Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

More Android vs. iOS

Is it any surprise that I like Android as an operating system? Would you be shocked if I told you I despise Apple’s App Store practices and how they restrict iOS devices? If you answered yes to either of those questions you’re either new here or have problems comprehending what you read. In the first case let me say welcome and in the latter case let me question your intelligence.

I’ve made a few posts about my Android phone and a few posts criticizing Apple’s practices in regards to iOS. This post is quite an opposite because I must give Apple some serious credit where it is due, their support for older devices.

Apple does a pretty decent job of supporting old versions of the iPhone for some appreciable amount of time. For instance if you have the previous model of the iPhone you can install the newest version of iOS and get many of its features. This isn’t so true in the Android world. I have an HTC Evo 4G and a while ago HTC released Android 2.2 for the device. Unfortunately that update has some glaring issues, the biggest of which in my opinion is the inability to sync multiple GMail accounts. If you have two GMail accounts added to your Android phone only the primary one will sync automatically leaving you to manually refresh each other account. Couple this with non-functioning VPN and flaky Exchange support and you have a desperate need for a patch.

The problem is HTC has so far simply stated they are looking into the problem and have not released an fix. Why am I concerned? Because of the history most Android manufacturers have with dropping support for devices that aren’t that old. While an iPhone owner can expect to receive updates for a couple years after purchasing their phone most Android users are lucky to receive fixes for a full year. There are some exceptions such as Google’s Nexus One (which is no longer being sold to consumers) and Motorola’s Droid (which is obsolete) but for the most part it seems manufacturers are quick to drop support for their devices forcing you to either go without updates or upgrade to a new phone.

I will also note that Palm has done a great job at continuing to support the Pre and Pixi but that could be due to the simple fact those are the only two phones they have released. Previously they were fast to stop releasing updates for their Treos and PDAs.

Let me simple give Apple a big cudos

Licensing Toy Guns

Australia is going for the gold today as they’ve landed on this site’s front page twice. New laws are being pushed in Australia that will require toy guns be licensed as real ones. Oh, and because there is no limited to stupidity this law will also involved other things:

The proposed changes will also impose restrictions on the ownership of laser pointers, tougher penalties for selling items such as crossbows, bullet proof vests and knuckledusters without the appropriate licence, and stricter rules on firearm storage. In certain circumstances, religion will be a lawful excuse for carrying a knife and police who take their service-issue firearms home will be exempted.

Be careful with those dangerous laser pointers, you could put somebody’s eye out with it. We also must appreciate that the police are like you and me only better so they are exempt from this legislation.

I Don’t Like It, Make It Illegal

I haven’t had a good nanny state story in a while but thankfully some Australian activists have shattered that fact. There seems to be a 25% increase in pedestrian deaths and the assume culprit are iPods. The most obvious solution to such a problem is to make it illegal:

But Mr Scruby said the rise in the popularity of iPods and other listening devices illustrated an urgent need for action by state government and manufacturers.

”The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars, but is apparently unconcerned that listening devices now appear to have become lethal pieces of entertainment,” he said. ”They should legislate appropriate penalties for people acting so carelessly towards their own welfare and that of others.

”Manufacturers … should be made to [warn] consumers of the risks they run.”

Yes that will fix the problem, legislation. I mean it always works so well. Once you make something illegal it’ll go away. I’m sure Australia will be free of iPod related accidents as soon as that legislation is passed. It’s a good thing government can protect us from ourselves.

I also love how they want manufacturers to put yet another warning label that will be ignored onto the device.

More on Righthaven

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a nice write up on the recent copy-right troll factory known as Righthaven. They’ve been going around suing everybody they can find who’s used any text from any story in a news article they own the copyright to. The main problem is Righthaven is doing several things different than other copyright holders. The two things I have the biggest issues with are the following:

Righthaven lawsuits are demanding that courts freeze and transfer the defendants’ domain names. Imagine if a single copyright infringement on Huffingtonpost.com or Redstate.com could result in forfeiture of the entire domain. Effectively asking for control of all of a website’s existing and future content — instead of only targeting the allegedly infringing material — is an overreaching remedy for a single copyright infringement not validated by copyright law or any legal precedent. This also indicates that the attorneys are willing to make overreaching claims in order to scare defendants into a fast settlement.

Righthaven goes straight for litigation. Righthaven isn’t sending cease and desist letters or DMCA takedown notices that would allow the targeted bloggers or website operators to remove or amend only the news articles owned by Righthaven. Instead, Righthaven starts with a full-fledged lawsuit in federal court with no warning. It’s sue first and ask questions later, which smacks of a strategy designed to churn up legal costs and intimidate defendants into paying up immediately, rather than a strategy aimed at remedying specific copyright infringements.

Yeah screw the whole idea of being nice and first requesting any infringing material be taken down. Going straight to a lawsuit is obviously the best idea out there. Seriously they are total douche bags.

I Can’t Tell You How Many Times I’ve Wanted to Do This

Just read the first paragraph of this article:

A Salt Lake City mortgage company employee allegedly got drunk, opened fired on his firm’s computer server with a .45-caliber automatic, and then told police someone had stolen his gun and caused the damage.

Minus the getting drunk and accusing somebody stole my gun this paragraph really describes one of my dreams, shooting a server. Of course I wouldn’t lie about what happened unlike this drunkard mentioned in the story:

A probable cause statement alleges that Campbell told police he had been “mugged, assaulted with his own firearm and drugged” by a mystery assailant.

Yeah because that’s certainly a believable story. Pro tip here, if you’re going to make up a story in an attempt to lie to the police make it a believable one. Better yet don’t have a gun one you while you’re drunk.

Viktor Bout to be Extradited

A little over a year ago I made a post stating that accused weapons dealer, Viktor Bout, was not being extradited to the United States. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the story I’ll recap quickly.

Viktor Bout is a man accused of selling weapons to people our government doesn’t like. These sales take place outside of our borders but of course we like to have our noses in the business of everybody else. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) setup a sting operation in Thailand to catch this man and catch them they did. The DEA posed as members of the Farc group of Columbia. The sting operation was a success but that’s when everything stated to go wrong for the DEA. Thailand was not willing to extradite Mr. Bout because their country sees the Farc as a political group not a criminal gang. Due to this Thailand fought extradition and won last year. The United States appealed and won this year.

I mentioned two reasons in my previous post why I don’t believe the charges against Mr. Bout are valid. Go read that to find my opinion. Either way I think Mr. Bout is completely boned now since the following charges are being aimed against him:

Mr Bout, a former Soviet air force officer, faces US charges of conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.

Yes the terrorist word was rolled out. This means one of two things; he’s guilty until proven innocent (that’s how our courts seem to run the second terrorism is one of the accusation) or he’s going to be sent to Gitmo without trail. Russia is trying to get him back and maybe we can trade him for a few more of our spies, but I’m doubting that will happen.

Of course if we lost this appeal we found a way to appeal again by simply adding more charges to the list:

American authorities lodged two further charges of money-laundering and electronic fraud against Mr Bout before Friday’s hearing – if their appeal had been rejected, he would have had to remain in jail pending another decision.

Basically we were going to get this man on our soil regardless of what we needed to do.

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.

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.