We Want Beer

Some laws that are being worked on include:

• Getting a comprehensive bill passed that will allow all breweries in the state to sell a portion of their beers direct to the public.
• Getting a comprehensive bill passed that will allow all brew pubs in the state to distribute their beers to wholesalers, liquor stores, etc.
• Getting a bill passed that will change the way out of state (and out of country) breweries are licensed.  Updating these permits will make it easier for smaller breweries (if they so chose) to enter into our state.
• Getting a bill passed that eliminates the 24 oz ‘Happy Hour’ law at beer festivals.  This will make it easier to have more successful beer festivals in the state which will help drive beer tourism and helps the economy.
• Getting a bill passed that will allow a consumer to import a greater quantity of beer for personal consumption.  This is not allowing someone to bring in kegs and kegs of beer, but instead allowing a consumer to visit great breweries out of state and bring in more than a case back without facing penalties.
• Getting a bill passed that will allow bars that carry liquor licenses to sell growlers of beer.  Currently growler sales are limited to places that have a beer and wine license only.

Open the Taps Member Survey Shows Members United

If you happen to live in Texas please take time to check out their voting guide.  Even if you aren’t the type of person to email/FB/twitter your elected official much less any potential candidate it would still be worth your time to be educated about which candidates support freedom for beer in Texas.

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I think I speak for both the Sloth (Atari) and myself (Commodore 64), you had a huge influence (MOS 6502) on both of our childhoods and ultimately our adult careers.

MOS 6502 microprocessor in a dual in-line package, an extremely popular 8-bit design (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Image via Wikipedia

As the article states:

At press time, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad, new iPad.

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I also noticed they had both the base version of Khet along with the expansion.  After checking prices they seemed on par with most and even a little less than other places so I decided to finally get it.

Khet (Photo credit: nachof)

I also wanted to give some props to the customer service at Vat19.

I have been noticing for the better part of a month that when I get gas and use my debit care I was not able to use it as “credit” because the zip code verification always failed.  I just assumed that it was because the card is incredibly old (expires in about 5 months).

After submitting my order at Vat19 I received and email withing about 5 minutes stating there was a problem with my credit card and they asked for assistance in resolving it.  I went out and checked my account at Wells Fargo and realized that for some odd reason they reverted the address associated with the card to my 4+ year old Nebraska address.  I responded to the email I received from Vat19 explaining the problem, gave them the correct (although still wrong) address and within minutes the owner(!) had responded that the update fixed the issue and my order would be processed and shipped same day.

Shipping the same day is their policy as long as the order is completed prior to 1400 central time.  I was not necessarily expecting it to still go out after the issues even though they were resolved prior to 1400.  Add to that, by luck of where I live, the product is showed up on Friday, roughly 48 hours after I ordered it, through UPS Ground.

While the shipping time is a bonus what really impressed me was the customer service I received.  All too often it’s easy to bitch about bad service.  I know I do it all of the time.  But at the same time I think we should give props when a company does well too.  That rarely happens.  So good job Vat19.  While your products are unusually “kitch” I don’t have any problem recommending your site for anyone in the market for that type of thing.

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But then today I was thinking about how software compares to the “real world,” and it seems that the same layering/dependency problem exists there too—what if every structure, machine, and tool on the Earth was destroyed and we had to rebuild everything from scratch? Even if the associated knowledge was somehow preserved, I wonder how long it would take us to get back to having supertall skyscrapers, fly-by-wire jumbo jets, and smart phones.

Perhaps the situation with software isn’t so bad after all, or at least the real world is no better off (depending on how you look at it).

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As it stands now…most user-visible development…[has] been put on hold…. We have no working theme…our current window manager Azalea is now unsupported.

Let’s face it: without a usable desktop environment available, nobody cares if you have managed to take a foreign programming paradigm and bolt it onto Objective-C or make Objective-C code (sort of) run on the Javascript runtime. This is how projects fail, or at least manage to forever languish in obscurity.

I hate to say it, but the fate of the Étoilé project now seems doomed to follow that of the GNUstep project itself, which, while technically impressive, has repeatedly failed to produce a practical system for users, despite nearly 20 years of ongoing software development (sound familiar?). As it stands today, the GNUstep UI is basically an imperfect clone of the outdated 25 year old NeXT UI, even though it’s still not nearly as usable or solid as the NeXT was in 1992 (I know, support for themes is in the works, but it doesn’t appear to be of practical use today).

Don’t mistake my point here—I would love to be proven wrong. I have been hoping to see GNUstep succeed for the past 15 years (and for a while there at the end of the 90′s, when OPENSTEP was poised to enter the mainstream, I actually thought it had a very good chance). But I have grown very weary of waiting for a utopia that has never materialized.

What do I think Étoilé/GNUstep need to do to succeed? It’s simple. Focus on providing a comprehensive, usable, environment for the end user. Make that your number one priority. You should not worry about providing a bunch of pie-in-the-sky, next level shit until you have first achieved this goal. Don’t concern yourself with surpassing the competition in terms of usability until you have first caught up with them.

Ideally, this should come in the form of a custom OS distribution on a Live CD, or a set of packages that are dead simple to install on popular operating systems. There should be two simple installation options for users and developers.

Once you actually have this platform to offer, you will have three things that will provide the critical mass that is required to achieve your long-term goals:

1. end users who care about your platform and are excited about it, which will attract
2. developers who care about your platform and are excited about it, which will produce
3. third-party applications that run on your platform, which in turn will make (and keep) the platform viable.

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After learning that Linux and U-Boot had been ported to the Trim-Slice and reading about CompuLab’s commitment to open source, I was very excited about this system as an ARM-based target for low-level boot loader and operating system development projects.

However, my excitement quickly changed to dismay this week, when I received my Trim-Slice and set out to gather the tools needed for low-level software development. What I found is that while CompuLab may be committed to open source, NVIDIA clearly is not.

It turns out that, unlike most commercially-available processors, manuals for the Tegra 2 are not publicly available on the Internet or elsewhere. NVIDIA only makes this documentation available to their commercial “partners/customers.” This pretty much dashes all hopes of using the Trim-Slice for low-level development, unless all you want to do is tweak the existing U-Boot or Linux kernel.

As I see it, Linux for the Tegra 2 (L4T) exists mainly to create the illusion of openness around what is essentially a closed system. I have no problem with closed systems, when marketed as such. What I find misleading and frustrating is that this processor is integrated into products that are marketed as open systems.

These days, with whole systems integrated on a single chip, closed systems are more closed than ever before. Before SoCs, it was often possible to reverse engineer much of the system architecture by examining the design of the logic board, which often included a large number of components with readily-available specifications.

As it stands, it appears unlikely that operating systems other than Linux could be ported to the Tegra 2 without the direct involvement of NVIDIA, since the only source of information on the processor is the Linux kernel source code. Linux kernel source code is not a substitute for proper hardware documentation. Source code is neither a complete nor reliable source of hardware information, not to mention the copyright problems that would arise due the code being under GPL.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for a truly open system, look to something other than the Tegra 2.

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It’s an interesting question.  If you are truly a believer in Christ, and in Christianity on the whole, then your answer must be a resounding YES!  And not just for Anne Frank, you must also include the 6 million slaughtered by the Nazi’s in WWII,  Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Sammy Davis Jr., Howie Mandel, George Burns, The Beastie Boys, the list goes on and on.  Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah and do not “accept Him as their Lord and Savior”.  Both of those points are the central to all of Christianity.  You could go as far, and it wouldn’t be a stretch, to say that without accepting those two points you can’t be a Christian and you can’t be saved.  Period.

Yet as Hermant points out, and you can verify for yourself in the comments to Ms. Evans’ post, most “Christians” completely sidestep the question.  Rather than standing up for what they have been taught, for what they claim they believe in, what they tell me personally when they find out I am an atheist, that yes, because Jews don’t accept JC as their Savior they will all be dining in the fire, they waffle and resort to vague statements about “I can’t say, God decides.”

How disingenuous is that?  I, as an atheist, am going to hell because I don’t believe in and worship Christ but if you are a Jew with the exact same belief you get some vague, politically correct, “don’t call me an anti-Semite”, BS response.  The fact of the matter is, if you are a Christian, a true Christian, if you believe in the Bible, it’s teachings, then you are, you must be, at least a little anti-Semitic.  At least if you class “knowing” all Jews are going to hell as anti-Semitic.

In the end, no matter how you look at it, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, etc., are ALL equally damned in the eyes of Christians.  They do not, by definition, “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior” and do not believe he is, was, or ever will be, the Messiah.

So for everyone who worries about my “eternal soul” and wants me to “let Christ into my heart” I have only one response for you, assuming you are right, then just like the Jews, God decides who gets into heaven and apparently that is NOT based on the basic cornerstone of your religion.

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Back in the day (yeah, I am getting old) the place was an “imaginarium” in every sense of the word.  The stores were a wall to wall tinkerer’s wet dream.  You would walk in for a few resistors, a diode, and a relay, a simple 5 minute ordeal, only to walk out an hour later having spent $40 on stuff you never knew existed (or that you NEEDED).  Additionally, the people who worked there were just like you.  They were interested in and excited by building “stuff”.  Often times they would be able to suggest ideas for your project, alternate parts in the rare event they didn’t carry something, and they had the ability to get something if the alternate wasn’t acceptable.  They could answer technical questions.  They could educate and inspire.

Fast forward to today.  Any components they have are relegated to the back corner and usually only comprise a few small bins.  The people who work there are ignorant as to the use of any of them. To them they are relics taking up space in the store.  All they want to know is if they can sell you a mobile phone contract.

In short, today’s “The Shack” sucks.

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