Sebastian – Page 521 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Stratfor’s Lessons on Norway Attack

Reading through this, one thing that stands out is this is not a guy who was going to be stopped by a few extra gun control laws:

Unlike many lone wolves, Breivik demonstrated that he possessed the intelligence and discipline to plan and carry out an attack that spanned several years of preparation. For example, he joined a pistol club in 2005 just in case he ever needed to buy a gun through legal means in Norway, and was able to rely on that alternate plan when his efforts to purchase firearms in Prague failed. Breivik was also driven, detail-oriented and meticulous in his planning. His diary documents that he was also extremely patient and careful during the dangerous trial-and-error process of manufacturing explosives.

This guy would have kept trying, even if it meant going back to the black market. It seems like he did have the contacts if he had really tried. One thing that’s kind of scary is the fact that there seem to be, at least according to the Norwegian killer, at least fifteen other people throughout Europe who shared his philosophy, and who may be planning attacks of their own.

Faith in Government

When my company’s 401k plan got cancelled, I had to roll everything over into a Traditional IRA. I thought the transfer of money would happen through ACH, since I had to give them the financial institution’s information. But a few days ago I got a check in the mail, made out to the bank I got the IRA with, for an amount larger than I’d ever seen on a check before. So I found out what address to send it to, filled out the deposit slip, and went over to the Post Office to get it where it needs to be.

I got every piece of tracking on that thing that they would allow with a PO Box destination. I don’t trust the Post Office with that kind of responsibility. It made me think whether people like Obama and his supporters on the left would feel nervous putting most of their retirement savings into the hands of the US Postal Service. If the answer is yes, then why do they trust them with our health care? Does the government magically become more competent when they are asked to manage the health care system as opposed to delivering the mail? The latter tasks seems to be a lot simpler to me, yet I’m still nervous entrusting them with my life’s savings.

New Study out on Gun Control Support

There will be much our opponents can latch on to in this study, but the results are interesting, nonetheless. The authors imply cultural inclination, while a factor in whether you support gun control or not, is not as causative as many studies have shown.

Our CAS allowed us to compute a direct measure of the respondentâ€™s attitudes on egalitarian, libertarian and moral traditionalist issues. We then used those indexes to test whether they had any predictive value in informing opinion on gun control. While the egalitarian and libertarian indexes played some role in influencing opinion, our results indicated that demographic factors play as equally important a role. Moreover, when we included policy issues in our analysis, we found that our cultural indexes lost all significance.

The more I read studies like this, the more I think of rational ignorance of voters. Most people don’t know the issues, and don’t think about the issues in any consistent way. I don’t particularly like how they framed the issue here “banning ownership of assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons,” since assault weapon is a fictional category, made up by our opponents to confuse the public. Better to say ban semi-automatic weapons. I would also be interesting to see how it would poll if you used self-loading weapons, instead of throwing the word automatic in there. There was a tendency in this study to let one issue ride on another. So we speak of background checks and registration, allowing registration to ride on the back of background checks, or perhaps the other way around.

Americans are most united in their support for registration requirements/background checks, with 93% of respondents in our survey supporting such restrictions. Though there is more dissention, a majority of Americans also favor restrictions on assault/semi-automatic weapons and bans on carrying guns in public places. Sixty-three percent of respondents in our survey supported bans on assault/semi-automatic weapons and 57% favored bans on concealed weapons. Our survey revealed the most opposition to handgun bans, with only 22% of respondents in our survey favoring such bans. These opinions, of course, should be seen in the context by which respondents in our survey viewed the Second Amendment. The results indicated that 74% viewed the Second Amendment as intending to protect the right of an individual to own a gun, with only 26% viewing the Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form a militia.

This is consistent with other polling I’ve seen on the issue. It has to drive our opponents nuts they can’t get traction on these specific issues, but the problem is the cultural identification part, I’d be willing to wager. When you get to specific policies, no one wants to come off as extreme, but none of those people saying they want to ban assault weapons, or want universal background checks, are motivated to turn it into a political movement. I’d be willing to bet in the gun owner demographic, it might even be possible to get some of the folks that support bans out to vote against a candidate who’s bad on the Second Amendment.

Here’s an interesting experiment. Take the same people, and have one surveyor tell them they represent a gun owners rights group, and another that they represent a gun violence prevention group. I’ll be given the same set of people you get wildly fluctuating numbers. I find these kinds of social studies interesting, but I don’t lend much credence to them. People are irrational beings, and tend toward ignorance when you start speaking on political topics. As much as people might say they vote based on issues, most do not. It is an emotional decision making process for most.

Trouble for Barry

He’s lost Harry Belafonte.

Inquirer Covers Fast and Furious

Surprisingly, they come down on Holder much harder than many other media outfits, and suggest it’s time for the Attorney General to be more forthcoming about how this happened, and this is the real shocking quote coming from the Inquirer, “Finally, [Holder] needs to explain how the administration went from wanting to ban assault weapons to supplying them to drug lords.”

In the mean time, the Washington Post and the New York Times are both busy carrying the water for the Administration, and trying to turn this into a discussion about our gun laws. I noticed the media is now more willing to come down on Fast and Furious, now that I think it’s clear who they plan to make the scapegoats. It seems unbelievable that an operation like this was concocted at lower levels, rather than directed from above, but both the WaPo and the Times don’t seem to want to acknowledge it. It’s rare that I offer kudos to the Philadelphia Inquirer, but in this case they deserve it.

Problems with OS X Lion

My first review yesterday was after upgrading and playing around with the new features a bit. Now that I’ve had more experience with it, I should warn you all that there are numerous problems I’ve found. Here’s my list of annoyances:

Time machine tells me backups are delayed if I disconnect the backup drive more than an hour. Previously it would go ten days between warnings. Ten days was preferable, especially for laptops you’re roaming around with. I’m not certain this is a bug, either. From some reading, I think versioning might be integrated with Time Machine, and needs it to work.
Versioning is annoying. There are some documents I might want to enable that feature for. I don’t want versioning to be universal unless it’s going to be transparent, which it is not. If this depends on Time Machine, it’s a poor implementation. Digital managed a good implementation of this idea in the filesystem for VMS.
MacFusion broke, as did MacFUSE. MacFUSE was easily fixed, but you can’t delete shares in MacFusion. If you’re not using FUSE filesystems, this isn’t a concern.
I had a weird error that prevented any apps from running. Upon examination, one of the OpenGL libs was trying to load another support library, “libCVMSPluginSupport.dylib”, but spelled “libCVMSPluginSuprort.dylib” The ASCII difference between r and p is only a single bit, so it’s possible a bit flipped in memory, and this isn’t related to Lion at all. That happens sometimes, and looking at the library trying to load it, it was spelled correctly in the binary code. A memory leak could also cause data corruption, which would be Lion related, but I would have expected more extensive damage than a single inverted bit in a string.
I have previously used a plugin that blocks all Flash on any page I don’t specifically approve. It was sophisticated enough to display still images for popular Flash apps like YouTube. It has greatly improved my life when browsing with huge numbers of tabs already open, because I don’t have dozens of instances of Flash running, slowing my machine down to show me ads I don’t want to see. This plugin seems to have stopped working under Lion.
The Mac will no longer wake on mouse movement. You have to actually click the mouse to wake the machine up. I’m fine with that, but an option to change it would be nice, and telling me would be too, so I’m not moving my mouse around frantically thinking my machine just crashed.

So that’s the list so far. We’ll see what else I find. My friend Jason thinks I’m nuts for suggesting it’s a good release. I believe his exact quote was “What the hell are you thinking? Its a horrible release.” Not doing any real work with this machine currently, I’m probably less inclined to find problems than he is. But just so anyone who wants to upgrade is aware, there could be problems.

Today’s Dilbert

I thought today’s Dilbert cartoon was pretty funny, and on topic for this blog:

Dilbert 7/31/2011

Mac OS 10.7: The Lion Sleeps Tonight

I decided to upgrade one machine to Mac OS X 10.7, or Lion, as it’s branded. Just to make life more exciting, and because I’m bored, I decided to try it first on the Hackintosh. That added surprisingly little complication, given that there’s a procedure. The only complication I had was having to downgrade the sound driver, because Apple dropped support for the sound chip on my board some time ago.

So how is Lion? To be expected, Apple improved the eye candy. One thing I noticed immediately is a much improved text to speech capability. This showed up first on X-Plane, since it uses this to simulate air traffic control messages. If you upgraded from Snow Leopard, you may have to change it in the “speech” control panel. Apple also seems to be trying to bring iOS-like features to the Mac OS. That already happened in the later releases of Snow Leopard with bringing in the App Store concept. For Lion, there’s the LaunchPad, which is a virtual clone of the iOS Springboard. LaunchPad would seem to obsolete the Applications dock, so it would be interesting to see if a fresh install comes with the App dock enabled. Lion also comes with FaceTime, first introduced on the iOS platform, which is a videoconference app similar to Skype.

iCal and Mail are totally redesigned. I’m not sure whether I like it yet. You can go back to the classic view if you don’t, for Mail.Â Just as a warning, your calendar will probably be messed up when you upgrade. Mine was, and so was a friend’s. Mine was easy to fix. Apple also decided to change the way scrolling works. They’ve been pushing the trackpad device for Mac users for a while now, which is a touchpad interface similar to an iDevice screen. The Magic Mouse, which I use, is a touch interface as well, where you can scroll just moving your finger on the surface of the mouse. If you’re used to a scroll wheel, this seems counterintuitive, but if you’re used to an iPad, it might seem more intuitive. Tellingly, Apple refers to their reverse scroll feature as “natural scrolling,” implying if you don’t want to scroll Apple’s way, you’re unnatural, and clearly an abomination in the eyes of Steve.

One concept I do like is full screen apps through Mission Control, and the ability to move between them with mouse or trackpad gestures, similar to how iOS 5 is going to work when it’s released. The concept seems borrowed, in a way, from workspaces, in Unix/Linux environments, except it’s more suited to allowing you to use applications full screen and still being able to switch easily between them. There are some things I’m not sure I like about the implementation, however. For one, if you miss with a finger, you end up giving the mouse a scrolling gesture, which has different behavior in full screen apps. I’d rather have the option of a keyboard key, and gesture. Apple seems to have decided mice are so 1980s, man, and they stole that technology from Xerox anyway, so to hell with it. Trackpads for all! We’ll overlook that everyone pretty much stole the trackpad idea from Apollo Computer. Another deficiency with the Mission Control concept is that for multi-headed machines, it does not allow you to have one full screen app on one monitor, and another full screen app on another.

The new iChat has some extra features, but Adium is still better. Resume, which basically tries to emulate the consistent state of iOS between shutdowns and restarts would be nice if it worked a little better. Safari has a lot of new features, and what specifically is interesting for me is the “Reading List.” This was introduced a few weeks ago in Snow Leopard, but under Lion it’ll sync between other Macs and iOS devices, though I haven’t seen it work yet on iOS devices. Possibly this is an iOS 5 feature. For me, it’s important, because I do a lot of browsing on the iPad, and bookmark syncing between iPad->MobileMe->Mac and back again has been awkward. This might be a much better way to tag posts and articles for blogging that is readily available on all the devices I use, with syncing through MobileMe.

One feature I haven’t had a chance to play with yet is FileVault 2, which allows you to encrypt data seamlessly, and with high performance. I don’t have much interest in encrypting my day to day files, but encrypting backups might be something I’d like to do, since I often leave (left) that disk at the office so if my house burned down I wouldn’t lose everything. One problem, though, with encrypted data is remembering the key passphrase or not losing the key. Computer forensicists are also going to have fun with this feature, because with “Instant Wipe”, the key pretty much gets destroyed, rendering the data nothing more than digital gobbledygook, which then gets erased anyway. I am all in favor of pervasive encryption, however, because of governments who can’t seem to mind their own damned business. I’m glad this feature is present, even if I never use it.

Versions is another feature I haven’t played with yet, but essentially it’ll keep multiple versions of documents going back to its creation, and lets you browse versions and roll back. Though, I would imagine only iApps support that currently. I just opened up Word, and it does not seem to use the feature.

Overall, I’d suggest its not a bad release. It’s certainly a greater step than between Leopard and Snow Leopard, in terms of new features. One disappointing thing, for me at least, is that OpenGL performance on the MacOS is still fairly pitiful compared to Windows, and quite pitiful compared to Linux. Upon benchmarking, Lion is a very slight improvement in OpenGL performance over Snow Leopard, but not enough to be worth mentioning. Apple would be wise to work with AMD and NVidia to optimize its drivers for stronger OpenGL performance. Other than that, it’s worth the thirty dollars to upgrade. Waiting until the first maintenance release or two might not be a bad idea either, if you’re looking to avoid small problems and quirks. I plan on upgrading my two MacBooks, and Bitter’s MacBook Air, before I start a new job.

RFID Chips in Chiappa Firearms

Robb has a pretty good round up of the issue this past week, where Chiappa was found to be putting RFID tags in their firearms. Chiappa notes that it’s for inventory control. That is a legitimate reason, but if that is, indeed, the reason, you address your customer’s concerns by making it easy to remove, and helping the customer remove it. I also would suggest that banding the firearm with a tag would be far more preferable than gluing it into the grip.

But even as a form of inventory control, I am not pleased with Chiappa, or any other firearms manufacturer even going there, because this would make gun control in public places perfectly enforceable for the law abiding. Why? Because the next thing our opponents are going to start pushing, and thanks Chiappa, for giving them the idea, is to make RFID tagging on firearms mandatory, and making it illegal for an owner to remove or destroy the tag.

Now all you need is an RFID scanner to find out if someone is carrying. Now all a thief needs is a scanner to look for their presence in a home. Now all you need, if your goal is to get as many gun owners in prison as possible, to have a tag fail, and the police accuse the person of disabling it.

So I’m with Robb. Chiappa either didn’t think this through, or doesn’t care. Neither excuse is acceptable. We’re willing to pay more to do things the old fashioned way so we don’t open this can of worms. One thing I will say for sure, if they ever do mandate RFID tagging in guns, I’m going to develop a scanner for the pant wetters among our opponents that tells them when they are near someone with a gun. Why? Because they’ll find out how often that’s actually the case, and it’ll either help them get over their phobia, or force them to lead a secluded life behind closed doors.

How About a Government That Leaves Me Alone?

I hate the GOP, and I hate my choices. So with the Democrats, I can either have my money, and my kids’ money, spent so fast that our head spins, or, under the GOP, I can deal with stupid Internet snooping bills that invade my privacy and force ISPs to spend huge sums of money watching what everyone does. Let’s not even, for a moment, think about what this will do to the performance of high speed connections, where services will have to be forced through proxies, in order for their behavior to be logged. I propose an amendment to this bill, suggesting that Congress’ and the White House’s internet connection get tapped too, and the logs opened up to anyone who wants to look. Think it’ll pass then?

I should note that Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT), and Rep. Issa (R-CA), all voted against this stupid, stupid bill. The rest of the GOP fell in line. The GOP is still for big government, they are just for different big government than the Democrats.