Thoughts...

Consider this a 30 minute ramble. Unedited, and like cartalk, unencumbered by the thought process. I am multitasking, with blogging, eating and listening to Dave Grohl on FreshAir taking place simultaneously.

Let the stream of conciousness begin.....

I hope that 2008 is the year that a young promising cyclist can enter the pro ranks without doping just to keep up. I doubt it.

I hope that in 2008, the police stop tasering people who smart off to them. I was thinking of designing a taser proof jacket, with woven stainless steel in several layers inside to short out the taser leads. Is illegal to make taserproof clothing for folks who go to political rallies?

One thing that I have been thinking of lately is that as the level of technology increases in military and police applications, the level of technology required to thwart them drops. For example, if the police employ a laser guided rocket propelled EMP device to stop your car, you could just commit crimes on a motorcycle. If they can stop a motorcycle, just ride to your next bank robbery on a horse. No EMP weapon will stop a horse. Most handguns won't either.

The US military is developing a chemical laser to be flown above the battlefiled on a C-130 gunship. The laser produces enough power to "disable" (read "melt") vehicles. What if a guy mounts his bathroom mirror on his camera tripod and bolts the whole thing to the top of his '88 Corolla? Could he redirect the beam from the C-130 back to it's source and melt the eyballs of the C-130 crew? Or swing the beam around and scorch whomever he wanted? Has the military thought of this? Unlike a depleted uranium round, a laser beam could be bounced back to the source.

Why are we disarming US citizens during a war in which citizens are the primary targets of the enemy? If two or three passengers on the 9/11 flights had been armed with handguns, 9/11 could have been a wikipedia paragraph. Perhaps it makes more sense to allow citizens to arm themselves, or arm them. Make their ammo and range fees tax deductible because they are providing a valuable service to the nation.

Five minutes to go....

Tuned off Dave Grohl on Fresh Air, because he sounded like a dork. Why does Terry Gross take so much vacation time anyway? Does she have a beachfront place in the Bahamas? Or is she actually in prison?

I switched my desktop machine from OpenBSD to Ubuntu linux for three reasons:

1. Evolution under BSD did not work with our Exchange server for Email.
2. No Fire Wire support in OpenBSD. I inherited a bunch of big firewire drives and use them to store back up images. The Ubuntu live CD recognized and mounted the firewire drive. Cool.
3. I put a floppy in the drive and when I tried to boot after Christmas, the OpenBSD system failed the drive test of the floppy. I looked on the net and found no fix. It would boot to the test and then barf out to the shell. fsck and fsck-ffs'd a million times and even pulled the floppy ribbon cable, no joy. After 30 minutes, and given 1 and 2 above, decided to go to linux. The OpenBSD server is running fine. Did have to reboot for some reason after pf would not allow inbound ssh, even after pfctl -d then -e and -i /etc/pf.conf. Reboot did work.

Time is up.