You may have qualified on shooting a rifle, you apparently didn't qualify on reading since you are criticizing me by repeating things I said, like the fact that M4/16 are very accurate to long ranges, and that there are larger rounds in use for longer ranges. So perhaps spend more time reading and comprehending, and less time pulling out your (alleged) credentials and repeating what was already said as though it is something new.

As for fragmentation first off you act as though it is a bad thing when talking about a target. Quite the opposite. A round that fragments, expands, or tumbles in a person does much more damage and thus has a higher probability of stopping the target in a single shot.

In terms of fragmentation on other barriers: Try it. Shoot through a window, a couple sheets of drywall, etc. Put a paper target a bit behind it so you can see what happens. At short (less than 100m) range, the round will usually fragment on account of its high velocity. Depends on the round composition, of course, 62gr M855 will fragment less than a 75gr BTHP round. They don't explode in to tiny specs if that is what you are thinking but they break apart.

It is amazing how much misinformation flies around about guns. One of the common ones is "OMG the M4/16 is such crap, the AK is so much bettar!"

You are quite correct about the range. The AR-15 platform weapons are much more accurate. Anyone who has ever fired both can easily tell that.

The issue that people like the grandparent conflate is the lethality of the 5.56x45mm round at longer ranges. Though the M16 can easily hit a target at long range (with a skilled marksman operating it), because of the small size and low mass of the round, it is often not as effective as you would want. If the bullet does not fragment or tumble, it can go right through someone and the small hole does little damage.

That is the issue it has at range, not accuracy or ability to reach that range.

Also this isn't like it is some completely unknown, or unsolvable, thing. The military also has weapons that use 7.62x51mm rounds which are larger rifle bullets and have much greater range, mass, and kinetic energy. For longer engagements still things like 8.58Ã--70mm and 12.7Ã--99mm are used.

Of course as you move up in caliber and amount of propellant, weapons become bigger and heavier, and have larger amounts of recoil to deal with, it is always a tradeoff and is one reason why the standard personal weapons use 5.56.

In terms of 5.56x45mm vs 7.62Ã--39mm (which is what the AK uses, is is not the same as the larger NATO round) the real issues come up at medium range (100-300m) and with barrier penetration. The light, high velocity 5.56 round tends to be fantastically lethal below 100m because the high velocity results in fragmentation when it hits the target. However since military rounds may not be specifically designed to fragment or expand (the Geneva convention prohibits it, civilian and police rounds are available that do), as it slows down at greater ranges they lose that ability and are not as damaging. Also, because of their low mass and tendency to fragment they are poor performers when shooting through barriers like windshields, doors, and so on.

THAT is the issue the rounds have in general use vs 7.62Ã--39mm rounds. Not long ranges. While they aren't super effective beyond 300m, they are reasonably accurate at least, which is not the case with the 7.62 rounds. At a long range engagement an M4 would be at a decided advantage to an AK-47.

However neither was designed for long range use. They are carbines, made for medium range and below. They trade overall power and range for smaller size, lower weight, and better portability. As their widespread use in many conflicts around the world indicates, they do well in that arena.

Hopefully.
Something they learn.
Is how to make proper paragraphs.

In all seriousness though you need to get down off your high horse before you fall and break your neck. I've heard this BS of "Oh our homeschooled kids are SO much better than public school kids!" However I work at a university, and our admissions don't seem to bear that out. Homeschool kids often end up getting stuck in remedial classes, particularly English, because their skills are not up to the level required. To me that is particularly shocking, since I consider our entrance requirements to be pretty damn lax.

The problem I think is in part attitudes like yours: You seem to be very caught up in how smart your kids are, and how great you are for teaching them yourself. You are not looking at the situation through a lens of objectivity and thus are likely missing deficiencies in what you teach and what they learn. These will be laid bare if they choose to go to university, because they don't give a shit how special you think your snowflakes are, they will be required to meet certain standards like everyone else.

None of this even touches on the social learning aspects of public school. Just remember: Some day your kids will have to go out in to the wider world, and will no longer be accountable to you. If you've shielded them and controlled their lives, well they may go way more wild than you ever thought possible.

I don't agree with cutting taxes to schools, but I do agree school administrators need to be held to account. I remember when we passed an increase for schools and the money was specially provisioned for various things: Teacher salary increases, labs for students, etc. It has specific provisions of what to spend it on. So what happened? The administrators gave themselves nice raises and had to get sued over it.

The answer in my opinion is not to reduce school funding, but to increase administrator accountability.

I have a BP machine at home. Why? Because I have what my doctor calls "white coat hypertension." What that means is I get nervous when I go in to the doctor's office and my BP goes up. Measured at home, my BP is on the high side of normal, but fine. At the Dr's office it is at the high side of prehypertension or low side of hypertension. It's not a difference in the machines, they have me bring mine in to check the calibration.

Ok well that means they can't keep an accurate record from their measurements. So they need me to measure it myself, which I do, and then let them see the results. These days such a thing is very feasible since electronics technology means we can produce quite accurate automated systems, that aren't that much.

For that matter a large part of your physical can be, and is, automated that being the blood test. You need a skilled person to draw the blood, but after that it is usually a computerized system that does all the analysis. It can be done by a separate lab from your doctor.

You still need to see them in person for plenty of things, but there is plenty of stuff that can be reported to them remotely and they can just look at the results. I don't see this as a bad thing, personally.

You find that for Windows and OS-X, support is pretty broad. Stated as things like "Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8" and pretty lax hardware allowances. However when you look at games for Linux they are things like "SteamOS" or "Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Steam OS" and sometimes specific hardware that is supported.

Why is that? Compatibility issues. They aren't going to go and support every varied Linux distro out there. They've found a couple that work (and the same thing really, SteamOS descends from Ubutnu LTS) and that's what they are going to support. Doesn't mean it won't necessarily work on other stuff, but they aren't going to take any calls on it.

You see it in enterprise software too. The engineering programs we have tend to have a couple extremely specific enterprise Linux distros they support and that's it. Call them running anything else, they'll tell you to go away.

Linux users just have to accept this as one of the costs of openness. If you have an OS that anyone can fork, anyone can redsign, anyone can do their own things, well then support will get limited to chosen configurations. The more complex the software and its interactions with the OS, the more limited the configurations that will be supported.

I work for an engineering college at a big research university. As such, lots of computers, some of them Linux. Despite the smug assurances you may see online that Linux users don't need support, nothing could be further from the truth. Some people who choose to use Linux at work do it because they've a lot of experience with it, and aren't much trouble. However many more do it either because:

1) They have a tool that only runs on Linux, or more accurately that they can only figure out how to make run on Linux. It is usually something cobbled together by a researcher at another university for Ubuntu and only compiles easily on that. If you knew what you were doing you could modify it for something else, but they don't. They usually end up needing a moderate amount of support.

2) They have the idea that Linux is the "l33t professional" OS and it's what you need to use if you want to be a serious computer user, so they want it. No thought goes in to it, they have no experience with it, no understanding, they figure it'll just be easy. These kinds need a ton of support.

A few examples:

--A grad student said she needed Linux on the computer she had bought and configured (without consulting IT). All the software she wanted run on Windows and out Linux guy even told her she'd be better off with Windows. Nope, had to have Linux. We got a continual stream of tickets when she couldn't figure things out, had problems with the AMD driver and so on, and he finally told her "Let us install Windows or go away."

--A professor who bought a system and FPGA card, again without consulting us, and then said he needed Linux. This was after his grad student tried and failed to install it, hosing the system in the process. We put Linux on, and then it turns out neither he nor his grad student have any idea how to make the FPGA card work. It has no programming, you have to do it from scratch. They also don't know how to use Linux to the point they whined about "not having admin" on the Linux install which they had full control on, they just couldn't work out sudo.

--A couple of grad students that insisted a new server needed to be Linux "for best performance". This was during a time when we didn't have a Linux guy (we are a small team, and our last one had left we were in the process of hiring the current one) so I looked in to it, and found the lead and recommended platform was Windows. I talked to the professor about it and she said go ahead with Windows, they grad students could deal, since support would be easier on Windows. Got the server up and running, first thing they wanted? Two programs that are Windows only and were mandatory to what they were doing. Had we given them Linux, we would have been reinstalling the server right away because it literally couldn't run the software they needed.

The flipside of Linux seeing increasing use is that there are plenty of clueless Linux users. They don't go in to Linux saying "I really enjoy computers and learning about them, I want to learn all about this OS, how it works, how to support it, how to modify it, etc." Rather they go in saying "Oh Linux is free!" or "Oh Linux is what hackers use!" and have no idea what the fuck they are doing, and need help.

Not hating on pro gamers, I think it is great that there's a market for this and personally I enjoy watching pro gaming content. But they aren't athletes. It is a word with a pretty specific definition. It means, well, someone who is athletic. You don't have to be professional to be an athlete, and just doing something competitive doesn't make you an athlete.

They are gamers. Professional gamers to be sure, but gamers. That isn't a positive or negative trait, it is just a descriptor. They play games, hence are gamers, and do it for money, hence are professionals in that regard. Professional gamers. Same thing with anything else. I'm a Professional systems and network administrator. The reason is I administer servers and a network, and I get paid to do so. I'm also a gamer, but not a professional one, nobody pays me to play games.

Words mean something, let's try not to blatantly misuse them. If you want gaming to get more respect as a hobby and as a profession, the correct method is to own it, not to try and pretend it is something it isn't.

Valve has real problems with focus. The thing is that they have Steam as this massive cash cow. They make so much money, tens of millions of dollars per employee, that they needn't do anything else. Every other project can fail and bleed cash and they'll be fine. You then combine that with their "no management" structure where everything is done by cliques and you have a situation for things to get abandoned. They go after what various people are interested in, and if interest drops, the project stalls or disappears. There's no one in charge to keep things on track, and no financial incentive to do so.

So as for Source, it'll depend on if there's interest. They've been pretty lackadaisical about keeping it current, hence why it sees few license compared to something like Unreal Engine. It may just peter out at some point and stop getting any real updates. They probably won't make any official cancellation, it'll just be abandoned as they chase after whatever new thing catches their fancy.

Which you can do if you buy your own.

Those all-in-ones are trouble in two big ways:

1) Failure due to heat. When you start trying to jam all the components in to one box, it gets hot. They can't go for a big case or fans or something like that, because consumers won't like it. So they run hot, and tend to fail sooner. No guarantees of course, but my informal observation shows that separate units work for longer.

2) Limited and expensive upgrade path. If one component of the system is outdated and you want to replace it, well you get to toss the whole thing and buy a new unit... assuming you can even get one. Like on Cox, all their all-in-ones are still only N wireless, no AC available. If you have separate units, you can upgrade them as you need/want to.

I find it much nicer to pay more up front, and have the better setup and options. Personally I have a Cisco cable modem, Edgerouter Lite router, and Netgear R7000 wifi bridge (it could act as a router, but is set not to). They work nice and stable, never needing reboots, I have the latest WiFi technology, and I can upgrade any piece as I wish. As a practical matter the WiFi will probably get upgraded first, in a few years, the cable modem next, whenever they start offering speeds in excess of what an 8x modem can handle, and the router not for a very long time, since it can handle a gig of throughput.

So while my up front costs were high, there's no monthly charge, I have excellent performance and stability, and support for the latest stuff.

Namely the "no refunds EVAR" on games that retailers seem to take. Even if it doesn't work, oh well too bad it's software so you can't have your money back. It really shouldn't be allowed. Anything else you can take back if there's a problem, but not software because "Oh you might be an evil pirate!"

Not only is the cost non-trivial but there is the issue of where do they go? People don't like cell towers. They whine that they are ugly, they NIMBY about them. Now all in all it isn't a huge problem, you can find enough commercial properties that are happy to lease you space on their building. However if you want to build out past a certain point, you run out of good spots. It becomes harder, or impossible, to find more and more expensive to do so.

There's also the issue of interference and overlap, as well as cell hopping. There are practical limits to how small you can make a segment. You try and stick a ton of really tiny low power ones around and they'll start stepping on each other and phones may have fits as they hop all the time.

The real answer is what we have already: Short range wireless, aka WiFi, for higher bandwidth transfers in selected locations and longer range wireless for general coverage. I don't find my data cap of 1GB on Tmobile to be problematic because I use WiFi at home and at work. When there's an area I know I'll be in a lot, setting up WiFi is cheap and easy, not to mention faster.

The easiest way really is for people to just play nice, however some folks have a problem doing that. They get an entitled attitude and decide to use whatever they can (as you can see from other posts in this topic). That creates a problem.

If you don't mind keeping tanks of h2 and o2 around, the spare power could crack water to run an external combustion engine (like a Whispergen stirling) or feed a fuel cell. I suspect the technology to do that could be refined and made efficient. It's just a water bubbler in a DC circuit, after all. Two bell jars. Simple, if not common.

You may remember the Shannonâ"Hartley theorem from engineering class as it relates to the bandwidth of a given channel. Well with radio transmission, this becomes something you really have to think about. SNR is set by environmental noise and FCC transmission limits. Spectrum is something you only have a license to a small amount of. As such, the total bandwidth you can put out has a hard limit on it. Everyone on a tower shares that bandwidth and there's just nothing you can do to increase it. You can't "lay more fiber" or "use another laser" or anything like that which you can do on wired connections. On a given segment, there is just only so much bandwidth nature and regulations will let you have.

So the more grabby people get with that bandwidth, the less there is to go around. If someone is using as much as they can because they have their phone hooked to their computer doing torrents, that slows everyone else down, even if you are are just using it in small spurts to check your e-mail.

That's the thing with RF communications. There is only so much spectrum that is useful (different frequencies have different transmission characteristics), everyone wants a piece, so there is only so much you can get, and everyone on a given system shares the same stuff. You have to share and play nice, you can't just build out more capacity to easily solve the problem.

It is realistic to tell a cable company with an overloaded segment "just allocate more channels to DOCSIS" because they can do that. They have the bandwidth on the wire. You can't tell the phone company "just use more spectrum" because they only have so much they are licensed to use.

The Poe is strong with this one.