Not quite there yet

I'm waiting for the market to roll out a PDA/computer hybrid:

• It would operate as a PDA when it's pulled from its cradle and jammed into my pocket,
  
  
• It can connect to WiFi hotspots and provide a full-featured browser on a low-res monitor in the PDA mode;
  
  
• When it's resting in its cradle, it does not sync with another computer, it reboots as one, and simply interfaces with input devices, peripherals, a high-speed IP connection, etc through the cradle.
  
  

For respectable desktop performance, it would farm out the functions of full-power CPU, graphics processor, and vast amounts of memory to the cradle, and run from on-board equivalents only when portable. Separate OSs?



It seems that all of the components are there, only waiting for integration.



At least one company is pursuing it, I don't recall the name (OXO?), but they are, of course, basing theirs on Windows.



Who else is close? One of the reasons I went for the iRiver MP3 player is that it could be the progenitor of such a desktop/PDA killer. It is principally, by weight at least, a hard drive. The desktop/PDA killer will be, mostly, a hard drive, with enough application hardware and an OS wrapped around it to support PDA functions, using information written to that drive. Putting a Palm front-end on this drive will do that, if Palm can be made to access hard drives. The whole Palm front-end can go inert when the device is docked.



When the killer is booted in its cradle, the CPU there strokes the hard drive and accesses everything that the Palm OS has put there.



Other devices will be coming towards the killer from other directions. For example, Tapwave's Zodiac is a game console. Put a HD in it?

WTF for the day

At the Commissary, right up front near the entrance, there was a rack of the current generation of MREs for sale. For about $7, IIRC, marked down from the usual $9.



There's nothing wrong with them, I've lived on them and was able to transition back to real food successfully afterward. Some of them I even like---the pork rib, for example, and the clam chowder.



But I wouldn't actually buy them. Through the normal course of my service, I accumulate enough of them for my other needs, like the car trunk and the occasional hunting trip, even the overnight bag if I'm on a weird commercial airline flight. But somebody out there thinks they're great long-term survival food and they want to buy and hold them against Doomsday? Not at seven bucks a meal.



The real punchline, though: they're for sale, to any qualified Commissary customer, though every package is marked in Uncle Sugar's standard all-caps boldface,

COMMERCIAL RESALE IS UNLAWFUL

Hey, I just work here.

Bee in My Bonnet

Hello all! Well, just like jumping into a cold pool is best done all at once and quickly... here goes my dive into blogging!



I usually listen to Christian radio while on the job as Mom the Chauffeur. Last week for some reason I tuned into conservative talk radio. Dennis Prager (http://www.dennisprager.com/) was interviewing a gentleman about Liberals - why they act as they do and why they won't change. Maybe this is old news to you, but for me it finally lit a light bulb. The point being made was that for Liberals equality was the overriding priority. Equality is more important to Liberals than morality or freedom or responsibility or anything else. It is their overriding concern.



I asked myself how the world would look though equality colored glasses.



One example: parents versus children. For there to be equality children need to have the same power as parents. And so we have children suing parents and parents afraid to discipline their children when they misbehave in public. Children are smart enough to use their parents hesitation to their own advantage. Parents are responsible for forming morality and decision making in their children and discipline is one of the tools. Oh, but I forgot. That would only be important if morality and decision making had a higher priority than equality.



And what about jobs? In my lifetime I have already seem equality erode job standards. When women wanted to become firemen, they had to lower the standards so the women could qualify for the positions. Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for women being firemen. I think it's great. But I also think they need to meet the same standards as the men for our safety and theirs! Those standards were not plucked out of thin air. If you want the job then work for it and EARN it!



Life is not supposed to be fair and I'd Like to know who started the rumor that it was!

More speedgoat

At 1320 hours Mountain, I felled a pronghorn on Foote Creek Rim, west of McFadden, Wyoming.



This is what leave is for.

Update: The buck fell at 13TDS0365819982. Range was 207 meters, through a light crosswind, with the same 139-grain .284" pointed-soft-point thrown by 50 grains of IMR4350 from the same 7x57mm Ruger as last year. He fell instantly, then after about twenty seconds he got back up. Then he fell again for good.

He was struck through the sternum. The projo was not recovered.

Next time:

• a laser rangefinder is on order, using miles left over from an old credit card, not enough for a ticket but plenty for this gadget.
  
• need to carry a safety-orange object just to mark the place where I took the shot. Having nothing this time, I just stacked some rocks. Not easy to find after dressing the animal.

No on Amendment 36

That's it. Just no.

Make way for another poster

Barbaloot amazes me. She texted me last week: "I want you to help me set up my own blog."



She's been listening to Dennis Prager, some Hugh Hewitt, some Glenn Beck. Her dander is up, dogs. She's gonna do something rash unless she gets to post.



FWIW, she's been following the story of how Dan Rather is imploding, and she now "gets" what web logs can do. She looks at my blogs differently now; she no longer regards the time I spend at them the same way she views playing Harry Potter or Diablo. Blogs have crossed the line from interesting geeky diversion to, well, something deeper, more important, engaged with the world. Those who dismiss arguments that blogging has had its watershed in Ra^therGate should interview Barbaloot about it.



We discussed it some, and she chose to post here for a while, taking the pseudonym I have always used for her. If she wants, we'll launch her on her own blog later.



I'm hunting antelope this weekend, and plan to have her set up before I go, so watch this space.



Did I mention that she's the best thing that ever happened to me, and that I don't deserve her? And that if she finds out I got that MP3 player she'll kick my ass?

Buy only the amount of electronics you must have to survive to your next paycheck

Consumer electronics prices continue a weird downward spiral. I posted recently about my beloved iRiver iHP120. I scored an open-box special from BestBuy at just under $300---new ones went for $339. When I was choosing a new LeapPad book for Boy's birthday, I glanced at the MP3 players again and got one of the nastiest buyer's remorses of my life.



They had put their existing stocks of iHP120's on clearance for $269. Making room for the 40GB model? Maybe. Or maybe they're making way for a player with a screen that shows JPEGs and BMPs too. Same MSRP as the audio-only player.



That remorseful incident was last Friday. Today, browsing at a CompUSA, I saw they still had their iHP120's at $329.

Toad tries to stand

He's cutting a tooth, and he wants to stand like his brother and sisters do.

Roxaaaannne

More men than women have failed to reproduce in each generation.

This item from FuturePundit is not news, it's merely repeatable objective proof of something geeky men have always known:

"There are men around who aren't able to have children, because they are being outcompeted by more successful males."

Any bearer of a Y chromosome who's seen Roxanne can tell you this, though in less charitable terms: "You wanted it all. All the romance and emotion, all wrapped up in a cute little nose and a cute little ass!"

[FuturePundit's] guess is that the legalization and increasing use of divorce has increased the gap between what percentage of women and what percentage of men manage to reproduce in each generation.

Think of the thousand Princes in Sa'udi Arabia, and how they came to be. Then think of the millions of poor schmucks in such countries, who will never get laid in their lives, let alone sire children, because of a paternal religious/political system that treats women as property and allows men to hoard them under polygamy. Liberalized divorce simply means shifting the balance of power over procreation from man toward woman. Clearly, having all of the power rest with the man has not been beneficial there.

A shortage of females will very likely select for genes carried by males who become more successful.

Check out the quote from Roxanne above. Shifting the balance completely over to the woman will result in attractive, hunky guys who know how to talk women out of their clothes. Is that how brutal Mother Nature would define success?

I don't deserve her

Barbaloot and I celebrated eleven years of marriage this weekend. I chose Moroccan, and suggested to her to invite Firstborn. Like a shot Firstborn agreed.

I am lucky to have this woman. I don't deserve her, but she's mine.

Wow

Tasteful, but some are not safe for work. A picture a day of Wanda. HT Instapundit.

Add one more industry, Laila

We would also like WUTT! to be recognized for our opinions on Film and Television. To wit:



Which supporting actor do you think most deserves a lead role in a major Hollywood motion picture?

It's time for the Baldwins, Travolta, Cruise and the others to step aside and let some sunlight reach through the canopy of this knotted forest. These people deserve Star Vehicles.



Winner: !



Runner-up: !!



Actress: !



Please offer yours in Comments.

Ownership society

If a company finds that a particular property has become a liability to the point it affects the company's stock price, it can spin the property off.



Chaz reminds me of a grassroots plan to buy a major anti-gun broadcast network and assign proxy to the fire-breathing gun lobbyist Neal Knox. He'd take the network in a new editorial direction.



The plan looks more feasible today than it did when it was floated years ago. The network? CBS.



I advise holding out a while longer. If VIA goes below 30?

Yes we do, but . . .

Orin Kerr asks at VC, regarding Ra^therGate: C'mon, folks: don't we have more important things to blog about?

Remember why we Americans in general and bloggers in particular are obsessed with media dishonesty and inaccuracy. That election over which Orin expresses concern cannot be expected to conclude fairly or peacefully if a major media outlet is carelessly reporting a fraud passed to them. The power of the media in political affairs is a given. The responsibility that

the media have in these affairs is unenforceable.

As far as I am concerned there is prima facie that the memos are frauds. Consequently the network that relies on these memos should answer challenges to their validity, and challenges to their fairness in other reporting about the memos' subject as well.

If true, their errors need to be detected and corrected, and I'd rather have bloggers doing it than Congress or the courts.

If false---if the influence of the network media is diminshing, and that of decentralized media is increasing---media consumers are making it so, and should articulate why.

Either way, I don't see this as a matter distracting the body politic from the truly salient issues of a presidential election. I see this as a message to the body politic to be aware of the curvature of the lens through which they view the election, and to either correct that lens or discard it if they feel it cannot be trusted.

The only way to do that, within Constitutional constraints, is to point out the distortions, in painful detail, over and over and over, right now. It will not interfere with discussion of genuine campaign issues, it can only help.

Haven't seen any yet

I was hoping to see some Kalashnikovs in the streets---Sarah Brady said so---but none have surfaced just yet. At least on my usual route along Mississippi, Chambers, and Parker Road, and if there are any in Aurora or Parker, that's where the little bastards would be. Right on the sidewalks. Were they supposed to be falling from the sky?



To anybody reading, if you do see one and don't really want it for yourself, hold it for me, would you?



Maybe I have to wait until after midnight tonight. Tomorrow's another day.

Time for some nomenclature, OK class?

Alphecca rates the Manchester Union-Leader highly in its politically balanced approach to reporting on firearms issues. However, their editor needs some schooling:

About the only material difference New Hampshire gun enthusiasts are likely to see after the federal assault weapons ban expires tomorrow are lower prices for high-capacity gun cartridges that hold more than 10 bullets, gun owners and dealers said.

The thingy that that is projected from the gun, travels to the target and hits it is a bullet. In shotguns, specially built to throw multiple projectiles in a single discharge, the many projectiles are called pellets of shot.



The device that contains the projectile along with a measured quantity of propellant is the cartridge. A shotgun cartridge is called a shotshell.



In a self-loading firearm, such as that class of self-loaders that is now legal to manufacture and market with military cosmetic features, the device that holds and feeds cartridges into the firearm is a magazine. A common misnomer for magazine is clip, which actually refers to a device used to stack cartridges together for insertion into the magazine.



So what the sentence should have said is:

About the only material difference New Hampshire gun enthusiasts are likely to see after the federal assault weapons ban expires tomorrow are lower prices for high-capacity gun magazinesthat hold more than 10 cartridges , gun owners and dealers said.

The editor surely did not mean to refer to the Salvo project, which sought to fit multiple bullets in a single cartridge. This was not a shotgun, in that the cartridge contained a number of simple spherical pellets of lead that are thrown from a smooth barrel in a spreading pattern, but an axial stack of bullets, each fitting the bore of a rifled barrel and taking spin from it.



But I digress. If the press wants to be taken seriously, they need to get even the simplest facts straight, even if didactodorks like me can still figure out what they are trying to say.

"There will be a next move. Count on it."

In reference to the forged Bush TXANG memos, Sandy at comments at ChicagoBoyz that "we're going to see attempts to bring the blogosphere/net under gov't. control."



Could gigital rights management could be applied to this task somehow?



Oh and remind me again how the current McCain-Feingold-reformed situation is better, wherein Big News has a free hand to report on candidates, but certain other entities have legal limits imposed on their political speech within X days of the election.

Red sails in the sunset . . . .

I like Geek's postcard to DiFi.



Ding, dong, the witch is dead. The 1994 AWB sunsets.



Oddly enough, as I've shopped for these dreaded weapons during these ten years, prices spiked on the pre-ban weapons early, but the free(er) market reacted. Rule-beating weapons (no flash hider or bayonet lug, some domestic parts) otherwise identical to the banned weapons appeared promptly and prices quickly settled down, even to levels below those for the pre-bans.



Without realizing it, the proponents of the AWB energized a domestic industry in weapons that used to be strictly imports. Of course they didn't anticipate this unintended consequence. Will they learn from it?



So what will happen to prices? Up, or down? Supply increased during the ban, as companies set themselves up to manufacture domestically what the AWB would not allow them to import, and that capacity isn't going away. It was more affordable for me to get an FAL during the ban than before it. With the AWB sunsetting, some products will be legitimate to import again, so overall supply increases.



On the other side of the price curve, will demand increase simply because a law changes?



My prognostication: many people who get their news from the major press have assumed that these weapons have been unavailable for the last ten years, and now that the ban is over, they'll buy. Prices will spike, but this time the domestic manufacturing capacity will ramp up to absorb it faster than when the ban was imposed (easier to add a shift to machines already tooled up, than to set the tooling up in the first place). Prices won't spike as high and will fall sooner for end items.



Meanwhile, owners of post-ban guns will want to refit theirs with post-post-ban features. Many of these are bolt-on, such as stocks and bayonets. That capacity is there, in fact the products themselves are, since they were removed from complete weapons or parts kits to make post-ban weapons in the first place, as well as third-party firms making domestic parts for rule-beaters.