Quote of the day—Ashley

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Nobody cares about your guns, if you hunt with them or (I hope) someday kill yourself with them.

…

Everyone else considers “ya’ll” crazy. We strive for the day that your ancient propaganda goes extinct. You, Mr. Redneck, are a dying breed of ignorance.

Ashley
November 5, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—The Coquette
[Why are anti-gun people so violent? Oh, yeah. Now I remember.

Don’t ever forget. There are a sizeable number of anti-gun people that want you dead. They want your children dead. This is just one willing to announce it on my blog. They believe their desires are so mainstream they don’t even have to hide that wish and will tell it to your virtual face. And perhaps it is a mainstream view in San Luis Obispo California where Ashley is (IP address 66.215.49.99). Yet people look at me a little strange when I tell them I try to avoid California because those people hate “my kind”.

People will say “it’s just talk”. “You don’t have to worry about someone like that.”, they will reassure me. Probably not. But I’ll bet a lot of people didn’t think they would have to worry about a half nuts failed artist in prison writing a book about “My Struggle” either.

And you do you notice that in her world view I’m ignorant and crazy? I’m quoting U.S Supreme Court cases, Federal Appeals Court cases, and Gandhi. What does she reference to bolster her view? Nothing. And claims of me being ignorant by people who have spent more than two minutes of time talking to me are non-existent. I am therefore forced to conclude that Ashley has based her conclusion on ignored data. Which, if I’m not mistaken, makes her the ignorant or possibly crazy one.—Joe]

Right to carry violated under color of law

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It’s possible this could be a good case to take much further and set a good precedence:

The Second Amendment Foundation has filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Arkansas on behalf of a legal resident alien, alleging that his right to keep and bear arms is being violated by a state law that prevents him from obtaining a concealed carry license.

The lawsuit, on behalf of Martin Pot (pronounced Poht), a citizen of the Netherlands, challenges the Arkansas statute because it “completely prohibits resident legal aliens from the concealed carry of guns, in public, for the purpose of self-defense.

SAF, “winning back firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time”.

Progressive violence

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I was looking at some of the mining history in Idaho and found this:

Labor unrest was a problem throughout the district in the 1890s, and martial law was declared on two occasions. In 1899 labor agitators destroyed the Bunker Hill mill with a massive explosion of dynamite (Figure 35). Attempts, often successful, to destroy property were a favorite tactic used by union organizers against companies whose management was opposed to having unions at their mines.

BunkHillAfterExplosionFigure 35. Bunker Hill mill following explosion in 1899. (Engineering and Mining Journal, v. 67, p. 648).

And from here:minewar

Business are frequently criticized for their oppression and violence against workers. Progressives/liberals/communists do not have any high ground to claim.

Quote of the day—The Coquette

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Dude, you can wave court cases in my face all you want. At the end of the day, you’re still the wingnut who’s against centralized firearm registration and liability insurance because guns are like bibles.

The Coquette
November 3, 2013
Comment to On gun control
[There are so many lessons to be learned from this thread.

My response:

If suggesting the Second Amendment should be treated like the First Amendment means one should be called a “wingnut” then you will have to call a bunch of Federal Judges the same: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-…

And if you can’t be persuaded by the laws, the Federal Courts, or me gently pointing out the facts that makes you the dictionary definition of a bigot. I’m so glad we are a ruled by laws limited by the enumerated powers of the Constitution rather than by bigots. Otherwise we would still have Jim Crow type laws still being enforced, Jews being denied entry into schools, and concentration camps for the Japanese.

If being a defender of civil rights makes someone a “wingnut” in your book then I have a lot of “wingnut” company I am proud to be associated with. Are you just as proud of your association with the KKK?

Coquette response:

You’re not a defender of civil rights, Joe. You’re just an old white man in a fedora leaving creepy comments on my website.

It’s sad, really. You’re so myopic that you can’t even look past the barrel of your own gun and focus on the greater good.

My response:

All the evidence presented here is that the right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated civil right. All nine Supreme Court justices in the Heller decision agree with that. That your refuse to acknowledge that and insist that my defense of that right is somehow contrary to being a defender of civil rights takes a great deal of arrogance or is evidence of serious delusions.

We are done here. But thank you for playing along. This thread is
great material for my blog. You will be featured with Quote of the Day status on Tuesday.

Coquette response:

Looking forward to Tuesday, big guy. In the meantime, keep on using words that you don’t understand.

It should not be surprising that in addition to being prejudiced against gun owners that they have hostile opinions about people of certain ages and skin color.

Coquette is not the least bit concerned with the Bill of Rights or court rulings. All that matters is what they think is “the greater good” and looking down on people that disagree with their “superior” opinion. There is not even a glimmer of recognition that they might be wrong.

But that Coquette is concerned with “the greater good” tells us all we really need to know. The concept of individual rights is either alien or distasteful to them. The “greater good” is the mantra of the tyrant and the ever present excuse for genocide.

That someone can be that blatant in their disregard for the rule of law and individual rights is extremely scary. Even President Obama and VP Biden say they “respect” the Second Amendment and the courts rulings. They don’t of course, but they claim to. This person completely ignores the concept of rights. This is how governments end up murdering millions of their own people. People like this get into power and the rule of law disappears.

Again, the Second Amendment is to protect people from liberals.—Joe]

Well there’s your problem

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Via Sebastian we have this article whining about the lack of funding for the ATF. I only had to read as far as the second paragraph to see what the problem was:

The ATF, charged with keeping track of the nation’s 300 million guns…

Listen guys, the ATF has no more authority to keep track of the nation’s guns than it, or any other government agency, does the nation’s Bibles, Korans, and Torahs. And even if it were given the authority it would not be possible to keep track of those guns anymore than the DEA, with twice the funding, can keep track of the recreational drugs in this country.

And if you want to look at it another way try this: Our country is deeply in debt and getting worse. If the ATF isn’t doing the job you think it should be doing with the funding it is getting then let’s just get rid of it. Then put the money someplace where it would do some good. I would like to suggest paying off the debt.

CSGV and VISA

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CSGV now wants VISA to stop its affiliate program with the NRA:

Visa is helping to pay for NRA lobbyists who advocate against common-sense policies like background checks on gun buyers, and for dangerous legislation that would force K-12 schools, colleges, places of worship and businesses to allow the carrying of loaded guns on their premises.

I have a suggestion for CSGV. Why don’t you guys compare what a boycott by CSGV members would mean for VISA versus them dumping the NRA? It may be that this plan “can’t get the votes necessary” to succeed just like the gun control legislation they have been pushing.

The NRA has something like five million members. How many does the CSGV have?

Oh! That’s right. CSGV doesn’t have members so we can’t really do a direct comparison on that parameter. How about the number of people that show up for the annual meeting? The NRA has something on the order of 75,000. How many does the CSGV have?

Oh! That’s right. The CSGV doesn’t announce any annual meetings or make it known how many people show up at their meetings. But then a small apartment balcony with a couple lawn chairs is probably all they would need or could afford so announcing such a thing doesn’t make any more sense than demanding VISA drop the NRA.

Consensus with Biden on gun laws

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I’ve been reading (listening to it actually) Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours. In it she tells of V.P. Biden telling Jim Baker, “regarding the lack of prosecutions on lying on Form 4473s, we simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form, that checks a wrong box, that answers a question inaccurately.”

Only 44 out of 72,659 denials of the NICS check were prosecuted in 2010. If the firearm buyer told the truth on form 4473 when they tried to purchase the firearm the seller would have either been denied the sale on the spot and no NICS check would have been performed or they would have passed the NICS check. If they lied then they committed a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

I realize V.P. Biden has a problem with his head whistling when the wind blows so I’m not surprised he didn’t think of the following when he tried to get consensus on gun law changes. Gun owners, the NRA, and Biden should all be able get behind legislation to get rid of gun laws the Federal Government can’t and won’t enforce. If they aren’t going to prosecute people for improperly filling out a form then lets get rid of the form. Otherwise people might as well scribble “Screw you!” on it and call it good. I might be okay with that last approach too. It would be a common sense compromise, right?

Make it moot

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New York City’s has a “stop and frisk” policy where the police stop, question, and frisk people they deem suspicious. If drugs or weapons are found the evidence is used in criminal charges against them. In a typical year 500,000 to 600,000 stops are made. 86% to 90% of the time the person is innocent.

A Federal Judge told New York City to knock it off. But then she was removed from the case. Paul Barrett wants the city to use this opportunity “to come to a consensus on how the NYPD can continue its decades-long successful campaign to reduce violent crime, while at the same time respecting the Constitution’s ban on discriminatory government policies.“

As near as I can tell Barrett doesn’t have a problem with the searches as long as they don’t discriminate by race on who is being stopped for searches. I find this almost surreal. What would get it through his head that ignoring Fourth Amendment rights is a dangerous path to travel? Barrett’s mother escaped Europe as a little girl. Many of her relatives died in the camps during WWII. Maybe if consensus were for the police to refrain from frisking people unless their papers aren’t order. Have the police ask nicely and say, “Papers please.”

No. The “consensus” should be for the cops to cease stopping and searching innocent people. And another thing is the people should pass “constitutional carry” legislation and also end the war on drugs. After that what would be the point of frisking people? Suspicion of stolen property? Sure. Wounds from when they got shot attempting to harm an innocent person? Sure. But only after articulable probable cause that the person was a person of interest in a crime.

The number of innocent people stopped should be on the order of 10% or maybe 20%. When the innocent stop rate is 90% that is conclusive evidence the police need tall shiny boots and a German accent.

Quote of the day—Mailin Wong

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The best is to move to another more civilized country when people don’t get boners just by watching guns.

Mailin Wong
May 5, 2013
Comment to Staples starts selling 3-D printers
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via email from Sean Y.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Emily Miller

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The only way a mandatory check would work would be if the government could track every one of the 300 million firearms in the United States. And then the criminals would ask permission before buying them.

Emily Miller
Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours
[300 million guns? We have computers that could do that, right? They built a computer system that signed people up for Obamacare so they should be able to do that for gun owners, right?*

These would be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for “universal background check to work”.

They would also have to shut off the smugglers. You should assume this would work about as well as the War on Drugs has worked.

They would also have to prevent all the 3-D printers from making new guns. You should assume this would work about as well as the peeing into the wind.—Joe]

*In fact the Canadian gun registry (disbanded after costing 2 billion rather than 2 million) was built by the same people that wrote the Obamacare website.

Guns stop mass shooters

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A good case could be made that the more people that have guns the less likely mass shootings are to occur. It a little tough to do the experiment because how do you know of a mass shooting was stopped because more people have guns?

But there is evidence even if we can’t do a fully controlled experiment like we would like. There are a number of cases listed here (H/T to John Lott) where the bad guy left a note or had made a modest start toward challenging previous mass shooting body counts when they were stopped by someone with a CCW and a gun.

There is also evidence presented in John Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime as well. In the first edition (not sure about later revisions) the number of mass shootings prior to allowing people to exercise their right to keep and bear arms in public (no CCW) there were a modest number of mass shootings, then after passage of right to carry laws the mass shootings in that political jurisdiction went to zero. This was prior to the Gabby Giffords shooting which, of course, was in the gun friendly state of Arizona. But given that one exception when mass shooting occurs you can make a very safe bet that it happened in a “Gun Free Zone”.

It’s time to stop the mass shootings. We must stop government from infringing on our rights.

Comment backup

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I’m backing up this comment here in case “Reasoned Discourse” breaks out over there.

Gun ownership is a specific enumerated right. Driving a car is a privilege.

Gun ownership is much closer compared to freedom of religion. We don’t, and can’t legally, require all the Jews, Catholics, and Muslims to register, pass tests, and register all their religious books. And so it is with the right to keep and bear arms.

There’s some truth in it

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BlondeObamacare

Via email from JoeyD.

My HP-35 calculator died

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When I went to college in the fall of ‘73 they were teaching engineering students like me how to use slide rules. But the HP-35 scientific calculator had been introduced in 1972 and a few other students had them. It was an amazing thing. The HP web page (linked above) says:

HP asked a local market research firm to do a market study. They did and determined that the HP-35 Scientific Calculator would never sell because it was too expensive. Bill said “We’re going to go ahead anyway.” The product was so popular that HP couldn’t make them fast enough.

Bill remembered, “We figured, in the first year, if we could sell 10,000 calculators, we’d break even. We sold 100,000.”

I played with one for a little bit and then went to the University Book Store and bought one. It cost $300. That was a lot of money then. An entire year of school with books, tuition, room, and board was on the order of $2000.

I brought it back to my dorm room and the engineer across the hall from me came over and we played with it until dawn. It was absolutely amazing.

I eventually owned several different HP calculators. I programmed them and spent a lot of time “crunching numbers” for my electrical engineering problems.

I had gotten at least two different battery packs in the late seventies for my ‘35 when the old NiCads died and then ran it on the charger for years. The power switch got a little flakey and some of the keys got some bounce in them and I would have to sometimes fiddle with it to get it to work right. But it always would come through for me.

My HP-35 sat on the shelf a lot after I got newer calculators but when I set up my reloading bench back in the mid ‘90s I got it out and left it there. I would use it for estimating how many rounds I could get from a pound of powder or muzzle velocities and “power factors” from alternate powder charges or bullet weights.

As I was unpacking my gun room today I plugged it in and it would not turn on. I don’t know if it is the power supply, the power switch, or something else. It doesn’t really matter at this point. As of last month I have had it for 40 years.

I have another HP calculator I’ll put on my bench. If it lasts 40 years from when I bought it then it should last for at least another 10.

WP_20131102_010
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Let’s look to the UK for healthcare

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The UK has government run health care. That’s been working out well hasn’t it?

Oh! Maybe not:

A plan to create the world’s largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.

…

“The department has been unable to demonstrate what benefits have been delivered from the £2.7bn spent on the project so far,” Margaret Hodge, chair of the PAC, said. “It should now urgently review whether it is worth continuing with the remaining elements of the care-records system. The £4.3bn which the department expects to spend might be better used to buy systems that are proven to work, that are good value for money and which deliver demonstrable benefits to the NHS.” A further £4.4bn was expected to be spent on other areas of the vast IT project.

H/T to Adam Baldwin.

What I don’t think most people realize is that software doesn’t scale in a linear fashion from small projects to large. I can write, debug, a deliver a program to you that prints out, “Hello world!” in a minute or two. I can easily do it in five lines of code. That figures out to about 1200 lines per day* if I were to spend the entire day coding at that rate.

Yet when you look at the number of lines of code delivered on real projects it’s about 10 lines per day per developer. On a project as large as an operating system like Windows it’s much lower.

The problem is that planning, complexity, documentation, testing effort, and difficulty goes up much faster than the number of lines of code increase. You can pump out the code at a fast rate but it’s not something that is going to work well. It will be very fragile. You can find test cases where it will work correctly but as soon as you do something a little unusual or the system is under load and the timing on something changes you can end up extremely difficult to find bugs.

As the size of the project goes up communication between teams become a problem. With a poor design a small change in one part of the system affects many other parts. Communicating and coordinating this occupies increasing amounts of time and care. A change occurred “somewhere” in the system and your code stopped working. It can take an hour or a week to find the problem and get it fixed so you can continue to add features. Even worse are “build breaks”. This is when someone changed something and you can’t even build the software into something that runs so it can be tested. This can mean every single programmer on the entire project is at a standstill. As you might imagine these are very high priority events and you can have people baying for your blood. People take them very seriously and the consequences are high but they still happen.

A former roommate working on Windows NT back in about ‘99 told me she had a bug fix ready for check-in but wasn’t allowed to for months because of concerns that it was a change that could affect other people.

How many lines of code are in the Obamacare system? I don’t know for certain but there are reports that it contains 500 million lines needs to have 5 million lines rewritten. Do the arithmetic to arrive at your estimate of how many people working for how many days is required before it will be “fixed”. My best guess is that the politicians had the U.K. model in mind and that’s what they will get (see above).

Everything I see about the Obamacare web site indicates it was thrown together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. There are very few companies that have been able to write very large complex systems successfully. Microsoft and Google come to mind. The contractor for Obamacare isn’t on anyone’s list of successfully large scale system developers.

They claim it will be working by the end of November? Did they say which November?

* Yes. Lines of code per day is a poor way of measuring productivity. For example one can be very productive while reducing the number of lines of code in a program. Yet, it is good enough for many uses and can illustrate valid points with serious error.

It’s for your own good

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Sometimes people just don’t get it unless you can present the information to them in the proper format for their brains to grasp it.

Does the following help?

From @State_Control:

CapitalistsSocialists

What if it were a business that told you to buy their product or they would send men with guns to collect the money anyway? It’s for your own good they tell you. What would you do?

Why should it be any different if it is Obama doing the same thing?

What caliber for hunting?

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I seldom hunt but I do know a fair amount about ballistics. I only see one thing I disagree with on the info graphic I found here:

Choosing-The-Right-Caliber-Infographic

I’m pretty sure a .50 BMG would work fine for even the largest “Jurassic class” game.

Quote of the day—mikee

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People? Brownian motion with random, moving magnets arrayed in their environment, as far as I can tell.

mikee
October 24, 2013 at 11:55 am
Comment to Quote of the day—Timothy Sandefur
[This comment showed up when Barb and I were at lunch. I laughed pretty hard when I read it. I showed it to Barb but she didn’t know what Brownian motion was and it spoiled the mood some.

It’s funny because I suspect, on the scale of all humanity, the model has a positive correlation with the available data.—Joe]

Stars schedule slippage

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Best of intentions, yadda yadda yadda. Between various things happening on the home front that took time away from editing, my editor having a few medical challenges, the fact she’s doing it “on the side” and has to work around her work schedule, and the fact I am ending up looking at somewhat more substantive edits than I had originally planned, it isn’t ready quite yet. Cover art is taking longer than expected, too. All in all, The Stars Came Back is taking a bit longer than planned. *sigh*. An educational experience, if often frustrating and painful, all around. But I think the book will be much better for it. Now aiming for sometime in November, because it is national “write a novel” month.

Computer security just got harder

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This has been coming for quite some time (H/T to Jeff):

Triulzi said he’s seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit in a computer’s peripheral component interconnect, the Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU.

I wrote and demonstrated to some folks in D.C. a prototype of something like this in 2004 or 2005. Even before that lots of people knew it was possible.

You can remove all hard disks from your computer, install empty ones, and as the computer is booting up for the first time infect the new hard disk before the O/S even attempts to boot off of the CD drive. Of if you wanted you could just refuse to boot.

Imagine a stealth virus that infected some large percentage of all computers then on September 11th would only perform one function—format any storage device it had control of.

Sleep well.