Month: October 2011

Hope and Change Baby

Remember when the Obamessiah promised he wouldn’t go after medical marijuana growers:

“Prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users,” he said in the summer of 2007, is “really not a good use of Justice Department resources.” Later he extended that statement to include medical marijuana growers and promised that “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.” Early in his administration, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, reiterated these points.

Apparently The Chosen One doesn’t remember this:

Federal prosecutors have launched a crackdown on some pot dispensaries in California, warning the stores that they must shut down in 45 days or face criminal charges and confiscation of their property even if they are operating legally under the state’s 15-year-old medical marijuana law.

Perhaps this is part of Obama’s new job creation bill, hire a bunch more government goons to raid and shutdown medical marijuana facilities. Either that or the federal government is just upset that a state is refusing to respect their authoritah. Finally, just so there’s no ambiguity, I leave you with this paragraph:

The Department of Justice issued a policy memo to federal prosecutors in late June stating that marijuana dispensaries and licensed growers in states with medical marijuana laws could face prosecution for violating federal drug and money-laundering laws. The effort to shutter California dispensaries appeared to be the most far-reaching effort so far to put that guidance into action.

Obama promised he wouldn’t use the Department of Justice to override state marijuana laws and he’s using the Department of Justice.

Real Contributions to Society

I believe Kevin Williamson summarized a fact of life that I often talk about but can never eloquently express:

CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit.

Bear with me because this post isn’t another about Steve Jobs, but one about those who fail to realize what social good really is. According to many a wealthy person who fails to publicly donate great deals of money to various charitable organizations is an evil man who has gained greatly from society without giving anything back. Truth be told, for many, their wealth was obtained through the social good they provided.

Steve Jobs is only on example of this. Henry Ford is another example, the man innovated the assembly line to manufacture automobiles and paid his employees well so they could afford to purchase those very automobiles and kickstart the market. Affordable automobiles dramatically changed society for the better just as affordable computers did.

Instead of writing a long complaint about Steve Jobs’s less than stellar philanthropic tendencies from a personal computer, you should be writing a long post thanking him for bettering society by having the vision to see computers as more than giant expensive monstrosities that only the wealthiest of businesses could afford. This is the beauty of capitalism, resources are allocated in a voluntary manner to those who best serve the desires of society. If you don’t like Apple computers that’s perfectly OK because you can purchase a computer from one of their competitors. You get a direct vote in saying which good best serves your needs without forcing it upon others.

When you purchase a Ford automobile you’re effectively saying that Ford has found a means of serving your needs better than Toyota. If you purchased a Prius you’re giving your vote to Toyota. Regardless of what automobile you buy it doesn’t effect me and I am still allowed to decide for myself which vehicle will best serve my needs.

Capitalism is a beautiful thing and we should strive to expand it throughout our society instead of expanding government controlled markets.

My First Apple Computer

I guess being in the technology field I should have expected the immense amount of news regarding Steve Jobs’s death to flood every channel of communications I have available to me. This news has actually interrupted my process of finding, reading, and writing about various articles of interest so you’re dealing with less than optimal posts today. In luie of having normal A Geek With Guns content to post I’m going to perpetuate a meme that’s been going around, I’m going to talk about my first Apple computer.

While others can talk about their experiences with an early Apple II or one of the first Macintoshes, I only jumped on the Apple ship after they shipped OS X 10.4. Before that I really had no use for Apple computers as I found their operating system lacking and the available software sparse. When 10.4 shipped I finally believed the operating system to be a competent and fully featured UNIX system and I had been looking for a good laptop running some flavor of UNIX for some time by then. At the time Linux was still unusable as far as I was concerned for laptops (suspend never worked correctly, battery life was usually half of what you could get in Windows, driver support for various Wi-Fi cards was non-existent, etc.).

Needless to say I ended up buying a PowerBook G4. My first PowerBook was one of the last in the line (model identifier was a PowerBook5,6) and came equipped with a measly 1.67GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive. The bloody thing ran though and gave me few headaches. I used it for most of my school work and eventually it filled the role of everything except gaming (which I used to do far more of when I was young). While I still own the machine it really is of little use considering how woefully underpowered it is. Still, it’s fun to bring it out of storage once in a while and power it up for nostalgia sake.

Still, from that humble laptop I eventually purchased the first model Mac Pro to replace my aging desktop. While I spent most of my life vehemently hating Apple computers the quality of their new operating system and hardware won me over. Now most of my machines are Apple manufactured and I can say they have given me far fewer headaches than previous machines I have owned. Hell Apple won me over in the phone market even though they perform practices that I find detestable (yet their phones do what I need which is what is really important in my opinion).

What is it With Police and Shooting Dogs

It seems like every SWAT raid story involves members of said SWAT team shooting the home owner’s dog for no apparent reason. Well it’s not just the SWAT team that has a joyous time killing harmless animals; the Langrange, Missouri police department decided it would be a jolly good time to shoot a restrained dog that was passively lying on the ground while wagging its tail. The following is video footage of the event:

What a bunch of disgusting fuckers. My hope is that this video goes viral and the officer that shot the dog is fired (I’d also hope he is brought up on charges but alas that might be asking for the absolute impossible). A tip of the old hat goes to Uncle for this.

Odd OS X Lion Server Bug

Since I was beating my head against the wall for several hours last night trying to figure this out I’m going to give a piece of advice to everybody working with OS X Lion Server in a virtual environment.

You can not set your virtual server to be an Open Directory Master unless there are at least two CPUs attached to the virtual machine. No errors indicating as such will be given, apparently you’re just supposed to know this intuitively. It’s a very strange bug and thankfully somebody figured it out.

More Proof That The Government Views Us as Serfs

I often throw around the word serf as a tongue-in-cheek description of how the government views us. Sadly it’s not as tongue-in-cheek as it should be. A serf was a term used for somebody who worked land owned by a lord. While the lord reaped all of the benefits of the land the serfs were merely allowed to work said land and live there. This is basically the relationship that exists between government and people. Minnesota decided to give a great example of this fact to the citizenry by auctioning off mineral rights to private property:

Private property owners from the Ely area will make a final appeal Wednesday to the state’s top leaders to stop exploration for copper on their land, which lies in a part of the state cherished for its clean lakes and stately forests.

The state’s Executive Council, made up of the governor, the attorney general and other elected officials, is holding a special meeting to hear out citizens who have been fighting the state’s decision last April to sell 50-year mineral leases on their land.

Residents and cabin owners in what may become a new copper mining district near Ely say they were shocked that the state’s century-old minerals law seems skewed to favor mining companies over property owners. It was also their introduction to a side of the Department of Natural Resources that they had never seen — the one with a mission to promote mining.

This is very common throughout the world, while the government will “sell” you property they will keep all mineral rights over that property even after the sale. Canada is a great example of this where the government claims ownership to the mineral rights of all property sold after the early 1900s.

While the people living in Ely, Minnesota thought they owned their land they’re now realizing that they don’t. If they truly owned their land they could forcibly remove the mine speculators from their property as trespassers. Instead those speculators have permission from the government to not only search “private” property for minerals but also mine those minerals without having to grant the “owner” of the property anything but minor compensations.

How disgusting is it that you don’t even own your own property? If you find gold somewhere on your property you’d best not tell anybody as the government may gain knowledge of it and move in to take that gold from you. For a society to be truly peaceful absolute property rights must be recognized.

So Long Steve Jobs and Thanks For Everything

I knew I’d be writing this article sooner or later but I was hoping it would be later… much later. Unless you’ve been living under one of the world’s largest rocks you’ve likely heard that Steve Jobs died last night. It’s strange to see the passing of a business man garner so much publicity but I believe that speaks for the impact he had on the world. Along with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs literally changed the world.

If it wasn’t for Steve Jobs I can honestly say I wouldn’t be where I am today. I say this not because Steve Jobs was a man of inspiration for me in my youth, but because the invention he helped nurture into fruition kicked off the personal computer revolution. People will rightfully point out that Steve Wozniak was the man who invented the first marketed personal computer but it would be an act of absolute ignorance to say Steve Jobs had no part in its success. Of the two I’m obviously closer to Wozniak, I’m an engineer who loves to invent and tinker but I have no clue how to market or sell. Jobs’s genius was in his ability to sell the product. Through my career I’ve worked with numerous sales people and I can say without any uncertainty that I truly understand why they’re as important as they are. Without Wozniak there would have been no personal computer as we know it today and without Jobs we would have never heard of the computer Wozniak built.

Whether you love or hate Apple you have to admit Jobs did something few can lay claim to; he changed the world. But the personal computer wasn’t the only thing Jobs could lay claim to, he also revolutionized the music market and the mobile device market. After his return to Apple Jobs took the failing computer and turned it into one of the most successful companies in the world. A major part of that turn around involved the iPod. Although the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player on the market it was the one that moved MP3 players from a device known only by geeks to a device owned by a great number of people.

Another success under Jobs’s belt was the iPhone. When the first iPhone was released I was still on the Palm Treo 755p so I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Yes the iPhone looked nice but it couldn’t run any applications and had limited functionality compared to my phone running ancient Palm OS. Like most things Apple introduced though, the iPhone slowly evolved into an incredibly powerful tool. When the news of Jobs’s death arrived one of my fellow computer science graduates called me to talk about it. During this conversation we got on the topic of all the things Jobs accomplished and I remember saying, “Hell, I’m talking on his legacy right now.”

Technology has become so pervasive in our lives that we rarely stop to think about all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into getting our devices from the prototype stage to a completed product. When you sit down in front of your computer you barely ever think about the efforts of Alan Turning who came up with the theory modern computing is based on. When you pick up your phone you probably never stop to consider the great amount of effort it took to make the device function as well as it does.

Part of what made helped rocket Jobs into success was his attention to detail. If there was one thing Jobs brought to the table, above all others, it was his extreme attention to detail. This is pervasive in all of Apple’s current product lines. The MacBook Pro I’m typing this story on is a beautiful piece of technology that is not only insanely powerful but a work of art in of itself. My phone is a very powerful and complicated piece of machinery that remains simple to operate. This page you’re now reading was uploaded to your computer by a tiny Mac Mini sitting underneath my television.

Many who knew Jobs said he was arrogant and often very difficult to work for. I didn’t know the man personally so I can’t comment on his personal life but there is something to be said for a man who is seen as arrogant yet able to attract some of the greatest talent in the world to his employ. Jobs was a visionary who helped change computers from giant room-sized devices that only large businesses and laboratories had to small device that many households hold many of. He was never one to back down and always followed what he thought was right. To sum the man up it would be easier to say he had balls. It’s rare to find a man who is so incredibly talented that he changed the entire world. What’s even rarer is to find a man who changed the entire world in a positive way.

So long Steve Jobs and thanks for everything. Life on this planet would be far different had you and Wozniak not come together to revolutionize the world. We’ll miss you and I can honestly say the world is diminished without your presence.

Why Not, We’ve Limited Every Other Right

Is it bad when our “representatives” are so brazen in their hatred for our supposedly constitutionally guaranteed rights that they flat out say we should reinterpret those rights as privileges? I think it’s bad and that’s exactly what they’re doing:

Proponents of a more refined First Amendment argue that this freedom should be treated not as a right but as a privilege — a special entitlement granted by the state on a conditional basis that can be revoked if it is ever abused or maltreated.

Wow… I’m really at a loss for words. Can you imagine what would happen if you could only exercise speech at the blessing of the state? This blog would be gone in a heartbeat along with, likely, 99% of the other gun blogs. The Mises Institute would likely get the gag order along with Reason Magazine and every other publication that dares criticize the government.

Then again the government has already turned every so-called right into a privilege that requires state approval to exercise so why not speech? While we’re at it why not require passports to travel between the various states of the Union? Perhaps the government could install cameras in every home to ensure nothing seditious is taking place within.

Make no mistake, unless people demonstrate visible outrage over statements like this the critters in Congress will think they can get away with acting on these statements.

The Obama Campaign Blame Game

Those dastardly Republicans are at it again, they’re doing everything in their power to block the Obamessiah’s jobs bill! What a bunch of despicable bastards! Don’t they know that they’re going to ruin this country unless they follow the plan of Our Dear Leader? Wait a minute… when did Harry Reid become a Republican:

On the Senate floor today, Republican leader Mitch McConnell asked for unanimous consent to proceed on voting on the bill. Reid, who has struggled to find enough votes for the bill in the Democratic caucus, objected to the motion and killed the opportunity for a vote.

But that doesn’t jive with the message the Obama Campaign sent out regarding this:

President Obama is in Dallas today urging Americans who support the American Jobs Act to demand that Congress pass it already.

Though it’s been nearly a month since he laid out this plan, House Republicans haven’t acted to pass it. And House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is out there actually bragging that they won’t even put the jobs package up for a vote — ever.

It’s not clear which part of the bill they now object to: building roads, hiring teachers, getting veterans back to work. They’re willing to block the American Jobs Act — and they think you won’t do anything about it.

But here’s something you can do: Find Republican members of Congress on Twitter, call them out, and demand they pass this bill.

So Harry Reid blocked the vote on Obama’s jobs bill and the Obama Campaign is blaming the Republicans. Since our politicians are acting like a bunch of three year-olds I propose we change the Capitol Building into a giant playpen full of children’s toys. Hell we can even get them a pony.

Apple Displayed Masterful Mediocrity Yesterday

Yesterday was Apple’s iPhone event and I must say they have mastered the art if being completely mediocre. The only announcements they made that I felt remotely excited about were the fact that Sprint will now have the iPhone (as they’re the last carrier with unlimited data that’s quite nice) and Siri. After they finished jerking themselves off over how great their sales are, Apple’se first product announcement was Cards. Cards is an application that lets you send, well, cards to people for $2.99 a pop. When they made Cards their first announcement I knew this event was going to be non-consequential.

Apple again talked about iOS 5 but alas I’ve been playing with it for months now and there was nothing new tossed in at the last minute to make it exciting. Either way iOS 5 will be officially released on October 12th.

Next on the list of announcements was Siri. Siri is the iPhone 4S’s new voice service which is akin to Android’s voice service if it were on steroids. Let me rephrase, if Siris works it will be akin to Android’s voice service on steroids. Siri will supposedly allow you to do a great number of tasks by using your voice which is nice for those who see the need to send a text message when they’re hurtling down the highway (you know who you are, I hate you by the way). While Siri looks impressive it’s restricted to the iPhone 4S which limits its appeal.

Speaking of the iPhone 4S, that was Apple’s only notable hardware announcement (they announced a new iPod Touch, but who really cares). The iPhone 4S is simply an iPhone 4 with a faster process, better camera, and dual mode radio (every 4S is both GSM and CDMA capable). It’s not really worth the upgrade in my opinion if you’re already carrying an iPhone 4.

So there you have it, Apple’s rather lackluster event. I think Amazon won the device unveiling this month but that could have something to do with the fact that I’m a Kindle fanboy.