nah... Glenn Gould's versions are often the first that people hear. Afterwards, everyone else plays it "wrong". (I happen to dislike some of his work for the same reason). People don't buy gold-coated power cords so they can listen to free music.

It's open source. Create the lilypond files yourself.

"potentially"? How about you find some git that skipped work because of it.

Yeah, another example of how copyrights and trademarks can never die; 776 BC and it still hasn't expired.

Yup. And a lot of times, those self-packed loads fail. Gunpowder mixture is the wrong type, wasn't packed tight enough, moisture, grease, etc. I've seen these hobbyists you speak of; All of them have at least one story of how they ruined their gun because their custom ammo was shit. You do it amateur, you get amateur results. But hey, don't let me stop you from taking your custom-built guns and ammo into a combat situation...

The "valid military reason" is called "economy of scale". We don't want to blow their budget on ammo, and by happy coincidence, our allies don't either.

That would be stupid. Iran doesn't have much of a defense industry; they rely on importing arms. It makes no sense to outfit some of your military with Mark I whatchamagigies and some of them with the incompatible Mark II whatchamagigies. There are few things more damning than sitting next to three full ammo boxes, and not one round that'll fit the only gun you have.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to stimulate your industry: That's a purely American thing. In the rest of the world, you steal tech, duplicate it, and save yourself the R&D costs. See also: North Korea, China, India, Egypt, Iraq...

The traditional response to this is to decentralize your weapons depots, caches, and supply lines, and to be as covert as possible. Every ground war we've fought against similarily sized and equipped militaries has been massively asymetrical, and the enemy wears us down by hit and run tactics (which we invented), and urban guerilla warfare. They don't give two shits how much you capture, as long as they've got just enough left to keep costing us economically. They know if we invade, we're out a few more trillion dollars -- and our economy just can't handle that right now (it couldn't before!). Stop thinking like this is conventional warfare: It isn't. It hasn't been since the 70s.

History remembers that it doesn't really matter what ammo you use, as long as you've got a fuckton of it. And by ammo, I mean nukes.

Yeah, why would a country who's factories were burning, a third of its population dead or injured, and entire cities leveled want to put their limited resources towards making sure they could use whatever ammo was available. The mind boggles.

I am looking at things from Iran's point of view. I think you should go work for them. The kind of advice you're spouting could set them back an extra decade, easy. Save us a lot of money so we wouldn't have to build IED-resistant personnel carriers, missile defense platforms, and more stealth tech to give us a greater force multiplier.

In my experience, you're not generalising. You're just stating a fact. :-)

So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together. It's like Junkyard Wars, only with dictators instead of teams. Yeah... I can see why they say we shouldn't perceive it as a threat... but it's not because they're dangerous or anything. They'll probably kill more of their pilots in training flights than we would with a bombing run or twenty.

So I would argue the current system is broken. For all the energy, time, and money our government puts into accountability you'd think we would not be reading headlines about how the GAO (Government Accountability Office) itself miss used all sorts of funds to throw wild parties. I am sure that the accountability processes and procedures and auditing do in fact prevent lots of fraud and abuse. The trouble is I am not sure they are cost effective.

You don't install a million dollar security system to protect a couple hundred thousand in other assets do you?

Perhaps accountability should be results focused. Did your your office/department/bureau accomplish its assigned objectives using the funds allotted? If bSuccess goto :quit; Else DisciplineTheResponsibleParty(Audit());

  In the end there may be a little moral victory in seeing the money not go out the door to fraud and abuse, but if it costs as much to prevent that as the fraud an abuse costs does it matter to the tax payer in the end? As I see it either way my pockets been picked, and the money is been spent. I only care at that point society got the benefit was supposed to get from that.

When I was working for the man, there was no profit motive for me, either. Sure, managers had their targets and I, in theory, might receive a bonus. However, the bonus was so small and tied to things beyond my control that it might as well not have existed.

I guess most of the federal agencies I've dealt with weren't well-functioning (or have a differing opinion on what the "right thing" is).

Its the rate at which they installed new power generation capacity. Those Germans are demons.