Just discovered this wonderful tool which uses Webkit for generating PDFs. Now generating a PDF from a Web app is just that much easier.
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Virtual tour of my apartment (FOR SALE)
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3g data plans in Canada. What they don’t want you to know.
I have an iPhone with a pretty good data plan through Rogers (6 gigs/mo for $30). No complaints. I generally use under 100 megs per month. I recently bought an iPad but didn’t want to spring for the 3G version because they are trying to make us spend an additional $35/mo for a separate data plan for that unit. My original hope was that I could tether from my iPhone to my iPad so that I could make use of my existing data plan. Well…. they thought of that and disabled tethering intentionally on the iPad. They want to squeeze that additional $35/mo out of us.
No worries, though. For now I’m happy to just use the iPad at home on WiFi.
A second scenario came up this past weekend. I was traveling in the states with friends and I need to have internet access at all times due to my online businesses so I looked into the options that Rogers has for me to be able to use my 3G in the US. For $30 you can get 10 megs!! That means that if I used 100 megs in 5 days (which is entirely likely) it would cost me $300 for 5 days. Get real!
My next idea was to see about getting a sim card from AT&T to use my iPhone on AT&T’s network while I was in the states. AT&T seems to be drinking the same cool-aid as Rogers, however because in order to get 3G with tethering support I needed to sign a 2 year contract at $60/mo with them. Not really worth it for 5 days.
So I walked into Best Buy to see if there were any other solutions available to me. There I discovered the flourishing pay-as-you-go market in the states (that is non-existent in Canada). I was able to buy a Virgin Mobile Hotspot for $150 that generates a WiFi network wherever I am that I can use to access the internet on all of my devices (my 3 friends and I were all able to work online while we travelled down the I5). All I had to do was buy a $20 access card for Virgin which gave me 300 megs of 3G data (more than we needed). And if I ran out I could have just paid another $20 for another 300 megs. If I’m ever traveling in the US now I can just throw $20 on my account and have full internet access wherever I go.
This was an awesome solution so I decided to see if we have anything comparable in Canada.
Lucky me! Rogers sells a MiFi device that is very similar to the Virgin one for only $249. The only thing is that they don’t have any form of pay-as-you go packages. Their cheapest package is $35/mo for 500 megs. Remember that I’m already getting 6 gigs on my iPhone for $30/mo. So for more around twice as much money, I can get less than 10% more usage (when I’m currently only using under 10% of my existing 6 gigs per month).
This is just greed. They offer no solution for me.
So I guess we’re out of luck in Canada. Guess again. A quick search on Google brings up an iPhone app called MyWi which will transform your iPhone in to a wifi hotspot. That way you can run your computer, your iPad, your iPhone, and whatever else you want off of your iPhone’s data package.
Of course Apple doesn’t want you to use this (so it’s not in the App store), and Rogers doesn’t want you to use this. They to milk you for everything you have. No thanks.
iPhone Web App Development: JQTouch vs Dashcode
I’ve been playing around with iPhone and iPad web app development for the past week or so (I’m working up to building a native app, as there are benefits to playing both sides of the field here). Given my familiarity with jQuery, I felt inclined to try out the jQTouch framework to start with. After some successes and failures, I then decided to take Apple’s Dashcode development environment for a spin. Here are my initial impressions:
My adventures began by modifying the demo jQTouch application to do what I wanted. I was impressed by the capabilities of this framework out of the box. It looks good on both the iPhone and the iPad – and feels just like a native app. The user can add the page to their “home screen” to load it up just like a native app also. My first stumbling block came when I faced the iPhone’s “no multi-tasking” limitation. If the user spent some time browsing to a particular place in my app, then left the app for any reason (e.g. to take a call or check their email), then they would be sent back to the start screen of the app and lose where they were altogether. I tried a number of workarounds the involved things like local storage, session storage, cookies, sessions and the like, but all were a little klunky. I realize that this problem will be fixed in iPhone 4 with the advent of multi-tasking, but many iPhone’s don’t qualify for this upgrade so it was important to me to at least be able to retain state.
Rather than hack jQTouch to pieces to try to implement this functionality (believe me, I tried), I decided to see what else was on the web app development landscape. That led me to Dashcode.
So I started the project more-or-less from scratch using Dashcode. I was impressed most by the Dashcode interface – how it allows you to drag and drop GUI widgets, or code snippets. It really is a model to follow if you want to develop an IDE. With Dashcode, you are almost completely insulated from the HTML markup. Instead you work with the visual WYSIWYG pallettes or with the javascript API to update the model. Rendering is done using MVC, and the performance of the resulting app is noticeably (on my older iPhone 3G) snappier than with jQTouch..
Unfortunately, I ended up hitting the same wall as with jQTouch: saving and restoring application state is a bit of a bitch. It involves more than just recording “where you are” in the app, because of the way the “back” buttons are set up, you have to recreate the entire environment, history and all. This is more than I really wanted to do right now.
So at this point I had 2 nearly complete, and almost identical apps. One using jQTouch. The other using Dashcode.
But now that I had climbed the learning curve in both of these frameworks, I knew I could do better. So I started, more-or-less, from scratch with a new project using jQTouch that will incorporate all that I had learned. I’ll be releasing the app in a few weeks.
Here is a brief comparison of these two ways of building iPhone/iPad apps:
- Dashcode produces an app that is a little snappier and a little more native (on the iPhone).
- jQTouch seemed to allow me more flexibility since I have direct control over the markup. In addition the development cycle seemed to be a bit faster using jQTouch. (However I’m sure you could improve the dev time on Dashcode if you used jQuery and other productivity libraries on the javascript side of things… I had been trying to use its API directly).
- Dashcode doesn’t seem to scale up to the iPad larger screen as easily as jQTouch. The extra flexibility in jQTouch with markup etc, makes me feel better equipped to customize the interface for the device.
- Dashcode is a fantastic IDE.
DRM/Apple to save the world from crap content
The internet has no shortage of pundits complaining loudly about the iPad’s extensive use of DRM (digital rights management). They say that the device is “crippled” by DRM and that it is a giant step backward for the software freedom movement. I’ll concede that it is a step back for the free software movement (a movement that seems to push for the abolition of any form of intellectual property), but I don’t think that DRM is necessarily a bad thing, especially in this case.
Over the past 20 years we have seen technology improve to the point where almost anything of intellectual value (e.g. software, literature, music, movies, schematics, business processes, etc..) can be copied and shared freely. In addition we are now at the point where it is easier than ever to produce creative works. If you’re a writer you can start a blog with the click of a button, or publish e-books on the ‘net for download. If you’re a movie maker, you can shoot, edit and publish movies all for virtually free using common software and video distribution services like YouTube. I.e. the barriers to entry into the world of creative productions became very low. These two trends complement each other to some extent since the increased demand created by the free distribution of content is met by an increased supply of content due to the lowered production costs.
So analyzing the trend with our broad economic brush we might conclude that everything is fine and that we have just reached a new equilibrium with an unprecedentedly high demand for creative content which is nicely met by the record levels of supply. Unfortunately our purely economic metric is incomplete. The axes on our familiar economic model are marked “Price” and “Quantity” only, and a shift both the demand and supply curves to the right (i.e. increased quantities at lower prices) should indicate greater wealth for all. But what of quality? How does the quality of the content fare in this new utopian equilibrium where content is both “free” to consume and “cheap” to produce? Now that we are a little over a decade into this experiment (that arguably began with the advent of broad-band internet) I believe we are in a good position to see a trend along the quality line – and it does not look good.
Over the past 10 years we have turned to the internet for more and more of our entertainment. At the beginning the quality of content paled in comparison to competitive content through conventional sources. You could stream or download audio to your computer but the quality still wasn’t as good as CD and it was time-consuming and inconvenient to go through the hassle of trying to find music that was decent quality – and then ultimately burn it onto CD in a 2X CD recorder (it would take 40 minutes to burn a CD). You could get some news off the ‘net from various news sites but it wasn’t in an easy to read format, nor was it comprehensive. Video seemed a life-time behind the conventional media formats (e.g. DVD, satellite TV or cable … or even VHS for that matter). You could download a smattering of books, but there wasn’t an easy means of copying it to a portable device for reading – so it was a far inferior experience to the real thing. What the internet provided wonderfully at this time of birth and exploration was access to a wealth of amateur content. People were able to, for the first time, try their hand at publishing and share their thoughts and art with the world. And the world could take it or leave it. This period of the internet was an exciting time and didn’t present a threat yet to quality. If you really wanted to watch a good movie, you still needed to look outside the internet for it. Similarly you had to seek the professionals for quality news and editorials.
This baby that we called the internet, grew like a weed, however, and in a mere 10 years has improved to the point where everyone can become a publisher, and aggregators like Google have solved the problem of comprehensiveness that limited the early internet. Everybody can contribute a tiny piece of the puzzle and old faithful Google will assemble the pieces into a shallow approximation of the complete picture. This approximation amounts to a cartoon-y picture of the real picture where only the primary colors are every present (no shades, skin-tones, or mixtures that we expect in the real world). The fact that technology is now able to paint these 4 color portraits of our world and culture is a remarkable achievement. We can look at these 2-dimensional, computer aggregated cartoons and quite easily imagine their real world equivalents (we see that the people have only 3 fingers, but that’s OK, we’ll settle for that – it’s close enough). The insidious problem with the ease with which these cartoon representations of reality are produced is that now there is little to no demand for the art of producing photo-realistic paintings (or any style other than 4 colour cartoons), because the “free” cartoon puzzles that are assembled by the internet aggregators are “good enough” to satisfy 99% of the demand. And without demand, the price to produce a real painting that accurately represents the world it is meaning to portray goes through the roof – and ultimately the craft disappears into history despite the fact that it is a far superior product to the free cartoons that it was replaced with.
This analogy of the cartoon puzzle describes the state of creative works with ever increasing accuracy as time goes on. We have been corralled into consuming mediocre content on a regular basis because it is so easily accessible.
So how does all this relate to DRM? A big reason why the cartoon puzzles have become much cheaper to produce than photo-realistic paintings is because the transaction cost of obtaining the painting is higher by “legal” means (i.e. purchasing the painting legitimately) than it is by “illegal” means (i.e. copying from a friend or downloading from torrent). So even if there remains a market for quality paintings after it is flooded with cartoon puzzles, there is a logistical barrier to the distribution of it. Purchasing the painting legitimately currently involves having to go into a store and purchase some physical media on which the painting resides (e.g. a DVD, news paper, magazine, book, etc…). This is far more difficult that simply turning on torrent and downloading it – for free!. If we make a digital version of the painting available for sale, then it will soon be copied to torrent for distribution. And having to fill in credit card information on a web site and all kinds of personal information just to buy a $5 painting is still far more of a hassle than simply downloading the product on torrent – for free!. Only when the transaction cost of obtaining the painting legitimately is *lower* than that of downloading it from torrent, will there be reason for a customer to buy the painting.
Enter the iPad, a device that is now infamous in “free software” movements as a “crippled, trojan horse of DRM”. It provides two powerful remedies for our assailed painters:
1. The extensive use of DRM makes it difficult to illegally distribute the content on torrent once downloaded (this will help to increase the transaction costs of obtaining the paintings illegally).
2. The seamless integration with iTunes’ payment system makes it completely painless to purchase the paintings legitimately. One click and it’s yours in a format that is ever so elegant and pleasurable to consume. This significantly decreases the transaction cost of obtaining paintings legally.
After only the first couple of months of the iPad being on the market, the signs that this strategy is working are quite evident. Already “painters” like Time magazine, marvel comics, the new york times and more have cast their lots and started delivering high quality paintings, the likes of which have not been seen yet in the digital world. The promise of a digital market for paintings is once again compelling artists to pick up their brushes, dip them in the ink of their personal creativity, and cover the canvas with innovative and truly unique paintings. As patrons return to the market place, and the rank of artists continue to swell in this new platform we may be in for a new renaissance and a return to a world where quality and originality is king. If not, then we may doom ourselves to a prolonged dark age of cartoon puzzle art. I’m optimistic that we’ll choose the former, despite ourselves.
iPad: Initial impressions
Just picked up an iPad today and am very impressed – not only by its potential for changing the world, but for its immediate utility. Here are just a few things that I notice after playing with it for 4 or 5 hours:
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When reading, scrolling down a page is quite hard on the eyes (you get kind of car sick doing that too much). I notice this particularly because of the extensive use of side “sweeping” in iPad applications. E.g. the Comic book apps allow you to read a comic one page at a time, and then just flip the page to see the next cells. This is very easy on the eyes. The Financial Times app also makes use of side scrolling to read its news paper – less scrolling down – more sweeping across. This makes for a much more pleasent reading experience. Look to see much more of this style in the future as more devices like the iPad hit the market.
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It looks like there’s nothing for sale yet in iBooks (probably a delay because we’re in Canada). However its extensive selection of free titles (generally classics that have passed their copyright expiration dates) makes for lots of choice still. I started to read “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government” by Jefferson Davis (the president of the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War) this afternoon to complement the a book I’m currently reading about Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet. The iBooks experience is almost as good as reading a real book. It makes it very easy to flip pages, change font size, and skip to any part of the book. I appreciate it’s little status message ever present at the bottom right corner indicating how many pages are left in the current chapter.
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The Kindle App is also quite good, and currently provides a much larger selection of books to purchase. (iBooks appeared to have zero books available for sale). The only problem is that they make it damn hard to purchase any books. The Kindle app has a button to “Shop for books from the store”. But this just takes you to the amazon web site which is not optimized in any way for mobile devices or the iPad. After logging in, entering credit card info, and finally finishing the purchase, it downloaded a book on iPad software development into Kindle. They really need to build the purchase mechanism into the iPad to make it competitive with iBooks (which allows you to simply click on a book and purchase it on the spot – and be reading it in seconds).
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Comics! The iPad is a savior for the fledgling comic industry. Reading comics on this thing feels very natural. I downloaded both the Marvel Comics app and the Transformers Comics app, which allow you to read comics in a rich, full-screen, environment. They offer some free comics and have others for sale. I purchased one issue of Transformers for $1.99 and it was as simple as one click and I’m reading it.
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News papers are now multi-media. I downloaded the free Financial Times app which is a UK news paper. Reading it was much like reading a news paper, giving you the same ability to read the articles in columns and scan to the right to see other stories. They have embedded videos associated with some articles, and tapping on the video displays the high quality video right inside the window (as expected, but still really cool). I think we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg in our exploration of how different media can be melded together to enhance the user experience.
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HTML5 Support – After reading about iPad’s rich support for HTML 5 it occurs to me that Apple is doing the world a favour by taking a hard stand against browser extensions like Flash and Java (sad to say). The market share of the iPhone OS (estimated at over 318 million units between iphone, ipod, and ipad) is so big that Apple is able to single-handedly force us to endure a little pain for the greater good in the long run. HTML has been moving at a snails pace since it’s introduction and this has been a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, whereby developers don’t use any cutting edge features because of lack of browser support, and the standard hasn’t progressed very fast because there hasn’t been the demand for cutting-edge features from the development side. Apple is changing that with the powerful HTML 5 support in Safari for iPhone and iPad. Finally HTML/CSS/Javascript is at the point where you can create a full desktop application using open web standards. In addition this model for networked applications is much cleaner and safer than previous strategies (such as Java and Flash applets) because they truly run inside a sandbox where they cannot harm your computer.
The Apple war against browser extensions (Flash and Java applets) reminds me in some ways of the American civil war and the related end to slavery. Just as slavery was entrenched into the culture of the south to the point where they could not willingly let the practice go without experiencing major economic hardships, we, as computer users, have become dependent on proprietary browser plugins like flash to make up for features that ought to have been built into the browser to begin with. Just as it took a bloody war (or some southerners might say a Northern dictator) to force the issue on slavery, it takes a dictator from the South to force us into the future of computing for our own good, when we lacked the will to make the leap on our own.
I’m very excited to start developing HTML 5 applications, now that there is a reliable and stable platform to target: the iPad!
You are not a Gadget
I just finished reading “You are not a Gadget – A manifesto” by Jaron Lanier, and I do recommend it for anyone who is interested in the future of our society and how it will include technology. The real meat of this book lies in its middle section where Lanier discusses the challenges that the new Web 2.0 culture (aka the “hive mind”) is imposing on us. Lanier believes that our shift toward aggregation of creative content is destroying the personal creative aspect of our culture which is central to our personhood. In certain sections of this book it almost seems like Lanier is just a Luddite who is afraid of technological change, but the first and last sections of the book are there to remind us that he is far from it – as he is one of the pioneers of virtual reality and still working on the bleeding edge of computational research and development. He is not a luddite – just a creative person who is concerned by the direction that our world is taking – one that marginalizes individual creativity in favor of a hive-mind utopia.
I tend to agree with many of Lanier’s concerns. I am greatly concerned with the culture of “free”, where people believe that they should be able to get everything (digital at least) for free. This is a road to little or no creative development and, ultimately, to the socialization of all creative endeavors (which I believe is a bad thing …. let me know if you need me to connect the dots).
Anyways… I strongly recommend this book. It’s a good read – and a relatively easy one.
Apple no longer updating its Downoads section
This article confirms my fears after noting that Apple hadn’t updated its downloads in over a month. The Apple Downloads section was my bread and butter for advertising new releases of my Mac software. Since apple discontinued its download section, my sales have taken a significant hit.
This section offered a compelling reason to develop Mac software. It provided an instant market place for my software and despite the mac market being smaller than the windows market, this connection point more than made up for this shortcoming. With its demise goes much of this advantage to the point where developing for Windows becomes much more attractive.
Mac, you’ve got a friend in Java. Now be nice.
I have recently rediscovered the joy of programming in Java for desktop Applications. Mac OS X provides a perfect deployment system for Java applications since Java 1.6 comes standard, so you don’t have to worry about directing your users to download Java for your applications to work. What’s more, since your application is written in Java it can easily be adapted (and perhaps unchanged) to run on Windows and Linux. So what is so great about Java:
- It is multi-threaded from the ground up.
Although threads can be used in many other programming languages, Java presents by far the cleanest and complete implementation I have ever come across. The language is built for threads at its very core with locking and monitor capability on any object.
- Namespaces and packaging
Between Java’s rich namespace support and it’s native packaging JAR format Java allows you to build applications component by component with minimal hassle when it comes to putting the components together. Unlike interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, and PHP, you are able to build your sky-scraper of an application without worrying about the size of it affective the speed of it. When you’ve completed a library, you can package it up an wrap it in a bow and feel confident that this component will serve you well for many projects to come.
- Garbage Collection
Most of the time, honestly, I don’t want to have to worry about mundane details like deleting objects that are no longer being used. Garbage collection does add a bit of overhead to an application, but it is well worth it 99% of the time.
- Swing
Say what you will about Swing, but it still stands up as one of the most powerful and portable GUI toolkits available on any platform. With only a few lines of code you can have yourself a full-fledged application with the look and feel of the native operating system, and have it run on Mac, Windows, and Linux without the need for any form of recompiling. It gives you the building blocks that you need to have a rich application, and allows you to extend quite far also.
There have been some troubling trends over the past few years as they pertain to Java. New dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have gained a lot of attention at the expense of Java. Windows has stopped shipping with Java and the IPhone and IPad don’t support Java and likely never will. My website stats indicate that only about 85% of Windows user have Java installed – this is definitely less than 10 years ago when virtually all Windows machines were equipped with Java. If you do a Google search for “Java OS X” or “Java for Mac Desktop Apps” you’ll find a plethora of articles circa 2002. There is scarcely anyone talking about using Java on the Desktop in the past 3 years. Has everything worth writing been written, or is this just the writing on the wall.
I hope this does not foreshadow and end to the glory days of Java as a development platform on OS X. It would be tragic if, one day, Apple decided to leave Java out of the default install. That would force users to install Java before running any software dependent upon Java – which would make Java a much less attractive platform to develop on.
Radical Views on Individual Rights and Freedoms
I had a recent discussion with a friend who holds some radical views on certain topics. I address 3 specific claims that he made during our discussion.
Claim 1: Roads are completely funded by gas taxes
This claim is really neither here nor there. I believe claims such as this one are made as part of the larger claim that we shouldn’t have to pay income tax.
Now often this claim is not made in reference to any particular country, state, or province, so it it hard to address (because different countries will have different policies on things like this).
Based on the following links it appears that in the United States most of the Fuel tax is applied to the development of roads, but it is not clear whether or not this covers *all* road infrastructure. I have also included 2 links to the BC government website which show that the PST does contribute to the fund to pay for roads in addition to the motor fuel tax.
Since roads are built out of the general budget, it is very hard to track down exactly which monies have been applied to building roads. I consider the point moot as it doesn’t really matter whether the money for our roads come from income tax or gas taxes or both. They come from taxes one way or the other. Of course conservatives who are philosophically opposed to income tax might (certainly would) take a different position on the importance of this point.
http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Provincial_Sales_Tax/about.htm
“… an important source of funding which is used to support British Columbia’s roads, schools, hospitals and other community services.”
http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Motor_Fuel_Tax/mft.htm
“British Columbia’s Motor Fuel Tax is made up of two components: provincial and dedicated taxes. The provincial portion goes to general revenue and helps pay for a wide range of government programs, such as health care and education. The dedicated portion goes to the BC Transportation and Financing Authority, Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority and the BC Transportation Authority
to help finance transportation projects in various parts of the province.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax
“In the United States, the fuel tax receipts are often dedicated or hypothecated to transportation projects so that the fuel tax is considered by many a user fee. In other countries, the fuel tax is a source of general revenue.”
http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2009/05/do-roads-pay-for-themselves.html
“State motor fuel tax is collected from all over the state and goes into a single pool of revenue—about one quarter of which goes to fund education, and about three-quarters of which goes to the state’s highway fund, where it is spent on transportation uses and some non-transportation functions of government.
Then the state receives federal funds as the state’s share of the federal fuel tax; about 70 cents of every gas tax dollar Texans send to Washington comes back for road use.”
Claim 2: Income Tax Unconstitutional
I’ve heard this one a few different times from a few different people so I thought it might actually have legs. If you do a search on Google you’ll surely run across this short essay by a man who is convinced of the unconstitutionality of income tax:
http://www.prolognet.qc.ca/clyde/tax.htm
This author argues that income tax is unconstitutional and thus is illegal in Canada. He cites sections of the BNA (British North America Act) which he claims prohibits the fedreal government from imposing direct taxation on its individuals. He also cites the case of a deceased Manitoba resident named Gerry Hart, who allegedly avoided paying income tax for 50 years and won all of his 22 court cases against revenue Canada when they attempted to retrieve the money.
When I decided to look into the case of Gerry Hart, I found this page:
http://www.ownlife.com/tax/cases.htm
This page lists a number of court cases in Canadian history where individuals have attempted to fight income tax. In all cases, the courts upheld that the federal government CAN indeed charge income tax. In addition this page addressed the claims about Gerry Hart:
“the legend appeared in the Michael Journal, a somewhat religious newspaper produced in Quebec and distributed, for free, throughout Canada.
No case has been published which involved the making, by Gerry Hart or his company (Hart Electronics Limited), of a successful argument that the federal Income Tax Act is unconstitutional.”
So this claim appears to be a myth.
Claim 3: You don’t need a driver’s license or insurance to drive a car.
When the claim was made, the claimant did not know whether this was limited to a particular jurisdiction or if it was for any jurisdiction in the British Commonwealth. A little bit of Google searching has answered the question:
1. This is a debatable issue in the United States.
2. In Canada there is no debate.
In Canada it is clear that there no such “right to travel”. Driving is a privilege, NOT a right (http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/): “Section 31. Driving a privilege:”
The United States situation is far more convoluted and it owes to its tumultuous history.
If you do a search on Google for “Right to travel” you’ll discover a slough of websites that are run by “patiots” and “freedom fighters”. You’ll almost always find that these sites are linked to, or contain information about, conspiracy theories such as the NWO or FEMA death camps. All of these sites are showing the same information and citing the same sources to argue that Driving is a right that is protected under the constitution of the United states (under the section of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness) as a right and not a privilege. They all cite a number of court cases to support their point, but the main court case that gives this position legs is the supreme court case Thompson vs. Smith, 154 SE 579 where they quote:
“The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, either by horse drawn carriage or by automobile, is not a mere privilege which a city can prohibit or permit at will, but a common Right which he has under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
If you dig you can even find a pre-filled afidavit on which you can fill in your name and state to present to the court to declare that you don’t need to have a driver’s license in order to drive. (http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf)
Now this has not been tested in court recently (as far as I can tell in the past 60 years) so I would suspect that these arguments would hold any water in a court these days. There was a case in 1986 where someone tried to argue similarly and lost (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html – 03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port), but the ameteur commentators insist that she simply made mistakes in her arguments.
I could not find any reputable sources that even commented on the issue. This yahoo answers thread (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH) contained a decent response:
“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.
You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road – like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.
As you present in Boggs – “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”
Any reasonable person must realize that licenses are important for public safety. This is one major reason for the disagreements between the left and the right in the states. Many from the south are fixated on individual rights to the exclusion of consideration to how those rights affect others. That is where these types of bogus arguments come from. I mean, really!
Refernces:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/39244
http://www.landrights.com/The%20Charles%20Sprinkler%20File.htm
http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf
This one is particularly entertaining:
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html
(03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port)
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH
“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.
You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road – like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.
As you present in Boggs – “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”
http://www.uslawbooks.com/travel/travelcites.htm
http://www.bcrevolution.ca/bc_court_of_appeal.htm
http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/