You'd be so much more dangerous after law school. Barb may have saved the world from... I'm not sure what. It would be scary.

Sean Flynn
April 9, 2007 17:28
[I once told Sean that I had briefly considered going to law school. That idea was quickly quashed when Barb threatened to divorce me if I did. She accuses me of already being too argumentative (I object to that accusation!).--Joe]

My son recently returned from a trip to the DC/NYC area.  He had a great time, other than the three hours he spent in a plane at JFK, due to an undefined "security breach" and of course having to go through several check points along the way.  Oh, and he had a pair of toy handcuffs (they have no lock and no key, among other differences from the real thing) confiscated from him at one of these checkpoints.  Somebody dodged a major threat to society there-- a 13 year-old student on a trip with fellow students, smuggling toy handcuffs.

After talking with him about this at length, and remembering the fact that I had been in DC, NYC, and other places around the country years ago, complete with multiple knives, without a single checkpoint involved, I posed this question to my family:

What would it take for our society, our country, to eliminate security checkpoints within our own borders?

For some people, it is a hateful, disturbing question, not least because they like the idea of checkpoints.  For others, there will be varying, even diametrically opposed answers.  I know the answer (yup, little ol' me) but after getting hostility directed at me in return for having said it, I'll just pose the question and have people think about it for a while.  Hint: Joe's April 7th QOTD.

I suppose that in order to ponder the question, you, like me, would have to actually want to travel your own country without being treated like a potential criminal, or feeling as though you're in France and the year is 1942.

Maybe I'll post my own short, sweet answer later.

Update: Just to make it more clear, the question is about the sort of changes we would need to make in our society, and in our government policies.

I've upgraded the Boomershoot Internet wireless capabilities to where I want them. I now have an Internet connection at the explosives magazine:

Ahhh.... shelter, guns, explosives, electricity, an Internet connection, a little food and water and all I need is, well... let's just say Barbara.

Here is a crude partial map of the signal strength. I was way overdue to be home and didn't have time to do a very good job on it. I had planned to walk the area but instead drove around in the van. I suspect the neighbors figured I was crazier than they already thought I was. The signal inside the van isn't as going to be as good as if you were in a tent or just set up at your shooting station. There are two access points with the SSIDs of Boomershoot1 and Boomershoot2. Boomershoot1 is illuminating most of the area with Boomershoot2 just hitting the western quarter of what you see in the map. This gives the people in shooting positions 63 through 70 a signal. Although it's not on the map Boomershoot2 is primarily to get signal to the explosives magazine and I was able to tweak it enough to get the west end of the shooting area.

The line of signal strength measurement at the south through the center of the picture is right next to the shooting berm. Further to the east I dipped down into the actual shooting positions in the .50 Caliber Ghetto.

Here is the Taj Mahal with it's wireless antenna fully installed:

She's even cute in a video with a bag over her head. At four minutes it is a little long. But that doesn't stop a father from being proud.

...it's completely legal almost everywhere for any gun owner to sell a firearm to anyone else without any background check at all. If you have a gun, you can sell it at a gun show, through the newspaper, or even online, without any sort of background check at all.

It's currently legal to own weapons like the .50 caliber sniper rifle, weapons that no civilian should ever be allowed to have.

...

Murder isn't legal-- unless you're in a state with a License to Murder law, and you can claim that you "felt threatened" before you pulled the trigger.

In 48 states, it's completely legal to tote around a loaded firearm beneath your clothes.

...

And yet none of these people have broken the law. They're getting away with it-- but because our laws are so loose, they're doing it completely and totally legally.

Gun Guys
April 6, 2007
Via email with the subject: "Gun Guys: Getting Away With Not Breaking the Law"
[I find it very telling that he has a problem with people getting away with not breaking the law. It reminds me of this quote by Ayn Rand.--Joe]

First email sent from my explosives magazine (the Taj Mahal) at the Boomershoot site (use the aerial or hybrid view):

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 5:04 PM
To: 'Ry Jones'; 'Doug Huffman'
Subject: From the Taj.

 

Ping times are 1483 mS on average. This makes for a very poor remote desktop experience. But it does work.

 

Lots of fun. An inverter blew out and took out the power supply for the range extender. Lucky I had another with me that worked. Lots of other hiccups too. Nothing ever goes smooth.

 

-joe-

Those ping times were to boomershoot.org which is physically in Dallas (I think). My remote desktop is actually in the Seattle area but I didn't have a way to ping off of that location easily. Yeah, I could have used my remote desktop to connect to the router and enable ping responses but I didn't think of it at the time. The ping times are mostly in the earth to satellite to earth again so it doesn't really matter much if I'm pinging Dallas or Seattle when we are bouncing off of a piece of metal in orbit.

I'll have pictures and a signal strength map to post tomorrow. The bottom line is that it will be hard to find a place at Boomershoot 2007 that doesn't have a free WiFi signal.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson
[We have drifted so far from the inconveniences of too much liberty I find it difficult to imagine what those inconveniences would be.--Joe]

Via Ry. Meet MOP, Boeing's new bunker-busting super-bomb:

The 20-foot-long bomb that weighs 30,000 pounds — much heavier than the 21,000-pound MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Burst bomb, unveiled in the prelude to the Iraq war.

...

MOP will go a lot deeper — 200 feet of 5,000 psi concrete. MOP pulls it off by not being all that explosive — less than 20% by weight, compared to almost 90% for the MOAB. That's because bunker-busting bombs need very thick casings to survive the effects of impact.

...

Potential targets for MOP or other deep penetrators would include the Iranian underground centrifuge cascade at Natanz and the heavy-water reactor complex under construction at Arak.

Ry told me about it yesterday. I thought about for a few seconds and announced, "I'll bet I could defeat it with 100 feet or less of concrete." I explained and Ry countered with a solution to my defense. I modified my defense and defeated that as well. About midnight last night I woke up with a solution to my modified defense--use more than one bomb per target. I thought about that solution for a few seconds and came up a defense against that attack plan too.

I incredibly impressed someone has designed a non-nuclear bomb that will penetrate 200 feet of high end concrete. But with a smartly designed bunker that may not enough. But my thought process over the course of just a few hours should be a lesson to Iran, don't count on your bunkers being safe should you continue on your current path. You designs could be made obsolete in a matter of days. Can you redesign and rebuild as fast was we can come up with new attack plans? And you won't know our plans until after the bombs start dropping.

The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers

This includes such things as:

Geeks don't shock easily

Geeks have seen all the porn you can imagine and then some, priming them to be open to your sexual peccadilloes. They are not only less likely to be shocked by your exotic requests -- they might not even realize that other people think your turn-ons are exotic.

Conversely, your geek lover might be relieved that your wildest fantasy involves only two other people, five utensils and a trapeze.

Geeks know kinky people

Geeks haven't just seen a variety of positions, kinks and fetishes in blue movies. They know (or are) people who enjoy those things, so they don't dismiss entire categories of sexual interests as the sole province of a bunch of weirdos in San Francisco.

It's hard to sustain prejudice and bias against an abstract group when you develop relationships with individuals and discover they're just like you. It doesn't matter if they dress up like ponies, or refuse to conform to a societal idea of gender norms, or eat pancakes for dinner. Geek lovers know better than to try to impose their sexual preferences or standards on others -- including your friends -- and are more likely to love and let love.

A leftist idea can be recognized by three earmarks, It will be:

1) Founded in ignorance,
2) Focused on irrelevance,
3) Engaged in wishful thinking.

Mark Philip Alger
http://www.babytrollblog.com/
[Also found in the sidebar with the above:

4) "And threaten use of the coercive power of the state to extract compliance."
--Arnold's Corollary (ed.)

Yup, and the political right has it's own set of faulty hypotheses (gay cooties for example) and follows up with the same number 4). This is why, in part, the U.S. Constitution only granted the government an enumerated set of powers. To protect the people against things the government has no business getting involved in. But virtually no one pays attention to the Constitution anymore.--Joe]

It’s not a build break until you have people baying for your blood in the morning.

Suresh Parameshwar
April 3, 2007
[From a technical perspective a "build break" occurs when computer source code will not compile (the automated process of converting human readable code into machine code). In almost every medium or larger sized project people check-in their code to a common computer which does the compile once per day/week/whatever. The resultant code is then installed on test machines and the testers go to work on it to see if they can find bugs. The developers also "sync up" with the common computer to get everyone else's changes to use in their development for the next day. If the build breaks nearly all the testers and many of the developers are idle until the build is fixed. Hence, it's a big deal if the build is broken.

I had checked in some code in the middle of the afternoon with a stupid mistake that broke things. Mike noticed it something like 40 minutes later and I fixed it within a few minutes--long before the morning build. Suresh was reassuring me it wasn't a big deal, even though I was quite embarrassed.

Today Suresh was slightly embarrassed when I during a code review I pointed out one of his mistakes. But we're not going to talk about that here.--Joe]

From Albany New York:

Under the proposed law, gun owners would have to register with the city, even if they already have a valid gun permit. And dealers would be required to file a report every day with the chief of police, listing sales.

The measure would also outlaw the sale of higher caliber ammunition.

So what is it this is supposed to accomplish? Can they answer Just One Question before going forward with this? Of course not.

And can you imagine stink that would raised if a similar laws were proposed for some minority group other than gun owners?

Bigots. Nothing but bigotry can explain their beliefs and actions.

Currently I'm not at liberty to go into great detail on what is happening with the return of the DVDs constituting 99+% of the information we obtained in discovery. That will soon be fought in court and I can probably talk more about it then. What I can say is that PNNL claimed the information on those DVDs was "extremely sensitive" information and hence my lawyer and I were required to return it. The judge agreed without giving us an opportunity to refute that claim. This is acceptable in certain extraordinary circumstances which PNNL/Battelle claimed were present.

I thought people would be interested in knowing what PNNL defines as "sensitive". This is from their public website (IIRC PNWD stands for Pacific NorthWest Division):

sensitive information

At PNWD, information is considered sensitive if any of the following criteria are met: information is protected under the Privacy Act information for which Battelle would be liable if released to unauthorized individuals information for which Battelle is legally responsible information of which corruption or loss would substantially delay a project or impact the completion of a mission or goal information that cannot be reproduced or that would be unreasonably expensive to reproduce information that could profit an employee or outsider through unauthorized use, modification, or disclosure; or information that could be harmful to DOE, Battelle, or cause unfavorable publicity (e.g., financial, technical, or supply data) data identified by DOE as unclassified controlled nuclear information (UCNI) or data identified as export controlled information.

Bold emphasis added by me.

Needless to say we are challenging the validity of this as being sufficient reason to withhold discovery data. These guys are slime-balls and know that public disclosure is not good for their future.

I can understand their motives. Being rented out to their fellow inmate bidding the most cigarettes is something to be postponed as long as possible.

It was a day when men, recognizing the reality of evil, carried weapons that enabled them to stand in the gap for those being unjustly tormented and threatened. Virtually any man on the street could come to the aid of a victim like Clara.

That was then; this is now.

Bob Allen
April 4, 2007
How gun control trades life for death
[Clara is the woman killed in the CNN building yesterday.--Joe]

And you choose to be unarmed? To me, that just doesn't make sense.

Nicki Stallard
Pink Pistols: The Gay Group That's Getting Armed
Posted April 3, 2007
[Jeff Soyer, gay gun blogger at Alphecca, is quoted in this article as well.--Joe]

All warfare is based on deception.

Sun Tzu Wu
From The Art of War
[PNNL will love seeing this one today.--Joe]

Boomershoot 2007 stuff. There are even mugs, posters, bibs, thongs, and boxer shorts. All with this awesome image (edited by Xenia Joy):