Month: January 2010

Say Hello to the Dumb Gun

Here’s a bad idea in motion. It’s a $10,000 .22 “smart” gun. The principal is simple, the gun only fires when it’s close enough to a watch that the owner would need to wear.

Of course one would inquire about the usefulness of a gun that fails to function because the battery in a watch died. Furthermore the designers put a nice bright LED on the guns that is green when the gun is activated and red when it’s not. Of course in the middle of the night when you don’t want to give away your position you’re rather fucked. Speaking of the night what happens if somebody breaks into your home and you have to act fast? Grab the watch, throw it on, and fire?

This gun looks like failure incarnate.

Mayor Steve Lampi of Brooklyn Park

The office of Steve Lampi has been very good to fill my information request in a timely manner. They’ve done an outstanding job providing all information between Mayor Lampi and Mayors Against Illegal Guns. I haven’t read through everything yet but I’m going to post what I have received. The documents linked here are not descriptively titled which I apologize for. I’m going to leave the document titles as I received them until such a time I can come up with a decent filing system and naming convention. Anyways here’s what I’ve received so far:

Document 1
Document 2
Document 2A
Document 2B
Document 2C
Document 2D
Document 2E
Document 2E1
Document 2E2

Minnesota Mayors Against Illegal Guns

We all know the organization Mayors Against Illegal Guns is a deceptively named organization that is actually Mayor Bloomberg’s personal crusade to disarm the American populace. Of course this organization is also fairly secretive with little information given publicly.

Thankfully there are laws similar to the federal Freedom of Information Act in every state. Since I live in Minnesota I decided to use our law to extract as much information about the organization as I can from Minnesota mayors whom are members. There are five Minnesota mayors in the coalition:

Mayor Steve Lampi of Brooklyn Park
Mayor Elizabeth B. Kautz of Burnsville
Mayor Don Ness of Duluth
Mayor R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis
Mayor Chris Coleman of St. Paul

I have sent requests to each of these mayors and am planning on posting all retrieved data on this site as well as Truth About Guns. There are two main goals to this project. Goal one is simply to find what information the coalition is sending to its members. The second goal is a little more complex.

We know many mayors don’t know the actual purpose behind Mayors Against Illegal Guns. This is known because may mayors have left once it was made apparent that the coalition isn’t against illegal guns alone, but guns in general. This lead me to believe the correspondences being sent to members are as carefully worded as information that is publicly released. If this is so this information could help us better fight Bloomberg’s little posse.

Periodically I’ll post information retrieved. Everything I receive will be posted regardless of perceived value or redundancy with information previously posted. I urge every gun owner to take similar actions in their state of residence.

Responses

Mayor Steve Lampi of Brooklyn Park

State of the Union

Yesterday was Wednesday meaning two things. The first is that it was the night of the weekly Liberty Hour where a group of friends and I get together and talk politics, economics, and everything else right-wing libertarian terrorists talk about. But last night was also the Obamessiah’s speech where he lied through his teeth talk about the previous year and the coming year.

What did I take away from it? Nothing good. First there was the Bush blame game which is really getting old at this point. Second there was the whole lie about how the bailouts saved the economy. And of course a constant slew of bullshit streaming from his mouth.

There were a few funny things. First Joe Biden apparently didn’t get the memo and started to clap before he was supposed to. Second the president of Haiti was there and appeared to be sleeping until Obama mentioned his country. Nancy Pelosi looked as scary as ever. And it was funny watching the Democrats stand and applause every two seconds while the Republicans only stood and applauded every 10 seconds. Sadly nobody gave the President the finger.

What did I take away from his speech? Well I reaffirmed that the government doesn’t like the citizens.

The iPad

My friend Chris summed up my thoughts on the new iPad as well:

Its perfect, I was just thinking the other day: Wouldn’t it be great if I had an iPhone that didn’t fit in my pocket and couldn’t make phone calls? Or a netbook with no keyboard and 50% glass.

Yeah I’m not impressed. I’ll also add wouldn’t it be great to have an e-reader with an LCD screen so I can replicate the experience of reading books on my laptop. I really don’t see where Apple is going with this thing.

MacBook Air USB Ethernet Adapter Works on All Macs

Just a heads up to a question I had for a while but never found a definitive answer to. Apple has a USB Ethernet adapter for the MacBook Air which lacks any Ethernet interface. They advertise it as only working with the MacBook Air and if you ask an Apple Store employee they will tell you the adapter doesn’t work with any other Apple computer.

This made little sense to me since I assumed the driver for their adapter is included in their operating system. Anyways I purchased one because I need access to two separate networks at work. Anyways I’m happy to report the adapter works perfectly with my MacBook Pro laptop.

The adapter works very well. Being it plugs into a USB port (The theoretical maximum data rate of which is 480 Mbps) the adapter only runs at 10/100, so no gigabit for you. The data rate is good enough for the purposes I have at work but I wouldn’t want it for home use due to speed issues. Every application on the Mac, included my beloved and needed Wireshark, see the adapter as a standard Ethernet port and interact with it accordingly. That was my primary and honestly only requirement.

On the downside there are now status lights on the adapter. This is very annoying as I often use the status lights to determine if a port has gone dead or if data is flowing. Either way it works and that’s what I cared about most.

NRA Granted Divided Time in Chicago Case

Some news has appeared during my moving hiatus that I’m not very happy to hear. Via Snowflakes in Hell I found out the NRA was granted their divided time in the Chicago case in front of the Supreme Court.

Those of you unfamiliar with Supreme Court cases each side gets half an hour for their arguments. Within this half hour time space each side must also answer questions from the judges. This leaves little time for each side and losing 10 minutes, or 1/3, of the time to the NRA is going to really eat into Mr. Gura’s time.

I’m not happy with this outcome nor the NRA’s little ploy but I do understand their reasoning.