Snowflakes in Hell

Dave Hardy talks about an interesting book on combat.  My favorite part of this post shows us the importance of training:

Necessities of training, because a person will drop back to their instincts (interesting case of an officer who constantly trained at disarming people by hand. Have someone hold a gun on him, and take it away from them, hand it back and repeat. He came face to face with an armed criminal, snatched the gun away from him — and handed it back. He survived the experience luckily.)

Ooops.   I guess instead of practicing giving the pistol back to the trainees, he should have pistol whipped them with it.   Of course, this would have probably impacted negatively on his career as a police trainer.

Comment by Sailorcurt over at SayUncle:

If the Brady Law has been such an “overwhelming success” why do they constantly push for further restrictions?

Referring, of course, to The Brady Campaign’s statement:

The Brady Law, which mandated that federally licensed firearms dealers (FFLs) check the backgrounds of prospective gun purchasers, has been an overwhelming success.

Good question!

SayUncle took me back more than a few years with this post on Backyard Ballistics.

My friend Brad posing with the potato cannon we built more than ten years ago in New Hampshire. We’re all fatter and have less hair today. It could launch a spud a good 300 yards. Somewhere, I still have it, although it’s been shortened because it was too long to get back into the trunk for the drive home.

I had no idea, actually, that I could have been arrested driving that thing home. It’s a firearm both in Massachusetts and in New Jersey, and I did not have a license for either of those states. Moreover, because it’s not a firearm under federal law, I couldn’t claim FOPA. We carried with us a letter from the ATF saying it wasn’t a firearm, but didn’t realize that didn’t matter. State definitions vary.

Things you do when you’re a dumb college kid and assume you live in a free country where silly things like the constitution mean something.

I’ve been spending my time at work migrating over to a new file server. The old Windows 2000 file server was getting rather long in the tooth. Microsoft wanted to charge more than two grand for a Windows 2003 Server and CALs for the whole company, so I said “Piss on that!” and decided to convert it to a Linux server using Samba. I plan to move all the company’s print functions over to Samba in the next few days. My ultimate goal is to have Windows only used as Active Directory domain controllers and for Exchange. I would ideally like to get rid of Exchange too, but I’m not selling management on the idea, and they seem to have no issue forking over 8 grand to Microsoft when I could for over 1.5 grand and get Zimbra to do the same job under Linux.

Of course, this new file server is just a stop gap. The big plan for the following year involves consolidating our Andrew File System under samba, and to move most of the simulation data (which is into the terabytes) to a new distributed cluster file system written by one of my coworkers.