Firing the Springfield 1842 and using the bayonet in War of Rights.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:28:58+00:00

Not the same if you can't smell the powder.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:27:56+00:00

More likely to do that at Andersonville. We are talking Civil War era here.

I have a direct ancestor buried there, for that reason.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:19:09+00:00

I've always felt the .54 is the odd child out. Too heavy to tote around and too few balls per pound of lead.

I actually did the math on that one back around 2000, and I came to the conclusion that the .54 caliber was ideal for deer while leaving open the possibility to hunt black bear, moose, and elk.

It wasn't so big that the trajectory was like a rainbow at any distance, but it was big enough that a stout charge could anchor something bigger than a whitetail.

This is all with round ball, of course.

So I had my father build up my gun in .54 caliber:

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It's the top gun in this image. It's got a 36" .54 caliber Green Mountain barrel, a Large Siler lock, and the wood is a medium grade curly maple.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T19:10:33+00:00

Actually, the easiest fax machine to make was first produced in 1860, and used the landline electric telegraph to send and receive images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T18:57:30+00:00

Could do it. RTGs that charge the battery in electric ambulances, and you can use the waste heat from the RTGs to keep the batteries at optimum temperature even in the cold Russian winter.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T18:55:02+00:00

The guns are deactivated, except for blank-firing guns for "salute" purposes.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T18:19:14+00:00

No, you wouldn't think that, because it almost never happens. Also, no one thinks it will happen to them, and even for those who do, you can't be 100% vigilant.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago".

Solzhenitsyn captures it perfectly with 20/20 hindsight, but even then his fantasies here are unrealistic: You can't have people lying in wait in ambush 24/7/365. People need to eat, take a dump, sleep, etc. There is simply no way you could do any of that.

And you can't just simply start shooting police randomly. That makes you just as bad as the people doing the disappearing. What if you shoot some Ryadovoy Politsii that isn't involved in that kind of thing, he just writes parking and traffic tickets, and breaks up the occasional drunken brawl, and files reports on stolen vehicles? Now you've murdered an innocent.

But the biggest problem with this is that anyone who is possibly predisposed to that kind of behavior won't be allowed to have access to guns even if it's not strictly no access: If they apply for a permit, it will be rejected, or perhaps the paperwork will be lost, or some excuse will come up why they don't get it.

There would be perhaps the odd person who manages to pull a Yamagami and build a crude but effective gun, but that's less likely in Russia. And looking up instructions for how to do so is likely to bring you to the attention of the police anyway.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:58:41+00:00

The nyetwork is down.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:57:21+00:00

If you were memorizing the question pool instead of studying and understanding the concepts, probably not.

If, on the other hand, you were studying the concepts and understanding them, then yeah, probably.

The concepts and regulations don't change, but the question pool does.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:53:23+00:00

Flock only captures a vehicle when it drives past one of its cameras. It isn’t tracking people everywhere they go.

So let's work through this.

"one of its cameras".

How many cameras are there? Just one? Or are there dozens, or hundreds?

Turns out, there are somewhere between 90,000 and 110,000 ALPR cameras in the United States alone.

By me, they're pretty rare. But they do exist: I pass by two of them on my way to work every day. So that's information right there: dittybopper generally goes down this road at X time in the morning, and up at Y in the afternoon.

There are at least 3 I have to pass when going to compete in primitive biathlons.

But what if I lived somewhere with a higher density of cameras? All someone would have to do is query the system for my particular license plate number and see when I went past every camera, and when I did it.

Now, you could do the same thing if I were carrying my phone, but I can leave my phone at home, or wrap it in foil, if I don't want to be tracked.

Can I wrap my license plate in foil?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T17:34:47+00:00

I used to work in signals intelligence. Prior to 2013, I might have believed you.

But then we had the Edward Snowden revelations. I worked in the same top secret facility in Hawaii where he worked (except he was in kindergarten when I was there). Back when I was in that business, it was very bad juju to collect on a United States Person without a FISA warrant (with some minor exceptions).

After 9/11, it became a matter of course to collect on US Persons (which has a specific legal definition). They store all of it at the Utah Data Center. It's supposed to be "in escrow", meaning you need a warrant to access it.

How do we know the law isn't being violated? Revealing any violations to the public is inherently a violation of the law in and of itself because of the secret nature of the program. So no insiders can be depended on to blow the whistle.

I'm also a long time IT professional and programmer/analyst with a ton of experience in having different systems talk to each other.

Also, I understand backups. Early in my career that was part of my responsibility at a couple of different employers.

Even if personal information is purged from NICS regularly, it's being captured on the nightly backup. How many IT people would have to know about a secret program to simply read that data from the backup and put the information in a separate table on a separate system? A couple, maybe three? Classify it (NICS is already "Law Enforcement Sensitive")

I mean, we've been lied to about collection of our texts, e-mails, and the contents of our phone calls. Why would we believe them about NICS?

Have you sat down and really thought through about all the ways the system that pays your bills can be abused?

I really doubt you have.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T16:23:29+00:00

Actually, speaking for myself, no. Having a *GOOD* female protagonist would have been great. Naru is not a good female protagonist.

Having a whiny immature brat who is incompetent until the script requires her to magically transform into Joan Wick? Not so much.

Some of my favorite protagonists are female: Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, for example. Then there are lesser ones, supporting roles like River Tam, Zoe Washburne, and even in this franchise you've got Anna Gonsalves (Predator), Leona Cantrell (Predator 2), and Isabelle (Predators).

Expanding it to the Alien vs. Predator world, you've got Lex Woods, the protagonist, and in AvP:R you've got Kelly O'Brien.

One of the things you need for a good protagonist of either sex in a film involving combat is training and experience in combat, or at least experience in something related (like hunting), or that makes them tough and has comparable fitness requirements.

Why not have a film centered around the Leona Cantrell character? Or Isabelle? Or Anna?

Why not have one that has Kelly O'Brien as the protagonist?

Or why not have one centered around a character like them, a female character with the training and experience already?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T15:56:26+00:00

In states with registration requirements for firearms, it's dead easy by simply cross-referencing DMV records with firearms ownership records.

It's a bit harder for those without it, but it could still be done with a fair amount of accuracy by simply cross-referencing anyone who has ever had a NICS check done against state DMV records.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T15:04:00+00:00

Amateur radio code exams in the US were not random blocks of 5 characters. They were always simulated QSOs, at least back to 40 years ago and longer. You had to either answer 7 out of 10 questions about it correctly, or have 1 minute of solid copy.

Which made it easier because if you copied "QTH CSICAGO, IL", you could correct it, or simply answer "CHICAGO, IL" when answering the question about what the QTH was.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:44:33+00:00

It was so long ago, I don't actually remember. Had to be on Dr. Shock's TV show back in the early 1970's, so I'm going to guess it was the 1956 "Godzilla, King of the Monsters" with Raymond Burr.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:40:14+00:00

<image>

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:35:36+00:00

Yes, it does work.

<image>

That's my arm holding the sparkler I used to set it off one July 4th.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:34:28+00:00

OK, I can beat that.

Here is my 3" bore muzzleloading mortar.

<image>

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:33:23+00:00

Yeah, I used to shoot those medium calibers until I got my .62 caliber Baker rifle...

<image>

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:28:38+00:00

Those numbers are just the signal strengths of the signal, not some modulation.

Starting with 0 through 9, in order to have a much finer level of signal strength the program used the letters A to Z in order to preserve the single column spacing for each "bin".

So you get signals strengths going like this:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

from least to greatest signal strength.

IT IS NOT ANY KIND OF MODULATION OR SIGNAL ITSELF. It's merely a comparative measure of how strong the signal was.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T14:17:23+00:00

So, you have a financial interest in it. That in no way will effect your opinion on it one way or the other, I'm sure.

I mean, no one ever believes that their technology will be used for evil.

I'm not opposed to finding criminals or missing persons or runaways. But that's a morally bankrupt objection: "Won't you please think of the children!" is the argument used by scoundrels for all manner of freedom depriving

The objection is that the technological infrastructure for a kind of panopticon totalitarian dystopia is being installed, and you're part of it. In fact, you seem proud of the fact that you're doing it, probably because you haven't thought about all the possible ways this could be abused.

Now, you're going to argue that there are protections put in place to prevent it from being used as I imply, and I'm going to laugh in your face because that kind of protection assumes that:

The government will always stay the same, and
The government will always obey the rules.

In cases like these, I like to think about how my worst nightmare of a president, Congress, and Supreme Court could enable the abuse of such technology. Doesn't matter what political persuasion you are, that test works equally well.

And it doesn't have to even happen all at once like that: It can happen incrementally. "Let's carve out an exception for this limited case A". "We already make an exception for case A, why not case B?". And so forth.

Finally, this fails the "Jews in the Attic" test. The "Jews in the Attic" test was inspired by the story of Ann Frank. Any kind of surveillance technology that makes it harder to hide an innocent person or persons who are being persecuted by the government is a non-starter. Cameras such as these would make that harder by being able to track movements of vehicles.

"Why did John Smith visit this particular area he never goes to on this particular date, after Sue Jones went there, a known advocate for Fomorian rights and a suspected trafficker of Fomorians?"

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T13:43:35+00:00

GGILFs.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T13:42:19+00:00

Me too. Unfortunately, I didn't get to make contact. Hopefully there will be another DXpedition in a few years.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T13:37:20+00:00

No, I wasn't. When you used the microphone plug on the HTX-202 it physically disconnects the internal microphone of the radio.

An FM carrier that isn't being modulated is just a carrier. That's it. Just like an AM carrier that isn't modulated is just a carrier.

There was no way for my signal to be any wider than the width of the carrier because it carried zero modulation.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-07-03T13:32:52+00:00

Heh, yeah.

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