2nd Amendment Purpose and Limits

I think the purpose of the 2nd amendment is to guarantee that the people have a right to defend themselves, even against a corrupt government if necessary. It's important for this to stay in the constitution so that people easily recognize any attempts to prohibiting them from owning weapons.

The 2nd amendment was written at a time when the weapons a man used to hunt or defend his territory were not much different than the weapons infantrymen carried into battle. Armies had cannons and grenades, but these were not used for police action against citizens.

Today, the weapons available to our military and police are far superior to those we use for self defense and for hunting, their training is excellent, and they have an operational and logistical capability unrivaled anywhere on the planet. What kinds of weapons should civilians have in order to defend against a (hypothetically) corrupt government and military forces with such strengths?

Clearly, it doesn't make sense for citizens to buy and store grenades, machine guns, tanks, cannons, and missiles. The safety and maintenance procedures alone can be a full time job (this is just one reason we have an active duty military force even during times of peace). Even if training on using this equipment were offered to any interested citizen, I would hesitate to be a neighbor to someone who stores bombs in their basement or back yard.

On the other hand, we should not arbitrarily limit the kind of weapons that individuals are allowed to possess. Our rights should not be subject to whims, knee-jerk reactions, or fashion. If we need to limit weapon ownership, it must be in a very deliberate, thoughtful way.

I think the distinction should be made between weapons that are useful against specific individuals and weapons that are "area weapons" or cause an amount of damage that is enough to destroy structures or injure bystanders and not just targeted individuals. So, using this guideline: clubs, knives, swords, pistols, and rifles are all weapons that are easy to target to specific individuals and in the hands of a reasonable operator are unlikely to cause harm to someone other than the intended target or to cause great collateral damage. So I'm intentionally discounting any occurrence of someone flailing a sword wildly in a crowd or shooting wildly into a crowd. However, grenades, rocket launchers, machine guns, and tanks are all area weapons and have a potential to cause great collateral damage and should be restricted to military use.

The police should be restricted to individual weapons the same as are authorized for individual citizens. If a criminal is using area weapons or explosives then the police must call the national guard for assistance. In this event, the national guard should not hesitate to kill the criminal if necessary to stop the violence. As soon as the violence as ended the national guard mission is over and the police resume their investigation.

If the deceased criminals had any possessions these may be used to repay some damages but unfortunately it's common for violent criminals not to own much. In this case the community should band together to support its victims, and be comforted by the fact that taxpayers are not paying any money to clothe, feed, and house (in prison) criminals who used advanced weapons to hurt others.

Government Should Use Open Source Software

A law in New Hampshire was passed that requires state agencies to consider open source software when purchasing.

Full details: http://www.nhliberty.org/bills/view/2012/HB418

I think it's a good idea that can reduce costs for the government, especially when it's time to switch vendors, because when using open standards it's easier for other companies to estimate how much it will cost to integrate or modify, which means reduced risks for companies who bid for a contract, which means more competition and lower price for the government.

Smart Electric Meters

Benefits to using a "smart" electric meter that stores and transmits electricity usage wirelessly to the electric company:

Presently, electricity customers can monitor their usage by observing the analog meters outside their property. The procedure is to observe the amount shown on the meter, wait for some time (an hour for example), then observe the meter again. Subtract the earlier reading from the later reading to obtain the amount of electricity used during that period.

An advantage of "smart" meters touted by electric companies is that customers would be able to more easily monitor their usage by logging in to the electric company website.  However, this creates a risk that someone else can steal that information or take advantage of security flaws to observe the customer's usage and glean personal information such as if the customer is home or away, or what appliances the customer is running inside the home.

We can have the best of both worlds by installing our own smart meter that reports wirelessly to its master - the person who installed it. Customers could purchase an application that runs on a laptop or smartphone that communicates with their own smart meter and monitors the usage.  The smart meter could include 32 MB of data memory, which would be enough to store the reading every minute for an entire year, along with the cryptographic keys it needs to communicate securely with the master's application.  When the memory is full it the device would simply purge the oldest entries to make room for the newest ones. Clearly, the owner can be away for an extended period of time and still monitor usage that occurred during his or her absence.  The meter would need to transmit the same amount of data wirelessly continuously in order to prevent outsiders from gaining information about usage based on the length of the wireless transmissions alone. However, the transmission can be low power because it's for local use only and the smart meter could allow the owner to set the interval between transmissions (to be 1 minute, 5 minutes, 1 hour, etc.) in order to further cut power usage, or even make it "on demand" by pressing a button or issuing a command wirelessly.

The electric company is welcome to install its own smart meters as well in order to save the cost of sending someone to monitor them. However, it does not need to risk its customers privacy by making that information available online because customers can install their own smart meters if they want that capability. Risking everyone for a benefit that only some people want does not seem to be a good idea and government should not encourage it.

In addition, continuous communication between meters and the electric company can help to pinpoint power failures but those communications need not include personal information - they should be simple and anonymous such as "node 1234 receiving power from the grid" or "node 1234 not receiving power from the grid" and encrypted so only the electric company can interpret them.

Net Neutrality to Protect the Commons

Americans for Tax Reform has taken the ISP side of this issue in the name of less government regulation. This issue has nothing to do with tax reform and if handled properly has no regulatory burden any more than we have to regulate who gets to use America's roads.

The Internet is a commons and it's the government's proper role to make sure that it remains available for the benefit of everyone.  I, for one, subscribe to Internet service at home and via my phone so that my ISP will deliver the world to me - and I'm already paying for the access so I reject any idea where the ISP will further restrict what I can access by charging the other side for it as well.  This is highway robbery - everyone has already paid for their access and now the man in the middle wants a bigger cut.  

The Internet has grown because the free market works but ALSO because all sites are on an equal playing field:  business owners control how well their site is accessible by investing in better servers and more bandwidth, and customers control how well they access the internet by choosing their devices and bandwidth. Now some ISP's see a new profit venue by charging businesses more money to ensure their data flows well to customers accessing it through that ISP - even though both businesses and customers have already paid for their bandwidth separately. This is going to lead to the OPPOSITE of a free market because as ISP's consolidate, more and more customers are forced to access the internet through less and less ISP's. So this means that just A FEW entities will have a large amount of control over what people see by simply adjusting how much it costs.  Only large well-funded businesses will be able to afford having great performance and customers will gravitate towards those sites, some which will inevitably become mere portals like AOL.  Because this model will work well for ISP's, they'll exploit it as much as possible, which means for smaller businesses, the barrier of entry into the internet marketplace will be raised again and again until eventually starting an online business will become very prohibitive.  It turns the Internet from a free market to a very controlled market - but controlled by a few really large monopolies.

Sprint, Verizon, and the like didn't invent the Internet and the prospect that they will reduce their individual investments in their  network infrastructure doesn't scare me at all. They'll cut jobs? Fine, you can't terrorize me.  If they don't think it's profitable they can quit the business and someone else will happily take over their customers.  It was tax money that led to the creation and many subsequent innovations of the internet, and the livelihoods of a lot more people can suffer as a result of letting ISP's dictate what we see online.

Humanity loses again: HTML 5 chosen over XHTML 2.0

The W3C let the XHTML 2.0 charter expire on 31 Dec 2009.

This is bad, because XHTML 2 is better organized than HTML 5.  Everything neat that HTML 5 can do could also be done in XHTML 2... on the other hand, HTML 5 includes some big gaffes like reserved style sheet class names (like .copyright, in contrast with the special pseudo-classes like :first), and HTML 5 keeps bad tags around like font and italics, even though these are better represented as style sheets - either inline or separated.

Xhtml.doc nicely summarizes some pros/cons.

Objective-C

I'm learning Objective-C and I am really stewing over a few things:

First, there's a lot of punctuation in Objective-C.

Second, I don't like that the annoyance of writing header files is extended by having to write @interface et al. We should know by know how to write implementations and have a tool to create the header files from publicly visible methods. I get really annoyed when I'm writing things twice. #import is a nice improvement over #include though.

Third, I don't like that the word @interface is used for the declarations in the header file. Because the header files don't do anything for the programmer, we have a new word @protocol to describe the same thing that "interface" does in Java. But at least Objective-C has its @protocol word, because that's a really useful programming technique.

Fourth, I don't like the way are declared on classes and variables. It looks awkward to be in a class declaration after the parent class, and it looks extraneous in a variable declaration. I like the Java way better, where I can just clearly write "class ... implements ..." and declare variables with the interface as data type so that both me and the compiler know what they can and can't do. After all, when they conform to an interface, it doesn't matter to the programmer what type they really are.

Fifth, I don't like the arrangement of functionality in the Foundation framework. The NSString class has methods for handling file paths and that seems out of place. I guess that because it's so much more cumbersome for the programmer to create new instances in Objective-C with the alloc/init/release formula, the Objective-C guys found it more convenient to stick a bunch of methods into related using objects so they can be accessed directly instead of in a package where the functionality is grouped together. At first I thought it might have been added with a category (mix-in... neat) but the documentation for NSString doesn't mention that so I think it really is built-in.

Net neutrality

The best argument I've read for net neutrality:  we host their wires.   It was written in the UK but applies to the USA just the same.

If net neutrality is not enforced, what are the traffic-shaping ISP's going to do when angry citizens start cutting the lines?  I don't really care, because they'll deserve it. 

Computer Forensics

There are only two kinds of digital evidence: 1's and 0's. 

Session Timeout on Login Screen

I was just at a website where I didn't remember the password and had to look it up. When I found it, I switched back to the browser and typed in my username and password. Clicked Login. What I got was a page saying that my session had timed out and I had to click a link to return to the login page.

That's stupid. There's no security value at all in expiring a session of someone who hasn't logged in yet. And since the site is absolutely not dynamic at all until after you login, there really isn't any value in keeping a session for someone who hasn't logged in yet. So if there's going to be a session assigned to me before I log in, and it's worthless, then don't bother me with a message saying it expired. Just make me a new one, and then take me to my homepage. Or, if I got the password wrong, then make me a new one and take me back to the login screen immediately. But I really don't care that the worthless session expired, and I'm really annoyed at having to read that and click one more time just to try again.

Broadband stimulus and net neutrality

Obama got this part right: if the government is going to pay ISP's to grow more networks, then it has to benefit the people of the United States, and that means Net Neutrality.   If the ISP's want to change the rules, they need to come up with their own dollars.  

I want Net Neutrality because I never liked AOL.  Without Net Neutrality, the entire Internet is going to feel like AOL felt in the 90's, and that's terrible.  Oh, wait, not the entire Internet -- just the sites that don't pay extra for high-speed visitor traffic. Or maybe just the sites that I don't pay extra to visit at high-speed.  Or maybe just the sites that have streaming video or audio but are not sending royalties to my ISP.  

On the other hand, I know that whatever happens, the people will be alright. If  the big corporations successfully brainwash our politicians into handing them everyone's money without restrictions, then we'll just have to come up with another way to network. It might include a new technology, or a new generation of local non-profits for interconnecting nearby cities, or clever ways of hiding the true nature or destination of our traffic from the ISP's.

I read on PC World that wireless carriers are arguing that more some ISP's claim that broadband deployment will be slow if we have Net Neutrality, because they'll spend their time fighting with the government about the rules. 

Good:  Public Knowledge, Center for Democracy & Technology, Save The Internet, Free Press

BAD:  CTIA, for saying that Net Neutrality debates are harmful because they'll delay the stimulus spending. To CTIA's members, I say get lost -- if you don't like the restrictions, don't apply for the funds. Someone else will gladly comply and build broadband networks in places where you don't want to do business.