Technology – Page 11 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Our Friends the Republicans, Part II

Looks like they are looking at regulating the Internets in a supremely stupid manner. The GOP really is just Statism Lite, except it is neither less filling, and it sure as hell doesn’t taste great.

UPDATE: Look who’s involved:

And the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which will be sending a representative to tomorrow’s hearing, previously adopted a resolution (PDF) calling for a “uniform data retention mandate” for “customer subscriber information and source and destination information.” The group said today in an e-mail exchange that it still supports that resolution.

Good to see they aren’t limiting themselves to defecating only on Second Amendment rights.

Legal Brain Teaser: Machine Gun, or Not?

My friend Jason and I were just having a discussion about the National Firearms Act. Given that he has a Saiga-12, there’s a strong possibility he’s going to have to register it if the ATF ruling coming out next week declares they are banned from importation because of a lack of “sporting purpose.” We were further discussing this is going to mean a lot of people who own them, and there are many, are going to end up in federal prison because they just don’t know about the new requirement. The discussion continued into the legal vagaries and silliness of the NFA, and we came up with this brain teaser, that involves gun wielding robots.

Say you build a robot that could wield an unambiguously semi-automatic AR-15, but could pull the trigger very rapidly at the same rate of fire as that of an M16. There are three possible methods such a theoretical robot could function:

You had some sort of device that commanded the robot to fire.
You could command the robot to fire verbally.
The software in the robot was programmed to, completely autonomously, acquire and fire a three round bursts at a series of targets.

The brain teaser here is whether or not the robot is a machine gun under the National Firearms Act, and if it is, which part is considered the machine gun? Is the robot itself a machine gun? Is the software a machine gun? What if you changed the software so it only fired one shot at each target?

My feeling is, in the case that you can command the robot to fire with some kind of device, the robot is indeed a machine gun, and not the software, because the programmability allows it to be readily converted. Whatever device you pressed or actuated to get the robot to fire can legally become the “single action of the trigger.”

It becomes far more ambiguous in the case where the robot operates autonomously, or if you could verbally command the robot to fire. If you commanded it to fire verbally, and it let loose a three shot burst, what was the single action of the trigger? This makes for an interesting case if anyone ever develops a general purpose robot that happens to be able to fire a gun, but much faster than a human could. Will all general purpose robots of such a nature need to be registered under the National Firearms Act? What happens if such robots become ubiquitous? Will you need to program them not to be able to fire weapons? Maybe that would be a smart thing to do.Â When they outlaw killer robots, only outlaws will have killer robots.

Life Without Adobe’s Flash

I’ve just installed a Flash blocking application into Safari, after having the browser begin to crawl for the umpteenth time, because I had 20 tabs open in various windows with Flash doohickeysÂ in them. I decided to take this route instead of an ad blocker, because I really don’t mind ads as long as they are unobtrusive, and some ad blockers tend to distort the rendering of the document.

One thing I’ve noticed on iPad is how much smoother browsing is without Flash. 99% of the time I don’t miss it, and most major web sites are starting to implement HTML5 to work better with mobile devices. So I figure I won’t miss it on Safari for the Mac either. The plug-in allows for me to override for certain sites, like NRA’s Flash monstrosity web site, or NRA News, for instance, but the default is blocked. YouTube works fine without Flash, as do most other embedded video services these days.

Flash has been, and continues to be, a scourge on the Internet, much like the Vikings were on 9th Century Europe. Flash rapes the batteries of laptops and mobile devices, pillages your CPU cycles, and murders your browser’s child processes. And just like Java, even when it does work, it’s just too damned slow. Flash, just say no.

The Other Big Weekend News

So Verizon made the iPhone official today. I can’t wait. I don’t plan to upgrade from my first generation Droid since I’m perfectly happy with my phone. However, Sebastian will likely make the switch as soon as possible. He purposefully did not get the iPhone 4 so he wouldn’t be trapped in a 2-year contract with AT&T. Instead, he got an iPad. Now he can upgrade and have a carrier who can, you know, actually handle phone calls.

I’ve been a Verizon customer since my early days of college. I avoid the stores at all costs, but their phone customer service has been nothing but wonderful. They don’t make doing business with them a pain in the butt, and I’m a fan of such simplicity. More importantly, I can make phone calls.* :) Continue reading “The Other Big Weekend News”

Living in Star Trek

Looks like some folks at MIT are trying to make a flute that can be printed on a 3D printer:

So now we have a PADD, we all have bridge screens in our living rooms, we talk regularly on communicators, and now we’re getting simple replicators.

Hat Tip to Instapundit

Overpriced Cabling

The customer reviews for these 8000 dollar audio cables on Amazon are hilarious. But this phenomena isn’t limited to Amazon. Best Buy, who has never met a cable they wouldn’t like to overcharge you for, has an HDMI cable by the same company for sale with similar humorous reviews.

I’m not sure how the people at AudioQuest sleep at night, knowing they are essentially ripping people off. HDMI is a digital signal. Either the display it’s attached to receives it, or it doesn’t. A bad cable could give you a high error rate, but you’d probably notice that. The spec wouldn’t have been designed to require a 600 dollar cable to get error free transmission. I’d also be surprised if the speaker cable sold at Amazon doesn’t perform any better than other audio cables sold at a fraction of the price, if you ran each through a distortion analyzer over the range of human hearing.

See this technical paper from AudioQuest:

Conventional use of the above formula falsely assumes that it is acceptable to have a 63%Â reduction in current flow and an 86% reduction in power density at the center of a conductor. However,Â this formula does not by itself describe at what depth audible distortion begins. Listening (empiricalÂ evidence) shows that audible distortion begins at somewhat lesser depths.

The human ear is actually a pretty poor instrument. The question is whether these claims stand up to the harsh truth of the distortion analyzer. All this sounds like a lot of inapplicable technical detail meant to try to sell you an overpriced cable.

Lightbulb Black Market

Been some talked about bans on light bulbs here and here. This has to be one of Congress’s dumbest moments, and it’s worth noting it was a GOP congress that did this to us. Thanks guys! CFLs have gotten to the point I am mostly satisfied with the quality of the light, but a big pet peeve of mine is that they take time to warm up, and produce substandard light until they do.

Recently I got CFL versions of this halogen light, which previously hadn’t been available. The light quality is iffy, and the strength is way too low. Fortunately, I think these GU10 halogens aren’t on the ban list. But I am pondering whether they are good enough. My kitchen floods draw 300 watts in their full glory with halogens, and with CFLs they draw a whopping 42 watts. But does it really save energy when you want to leave them on to avoid having to wait for the lights to warm up?

I’ve also wondered how much energy these bulbs really end up saving in the first place, at least in climates where you use a furnace for a good part of the year. Most light bulb energy is lost as heat, but is it really lost if it’s cold enough to run the furnace? I have no doubt they save on electricity, but how much extra are you spending running the heater to make up for the heat not being put out by your lighting system? For much of the year, I think CFLs are just a way to convert electric consumption to gas and oil consumption in home furnaces. Sadly for us power generation is more green than home heating.

I’m generally not too optimistic about the green technology movement. I saw a Toyota ad a few days ago where they wanted people to send in their “green” ideas. One that they were touting was running their regenerative braking system on roller coasters in amusement parks, suggesting it could be used to power the whole park. I’m guessing Toyotas marketing people don’t have much of a grasp on physics, particularly the first and second law of thermodynamics. Nope, won’t power the park. Won’t even be enough to jack the coaster up the chain. That’s not even mentioning that it would probably ruin the entertainment value of the coaster ride. Most green technology is a complete crock, and many fail to appreciate what a bummer thermodynamics is.

Merry Christmas: Skynet Will Kill Us All Edition

Time to polish up on your shotgunning skills:

Merry Christmas everyone, I think. Hope you got some #4 bird shot in your stocking.

Is This Thing On?

Sorry about the outage folks. See, a few days ago I noticed Verizon was offering a 25 megabit/sec up and 25 megabit/sec down FiOS deal for 100 bucks a month. Given that’s what I was paying for a 20 megabit/sec up and 5 megabit/sec down FiOS circuit, I decided to remedy this situation. I’ve done this a few times, and it’s always gone without a hitch. Suddenly you just find yourself upgraded to ludicrous speed.

This time the sales guy put in the order to change my account, over to a DHCP dynamic IP account, unbeknownst to me. I didn’t notice until everything suddenly went offline. A call to Verizon’s tech support quickly revealed the problem when the tech told me “I’m going to cancel all the leases and reset your line,” which prompted me to say “Leases? What leases? I have a static block. We don’t need no steenking leases!” But this was apparently not reflected in my new account information. Panic sets in. The tech can’t do anything without billing’s approval, and billing, who keep bankers hours, are already closed. This means I’ll be out for the night.

So this morning I called first thing at 9, when the billing people arrive, and thanks to the valiant efforts of Nicole at Verizon, we seem to be operational again. I was very worried due to some system issue or another, I would be unable to get back the same IP addresses, which would have protracted this outage another day or so, and maybe more for some people being fed by a DNS server who doesn’t honor cache expiration. So now we should be up and running again with the old IP block, much faster speed, and a 50 dollar account credit for the month.

I’ve generally been very happy with FiOS, and Verizon was very cooperative and apologetic once they realized their error. I’ll forgive a mistake that gets fixed smoothly. This is good, because I really only have two choices when it comes to high speed business Internet, and Verizon is definitely the lesser evil.

First Person Perspective

When I was out in Hawaii, I decided to get one of these to film things I wanted a first person perspective for. It works, especially with a flip camera screwed on to it, but you have to position the hat just right. I’m a lot more impressed with Joe’s video camera glasses. Go see it in action on an IPSC stage.

I wish they made one that would clip to an existing pair of prescription glasses. I could shoot with uncorrected camera glasses on, since my uncorrected vision isn’t that awful, but obviously seeing clearly is better.