Virdea

Yeah, accurate translation when you need it for movie models is very expensive, and then even when you hire a trained translator they can hose you. If you hire vince to make your model and buy the lowest quality you get google translate. He only hire professionals for the more expensive models (it is an issue of cost).

Well, that is a simplification, and it requires some understanding of the current problem with US prisons. Currently there are around 200,000 Federal prisoners serving a mean sentence of 37 months. 51% are in prison for trafficking. Currently there are around 1.3 million state prisoners serving a sentence mean of 17 months. 16% are in prison for trafficking. The total people behind bars is around 2 million. 500,000 are in local confinement and serving sentences less than 12 months. About 4 million people have some sort of non-prison deferment currently. 25% of them have solely drug related crimes. About a million people have some for of early prison release, 40% of whom have served time for drug offenses. Most parolees are probationers as well, so those numbers overlap. Simplification: 2 million behind bars on any given day. 25% for drugs only. 4 million being supervised. 30% for drugs only. Drugs are a factor in 75% of all non-drug / non-victimless crimes committed. Most of these crimes are property theft or strong arm robbery. The average cocaine habit in Seattle Washington costs $18,000 per year. The average perc habit costs $27,000. The average addicted person will commit somewhere between 18 and 27 crimes a year to maintain their habit. The average person who is jailed for drug trafficking will have been convicted of 9 criminal acts before serving a day in prison. Each kilogram of cocaine imported in the United States is responsible for around 2 murders. Now the answer to your question One of the considerations that must be taken into account with trafficking is that the offense tends to be repeated, often. The vast majority of murderers will only murder once in their lives. The vast majority of traffickers will not only repeat their crime, but will repeat it A LOT. You can look up in some state websites the charge sheets for federal inmates, and the average inmate in jail for trafficking has committed and been caught for the crime 14 times. People rarely are jailed for marijuana in any state in the US. Virginia is a Class 1 misdemeanor - jail time is possible but generally only happens on the sixth or greater offense, and then the convicted person spends only two days per week in jail. First time offenders who get jail usually did something else. South Carolina trafficking rules are some of the harshest - under 100 pounds usually gets some form of rehab program for the first two offenses, Usually they convict, give you the sentence, then suspend sentence. The worst marijuana case I saw was a fifth offense with stacked suspended sentences resulting in a 25 year standard sentence (read 25 years as 5-1/2 if no gun was involved - medium security and good behavior opens parole up after 5 years).

Yes, before CRASH fell from grace. Don Cheedle who would go on to be in Crash the movie was a two-bit gang hoodlum.

http://www.modelerv.com/models.html One of the countries best modelers. I hire him to make all of my film models that I need.

Also, Rampart is not always seen in a bad light, and Rampart has achieved cult-hero status among many Californians who see them as the Robin Hoods fighting against the LAPD. Chris Dorner before he was killed often stated that Rampart officers killed or jailed needed to be avenged. He blamed the growth of H13 in LA on the loss of Rampart - which he believed protected communities against that gang (and favored less violent local gangs like the Crips). A very controversial subject.

Traffic originated from an attempt to tell some of the story of Rampart Division, but went way off the rails and became a very different movie in rewrite. Rafael Antonio Pérez was the main influence for writing Vic Mackey. Training Day used Rafael Antonio Pérez to build the character played by Denzell Washington. The shooting of Kevin Gaines was the inspiration for what would become Crash. Basically the script was written by taking the story of Gaines and building outward from there. Rampart inspired more digital output than nearly any other police story that ever happened - but few people have ever heard of it.

Did they sink you! The shame of it. By the way, I was just up at UT a few months ago to hear Roméo Dallaire speak. I try to get there every year when he has a big lecture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Pérez_(police_officer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Gaines_(police_officer)

Key words if it exists. Richland County Sheriff's department 2002 Leesburg Estates arrest. Gina Smith of "the State" may have blogged - she did not cover it, but she told me the video still is around somewhere.

I was thinner, had more hair... and my wife saw the video but did not recognize me, she said to me, "come look at this idiot, he works for the same department as you do!"

No need to shut up, I was a cop and nothing in your previous post is all that surprising. I can answer some of it. Why are police rarely punished The answer is not why are police rarely punished, but why are people of all colors, economic backgrounds, and genders not punished or even charged with crimes. The answer is the American jurisprudence system which is unique in almost the whole world in being an adversarial system requiring for a crime to be judged guilty for there to be a preponderance of evidence supporting the crime, and that evidence must be convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, and the whole thing must pass two tests - the test of law ruled over by a judge, and the test of truth ruled over by ten average citizens whose only unifying characteristic is their inability to escape jury duty. Of every 100 arrests with probable cause (which research shows around 70% will be guilty in varying degrees) less than 30 people will stand trial for the crime (and they will have committed the crime objectively about 98% of the time) and about half of them will move through the entire trial to verdict and be punished. So if you rob a store, you are about 50% likely to be caught, and since you are part of that 70% who did it you are about 50% likely to go to trail (little more than that, but just for example) and are about 50% likely to be punished. That is .5x.5.x.5, or about 13% chance of ever facing punishment for your act. My example is rough but is close to several other ways of measuring it so it is probably pretty good. The average person is given a near free pass on their first criminal act unless it is violence in the first or second degree. Most felony cases are diverted for the first or second time - so you run over a neighbors kid while screwing around in your car after a few beers and you chances of getting jail time are about the same as getting 00 in Vegas. Take our police officer who shoots someone. It is called different things in different states, but it is useful here to call the two big crimes you can get Officer Unlucky on that will result in jail time is Murder in the 1st Degree or Murder in the 2nd Degree. Conspiracy to commit murder is another one. Officer Unlucky has an absolutely clean criminal record - or else he would not be a cop. So you are not getting anywhere by charging manslaughter even if that is what he did because no one, no even the Son of Sam, does jail time for a first time offense of manslaughter - at most he will be diverted. But Murder1/2 are hard to pin on Officer Unlucky. Murder One requires mens rea that includes evidence of premeditation and planning. The guys picture and the words "I will kill that guy today" are really nice. The bad guy who kills someone by telling his gang buddies he is planning it, then going to do it, gets Murder 1 because he planned and executed. So Murder 1 is probably out. Murder 2 is hard as well. It is murder that defined as "dangerous conduct leading to the death of another when that conduct shows an unreasonable disdain for human life, and when the act was not committed under reasonable duress or a situation where one may presume that the average person would feel endangered in their person or feel concern for the safety of others." Officer Unlucky, to win this ticket, has to look at a car full of kids and respond to getting the bird flipped at him by unloading his pistol into the car. I am sure this happens, but it is seldom it really does. Manslaughter of various types will get the cop fired, but nothing more unless he is a felon already. Now here is the kicker for juries. Juries are suckers for balance. As soon as the video emerged of the guy in Ferguson bullying the store keeper came around you lost all chance of getting through a manslaughter case. Happens all the time when ganger 1 kills ganger 2. Ganger 1 skates because ganger 2 is a shit and the defense can prove it. This is not fair, but it is the nature of the jury system. If the dead guy charged the cops, if he fought before he died, if he robbed old ladies or has a felony arrest there is no good way to get someone who kills him on manslaughter. It has to be Murder 1 or Murder 2 where questions about the character and actions of the victim cannot be introduced at all - If Jeffery Dahmer ate Son of Sam you have to go for Murder 1 or 2 to make a dent, unless it was the second person he ate.

There is an extremely embarrassing video of me, thankfully taken before Youtube but it received air time on the nightly news. I was chasing a man through Leesburg Estates that we had a warrant on - he had several weeks before held up the gate guards at Fort Jackson and stole their M16A2 rifles and M9 pistols, along with cellphones, pistol belts, spare magazines, and gameboys. We were suppose to be delicate about the situation because they just wanted the rifles back without any press. My partner and I saw the goofball on the list with another guy we were after - so I took after one and Gonzales took out after another. The video shows this guy, whose pants were worn around his thighs, loose his pants and start hip-hoppity-skip jumping to get away from me. The embarrassing part is he almost did - he put like a hundred meters between me and him (I was probably the world's worst road deputy and still wonder that I survived) before tripping and face planting into a curb. I ran up and on the video yelled "quit resisting" as I put the handcuffs on and he replies he is not resisting, he swallowed several teeth. Far from being a heroic cop, I looked like I was planning to apply for the Keystone division of RCSD but was lacking in skills had been made a junior member.

It is impossible to quarterback a police shooting without all of the data. I know - I have done forensic analysis on 31 use of incidents in the past two decades and am a graduate of the SC police academy and 5 years of street work (part-time, but I was a full deputy). On the one hand I agree with people who say police should be held to higher standards. On the other hand - they usually are. On the other other hand - some of the most egregious cases of police violence went unpunished. Look up the real incident that lead to the creation of the TV show the Shield and the movie Traffic and tell me that police violence is not sometimes swept under the rug. Police violence in the US won't be solved anytime soon because it is a double edged problem that requires two fixes. The questions go hand in hand, but you cannot voice them in the same sentence to the same group without being called a name and shutting the conversation down. The two questions are pretty easy to state. #1 There are very very few cases of police shooting people who were not committing a criminal act followed by an aggressive posturing. How do we teach people not to commit crimes and then charge police? The second issue is similar. Ambush of police is up across the board and across the United States. If you are a cop and you are going to get killed in a crime, it will be when you are ambushed. The current shoot / no shoot criteria is based on being right about the actions of a person you are facing 100% of the time or being quite possibly dead, so US police moved the shoot / no shoot line over - but then more people get killed. How do we reduce ambushes allowing police to reset their shoot / no shoot point. And a technological question. Where is the ranged non-lethal weapon that will allow me to successfully deal with a 260 pound irate charging male before he enters my shoot envelope. I was in a fight with such a man for nearly five minutes as he tried to get my gun, and you never know fear until you realize that your next mistake is your last and your wife and cats will never see you again.

It is impossible to quarterback a police shooting without all of the data. I know - I have done forensic analysis on 31 use of incidents in the past two decades and am a graduate of the SC police academy and 5 years of street work (part-time, but I was a full deputy). On the one hand I agree with people who say police should be held to higher standards. On the other hand - they usually are. On the other other hand - some of the most egregious cases of police violence went unpunished. Look up the real incident that lead to the creation of the TV show the Shield and the movie Traffic and tell me that police violence is not sometimes swept under the rug. Police violence in the US won't be solved anytime soon because it is a double edged problem that requires two fixes. The questions go hand in hand, but you cannot voice them in the same sentence to the same group without being called a name and shutting the conversation down. The two questions are pretty easy to state. #1 There are very very few cases of police shooting people who were not committing a criminal act followed by an aggressive posturing. How do we teach people not to commit crimes and then charge police? The second issue is similar. Ambush of police is up across the board and across the United States. If you are a cop and you are going to get killed in a crime, it will be when you are ambushed. The current shoot / no shoot criteria is based on being right about the actions of a person you are facing 100% of the time or being quite possibly dead, so US police moved the shoot / no shoot line over - but then more people get killed. How do we reduce ambushes allowing police to reset their shoot / no shoot point. And a technological question. Where is the ranged non-lethal weapon that will allow me to successfully deal with a 260 pound irate charging male before he enters by shoot envelope. I was in a fight with such a man for nearly five minutes as he tried to get my gun, and you never know fear until you realize that your next mistake is your last and your wife and cats will never see you again.

How about an AFG with the possibility of adding an AFRG or even AFPDG? To work the 22mm grenade launcher point must be made smart and communicate with the sight, which has a digital alidade set up for 45 degree and 78 degree sighting (and could throw the grenade on a flat trajectory about 75 meters - any less and it won't arm anyway). An AFG is an air foil grenade. It is an offensive grenade with 350 grams of RDX, a smart ogive, fired by a bullet trap. Blast radius is 10 meters. Using the new head it has a circle of error at maximum distance of about 2 meters even in strong winds. It also has the ability to enter windows and has enough maneuver potential to fly around a corner by sketching an arc to its target. AFRG adds a small solid rocket motor - same as they make for toy rockets. The rocket motor ignites about 40 meters out and adds to the accuracy and range of the munition, halving the error rate, flattening the trajectory or doubling the range. The grenade is heavier though. AFPDG is the weirdest one because it uses the smarts twice. First it is fired at a 78 degree angle and lofts the grenade about 500 meters into the air. In flight a drogue shoot deploys at the top of the ogive when velocity falls near zero - this is what happens with para flares that have no smarts. The sight looks down, finds its target again, pops its drogue, and fires its rocket only after it enters a terminal dive. Much more complicated and heavier, but has absolutely no way to be traced back to the firing unit when designed correctly.

I agree on the 40mm getting fins. The long grenades could do it - with a small increase in propellant to keep your range. The fins would spin deploy on the upward flight, then the smart nose would get its glimpse to the target. Indirect fire means that the GL has to be smart as well as it have to tell the nose what the target looks like, but this is all easy. The weakness of the 40mm has been its miss circle, so anything that made it land closer to the intended target would get it back into the running. The big advantage of the 40mm is that it might become universal. Six guys lobbing grenades is going to be a lot of firepower if those grenades are landing within a meter of where they are aimed.

I have been trying to wrap my mind about smart munitions for a while, and I am taking another physics class from a friend at UTK next fall, but I understand that there are a limited number of ways to generate course correction in a moving object. Airplanes generate course corrections by manipulating areas of low and high pressure around their wings - this is the most common way to do it. In the Sioux City crash I interviewed aviation people (I was present on the ground for the crash) and those pilots generated course corrections by varying thrust on the engines - which apparently is really tough to do without a computer. Computers allow all sorts of new thrust options - stealth planes are often unnatural shapes and reply on constant computer correction to leading edges to fly at all. The project I mention has two technology test beds coming together. The first is how to make a bullet change directions. The second is how to make a targeting system small enough to fit in a bullet.

The M32 is a hell of a weapon, but the 40mm may be ending its days and the Exacto may not be the right technology for it. Exacto uses distorting ridges to make course corrections. The ridges are very small - with grooves not even a millimeter deep. When they distort they need considerable negative air pressure behind them to cause a course correction - and that negative pressure comes from positive pressure on the leading edge of the ring. To generate that pressure you need something like 600 meters per second at sea level on a 12.7mm round - a couple hundred meters per second on a 40mm round if it scales that well (has to be tested I am sure). There has been speculation that there is another control surface technology added to this based on very precise control of an offset wobble introduced into the ogive shape of a spinning bullet, but there is no literature on this - just some backroom talk that I myself was part of - and I always assume if I am involved in a conversation about military technology it cannot be really secret after all. However in this case my idea of an unrifled sniper weapon goes away but the 40mm comes back - 40mm grenades spin. The 40mm generates less than 80m/s at the muzzle, so it is not a candidate for this technology assuming these ridges are all that there is to correct with. The limitation of the 40mm has been present for a number of years, and that is a spin-armed grenade is pretty accurate, but its accuracy cone is larger than the burst radius of the ammunition, and the form factor of the 40mm prevents higher velocities in shoulder weapons or smart accuracy because it has no effective control surfaces and does not generate enough velocity that any reasonable control surface could deploy. Now a rifle grenade which has no form factor limitations could have big flip out wings. The smart fuse that allows for corrections married to it would be effective. An alternate might be a longer 40mm grenade that has some form of deployed bat wings. As Toxn says, a 30x173mm HEDP would be a terrifying weapon if it was fired even single shot using this technology. Unstart's mention of the M18 might actually be a brilliant idea. A big 57mm needs less velocity to effect changes, and that means it could be slower and even more accurate. The big thing about the M18 was that it had nearly 1 kilograms of explosive in the HEAT design. Disadvantage is that you loose the stealth provided by a traditional rifle.

The LAG reduces training time needed for sniping, making the task more accessible to wider deployment. The French issued 1 sniper rifle per squad since the 1950s but their big problem has always been to find and train enough people to truly make that effective. The physical envelope for a sniper is just too extreme for it to be common. The LAG increases the physical envelope, meaning that precision weapons get more squad level air play and are more effective once they are in place. HE has been a problem for precision munitions because the most effective use of this technology is in a pretty fast moving projectile (unless you move to a finned projectile). The little ridges that generate course changes need to be pretty large (again, bigger than 11mm) but also need hefty velocity to make useful changes - sort of like how slower planes need more wing to generate lift changes. The difficulty with many tests is that the 20mm shell just does not provide enough HE space. HE is an important answer to squad based firepower, but this technology may not be all that important to it - although I could see a fin controlled rifle grenade being a real winner using it.

For a couple of years, but I thought it was great CNN had a video story on it. Not often obscure research projects get any air time at all.

For the past decade work on smart ammunition has progressed. While most of the press went to chemical explosive weapons (a notable failure in the 20mm range but making progress in larger weapons) there has been quieter work on smart, man portable, kinetic energy weapons. They won't replace the small calibre 6mm range rifles that arm most nations. And there is absolutely no chance of making a 6mm range bullet smart in the next decade. The new weapons are being tested in 11mm and higher calibers. A successful test which made the popular press recently uses 12.7x99mm. For years tests using bench arrangements have shown the smart bullets can correct for as much as 4 MOA error, but these tests were never real world, and duplication of effect was hard. 4 MOA is 100mm correction at 100 meters, and nearly 1 meter at a kilometer. There is rumors - based on scientific papers, that more change of target can be garnered. There are caveats. The bullet design must be large enough to include the optical sensor in its tip. These sensors are now tiny, but they still are as large as an entire 5.56x54 bullet and mass 2 grams or more. Second, the vane rings on the bullet must be large enough that their bite is effective in moving the round. The smallest that can be is around 11mm. Finally the bullets really only work well at longer ranges. Although change of angle is being used to express how well they work, in reality the figure is nonlinear and the bullets do not have much effect at shorter ranges. The most exciting aspect of the recent tests, buried in the popular hoopla, is that it took a series of lesser trained shooters and had them duplicating the shooting performance of skilled snipers at 800+ meters. There are two primary end users envisioned for the weapon. The first is the sniper, who can use the bullet to overcome windage error - always the hardest thing to overcome. The second though is the possibility of creating a new class of weapon for squad level use. The weapon had play in the 70s called a "Light Assault Gun" - a modern day anti-tank rifle. The new LAG would not have a rifled barrel, but would have smart sights - possibly helmet sights. The operator would use direct fire on targets in the open 400m to 1600m as part of a team's bounding overwatch tactics. The round could also be programmed in avoidance - meaning that team members would wear a device that would send out an RF signal. Accidental shots at a team mate would cause the bullet to over-ride and miss.

After 1922 the Red Army was able to mostly arm itself. The last mentions of "half armed battalions" comes from the Poland-Soviet War, and from Red Brigades who were suppose to take equipment from Soviet units. A famous case that Finnish members of the board likely learn in school was a Red Finnish unit who was ordered by the Soviet Army to try and attack a target. It did not, and a few days later a messenger showed up on a mule and handed a note over to the Soviet commander. The note - a small scrap of paper, was written in charcoal. It said, "Cannot attack. No rifles. No ammunition. Also, no paper."

Lots of primary source on this. Although the first mentions of unarmed battalions and lack of training occur as early as Plevna, just a single glance at the literature of WW1 gives us hundreds of mentions in letters, battle reports, meetings of the allied high command, German discussions of the subject, and the like. Here is a small example: "In the early weeks of the war (1914) the Russian Army was supplied with one rifle for every two men. In the fighting in Galicia, the Russians had one rifle for every six men, and later one rifle for every ten men. Battalions were even sent into battle un-armed. Relief could not be brought up because the rear reserves had to wait for rifles of dead soldiers to train with". -Literary Digest, October 1917. "Russian soldiers routinely enter battle without rifles. Russia states that it desperately needs 200,000 rifles per month but is not getting near this number. Soliders share rifles and enter battle using improvised weapon". -Notes from the Chantilly Conference, December 1915. "Unarmed men are being sent into the trenches to wait until their comrades were killed or wounded and their rifles become available." General A. Knox, British Observer to the Imperial Russian Army. -Discussed in detail in "With the Russian army, 1914-1917 : being chiefly extracts from the diary of a military attaché" where his diary has nearly 20 entries where lack of rifles are cited by Russian high command. "Before Riga in 1915 there were but half as many rifles as there were men. In the trenches were a multitude of utterly unarmed men, who gained a weapon only when a comrade fell. They were fed well enough and had plenty of cartridges, but they lacked rifles." -Russia in Upheaval By Edward Alsworth Ross, published 1918. Ross was a complete ass better known for accidentally starting the tenure movement in the US but he had unparalleled access to Russia. The main problem is that this lack of weapons was advanced to include WW2, where Russia, except for a few distinctly unusual cases (which could be argued affected every army), had plenty of weapons.

I have found many weapons get bad press rather than are bad weapons. I fired a Chauchat last year, and know a number of owners of the weapon. The weapon is reliable and accurate, and as a team weapon it caused the Germans to go so far as to put a stock on the huge 08 trying to get a weapon as effective into the hands of soldiers. Its reputation was earned when it was chambered for an overly powerful cartridge using bad metric conversion tables and assigned to one man gun teams (it was designed for two) who were not told to clean it each day... But if it was so bad why did the French make 175,000 of them and why did the French users love it so much? The British PIAT was during WW2 hated because it would fail to recock, but it was a very effective weapon. The M60 now has a reputation as a dog but performed very well for America for two decades. The M14 was cancelled because it was the wrong rifle at the wrong time, but decades later it is well respected and back in issue. I think the worst weapon ever issued, and it would be a problem for the Russians until the 1950s, was none at all. Although often assumed to be a piece of fiction from movies like Enemy at the Gates, it was in fact a long standing requirement of the Russian military, Imperial and Communist.

They kept it in 7.5x54mm. The German Army issued about 80,000 of them to divisions stationed in France, along with 20,000 Berthier M34s. MAS continued slow serial production during the war - they did not bother to run serial numbers so numbers will forever be a mystery, but I have found 6 rifles along that had NAZI intake marks so the number is likely pretty significant. Captured war stocks of 7.5mm were not sufficient once those units went into battle, and French manufactured 7.5 after the start of the war was unreliable and dangerous, so units equipped with the rifle tended to dump them after a few months in combat for lack of ammo supply, although the Germans loved them because they were easy to train new soldiers on.