Which Gun To Buy Next
It’s been long enough since my last gun purchase that I’m starting to eye another.
This time, as in times past, the decision is difficult. I have the same insatiable lust for firearms as I do for books and technology; that is to say, given infinite resources, I would consume infinitely.
I currently own a Kahr PM9 (9mm subcompact semi-auto pistol), a Winchester 1300 Defender (12ga pump-action shotgun), a Mossberg 500 Home Defense (another 12ga pump-action shotgun), a Remington 870 long-barrel shotgun that I don’t ever use, a Marlin 70 (.22 caliber semi-automatic rifle), and a Ruger Mk II (world-famous .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol).
The gaping holes in my collection include:
- AR-15 (My brother has one which I’ve used w/ him at the range, therefore I don’t miss this as much as I otherwise would)
- AK-47 (No gun enthusiast’s collection is complete without one)
- AK-74 (The modern version of the AK-47, which fires a smaller, lighter round with more favorable ballistics, however the ammo is not made in the US and thus is very hard to get)
- Glock 27 (A sweet .40 cal S&W semi-auto pistol)
A decent Chinese AK-47 can be had for around $400. A Glock 27 is around $500-$600, and a new AR-15 starts around $750. From a purely economic perspective, the AK-47 wins. But I really want that Glock too; a hard choice must be made…
"PROTECTION OF LAWFUL COMMERCE IN ARMS ACT" and Federalism
Recently, President Bush signed the “PROTECTION OF LAWFUL COMMERCE IN ARMS ACT”, which protects firearms manufacturers from lawsuits based on criminal use of lawfully manufactured and sold firearms. While the gun control lobby has decried this legislation as an extension of protection not enjoyed by any other industry, they’re only half right.
While it’s true that no other industry of which I’m aware enjoys an explicit protection such as that provided the the PLCAA, that’s only because the legal principle of proximate cause provides a general protection against friviolous suits of manufactures several layers of lawful indirection removed from any actual crime. The suggestion that Ruger or Bushmaster can be held liable when the citizen (who bought (or stole) a gun from a dealer who bought it from a distributor who bought it from the manufacturer) commits a crime with that gun is to ignore the doctrine of proximate cause, as well as utterly abandon common sense.
Regardless of one’s attitude toward private gun ownership in the US, it must be acknowledged by rational objective citizens that such a distortion of tort liability is greviously unjust, and has far-reaching implications for many other industries. The possibility that manufacturers of a legal product are liable for its criminal misuse far down the supply chain would cripple any industry. Common worst-case examples are cars (criminals use them all the time), computers (terrorists, cyber crime, etc), cell phones (two words: drug dealer), and McDonald’s (feeding felons should be a crime).
However, that said, I can’t get past the sense that this act seems unconstitutional. Without a strained reading of the commerce clause, it’s hard to see how this is an issue of federal import. Most of the suits are in state courts, and most have been dismissed on the grounds that they are, well, stupid. The opportunistic local officials who pursued the suits and the lunatic judges who allowed the suits to proceed are both fairly well disgraced. The gun control lobby is reduced to long-discredited talking points and emotional hyperbole. So, I ask again, where’s the federal issue?
That’s the problem with federalism: it requires its adherents to oppose things they really want, at least as often as it provides an argument against things they don’t want. Perhaps that’s why federalism is dead in this country. Nonetheless, as a Zoroastrian amongst agnostics, I cling to my aging, outmoded beliefs.
Social Conservatives Crusading/Railing Against 'Bad' TV
Periodically on the Heritage Foundation’s Townhall.com I run across a social conservative piece like It’s always Halloween on ‘Nip/Tuck’ by Brent Bozell, who among other things runs a conservative lobbyist group whose primary function is to complain loudly about the bad things they see on television. Bozell watched another episode of Nip/Tuck, and was predictably horrified. Apparently, Nip/Tuck is actually a depraved orgy of envelope-pushing sex, violence, necrophilia, and ‘sleaze’.
This type of social conservative thinking doesn’t agree with me in general (that is to say, even when applied to programs I do not like), but it is particularly disagreeable in this particular case.
First, Nip/Tuck is an edgy, explicit, adult-oriented dramatic series; to fail to recognize that and instead focus on the litanny of plot lines and scenes which are inappropriate for children is somewhat specious. In fact, before the show starts, FX displays a disclaimer so unambiguous it may as well read ‘this is a depraved, base program and will corrupt all who watch it’. If one ignores that disclaimer, one cannot subsequently complain about the show’s depravity and corrupting effects, as though they are unexpected.
Second, it is not an uplifting series; a fairytale Hallmark special with likable but slightly troubled characters and a happy redemptive ending. Rather, it is a dark and strangely compelling examination of superficiality, human conception of beauty and ugliness, and the nearly meaningless distinction between the two.
A typical motif in the series sees a patient with some physical deformity or injury or perhaps just wrinkles, seated in the plastic surgeons’ office. One of the surgeons consistently opens with ‘what don’t you like about yourself?‘. The episode then progresses, usually revealing the patient’s (and surgeons’) emotional scars running deeper and wider than the physical defect onto which they’ve been projected. The typical conclusion sees the underlying emotional issues unresolved and thus pain and self-loathing remain, or has the characters reaching some sort of closure or healing only upon grappling with their non-physical wounds.
This being FX and not, say, PBS, the stories are infused with somewhat graphic imagery; one of the objectives of the show is to shock, and clearly it’s worked on Mr. Bozell. However, to see only the explicit FX imagery is to miss utterly the point of the series.
Third and most important, Mr. Bozell isn’t writing his indictment of Nip/Tuck as a critic; he’s not complaining of dull plots, bad acting, or poor production value. He takes the same approach to problem solving as do gun control advocates, War on Drugs sycophants, and anti-corporate Marxists: he sees something he doesn’t like, casts it as a threat to our children, and demands government intervention. While this piece does not make any explicit calls to action, Mr. Bozell’s organization consistently demands federal cures for broadcast media’s ills.
As he concludes his article, he points out two shocking facts:
- Nip/Tuck is watched by 162,000 teenagers and 55,000 children in the 2-11 group. Presumably this is supposed to demonstrate to concerned parents that their children are not safe so long as such filth is allowed to stand; in truth, it is if anyting an indictment of the incompetence and irresponsibility of over 200,000 parents. It is not any government’s job to make sure you kids don’t watch bad things on TV: it’s yours.
- FX receives millions in cable fees from anyone who was cable; even you, dear reader, upstanding and moral citizen that you are, subsidize FX. This is a thinly-veiled allusion to an action item on the social conservative agenda for at least a couple years: so-called ala carte cable programming. As a believer in free markets, I applaud efforts to transform broadcast media monopolies into a marketplace of channels, each of which must stand on its own and earn its cable fees. However, when these calls are made to the federal government, I draw the line.
There are now so few issues on which social conservatives and I agree, I almost feel guilty claiming the ambiguous title ‘conservative’, without the customary elaborate qualification, like ‘small-government libertarian conservative’ or ‘Christian social conservative’, or the contradictory ‘laissez-faire social conservative’. However, it’s the bizarre coalition of groups with substantively unrelated or even contradictory views which enabled the Right to take the Congress and the White House, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain too bitterly…
FUSE Implementation Based On WebDAV
FUSE is an API and kernel component which allows non-privileged users to install and run file system drivers in user mode. Typically, FS drivers are compiled into the kernel or loaded as modules by superusers, so FUSE is quite a departure from that model.
This is appealing for all manner of reasons; by exposing various types of information in terms of the file system abstraction, it can be easily exposed to applications that otherwise wouldn’t grok it. For example, I’ve seen a FUSE project that exposes an IM buddy list as a file system, where text written to a buddy’s ‘file’ is sent as an IM.
Unfortunately, there are no FUSE implementations on Windows. While a kernel-mode file system driver could be developed, if it doesn’t ship w/ the OS it is of somewhat limited value, since only admin users can install FS drivers.
However, it occurs to me that XP at least allows non-admin users to mount WebDEV sites as file system devices. A user-mode tool that exposed FUSE file systems as a WebDAV share on a localhost HTTP server could expose FUSE filesytems through the WebDAV FS driver, albeit circuitiously.
Hybrid Web- and Desktop-based App Plumbing
I keep reading in the buzz rags about how web-based (more specifically, ‘Web 2.0’) office productivity apps will kill MS by the end of next week. ZD has a list of a few of them, which is quite underwhelming.
I have several complaints about these apps, which I think partially reflect why MS still needn’t worry:
- They’re hosted. As much buzz as there is around ‘software as a service’, for individual users to trust their office docs to an unproven unprofitable start-up is quite a stretch. Remember all those intranet/project collaboration sites back in the New Economy (before Backpacker came along)? Hope you didn’t store anything important with ’em.
- They’re silos. Without an open API, your docs are locked into their service. That sucks. Even if the firm were stable and profitable, that still sucks.
- They’re web apps. As hard as it is to believe for the muni wifi set, there are still places on this planet without broadband internet access (like, say, commercial aircraft, though that’s changing gradually). If you need a ‘net connection to access your productivity app, then it’s not a very productive app.
- They’re desktop/laptop. At least Office docs have some degree of mobility in the form of Pocket Office apps and the myriad third-party translators and viewers. So, you can keep docs in sync w/ a PDA or smartphone. Not so here.
Don’t get me wrong; I like responsive AJAXy apps as much as anyone. I’d even like to see the emergence of web apps with a desktop feel. But what I’m averse to is a centralized, hosted, siloed model where the guys selling you the software-as-service also control your data.
What I’d rather see is something more decentralized and ad-hoc, with responsive web apps hosted primarily by a local web server (WEBrick for example), which would have full access to local peripherals. For on-the-go work, the same web app would be available from your own web host, under your control.
Established, decentralized comms protocols ala XMPP would enable information portability, under your terms, with some sort of federated identity management model. The ‘service’ would be third parties hosting the apps for you, providing storage, etc.
I’ve run through at least half a dozen iterations of this idea in my reflections on produtivity software, and each one seems a little closer to the mark than the last, but I can say with the utmost certainty that GOffice not there.
Distributed Web-Based File Storage/Backup
Commodity hosting accounts now provide gigabytes of storage, and in some cases terabytes of monthly transfer allowances, for less than USD 10. Why not take advantage of this space to implement a cheap offsite backup solution? A simple PHP page could provide an authenticated gateway to the file system, and a simple client could implement the backup. For added intelligence, it could span multiple hosts, with varying degrees of redundancy.
Potential issues:
- Terms of Service of many hosting providers forbid using your storage allotment for files not accessable via your site. In other words, the files you put there have to be linked on your site or else. In practice, this strikes me as very hard to enforce, since plenty of legitimate apps maintain files that are not directly web-addressable (like Gallery2 with the image firewall on).
- Security may be complicated. The user can’t be expected to do any more than enter a password, if that much. There’s also a disparity between the sophistication required to provision and set up a hosting account and the rank-and-file user. Perhaps a more realistic usage scenario would be a technical user setting up a backup facility for a few friends.
- The backup tool would need to be pretty straightforward. Perhaps some heuristics to identify files users want, such as everything in My Documents or ~/Documents or ~ depending upon OS, plus a search for user-modified files.
64-bit 1TB File Server (Or, 'How to dispose of $2k')
For roughly a year now, I’ve been tweaking the specs on a 1TB file server I keep meaning to build. When I started the project, I was confined to artemis’ meager ~30GB RAID storage. I added a 120GB RAID 1 volume running off a Highpoint RocketRaid PATA RAID controller connected to aragorn, which helped a little. Unfortunately, aragorn ate shit and died, and one of the 120GB drives in the RAID array seems damaged, as I can’t duplicate the primary drive onto the secondary now that I’ve moved the controller and drives over to boromir.
When I upgraded to prospertine, with 3×75GB Western Digital 10kRPM SATA drives (two volumes; 1 RAID0 volume @150GB, and one POD volume @75GB), the situation improved, but I’ve already maxed prospertine out, primarily with my VMWare virtual machine collection and files I pulled of the ailing 120GB array on boromir.
With my digital photography habbit getting worse, my compulsion to create VMs growing more pronounced, and my insatiable appetite for ISOs of pre-release MS software and new games, my disk space situation is dire. It may be time to make the leap into terabyte land.
The latest config, as of right now, is a Prescott 531 processor (chosen for a combination of EM64T 64-bit extensions, hyperthreading, and price), an Intel server mobo based on the E7221 chipset, a Highpoint RocketRaid 2220 SATA-II RAID controller, and five WD Caviar 250GB 7200RPM SATA II disks. I’m also throwing in some GigE gear; prospertine has on-board GigE, as does the mobo included in this config, and I’ll want that speed if I’m to offload a bunch of data onto a network share.
The plan is to create a single RAID 5 volume, which lacks the blistering performance of RAID 0, but by distributing parity information across the volume, provides the redudancy I require. Under RAID 5, a volume with n same-sized disks with m bytes per disk has a usable capacity of *m bytes; in other words, you lose one disk’s worth of storage to the parity blocks.
Given this math, my five 250GB drives will provide an even terabyte of usable storage. The other Seagate Barracuda you see in the wishlist is to replace the failed drive from aragorn’s/boromir’s array: I’ll be using a RAID 1 volume composed of the two 120GB PATA drives as the system drive for the new file server, so I need them working.
I’ll run FreeBSD, either 5.4-RELEASE or 6.0-RELEASE, depending upon what’s available. FreeBSD supports the EM64T 64-bit extensions, so I’ll be able to run in 64-bit mode. FreeBSD is also supported by Highpoint, which provides both binary and source versions of its drivers.
I could run Slackware Linux instead, but as Linux has emerged as the bohemian rebel OS of choice, I’ve found myself drawn to the niche BSD OSes instead.
I considered a Pentium D (dual-core), which has alot of appeal to me, but the increased cost and power requirements didn’t seem worth it. I also considered AMD’s 64-bit line, but I’m less familiar w/ the ancillary components (mobo etc) so went w/ what I know.
I found a nice X-Alien case, with a huge 450W power supply. I used a power supply calculator to estimate my power needs, since I was concerned a total of 7 SATA drives would overload a normal PSU, but I was surprised to find an estimate of slightly over 300W. I guess those modders w/ 500W PSUs are running 200W video cards? Perhaps SLI configs really suck down the juice.
Fun With Markov
As I was reading a block of consultant-speak produced by my employer, I found myself thinking how amusing it would be to combine the pretentious, inscrutable MBA-speak style one reads in analyst reports and New Economy jerk-off mags, with content that is jarringly different, such as the Bible, erotic fiction, or Dr. Seuss.
To explore this idea further, I turned to Markov text generation. Using Markov models to synthesize almost-legible texts which eerily preserve the tone and style of a given input text is a well-established technique; I simply want to experiment with it a bit. A google search for ‘markov text’ yields all the relevant background.
In particular, I’m interesting in combining multiple texts to produce a synthesis of their styles. Alice in Wonderland and Revelations has already been done, with semi-comical results, but I wonder if there isn’t more to be done.
Here are some notes I took whilst at the office reflecting on this subject:
Experiment with:
- Providing a corpus of text containing baseline verbiage. The probabilities from this text would be subtracted from the sample text probabilities, so the distinguishing words and phrases of the sample text are exposed.
- Web-based tool w/ URL and text area text sources
- Combine multiple sources, and assign weights to each source to boost the probability of words/phrases from one source over the other.
- Find some way to combine texts in an interesting way, such as Dr. Seuss’ novel structure w/ analyst whitepapers’ inscrutable MBA-speak.
- Markov text from logged IM conversations, recreating the IM style of both participants. Markov text from IRC transcripts
- Implementation that detected headers from body text and applies separate text generation logic to both
- Amazon Top 100 list title and author names re-generated with markov text. Perhaps reviews as well.
- Blog post generator; given an RSS feed URL, use markov text to generate another post. Perhaps include mix-ins from other blogs.
- Markov text from spam/phishing scams
Update:
I’ve refined my thinking on this subject. I think Markov text generation would benefit from more intelligence and more amusing combinations of literary styles if it included information about parts of speech. For example, knowing the the word ‘ham’ comes after ‘green eggs and’ with a high probability is useful, but knowing that ‘ham’ is a noun makes it more likely that other nouns can be substituted for ‘ham’ without impacting the readability of the resulting text.
This matters to me because I want to be able to combine some aspects of one corpus (perhaps sentence structure or compositional style) with other aspects of another corpus (vocabulary specifically), to combine the two. By encoding part-of-speech information, the distintive vocabulary words from one corpus can be overlaid atop the compositional style of another corpus, to generate phrases like ‘green eggs and optionality’ or ‘And God sent down a foglifter from heaven’, etc.
The Moby project has an extensive database of English words encoded by part of speech, and a Baysian predictor could be used to guess the part of speech of unknown words based on context. Perhaps additional rules could infer speech part based on prefixes or suffixes, which is particularly important in a language like English, where nouns can become verbs so easily. Of course, irregular verbs make this more difficult than it needs to be.
Once this information is captured, the distintive characteristics of particular documents could be identified by comparing them w/ a large corpus of ‘plain’ writing. Unique words, phrases, and structures would emerge if the traits of the baseline corpus were subtracted, leaving only the differential elements.
By quantitatively identifing what distinguishes Dr. Seuss from a New York Times article (apart from the superior cogent, unbiased depth and breadth of Seuss), it should be possible to introduce Seussian elements into a New York Times article (thereby making it better).
Another update:
Apparently part of what I’m trying to do (ascertain the part of speech a word belongs to) is a problem well known to computational linguistics. In CL, algorithms that determine the part of speech of a token are called taggers, as discussed in Tagging the Teleman Corpus. Apparently there are a number of approaches, including a variation of the Hidden Markov Model I was proposing, Bayesian classification, statistical approaches, and neural networks.
Typically when the academecians put themselves to a problem it becomes inaccessible to the laypeople. This is probably no exception, but maybe I’ll be able to extract a few nuggets of wisdom I can use.
Why is offsetting controversial?
This week I’ve been listening to Republican and Democrat party leaders in the House wail and gnash their teeth over the newly-discovered need to return to fiscal responsibility, ostensibly to offset the mind-boggling largess of Gulf reconstruction efforts.
While I am gratified by the rediscovery of fiscal responsibility, I do not understand why this is a painful process. As usual, Democrats have an answer, and it’s more taxes (but only on the super filthy deserve-what-they-get rich, so I’m safe). Republicans also have an answer, and it’s spending cuts across the government, and de-authorization of future-years spending obligations on boondoggle programs. Anyone familiar with my politics knows I like the Republican idea and don’t like the Democratic idea, but what I don’t understand is why either of these ideas are needed, when the transportation, energy, and omnibus spending bills are so heavily ladden with pork as to observably distort spacetime.
C-SPAN has an interesting feature during spending bill debates; every hour or two they read some line items from the budget; I assume a random sample. But it’s never stuff like ‘$50 million to modernize the Energy Deparment’s nuke tracking system’; it’s crap like ‘$2m for a bike path in Ted Stevens’ home state’, ‘$500k for a bike path in Barbara Boxer’s home state’, ‘$10m for some guy John Warner knows from high school’, etc. So, I ask again, why is anyone talking about raising taxes or cutting government programs when there’s all this low-hanging fruit (er, pork?) to be plucked? Immediately after the hurricanes Pelosi and DeLay both gave up ~$100m in pork they’d ‘won’; was that the extent of the pork-trimming?
To hear about all this indefensible, unconstitutional redistribution of taxpayer dollars, I wonder how we arrived at this point. Not 300 years ago, Madison and Boone were foreswearing federal aid of any kind; now I have 535 congress-units rummaging around in my pockets for whatever they can find and bring back home. If only there was a competitive market of liberal federalist democracies; maybe then things would be better.
Update:
I now know why offsetting is unacceptable. At the risk of sounding like a C-SPAN caller, I’m surprised I’ve not seen more of this in the media. I can’t decide if the media silence represents a glaring bias to the left or to the right; I think I’ll go with the neocon/Likud cabal on this one.
Non-Admin and Automatic Updates
Prospertine is the first machine I’ve run primarily with a non-admin user account, as per Keith Brown et al. After several months of this, I still come upon minor gotchas from time to time.
In this case, I awoke to find prospertine had rebooted. In the world I come from, where hardware drivers suck and are only sort-of compatible w/ the rest of the system configuration, this can only mean one thing: BSOD. So, I dutifully check the System log for the STOP message, planning to fire up WinDbg to view the mini dump and determine which buggy device driver screwed me this time. To my surprise, there was no bugcheck; only a flurry of log messsages about Automatic Update around 3:00AM.
It seems that, when you’re an admin on a default Windows install, you’re prompted before installing updates, and again before rebooting. As a non-admin, you’re not given the luxury of an option.
At any rate, I opened the Automatic Updates control panel (as an admin, obviously), and switched from Automatic to ‘Download…but let me choose when to install…’