Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[hyzmarca]

You know . . all those people who make such a hullaballoo about Shotguns and the like for Home defence right?
Why do you never see / hear any of them affixing a bayonett to their boomsticks?

Because it isn't the seventeenth century and they aren't fighting in infantry squares.

Seriously.

The bayonet was invented because it turns your long single-shot musket into a half-decent spear and thus greatly increased the firepower f the then-standard standard shot-and-pike squares at the cost of a slightly longer musket and a slightly shorter spear.

Modern bayonets just turn your perfectly good rifle into a very shitty spear, while you're better off just, you know, shooting your targets. With modern multi-shot magazines, it just makes your weapon longer and heavier without giving you any advantage. It's negative utility in most cases.

[Meikle641]

Modern bayonets just turn your perfectly good rifle into a very shitty spear, while you're better off just, you know, shooting your targets. With modern multi-shot magazines, it just makes your weapon longer and heavier without giving you any advantage. It's negative utility in most cases.

Plus a bayonet can add a lot of length to a firearm, a downside for HD. Halls can be narrow at times, and most rifles and shotguns are a good 36 inches or so long, and a bayonet might add 6+ inches to that.

That's partly why the M4 is used so often these days, since room to room fighting is more common. On a semi-related note, I've been finding articles and studies that are saying that .223 penetrates less panels of drywall than the popular 00 buckshot round. That kinda surprised me.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, there's two things to keep in mind with this sort of thing:

1. Joe Home Defense Guru is often full of shit, and is virtually always full of shit when talking about shotguns.

2. Shotguns always end up looking totally sweet in any test that involves light barriers and is well within their effective range. That's because shotguns are an extreme example of firearm design, using beefy projectiles and subjecting them to relatively low speeds, so your shotgun slugs or pellets stay fairly intact as they plow through barriers that are too wimpy to stop them completely in the first place. Shotguns put big cool holes in things, but that belies the fact that there's lots of ranges where rifles beat them virtually by default.

So, yeah, when people talk about "limiting penetration" by using shotguns, they're talking out of their ass and need to communicate better. Shotguns might reduce risk to bystanders by virtue of being unlikely to hit someone standing in the next county over, but they punch through brush, barn doors and studio apartments just fine when used at average civvie fight ranges.

[fectin]

Also, many gun enthusiasts do like bayonets. You just don't hear them talk about it as much, because they're not really useful and because there isn't really a big call to regulate knife ownership. So unless you get into a lot of "guns are cool" conversations with actual gunowners, the topic just won't come up, just like Jack Thompson probably doesn't hear a lot of detailed analyses of which aftermarket controllers are best.

Essentially, they occupy the same thought-space as silencers, but without silencers' extensive and stupid regulation.

[fectin]

From a political perspective, why did modern YEC decided to center what little science there is in their movement around Noah's Ark? That's just a baffling decision, because from a strict scientific perspective it's probably the most mockable and indefensible part of the Bible. Why not, oh, the plagues of Egypt or biblical longevity?

You're coming at this backwards. First, take let's their interpretation of the bible timeline as fact (everything from here on assumes that). Now, take carbon dating as also correct observations. How do you reconcile the two?

Obviously, something must be off in our carbon dating model. And since everything up to about 6000 years ago tends to match up, and everything before that doesn't, something must have happened 6000 years ago. Conveniently though, we know of a global event 6000 years ago which profoundly altered the world: the flood.

So, in proper scientific form, we want to test that theory. One way to do so might be to find an artifact which we know is pre-flood, and show that it also tests as millions of years old. Again conveniently, we have records of something just like that, along with a location for it: the Ark. Which is why YECs are very keen on actually finding it.

So, in answer to your question: they aren't doing this because it's an easy sell, They're doing this because it's a good-faith effort to explain what they see as a significant discrepancy. Like Joseph Priestly, they are actually incorrect, but that doesn't make their methods wrong.

Of course, there are also a bunch of loudmouths who don't understand that, and think that just yelling "Noah's Ark!" will somehow prove that science is all a lie. They are bad people who should feel bad, and you should look down on their willful idiocy. (There are also some people like that with real science too, and that they happen to support something correct should not excuse them from the same scorn.)

[talozin]

Also, many gun enthusiasts do like bayonets.

This guy, for instance, obviously really, really likes bayonets. Which, joke aside, is kind of ironic, because a break-action shotgun is probably one of the few remaining use cases for a bayonet that might occasionally make a tiny degree of sense.

Also, one more reason why no one except a few idiot mall ninjas wants a bayonet on a home defense weapon: because when you're awakened in the middle of the night by a loud noise, cutting yourself while trying to grab your shotgun is a thing that's nice to not have to worry about.

[fectin]

I like how he thinks little plastic clips are a good way to make a structural attachment. The specific attachment method is silly, even if the Picitinny system were good for that (which, AFAIK, it is not).

But yeah, this is what a real modern bayonet looks like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bayon ... ompany.jpg

Aside from the funny hole in the guard, you could very easily not notice that this is anything different from a KA-BAR.

[Prak]

I've taken to typing up longer game design posts in word and then copying over here, just so I have a local copy of the stuff. The problem with this is I either have to write in BBCode, or go through and put it in.

Does anyone know of some plugin or program or such which will convert word formatting into bbcode?

[Meikle641]

I wish I knew. That's why I've been linking to mediafire lately; fuck making two versions of a document.

[radthemad4]

Ever get that feeling where you realize there's just too many things to experience in the world and not enough time to experience even just the stuff you really like? Or the feeling where you get some free time and there are so many choices that you're not really sure of what you want to actually do with it?

On one hand I'm glad there'll always be something to do, but these feelings have been nagging at me recently and I'm wondering if you guys know how to deal with them.

[Stahlseele]

i am lazy as fuck. i don't ever get that feeling . .
dealing with it?
make a list, work the list from top to bottom, cross off what you have done and take the list out next time you get that feeling again.

[DSMatticus]

I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.

[Stahlseele]

*snickers*
ah, yes, the master slackers method ^^

[rampaging-poet]

I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.

Mind if I sig this? It describes me perfectly.

[DSMatticus]

Sig away, attribution optional.

[Lago PARANOIA]

DSMatticus is extremely quotable. I think he's been in my signature rotation 3 times and I see him pop up in peoples' sigs even more than Frank.

[radthemad4]

I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.

Yes, that's a leisure activity too and possibly the one I partake in the most. I've got a media to do list in bookmark folders by medium (e.g. games, anime, webcomics, etc). TVTropes keeps it growing.

New question: What's the best way to find the original post of a sig? Googling it tends to just bring up tons of posts from whoever's sig it's in.

[Prak]

Search by the line and author.

[JonSetanta]

I'd like to know why I still get depersonalizing panic attacks three months after my last Valium pill.

Granted I was on benzos of all kinds for a whole year, but I was also being medicated for the same result of the pill; it was the meds causing the panic. I'm in the 5% of users that gets an adverse effect from it and I actually believed my doctor when he said "you are an anxious person".

[radthemad4]

Search by the line and author.

At first I tried messing around with google and wondering what you meant, and then I found this on top of the screen. Thanks.

[radthemad4]

When addressing or referring to people with small caps usernames, should they be capitalized?

[Josh_Kablack]

When addressing or referring to people with small caps usernames, should they be capitalized?

Basic rule of thumb here is to address people as they wish to be called.

If you are writing a paper for a class or new article or somewhere that more formal English usage is expected, ask the professor or refer to the style guide. Or if you have to wing it, then use the name as is, but inside quotes:.

On one forum, a user named, "lowercaseusername" asserts that blah blah blah

[Blasted]

You know, that's not a topic that's ever been discussed in any of the style guides I have. As it's a proper noun, you'd expect it to be capitalised, but because of case sensitivity you may actually be referring to another person. I think the name in quotes is definitely the way to go.

[erik]

As for myself I don't really care if it is erik or Erik. They are both appropriate.

Exact name inside quotes seems a solid default if you are trying to be formally proper.

[Cynic]

Practically, I don't really see it being an issue for sourcing because most databases don't really differentiate between lower case and upper case in user names.

There might be something to how it's actually capitalized within a name.

for example 'aXXo' is most definitely a user name/group that is defined by the different capitalization.