Hoplophobic Response
And for your information, Mr. Doucette - WE DID NOT RESCUE ANY FUCKING WHITE RICH FOLKS FROM NEW ORLEANS. NONE. What we DID do was deliver water and beds to evacuees in Lake Charles and its neighboring towns. What we DID do was provide security at the Civic Center and the Burton Coliseum, without regard to whether or not the people to whom we were providing said security were white, black, purple or polka dotted. What we DID do was receive and return hugs from little children without any regard for their race (and yes, for your damn information, many of them were black). And we got here as quickly as we could, under conditions you probably couldn't even imagine from your plush, air-conditioned office or your NAACP-funded, comfortable home.
# John Ross - Mistakes We Make in the Gun Culture - typical and more effective answers to hoplophobe proposals. A repost. Worth re-reading.
THEY SAY: "We'd be better off if no one had guns."
WE SAY: "You can never succeed at that, criminals will always get guns." (FLAW: the implication here is that if you could succeed at eliminating all guns, it would be a reasonable plan.)
WE SHOULD SAY: "So, you want to institute a system where the weak and elderly are at the mercy of the strong, the lone are at the mercy of the gang. You want to give violent criminals a government guarantee that citizens are disarmed. Sorry, that's unacceptable. Better we should require every citizen to carry a gun."
# Jacqui Cheng & Clint Ecker at ars technica - iPod nano - Cheng and Ecker rave about Apple's new tiny iPod. Sounds great to me, but it seems a bit expensive at $199 for 2 gigs or $249 for 4 gigs. It survived stress testing amazingly well, however. They had to run over it with a car twice and throw it high in the air and drop on the pavement to get it to stop playing. Yowza! [javalobby]
The nano is nearly perfect; it is amazingly small and packs almost all of the features of the iPod photo and a few more. If it weren't for its lack of Firewire, lack of compatibility with older accessories, and no current support for video output, I don't think we'd hesitate to give the nano a perfect ten. Those shortcomings drop the iPod nano's score a couple of points to a solid eight.