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May 9th, 2005 Guns - The French FAMAS, in NATO 5.56mm. No, seriously. The French do have a rifle in their country. Several, in fact.
Stands for Fusil d'Assaut de la Manufacture d'Armes de St-Etienne (assault rifle from the Armory at St-Etienne). It took 11 years to make from initial start to adoption (1967-1978). And you thought the US M14 was a bad case of overdevelopment. It shoots the NATO standard 5.56mm cartridge from the NATO standard magazine, though not necessarily in wartime. One particular similarity it has with the M16, besides the magazine, is that the sights are integrated into the handle, which sits high above the barrel. This puts the bolt and barrel in line with the shoulder stock, which means that recoil is directed into the shoulder directly, instead of at an angle. Most "traditional" looking rifles, with their stocks that extend back below the line of fire, let the recoil force act at an angle relative to the shoulder. This produces increased muzzle climb in a traditional rifle as opposed to a rifle with sights elevated above the barrel. The French should thank Eugene Stoner for this, but they won't, for two reasons. First, they're too snobby to recognize the contributions of a foreigner, and two, the rifle would never be fired in anger, which means they never get the chance to notice reduced recoil. (Yes, I know the FAMAS was used in Desert Storm, but I don't care. French Military jokes are all to easy to make.) My New Trek Communicator - My Kyocera 6035 finally died over the weekend, so on Sunday we went to the mall and replaced it with a Motorola v710. It's a flip phone, so no matter what I do I can't get rid of the fact that I'm stuck in a strange time-warp where Gene Roddenberry's vision of futuristic personal communication is sitting on my hip, combined with gadgets he didn't anticipate existing - cameras without film, sound without reels, and the ability to have an emergency operator instantly tell where I am. Yeah, it's a little creepy. Of course, not everything from his vision of the future has come true, but disturbingly large parts have. The teeny-boppers at the mall in our world wear just about as much as the alien women do in his. We have bicorders (video cameras) but no tricorders. <sarcasm> But, of course, we have that ever-destructive desire of men to make money - oh, how dare they! Would that they would seek knowledge above all else so that we can move beyond this petty desire of ours to war with one another. </sarcasm> Of course in our world, some people can't see past the fact that there is a certain segment of society that just doesn't want what they're peddling, but is willing to give them some money for something else. The inability to distinguish between the certain segment and the sucker who'll shell out cash for anything destroys the personal, customer-first approach to business, and it degrades the reputation of the vendor. Examples: Gilby, Lileks. Offending the customer is the one thing that companies should never do, but they seem more and more willing to do it in order to bring in a few bucks. Something is seriously wrong. But then there are other problems with the new phone. Now that I have a phone without the Palm OS, I have to find some replacement for the CalendarTodoPhoneMemos functionality. So far the best option is a Hipster PDA and the Fisher Bullet Space Pen. Take that, Roddenberry. |
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