No ebooks, no flying cars: the future is here, where are my ebooks?

Interesting article here from IDG Connect on why eBooks still face an uphill battle.  The short answer (in my opinion): lack of random access, simultaneous access.  Also, institutional inertia. 

Houston is Number One...in burglaries (from Jan 3rd)

Yahoo posted a story from CNBC on January 3rd that ranks major metro areas by burglaries.  Houston was tops, followed by all of the usual suspects.  It seems that this represents a trend in recent years.  I just thought it would make a good PSA, especially since this is the first I've heard of it.

Who's moving where from Business Insider

Check out the map of who's moving where from Atlas - of course that probably only really counts those folks who use moving vans to move.

The original is here.

Interesting trends.  Plus, I think Canada is getting bigger.

'Well-regulated' and intent: Words have meanings

We hear a lot of back-and-forth about whether the 2nd Amendment is talking about individual or states' rights.

Some things come to mind on this. First, wouldn't it be unusual among the Bill of Rights amendments to have one that discusses a collective right? I think most of them dealt with individual rights, didn't they?

Next: well-regulated. The term has nothing to do with a militia being a state organization - it's about whether the militia is capable of performing effectively. The use of the term isn't novel to the Bill of Rights, as this post at constitution.org points out

Here.

Maybe we should seek to figure out all of the interpretations relevant to the First Amendment next. After all, I don't think the founders could have conceived of the slop that we see on the Intarwebs these days billing itself as 'news.'

As I've said before, if politicians would just interpret the Second Amendment the way they want to interpret the First, we'd all be REQUIRED to own guns, most likely.

Assault weapons at the founding

I was thinking about the whole 'intent of the founders' argument today. Back when the Constitution was ratified the populace was armed with hunting rifles and/or fowling pieces. Some folks probably had pistols of various sizes. Military units were mostly armed with smoothbore muskets that could be reloaded 2 to 3 times as fast. Muskets were only effective at short range, in volley fire against troops lined up in a similar 3-rank fashion.

Rifles, the weapons of the common folks, were far more reliable and accurate than the Brown Bess muskets of the regular army at the time. They also required training to be effective - military training wasn't needed to learn to fire or load a musket since aiming didn't really matter, military training was needed to condition troops to be dumb enough to march close enough to other troops and take marching commands in the fog of battle. And to train them to use their bayonets, which were in their infancy.

What I'm getting at here is that it's certainly worth considering that the founders saw armed civilians having BETTER weapon technology than the state-of-the-art standing armies of the day. A few with rifles and their accuracy can hold off or incapacitate dozens of regular troops; we see numerous examples throughout the Revolution. In fact, when the Continentals tried to go toe-to-toe with British regulars it didn't usually work out so well.

As we have a debate about how to stop gun violence caused by loonies, we should avoid the specious arguments about 'founders' intentions'. They clearly intended citizens to have the right to protect themselves, and superior technology was part of that intent.