…the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment right, recognized in Heller, to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense.
I didn't doubt it would end up this way, but the Supreme Court has just ruled that the right to keep and bear arms isn't just a right in Federal jurisdictions but also a right that must not be infringed by the states.
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Guns” Monday, Jun 28 2010 10:07 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
A little while ago I posted this table:
| Cost/mo | Allowance (GB) | Cost/GB | 1 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | 0.01 | $1,900 | $1,901 | $9,501 | $19,001 | $38,001 | $95,001 |
| $35 | 0.2 | $100 | $115 | $515 | $1,015 | $2,015 | $5,015 |
| $60 | 5 | $50 | $60 | $60 | $310 | $810 | $2,310 |
Today we have a new table from AT&T, admittedly the prices got better:
| Cost/mo | Allowance (GB) | Cost/GB | 1 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $15 | 0.2 | $50 | $75 | $375 | $750 | $1,500 | $3,750 |
| $25 | 2 | $10 | $25 | $55 | $105 | $205 | $505 |
While this still seems steep to me, especially since the $30 unlimited data plan has been eliminated for iPhones and iPads, it's a massive improvement, despite the people freaking out about it.
I should point out this only is for smartphones, the data plans for laptops appear to not be part of this.
Update: For DataConnect the $20 plan seems to be gone now.
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Technology” Wednesday, Jun 2 2010 06:17 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Oh how I wish someone made a registry that for a small fee, would accept real CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays, Amazon and iTunes accounts, or whatever, and would register that a particular person had purchased a particular piece of content. In exchange, the service would guarantee that when new formats came out they could download that song or movie or even, ick, cut new physical media.
Imagine that all the content providers loved this idea and would immediately allow people to buy their music or movies through the registry and not have to deal with physical distribution and format wars themselves. Imagine further that these providers could provide the best possible masters to the registry and make a little money no matter how the user decided to use their media.
Imagine they could come up with a way for families to share their music amongst themselves for less than the cost of buying all the music and movies again.
I sit here thinking about what it would mean to send every CD and DVD in the house off, and turn over the keys to my online download accounts in exchange for a shiny new download service that works with everything I have. I even imagine that DirecTV gets in on the deal and updates their software so I can download my own content to my receivers through the satellite and distribute it to my local computers, iPods, and media centers instead of killing my puny Internet connection. I imagine that Netflix figures out how to make rentals appear on this service in some way that's temporary.
It will never happen of course. Everyone seems to think they'll lose something in this kind of arrangement. But sometimes it's fun to dream about what would be best for the consumer. In fact, I think it's the way out of the rental mess for Netflix, but I doubt they like the idea either.
Instead we are forced to play in walled gardens and buy our music and movies again every time something new comes out. Heck, I have DVD and Blu-Ray versions of a lot of different movies at this point. What a waste!
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Technology” Monday, May 31 2010 12:07 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
As I mentioned in November, WebKit-based browser like Chrome, Safari, and especially the iPhone and iPad didn't support open font technologies like @font-face the same as Mozilla and Internet Explorer do, but apparently they do support SVG fonts. The folks at FontSquirrel have updated their kits to include SVG, so poof, the blog is much more readable on those browsers now!
They probably fixed it a long time ago, but I never bothered to look into it until now.
Now to figure out why Chrome doesn't show the blog title correctly…
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Blogging, Technology” Monday, May 17 2010 07:01 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
My new laptop has mobile broadband capability, so I looked at the prices. I pay $400/mo for 1 megabit up/down at home (spread over a large number of devices, at least), so I was just seeing how bad it was out there.
Well, AT&T has a page here that indicates it would cost far more for me to go to mobile broadband for my laptop. That table indicates that there is no unlimited plan, and there are only three other choices. I homogenized the units to gigabytes (there are little KBs hiding in there!), and calculated the price of using 1GB through 50GB a month to see how bad it could be:
| Cost/mo | Allowance (GB) | Cost/GB | 1 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | 0.01 | $1,900 | $1,901 | $9,501 | $19,001 | $38,001 | $95,001 |
| $35 | 0.2 | $100 | $115 | $515 | $1,015 | $2,015 | $5,015 |
| $60 | 5 | $50 | $60 | $60 | $310 | $810 | $2,310 |
I can only conclude that it makes no sense to buy any of these plans if you intend to do any significant work, play, or surfing on the Internet. Never buy the $20 plan for any reason, no matter what, since just surfing to a single web page could use up all of your monthly allowance, and $1,900/GB is pretty darned expensive. Compare that to the hourly activity of a 13-year-old girl and Farmville and you're bankrupt in no time.
A reasonable solution is a $100/mo unlimited plan. Frankly, the most reasonable approach is automatic upgrades to the next higher tier if you go over your limit. Until this is fixed, I cannot consider mobile broadband for a laptop.
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Technology” Thursday, Apr 22 2010 12:30 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Business, Technology” Tuesday, Mar 16 2010 07:54 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
There is a point people have missed in the Apple iPad rollout, and I wonder if Apple missed it too.
A lot of people familiar with the apps and interface of this new device have iPhones. The “killer app” therefore should leverage this. Pair them with bluetooth. Allow the big pad to use the iPhone's camera and phone for video conferencing or other conversations. Show caller id on the big pad when your phone is in your pocket. Make the iPhone into a communications hub and the pad the presentation hub.
I didn't see anything about Nike+ in this, but there's another sensor network that could feed data into the iPad. Microsoft and others are worried about Media PCs, but this thing, done right, is a really slick Media Nub. Far better than any other netbook or tablet I've seen to date.
Another thing that is missing is iPhone v4. Will it be nano-sized and all the display work goes to another device? Will it complement the iPad in some other gotta-have-it way? Are a series of bluetooth sensors going to come out? People are so quick to dismiss a single product, but what Apple excels at is integration and user experience.
There are many other Apple products. How will this iPad interact with Apple TVs it finds on your WiFi network when it sends out its BonJour requests? How will it interact with the rumored Apple product that will be integrated into TVs, cars, and the like? What will happen with data visualization masters make apps for it? With a 1024x768 screen it's pretty limited, but that IPS screen has wonderful viewing angles and there's a possibility of bigger pads, and higher resolutions. Old acceptable printed pages had 300 dots per inch... I'd like to see 200 in an iPad. 1080p displays at 200ppi would be 9.6 in x 5.4 in. Sure, that would eat a lot of power, but a lot of strides have been made already.
Finally, I was disappointed with the book experience. Since Apple has a product they are unlikely to let other book products be made. They didn't even say what format their own book app will use. Will I be able to generate good looking content for the iPad with LaTeX? With Word?
The killer book experience I want something like the iPad to solve is my own ability to flag/highlight passages and write notes in the margin. I want to see what other people's notes are. I want links to related content. Some books live on their own but other books live in a context of other publications.
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Technology” Thursday, Jan 28 2010 05:26 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Politics” Sunday, Jan 24 2010 07:04 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
With Brown winning the election for the Senate in Massachusetts perhaps Obama will divert from his current path of hyperpartisanship—is that the change you had hoped for?—and return to his promised bipartisanship… In fact, this particular loss of the 60th vote may save Congress and the presidency for the Democrats if they can change the tone of the debate before November.
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Politics” Tuesday, Jan 19 2010 08:37 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Politics” Tuesday, Dec 15 2009 06:53 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Politics” Friday, Dec 4 2009 07:42 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
As we near the completion of Oracle's acquisition of Sun, I've been noticing applications that require Sun's particular implementation of Java despite the fact that I'm using a compliant Java from a different vendor (IBM). I found a bug in jruby which required NetBeans and I even hit a firmware update tool for a printer that would only use Sun's Java!
Kinda defeats the purpose of Java's openness by having apps rely on particular flavors of it, doesn't it?
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Technology” Sunday, Nov 29 2009 10:35 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “General” Tuesday, Nov 24 2009 05:55 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
I recently started using @font-face and the Gentium font to play with fonts and the web. The folks at fontsquirrel.com have a nice generator so that web browsers that support otp and woff fonts can use the most efficient method possible to download and use fonts.
But there's a problem. Safari, Chrome, and the iPhone—WebKit-based browsers—appear to have a bug where little boxes show up for newline characters, double quotes, and other special characters. It's infuriating!
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Nov 12 2009 08:39 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
Josh Poulson
Posted in category “Politics” Wednesday, Nov 11 2009 01:09 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks
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