Tag: You’re Doing it Right

A Novel Idea by Cellular Providers

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the new cellular data standard that is being adopted by Verizon and AT&T Even Sprint is considering switching their WiMax network to LTE. I’m rather excited for the technology as it means we’ll be able to blow through our impending data caps even faster now.

Currently there are two competing cellular standard in the United States, GSM and CDMA. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA while AT&T and T-Mobile (and the rest of the world) use GSM. Both standards have pros and cons. While CDMA is less susceptible to interference GSM allows a user to access their data plan while on a phone call. Data networks give a means of bypassing limitations of both GSM and CDMA but cellular providers haven’t been willing to utilize this potential until now.

AT&T and Verizon have both announced plans to do voice over LTE (think Skype). This would allow both carriers to use their upcoming LTE networks for voice and data through the wonderful fact that voice really is just data (as both CDMA and GSM use completely digital voice networks). Utilizing voice over LTE would alleviate many of the problems faced by nothing having a universal cellular standard in the United States, namely you could take your roam on Verizon’s network if you were an AT&T subscriber and visa versa (so long as both companies used the same voice over LTE protocol and had roaming agreements). This would be great being many locations in the United States have great coverage for either GSM or CDMA but not both (for instance my hometown has CDMA coverage but not GSM coverage).

I’d love to see this happen. It also makes economic sense since there wouldn’t be a need to support multiple radios and protocols for separate functions of phones. Likewise anybody who has used Skype on their phone has already done what AT&T and Verizon are looking into. It’s not a difficult idea to implement as the technology is there and the LTE networks are being built.

Arizona Intrastate Commerce Act

Arizona is working diligently to piss off the federal government. Honestly anybody willing to piss of the federal government is OK in my book and this new bill introduced in Arizona should really do the trick if passed. Several states have passed Firearm Freedom Acts.

Congress uses their power to “regulate interstate commerce” (which means something completely different than “abuse the shit out of your power” but alas) to justify gun control legislation. Justification is made stating guns traveling across state lines are interstate commerce and therefore subject to federal laws. Firearm Freedom Acts state any firearm manufactured, sold, and used exclusively in a state are exempt from federal laws since no interstate commerce took place.

I’ve often asked why these laws are written exclusively for firearms. When I was caucusing last election cycle we had an opportunity to present new platform agendas. The agenda I suggested was basically Arizona’s Intrastate Commerce Act. Obviously it didn’t go anywhere since most people at the caucus are a bunch of authoritarian neo-cons who can’t conceive of a law that would effectively enforce constitutional limits to Congress’s authority. If passed Arizona’s law:

SB 1178 will amend the Arizona Revised Statutes in order to provide that all goods grown, manufactured or made in Arizona and all services performed in Arizona, when such goods or services are sold, maintained, or retained in Arizona, shall not be subject to the authority of the Congress of the United States under its constitutional power to regulate commerce.

So it’s the Firearms Freedom Act applied to all goods and services manufactured, sold, and exclusively used in Arizona. Sounds like a good idea to me. Frankly I’m really enjoying this small surge in states telling the federal government to sod off.

Wisconsin Judge Rules Concealed Carry Ban Unconstitutional

Wisconsin still remains one of only two states in the Union that bars its citizens from some method of legally carrying a concealed handgun. I learned through Says Uncle that a Milwaukee Country judge ruled the ban unconstitutional yesterday:

In the ongoing evolution of Wisconsin gun law, a Milwaukee County judge has ruled the state’s ban on concealed weapons unconstitutional as applied to a man who had an unloaded, encased gun under his car seat three days after he had been robbed at gunpoint in the same area of the city.

In an eight-page decision and order, Circuit Judge J.D. Watts agreed that for Jeremy Pinnow to exercise his right to bear arms for security and self-defense, he had few other choices.

What’s interesting is the fact a cased and unloaded gun was considered a form of concealed carrying. In my book that qualifies as transportation of a firearm in a legal manner (had he been driving a pickup this would have been kosher under federal laws as there is no place to store the firearm separate from the driver).

Either way I’m hoping this ruling sticks through the appeal process that is likely to happen (this is in Milwaukee Country after all). If this ruling sticks it could offer the ammunition pro-gun organizations need to get carry legislation moving through the Wisconsin political black hole.

Convert That Ruger 10/22 to Shoot Arrows

Coming from the “because it’s there” department we have this amazing contraption:

LaRue Tactical is now selling a kit to convert a Ruger 10/22 into an arrow firing rifle. It replaces the barrel with a heavy profile barrel that can only chamber .22 blanks. An arrow is inserted into the barrel and a .22 Blank will propel it at 435 ft/sec.

Crossbows are for chumps… chumps without a .22 chambered stake driver. This thing should also be good against vampires. I’m not going to lie I kind of want one, just not bad enough for the $599.00 asking price.

HP/Palm’s Unveiling

Yesterday HP/Palm unveiled their new WebOS product line. Needless to say after seeing it I’m feeling a bit underwhelmed but am certainly impressed with some of the announcements. First HP/Palm announced two new phones, the Veer and Pre 3.

The Veer is the new entry level WebOS device. It’s smaller than the Pre 2 which I find a bit perplexing as the Pre 2 is already a pretty small phone. Specs-wise the Veer is certainly not going to blow you away with a 2.6″ 320×400 screen, 800 MHz processor, 8GB of internal memory, and a goofy proprietary connector.

The second phone unveiled was the far more interesting Pre 3. This appears to be the new high end flagship phone for HP/Palm putting the Pre 2 between itself and the Veer. The main complain I have about the Pre 2 is the screen, it’s 3.1″ with 320×480 pixels of real estate. The Pre 3 on the other hand has a 3.58″ screen with 480×800 pixels of real estate (the same as the Evo 4G).

Likewise the Pre 3 has a 1.4 GHz processor which is pretty powerful for a phone. Since WebOS is known for its multi-tasking capabilities it makes sense to dump a decent amount of RAM in it, say, 512 MB. Sadly the internal storage is either 8GB or 16GB depending on the model you get. This is a rather pitiful maximum as the iPhone can go up to 32GB and any modern phone with a microSD card can be topped off with a 32GB card. HP/Palm really should have released a model of the Pre 3 with 32GB on board. I’m actually looking forward to this phone.

The third thing HP/Palm announced was the iPad TouchPad. This device looks rather familiar with it’s 9.7″ 1024×768 screen in a tablet format. With that said the TouchPad has some unique features such as 512MB of RAM on board and a far more pathetic choice in internal memory, either 16GB or 32GB (the iPad can have up to 64GB). The processor clocks in at 1.2GHz which is very respectable.

HP/Palm did some nice things to integrate the phone and tablet. The coolest feature is probably the fact if you physically tap a WebOS phone to the tablet whatever web page you’re viewing on the tablet will automatically open on your phone. Taken a bit further this feature would be absolutely awesome. I often look up an address on my iPad and then have to retype the address into my phone when I leave. I’d love to be able to tap my phone to my tablet and have them communicate the address themselves. Likewise WebOS lends itself much better to multi-tasking than anything Apple has attempted in iOS.

HP/Palm also announced something very interesting, WebOS will be coming to PCs later this year. The idea of having a universal operating system between my phone, tablet, and computer does have a nice ring to it.

All in all I think HP/Palm had a good show and unveiled some interesting, if not overwhelming, products. I’m looking forward to seeing if they can carve out a piece of the market for themselves or if they’ll end up being a complete niche which almost nobody uses.

Good Problems to Have

This whole “constitutional carry” movement seems to be picking up speed. Wyoming has a bill moving through their legislature, a Tennessee representative just introduced such legislation in his state, and now New Hampshire has not just one but two competing constitutional carry bills:

Competing bills have been filed to eliminate New Hampshire’s license requirement for carrying concealed weapons, dividing the pro gun community. Some are lining up behind state Rep. J.R. Hoell, a Dunbarton Republican, and others behind state Rep. Jennifer Coffey, a Republican from Andover.

Man I would love to have that problem here in Minnesota.

As a side note let me just raise a big middle finger to Seacoast Online whom is the source in the NRA-ILA article I linked to. Usually I try to link to both the source I obtained my information from as well as the original source of the information. I didn’t do that here because Seacoast Online are asses. When the page was loading I saw the article for a split second (long enough to read the first sentence) before it disappeared. Why did it disappear? So the page could display a message telling me to enable JavaScript.

I use NoScript to only allow sites I trust to run JavaScript. This saves a ton of headaches online including those stupid advertisements that appears over articles in some web pages (not separate pop-up windows but inside the windows the page is displayed in) among other malicious activity. Some pages need JavaScript because they are poorly made, I get that. But when a page can display the article without JavaScript and chooses to hide it after the page completely loads that’s just inexcusable. Serious dick move there guys.

Since the Cat is Out of the Bag

My interest in Palm’s WebOS should be well known to anybody who’s read this site for a while. Although I’ve had a lot of interest and did eventually get a used Palm Pre I never ended us using a new Palm device as my primary phone. The main reason was the fact their hardware was woefully behind once I finally decided to upgrade form my Palm Treo 755p.

Palm (well technically now HP but I like calling them Palm better) has been running a discount program form developers. If you’re a developer Palm will give you $200.00 off of an unlock Pre 2. It’s a pretty sweet deal when you consider it’s an unlocked phone that gives you access to WebOS 2.0. A couple of weeks ago I inquired with Palm about this program and they sent me back a couple of e-mails asking about the applications I was planning on writing. This was basically a quick screening process to ensure I wasn’t just trying to get a cheap unlocked phone, but instead actually planning on developing for the platform.

After a couple of e-mails they offered me a free Pre 2 for development purposes. I figured that was a pretty good deal and took them up on the offer. I’m not exactly sure when the phone will arrive but I was told it could arrive as early as this week (although being Palm is having their big event tomorrow I was told that was no guarantee).

Either way I didn’t say anything as I was unsure if this was something Palm was doing but wanted to keep if to developers expressing interest in the discount program. Well it seems that’s not the case and Palm has 100 99 Pre 2 phones they’re planning on giving out to developers free of charge. So if you’re a developer and have interest in WebOS you could get a hold of Palm via the Pre 2 discount program. It’s likely you can nab yourself free reference hardware (that will function properly on either T-Mobile or AT&T but will only have 3G speeds on AT&T).

The Evolution of Attempting to Repeal Minnesota’s Permit to Purchase Law

I’ve been following the progress of the bill to repeal Minnesota’s redundant and ridiculous permit to purchase law. What I think is interesting is how this bill has evolved. The bill first started off as HF 161 which would have extended the validity of permits to purchase to five years [PDF].

This would have made sense in that you’d only have to renew the purchase permit as often as a carry permit. In Minnesota a permit to carry also works as a permit to purchase so those of use with carry permits never have to obtain separate permits to purchase. Likewise permits to carry are good for five years before you have to retest. Nobody could ever give me a good reason why a permit to purchase was only good for a year while a permit to carry was good for five years, they should have both been good for five years.

Well apparently HF 161 was amended with the following [PDF] which just eliminates the stupid permit to purchase all together. I’m not sure how this bill went from simply extending the validity period of a permit to purchase to eliminating it completely but I’m glad it did.

A few law enforcement organizations are opposed to repealing this requirement and cite claims of the state background checks being more thorough. I believe this has more to do with the fact that they like having the authority to tell who can and can not exercise their right to bear certain arms (you don’t need a permit to purchase for shotguns or “sporting purpose rifles” just handguns and “assault-weapons”).

If the state background checks actually caught anybody that would have been missed by a federal background check I can guarantee you that the law enforcement organizations would be touting out each and every instance to prove their point. The fact that they haven’t brought out a single instance leads me to believe it’s never happened or has happened so rarely that bringing up the numbers would be embarrassing considering the cost of doing these additional background checks.

ATF Looking to Lose Some Funding

Some good news has been brought to my attention. Due to the overinflated national debt budget cuts are in the works and everybody’s favorite assholes, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), are one of the targets:

About three weeks before the deadly shootings in Tucson renewed a national debate about gun control, the White House budget office proposed steep cuts for the agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws.

Does this mean the ATF won’t be able to afford these “studies” that determine what kind of shotgun is “sporting” and therefore legal and what kind of shotguns are super-concentrated-evil? I doubt it. I’m sure no matter how little money the ATF receives they’ll still find time in their busy schedules to stomp all over our rights. But it’s nice to see these assholes may not be receiving as much money to do so in the near future.

Health Insurance Company Enrichment Act Ruled Unconstitutional

It seems a federal judge in Florida actually read the Constitution of the United States and thus has ruled the erroneously named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional:

Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the requirement that Americans purchase health insurance or face penalties violates an individual’s rights.

And there was the main problem with the bill. You no longer had the freedom to choose whether or not you wanted to buy health care, instead you were forced to do business with insurance companies. Due to the way the bill was written this ruling goes against the entire thing not just the mandatory insurance purchase section.

Another thing I found telling was this paragraph:

A federal judge in Florida has declared the US healthcare reform bill passed in 2010 unconstitutional, ruling in a suit brought by 26 states.

Over half (yes only be one) of the states are against this bill. I don’t know about you but I can’t remember the last time over half of the states agreed on anything. Apparently putting a gun to the heads of their citizens and telling them they will buy something didn’t go over as well as our “representatives” thought it would.

This is a good start but you know the decision will be appealed right up to the Supreme Court where we really won’t be able to guess what the ruling will be.