Author Archives: Joe

This is what you get in a police state

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Big Brother gets to watch you in return for the false promise of increased security. From our worlds airports:

Faces are blurred, but not chests or crotches. Snoerwang said that was necessary because otherwise “women could just hide things by stuffing them in their bras.”

…

Snoerwang said the images generated by the machine were not like photographs.

“They’re kind of futuristic. There’s nothing sexy about it,” she said.

What does “nothing sexy” have to do with making it acceptable? And to who? There are people that find animals and fecal material sexy. Want to bet that there won’t be a culture of some sort of deviants built around these photographs? And there will be names attached to the photos as well. Names are checked on your ID just before you go into the machines. People watching the images will snap pictures with their cell-phones or other miniature image capturing devices and associate the picture with the name from their friend checking the ID.

It will do nothing to prevent determined people from getting weapons on board. It only will catch those that are careless. In the mean time airport security costs billions. The airplane security game cannot be won with the current assumptions. It’s time we considered the alternatives.

Just testing

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Before bringing my blog back online I did some performance testing while it was hosted on my own machine. This included tests with all the links, sitemeter, etc. visible. Most of the testing was done early (as in midnight until 3:00 AM) on Wednesday morning. Can you tell from my Sitemeter graphic?

Quote of the day–Kevin Baker

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And hey! Nuclear Winter will stop Global Warming! It’s a two-fer!

Kevin Baker
May 14, 2007 2:16 PM
[From the comments to the post To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. Which, by the way, is an excellent post. I kept thinking that someday I would write down my thoughts as expressed by Kevin in this post. But it would have been a far more feeble effort than Kevin’s well researched masterpiece.–Joe]

If it would available I would consider this

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No hair transplants for me. I would consider regrowing it though.

Quote of the day–Nicolas Sarkozy

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There is a demand for change. Never have the risks of inertia been so great for France as they are now in this world in flux where everyone across the world is trying to change quicker than the others, where any delay can be fatal.

Nicolas Sarkozy
May 16, 2007
Sarkozy Gets Off to a Fast Start as President of France
[He also said France needs to get back to work. Sounds good to me.  And from the same article:

Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claims links with Al Qaeda, threatened in an Internet posting on Tuesday that it would wage “a bloody jihadist campaign” in France in the coming days in reaction to the election of the “Zionist crusader,” Mr. Sarkozy.

Ditto what Tamara said.–Joe]

What happened to my blog

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The short story is here. Despite some coincidences I do not believe it had anything to do with PNNL/Battelle. Here is the slightly longer story I told my web hosting company:

I believe I have the answer as to why there was high CPU usage. The blogging software I’m using (dasBlog) has some very inefficient code for dealing with what it calls “Comment Views”. When viewing a single post without the comments, for the same CPU usage, the number of views is over 100 times faster than when viewing with the comments.

I did some code and configuration tuning and was able to improve the performance by a factor of 2 to 3 depending on how I was testing it. There are still lots of room for improvement and I decided to just turn off the comments until the performance is more comparable to the performance without the comments. This eliminates the CPU intensive view type entirely.

This CPU expensive view mode probably normally isn’t a problem except with the robots come visiting. They view the posts in all their view modes.

Would you please enable my site again?

Thank you.

I was up until 4:30 this morning getting it ready to go back online in crippled form (comments are disabled). I still have work to do to get comment views more efficient and then I’ll turn the comments back on.

I need to get to work now but I’ll update the story here by tonight sometime. I’ll fill in the Quote of the day posts tonight sometime too.

Quote of the day–Tamara K.

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The guy’s as popular in France’s Muslim ghettos as a bag of pork rinds, which rates another thumbs up in my book. If non-assimilating misogynist welfare leeches hate him, he can’t be all bad.

Tamara K.
May 9, 2007
My reaction to the Frog reaction to the Sarkozy win…
[Sarkozy has a big job ahead of him. But his election gives me hope for a world where the Islamic extremist demands for world domination are thwarted.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Huey Newton

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An unarmed person is a slave, or is subject to becoming a slave at any time.

Huey Newton
[See also Negros With Guns and blog postings one and two. Of course Newton want to implement the slavery of communism in this country but that’s a distraction from the truth of his statement above.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Patrick V. Murphy

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We are at the point in time and terror where nothing short of a strong uniform policy of domestic disarmament will alleviate the danger which is crystal clear and perilously present.  Let us take the guns away from the people.  Exemptions should be limited to the military, the police, and those licensed for good and sufficient reasons.

Patrick V. Murphy
Former NYC Police Commissioner
HCI spokesman
[HCI, Handgun Control Inc, has become the Brady Campaign but the sentiment remains the same. Don’t let them tell you they respect the 2nd Amendment as a right for the people to keep and bear arms. If you have to be licensed, ask the government for permission, it’s not a right. It’s a privilege.–Joe]

Quote of the day–H. L. Mencken

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Unquestionably, there is progress.  The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

H. L. Mencken
[This is no exaggeration. I’m still smarting from the checks we wrote out for taxes on April 15th.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Mark Twain

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France has neither winter, summer, nor morals – apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

Mark Twain
[French jokes apparently go back a long time. Probably since there was a France. I had said no more French jokes for a year. But that was before I found out the pilot wasn’t French.–Joe]

What they are up to

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The PNNL/Battelle lawyers must be desperate, have dirty minds, or else are just fishing around for the pleasure of more billing hours. Since Battelle isn’t paying the bill (U.S. taxpayers probably are) what do Battelle executives care?

Interrogatory 4: Do you operate a website that is a bedroom cam website or similar type website? If the answer is affirmative, please describe in detail the contents of the website whether a person must pay to view the website and the approximate number of people per year that view the website.

The answer is no. Never have. Almost for certain never will.

What they may be fishing for is that while I lived in Richland I had a cam in my room which showed the table where I used my computer and part of the bed. Primarily this was for my wife and kids to check to see if I was awake before they called me at odd hours of the day or night.

I also used it for security as I had a gun safe and sometimes left the company laptop there and wanted to be able to see if my roommates (or anyone else) ever came into my room when I wasn’t there. I know the PNNL “investigators” repeatedly viewed that cam.

Other questions include the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all marital counselors Barb and I have ever visited.

On the other side of things it’s also clearly apparent they either deleted or withheld email that we requested in our interrogatories. Yeah it’s a crime, but it’s a lesser crime than the felonies they have already committed so you can understand their motives.

 These guys are “real pieces of work”. I’m looking forward to attending their sentencing hearings.

Another Boomershoot idea?

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Uhh… I don’t think so Ry.

Quote of the day–Sean Flynn

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My dream is to attend Boomershoot with an energy weapon.

Sean Flynn
May 9, 2007
[This was while discussing potential changes for Boomershoot 2008 with Ry and I. This is actually close to one of my nightmares from a few years ago. The fields burst into long streams of flames from dozens of laser range finders that ignited anything they illuminated.–Joe]

Just what I would expect

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From a “Gun Guy” email I received.

If someone is opposed to one inalienable right, such as the right to keep and bear arms, then it comes as no surprise when they are also opposed to other inalienable rights:

Terrorism suspects shouldn’t be allowed access to any weapons, much less these deadly ones.  But if the bill is defeated by the NRA, those suspects will still be able to walk into any gun store and buy a weapon off the shelf.

“Suspects” are whoever law enforcement wants to call a “suspect”. There is no due process, another inalienable right, involved. Everyone could be a suspect. But of course “everyone” is who this bigot wants to prohibit from owning a firearm.

Another thing this idiot bigot doesn’t understand is that making it illegal to sell a “suspect” a firearm gives people an easy way to find out if they are “on the list”. Just try to buy a firearm and if you are successful you can be pretty sure law enforcement isn’t watching you or that your fake ID hasn’t been exposed yet.

If someone is so dangerous they can’t be trusted with a firearm then they shouldn’t be allowed to roam the streets and buy gasoline and matches either. Either lock them up or stop infringing their rights.

I was going to ask for these

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Peter showed these to me on his camera a few seconds after I pulled the trigger that initiated the explosion. All the other pictures I have seen missed a lot of the fireball because the fireball left the top of the frame so quickly. Peter captured it with this sequence. Probably 20 seconds prior Peter asked if we were too close. In response I asked, “You are wearing sunscreen, right?” As I knew from experience four gallons of gas being burned in the space of a couple seconds it was going to be very warm for the observers.

Here is my favorite of the sequence:

For scale notice the sticks, some of them on fire, some falling from the sky and others attempting to achieve orbit. Those are all 18 inches long.

That was a fireball. Not some wimpy fire spread around on the grass like some years. This was a true fireball. As Ben said, “The morning fireball was amazing. A-MAZE-ING.” Thanks Ry.

Thanks to Peter for sharing.

Thanks to David at Random Nuclear Strikes for finding Peter’s pictures.

Not bad

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I hadn’t fired (or cleaned) my pistol since last November. I did both on Sunday. I came in fifth out of twenty people. My only complaint is that I showed Adam what I thought was the best way to shoot “Secret Agent Double-Oh-Spud”. Then he was the only person to beat me on that stage.

Quote of the day–Ry Jones

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I’ll work to make the event so painful and expensive that nobody returns… I’ve already put out enough ideas about how to make a 1000 yard shoot hard; we’ll see how moderate they are when Joe rejects all of them.

Remember, Joe wanted a berm to shoot from, I wanted a trench full of mud. spectators would get paintball guns to distract the shooters. Joe’s no fun!

Ry Jones
May 9, 2007
You love me! You really love me!
[He forgot to mention that after Boomershoot 2006 he also suggested the entry fee be raised to $4000. And don’t forget that at Boomershoot 2007 it was his creation of the fireball target that resulted in flaming sticks falling from the sky. I love Ry’s ideas. I just don’t always implement them as originally proposed.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Frédéric Bastiat

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If every person has the right to defend–even by force–his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Frédéric Bastiat
The Law — What is Law?
1850

1000 yard Monday

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As Ry mentioned he pitched an idea to me today. For Boomershoot 2008 he suggested two things:

  1. We dispose of the farce known as “cleanup” where people shoot the “leftover” targets from 25 yards away. In actuality I hold back 150 to 200 targets just so people get a chance to do that. Instead we do that in a more formal manner on a different day and give people more targets especially for that.
  2. We do a 1000 yard event for the few, the arrogant, those that say the existing Boomershoot is too easy. Utilizing the existing targets, four and seven inches square boxes, we separate the “men from the boys” by separating the targets from the shooters by 1000 yards. We do this on a different day and perhaps a different location. It could be called 1000 yard Monday or some such thing.

I’m interested. It could work. And as Ry pointed out, it’s in keeping with my original intent for Boomershoot. I need to find 1000 yards that can handle five or ten shooters. And I need to confirm my potential new supplier of ammonium nitrate. We’ll be making and using more HE.