Sturgeon

The longer form would require research I don't really have the schedule room for, it's a book I've heard a lot of discussion of by people with pretty sound knowledge of historical practice, but the short form of the argument is partly what's been mentioned earlier with the bumper crops of animals like the passenger pigeons, and partly discussions of carrying capacity of the land to support the people mentioned in accounts of the first explorers. Their agricultural practice was pretty awesome, Tenochtitlan was a big city supported by a mix of chinampas, which were small plots on shallow lake beds that could get up to 7 or so harvests in a year, and that whole giant lake, where a series of levees allowed pretty large-scale fish farming.
 
This is of course partially advanced compared to the usual implications of stone age, when they were considerably more advanced than that.
 
I do want to read the book, but I'm pretty busy these days.

Is that a bipedal AA robot in the end of the row there?

Top secret data on the project retrieved by the CIA.
 

Gaijin continues to demonstrate economic wisdom by tying the price of their gold to the ruble instead of the dollar.
 

Toxn, have you read the essay Feathered Tempest?  One of the ideas touched on in it is that the environment of North America that allowed the Passenger Pigeon to exist in such enormous numbers was substantially anthropogenic; i.e. the North America that the Europeans discovered in the 1500s wasn't some unspoiled Eden.  It had already been ecologically reworked by humans.
 
Everything I've read about Pleistocene taphonomy and paleobotany seems to indicate this is true; humans pretty thoroughly re-landscaped North American even though they were at relatively low population densities and were non-agricultural.

Holy crap, I'd heard about people destroying GMO test fields, but I didn't realize that the campaigns to do so were so extensive and coordinated.

I'm too embarassed to post pictures of the 1/72 scale stuff I have built myself.  Mostly I buy the prebuilt platic or diecast stuff. 
 
When I was a kid, I had a collection of German tanks in 1/35 scale, all Tamiya kits.  I had various other kits in various scales, including all sorts of weird stuff my friend and I built out of spare parts. We made an entire army of made up vehicles to battle the German tanks.  Eventually, all the weird stuff got blown up when my friend and I came into the possesion of several packs of bottle rockets.  It was a glorious battle, plastic shards flying in ever direction.  The German stuff never got the bottle rocket treatment, I think it eventually got sold in a garage sale when I went off to college. 

I'm firmly of the opinion that simple conservation is a railed ideology and yet another example of how hippies ruin things.
What we really need is to move away from our absurd natural/manmade mindset and really get into the nuts and bolts of designing and maintaining ecosystems.
For instance, it blows my mind that we have almost no formal studies (not eveb a good theoretical framework) for how to produce a stable, closed ecosystem. Or an ecosystem equivalent of the standardised biological parts initiative.
We're still tinkering when we should be frantically designing, essentially.

If you haven't read colli's post, do so. He's entirely correct.

So, it's worth pointing out for this generation that the above situation is why Jeff Cooper is important. I've said a lot about what a weirdo Jeff is, and how stupid his scout rifle idea is (OK, realtalk: Just because an idea has an internally consistent train of logic does not make it a good idea), but he was one of the first to concern himself with the idea of the fighting civilian. The scout rifle is like the FBI crouch: It's not really a great idea, in retrospect, but the scout rifle has its origins as far back as 1966 - so even then Cooper was thinking about the problem of, basically "what happens if there's something like Ruby Ridge?" almost thirty years before that actually happened. And yes, the Bren Ten handgun is goofy and stupid, but it was an answer to a question that was brand new at the time.

For people interested in tanks, you can draw parallels between this situation and that which resulted in the American tank destroyer doctrine. I was walking through the Barksdale Air Power Museum about a week ago with my father, and we were talking about Butterfieldian historiography and the Apollo program, and as an example he brought up the American tank destroyers. "I was reading an article," he said "about the tank destroyers, and what they were trying to do. Nobody had stopped the Blitzkrieg at that point, but they knew they needed to. I tell you what, they didn't end up using them quite that way, but somebody was really thinking when they came up with that idea."

Indeed. Here's to you, Jeff Cooper. For thinking where few else did.

From numerous discussions on rocketpunk manifesto (which is an awesome site btw, if a bit neglected) my impression is that part of the problem is that there simply isn't a market for more launches and no concievable way to develop one sans... well, more launch capacity.
The old economic chicken-and-egg issue, basically.

Let's all take a trip back to the late 1970s and early 1980s.  This was the time of punk.  This was the time of despair.
 
Punk was all about minimalism; strip everything down to a few chords, wear clothes you fished out of a garbage can or made yourself and infect yourself with parasitic worms so that when you vomited on some other asshole in a fight, they got parasitic worms too.  It wasn't pretty, but it was cheap and it worked.
 
Punk was about to hit pistol design in a big way.  The aglockalypse was just around the corner.  The glock is the practical application of punk to the art of small arms design.  It's reminiscent of John Browning's early striker-fired design prototypes for the hi-power, only made out of plastic and missing half the parts.  Not pretty, but cheap and it sure does work.
 
The world was very different in the punk era.  Remember that in the United States, violent crime increased dramatically in the late 1960s.  In the 1970s they were still figuring out what to do about that.  They hadn't had a few decades for the idea that gunfights were just something that might happen day to day to sink in, so the art of practical handgun usage was in a pretty sorry state.
 
Or rather, practical handgun knowledge was in a hilariously bad state at the time.  I read through a police marksmanship manual from the late 1960s or early 1970s; it's like an infantry tactics manual written pre-WWI.  It's heartbreakingly naive because they hadn't seriously had to seriously think about the problem before then.  They had come from a more peaceful world, and were still getting their bearings in the grimdark of the 20th century.
 
This police marksmanship manual still taught the FBI crouch.  The FBI crouch is a sort of distillation of the WWII-vintage Fairbairn-Sykes theory of gunfighting, which emphasized speed over accuracy.  The idea behind the FBI crouch is that you crouch down so that you're harder to hit, and you sort of get your dominant arm that's holding the weapon into a repeatable, ergonomically neutral alignment with the rest of your body so that you can aim with your entire body.  As you can see, this isn't a shooting stance that allows you to use the pistol's sights.  In some variants of the stance, you cross your left forearm over your torso so that incoming bullets have that much more flesh to go through before they start hitting your vital organs.
 
Basically, it's the sort of theory of how to gunfighting that you might come up with in a society that, until recently, hasn't been doing a whole lot of gunfighting.
 
Everything was in a more primitive state than it is now.  Nowadays you can go into a gunstore and have dozens of brands and styles of pistol ammunition to chose from; hollowpoints of all descriptions line the shelves, each promising to kill people more dead than the next one.  Oh, and you can buy full metal jacket if you need something cheap for practice.  Back then, full metal jacket was the fancy stuff; the most common ammo was cast lead.  Also, cops weren't totally sold on automatic pistols until about halfway through the '70s, they still mostly used revolvers.  Also, almost nobody owned a handgun.  It was considered weird.  Owning a rifle or a shotgun was perfectly normal; what else are you going to go hunting with?  Owning a handgun was weird because handguns are for shooting people, and why are you even thinking about shooting at people you weirdo?  The laws and court precedent for self-defense cases were a lot different then too.  Formerly peaceful society, still coming to grips with the grimdark.
 
So, secret about Beretta; they basically want to make hunting shotguns and make up-scale hunting apparel.  They can't design automatic firearms actions to save their lives.  Whenever they have to make something automatic they rely on Germans to design the things for them.  The AR-70, for instance, was originally a joint design effort with SIG (SIG's evolved into the SIG-540/550 series).  The ARX-160 was designed by Ulrich Zedrosser, who, as you might surmise from his name is not Italian.  The Beretta 92 is the last in a line of Beretta pistols that started off basically as clones of the Walther P-38.
 
You can imagine it; Beretta in the 1970s doesn't really know what makes an automatic pistol a superior combat piece, although they've been making clones of the Walther action long enough that they can make them work very well.  Cops don't know how to gunfight either; all they know is that these automatics seems a whole lot easier to shoot yourself with than revolvers, so they're going to need some sort of super-duper double safety device.  Some want double action with a decocker, some want a safety as well, someone want a combined safety decocker...
 
So Beretta shrugs their shoulders and tries to please all these cop agencies.  Obviously, they're mainly going to be selling these things to cops and military and a very small number of weirdos.
 
Meanwhile, Jeff Cooper, Jack Weaver and a small but growing number of practical pistol competition shooters are figuring out how to actually fight with a handgun.  Meanwhile, in Austria, long-standing armament maker Steyr is about to get a nasty surprise when the Austrian Army holds a competition for their next pistol.

Okay, so I'm working off my phone (power failure) with a baby on my lap. In any case, here is a quick rundown:
Hippies suck. They've essentially shut down GMO research in Europe (over 60% of all test fields get destroyed), demonstrating that terrorism works like gangbusters when you're sufficiently white and well-off. On that note, it's also a myth that hippies are some sort of sidelined underclass. The truth is that hippies were always the scions of the upper crust and think and act in ways that the romantic aristocrats would fully understand. Which also explains why so many of them wholeheartedly embrace population control and euthanasia to prevent those overbreedin' third worlders from sucking up mother earth's scarce resources.
As to their other relationships with the poors, hippies are generally much happier with dependance and 'noble' poverty than they are with development and investment. Which is one of the reasons why we still have a ridiculously destructive and predatory food-aid system rather than anything helpful.
Finally, a personal story: a few years ago, I was holidaying in the Cape during the fire season. At this time, there were two major events playing out in the area. The first was a series of massive fires in the Cape flats, which killed many people and left hundreds homeless. The second was a confused humpback whale which beached itself near Hermanus.
The latter resulted in candle-lit vigils and numerous, expensive attempts to return the poor addled creature to the sea. When it inevitably died, there was an outpouring of grief by the well-off hippies who had gone to light candles next to the beast.
The former resulted in shrugs.

8 gigs shared high bandwidth graphics RAM in both consoles. There's gimmick cards coming out with that much already, but cards are actively using 4 gigs for the settings they can drive.
 
I'm more annoyed about the processors being AMD versions of Atom. 8 cores of that isn't much at all. At least it might teach devs to code with multiple threads cause it's the only way they're getting anything out of it.
 
The nice thing about the processor is that a platform can actually last a long time before it gets marginal. That's why I thought about getting a Haswell-E until I realized it'd make the heat output into my relatively small room more than I wanted.

I forgot the nonsense about the Boers. Not having enough/good enough equipment was hardly the reason why the Brits fared so poorly.

If a small arms range advantage is going to matter, it would matter in defensive engagements.
 
There are a few stories from the Boer War where the Boers knew where the British would attack, and could arrange their defenses accordingly.  They even went so far as to place large, white rocks at 100 yard intervals so range estimation could be done faster and better.
 
Somehow this wasn't a dead giveaway to the British that it was a prepared position they were attacking frontally.  Too many years of fighting people armed with dried grass.

Clearly the Stg44 is the perfect example of a rifle being developed with zero interference from politicians.

Shuttle takes a lot of criticism, and according to my most recent estimates, approximately 52.4% of it - globally - comes from me, so pay attention. I'm about to praise it.

If you pay attention to spaceflight, you'll find that there's a couple of reasons to why we don't have colonies on other planets yet. One reason is that spaceflight isn't cheap. The other reason is that spaceflight isn't cheap because it isn't safe.

Alright, so why isn't spaceflight cheap? Well, imagine building a wonderful, awesome, complex thing, with lots of fiddly moving bits, and then you send it off to do what it does, and it explodes and is destroyed. You'd be pretty bummed, right? Rockets are designed to do that every single time they fly. That big Saturn V rocket that took us to the Moon, it didn't come back. The only thing that did come back was that little thing at the top that looked like Madonna's tit, and none of those ever flew again, nor could they. But some rockets do come back, like Space Shuttle. Those require a huge number of man-hours to refurbish and bring back to flying condition, and sometimes, despite the best efforts of those folks, they break up over Texas anyway.

Which brings me to my next point: spaceflight isn't cheap because it isn't safe. You know how awful paying insurance on your car is? Well, imagine paying insurance on a controlled explosion designed to throw something eight times faster than a rifle bullet. Even if it's not carrying dudes, that's probably not cheap. So spaceflight needs to become safer and surer, so the insurance premiums come down. It might help if we didn't let grandma drive the rocket; she's really too old to have a license.

So we need a rocket that's safe and reusable, ideally. That's where the Shuttle comes in.

Shuttle was neither safe, nor the kind of cheaply reusable we need, but it wasn't expendable, either. Shuttle had a lot of problems, but one thing it did genuinely contribute is experience with reusable systems. There are reusable hydrolox engines now that, without Shuttle, may never have existed. The Orbiter (that's the plane-looking bit) itself wasn't a dead end, either; the USAF's X-37B is currently flying, gaining us even more experience with reusable systems.

There's a very old metaphor, that what we can do now is only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. This conveys the value of experience, of building on previous accomplishments to achieve something great. Brilliant minds and ideas, foolproof engineering (no such thing! snorts my old boss), and eureka! moments dominate our minds because they are the sexiest part of progress, but more valuable than all of those, is having the experience, the shoulder of the giant to stand on to go somewhere new.

Shuttle, for all its faults, gave us an absolutely priceless body of experience in reusability (130 flights! That means a plurality of human flights into space have been on a reusable vehicle). Ultimately, it will be reusability and safety that open the door to space and let us explore the stars. Some have suggested it would have been better to not do Shuttle and instead do Apollo derived vehicles - there may be merit to this, but it must not be underestimated how important Shuttle has been in improving our understanding of reusability.

Now, how do we do reusability? Well, here's an email I sent to my father exploring an idea about that:
 
 
And as I said to him,
Alright, your turn. Tell me everything that's wrong with what I just said.

If you use them for the right stuff they are the single greatest change you can make for everyday feel of using a computer. They're very nice. 256 should be a pretty good size, and frankly for people who don't have them the black november deals are nuts. Even something as relatively old as an intel 530 is going to be a big deal for less than $.50 a gig, and the Samsung stuff's been nice and cheap for the high performance hotrods they are. A decent SSD from none is more of a jump than a good one from a decent one.

I would be super interested.
OK, as per Bojan, IS-7's gunsight was independently stabilized and there was a gun-follows-sight system.
 
The Soviet medium tanks were incredibly conservative compared to the prototypes they had in secret.

The biggest killer of WT for me is the amount of time I need to dedicate to a battle. In WoT, I can crank out a fight every 5-7 minutes, even if I die and have to use another tank. In WT, it takes what, half an hour to find and play a Realistic battle? Pass.

I have not seen it, although from what I've heard, the jury's still out on whether it's entertainment. Fiction, it certainly is.

Our first week here at SH is done. Honestly, this has been a much stronger start than I expected, and I thank everyone who's posted for helping.

There's a lot of good content here already; I can hardly think of a thread that doesn't contribute something to the making of SH into the research center I had in mind when I started it.

So thanks to everyone, and let's keep the momentum up. For now, if you have a question, ask it on the forum! Have a friend that you think has the archive savvy, inquisitive nature, and ritual-sacrifice-obsidian-dagger-blade-sharp wit that would make them a good fit for SH? Invite them! (For now, I ask members to invite only one person a piece; myself and collimatrix are currently working to expand the membership of SH by adding more people we think would be assets to the forum.)

Carry on, gentlemen!

Thanks.
 
Building it was so fun, I really regret buying decent prebuilts and upgrading those for the past three or four PCs.

So a little update, I picked up a pair of fans, a Rosewil, red led 120mm fan and a Corsair 140mm red led fan. I added them to the case, and now it glows even more red. 
 
I also stuck some 1/72 tanks on it cause I'm a dork. 
 

By far the best document yet written in favor of the GPC concept. I guarantee you'll learn something reading it, too.

Note: While hosted on his site, it was written by a Frenchman - Emeric Daniau - participating in France's current small arms research program, not Tony Williams.