Fixing Toshiba Canvio Connect External HDD

A very specific post on a problem that I faced and resolved yesterday. It appears to be quite common, so I hope this can be useful for others out there.

I bought a Toshiba Canvio Conenct 1TB to store movies and watch them on a TV with USB port, but at first the drive was unusable: it kept disconnecting every 10 min or so and needed to be unplugged and replugged to resume working.

A brief internet search gave interesting results: the drive is factory-configured to enter either standby or spin-down mode after a little while (I tend to think it's standby in fact), and that causes the TV to lose connection ot the disk.

So I connected the Canvio to my Ubuntu machine and did as suggested in the Toshiba forum:

   sudo hdparm -B /dev/

But in fact this only returned an error message ("Invalid exchange") and only basic information on the drive; I could not see what power management mode was factory-set for the drive.

Undeterred, I tried :

   sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/

But I got the same error message as before. So I switched to Root user, drive still connected, and hdparm worked as it should, showing me that the power management was indeed in mode 254 (where 255 is disabled).

Yet, the disc still lost connection from the TV after 10 min. So I read more on the invaluable man page for hdparm and realized that the -S option can be used to set the standby time for the disk.

Directly from Root this time, I gave the command:

   hdparm -S 0 /dev//

to disable the standby/idle timeout. Yet all I got was again "Invalid exchange". Again undeterred, I ejected the drive from the laptop before unplugging, and I tried to watch some other stored movie: the disk kept spinning happily well past the 10 minutes mark.

Resolved? So it seems.

Update 24/04/14: The connection between Canvio and TV (an LG LED model) seems to be very dependent also on the USB cable. Use a quality one with firm connectors for best results.

On the Sinking of Dispersed Oil

Ah, it looks like I have blog! I had kinda forgotten. I may as well write something here.

A very common misconception is that dispersants cause oil to sink to the sea bottom, thus polluting it. I always found it hard to believe, because oils generally are less dense than water and they will naturally tend to resurface rather than sink. Also, the effect of surfactants alone cannot increase the density of oil droplets above that of water.

So, does oil sink in the first place, and what can be the cause? To answer this question, the book "Understanding Oil Spill Dispersants: Efficacy and Effects - Committee on Understanding Oil Spill Dispersants: Efficacy and Effects, National Research Council - ISBN: 0-309-54793-8, 396 pages, 6 x 9, (2005)" comes handy.

First thing: dispersants disperse oil into minute droplets, that can be transported vertically down the water column. In simple terms, this means that while bulk oil remains on the surface, dispersed oil will reach a certain depth. As usual, many factors determine the depth that oil can reach but an indicative value is around 20 meters. The main driver here is waves.

So, at superficial look the effect of dispersants may appear as sinking the oil. But it is not.

But oil droplets have been observed to sink. That happens when denser than water aggregates with mineral particles are formed. In seawater there always is a certain amount of suspended mineral particles, and if they encounter oil droplets they can form aggregates; the buoyancy of these aggregates depends on the type and amount of oil and type and amount of minerals.

Oil droplet size is also important, and it appears that chemically dispersed oil is actually less prone to sinking than naturally (by wave action) dispersed oil. Also the type and amount of surfactants used to disperse oil has an influence.

In fact there are oil-siking agents designed for the purpose; they are made from sand treated with surfactants to make it oleophilic and thus adhere to the oil; the resulting mixture is stable and denser than water. In any case, intentionally sinking oil is a procedure used seldom if ever these days.

There is another plausible mechanisms for oil sinking I would say. Weathering: after light components evaporate and/or dissolve in water, a very dense residual tar may be left behind and sink to the bottom. Mineral particles can also be incorporated in the tar making it even more dense. I am not sure of what effect dispersants may have on this phenomenon. There are reports of accelerated loss of oil light fractions when using dispersants but no comprehensive studies.

So the conclusion is...  not that much is known. But from what it is known. it appears that dispersants do not generally cause sinking of oil although they may have a more important role in some cases.

Cool Vessel

Looking for other things I stumbled upon this story, which I think is pretty cool:

PacX Wave Glider "Papa Mau" arrives in Australia, setting a new world record!

PacX Wave Glider “Papa Mau”, completed his 9,000 nautical mile (16,668 kilometers) scientific journey across the Pacific Ocean to set a new world record for the longest distance traveled by an autonomous vehicle. Throughout his journey, Papa Mau navigated along a prescribed route under autonomous control collecting and transmitting unprecedented amounts of high-resolution ocean data never before available over these vast distances or timeframes.

And there's more details about the kind of vessel that completed the voyage:

The Wave Glider SV Series are the first unmanned autonomous marine robots to use the ocean’s endless supply of wave energy for propulsion (no manpower, no emissions, no refueling). With its ability to stay out at sea for long durations through all weather conditions, and communicate real-time data from the surface of the ocean, the Wave Glider SV Series is helping to advance mankind’s ability to observe and understand the world’s oceans.

Ain't got much to say about it but it seemed interesting and worth sharing.

Blaming Obama

It should be no mistery that I have little simpathy for the Obama administration*, but there are statements that I cannot agree with at all. Things like this, I mean:

11 dead workers from Deepwater Horizon who were killed by Ken Salazar's negligence

And this:

You believe that BP is culpable for the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, but those whose job it was to inspect the rig and make sure it was safe, and chose not to do so, are not culpable at all.

I also have this engineer's habit of wanting to know what factually went wrong before blaming someone, so I went and read the accident reports. Not only the "official version" but also the internal report form BP and the indipendent one from Berkeley University.

And all of them agree on one important aspect: the blowout originated from the bottom section of the well and most likely from the poor cementing of the production casing.

Who was in charge of the cementing job? BP and Transocean, that's who.
Not any governmental agency (their job was to review the designs, but there was no government officer out in the field supervising, nor there was supposed to be any).

I leave out Halliburton because from the reports it appears that they ran the proper tests and gave BP all the relevant information on how to correctly cement that last part of the well.

It was also BP men who decided to consider the well as stable despite contradictory test results and who decided to save time performing various activities at once: that made monitoring of mud returns difficult and generally distracted the rig crew from paying attention to the well. So the incoming blowout went undetected for many precious minutes.

Then the escaping gas from the well met insufficient or deactivated safety systems on the rig and that resulted in two explosions and a large fire; compounded with malfunctioning BOP control systems, the fire consumed Deepwater Horizon until it sank.

Taking care of the rig systems was, if I am not mistaken, prerogative of its owner: Transocean.

Statements like those above also contain the assumption that business need a controller breathing down their necks all the time or they will screw up and cause disasters.
Which is curious for someone who seems to believe in classic liberalism.

This looks a lot like a case of blaming Obama for anything that happened under his watch without consideration for how things actually went. Which is fine if you want to do anti-Obama propaganda, but not much else.

*I don't know enough of Obama the man to form a judgment on him.

Seeing Things at Work

Among the various implements used to combat and clean up oil spillages there are absorbent cloths and pads. These are made, from non-woven, fine-fiber PP and/or PET felt, which is higly lipophilic.

Their purpose is to absorb residual oil on water after the bulk has been removed by skimmers or other means (or the whole thing in case of small spillages especially if light hydrocarbons such as gasoline/diesel*) and also to remove oil spilled on floors, various surfaces and machinery etc.

Of course in my company there always are quite a few of those around and the scraps are often used for cleaning purposes. I know these things are designed for the purpose of absorbing hydrocarbons, but I've never seen them at work in practice.

However, a few days ago I accidentally knocked over a flask full of lubricating oil and spilled part of the content on the lab bench. I quickly realized that cleaning it up with tissue was going nowhere, so I tried laying one of these absorbing cloth on top of the spilled oil.

And after a few minutes the cloth had soaked up all the oil and trapped it into its fabric so it would go nowhere. Only a trace of oil remained on the bench, and I could easily wipe it away with a dry corner of the cloth.

Positively impressed, I decided to take a piece of cloth home and try it in a more demanding task: removing frying oil spatter from a stove top. And also there the performance was great: old deposits of cooked oil were removed completely with just one or two passes and no detergent at all. And the oil stays in the cloth; it tends to seep out much less than from paper, conventional cloths or sponges.

The only disappointing feture is that these absorbent clothes are single-use only: the felt will come apart with washing. But they can be squeezed dry once or twice using an adapted laundry wringer.

So here is my story, for the benefit of mankind!

*Then there are absorbent mats and pillows and booms, and also barrier booms with a detachable absorbent element and so on.

The R-world

I recently started playing around with the R software, and I like it a lot.

I was tired of the limitations of Excel and similar software, and of its tedious, carpal tunnel-inducing procedure to set all the fine details of a plot.

Also, I wanted to learn to use something more professional in view of my next, soon-to-come job.

R is not so user-friendly, even if with add-one graphical interface such as RStudio it becomes quite nice. But the right way to use R is to write code, and this will also let you learn more of how things work.

It took me a long time to write the first working script, but only a few minutes to modify it for a different dataset, for example.

And I am only an enthusiast self-taught newbie!

Testing Bloggeroid

Test post from smartphone.

A Burning Sensation of Pain

Today I wanted to copy an audio CD, a task that usually takes something like 10 minutes. But I wasn't so lucky.

First, the Brasero burning software that comes with Ubuntu wouldn't work. It returns an error message saying that cdda2wav is missing even if it installed properly. The bug is known around the Interne, but the offer of solutions is limited. Updating to the latest version works according to some, but it's available only as the detested tar.gz - which always give me problems because of this and that missing thing, and the notoriosly lacking and unreliable support for Linux.

So I decided to try the command-line utility cdrdao, and it seemed to work... only to say that my drive does not support some feature of the CUE format.

"Then back to Windows, at least there's no dealing with arcane packets there!", I naively thought and fired up an old - and SLOW - laptop running XP, downloaded a nice light burning software, switched to administrator account to install it - but it requires .NET 2.0 or higher. .NET 4.0 wouldn't install because the system disk is too full, so I downloaded the 2.0 version and at the same time another small light burning software.

I decided to forget about .NET and used the other burner, but it cannot find or read the image file it itself created. So, nothing to do there.

At that point, something like two hours had passed and a long string of curses accumulated.

I tried to rip the CD into mp3s to burn later, but even that program hung up for no discernable reason. Finally, I downloaded and installed Nero Linux 4 and with that I was able to finally copy the blasted CD.

Ubuntu Tech Notes

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on a stock-configuration Acer Extensa 5220.

The webcam is an USB mdel, Z-Star ZC0305.

With Skype (Beta) 2.2.0.35, I was unable to see or let other users see my video: the test screen (Skype options) remained black, while in a conversation my video window did not even appear.

The video instead appeared correctly in Cheese.

I was able to solve the problem with Skype using the solution given in this Ubuntu forum: run Skype using the following command

env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

libv4l must of course be installed.

This solution has not been tested on other machines or with different software configuration, but I hope it is useful for other users as well.

Alternate Failure Modes

The main concern about about the damaged nuclear reactors of Fukushima was, for most people, the release of radiocative elements in the atmosphere.

I never feared an accident of the same magnitude as Chernobyl, because the Fukushima reactors do not use graphite in their core, and thus they lack the fuel for the massive fire that at Chernobyl carried radioactive particles in the atmosphere.

At Fukushima, limited amounts of radioactive elements were discharged in the air when steam was vented from the reactor(s) to relieve vessel pressure, and some escaped from spent fuel rods in a cooling pool when the water evaporated.

However, Murphy's Law is still valid, and more radioactive elements found a way out. Not to the atmosphere, but instead to the sea. From the April 6 update of IAEA:

TEPCO has identified a possible leakage path from the Turbine building of Unit 2 to the sea via a series of trenches/tunnels used to provide power to the sea water intake pumps and supply of service water to the reactor and turbine buildings. On 4 April, a tracer was used in an attempt to determine where the water was coming from. The tracer was also injected into two new bore holes that had been drilled near the pit. On 5 April it was confirmed that the tracer was seen leaking from the crack into the sea. Coagulation agents (liquid glass) were injected into the holes drilled around the pits to block leakage of water. It was reported that the leakage has currently stopped at 20:38 UTC on 5 April. Work continues to prevent further releases to the sea.

So, higly contaminated water was able to seep into the ocean. But thanks to the relentless work of the personnel at the site, the leakage is stopped, at least for now.

How much radioactive materials escaped through this route, is hard to say. A lot of this is the not-so-harmful Iodine-131 which decays rather fast - but there is also cesium-137, which is instead rather persistant.

I am quite certain that this won't be the end of the world, neither of Japan as we know it - the material destruction of earthquake and tsunami are more serious issues, although they seem forgotten by the media.

Goodbye Vista

My laptop came with Vista Home Basic included, and I have never been happy with that (there was and also Office 2007 trial version, which I replaced with Open Office and Thunderbird the day the trial license expired) operative system.

An entry-level Acer laptop cannot be expected to be blindingly fast, but with the specs of this machine, things should run smoothly at least. That didn't happen with Vista tho: startup and shutdown times were in the vicinity of geological; sometimes the system just hung up for half a minute or so with no apparent reason while the disk was spinning furiously. Changing something so trivial as network settings took a long digging through windows and menus structured and named according to some unknown and perverted logic.

Moreover, requests to confirm actions popped up every few minutes, and the final insult was that Skype would not work: it could keep trying to connect for hours without doing anything, and the application was most often not responding. In my situation Skype is very important to keep in touch with my family and other people in Italy.

So I decided to relegate Vista to the backup partition and install Ubuntu 10.04 in its place. Well, it has been a few days but my computing experience has improved greatly: the computer is finally springy, it starts up and shuts down in reasonable times and all the applications I need work fast and well. There are no problems with hardware, either. And I can be root, the terror of the filesystem!

I have no regrets and welcome Ubuntu.

About Abiotic Oil

If you're an avid reder of Internet material, probably you have heard it: abiotic oil, the idea that oil is at least in part produced not by the partial decomposition of organic matter trapped in sedimentary rock (no, NOT whole dinosaurs as per caricature version of the biotic oil theory); rather, oil is produced by reactions between carbon and hydrogen (as carbonate and water) in the presence of iron oxide at the temperature and pressure conditions found in the upper part of the mantle, some 100 km under the surface of Earth.

Now, a cursory search will find a lot of people arguing hotly around the issue, but very few talking of it. More in detail, Internet debates rarely touch the science involved: the explantion of how it may happen that those chemical reactions go in the opposite direction of what we can see at STP (standard pressure and temperature).

The "stock" explanation is that high pressure makes the production of abiotic oil possible, but few details are available. What abounds instead is conspiracy and other whacked-out theories about why abiotic oil is kept hidden, and rants against Big Oil and evolution and Obama etc.

Finally, with some more research I was able to obtain some solid science. One of the main figures in the abiotic oil camp is Vladimir Kutcherov (often misspelled as Kutherov) who is currently working at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. The basic work is laid out in the paper The evolution of multicomponent systems at high pressures: VI.The thermodynamic stability of the hydrogen–carbon system: The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum. This contains theoretical modelling of the H-C system (hydrocarbons) and experimental results from a special apparatus built to investigate reactions at high pressure and temperature. According to this paper, at 50 kbar and 1500 °C, starting only from wet calcium carbonate and iron oxide, alkanes up to C10 and alkenes up to C5 were produced.

Another article dealing with the subject, but with only abstract available, is Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions.

What to say, Kutcherov does not look like a crank, and his work sound, at least under a cursory examination.

There is a point I'd like to stress, tho: even if abiotic oil is real, and plentiful, it does not mean that it is produced at a rate sufficient to cover consumption; moreover the eventual abiotic oil is predicted to exist at considerable depth, making its extraction difficult, expensive and resource-consuming.

Truth and Handles

"You cannot handle the truth!" is the famous line uttered by Col. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) in the movie A Few Good Men.

While in the movie that line of defence di dnot work, I think the statement is valid: there are some truths in this world that not everybody can handle. For many different reasons, but they still are hard to handle.

The specific case is the whole Deepwater Horizon / Macondo 252 disaster. There are a few ugly, hard truths there.

One is, the oil flow in the Gulf of Mexico is variable, cannot be measured exactly and any estimate is subject to severe uncertainty - more than mainstream media can handle(1), for sure.

Another - the main one - is that BP is proceeding by trial-and-error in its attempts to bring the gushing well back under control (before at least one relief well can be completed, but nobody seems to be inclined to accept that eventuality). And considering the difficult environemnt in which those attempts have to be carried out, I don not know if there is any other way.

Yes, it was easy to point out the clogging risk for the first dome, but much more difficult to come up with feasible solutions. The "top kill" operation has failed? Difficult to tell: apparently BP is trying the use of different shapes and sizes of "junk" in order to achieve enough restriction of upward flow, but all this takes time and indeed is trial-and-error.

Only those who have some knowledge of oilwell issues - or are willing to learn - can handle the ugly truths above. Most of the public cannot grasp the reality of the situation, and they only to want the oil leakage to be stopped, like... yesterday. Even the President of the USA seems to be in this party, or close to it.

There is another group of people who know how to handle the ugly truths, but for malignant use. It is the ones accusing BP of lying more or less since day one, the ones who would like to see the CEO of BP executed (for what crimes, it is not known). They are ready to use any admission of failure to accuse BP of incompetence or even of deliberately letting oil spill out. At the same time, any optimistic statement is seen as a proof of BP lying to the public.
Is there an obligation to be open and transparent towards your enemies?

Moreover, whenever there is an occasion there will be hosts of people offering a number of solutions to the problem that go from being in good faith but unworkable, to patently absurd - and those often come in a package with fantastic conspiracy theories as to why those solutions are not implemented.

Would I like BP to be more open and transparent? In an ideal world, yes. But I know that organizations of people, always, anywhere, try to spin news at their own advantage - honesty is appreciated because it's rare.

And in this real world, letting the public know everything would not help one bit with the well control efforts, neither the cleanup efforts. In fact it may even complicate things further by putting more pressure to perform rapidly on BP and the others involved - when the disaster occurred because BP wanted to complete the well in haste in the first place.

I have heard of talks of handling the well control operations to the US Navy: what experience does the Navy have with oil wells? They can destroy them if required, but control blowouts? Never heard of that.

(1) All journalista excluding a few scientific divulgators appear intellectually unable to understand what uncertainty is.

A Blimp on the Radar

I am writing this piece offline while I wait for the installation of software on some computers to finish. Yes, IT jobs can be that exciting.

Some days ago my blog-friend Wellington asked me a question about blimps, and that made me think. Apparently there are blimp enthusiasts out there who think that those devices can have a much more widespread use than now.

Instead, I think not, because blimps suffer from a basic but serious physical limitation: air density.

In order to provide buoyancy, a blimp must be less dense than the surronding air. But air is already a low-density fluid, roughly only 1 kg/m3 near the sea level (by contrast, the density of water is 1000 times higher). Even if the blimp were "full" of vacuum, and the mass of the shell and other hardware were trascurable, the most lift that can be provided is of one kilogram per cubic meter displaced.

A blimp with any relevant payload must necessarily be huge, and consequentially cumbersome and slow and very susceptible to wind (because the force exerted by wind is a function of the cross-section of the body). Fixed and rotary-wing aircrafts satisfy the needs for speed, payload and manouvrability much better; their only disadvantage is higher fuel consumption.

However, one use where blimps can be the best choice is for semi-mobile (or semi-fixed) observation and surveillance posts. A crew of a few men – or better, automated sensors – does not require a big payload; the blimp can move around in appropriate patterns slow and steady using little fuel and with little noise. Something that airplanes and helicopters do not do as well.

Boeing Fanboys

Those guys are out there. Whenever an Airbush crashes with or without loss of life, they loudly scream their "I told you so!"

They seem to revel in fear and death and destruction, when it confirms their prejudices - chief among those, that anything European is stupid and evil.

Yes, you don't hear them railing against some dubious choices by Boeing (like the infamous 747 cargo door, that initially was prone to opening in flight), because Boeing is American and anything american is clever and good.

The most hated target of the Boein Fanboys is the fly-by-wire system used on Airbus planes. A semplistic description of the system is a series of computers (not exactly like desktop PCs, tho) actin as filter between pilot inputs and control surfaces. A better description of the Airbus flight control laws can be found here, tho.

And I doubt that the fanboys have ever bothered to read that, because their objections go from semi-coherent to rabid ideological rants. No trace of an analysis of what fly-by-wire system are and do, there.

I have often heard that Boeing leaves final authority to pilots, while Airbus does not, but so far I couldn't find any source describing that in detail.

The reality is, human blunders and errors have killed far more people than computer malfunctions. The history of flight is fully of pilots and ground personnel screwing up until planes smash into the ground, break up or even burn without being evacuated.ù

By contrast, so far the Airbus fly-by-wire system is the direct cause of one, maybe two accidents and one of them occurred during a demonstration flight.

In the specific case of the Air France hull loss, the mostl ikely cause seems to be icing of the airspeed sensors, which occurred during severe turbulence and in conditions of near-zero visibility. It is possible to test in a flight simulator how well a Boeing would perform.
Wanna bet?

The Return of the Stupid-user

Stupid-user, English rendition of the Italian IT slang utonto, from utente (user) and tonto (fool, simpleton).

... The one who opens a ticket because her workstation at the bank went offline, and their helpdesk tries to ping the machine but obtains only 100% packet loss and nobody seems to be able to figure out why.

Then your heroic technician walks and after a brief inspection relizes that the RJ45 connector was not pushed all the way into its socket at the back of the VOIP phone.

But it's just another resolved call going into my paycheck.

A Quickie

Work is keeping me very busy, at least until I will learn to manage properly my workload.

I want to write something about a particularly annoying category of people: the Boeing Fanboys - those who see any accident involving Airbus planes as the proof of the manifest superiority of America.

And my piece won't be nice.

But now, goodnight world.

Done Training

For the last three days I have been away in a place soem three hours driving from Parma doing some training for a new job. One of the best aspects of the trip was the pleasant, cool weather at the feet of the Alps.

I have acquired some knowledge (how do you do certain precision regulations in a type of needle printer? With a hammer and a sturdy scredwriver, of course), had food and accomodation paid by the company - but they didn't spend a lot for that, I assume, bought some nice wine and locally-produced rice.

The new IT assistance job will start next week, so from Monday onwards blogging time will have to be reduced (like I've ever been a prolific writer working with a regular schedule...).

Recovering Kinetic Energy

Current braking systems installed on cars and trucks and many other vehicles are great from the performance point of view, but terribly wasteful when energy is concerned.

Disk and drum brakes do nothing but to dissipate the vehicle's kinetic energy as heat in a short timespan through friction. Precious fuel is burnt to accelerate the vehicle, and then all that kinetic energy goes altogether to waste.

The idea of recovering some kinetic energy and store it onboard the vehicle does make some sense. However, it is not so easy to put into practice.

So far, the methods proposed are mechanical or electrical. Mechanical methods involve storing energy as a pressurized inert gas, or in a flywheel. Of course appropriate components are required to automatically connect and disconnect the energy recovery system from the crankshaft or wheel axles, or an hydraulic transmission in at least one design.

Electric systems use one or more motor/generator, again connected to the crankshaft or wheel axles, and an array of batteries or ultracapacitors for energy storage.

The KERS used this year by some F1 teams can be either based on a flywheel or batteries, but I am not aware of any teams using flywheels. The KERS is designed to provide a sort burst of maximum power; in fact this device needs a dedicated cooling system and adopts particular solutions to provide very high charge and discharge currents.

Hybrid cars, as the now-famous Prius, use an energy recovery system, but the main point of hybrids is a large battery pack allowing them to travel long distances on electric power alone - they are not designed for performance.

Energy recovery systems add mass to a vehicle and thus increase fuel consumption somewhat; then they are most useful when brakes are used frequently, on urban or winding roads.

Hybrid cars are enjoying some success, but there are legitimate doubts on their real energy efficiency. I think that a KERS could find some use in sport cars (maybe even as an aftermarket part?), while hydraulic or hydropneumatic systems are more suitable for heavy vehicles like trucks or buses.

How Cool Is This?

Via some other blog, we have that the US Army is testing remote-control flying sniping platforms.

The U.S. Army is testing the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS) — a remote-controlled unmanned Vigilante robot helicopter equipped with a high-velocity sniper rifle¹.

Its RND semi-automatic gun is mounted on a self-stabilizing turret with built-in zoom camera, and fires 7 to 10 precisely aimed .338-caliber rounds per second.

The system is controlled with a common Xbox controller, making this ARSS² possibly the ultimate gamer's fantasy. And quite a nightmare for those at the receiving end; a volley of .338 bullets aimed at you is not much fun.


(1) Tell me when you see a low-velocity sniper rifle, it'd be interesting to research.
(2) It's only a matter of time before acronyms like CUNT or COCK enter military jargon.