Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Better Than Us

Our “representatives” have been positively frothing at the mouth with gun control legislation ideas. A New York “representative” appropriately named King is going to introduce legislation that makes it illegal to carry a gun within 1,000 feet of a federal official.

Of course the crazy ass Arizona shooter wouldn’t have shot Gabrielle Giffords if this law was in effect because it would be illegal to carry said gun that close to her. You know they really should just it illegal to shoot somebody as that would be kind of a catch all for these types of situations… wait it already is. I guess we just have to find that one magical law that will make murdering psychopaths reconsider their desires because that makes sense.

The other interesting thing to wonder is what will be the definition of federal official. The federal government employs a great number of people and chances are you have be closer than 1,000 feet to one without even realizing it. How will we know who are federal officials and thus who we have to keep an arbitrary distance from when carrying? Will federal officials be forced to wear some kind of indicator, maybe a “I ban guns within an arbitrary distance of me” sign, as they walk around? I doubt dip shit King put any such thought into these questions as they are concerns only of the peasants of which he rules over.

I Don’t Think the News Reads the News

Notice something wrong with this article?

They have bemoaned the state of America’s political discourse, called for leadership in toning down heated rhetoric, speculated over whether this is a turning point for Barack Obama or Sarah Palin and puzzled over the shooter’s mental state.

But one thing that has scarcely been raised is gun control.

Riiiiiight. It’s not like Feinstein and McCarthy are dancing in the blood happy that they may have a tragedy needed to push through a restriction on arbitrary capacity magazines or anything… oh wait that’s exactly what they’re doing. Wait a minutes, the article contradict itself:

But here in the US, the only regulatory response so far has been to call for a ban on the sale of high capacity magazines like the sort that Jared Loughner allegedly used in Arizona, enabling him to shoot 31 bullets from a semi-automatic handgun without having to reload.

So gun control is scarcely being raised but gun control is being raised. This makes no sense whatsoever until you realize it’s just one long anti-gun article. Those anti-gunners never were too strong on brains nor the ability to write something that doesn’t contradict itself. Hell even I can write an entire article that doesn’t forget earlier parts of itself exist.

A Bunch of Vultures

No sooner does the news of the Arizona shooting break does New York “Representative” Carolyn McCarthy talke about introducing new gun control regulations:

Many said that people with a history of mental instability, like the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, should not be able to buy a gun — and no one should be able to buy stockpiles of ammunition used by the 22-year-old assailant.

Hold the bus. At least when you talk about magazines with an arbitrarily sized capacity you can claim it has some kind of relevance to the shooting maybe. But talking about stockpiles of ammunition? Really? How much ammunition did the man have on him? Sure he may have owned 100,000 rounds of ammunition but that doesn’t mean shit if he’s only to carry a small percentage of that. In case that dumb bitch McCarthy didn’t realize ammunition has weight and size meaning you can only carry a finite amount. So how does having a stockpile change anything? The answer is it does and McCarthy is just a fucking tool. Oh and she isn’t the only dipshit:

Pennsylvania Rep. Robert Brady, a Democrat from Philadelphia, told CNN that he also plans to take legislative action. He will introduce a bill that would make it a crime for anyone to use language or symbols that could be seen as threatening or violent against a federal official, including a member of Congress.

Wait isn’t threatening violence against a federal official already illegal? Yes, yes it is. Don’t believe me? Well you could always try it and see where it lands you (here’s a hint, in prison). I do love how they law will only involved federal officials and not threats against lowly little peasants like you and me. After all they’re not our representatives but our rulers. We also have a fuck face from Illinois:

Another vocal supporter for gun control, Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley, told POLITICO that he hopes “something good” can come from the Arizona tragedy – perhaps discussion on a new assault weapon ban, sales at gun shows and tracing measures.

Yes because banning arbitrarily sized magazines helped reduce violence last time it was in effect… wait no it didn’t. We also have this golden quote:

“The ability to buy a weapon that fires hundreds of bullets in less than a minute,” said Quigley. “He had an additional magazine capability. That’s not what a hunter needs. That’s not what someone needs to defend their home. That’s what you use to hunt people.”

What the fuck do hunters have to do with the second amendment? Exactly nothing, the second amendment wasn’t put into place to allow hunting it was put into place to allow the citizenry to overthrow a tyrannical government. We also have a quote from another gun control nutcase:

“I’ve seen no evidence that he falls into those categories. It’s the same thing as this guy at Virginia Tech,” said Horwitz. “We can do a much better job checking people’s mental health background.”

No we really can’t “do better.” Crazy often doesn’t manifest until the person decides to, well, be crazy. No expansion of background checks will allow for every person with bad intentions to be caught. You can’t detect evil plain and simple.

You have to be appalled at these people who waste not time to swoop in on a tragedy and use the death of six people to forward their political campaign by pretending they’re looking out for your safety when in fact they’re doing the exact opposite.

Such Much for No Compromise

Gun Owners of America (GOA) like to tout the line that they’re the only “no compromise” gun rights organization in the United States. As far as I can tell their main reason for existence is to bitch and whine instead of doing real work. Likewise their whole idea of “no compromise” apparently only goes so far. As Snowflakes in Hell points out the head of GOA believes gun rights only extend to American citizens:

But Gun Owners of America Executive Director Larry Pratt says the state has every right to restrict conceal and carry permits to citizens.

“If the guy wants to enjoy the full benefit of residing in the United States become a citizen. He’s been here for 30 years what’s he waiting for?,” Pratt told FoxNews.com.

Pratt says the only reason the ACLU brought the suit is to pave the way for illegal aliens to have conceal carry permits.

“They want to make it so illegal aliens have the same rights as everybody else…every little bit chipping away,” he said.

The person in question here is Wayne Smith a man who legally immigrated here 30 years ago. He’s been here legally so I really can’t see how this case will allow illegal aliens to apply for carry permits but honestly I don’t believe anybody should need a permit to carry a gun regardless of who they are. Likewise I find it disgusting that Larry Pratt would be such a hypocrite by stating his organization is “no compromise” while he’s will make compromise on things such as making a justification on why we should need to beg the state of exercise our right to bear arms. Furthermore Mr. Smith has held a carry permit for years:

The lawsuit was filed this week on behalf of British national Wayne Smith, who legally immigrated 30 years ago, and for years was able to get a concealed license. In 2002, however, South Dakota amended the law, making U.S. citizenship a requirement to carry a concealed weapon. When Smith went to renew his long-held permit last July, he was denied because he is permanent legal resident, not a citizen.

Ironically the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the organization who is bringing up the lawsuit against South Dakota. The ACLU doesn’t have a friendly history as far as the second amendment goes but even they’re less willing to compromise on the revocation of a person’s carry permit. What does that say about Mr. Pratt? Frankly I think it says he’s a prick in the highest form.

Canadian Surgical Wait Times

It should be no surprise to anybody that I’m against any form of socializing anything. When I mention I’m against socialized medicine I usually get various response ranging between me being the second coming of Satan to simply being a complete tool of the “corporations” (which corporations I’m not sure, nobody ever tells me). One thing never fails though, when I get into an argument involving socialized medicine somebody invariably brings up how great it works in Canada.

The problem with this argument is it doesn’t work that great in Canada. Well I guess it works great so long as you are willing to wait on average 18.2 weeks for surgical and therapeutic procedures. That’s what the average wait time ended up being in 2010.

Personally I’ll take the horrible system here that allows me to get much needed surgery in a timely manner (although it would be nice if we could get rid of all the government interference which has increased the cost to an astronomical rate).

iOS Alarm Clock Bug

Nothing makes you feel quite as stupid as fucking up something you’ve done correct time and time again. That’s why I’m betting the iOS developers at Apple are feeling really stupid as they introduced another bug in something that’s been correctly done on almost every software platform on the planet, alarms.

The alarm on iOS apparently wouldn’t go off on January 1st and 2nd of this new year. How the Hell do you fuck up an alarm clock? We’ve been doing these in software since… well it’s been a long fucking time. Hell my first Palm PDA did alarms. Yet this is the second alarm clock bug found in iOS within a year (the last one dealt with time zones).

Strange Android SMS Bug

Here’s an interesting short message service (SMS) Android bug that has been making some headlines today. I don’t believe I’ve ever head this happen on my phone but there apparently is a bug in Androids SMS’s application that can cause a text message to be sent to a random person on your contact list instead of the person it was intended to go to. You can imagine some embarrassment when a text message meant for your girlfriend ends up going to the phone of your mother or other such nonsense.

I find this bug interesting mainly because it seems like a rather difficult thing to screw up and honestly the consequences could be hilarious.

Audio Streaming Can’t be This Hard

A new update was released for the Evo 4G last week which seemed to consist entirely of new bloatware applications. I didn’t install it on my phone because the update didn’t have any mention of fixing the audio issues I’ve had since the Evo went from Android 2.1 to 2.2. Well it’s a good thing I waited because instead of fixing the audio player the update went and introduced new streaming audio problems.

Basically streaming MP3s over HTTP protocol doesn’t work… at all. In an ironic twist of fate AAC audio works great (AAC audio sound quality was destroyed in the initial 2.2 update due to problems in the StageFright media framework used in Android 2.2).

Rant time. How fucking hard is it to test your fucking patches? Streaming audio isn’t exactly rocket science. All you need to do to test audio streaming is run some streams using several popular services such as Pandora and Last.fm. If streaming fails fix the problem and don’t release the Odin damned patch.

I’ve never in my life seen a single platform with some many damned problem related to media playing. Playing media isn’t difficult anymore, we’ve been doing it for quite some time. I understand if something like the 4G radio has problems because that’s new technology which is in no way mature. Media streaming on the other hand is old technology that’s been around, we know how to do it.

Is it really that much to ask for to have a phone that can properly play audio files? My fucking iPod from the 2003 could play audio files without an issue. My damned Treo 755p from 2007 running an operating system who’s last major version came out in 2002 could stream MP3s properly. The Evo 4G is a flagship product and can’t do the same things my old Palm Treo 755p could do three years ago.

Seriously, what in the fuck is going on over at HTC?

A Slight Overreaction

The police in Australia must be bored because they seem to be looking for excuses to deploy their helicopters. A thief stole a woman’s iPhone from a hospital, the woman used the Find My Phone app to track the whereabouts of the phone, and the police went into action with a fucking helicopter.

Let’s do some quite math here for a second. The price of the top of the line iPhone 4 in Australia is $999.00 plus any additional taxes. The cost of flying a helicopter is a complex formula which adds up to being a lot fucking more than an iPhone. If the police wanted to do something while saving the tax payers money they could have just purchased the victim a new phone and called it a day.