Month: May 2010

Not This Crap Again

Jay over at MArooned stumbled upon some major stupidity. Somebody is suing Starbucks because they dared to serve him hot tea:

According to the complaint, the plaintiff Zeynep Inanli was served tea that was “unreasonably hot, in containers which were not safe,” at a Starbucks store at 685 Third Avenue in Manhattan.

As a result of Starbucks’ negligence, the plaintiff suffered “great physical pain and mental anguish,” including the burns, the complaint said.

Of course they threw in the mental anguish. It’s easy to make millions when unspecified damages are thrown in. This would be a fine country if it wasn’t for all the fucking frivolous lawsuits.

Another Glock .22 Conversion Kit

Gun Nuts Media let us know there is another .22 conversion kit in the market. It has the following features according to the website:

* 15 round polymer magazine
* Last round hold open
* Fits the GLOCK® models 17, 22, 34 and 35
* Factory GLOCK® sights
* 1-16” Twist chome moly steel barrel
* 4140 Blued steel slide

It looks to compare favorably to the Advantage Arms kit I have. But the big difference is Advantage Arms is a California company and thus their magazines are restricted to 10 rounds, this new one doesn’t have that limitation. Unfortunately this new kit comes in at $350.00 to $410.00 making it quite a bit more expensive than Advantage Arms kit which comes in at $265.00 if you can find one (that being a HUGE if).

I don’t think a higher capacity magazine is worth an additional $85.00 myself. But I’m waiting with anticipation for reviews to see if anything else the new kit does is worth the additional cost.

Honduras Still Receiving Backlash for Enforcing Their Constititution

A while ago there was quite a stink over Honduras actually enforcing their Constitution and removing their then president from power. Well a lot of well respected neighboring states including Venezuela and our own government didn’t like the idea of a country actually obeying it’s own laws and threw up a stink.

Now they are threatening (promising?) to not attend the yearly European Union-Latin America summit if Honduras’s current president, Porfirio Lobo, attends. See they don’t recognize the legitimacy of Mr. Lobo’s seat because a potential dictator was removed lawfully to put Lobo in place. I love this:

An aide to Brazil’s President Lula, Marco Aurelio Garcia, said: “If Honduras attends, then at least 10 Latin American presidents will not go to Madrid, starting with the president of Brazil.”

I wonder what types of governments those 10 countries have. Probably something along the lines of what Venezuela has which is idealistically opposed to what the summit is apparently about:

But correspondents say its goals of development and democracy-building remain far off.

Yeah that’s not sounding like a threat so much as a promise.

Real Terrorist Prevention

Bruce Schneier once again points out how our government’s policies and methods for preventing terrorism are wrong. He wrote a recent article for the New York Times that describes what is being down incorrectly:

Think about the security measures commonly proposed. Cameras won’t help. They don’t prevent terrorist attacks, and their forensic value after the fact is minimal. In the Times Square case, surely there’s enough other evidence — the car’s identification number, the auto body shop the stolen license plates came from, the name of the fertilizer store — to identify the guy. We will almost certainly not need the camera footage. The images released so far, like the images in so many other terrorist attacks, may make for exciting television, but their value to law enforcement officers is limited.

Check points won’t help, either. You can’t check everybody and everything. There are too many people to check, and too many train stations, buses, theaters, department stores and other places where people congregate. Patrolling guards, bomb-sniffing dogs, chemical and biological weapons detectors: they all suffer from similar problems. In general, focusing on specific tactics or defending specific targets doesn’t make sense. They’re inflexible; possibly effective if you guess the plot correctly, but completely ineffective if you don’t. At best, the countermeasures just force the terrorists to make minor changes in their tactic and target.

Exactly. Our government agencies focus on specific threats and put in countermeasures for threats that have already been used. When somebody put explosives in their shoes TSA made you remove your shoes at their “security” checkpoints. When somebody tried using a liquid bomb on a plane TSA barred you from carrying bottled water on board (unless you purchased it at an exorbitant rate behind the “security” checkpoint). But bad guys are creative and think up new methods that avoid the implemented specific threat countermeasures.

No Miranda Rights For You

Dvorak Uncensored lead me to another reason for me to hate most of our politicians. Senator Lindsey Graham wants to deny reading Miranda rights to “suspect terrorists.” This another one of those bills that may look acceptable on paper until you look at what Senator Graham views as a terrorist:

“The homeland is part of the battlefield. So this idea that you get to America, the rules dramatically change, to the benefit of the suspect – the terrorist – makes no sense,” he said.

Yes the suspect is a terrorist. Note that wording. The suspect is not a potential terrorist, he or she is a terrorist. I’ve often argued that terrorism is akin to child molestation in this country in that you are guilty upon accusation. In either of the two cases you are pretty much screwed because even if you are found guilty the stain of the accusation is permanent and is as good as being found guilty. I will note another thing here:

Graham told POLITICO he is working on legislation that would redefine the so-called “public safety exemption” to Miranda warnings. Under current law, police can question a suspect to obtain admissible evidence without informing them of their rights if they believe that there is an “exigent danger” – like a ticking time bomb — that another crime is about to be committed.

If the suspected terrorist is an immediate threat Miranda rights can be ignore. So why do we need another law? Oh that’s right because you could avoid having to inform detainees of their rights simply by accusing them of terrorism.

Now truth be told you’re an idiot if you don’t know your rights. I’m not saying having to read Miranda rights is a good or bad thing here (personally I think they’re a good thing). What I’m saying is we shouldn’t be making exceptions like these to laws. It’s a slippery slope to say the least. The next thing that would be up I believe would be an exemption to a fast and speedy trial for suspected terrorists holding an American citizenship caught within the United States.

Likewise Mr. Graham’s attitude that suspected terrorists are automatically guilty is disturbing. Nobody who is making laws should have this attitude.

Ubuntu 10.04

So the new version of Ubuntu was released a short while ago. It’s now at version 10.04 also called ludicrous lackey or something like that. Anyways I’m already fighting with it inside the confines of a virtual machine. Here’s a very quick bullet point of what I noticed:

  • The new theme is ugly as sin
  • Now that the window control buttons have been moved to the left side (think Mac OS) the left side of the window feels cluttered (window controls plus the menu bar on the same side)
  • The problem of installing Eclipse from Ubuntu’s software repositories not including several update URLs inside of Eclipse hasn’t been fixed

More to come as I experience it.

Hollywood Computers

We’ve all seen movies where the main star creates a computer virus by aligning three dimensional cubes on a 10 monitor display in order to create a super virus to destroy the bad guys’ computers. Hollywood believe computers are magic and I found a good list of Hollywood’s favorite computer sorcery. My pet peeve is on there:

3. You can zoom and enhance any footage

This has long been the staple of the lazy writer (particularly those working for CSI): a security camera or photo is put on a screen, someone asks for zone G4 to be zoomed and enhanced, then as if by magic stunning detail appears from nowhere and the criminal is identified.

For this system to work it either requires every camera and CCTV system to use Gigapixel resolutions, or such incredible computing technology that Hollywood could throw away all of its expensive HD cameras and shoot everything using £50 camcorders.

As we all know, all zooming into a poor-quality image would do is give a muddled blurry mess on the screen. This technique was recently brilliantly parried in Red Dwarf.