Eugene Volokh is a University of Tennessee law professor whose blog, "The Volokh Conspiracy" is a good read. He usually makes a good deal of sense.
He had a piece in the Wall St Journal the other day on the legality of an anti flag burning law.
Some how I just wonder at the need for such a law, and the need to devote any thought to it. Now I don't hold with burning the American flag, but I hardly think we need burden the statute books with a law agin it. If you burn a flag in most places a large number of rough people will take great offense. In fact they will be offended sufficiently to take action right then and there.
Which is why very few flags are burned in public.
I am surprised that Eugene doesn't seem to understand this and wastes his time on a non issue.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Whither Sarah Palin ?
Just to set the record straight, I like Sarah Palin. Anyone who can work up from PTA to state governor, raise an big family, and manage a husband who races snow mobiles has got to have something on the ball.
Her announcement of resignation on Friday was a total surprise, and I have no idea what it means. It might be that the relentless media assault on her and her family is just to much, either for Sarah or for the family. I'm sure if Sarah decided that her children were at risk due to her political career, she would retire from political life. Mark Stein sees it this way, and laments that a real citizen in politics has been driven out by a vindictive MSM. He says this leaves us with monomaniacal single minded Clintons and Obamas, old party hacks like Biden or McCain, or dynasties like the Bushes and the Kennedys. If this is the case it's a shame.
Or, she might have decided that there are better platforms for a presidential bid than governor of Alaska. She is enough of a celebrity now to get plenty of national coverage doing anything. I hope this is the case, but what do I know?
Well, I know more than George Will does. George was opining on ABC this morning that Sarah might do well in Iowa but won't stand a chance in New Hampshire. I got news for you George. Everyone up here loves Sarah Palin. She is our kind of people. Men like her, women like her, kids like her, and we like her family too. Everyone who stepped into our Littleton HQ during the election was a huge Sarah Palin fan.
Anyhow, I wish Sarah well and I hope she stays in national politics. We need her more than we need the MSM.
Her announcement of resignation on Friday was a total surprise, and I have no idea what it means. It might be that the relentless media assault on her and her family is just to much, either for Sarah or for the family. I'm sure if Sarah decided that her children were at risk due to her political career, she would retire from political life. Mark Stein sees it this way, and laments that a real citizen in politics has been driven out by a vindictive MSM. He says this leaves us with monomaniacal single minded Clintons and Obamas, old party hacks like Biden or McCain, or dynasties like the Bushes and the Kennedys. If this is the case it's a shame.
Or, she might have decided that there are better platforms for a presidential bid than governor of Alaska. She is enough of a celebrity now to get plenty of national coverage doing anything. I hope this is the case, but what do I know?
Well, I know more than George Will does. George was opining on ABC this morning that Sarah might do well in Iowa but won't stand a chance in New Hampshire. I got news for you George. Everyone up here loves Sarah Palin. She is our kind of people. Men like her, women like her, kids like her, and we like her family too. Everyone who stepped into our Littleton HQ during the election was a huge Sarah Palin fan.
Anyhow, I wish Sarah well and I hope she stays in national politics. We need her more than we need the MSM.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Fourth of July
Got up at 6 AM to go down to the church pancake breakfast. Mixed pancake batter until 10 AM. The luck of the republic is fleeting up here, it rained most of the day. Made five pounds of potato salad for a 5 PM cookout. Hopefully the rain will back off by five.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Windows Auto Insert Notification, How to Disable it
Auto insert notification is a Windows "feature" that makes music CD's play in your computer automatically, just insert CD and the music starts to play. Convenient if you use your computer as a CD player. I play my CD's on my stereo, it sounds better.
Convenience has a high price. Auto insert notification does more than just start your music player. It also automatically loads and runs programs from the CD, from any flash drives, floppy drives, and USB gadgets. Virus's (Virii?) spread themselves via auto insert notification. The virus merely copies itself to the CD or flash drive, and it gets loaded and executed every time the infected media is inserted into a victim computer. The notorious Sony rootkit spread itself this way. Unless you disable auto insert notification, your computer is vulnerable to virus every time you insert a CD, a flash drive/thumb drive, or a USB gizmo.
Plus, auto insert notification is a CPU hog. When active it can suck up 10-20% of your CPU time. Working on a video capture project some time ago, we found the video dropped frames until we tracked down and killed auto insert notification.
With auto insert notification turned off you do have to click on your CD player program to play a CD. With a CD-Rom you will have to use explorer to launch the "autorun" program in the CD root directory by hand on install CD-Roms. That's the only down side to killing auto insert notification.
To kill auto insert notification on XP you hand patch the registry, using regedit. Regedit.exe comes with Windows and is found in directory c:/windows/system32. If you can't remember that, you can search for it with Explorer. There usually is a regedit and a regedt32, they both work pretty much the same.
Click on regedit and it will open a pair of side by side windows. The left hand window has a tree structure that looks just like the one in Explorer. Open Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom Once you navigate to the CDrom registry "leaf" the right hand window will fill with assorted icons.
Look for one named "Autorun". If it does not exist, you will have to create it. Click on Edit, click on New, click on Key. Make the new key a Dword and name it AutoRun. Capitalize the R just in case Windows cares about case.
In the right hand window right click on the AutoRun key and set it's value to zero.
That's it, you are done, close regedit and you have a faster and more secure XP machine.
You do it this way for XP. It's a good guess that Vista and Win 7 work a little bit different, but they both have auto insert notification and you want to turn it off. A bit of googling should turn up kill instructions for Vista or 7.
Convenience has a high price. Auto insert notification does more than just start your music player. It also automatically loads and runs programs from the CD, from any flash drives, floppy drives, and USB gadgets. Virus's (Virii?) spread themselves via auto insert notification. The virus merely copies itself to the CD or flash drive, and it gets loaded and executed every time the infected media is inserted into a victim computer. The notorious Sony rootkit spread itself this way. Unless you disable auto insert notification, your computer is vulnerable to virus every time you insert a CD, a flash drive/thumb drive, or a USB gizmo.
Plus, auto insert notification is a CPU hog. When active it can suck up 10-20% of your CPU time. Working on a video capture project some time ago, we found the video dropped frames until we tracked down and killed auto insert notification.
With auto insert notification turned off you do have to click on your CD player program to play a CD. With a CD-Rom you will have to use explorer to launch the "autorun" program in the CD root directory by hand on install CD-Roms. That's the only down side to killing auto insert notification.
To kill auto insert notification on XP you hand patch the registry, using regedit. Regedit.exe comes with Windows and is found in directory c:/windows/system32. If you can't remember that, you can search for it with Explorer. There usually is a regedit and a regedt32, they both work pretty much the same.
Click on regedit and it will open a pair of side by side windows. The left hand window has a tree structure that looks just like the one in Explorer. Open Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom Once you navigate to the CDrom registry "leaf" the right hand window will fill with assorted icons.
Look for one named "Autorun". If it does not exist, you will have to create it. Click on Edit, click on New, click on Key. Make the new key a Dword and name it AutoRun. Capitalize the R just in case Windows cares about case.
In the right hand window right click on the AutoRun key and set it's value to zero.
That's it, you are done, close regedit and you have a faster and more secure XP machine.
You do it this way for XP. It's a good guess that Vista and Win 7 work a little bit different, but they both have auto insert notification and you want to turn it off. A bit of googling should turn up kill instructions for Vista or 7.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
787 Structural Problem
Boeing has postponed the long awaited first flight of the all new, all plastic, 787 Dreamliner. This is a tremendous disappointment to Boeing and Boeing customers.
Apparently something (no photos so it could be anything) showed up during static wing bending tests on the ground. According to Aviation Week the problem was "delamination and deformation on body (presumably wing-to-body) join points during a routine stress test". The wings are attached to the body with titanium bolts. There was discussion of a fix, stiffeners. "The parts needed are small, only an inch or two." Eighteen (one for each bolt?) will be applied to the top side of the join.
More discussion followed about the Computer Aided Design (CAD) procedures. The author clearly feels that this problem should have showed up in computer simulations long ago, and he faults Boeing's CAD work.
For Boeing's sake lets hope the one inch stiffeners are readily available and solve the problem.
Apparently something (no photos so it could be anything) showed up during static wing bending tests on the ground. According to Aviation Week the problem was "delamination and deformation on body (presumably wing-to-body) join points during a routine stress test". The wings are attached to the body with titanium bolts. There was discussion of a fix, stiffeners. "The parts needed are small, only an inch or two." Eighteen (one for each bolt?) will be applied to the top side of the join.
More discussion followed about the Computer Aided Design (CAD) procedures. The author clearly feels that this problem should have showed up in computer simulations long ago, and he faults Boeing's CAD work.
For Boeing's sake lets hope the one inch stiffeners are readily available and solve the problem.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Billions for paperwork, not one one cent for tribute
Japan wants to buy the F22 from us. F22 is the hottest fighter in the air with the best electronics. It's also very expensive, so expensive that even rich Uncle Sam has decided to stop buying them after the 187th aircraft. At least the Pentagon thinks 187 fighters is enough, the Air Force wants more.
Congress is wrapped around the axle on the F22. The Members from Lockheed don't want to shut the production line down, but they don't want to sell the F22 overseas lest the "secrets" of the aircraft leak out to US adversaries.
In actual fact we should sell the Japanese as many F22's as they want to pay for. Japan is a loyal US ally, with some bad neighbors close by, giving them a solid reason for wanting advanced fighter planes. Japan is the second largest economy in the world, fully capable of building their own fighter planes (and airliners) from the ground up if they care to. Right now they don't compete with us in the aerospace business, but they could if they wanted to. Refusing to sell essential military equipment might be enough to make them want to.
Plus, the US could use the money. These things go for $142.5 million EACH to USAF. Ten aircraft is $1.4 billion. A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money. Plus we can sell them spare parts. Spare parts over a 30 year service life can add up.
And then we can sell paperwork. The Japanese are prepared to pay $2.3 billion up front for "non recurring engineering and manufacturing costs". This sounds like pure gravy for Lockheed in that the F22 is in full production and should not need any more engineering. Presumably the $2.3 billion will buy a couple of truck loads of paperwork.
All we need is for Congress to OK overseas sales of the aircraft. The customers have their check books out.
Congress is wrapped around the axle on the F22. The Members from Lockheed don't want to shut the production line down, but they don't want to sell the F22 overseas lest the "secrets" of the aircraft leak out to US adversaries.
In actual fact we should sell the Japanese as many F22's as they want to pay for. Japan is a loyal US ally, with some bad neighbors close by, giving them a solid reason for wanting advanced fighter planes. Japan is the second largest economy in the world, fully capable of building their own fighter planes (and airliners) from the ground up if they care to. Right now they don't compete with us in the aerospace business, but they could if they wanted to. Refusing to sell essential military equipment might be enough to make them want to.
Plus, the US could use the money. These things go for $142.5 million EACH to USAF. Ten aircraft is $1.4 billion. A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money. Plus we can sell them spare parts. Spare parts over a 30 year service life can add up.
And then we can sell paperwork. The Japanese are prepared to pay $2.3 billion up front for "non recurring engineering and manufacturing costs". This sounds like pure gravy for Lockheed in that the F22 is in full production and should not need any more engineering. Presumably the $2.3 billion will buy a couple of truck loads of paperwork.
All we need is for Congress to OK overseas sales of the aircraft. The customers have their check books out.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Write your Senator
I am snail mailing this to my senator. Even though she is a hopeless greenie democrat, I will invest a 44 cent stamp. If enough of us write our senators maybe we can stop this catastrophe in the Senate.
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen,
520 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator,
Please vote against the Cap & Tax energy bill that just passed the house.
First of all, you haven’t read it and your staff hasn’t read it. The bill is 1200 pages of legal gobbledygook, and no one has a clue as to how bad it will be. Or what bad things lurk in the darker corners of a document written with an eye to obfustication.
Second, raising the cost and reducing the availability of energy is a jobs killer. Industry creates jobs, and industry uses energy. It needs process heat, electro chemistry power, transportation fuels, electricity for machinery, lights, ventilation, and furnaces. Make energy scarce and expensive and industries go out of business, scale back operations or move over seas, throwing people out of work.
Third, raising the price of heating oil, gasoline, electricity and firewood hurts people like me, and especially people living on fixed incomes.
Fourth, global warming ended in 1999. World temperatures have been falling since then. Carbon dioxide is not the main greenhouse gas, water vapor is. The atmosphere holds between 10000 and 40000 parts per million of water vapor, where as carbon dioxide is 360 parts per million, too small to make a difference. Of that 360 parts per million, only 60 parts per million comes from burning fossil fuels. Even reducing man made carbon dioxide emissions to zero will have no effect on global warming.
Fifth, the cap & tax bill will subject us to oceans of expensive government mandated paperwork and create an army of government bureaucrats with power to forbid new construction, forbid purchase of vehicles, forbid repair of heating plants, forbid road construction and repair, forbid logging, forbid farming, and who knows what else. Economic activity will be slowed or stopped by bureaucrats armed with 1200 pages of vaguely written federal law.
Please vote against this disastrous bill because it will throw people out of work, raise prices, slow economic growth, and will not do a thing about global warming. Let’s not kneecap the economy for no reason.
Sincerely,
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen,
520 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator,
Please vote against the Cap & Tax energy bill that just passed the house.
First of all, you haven’t read it and your staff hasn’t read it. The bill is 1200 pages of legal gobbledygook, and no one has a clue as to how bad it will be. Or what bad things lurk in the darker corners of a document written with an eye to obfustication.
Second, raising the cost and reducing the availability of energy is a jobs killer. Industry creates jobs, and industry uses energy. It needs process heat, electro chemistry power, transportation fuels, electricity for machinery, lights, ventilation, and furnaces. Make energy scarce and expensive and industries go out of business, scale back operations or move over seas, throwing people out of work.
Third, raising the price of heating oil, gasoline, electricity and firewood hurts people like me, and especially people living on fixed incomes.
Fourth, global warming ended in 1999. World temperatures have been falling since then. Carbon dioxide is not the main greenhouse gas, water vapor is. The atmosphere holds between 10000 and 40000 parts per million of water vapor, where as carbon dioxide is 360 parts per million, too small to make a difference. Of that 360 parts per million, only 60 parts per million comes from burning fossil fuels. Even reducing man made carbon dioxide emissions to zero will have no effect on global warming.
Fifth, the cap & tax bill will subject us to oceans of expensive government mandated paperwork and create an army of government bureaucrats with power to forbid new construction, forbid purchase of vehicles, forbid repair of heating plants, forbid road construction and repair, forbid logging, forbid farming, and who knows what else. Economic activity will be slowed or stopped by bureaucrats armed with 1200 pages of vaguely written federal law.
Please vote against this disastrous bill because it will throw people out of work, raise prices, slow economic growth, and will not do a thing about global warming. Let’s not kneecap the economy for no reason.
Sincerely,
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