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This Concealed Carrier Saved An Officer Under Attack

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An concealed carrier in Ohio has been presented with the Citizen’s Award of Valor for stepping in with a drawn handgun to stop a meth abuser who was fighting a Mount Vernon officer for control of the officer’s gun.

The suspect stopped fighting Cpl. Michael Wheeler, and when Wheeler looked up, he saw the suspect staring down the barrel of Dylan DeBoard’s pistol.

Cpl. Michael Wheeler of Ohio’s Mt. Vernon Police Department owes his life to a brave civilian who stepped forward with a drawn gun.

Wheeler said he was being attacked by a homeless man who later acknowledged to officers that he was high on crystal meth. Knocked to the ground and fighting to subdue the “very irritated and out of sorts” attacker, Wheeler ended up on his back with the man straddling him.

“I’ve never been in that situation before,” the 14-year department veteran told InsideEdition.com Wednesday. “I’ve always been able to take control of a situation.”

Earlier this week, Wheeler was able to reward Dylan DeBoard, the man who saved him, with the city’s Citizen’s Award of Valor. Every day, he remembers that day last year when things could have turned out far, far worse.

He often stops by DeBoard’s home, Wheeler said, just to say thanks. “Every time I see him I let him know how much I appreciate what he did.”

On that day last year, Wheeler’s shoulder microphone had been ripped off in the tussle, so he couldn’t call for back-up. And then the man started going for Wheeler’s gun. And that’s when Wheeler began to think he was running out of options.

“I pulled him in close to me to try to restrict his range of motion,” Wheeler said. But the suspect just kept “trying to reach my belt.”

And right about then, the man sat back and put his hands up. Wheeler wondered ‘What the …?’

He lifted his head and looked in the direction the man was staring. There stood another man, with a gun.

After DeBoard announced that he was a concealed carrier, Cpl. Wheeler flipped the drug abuser off him and cuffed him. Wheeler credits Deboard for saving his life.

The post This Concealed Carrier Saved An Officer Under Attack appeared first on Bearing Arms.

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This Concealed Carrier Saved An Officer Under Attack

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Microsoft To Lay Off Another 2,850 People In the Next 12 Months

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Business Insider: Microsoft is planning to lay off 2,850 more employees in the next 12 months or so, according to Microsoft’s full 10-K report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Part of the document reads: "In addition to the elimination of 1,850 positions that were announced in May 2016, approximately 2,850 roles globally will be reduced during the year as an extension of the earlier plan, and these actions are expected to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2017." Business Insider reports: "The first 1,850 layoffs mentioned here were mainly from Microsoft’s struggling smartphone business, including 1,350 employees in Finland working at what was once Nokia world headquarters. These layoffs also included people in Microsoft’s salesforce, which was recently reorganized and saw the departure of COO Kevin Turner. In total, Microsoft laid off 7,400 employees in its last fiscal year, which ended on June 30th, 2016. The new layoffs are a continuation of the same plan, and include the sales group as well as others. About 900 people affected by the new layoffs were already informed during the sales reorganization, according to a person familiar with Microsoft’s plans."



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Microsoft To Lay Off Another 2,850 People In the Next 12 Months

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Christophe Gans’ Beauty and the Beast Is the Most Beautiful Thing We’ve Seen In Ages


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Christophe Gans’ version of the fairy tale, starring Vincent Cassel (Jason Bourne) and Léa Seydoux (Spectre) is coming to the United States this fall. And with this trailer, it’s officially the best-looking of any of the recent cinematic attempts to do these fairy tales justice.

Seriously, everything in this trailer is rich and the whole thing feels weirdly dreamlike. There is a lot packed into these two minutes, including the parts of Belle taking the place of her father and her deal with the Beast. But there also seems to be flashbacks to the Beast’s old life, something going on with Belle’s family of a ruined father and many siblings, and what looks like a bit of Jack and the Beanstalk thrown in for good measure.

Beauty and the Beast (or, with the original French title, La Belle et la Bête) will open in select cities on September 23, 2016.

via Gizmodo
Christophe Gans’ Beauty and the Beast Is the Most Beautiful Thing We’ve Seen In Ages

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Motorized Handheld 5.56mm Gatling Gun: The XM556 Microgun

Empty Shell, LLC: their website home page reads “Unique Firearms Design,” and they’re not lying.

The one we’re talking about here is called the XM556 Microgun, and it’s a motorized gatling-style gun that fires 5.56 NATO ammo like it’s going out of style. Oh, and it’s designed to be handheld, which makes it the first of its kind.

(Image: Empty Shell, LLC)

(Image: Empty Shell, LLC)

Here’s a quote from their website:

After working in the firearm industry… [we saw] a consistent pattern. Products typically evolved from companies looking around at current trends and trying to get on board before they caught on.

When we founded Empty Shell in 2014, it was decided that we would not go that route. We will only bring products to market that add value to the industry and have a large advantage to the end user. We will never sell something that you can find easily somewhere else. We also only add team members and vendors that understand our vision and are talented enough to produce parts with the same commitment we have in developing them.

About the XM556, they have this to say:

The XM556 is a new platform system… designed from scratch. The parts are not just a smaller imitation of the larger M134. An absolutely all new style of bolt was conceived and designed to eliminate current known issues with the M134. The bolts combined with many other improvements have been made to not only extend the life of the gun but reduce wear and reduce or eliminate stoppages.

Right now, they’ve uploaded a total of three short videos on Youtube. This first one shows the gun chewing & spewing 100 dummy rounds of ammo.

This next one shows a very short test.

And finally, the video below shows a “belt” of linked rounds being fed into the gun and then fired. This thing sure goes through the ammo quickly!

Here are some specs:

  • Caliber: 5.56mm
  • Barrel Length: 10″ or 16″
  • Total Gun Weight: 16 lbs (subject to change)
  • Rate of Fire: 2000/4000 (subject to change)
  • Total Length: Handheld 22″
  • Total Height: 6″
  • Total Width: 9″
  • Feed System: M-27 Linked Ammunition Belt
  • Fire Mode: Full Auto Only
  • Power Requirement: 24 Volts DC
  • Barrel Life: TBD
  • System Life: TBD
  • Status: Prototype/Still in Development

Want…

The post Motorized Handheld 5.56mm Gatling Gun: The XM556 Microgun appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.

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Motorized Handheld 5.56mm Gatling Gun: The XM556 Microgun

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It’s the data, stupid: Why database admins are more important than ever

It may not be all about the tables anymore, but the DBA role is still essential—even if the person doing it doesn’t have the title. (credit: Michael Mandiberg)

For those of us who have been in the information technology realm for too long, the title "database administrator" conjures up very specific images. We picture someone pulling hair out over issues with backups or snapshots not happening, schemas growing out of control, capacity plans blown up by new application demands, sluggish queries, and eternal performance tuning.

That old-school role of the DBA still exists in some places, particularly large enterprises where giant database clusters still rule the data center. But virtualization, cloud data storage, micro-services, the "DevOps" approach to building and running applications, and a number of other factors have significantly changed how organizations store and manage their data. Many of the traditional roles of the DBA seem to be moot in the shiny, happy world promised by the new generation of databases.

"NoSQL" databases don’t require a pre-defined schema, and many have replication built in by default. Provisioning new servers can be reduced to clicking a few radio buttons and check boxes on a webpage. Development teams just point at a cloud data store such as Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3) and roll. And even relational database vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM are pushing customers toward data-as-a-service (DaaS) models that drastically simplify considerations about hardware and availability.

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via Ars Technica
It’s the data, stupid: Why database admins are more important than ever