Linksys Talks to AirPort

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 06 Jun 2002 12:00:00 GMT
From Quotes of the Day:
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Incredible thunder storm last night. Flash after flash, the sky lit up over and over again for fifteen or twenty minutes. Some flashes with as little as two seconds until the associated boom. The weather report warned of large hail and a tornado watch ("watch" = weatherman thinks conditions are conducive. "warning" = someone reported seeing one), but we got only heavy rain.

I bought the Linksys Instant Wireless Network Adapter. $90 (plus tax) at Best Buy. It works! Since I live in the boonies out of range of all but one house, I didn't enable the encryption, which I've read can be problematic to get right. Important extra software is Jonathan Sevy's Airport Monitoring and Hangup Utility, which lets you see the modem connection speed and connect time and has "Connect" and "Disconnect" buttons to dial or hang up the modem. It requires Java. Apple's AirPort Admin Utility for Windows is also useful, though not essential unless you don't have an AirPort-enabled Macintosh.

Don Asmussen at Salon - Guns, guns and more guns! - a funny Flash animation about Ashcroft's second amendment, from a definitely anti-gun perspective. [brianf]

Tom DeWeese at The American Policy Center via CCOPS - The Back Room Deal to Destroy America - a number of senators are conspiring to destroy what's left of Americans' property rights, making Amerika even more fascist than it already is. Sieg Heil! [ccops]

George Will at The Albany (NY) Times Union - An armed pilot could stop the next attack - Mr. Will provides the other side of the story from his recent article poo-pooing armed pilots.

Recently this column presented, without endorsement, the views of three commercial airline pilots who oppose guns in cockpits. Today's column presents, and endorses, the views of three other commercial airline pilots -- two trained as fighter pilots, one civilian trained -- who refute the other pilots' principal contentions...

...

To thicken the layers of deterrence and security, in the air as well as on the ground, Congress should promptly enact legislation to empower pilots to choose to carry guns. Time flies. So do hijackers. And the next ones probably are already among us.

April Shenandoah at Sierra Times - Airport Searches - Biggest Show in Town - one woman's experience of the new face of airport "security". [sierra]

In my suspicious mind, I think that this fiasco is being used to condition Americans for future intrusiveness. Could this be a forerunner to home searches? Is it a precursor to restricted travel and freedom of movement?

Think not? Think again!

Ilana Mercer at World Net Daily - Whose property is it anyway? - if the American government still respected private property, there would be no discussion of arming pilots and no federally-funded really bad airport and airplane security. Private airline companies would be free to contract for their own security and people would be free to choose whether they prefer Mr. Colt's security to being a helpless victim. [geneice]

Salman Rushdie at The New York Times - The Most Dangerous Place in the World BugMeNot - Kashmir. [cowlix]

Is it really likely, however, that Pakistan would, so to speak, strap a nuclear weapon to its belly, walk into the crowded bazaar that is India and turn itself into the biggest suicide bomber in history?

Mr. Musharraf doesn't look like martyr material. Ah, but if he were losing a conventional war? If India's overwhelming numerical superiority on land, at sea and in the air won the day and Pakistan lost its prized Kashmiri land, would reason be swept aside? Worst of all, if Pakistani fury at a military defeat by India were to result in Mr. Musharraf's overthrow by Islamist hard- liners, Pakistan's nuclear warheads could fall into the hands of people for whom martyrdom is a higher goal than peace, people who value death more highly than life.

Joe Wilcox at CNET - One-on-one with Steve Jobs - QuickTime 6, MPEG-4, open standards, eMac, Dell, retail stores. [script]

Paul Graham - Revenge of the Nerds - good talk about Lisp, and why it's better than most other programming languages. I agree with him.

This is an expanded version of the keynote lecture at the International ICAD User's Group conference in May 2002. It explains how a language developed in 1958 manages to be the most powerful available even today, what power is and when you need it, and why pointy-haired bosses (ideally, your competitors' pointy-haired bosses) deliberately ignore this issue.

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