up a white flag and marching south just as fast as I can. Actually, if I can't get BreakFree to pour, I'm outta there. I put a 4 oz bottle of BreakFree CLP in the freezer at -10F for a week, and while subjectively thicker it seemed pretty serviceable to me. RUMINT has it that graphite powder can accelerate galvanic corrosion driven by the galvanic potential difference between Al alloy and steel. An interesting thread on the M14 in cold conditions here.
  20. Didn't terrorists use a ceramic squirrel in one of the Die Hard movies?
  21. http://news.yahoo.com/biting-fish-injure-more-70-bathers-argentina-153151162.html
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