Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Damn State Preemption

Since the state of Minnesota has preemption over firearms laws the Moorhead is unable to ban the real thing. So what’s are a bunch of whiny anti-gunners to do? Try to ban replicas of course!

By whiny anti-gunners I mean the Moorhead police:

Police chief Dave Ebinger told the city council it’s hard to tell whether the gun is a real firearm or not and that officers are forced to treat the replicas as though they are real.

Sorry that doesn’t add up in this state. So long as a person has a valid carry permit they can openly carry a firearm. Therefore the question for police isn’t whether or that firearm being carried by John Doe is real, but whether or not Mr. Doe has a valid carry permit (which sadly matters in this state). Ultimately none of it matters unless the gun or replica in question is being used to threaten or harm another person. When things get to that point it matters now if the gun is fake or real if the person being threatened believes it to be real (as they then have justification to defend themselves).

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.

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!

When We’re Big Brother

There are many things I’m not a fan of including the surveillance state. Apparently Ramsey County thinks differently than me since they now have a new service available via their web page. Yes by going to Ramsey County’s Web Cop page you can gain access to cameras dispersed throughout Ramsey Country:

We need your help. Join our “Neighborhood eWatch” and help prevent crime by reporting any suspicious activity you observe on one of our cameras. Log into the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office “Web Cop – View Commander Software” to view 10 of our wireless surveillance cameras. To enter the site click here. When prompted, enter the following:

Username: public
Password: public

If you witness suspicious activity, call the East Metro Real-Time Information Center (EMRIC) at 651-266-9450, where analysts are able to pan, tilt and zoom the cameras to get a better look at the incident.

If you see a crime in progress, call 911 immediately and ask for Ramsey County Dispatch.

Thank you for helping to make our community a safer place.

So Ramsey County is now trying to get average people to be Big Brother in their place. Beyond the obvious surveillance state implications here there is another problem with this system. Ramsey County is essentially relying on amateurs to be a front-line security force. Bruce Schneier did a nice write up explaining why relying on amateurs for front-line security will only nab you amateur results. In other words all the money spent on this setup will be meaningless because the police will most likely receive more false positives than useful reports of crime.

With that said there is one useful feature on this site, the crime reports. They post up reports on crimes that have occurred in Ramsey County and do a glorious job of justifying why you should get a carry permit and have a firearm on you as often as possible.

Freedom isn’t Free

It costs $250. At least according to personal reports found by Days of our Trailers Chicago is charging $250 for a handgun license. It’s nice to see your rights are for sale in Chicago and priced at such a level that those poor peasant can’t hope to afford any firearms. But when you think about it that makes a lot of sense. You don’t want the slaves overthrowing King Daley.

Now That’s Blatant

It appears our Senate is in such a hurry to push a piece of legislation they forgot to actually name the fucking thing. Take a look at H.R. 1586 [PDF}:

SECTION 1. This Act may be cited as the
‘‘______Act of____’’.

That’s a catchy name! Boy our Senate is just flat out blatant about not even reading bills anymore. According to the summary the bill is:

‘‘An Act to modernize the air traf- fic control system, improve the safety, reliability, and avail- ability of transportation by air in the United States, provide for modernization of the air traffic control system, reauthor- ize the Federal Aviation Administration, and for other pur- poses.’’

I haven’t a clue what else is in it but it must be important if they didn’t even have time to give the bill a fucking name. Cripes! You’re government at work.

Net Neutrality Redux

I’ve mentioned the looming war over net neutrality before. The more I look at this problem the more I realize it’s a no-win situation. Regardless of the solution found we lose something. Very recently Google and Verizon announced their legislative framework for net neutrality [PDF]. For those of you unwilling to read the document is boils down to this; Verizon is willing to surrender on the net neutrality battle on their wired networks in exchange for being able to ignore net neutrality on it’s wireless network.

There seems to be two options in regards to this battle; ask the government to legislate net neutrality or allow ISPs to control what goes across their wires as they see fit. No matter what solution is arrived at we the people get shafted.

Let us look at option one, government legislation. Anybody with a grasp of history knows government legislation doesn’t every work out as planned. The most dangerous outcome of legislating net neutrality is it will give the government precedence to further legislate Internet traffic. Sure this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal at first right? Wrong. With this precedence all we’ll need is one self-righteous politician wanting to “protect the children” or one politician in the pocket of Comcast to introduce additional legislation. For instance since the government now gets to state what traffic will be neutral (you can guarantee they won’t write a bill saying all traffic, they’ll set a committee in place to decide these things) they will get to change the rules. Maybe one religious zealot will decide pornographic websites must be filtered, throttled, or blocked and change net neutrality to add an exception for said traffic. Another politician might listen to Comcast and claim since BitTorrent is mostly used for illegal file sharing that ISPs have the right to outright block the traffic. It’s a deep and dark hole and we don’t want to travel down.

The other interesting problem with government regulations is their desire to hand out bailouts. How so? Well the newspaper industry has been chomping at the bit for a bailout and the government has been thinking about doing so. One proposal put forth was to charge bloggers a fee which would be sent to the newspapers. The reason? Well according to those proposing this bloggers only steal newspaper articles anyways so they should pay for them. What’s to say such a newspaper bailout isn’t included with any net neutrality legislation? You can guarantee such legislation will have hundreds of pet projects, pork, and other unrelated crap in it. What should take a paragraph will end up being 500 pages with nobody know exactly what’s in the bill.

Then we have option two, allow ISPs to control what goes over their wires. This is equally dangerous as the above because now each company will decide what sites their customers have access to. If you need an example of this just turn to AOL when they were an ISP first getting started. AOL did their best to create a walled garden providing a cleansed Internet experience for their customers. This wasn’t that surprising as when the Internet amounted to bulletin board systems you were mostly restricted to talking to people using the same ISP as you had. Alas this problem is even bigger due to the fact there are a handful of very powerful ISPs. Let’s say Comcast, America’s biggest ISP, decide they are going to block all BitTorrent traffic. Since most traffic crosses a Comcast line at some point they would effectively block BitTorrent traffic for most American users regardless of the ISP they used.

I haven’t answered one question yet, why do I feel net neutrality is a needed thing? Why do I think we have any “right” (I’m not claiming any rights here but it’s a word the better reflects my idea I’m putting forth) to uncontrolled Internet traffic? How can I believe companies can’t control what is going across their wires? Well the answer to all those questions is one simple fact, the Internet was created from public funds. I glossed over the history of the Internet in my previous net neutrality post. But the Internet evolved from ARPANET which was a government funded (in other words tax money funded) research project during the Cold War. Everything from the protocols to ICANN (who control allocation of IP addresses) was created with American tax money. Heck much of the physical infrastructure was paid for through public funds. Because of this I feel we have some say in how the system we paid for is used. We can bitch, whine, moan, and otherwise complain because we paid for it. It wasn’t created by a private company and thus is a public system. That’s why the rules here are different, plain and simple.

The ironic thing is what we have right now is the best option. Currently the government wants to legislate net neutrality but need an case to point to for justification. On the other hand ISPs want to begin charging customers more money via tiered (as in site access not connection speeds) Internet access but are know that will be exactly the case the government wants. It’s a stand off. So long as this stand off continues to exist we’re OK and everything is peachy. The second this stand off stops we’re going to start losing.

I Don’t Think the Pentagon Understands How the Internet Works

Read this headline and tell me if you think the Pentagon has a basic understanding of the Internet:

Pentagon demands Wikileaks return Afghanistan documents

Wikileaks can return whatever the Hell they want but that doesn’t stop the harsh reality that thousands of copies have already been made. Welcome to the present.