The Rusted Musket

Wall Street Journal this week had a short piece concerning the Army’s desire to finally move on from it’s current M16/M4 battle rifle platform. This is a great idea; Iraq taught us the 5.56 bullet hasn’t the knockdown energy and Afghanistan taught us the 5.56 hasn’t the power to effectively reach past 600.

In my opinion though, this is a fourth quarter substitution making little to no sense; it’s just too late in the game baby. We have a handful of troops in Iraq and we’re leaving Afghanistan in July. What war then are we fighting that justifies a new battle rifle? The ones we just left? I believe, out of necessity, we are entering an era of Department of Defense budget cuts that won’t fund foreign wars or gun projects; rightly so. I’m ready for about a decades worth of staying home and letting the world figure out their problems without US troops and guns. (That last sentence was indeed nothing more than a rant faced bunny on a trial, apologies)

More in Parenthesis

(Does the UN still matter? We’ll find out what we always secretly knew, without our troops, guns, and money, it doesn’t. I can’t be too hard on those other UN members though, they don’t have any money either, they spend it all on healthcare, for better or worse)

All that to say this project should have been funded and decided upon five years ago. So, in closing, I couldn’t agree more, and ironically less, with a new US battle rifle…

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

Looks like more basic freedoms are being infringed on in the UK. Basically the government wants to put a law into place that will allow them to monitor all internet, email traffic and telephone conversations, in the name of fighting terrorism.

There is a disturbing trend among governments to add more invasive “security” measures all in the name of national security. For instance, airports adding the full body scanners, completely disregarding privacy concerns and the potential health risks from the radiation dose you get. The scanners are totally unnecessary. Airport security right now is very good and there hasn’t been any hijacked or terrorist acts for years (other than a few “scares”). So why add more?

Don’t let your hard earned freedom be taken away so easily. Refuse to submit to full body scans and campaign against this invasive UK law.

Large cities are constantly adding more and more cameras. Most of the time they go in intersections to “reduce” traffic violations by allowing the police to remotely send you tickets. Lovely… There is a lot of controversy over cameras like that because of invasion of privacy concerns. Chicago has a very large network of cameras and is always looking to expand them. Funny thing is that despite the city having 10k+ cameras all networked together, Chicago is still a country leader in murders… Lot of good those cameras are doing…

My beef with them though is the privacy thing. Who really wants all their actions caught on video whether sketchy or not? It is just a disturbing trend if you ask me. More and more technology and methods are being utilized to assist in catching a few criminals all while the law abiding citizen is treated more and more like a criminal, with more and more freedoms reduced. The full body scans at airports for instance. Airplane security is important, but there is a time to draw the line and that scanner is it. Don’t let the local, state and federal government take your freedoms away! It may not seem like much but little by little it is being whittled away.

This is so disturbingly true…. As a IT Professional I usually don’t fix other peoples’ computers. Most of the time they want it for free and I will then forever be tied to their computer… The thing is, I would never ask a doctor to fix me for free, or a carpenter to build a table for just the cost of materials… Its a strange double standard.

What shows did you watch as a kid? Captain America? Transformers? Sesame Street? Bugs Bunny? Sponge Bob? Or maybe you didn’t watch TV all that much? These days, for better or for worse, kids generally watch a lot of television. Partly because they like to and partly because a lot of parents find that its a easy way to keep their kids entertained. To an extent TV is fine, and in some cases might actually be good if the shows have good themes behind them. Other times they are nothing more than senseless entertainment, or maybe politically charged drivel.

One interesting aspect of kid’s show nowadays is the lack of a good “manly” figure. What is a manly figure you may ask? Its not the bumbling, burping, jerks that so often get displayed on TV. Its the responsible, providing, leader that young boys want to look up to. Kids, especially young boys, need role models and examples of what a boy should be or what a girl should be, but our society has really muddled those roles now. Young men are no longer stepping up to be the head of the family or to take responsibility, instead they hide behind drugs, sex, TV, video games etc… What takes their place then? Women do sometimes, but more often than not the position remains empty.

Why and how did this happen? Part of it surely has to do with the feminist agenda of past decades. Feminism is all fine and dandy but it can and does go to far. I think it has negatively affected the gender roles of our society. Some women have really started to act like men and to take over the role that men should be in. I’m not saying that women should always be stay at home moms or shouldn’t have careers. What I’m trying to get across is that a lot of men don’t know what it is to be a man. They are emasculated in a sense. Men need to step up and take responsibility for themselves. They need to have commitment and be encouraged to lead their families.

Post inspired by this WSJ article.

Check out this hilarious video. Google’s new ad options..

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

Check out this hilarious video… I totally want this blender!

I came across this post a while ago and haven’t gotten a chance to write about this yet… I find it a little strange that the US military has a budget of hundreds of billions and they can’t even create a decent firewall for their combat drones… This worries me because these drones are going to get bigger and more powerful, so its probably only a matter of time before one gets “hacked” and turned on us… Its like Battlestar Galactica, they created the cylons (for those who haven’t seen the show, cylons are bipedal sentient machines) as a work force, I’m sure at first they seemed very benign, but in the end humanity is decimated by their creations.

We ought to be very careful going forward…

Well I’ve just have one of the more crazy months of my life, at least as far as web sites go. You see the host that I have three websites on decided to “sell out” and completely changed over owners and management. Somewhere in that process my three websites went down for pretty much three full days. After that I decided I should find some place else  as the change of owners scared me a bit. So I try and contact the support people to get my domains transferred… A day goes by, two days, three days a week and I don’t hear anything from them despite bombarding them with emails. Finally I get really fed up and threaten legal action (hey, domains are really important) and they finally respond assisting me in the domain transfer process.

Since I have three sites and might end up getting more (working on doing more website work) I figured a resellers account would be good. So I signed up for one of them and just finished transferring the site yesterday. Just in the nick of time too as I got a email this morning saying the shared hosting server I was on had been hacked and all data lost… Lovely!

Anyway, I’ve learned some important things from this.

1. Don’t be sucked in by the whole “free domain with a hosting account” crap, keep your domain at a larger domain registrar like godaddy, joker, dotster, etc..
2. Don’t have your domain at the same place as you host. Its just not worth it if something happens to that host. I say this because larger hosting places like godaddy and dreamhost don’t generally provide the level of service and reliability (at least on the shared hosting or smaller reseller accounts) as a smaller, reputable host does.
3. Lastly, don’t pay for a year in advance. Stick to a month to month or every quarter. The potential savings are just not worth the hassle of trying to get money back  if (its a big if admittedly) something goes wrong.

Let me just close with this: the internet is a ever changing place… I was perfectly happy with the host I had for over a year. They had good uptime, a very helpful staff and decent prices. But in the world of the internet anything can happen.

So being that I am a computer enthusiast and I work in IT, I thought it only right that I do a mini-review of the Windows 7 beta. Especially since I’ve used every Windows operating system since Windows 3.1 and I am a IT Professional… Lastly I don’t mind Vista but it could use some serious improvements and Windows 7 might just do that.

Windows 7 had a somewhat rough start (unanticipated demand for the beta drove the servers offline for almost a whole weekend) but Microsoft seemed to respond well to the demand and added more infrastructure for the beta and expanded the amount of available downloads. Anyway I ended up downloaded the beta at work on Monday. It was a bit tough to get the download as the links were not really working at the time, I ended up having to find a direct link to the 64bit version in the forums. After I found it, I started downloading. It took a while since the file is 3.15GBs but it downloaded correctly with no problems.

VMWare Workstation is a really great tool for testing so I figured I would try out my test in there. I created a VM and used the Vista 64bit as the template, setting it for two processors and 1GB of ram. I must say that I am surprised by how little needs to be done to install Windows 7 (well Vista too), you just need to put in the CD key and a couple other things and away it goes. I had no problems in installation and about a half hour later I had Windows 7 in my VM.

My first impression of it was pretty good. The desktop looked clean and the taskbar got a nice new look. It reminded me a lot of the KDE look. The icons for the quicklaunch portion got a bit larger and show desktop is a little bar on the far right instead of a quicklaunch icon. One thing that they added that I really like is the quicklaunch icon for Windows Explorer. Its nice since I spend a lot of my time in the explorer window and that is one less click for me (yes I know it could have added it by myself). I like how the clock shows the date by default now too, that means less work for me to find the day and less work is always good.

Clicking on the “start” menu shows a very Vista like start menu, but come on what did everyone expect. I’ve always liked the Vista start menu so thats no problem for me.  They did change the shutdown button though which was a gripe I had with Vista. It now has shutdown as its own button and a little arrow to access the other options.

Other notable changes are that the Security Center has been changed to the Action Center which has more options and uses. Basically it is used to help maintain your computer.

The last thing I’ll cover is the changed to the UAC, which I’m sure you’ll all agree needed to be changed. They changed it to work more like the security sliders in Internet Explorer, there are 4 options from full off to full on with a non-intrusive but still secure option as the default. Overall a very good way to change it.

My initial impressions are that it appears to take the good parts of Vista and improve them while fixing the bad parts. It feels a lot like what SP2 for XP did. It changes a lot of stuff but keeps the core intact. Maybe called it SP3 for Vista? 

Anyway, at this point it seems to be a very usable beta with no problems that I noticed. I’ll be very curious to see what they change in the release version.