Copying Hobby VHS tapes to DVD legalities

The Glock issue you mentioned if mostly an urban legend. Identifying a bullet fired through a polygonally rifled bore is more difficult but far from impossible. It actually turns out to be useful as far as crime goes because so few handguns use polygonal rifling that you are left with a very short list of possible guns. You pretty much narrow it down to Glock, H&K, Kahr, and Magnum Research.

As to the lawyers writing laws... geez. That is what gave us the "assault rifle" law. It was like a fashion show. They pick features that they believe make certain guns look scarier than others (e.g. just about any rifle Hollywood has used in an action film) and pass a law prohibiting them. They just ignored the fact that many other not so scary looking guns fire the same damn bullets. They also ignored the fact that so-called assault weapons are used in less than 2% of gun crimes to begin with.

And then they try to insist that they aren't engaged in a "death by a thousand cuts campaign" to ban firearms altogether.

The number one reason against capital punishment, IMO, is the possibility of mistakes. There are more than 25 cases of capital punishment being used to kill the wrong guy in America during the 20th century. Oops. Since 1992 there have been 15 men exonerated by DNA evidence. Lucky for them that capital punishment is no longer swift. I have no problem, in theory, with someone who is guilty being put to death. But a mistake makes you a murderer.

It does make me shake my head to hear the talk of such punishment being cruel and unusual based on "constitutional" grounds. It obviously wasn't considered to be cruel and unusual by the men who wrote those words into the constitution.

I do support DNA testing and other methods to exonerate people who have been wrongly incarcerated. There are many, many cases, however, in which there is little question of guilt and the death penalty is a fitting punishment. The two aforementioned criminals, as well as Gary Gilmore, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, Mark David Chapman, and a host of others would seem to be fair game to be put to death. (Gilmore, McVeigh and Bundy were executed, and I don't know of many people that shed a tear over them.)

Can we drop it and get back to model railroading?

Okay. How about that Lionel Great Train Robbery set? ;)

Sorry. You don't get to decide that for the other posters any more than you'd walk up to two strangers on the sidewalk and tell them to change the subject of their conversation.

We never left. If you have a model railroading post you want to get off your chest, for gosh sakes have at it.

No one is stopping you.

~Pete

I wonder how he would feel if one of these uncontrolled criminals came in to his house and destroyed his model railroad.

Spender wrote: [...]

I think capital punishment is too soft. A few years of anxiety while appeals wind their way through the courts, then a few seconds of pain (or not, since it's done "humanely" these days.) Not good enough punishment for creeps like Manson. I think lifelong solitary, with every effort made to prevent suicide, would be fair. And I mean _solitary_ - no human contact of any kind ever again. If hands-on treatment is required, knock 'em out with funny gas, deal with them, and let them come to in their padded, solitary, 24-hour-lighted, soundproof cell.

As for Sirhan Sirhan, he was deranged psychotic. In my more paranoid moods I suspect he was "managed" by those who wanted Robert Kennedy dead.

Well, most of them had no objections to treating humans as property either, and slavery was defended on constitutional grounds for decades. The beauty of the US Constitution is that most of it consists of statements of principles, not rules.

I see you made an assumption as to which side I'd take in this dispute. Without any evidence whatsoever. Typical.

Try breaking into my house and see how far you get :-).

All further responses cheerfully ignored.

The statement made no assumptions whatever. It was purely an implied query. It is you that is making assumptions. Without any evidence whatsoever. Typical.

Notice that none of the gun nuts has had *any* model RR-related posts, nor responded to my continued suggestions that it was o-t. I can only assume from that that none of them have any interest in model railroads, and are just spammer kids with nothing else to do, no significant others, or a clue.

This ends my participation in this idiocy.

mark

So how about some model RR posts from you?

The one that I've seen in MR, the one that I lust over, and when I can get a set up, hope to emulate is Sellios' Franklin and Manchester. Works well, since my time period is '39-'40. I'm a bit south of there, though: as a Philly expatriate, I run Pennsy. The one change I've made was to decide that while still under bankruptcy from the Depression, 42 years before the MoPac merged into UP, it was the Pennsy that swallowed it. So, though I only have a passenger car or two relabeled, that's the Pennsy Pacific, or PPRR....

And bringing in the MoPac was because my ...late... wife's late father had spent his career as an engineer on the MoPac. I have a picture of him in a MoPac Mike, and I modified a LifeLike (I think that's what it was - it's in the basement just now) Mike to look as closely as I could to the 1212.

mark

I agree, the F&SM is one of the great model railroads. We know that what Sellios has modelled is at best "based on" real buildings and scenes. But what he actually models is his concept of the Depression era.

IMO what Sellios' layout demonstrates is that a consistent visual style matters far more in creating the illusion of reality than the subject of the layout. It doesn't matter whether what's modelled is some segment of a real railroad, or whether it's a figment of the maker's imagination.

C S Lewis in one his essays distinguished between "life-like" == "giving the illusion of life/reality" and "like life" == "resembling life/reality". He noted the paradox that "like life" is not always "life-like", and points to some of the great works of fantastic fiction to illustrate his point (IMO, his books are also examples, as are the Harry Potter books and movies, etc.) The reason is that the content of the story is not what creates the illusion. It's how the story is told, its style IOW. In fact, many earnestly well-intentioned works of moralising fiction are neither life-like nor like life.

IMO, the FS&M is life-like, but it's not like life. Pelle Sjoberg's UP layout OTOH is both like life and life-like. In both cases, we see that model railroads are a kind of art. As in all the arts, the masters are those who have developed a style that expresses their vision of reality, their vision of what the railroad was and is.

Wolf Kirchmeir skriver:

You mean Pelle Søborg, don't you ?

Klaus

Yup. (Sjoberg is the Swedish version of the name, I believe. Lots of=20 Swedes in our corner of Alberta, when I lived in that Province.))

--=20 Wolf Kirchmeir

Wolf Kirchmeir skriver:

"Berg" is "mountain" - "Borg" is "Castle"

Klaus

Not familiar with Sjoberg's layout, but there is an issue with the F&M, which is that most of those who lived through the Great Depression, and were old enough to remember them, are gone, or rapidly going. (I just lost my ...late... wife's mom the end of September, and she was literally a Rosie the Riveter, building Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, and someone I cared deeply about. My folks are both long gone.)

So all we can do is look at the pictures and the films from then, and do our best to imitate it, (our) art imitating art, imitating life.

mark

Resistance is futile.

~Pete