Finally, respondents point to the slight uptick in gun regulation during the late-19th century. As the Court suggested in Heller, however, late-19th-century evidence cannot provide much insight into the meaning of the Second Amendment when it contradicts earlier evidence. In addition, the vast majority of the statutes that respondents invoke come from the Western Territories. The bare existence of these localized restrictions cannot overcome the overwhelming evidence of an otherwise enduring American tradition permitting public carry. See Heller, 554 U. S., at 614. Moreover, these territorial laws were rarely subject to judicial scrutiny, and absent any evidence explaining why these unprecedented prohibitions on all public carry were understood to comport with the Second Amendment, they do little to inform “the origins and continuing significance of the Amendment.” Ibid.; see also The Federalist No. 37, p. 229. Finally, these territorial restrictions deserve little weight because they were, consistent with the transitory nature of territorial government, short lived. Some were held unconstitutional shortly after passage, and others did not survive a Territory’s admission to the Union as a State. Pp. 58–62.
New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen (06/23/2022)
The team will be sending him to see a cardiologist before allowing him to return to play. Twenty year old collegiate athletes don’t typically collapse from idiopathic cardiac events. Granted, there is no evidence either way as to his vaccine status, but it would certainly be something to keep an eye on.
The pro vaccine folks are already calling it fake news because it isn’t like the collapse of Hamlin, but in my opinion the fact that it isn’t like the collapse of Hamlin is exactly WHY it needs to be looked at.
To continue my examination of passwords, we have already seen how to generate them. Now that we have spent all of that time coming up with a password that is hard for someone to guess, we need to be able to use it while keeping secure. How do we make them user friendly and accessible while at the same time ensuring that they are secure from prying eyes?
Once you have generated your password, you need to remember it. Anyone can remember a few secure passwords, but remembering a bunch of them becomes problematic, especially when they are secure and change every few months, as they should.
The use of password memory devices like license plate numbers, or children’s birthdates, or whatever other memory devices you may use has two different drawbacks- the number of passwords that you can remember like that will be limited, and will also be difficult to keep straight across a large number of accounts. I tried that method, and it fails when you begin getting a large number of them.
My password wallet has over 300 unique passwords stored in it. Some of them, like for bank and email accounts, are 20 characters long and change twice a year. Others, like for commenting on Disqus, are 12 characters long and may change every two or three years. That’s a lot of remembering. I simply can’t do it.
So how do we store our passwords? I used to use one common password for bank accounts, another for email accounts, yet another for blogs, etc. What this means is that you are running the risk of a data breach at one company exposing your passwords for others. Not ideal.
You can keep them off of all computers and just do what my mother in law does. She keeps a notebook with all of her passwords written down in it. Then what? Do you carry it around with you? What if you lose it? How do you constantly update it? Not convenient, not secure.
One big security hole for passwords is your spellchecker. Your spellchecker has a list of words that are spelled correctly, and compares that list to the words that you are typing. If there is not a match, it marks a ward as misspelled and may even suggest the correct spelling. Some systems will even automatically insert the word that is a likely match. Users add new words to the spellcheck dictionary by telling the system that the word is correctly spelled, then the software adds the new word to the dictionary.
What if that new word isn’t a word at all, but is instead the password to your bank account? Spellcheck dictionaries aren’t secure at all. The spellchecker simply marks the passwords as being correctly spelled by saving them to the dictionary. The two Internet browsers that are most notorious for this are the “enhanced spell check” feature found in Chrome’s settings or the browser extension “Spelling & Grammar Checker” for Microsoft Edge. Huge security problem there.
You can let Google store them for you, but that isn’t a great idea. Do I really need to explain why?
So we are left with password storage companies. If we want our passwords to work across multiple platforms- at home, on our cell phones, at work, and everywhere else where we use it, there are only a couple of ways to do that. We can transfer it from platform to platform manually, or we can allow the password wallet to be stored on another person’s system.
These systems have advantages- we can store a large number of complex passwords in a format that makes them readily available. The password list is more secure than writing them down, and since the password storage company stores the password file in an encrypted format with the decryption key being your master password, you now only have to remember the master password. For those of you who have a trick for memorizing a password, here is where you shine. You can use the license plate numbers of your last three cars, your kids’ birthdates, and other mnemonics to come up with a secure passphrase that is easy for you to remember, but hard for a black hat to guess, and use that to secure your password wallet.
The risk here was displayed by LastPass recently. A password companies files can be compromised, and the black hats are now in possession of your encrypted passwords. They can now brute force your master passphrase at their leisure and get your passwords.
This post is already long, so we can discuss this in a later post.
Speaking of expensive hobbies. One of the things that I do to stay busy is work on making my house a smart house. It all began about 8 years ago, when I installed a SmartThings hub. Our house is automated. I use our cell phones as presence sensors, and the house changes modes when we leave, come home, and go to bed.
My wife was very understanding, and has now come to love the automated features of the house. When we go to bed, the thermostat changes to make the house cooler, the lights turn off, and the smart locks on the doors all lock themselves. The landscaping lights change colors depending on the season. There is purple, gold, and green for Mardi Gras; Red, white and blue for Independence Day, that sort of thing. The hot water heater turns off when we go to bed or leave the house. It’s geeky, fun to do, and pretty bad ass.
But 8 years has gone by, and technology is evolving. I have always been bothered by the fact that SmartThings is a cloud based processor. I want local processing, and now that we are thinking about moving next fall, I have a chance to try it.
I am thinking of switching to Home Assistant. I just bought an Odroid N2+ processor and a 128 GB eMMC card to use as a server. Now I am going to learn how to program it and integrate it with all of the devices I am planning on using. So I will spend the next few months playing with it. I am planning on using smart switches that can control scenes as well as individual lights.
So Matt Gaetz wasn’t the principled newcomer. Turns out he wasn’t taking a stand, but was instead using the Speaker vote to gain more power for himself. Now we have a California RINO as speaker and Gaetz has a committee to weild power over.
The Republicans aren’t interested in saving America, just power for its own sake.
Many cities have rent control laws that prohibit landlords from raising rent on their property. So they are finding ways around it. Landlords do all that they can to catch tenants breaking the terms of their lease so they can remodel the rental property in order to avoid the property being regulated by rent control laws. One way that they are doing this is through the use of surveillance technology.
The tenant is violating the terms of the lease by subletting, throwing wild parties, or otherwise endangering the property and the landlord has a significant financial incentive to catch them. When they get caught, they are evicted. This somehow makes the landlord into the bad guy, because making a profit is no longer seen as the proper goal of owning a business.
The left is using government to force business owners to accept fixed pricing while at the same time costs such as property taxes, insurance, and other costs eat into and eventually eliminate profits. So the market is doing what the market does- it’s finding solutions.
Two of them, the Ultra Carry and the Eclipse were decent for being range guns. They fed and shot FMJ reasonably well, but could be picky when it came to feeding HP ammo. I consulted people that I respect on the subject, and was given a lot of conflicting advice. They told me to break the pistol in for 500 rounds and that would fix it. It didn’t. I was accused of “limp wristing” by people who hadn’t even watched me shoot. I was told to change ammo, because some 1911s are finicky. I was told to lube them more, and was also told to lube them less. Other advice was change the springs, get more gunsmithing done, and tons of other things. At the time, I just couldn’t find a place for a handgun that cost a kilobuck but wouldn’t give me 100% reliability out of the box that is required for a carry piece and saw no point in pouring money into a gun in order to make it shoot reliably when there were so many guns that cost a fraction of a 1911 that worked fine right out of the box.
That was a decade ago. Now I have several dozen handguns and have sold several dozen more because they didn’t suit my needs. I am set for the handguns I need now I am buying handguns that I want. What I want is a handgun that looks sexy, and the 1911 does. Not in a tactical or badass way, but in a way that offers clean lines. I just like the way that they look. I also want it to be reasonably reliable, and I constantly hear from 1911 fanbois about how accurate and reliable their 1911 is, if you get the right gunsmith to work it over. So now I am assuming that the custom made 1911s from a top quality gunsmith with a reputation for making the best is gong to fit that bill.
So I want to try the Ed Brown. Still, spending 4 grand on a pistol only to have it not be what you want is a bit painful, so I am looking at trying out a cheaper version for now. I misspoke before, I am not looking at an Ultra Carry, I am looking at an Ultra CDP or a Pro CDP. I don’t like the Rapide. It looks like Kimber’s attempt to make the 1911 look like a Glock. All of the unreliability of a 1911, with the looks of a Glock. The worst of both worlds. To compound the problem, they even make them in 9mm.
Sure, the Ed Brown is expensive, but that is the benefit of having a job that pays well and a wife who is understanding of your odd, expensive hobbies. At least she knows my money is going to guns and geeky stuff and not to a mistress. Not only that, but I need to have a Bar B Que gun for the unlikely event that open carry is ever legalized in Florida.
The 5th circuit Court of appeals struck down the Trump bump stock ban today, but not on 2A grounds. The appellant said that a bump stock can’t be a machine gun because the law defines a machine gun as one that fires multiple times with a “single function of the trigger” and a bump stock causes the trigger to function multiple times.
The government argued that the key is the action of the shooter, who only has to do one thing, the shooter’s trigger finger isn’t doing anything other than sitting still.
That would be a great argument if the law said a machine gun is one that fires multiple shots with a single action taken by the shooter, but that isn’t what the law says. It specifically says “single function of the trigger.”
