CmdrFenix.org

I have to wonder how long until this gets mandated by our friends at TSA here in the states.

Some passengers at Heathrow and Manchester airports will have to go through full body scanners before boarding their flights under new rules.

It is now compulsory for people selected for a scan to take part, or they will not be allowed to fly.

I’m sorry, but this is effectively “strip or no fly”. Am I the only person creeped out by this? Here are some questions that I have about this. If you were mandated to strip or no fly, what would do? How much safer does this truly make us for cost? Does this violate the 4th amendment of our constitution?

I will only say this. Looking all all the attacks that have happened in the last 10 yrs, would this very expensive technology really have stopped it? It is established that once you implement something like this, it is fairly rare for these types of security measures to be removed.

So here we have the case of Jason Baez of NYC. An honest working family with three kids. One night three people forced their way in, tied them up, and proceeded to robbed them. He reported it and police suggested he move until they find the perps. So without breaking his current lease, he takes on another appt and a mountain of debt until they find the people involved. They get a security camera, and Jason also gets a gun. Now NYC has some of the strictest firearm laws and “ordinary people” aren’t allowed to own them. It’s felt people should be the “only ones” armed.

But five months after the robbery, as Mr. Baez was visiting their Manhattan apartment to collect the mail, a police officer stopped him in the lobby and frisked him, he said. Finding nothing, the officer asked him if he had any drugs or weapons on him. Nervous, he decided to confess: “I just got home-invaded in September and I have a weapon for my protection,” Mr. Baez recalled telling the officer.
He was arrested, and despite having no criminal record, he faced up to three and a half years in prison. Prosecutors offered him a deal of one year if he pleaded guilty, and he accepted. He is to be sentenced Jan. 27.

This is why feel so many of the firearm laws in this country are bogus and the politicians don’t care about you or I. After all, why should they? They usually have protection that carries automatic weapons…

Hey I know what we can do!!!

Here in NH, some of the free staters have started recording their police encounters. I am not a supporter of the free staters, but I am a supporter of this practice as IMHO (in my humble opinion), there is no reason why a public encounter with police should only be recorded by the officer. It also puts them on notice that you do care so they’ll perhaps exercise more thought before they act.

Down in the progressive state of MA, even Martha Coakly is telling local LEOs to NOT use the state’s wiretapping law as a justification for arresting people. Here we have the case of Simon Glik who after walking down the street, observes some LEOs pulling a plastic bag out of the mouth of a suspect being a bit on the rough side. I am not saying they were, but he thought so, so he decided to record this event with his cell camera. This promptly landed him in handcuffs and under arrest for illegal electronic surveillance.

“One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,’’ Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, “my phone was seized, and I was arrested.’’
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.
Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.

What do you think about this? Should the “only ones” accumulating evidence be the police? I am not saying we should all be detectives, or put comprehensive camera systems in our cars, but how many of the legal slip ups by people could be avoided if they had another eye on it?

OK I just got my Open Beta key for STO. I’m going to be around but *cough* occupied. If you have been living in a hole someplace and never spoken to me, check out STO here! I’ll post a quick review after I have had a chance to absorb it.

I just got an alert from gonh.org (Gun Owners of NH) that local Demorcrats (and yes, this was ALL Demorcrat) have now back door banned firearms in state building of NH.

The NH Legislative Facilities Committee voted today to ban firearms in the NH State House.

This is a Joint Committee, and members are:

Sylvia Larsen (D)
Terie Norelli (D)
Margaret Hassan (D)
Mary Jane Wallner (D)
Peter Bragdon (R)
Sherman Packard (R)
Lou D’Allesandro (D)
Marjorie Smith (D)
Daniel Eaton (D)
Gene Chandler (R)
Martha Fuller Clark (D)
Sheila Roberge (R)

The Joint Facilities committee just passed by an 8-3 vote (party lines)
the following regulation on the State House:

“No person, except for law enforcement personnel in active duty, shall
carry a firearm or other dangerous or deadly weapon or an explosive,
openly or concealed, while inside the State House, the Legislative
Office Building, the Upham Walker House, or any of the underground
tunnels connected to these buildings. Law enforcement personnel, when
requested by State House security staff, must produce sufficient
identification establishing their status as law enforcement personnel.”

Here is what bothers me about this. They tried in scheduled session to do this twice last there and there was an overwhelming protest against it, which promptly instructed them to vote the bill as ITL (In expedient to legislate – Basically kills the bill). Regardless of who the people protesting (yes some of the “free staters” were there, but for the most part it was simply ordinary people) were, there is a large (and yes large is a valid statement considering the number of people who showed up) part of the population that disagrees with this. Now in scheduled session, they can’t get this passed, so what do they do? Do it as an unexpected event and ram it in the back door.

This is the shit that REALLY pissess me off. Letters are going out to ALL parties involved. I am going to print and send them certified. I’ll scan / attach it here when I’m done. Now I’m off to enjoy some of the holidays.

Well, I just want to wish everyone a safe and Merry Christmas!

Well, I have run Haiku on my laptop for about 2 days now and I’m ready to type up my thoughts and observations on it. Is it ready for use? No way. Does it show promise? Hell yeah!

Pros

• Boots my Dell Inspiron in 9 seconds. After 9 seconds it’s fully functional on the desktop.
• UI is a perfect clone of BeOS and very smooth and easy to use.
• Multitasking performance is insane! I ran multiple GL Teapot demos, the pulse demo, 3D Haiku demo, browser, and a few other file system windows and at no point did I feel even a slight drop in UI performance. (note: When I added multiple 3D apps I did see some after effects if the windows touched.
• Updated compilers and libraries meant I could get some of the newer apps compiled and working… well somewhat. (note: perl CPAN didn’t work at all and I couldn’t get it working in order to DL XML::Parser, which is needed for one of the dependencies of Pidgin)
• Networking setup was a breeze. It auto detected the NIC in my laptop and everything just worked.
• Downloaded a few apps from BeBits and they worked so BeOS compatibility is “good”. (note: many apps had MAJOR problems loading.)
• Installer was something I have been waiting for and I wasn’t disappointed. (note: There are obvious points where it could be improved / optimized, but for the most part it was simple and worked.
• VERY simple BeOS layout on the file system was a great touch.

Cons

• No package manager. This is a biggie as I had no easy way to uninstall apps I was trying to get working without going through the file system and deleting files.
• I mean I know it lacks a package manager, but being spoiled as I am a lack of an organized package delivery system like yum or apt is big now a days. This would *greatly* improve the functionality of the OS.
• Not a multi-user OS. That’s right, still unfortunately not a multi-user OS, but something that is “on the road map”.
• No way to password protect the single user account. Probably the biggest killer of this right now, but being in Alpha, I wasn’t probably going to leave this on my laptop.
• App support is limited. I was able to get “vision” working as an IRC client, but I couldn’t find a working IM client for this. Big Achilles heel here if you want to penetrate the desktop market.
• Buggy boot loader. After install, it wouldn’t actually boot on the HD. Had to boot the Live CD again and then run “bootman” in order to fix it.
• Needs a clearer roadmap for development. The roadmap they have looks more like a bug tracking system than a roadmap.

Considering the project started in 2001 and now in 2009 they are where they are shows the project definitely has great momentum and some talented developers. They started from the ground up and didn’t take the quick path of using the Linux kernel and just smashing in some GNU toolkits. As of 2008 it is now self hosting, which means it can check out and compile new versions of itself. They did update it to use the newest GCC compilers, which means the newer apps should all compile eventually, but it still has a long way to go.

I have a concealed weapons permit. I believe that having a firearm doesn’t make me a stronger person, but it is a tool that *could* be called upon if the time arises. I am not going to get into an argument with anyone about what instances I might have to use that, (and no a kid with a slingshot doesn’t qualify) but I would like to point out something that I just found out about that was buried in the Amtrak funding bill.

It may sound absurd. But President Obama signed a bill into law Wednesday that requires passengers who carry firearms aboard Amtrak be locked in boxes for their journey.

it was an obvious typo in the bill and I am guessing that if I tried to board an Amtrak train they wouldn’t try to stuff me in a box, but still. Why? Has there been shootings on trains? What reason justifies this action? It has no purpose. Before anyone starts trying to take this to an absurd argument level about liberty and freedom, I am talking strictly about rationale behind this bill. Is it not illegal to harm another human being with a firearm without just cause? I mean, are they trying to make me safer, how?

Earlier this week, Congress sent the president a massive spending bill that funded dozens of federal departments. Tucked into the transportation section of the legislation are safety requirements for Amtrak customers who carry firearms on board the government-backed train system. The bill Congress passed mandates that passengers with firearms declare they have weapons with them in advance and stow them in locked boxes while on the train.

I just have issues when things like this are just tucked away inside of seemly unrelated bills. The provision has no justifiable purpose. The crime they are trying to stop is ALREADY illegal. Why do we need more restrictions? I will also say the Republicans have contributed to my anger. (more often than not lately)

Rep. John Fleming and Sen. Roger Wicker, both Mississippi Republicans, are the primary advocates of the Amtrak gun provision.

I am in no way just anti-Democrats, but right now completely anti-Politicians in general atm. I think it’s about time we flushed this toilet.

I have always been a huge fan of BeOS since around 1999-2000. Simple, fast, and for its day very impressive. When the company went under, they took most of the code with them. A group started redeveloping the OS from the ground up in 2001. Last year, the OS because self hosting, which means it can compile new versions of itself. That in an of itself was a huge milestone. Well, this Sept the OS hit Alpha 1. This month, they released the “installer”, something that up until now meant you could only try Haiku within a premade VM. Well, I just burned my disc and started an install on my old Dell laptop. I have a huge grin on my face and cannot wait for it to finish.

Check it out here!

I’ll be sure to post some new info soon!

So with the only ammo that I can seem to get reliably being .40 S&W, I made the decision to purchase a handgun in this caliber. I’ve actually had this gun for several months as many of my friends will know, but I’ve been lax about getting this review written, so here it is! So many to choose from, but I finally settled on a Third Generation Glock 22. I got two 15 rnd magazines with the gun, but for IDPA picked up a third magazine.