Author: Brandon

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Constitution? Not in an Airport.

An amusing bit of news:

A man who wrote the fourth amendment on his skin was arrested at an airport.

A Charlottesville man who stripped down to his underwear at Richmond International Airport to protest security-screening procedures was charged with disorderly conduct Thursday, airport police said.

So, just to be clear. If you…

  • …are told to submit to groping and/or ogling by a TSA agent and don’t do so, you’re in trouble.
  • …make ogling more efficient by stripping down to your underwear in line without being asked, you’re in trouble.
  • …write the fourth amendment on your body, your first amendment rights will be violated and you’re in trouble.

Half the people behind this guy in line probably never saw the fourth amendment before this guy took his shirt off, so I say he’s just performing a public service.

Remember folks: Bureaucracy is the art of removing every last vestige of good judgment from every process involved. Don’t gum up the works by scrawling quotes from the nation’s fundamental legal document on your skin. You’re body belongs to the government, and they’ll have none of it, or didn’t you know that?

Happy new year!

NRA members should join GOA

NRA members should join Gun Owners of America.

Why?  Because the NRA is okay with negotiating away free speech.

I am a member of both organizations, but I will be thinking long and hard before renewing my NRA membership when it is due.

Hopefully, before then, the NRA will realize that it represents its members, not the organization itself. If the NRA is willing to make deals with an anti-First Amendment Congress in order to maintain itself as an institution, who is to say they won’t do the same for the Second Amendment?

Unlike the NRA, GOA is pro-Constitution, not merely pro-gun. So, if you are a member of the NRA, consider joining GOA as well, and perhaps letting your NRA membership lapse if they don’t clean up their act.

Shareware is just software

The ASP, formerly Association of Shareware Professionals, has changed its name to Association of Software Professionals.  I’ve been a member of the ASP for many years.  In fact, I served on the Board of Directors for two years.

I welcome the name change. The word shareware has a positive ring to it for me, but I have come to realize that for most people, it only serves as an unnecessarily confusing moniker for what is now a normal means of software marketing — trying software before buying it.

Back before the Internet was ubiquitous, someone wanting to market their software without going through the normal retail channels could encourage their users to “share” the application with others, who would pay for the software if they liked what they tried.  These days, there is no need for “sharing” a disk or uploading to a BBS, since one can simply visit a website to download the program.  There is a lot of debate over what the “first” shareware program was or whether or not it was even “shareware” at all, but the point is, shareware described a software marketing method, not the software itself.

The distinction is lost, however.  Therefore, it is wise to discontinue using the term altogether.

Though I market my software with “try before you buy” download versions, I haven’t used the term “shareware” in many years, because I’d rather describe my software to someone instead of defining idiosyncratic marketing terms.  My company does what other software companies do: design and sell computer programs.

So, kudos to the ASP for getting this done and moving on.

Floppy Disks Getting Rarer

I didn’t even know Sony was still manufacturing floppy disks, but they’ve announced that production will be ended early next year.

I still have a bunch of these in a shrink wrapped box (just in case I ever want to save a new file on my Commodore 64) — but those are even more rare, because the Commodore drives use an older double-density format.

Remember those floppy disk cases that let you organize the disks like they were paper in file folders?

Interestingly (well, to me), I have old floppy disks from the eighties that have outlasted burned DVDs and CDs from the early 2000s.