SB 1441 - was the Idaho CCW on campus bill

Well the State of Idaho has put forth a replacement bill for the Carry on Campus bill.

This bill is SB1441. Basically it reaffirms already existing Idaho code. It also makes it so counties and cities can have their own regulation on discharging (firing) of firearms, but not carrying.

Sounds good except for that this bill originally started to allow students who hold concealed carry permits to carry their guns on campuses by not allowing colleges to make their own gun laws and instead following State laws.

The new bill instead specifically states that colleges CAN make their own regulations and restrictions:

(c) The authority of the board of regents of the university of Idaho, the boards of trustees of the state colleges and universities, the board of professional-technical education and the boards of trustees of each of the community colleges established under chapter 21, title 33, Idaho Code, to regulate in matters relating to firearms.

Basically this bill now does the opposite of what it was originally designed to do, thanks to the presidents of the Idaho Colleges.

Pissed.

UPDATE: Bill was signed into Idaho Law March 28, 2008. No concealed carry on college campuses unless the school itself allows it (yea good luck with that).

Waukegan mall, Illinois

Details are still very sparce but an explosion has occured at a Tuxedo shop at Waukegan Mall in Illinois. A few injuries reported, no deaths at this time.

Hopefully this was just a gas leak explosion, but posting for reference as this could be the first of many mall suicide bomb terror attacks.

FBI warns of possible shopping mall attacks

More later as news develops.

UPDATE: As originally thought this was simply a gas leak. I mean why would anyone want to blow up a tuxedo shop...

February 28, 1993

This is what happens when a government agency, with guns and tanks, and no oversight, decides it just doesn't like a group of people.

Mainstream Linux? Will never happen.

In my post yesterday I mentioned I might play with Unbutu Linux on one of my spare machines. Well in the process of looking up information to do it I decided that Linux will never be mainstream.

As much as I bash M$ the simple fact is they will always be the dominant OS. Not because of some crooked things or getting rid of the competition. The reason M$ will always be the dominant OS is because of ease of use.

The reason Linux will never be mainstream can be summed up in three lines:

$ ./configure
$ make depend && make
$ sudo make install

No. Mainstream people do not want to go to a command line to compile and install stuff. We want to click on a happy little icon, hit next three or four times, then hit finished.

Now I've been in the command line world. I know how to do it, I've done it before. There is no reason for it any longer with today's computers. Linux has GUI available, but still gotta go to the command line to install it or run it, then gotta go to the command line to install anything onto the GUI, then gotta go to the command line to remove anything, etc etc.

Until Linux gets away from requiring the command line it will never ever be mainstream.

Now all you Mac people are of course going to say that Mac's are easy to use. Yea for the end-user but ever notice that there isn't very much software support for the Mac? Ever try to buy a non-Mac machine with OS/X on it? Go away.

Windows Vista is the Ten Plagues of Egypt

Window$ Vista is the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

I purchased two brand new Dell notebook computers yesturday. One for my wife and one for me.

We turned them on, did all the setup stuff, uninstalled Norton (the little Satan), installed AVG Free (I almost decided to pay for their full version I like them so much), installed AD-Aware Free, uninstalled all the AoL and Earthlink crap, and installed Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.

Then we sat back and marveled at the pretty features of Window$ Vista. And it was good. Then much like the telling of Revelations we slowly discovered that Vista was actually the Anti-Christ and had fooled us.

The notebook computers' processor is twice as fast as our desktops, they have FOUR TIMES as much memory. The notebook computers for all intents and purposes should be running circles around the desktops.

My wife tried to run World of Warcraft and the frame rate was TERRIBLE. Even using synergy was painful as when the mouse was on the client computers it was jumpy and choppy instead of nice and smooth like we were used to. We didn't even bother trying any of our other software (just getting WoW installed on a new computer takes a few hours)

It took pretty much all day (from about 2pm to 10pm) to set up the computers with just the stuff we want and need without all the crap given to us. We decided before going to bed that we were going to have to exorcise Vista from the computers and install our Windows XP in order to get the brand new computers to run to their best performance.

(btw now that I have yet another spare computer I think it's time to mess with Ubuntu or some other Linux flavor)