Month: August 2010

More Stupid Laws

Representative Edward J. Markey has brought forth the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. It was just passed by the House and is on its way to the Senate.

The bill, apparently, is an attempt to force technology companies to make web sites and devices accessible to the blind. Of course it’s a rather long bill to simply accomplish that so I’m guessing there are some other hidden surprises are buried in that bill.

I have a problem with this type of legislation (if that surprises you I’m guessing this is your first time visiting my site, welcome). Back in college I had a professor who was Hell bent of forcing all her students to create accessible web sites (she was the instructor for a couple web development classes). Sure that’s fine and all until you realize one major problem, you handicap your capabilities by doing this.

This site you’re reading right now is mostly text. I post very few images or other media here. Even with something as simple as text this site probably isn’t accessible to any screen reader on the planet. Why is that? Because I use WordPress. WordPress, like almost every other content management system on the planet, throws a lot of extra junk into a website. Need proof? Look at the source code of the page you’re viewing right now.

Screen readers also can’t interface with well when a page uses scripting, which almost all pages do (as I know because I use NoScript to block most of it). Scripting is needed for a lot of things including active content (think Google Maps). You just can’t get around it when you’re making dynamic web pages (OK you can but it’s a development nightmare and requires all active work be done server side thus requires far more hardware to run the same site). And that’s just web pages.

Devices are a whole different world. I’ve mentioned the whining over Amazon’s Kindle not being accessible (which they fixed when it was brought to their attention I might add). In the case of the Kindle that is a device that can be made accessible pretty easily because it only works with text. Tell me how can you make a touch-screen based phone such as the Evo 4G, iPhone, or Palm Pre accessible to a blind person? There isn’t technology available at an affordable price that can create a braille touch screen. Combine that with the fact that since there are no physical controls on many new phones there is no way to “feel” your way around the interface even if it reads everything to you. Amazon did prove if it’s practical to make a device accessible to disabled individuals it will be done. Otherwise it can’t be done because our world is regulated by reality which most politicians don’t understand.

The bottom line is people with disabilities have special needs. I’m sorry to say but these people need devices that are specially made for them. It’s a fact of life that when a minority of people exist that have needs different than the large majority not every device can be crafted around that minority. Doing so would slow our technological progress to a crawl or make everything so bloody expensive nobody could afford them. Just imagine how expensive automobiles would be today if they had to be accessible to the blind. Yes it would have to drive itself which would require a ton of on board sensors, computers, and other pricey equipment. Needless to say it’s not practical by any means so the blind simply aren’t allowed to drive.

You can call me an insensitive asshole for stating this but that doesn’t make it any less true. I simply am a big enough asshole that I don’t care what people think of me and thus am willing to state the blatantly obvious.

The RIAA and Logic, It’s Like the Brady Campaign and Logic

Apparently the RIAA is lobbying for the mandatory inclusion of FM receivers in all mobile devices. I can’t for the life of me follow whatever passes for logic with these people. How can you justify making a law to mandate the inclusion of FM receivers in mobile devices? Seriously what’s your justification? Please tell me because I my head hurts just trying to figured it out.

Is it to get people to listen to the radio? That probably isn’t going to work and I’ll tell you why. My Evo 4G has an integrated FM receiver (it wasn’t mandated by law but HTC figured if they’re going to throw in the kitchen sink then why not an FM receiver). I assume it works because everything else on the device does but I’ve not actually tried it. In fact I haven’t listened to an FM radio station since… shortly after I graduated high school I believe. That’s about the time I discovered FM transmitters that plug into iPods.

Now with my Evo I have an amazing data connection with Pandora and Last.fm. If I want to listen to a radio station I just punch up one of those two streaming services and listen to a station that doesn’t have advertisements and plays music I like (or at least attempts to). I pair that up with my Motorola T505 which connects to my Evo via Bluetooth and transmits the music I’m playing over a selected FM band. This means while I’m driving around I have my Pandora or Last.fm radio station playing music over my FM radio. Oh and it doubles as a hands free calling device to boot.

Sorry RIAA you’re business model is dead and buried. You can’t salvage it at this point and frankly nobody likes listening to the radio anymore because they play more ads than content. After all you can lobby for a law which forces every mobile device to have an included FM receiver but you can’t force anybody to utilize it.

Why I Never Delete Anything

One thing that is true about me is the fact I never delete files. OK I delete applications I’ve downloaded from the Internet once the versions I’ve obtained are outdated, and maybe a few other little files here and there. But in general I do delete files and that’s because storage is cheap.

I just picked up another 2TB 7200RPM hard drive for about $129.00. With space at that price level there really is no reason not to keep everything you’ve ever created, purchased, or downloaded.

There Ought to be a Law

Another anti-gunner who seems to lack the basic ability to comprehend logic. This article is mostly a hit piece on how guns are used to kill people and although not outright said a plea to ban them. Of course he points out a few shootings that somehow would be avoided if guns were illegal. Of course other laws were already broken in these shootings so I fail to understand how making more laws would have prevented them. Let’s take a look shall we?

13 are killed and 30 wounded at Ft. Hood, Texas, when an Army psychiatrist goes on a rampage.

Carrying a firearm on a military base is illegal. Homicide is illegal.

Three police officers in Pittsburgh are gunned down by a man who was upset about losing his job and convinced that the Obama administration was about to ban guns.

Discharging firearms within city limits is illegal. Homicide is illegal.

13 are killed at an immigrant community center in Binghamton when a Vietnamese immigrant goes on a shooting spree.

Discharging firearms within city limits is illegal. Homicide is illegal.

A former student opens fire at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, killing five students and wounding 18 more.

Carrying a firearm in the state of Illinois is illegal. Discharging firearms within city limits is illegal. Homicide is illegal.

A rifleman in Omaha starts shooting at a mall, killing eight and then killing himself.

Discharging a firearm within city limits is illegal. Homicide is illegal.

A student at Virginia Tech shoots 32 people dead before taking his own life.

Carrying a firearm on Virginia Tech campus is illegal. Homicide is illegal.

So if we append another law, “owning firearms is illegal” to these lists all of these criminals acts wouldn’t have happened? That’s your argument? No wonder we’re winning! Oh and as a parting piece:

The odd, ironic thing is that I have never once heard of a crazed “liberal” forcefully taking the guns away from anyone. Never even once. Instead, irresponsible, dangerous people who should not have guns do have guns and they keep right on using them to kill other people.

Yeah a forceful gun confiscation in the United States has never happened… oh wait. Sorry I seem to have deflated your argument, super sorry about that.

Gun Safety from Henigan

It’s a lot like sex education from the Pope.

Snowflakes in Hell dissects the ramblings of a madman. As usual Sebastian does an excellent job of ripping apart the malarkey being spewed by Henigan. Now ignorance is just plain funny sometimes and sad at other times. This article is a severe case of the latter:

But human beings are prone to mistakes – they can be clumsy, or distracted, or rushed, for example – and guns are sufficiently complicated mechanisms that even the slightest mistake can result in tragedy.

This is not true of other widely available products used as weapons. As the late columnist and humorist Molly Ivins once observed, “People are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.” In fact, the great paradox of gun design is that guns are complicated enough to invite accidents by adults, yet simple enough to be fired by a child.

Could the Brady Bunch please provide me the number of people killed every year while cleaning their guns? Even somebody with as much bias at the Brady Bunch, whom will probably include suicides in their statistics, will have a hard time coming up with significant numbers.

But it does go to who the average intelligence of an anti-gunner when they consider a firearm a complex device. I think they’d shit themselves if they ever actually looked inside of their computers.

No You Can’t Buy Your Property Back

A while back it was announced that South Korea was going to sell America back a bunch of M1 Garands. All the gunnies jumped up for joy and much cheer was spread throughout the land. Gunnies were getting their checkbooks ready in anticipation for the arrival of certified military M1 Garands. Alas joy has left the land as Say Uncle reports the United States government isn’t going to allow those South Korean rifles to be sold back to their original owners, the American people.

Yup our government is barring us from buying property our tax dollars originally purchased. How nice of them. Their reason:

“The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents. It was also worried the weapons could be smuggled to terrorists, gangs or other people with bad intentions,” the official told The Korea Times.

So terrorists are going to purchase a semi-automatic rifle that uses an ammunition that’s probably much harder to obtain than 7.62x39mm? Really? Instead of… fully automatic AK-47s that can be built in a cave? Really? That’s the best excuse those idiots on Capital Hill can come up with? Why not just say you don’t want the American people to be able to purchase these rifles? At least that would be honest.

Also now that the rifles can’t be sold to American collectors what’s to stop South Korea from selling them to a terrorist group? Logic fail!

Freedom of Speech so Long as It’s My Speech

I found an editorial over at Engadget that just makes me shake my head and weep for liberty. Apparently one writer there is shocked, SHOCKED I tell you that he was able to find Nazi themed applications on the Android Market. Hell he’s not only shocked he’s pissed off and demands censorship rights now!

Here’s the thing the Android Market is pretty open. There aren’t many restrictions in place unlike Apple’s iTunes Store. This means you are far more free to post what you want. Combine the fact you have an open platform and a freedom of speech in this country and you’re going to get things on there you don’t like. Of course the first thing a “progressive” liberal will want is censorship. I, on the other hand, want no censorship and instead realize that the price of the first amendment is having to encounter things I don’t like.

Let us look through some of the writer’s statements:

And here’s where we have to take a hard look at what censorship really means, and what kind of role it can (and clearly should) play in the new frontier of app marketplaces on mobile devices (and elsewhere). Let’s be clear about this right off the bat — an app store isn’t the internet. It’s not a free-for-all, it’s not an open venue where any type of wares might be hawked.

Actually it is exactly all of those things if the company running it chooses it to be. If Google wants to let anything into the Android Market then they can do that.

The whole point of these app portals is to provide a controlled service to your users that has guidelines and rules that make getting software onto your phone relatively easy and safe. Whether or not you have stringent policies for what you’ll accept (Apple), or few (Google), no one should pretend that this isn’t a siloed service that must have rails to operate.

No the whole point of an application store is to have a central place where store customers can easily find applications to run on their platform. This in turn is used to make it easy for those running said platform to find useful tools which encourages them to purchase that platform in the first place.

So the question becomes: what are your limits? If you say absolutely no censorship, does it apply to hate-speak?

Yes. The definition of absolutely no censorship is exactly that; absolutely no fucking censorship. In case the writer is unaware here is the dictionary definition of absolutely:

completely and without qualification; used informally as intensifiers; “an absolutely magnificent painting”; “a perfectly idiotic idea”; “you’re perfectly right”; “utterly miserable”; “you can be dead sure of my innocence”; “was dead tired”; “dead right”

I guess that word doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.

If you say yes to porn, does it mean yes to Hitler themes that appear when you search for seemingly unrelated terms? Does being open mean accepting everything? Or do we have to set some reasonable limits for what we will and won’t tolerate?

This man is obviously a “progressive” liberal. Why do I say that? Because he wants to set some “reasonable” limits on a right. Now since Google runs the Android Market they are free to do as they please include censor things but it appears they aren’t doing so. Personally I’m quite happy about this fact because it means, for now, Google is respecting my right to free speech on their platform store. But unlike the writer of this article I realize that freedom of speech means in turn for my right to say what I want other people get the same right. I don’t get a say in what other people say.

Think of it this way: app stores are kind of like privately owned bookstores.

Yup and with any privately owned store the owner can chose to respect patrons’ rights or not.

The owner of the bookstore doesn’t have to carry the art book of nudes or the pro-Nazi thesis.

But they can if they chose to.

In most situations, it doesn’t have to carry everything because there are plenty of other places to get those books.

Not if the writer had his way there wouldn’t be.

That concept is especially true for Android — users can sideload any applications they want onto their devices. No one is going to tell you that you can’t install a Nazi theme on your phone, but we’re pretty sure that Google shouldn’t make it so easy, and it shouldn’t subject a large portion of its users to content that rightfully deserves to sit on the fringes, not in the center.

Google isn’t making “it so easy.” They are simply providing a service where developers can upload their applications without having to worry about being blocked by arbitrary rules.

So ultimately, what’s the answer?

Shut the fuck up and let Google run their store as they please. If you don’t like it get an iPhone and be happy with Apple’s censorship.

But the part that’s confusing is the part that’s essentially a lie — that keeping certain pieces of content out of systems like the App Store or the Android Market equates to censorship… because it doesn’t.

Fuck back to the dictionary:

the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts : details of the visit were subject to military censorship.

Once again that word doesn’t mean what the writer thinks it means. Removing things you find objectionable or unacceptable is the very definition of censorship. The writer is a stupid little prat. I wouldn’t be so mad if he wasn’t lying and using misinformation. If he simply stated that he was offended and wanted the applications removed that would be one thing. But going on a tirade about how these applications should be removed and doing so isn’t actually censorship is twisting the meaning of words to build popular support for his crusade.

Look I despise Nazism as much as most people but that doesn’t mean I have the right to censor them. I also despise the Ku Klux Klan, Black Panthers, RIAA, MPAA, The Brady Campaign, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, SCIU and a long slew of other organizations. Do I want them silenced? No. They have a right to spew their bullshit as much as I have a right to spew mine. If any of those organizations made an application for the Android Market I wouldn’t demand a take down, I’d thank Google for allowing the first amendment on their store.

Sadly if this article gains any traction I know Google will most likely remove all the offending applications. Anyways I want to close out by saying fuck the author or this article for using standard “progressive” liberal tactics to justify his desire to only censor things he doesn’t approve of.