>Unk posted about Apple’s remote camera disable patent, to general complaint about jackboot-enablers.
It reminded me of an especially cute hardware hack, the keychan dongle that shuts off all nearby TV sets at the touch of a button. How long do you suppose it would be after the introduction of the camera-censoring tech that a nosy-cam version of TV-B-GONE showed up?
>All right, fine, the Legal Eagles tell me it’s not actually as bad as it sounds; but it still stinks and sounds dreadful: our State Supreme Court, in a mentally inferior 3-2 decision (in extra innings after rain delays on a moonless night, maybe — look, you run your courts your way and we’ll… See, we’re Hoosiers), decided a long-standing common-law right to resist unlawful entry (et sequelae) by the po-leece needed to be swept away.
As a practical matter, it’s kinda pointless; if Johnny Law comes knockin’ unwarranted nor in hot pursuit and you bar the door, you’re gonna get your hinder parts handed to you no matter what; after this ruling, if in the said process of rump-handing he happens to notice any Laetrile or prostitution, De Law is now on firmer ground if/when you’re brung up on charges….
Yeah, alla that. But IMO, it’s not the fiddling technical details, of which you’ve got to be an Esq. and plugged into the local legal loop to parse in full and proper, it’s the spirit of the thing; especially in that policebeings don’t get a weekly mental download from the Courts and are often operating without a whole lot more information on the fiddly details than you and me. (They’ve got handbooks…written, mostly, by lawyers in Law French or whatever they call the jargon nowadaze. You can image the utility of this to the working Peace Officer). So there are a lot of cops out there who just heard the same news story you saw and are thinking, in the backs of their minds, that the State Supreme Court is okay with possibly a little door-kicking and/or some preemptive home visits to the hinky. Most of ’em still won’t (I suspect the degree of personal restraint exercised by most sworn officers is altogether surprising, were we to learn of it) but no population is entirely free from those who Do Not Quite Get It.
And for their sake as well as ours (but mostly for ours, mine especially), this ruling needs fought. When I find out who’s standing up to it, I’ll let you know and we can pass the hat or have a bake sale or something. Wave signs. Go on a hunger strike and chain ourselves to the polling place door! (Look, it kind of worked for the suffragettes and all they were after was a chance to pick their oppressors). Something. (“Fetch the Gura!” Or does he only do guns? Fine, we’ll have to go ACLU on ’em).
–And I want to know who sang lead in this ruling: he needs impeached. Or at least unlawfully entered upon by a policeman or two.
Claire, quit hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock!
>It’s a beautiful place, with no shortage of natural wonders or clever and productive people; but the trouble with a place where you can get anything on the ballot is that there are plenty of persons — or tallish, hairless/featherless bipeds that have (mostly) learned to not make messes in the house — who have absolutely no grasp of “none of your business!”
And this time ’round, out in the Golden Pear State (look it up), in San Franciso, where happy, smiling people covered in tattoos and scarifications, with piercings through every bit that’s pierceable, will greet you and politely ignore your goggling eyes, they’ve put a proposal to outlaw (male) circumcision on the ballot.
I haven’t got a dog in that fight, bein’ female and not a mother, nor livin’ in Cally-forn-i-a; but I find myself goggling not at the innocent folks who have gone in for heavy decoration but the sheer, ignorant effrontery of the sort of shaved ape who thinks his personal prejudices and whims outweigh, gee, decades of custom, centuries of religious practice and, f’pity’s sake, deals made with G-d?
–Sure, you can tell me I’m an agnostic — but the parties to the cited arrangement are not.
Right about now, you prolly think I’ll go Godwin; but I shan’t. I don’t have to. I just wonder when San Franciscans will move on up to the year 1290 and put an Edict of Expulsion up for vote?
The tyranny of the mob, sooooo much better than the tyranny of a single man. And so very much more wise, too. You betcha.
>Or the lack thereof. A huge headache is drillin’ in via my left ear. It’s just the weather getting synerjiggy with my normal migraine but it has fair driven most thoughts from my head.
I’m not polit-blogging quite as much as I have in the past, largely because I think at the Federal level the system is unfixably broke, in both the “not working” and “no money” senses. Between the Party of Spending and the Party of Spending Even More,* the FedGov is at this point in time running on bad checks and (relatively) good reputation and as Larry Correia pointed out back on the 15th, the finances are so unprecedentedly far out of whack, there is no tellin’ how it will fall when it falls, let alone what form it will take. (And do not even talk to me about planned collapse; whle there are plenty of rats gnawing away at the foundations, their contributions are barely a patch on the huge damage done by elected and appointed officials who refuse to believe water runs downhill — and by majorities who vote for the voteable fools and liars.)
One thing’s for sure, the superbigsavings budget Congress came up with is a bad joke; it replaces a cowflop with…a cowflop with a ribbon it! Dig in, kids. If you don’t like that, there’s a proposal to jack up the taxes on the companies and people who employ us, which, as any simpleton know, could not possibly result in even more bankruptcies, layoffs and offshoring. Oh heavens no. And meantime, the party that was chanting No Blood For Oil elected their Own Very Special Peace-Loving Guy who got us in another war in oil country! Oh, hurrah. Meanwhile, our other wars sputter on, all of ’em producing the FedGov’s primary tangible product, maimed young people.
The collapse, when it comes, may look a bit like the fall of the old Soviet Union. We are fortunate in the U.S. that we’ve got State governments (at least, if you like governments). Many of them are even solvent, or nearly so and when — not if, when — the Federal Government of The United States of America augers in, the States will likely be able to cobble something together. If they can manage to dodge debt collectors after the Feds, there may be a path out.
But the clock is ticking. I hope things hold together long enough for the Golden Age of Commercial Space Travel to really get cranking but I have my doubts. It’s a pity — there is wealth enough up there to even prop up the bloated monstrosity headquartered in the District of Columbia; but do you want that? Perhaps the best we can hope for is that it falls slowly.
It’s sad. I never thought things would take this sort of a turn, not in this country; but we are within a few years of internal passports (if I don’t hurry up and get a passport so I can get a RealID driver’s license, I won’t even be able to travel far), government is getting back into the business of tellin’ businesses what to do (after FDR and Nixon’s efforts mostly landed in the toxic waste dump of history reeking quietly as a warning) the wheels keep spinning and spinning as the country sinks into the mud while grinning politicians call it “progress.”
Gah! A pox on ’em all!
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* Interchangeable, if you don’t mind repainting.
>I’d like to come up with something topical and amusing this morning but I have to be at the opthamologist’s in an hour and there just isn’t time.
…Okay, one thought for this 15th April: If “taxes are the price we pay for civilization,” we’re being hugely overcharged.
>…Or at least even more of.
Since I’m already earworming readers with well-known Broadway tunes, why not something from a different “Annie?”
Sadly, the subject of this morning’s disquisition isn’t as lighthearted: seems Our President, who as a candidate proclaimed that honoring the Rule of Law demanded that terror suspects be Mirandized, now tells us, no, no, noo, and he’s urging Feds to go all Jack Bauer on terror suspects, especially if they suspect an immediate threat to public safety.
I’m sure many readers will tell me Mr. Obama has finally seen the light, but it bothers me; it’s much too vague and flexible. At a time when Authorities are already tagging mainstream, freedom-friendly/gun friendly organizations as “terrorists” (and when gun-grabbing nutjobs go even farther) , I don’t think this is a blunt instrument we should be letting the Federal Gummint wield unquestioned.
And I’m really wondering where all those Democrat activists who issued dire warnings about Federal overreach during the most recent Mr. Bush’s tenure have scuttled off to. Guess it’s okay when their guy is in charge of Room 101, then?
(This is posted on a delay, I have an eye doctor appointment early as you read it. Sure hope they can make lenses for my new frames; I may even splurge on contacts again.)
>Hugo Chavez, noted astronomer and planetary ecologist, also fat-headed autocrat, says capitalism may have ended life on Mars. He’s serious.
The opposition: they’re committed, they’re commitable, and they think their ill-informed opinions are Eternal Truths.
Is this what spooked Balko into taking the blue pill?
>I still have a cold. I had a long, crappy day, followed by crap at the drugstore and the five-and-dime (doesn’t Target carry facial tissue in grown-up sized boxes? Kleenex?™) and things kept on crappy when I got home, in part due to crappy miscommunication over my crappy celphone, which renders words but doesn’t have quite enough crappy bits in the crapulous A>D/D>A to convey tone of voice.
Ghu help any frikkin’ telemarketer who calls; I’ll turn ’em inside out. Thrice.
I have just about had it with everything on this planet. But it’s just like thermo-damn-damn-damn-dynamics, it’s the only game in town.
>Update: As predicted in comments, it’s still infected. Ordered an external optical drive and I guess I will have to mindwipe the poor thing and start over. (Salvaged a bunch of IWOAS text files but that thumb drive needs looked at now, just in case. Malwarebytes claims it is clean).
Or this blog; last night, I started my “Top Shot” post on my little Eee but had to finish it on my desktop, and that after running spyware/malware scans: the Eee had a trojan, an especially annoying and nasty one, and I am not sure how I got it.
Initially, it wouldn’t boot up at all and I supposed the hard drive had died; but the hidden reset button got it to boot up, my browser launched okay but then opened another tab and once I’d closed that — chaos! Screen after screen of nearly-plausible warnings; the giveaway was their persistence and the long list of supposed risks, threats and “stealth intrusions” reported.
Removing the trojan took some time and effort and I am giving serious thought to keeping the wireless LAN off; my main use for the Eee netbook is to write fiction and I darned near lost tens of thousands of words I hadn’t backed up. Had to change a bunch of passwords, too.
…And today will be “install more protection day.” Oh, the fun.
>You thought with a Republican majority in the House we were making progress back to a FedGov that respected your freedom?
Better sing that to Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and sing it plenty loud; they are pleased as punch to require your ISP to retain scads of data about your online doings and then sell that info (free for nothing) down the river to Mr. Obama’s overseer Attorney General Eric Holder. They could not be more proud to turn your Constitution-readin’, gun-ownin’ online self over to the Feds, in fact.
That whole freedom of the press thing, that business of reading what you want, posting what you want, heck, it is way over-rated. You’d prolly just form up Committees of Correspondence if they didn’t watch you like hawk. Or read you some Tom Paine or Ayn Rand and get all kinds of baaaaaad ideas.
Radley Balko linked it and he gets a lot more hits than I do; but in light of his recent white-featherwaving over what Mass. did to TJIC, I thought it might be wise if somebody else pointed it out, too. Just in case.
(Frikkin’ Republicans. I never saw a bunch of guys more eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory than the wise old silverbacks of the Grand Old Party).
The Adventures Of Roberta X 