Blackie Collins, Kelly Wordens, ASP
Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. -- Howard Scott
I received my order from Botach Tactical, a Blackie Collins CIA Letter Opener, a Kelly Wordens Impact Kerambit, and an ASP 31 Inch Expandable Baton and wrist strap cap. On my monitor, the top two pictures are just slightly less than life-size.
Piers Anthony - Ogre's Den, JeJune 2000 - Interestingly, Piers Anthony carries an impact kerambit.
One of my concerns is self defense, which really is a part of my larger concern with health. I try to eat right, exercise, keep emotionally stable, buckle my seat belt, avoid pollution and so on, but suppose I am out in the forest and an aggressive boar attacks me? No, I am not referring to a critic; that is spelled "bore." Or a rabid raccoon? That's why I go out with my spear, or telescoping baton, or my "Armadillo" knife with the shielded hilt; these are deadly instruments. I hope never to use any of them, but want to have them in case the need ever arises. It's the seat belt analogy: I never want to crash (again), but if it happens, I want to survive it. But suppose I am on a distant city street, trying to find my way (I just do seem to get lost too readily) and a mugger accosts me? I won't have any of those weapons, because you can't take them on an airplane, yet I don't want to be helpless. I took judo classes for three years, twenty years ago, and while I never got beyond green belt--that's midway through the student grades--I did learn what to do if charged by a mayhem-minded man. But is there a simpler way? So I have kept my eye out, and may finally have found what I want. This is a piece of hard plastic shaped like the capital letter L, five and a half inches tall, with a big eyelet at the top, as if someone thought it was the lower case letter "i" and dotted it, only with one of those circles some girls use instead of a dot. (Girls tend to be rounded in various ways; I love that too.) A pretty silly looking item, of no apparent practical use. Yet it is one neat defensive weapon. You put your forefinger through the loop and wrap your hand around the stem; the base of the L sticks out awkwardly below your fist. But if someone attacks you, this dingus is deadly. If he grabs your shoulder, pretend you are holding a hammer, and hammer his hand with that base; he'll let go in a hurry, or get his hand broken. If he remains aggressive, hammer him on the head; if he doesn't retreat, it could break his face. If he tries to choke you, jam the tip of the base of the L into his hand or arm until he changes his mind. This is like brass knuckles, only plastic, with the base becoming the striking part, not the knuckles. I believe a woman could use this as readily as a man, and I think she could give a purse snatcher or rapist one hell of an ugly surprise before she retreats to safer territory. In fact I think any concerned woman should carry one, on her body, not in her purse, so that she can get her hand on it instantly. Meanwhile, I'll be carrying mine. So what is this tool? It is called an Impact Kerambit, pronounced keRAMbit, and I found it for $8 plus postage in a catalog titled SHOMER-TEC that specializes in law-enforcement equipment, but I suspect it is also available elsewhere. I also bought the instruction video for $29, and that's okay, but I have covered the essence here. I regret sounding like a salesman, but this was one item in a junk mail catalog that made a real impression on me. I see that the Impact Kerambit proprietor has a web site: www.kellyworden.com, so folk can check it out directly. However, that seems to be concerned with martial arts in general, rather than this particular instrument. I suppose if you went there and asked for it, they would respond.
Dave Winer's DaveNet - Are Men Back? - real feelings expressed here. Don't miss it.
Sierra Times - DEA Bans Hemp Products - an article from the Colorado Hemp Initiative Project about the latest nazi move by the d.e.a. [sierra]
Vin Suprynowicz - All applications approved! - part of The Libertarian series. University of Nevada's "ethics commission" approved the hiring of a member of the Board of Regents as an intern.
If any doubt remained whether the state Ethics Commission should be disbanded, it has now been resolved. It is not enough to merely call the so-called "Ethics Commission" a waste of whatever it spends on stationery and the light bulbs that illuminate its pathetically compromised goings-on. For in fact, it would be a far greater service to the taxpayers to take whatever the Ethics Commission spends, bundle up that amount of cash in packets of handy size, and burn them in 50-gallon drums outside the soup kitchens of Reno and Sparks on cold winter evenings, the better to warm the hobos.
Bruce Schneier - Crypto-Gram Newsletter, October 15, 2001 - Cyberterrorism and Cyberhooliganism, War on Terrorism, SSSCA, Nimda, Crypto-Gram Reprints, SANS Top 20, News, Counterpane Internet Security News, Dangers of Port 80, Comments from Readers. [newsforge]
A few minutes of speculation should be enough to convince anyone that we cannot make the United States, let alone the world, safe from terrorism. It doesn't matter what Draconian counterterrorism legislation we enact, how many civil liberties we sacrifice, or where we post armed guards. We cannot stop terrorism within a country. We cannot block it at its borders. We have always been at risk, and we always will be.
The only way to deal with terrorism is to eradicate it at the source: to root out and destroy terrorists and terrorist organizations. In this sense, President Bush's campaign against terrorism is the correct course of action. But to be successful, a counterterrorism campaign needs two components: in law-enforcement and in politics. Merely arresting and convicting existing terrorists, without addressing the geopolitical climate that created those terrorists in the first place, will not solve the problem. This is the lesson that the British learned in Northern Ireland, and the lesson that the Israelis have not yet learned in their own country. To use Bush's "War on Terrorism" metaphor--as flawed as it is--this corresponds to winning the war and winning the peace.
We need to do both.
...
Digital files can be copied. Nothing anyone can say or do can change that. If you have a bucket of bits, you can easily create an identical bucket of bits and give it to me. You still have the bits, and now I have the bits too. I have explained this in detail previously.
Software copy protection does not work. It doesn't work to prevent software piracy. It does not work to prevent copying of digital music, videos, etc. I have also explained this previously.
Copy prevention is easier, but still not foolproof, if you can extend the prevention mechanism into the hardware. If there is a software decoder that decrypts a digital movie when a user pays for it, he can always write a tool to extract the digital video stream after it has been decrypted. But if the decryption happens in the speakers and monitor, this is a lot harder. This general rule explains why it is easier to hack a software video player than a DVD machine. It's always possible to capture the content from the output device -- re-record the audio from the speakers, for example -- but it won't be a perfect digital copy.
The SSSCA attempts to push copy prevention to the output devices. It makes it illegal to sell computers without industry-approved copy prevention. It actually makes free and open operating systems (like Linux) illegal if they refuse to implement copy protection. It limits fair use, and basically puts the computer industry under the control of the entertainment industry.
It's insane.
American Civil Liberties Union - ACLU "Bitterly Disappointed" in House-Senate Joint Passage of Anti-Terrorism Legislation - The ACLU is not happy about the "USA Act". Neither am I. I agree with them that the following features of the bill are really bad news: Authorizes "Sneak and Peek Searches", Allows Forum Shopping, Creates New Crime of Domestic Terrorism, Allows the CIA to Spy on Americans, Imposes Indefinite Detention, Reduces Privacy in Student Records, Expands Wiretap Authority. The new domestic terrorism crime is especially chilling. [picks]
"This bill has simply missed the mark of maximizing security and, at the same time, minimizing any adverse effects on America's freedoms," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington National Office. "Most Americans do not recognize that Congress has just passed a bill that would give the government expanded power to invade our privacy, imprison people without due process and punish dissent."
Orville R. Weyrich, Jr. - Reichstag Fire - a short history of how the Nazis took over Germany after a fire burned down their parliament building. [grabbe]
They who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Recent events raise ghosts of the past.
Joel on Software - In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome - why NIH is sometimes a good idea.
"Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them." When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time. When you're a cordon bleu chef and you need fresh lavender, you grow it yourself instead of buying it in the farmers' market, because sometimes they don't have fresh lavender or they have old lavender which they pass off as fresh.
...
The best advice I can offer:If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what.
Leander Kahney at Wired - Handspring Phones Into Action - Handspring is introducing two new handhelds that include a cell phone. One of them also has a keyboard. [wired]
Tomcat 4.01 is available from the Apache Jakarta team. This is a bug fix release. [cafe]
My thanks to Northern Lights Internet Solutions Ltd (no relation to the search engine of the same name) for the inclusion of BlogMax on their weblogs tools page.
