Standard Mischief

Threat Level explains the $105 “safe harbor” solution that corporate personhood thingys like YouTube use to be able to host infringing content¹, yet avoid copyright trolls like Righthaven.

Of course, to exploit said safe harbor you’ll have to 1) Pay the fee; and 2) register with the government.

¹When you think about it, the DMCA is the entire business model that got YouTube kick-started in the first place. It’s a website that couldn’t even exist except for the unintended consequences of what at it’s core was meant to be an anti-reverse engineering non-competing gift from congress to large corporations.

It was all just a misunderstanding …or something like that. Things were coded wrong. Citi isn’t really anti-RKBA.

Un-huh.

Courtesy of the NRA’s Youtube feed.

Citibank Continues to Deny Credit to Firearms Industry 5:51 min.

Click here for pop-up | Direct link

Cam doesn’t say it, but the issue dates back to 2000, (not 2007).

Previously, for context.

Say Uncle got rid of his back in 2008.

More on Citibank

The side effect of not having an army of brain-dead zombies reading from your talking points and accepting your wheelbarrows full of cash is that your fellow RKBA supporters tend to make up their own mind. If the NRA helped resolve things back in 2008 and 2000, perhaps they should have shared?

just sayin’

Yup, more pastebin. At least it keeps me from saying “read it all” too much.

Previously, for context, and because three reverent links in a comment elsewhere seems to put me on my own blog’s spam blacklist:

[snowflakesinhell.com]

[saysuncle.com]

[saf.org]

I only needed the yellow belt in searchengine-fu to find this:

https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS07F9227S/GS07F9227S_online.htm

This looks like Cobham’s GSA price list. I guess the SWAG in my previous post wasn’t too far off the mark. Example:

426-4Q ST820-CS-1 820 Orion Tracking Subscription $861.46

That’s just the subscription, which can’t be anything other than a cellphone dataplan with the serial numbers scraped off and rebadged.

426-4Q ST-MAPNA Orion MapPoint North America $1,316.12

I guess this is just a digital map. And here I thought the upgrades for my tomtom’s map were outrageous.

426-4Q BP-103 Standard 8D Battery Pack $526.45

Got that? Over five bills for a eight D cell battery pack. I’m sure that batteries are not included. But it’s black, and all tactacool and those neodymium magnets aren’t free. Neither are those zip-ties.

426-4Q ST820BP 820 Battery Pack $382.87

This looks like the one in the photos. Let’s do the math:

1 Maglite S6D015 6-D Cell Flashlight, Black $20
1 Hour of machine shop time $40
1 Lamp cord cut from an extension cord at Wal-mart $1.09
1 power plug from Radio Shack $2.09
10 zip-ties, black $2
1 tube of superglue $1.49
2 packs Super Magnets .47″x.11″, 6 Pack $5.18
…
Ripping off Uncle Sugar with a 533% markup… Priceless

426-4Q TRAINING-1 Training 1 day $2,057.93

426-4Q TRAINING Training $2,632.24

It doesn’t say “per-person”

426-4Q ST820TK-SW Guardian with Software $5,259.70

This looks like the all inclusive price for the hardware and software. I guess I guessed low. Do you get the battery pack for that or is it extra? And why is it called a “Guardian”? It makes it sound like it’s a security alarm.

orion guardian st820

Hey, it looks like the FBI just left it there, stuck to the underside of someone’s car, without a warrant. I would assume abandoning something like that deliberately attached to someone else’s property would be forfeiting any ownership rights, although the FBI probably feels a bit differently.

I need to get into the custom law-enforcement only gadgets business. This thing looks like less than $200 in parts, (zip ties, magnets, a cut down mag-light for power, and a handy-talky packaged with a TNC and a GPS), and I’d retail it with special custom law-enforcement only features for say $2999 to the type of people who spend taxpayer dollars.

A slightly different design, less tactical (i.e. less black) would be marketed to hams¹ for say maybe $260. [youtube]

It looks like there’s a split decision in the circuses and so something like this warrantless tracking mischief might make it there to the supremes. Unfortunately, I don’t have any confidence that we won’t get another “bong hits 4 jesus” boner of a decision.² Until then, depending on where you live, it seems to be perfectly OK to publicly track the location at all times of you congressional-critters. So, anyone want to split the cost for one to be attached to my local rep’s private property?³

[h/t] Kevin (I wish you didn’t have such a god-awful comment system so I could leave a comment once in a while)

¹ Amateur Radio

² School kids don’t shed their rights to free speech at the schoolhouse door, instead, they are required to leave their rights at home just in case they run into the Principal out in public.

³ If anyone wants to search-fu up some homebrew plans, the magic word is “APRS” – Automatic Packet Reporting System.