I doubt it is just the patents. Add in the price point and the fact that this is a relatively minor product, so there are no fancy retooled factories and a minimum of custom components are going into this, as opposed to in a flagship product. Plus a dozen other little issues that fall under those or add to them. It's basically using cheap components for a cheap price point. The Air uses the absolute latest and best to get to the minimum weight and size, but at a high price point. Sony did that for years as well, and had a similarly high price point relative to the general market of the time.

It is quite a bit underwhelming compared to even higher end Android tablets like the $650 Galaxy Note 12, but the killer feature is probably intended to be what will likely be a $300 and change street price with the ease of Android (for those who already have an Android phone). It's comparable to their Pavillion 14" laptop: http://www.amazon.com//dp/B00B...

So it's a flip phone.

(Jokes aside, I like this product; I don't mean to be flip).

You are so right. The revolutionary war just legitimized the British Rule over the Colonies. The French just legitimized the rule of the French monarchy, ok so it took a bad turn but eventually they ended up with democracy. Then the Germans tried to take it away, twice, and both times the armed French resistance just legitimized the oppressive regimes didn't they. More recently revolutionaries just legitimized Momar' Qadaffi's regime. And armed resistance has legitimized the oppressive government in Egypt, yes first a radical muslim group took over but the people recognized this mistake and have now legitimized that regime as well. And Syria is seeing mixed results, but it's looking more and more like Assad is soon going to be legitimized out of a job.

An armed resistance against an oppressive regime is very possible. In the US the government would fall in weeks were a national movement to rise against it. I didn't agree with the Bundy's but armed citizens stood down the heavily armed BLM.

It's not a dream, it's not a fantasy, and it's not an RPG. It is real, and it is possible. Do I think it's just around the corner? Nope, we are nowhere near that point. But if we don't get some of the policies and laws of the last couple administrations (Clinton, Bush and Obama) repealed, it is going to get closer to that point.

The FBI does not include Suicide in their Homicide stats. Technically in the pure definition of the word yes you are right. But not as the statistics are tracked. The FBI tracks Homicides, broken down by method of killing.

The CDC tracks deaths by method, and that includes the death by firearm statistics that include suicides.

Actually the FBI does not include suicide in their Homicide stats. The CDC includes them in their Firearm deaths records, but Homicides do not by definition include Suicide (at least not in the official statistics that track homicides.)

But your cite is countering Kleck's original study from 1992/3. The prior cite, not only referred to the original study but continued studies of the topic by Kleck and by others even as recent as 2009. Yes there were flaws in the 1993 study, and the VAPC did point them out. But Kleck and others have continued to study and try to account for the difficult to quantify occurrence of DGU and if anything the numbers are increasing. As shown by some of the other cites on the pro-kleck citation. Can you come up with anything more recent than the VAPC counter argument from 1993. And even if that counter is correct, that's still a 4:1 ratio at the 65,000 the NCVS came up with. 4 crimes discouraged for every firearm homicide.

Most likely the number is substantially higher than the NCVS yet also substantially lower than Kleck's numbers. But we have a low of 65,000 and a high of 2,500,000 per year. Versus just over 14k firearm homicides last year. Even with the lower number we come out ahead. If we bump it up to 1 million DGU's (still less than half what Kleck claimed) it's an even far better picture. Take a look at the recent stories coming out of Detroit. When the chief of police said our budgets have been cut back so far, it is on the people to defend themselves, and they did. There's the mother who fought off four attackers (at least one of whom was armed) with her firearm. And several similar stories. Sorry but your VAPC cite fails to counter the reality that DGU is real and far more common than firearm homicides.

How to decide. Well as the 2nd Amendment gives no qualifiers and simply states shall not be infringed. I would posit, that if a person is considered safe enough to walk the streets. Then they should be able to exercise their right to carry. If they are too mentally unstable or criminally minded to be allowed to carry then they should be locked up, either at a mental health treatment facility for the mentally unstable, or prison for the criminals. Psychological treatment alone is not grounds for stripping a right. It must be those adjudicated in a legal proceeding to be unsafe. No more allowing the VA to strip veterans of their rights simply because they aren't good at managing their money, leading the VA to appoint a fiscal manager over their funds.

At what age? The age when one is no longer legally considered a child in the US, age 18, plain and simple, but I'd allow a waiver down to 17 for anyone who has enlisted in the military. Not that I trust them that much more (though after 20 years in the Army I do), but if they can be allowed to put their lives on the line, then they damn well can carry a firearm at home if they choose.

Should they be allowed in all buildings? No not all buildings, some buildings do have a need for higher security. In my state those are identified as jails, prisons, courts, and secure mental facilities. And of course the secure areas of airports, post offices and anywhere else the Feds have deemed off limits (I do disagree with many "federal facilities" that get the protection, but congress just made an overreaching blanket protection). I would like to see the Post office ban removed and a case is moving through the courts that is likely to do just that, so far the initial ruling is against the Post Office. And in my state those previously mentioned secure facilities are required to provide a location to securely store your weapons as well as a clear demarcation that you are in fact crossing into the secure area. I do note that the courts in the state (Utah) ignore that law, saying they set their own rules and they will just charge anyone who attempts to pass beyond the security checkpoints with contempt of court, yet they provide no storage areas.

What about schools you ask. Well thanks to the Federal Gun Free School Zone Act, for most citizens schools in the k-12 range are off limits, and so are colleges and Universities. But the GFSZ act does allow for the state to permit carry. And so with a Utah Concealed Firearm Permit, we can ignore the Federal law and carry into our schools, and we have been able to for nearly two decades now. Similarly our Public colleges and Universities are open to any with a CFP.

At any given time an unknown number of Teachers, administrators and visiting parents are carrying within our k-12 schools. Good luck trying a Sandyhook when our teachers can do more than just be the first victim. Not all do carry, I'd guess most do not, but enough educators have attended free CFP classes to indicate that few if any schools are ever gun free. So other than the four off limits places and the federal restricted areas, everywhere else should be open. It's not quite that way as there are a couple ways that churches can also prohibit carry (without any requirement to provide secure storage). Otherwise no "NO GUNS" sign posted in this state has any strength of law and that's how it should be. You can ask me to leave if you don't like my firearm (assuming you even know I have it since I usually conceal) and if I refuse then you can trespass me and prosecute for trespassing, but not for having a firearm.

Planes I would allow, just require passengers to declare that they have frangible rounds in the weapon. Let's see a terrorist try and hijack a plane when a sizable fraction of the passengers are armed. Train/bus/etc absolutely. Unlike a plain that has special considerations regarding the potential of a weapon being discharged (decompression). There is nothing special about those. Except that they have the potential of putting you in close proximity with low life scum who wish to do you or others harm.

Now others will come back and claim that if we were to allow such, we would have planes falling from the sky, and blood running in the streets. Except that every time relaxed firearm laws are proposed those doomsday predictions are trotted out, but such predictions never come true. Instead as firearms laws have been relaxed across the country over the last couple decades all violent crimes have decreased.

In fact studies tracking those who have obtained concealed carry permits show that such citizens are 4 times less likely than police officers to commit crimes. And in defensive gun use after defensive gun use, innocent bystanders are not getting hit by stray bullets. Why not? Because we who carry know we have to pick our shots, we will be criminally and civilly liable for every bullet we fire.

The police on the other hand are protected by qualified immunity and the blue wall. So we see the police in times square injure nine bystanders taking down a single armed criminal, who didn't fire a shot. Or we have the Police in LA shooting up a truck, of the wrong color and make with two female occupants, because its within a few blocks of a potential victim/target of their cop-killing ex-cop suspect who was a male. The city just paid out a big settlement to those two ladies who luckily survived, but those officers are back at work.

Now find me an example of a citizen shooting gone bad resulting in innocent bystanders being injured. I won't say they don't happen but they are very rare. And Trayvon was not such an event. Right or wrong, one shot was fired and it did its intended job, no innocent bystanders were injured.

Instead we find events like we saw two days before the Sandyhook shooting. At the the Clackamas (sp?) mall shooting, where an armed citizen drew down on the shooter, who was clearing a jam in his AR-15 but contrary to all the doomsday predictions of shootout at the OK Corral, he did not fire randomly, in fact he choose not to fire because there were innocents beyond the shooter, so the citizen withdrew moving his family to better cover and safety, ready to defend but not firing when he knew he couldn't do so safely. Now it can't be proved this stopped the shooting. But he did make eye contact with the shooter, who then ran off and put a bullet from one of his two handguns into his own brain ending the event. Maybe he quit and ran because he couldn't clear the jam, but he did have two handguns and could have kept on killing. But he didn't, it is suspected that once the shooter realized there was armed opposition he did what most such shooters did, killed himself. We saw this at Sandy Hook and have seen it time and again. They shoot and kill until they get the first hint of opposition and then they either kill themselves or they surrender.

Sorry about the Epistle. Hope I gave you something to consider.

In a fair fight with a Grizzly we humans lose. They have size, strength, speed and weapons (sharp teeth and claws) on us. But we don't have to fight fair, we are humans, we can use tools and weapons to ensure our survival in a negative encounter with an almost apex hunter. If we're fighting fair we've screwed up and deserve to be bear droppings. Most people who wander around the wilds of Alaska don't go hunting bears. But good luck finding one who isn't armed with a decent caliber weapon. Why, because stumble across the path of a bear and you are likely to die, if you don't have a way to fight unfairly.

A firearm is a tool, nothing more. In the vast majority of uses it is used defensively with rarely a shot fired. A smaller number of uses are by criminals. Again do you wish to fight a criminal who has no regard for the law fairly, or unfairly. He's going for unfair. I choose to not play fair either. He is a coward and looks for the easiest targets. Criminals hate trying to work in areas where they know the populace might be armed and fight back.

It's the ammo used. The Brits used 9mm or similar caliber ammunition. Most if not all 3D printed guns fired successfully in the US and Canada used .22LR. Not an ideal caliber for defense, but far better than nothing. The plastics currently in common used simply can't take the pressure of standard hangun calibers. But as a last ditch single shot weapon a .22 is better than nothing.

This video is pure propaganda. Trying to scare off people from printing their own untraceable undetectable guns. Perhaps .22 LR isn't readily available in the UK? But this does not prove these are not viable. Just that the British authorities are so worried about losing control over the serf's abilities to defend themselves that they have taken to making propaganda vids to scare them into remaining helpless.

There are some great points in there

1) access to data without vendor approval/involvement.

2) interop

3) no "remote killswitch" on software

4) no strange privacy leaks

I think these are all fine requirements.

But it's not clear to me why closed software couldn't meet them.

For instance, how does Windows + Office not meet these requirements?

1) the Office XML formats are documented, open, and have reader/writer libraries on non-Microsoft platforms

2) As a result of the consent decree, and much subsequent engineering and doc work, its quite easy to interop with windows and office.

3) So far as I know, there are editions of Windows and Office that require no internet connection at all, and certainly have no provision for remote-kill.

4) Microsoft is actually pretty good about shutting off telemetry, either on a per user basis, or with centralized management tools -- because enterprise customers want this capability too.

I have one of the older e-Ink, Wi-Fi only Kindles. Still has a physical keyboard, which I rarely use. My wife has the ad-supported one with no keyboard, and she doesn't seem to miss it.

The old e-ink kindle is great. I love it. They nailed the user scenario for me -- it is actually _better_ than a physical book. I can use it anywhere I'd use a physical book, I rarely worry about battery life. It's easier to read than a real book when laying on my side in bed.

I am completely uninterested in a color e-reader until it has the battery life and contrast of the e-ink display. And I don't want music, or apps, or multi-tasking, or anything else, because history tells me that adding them will detract from the basic experience of just reading a fucking book.

Here are the improvements I want out of a new kindle.

1) some kind of magical mystery charging. Maybe there is an inductive mat. Maybe its solar. Who knows. I said I _almost_ never worry about charging it. The next step would be I _NEVER_ worry about charging it -- and, I leave the Wi-Fi enabled and continue to not worry about it.

2) bendable/flexible - within limits. If they could make the thing so that it would reliably survive on the outside of soft-sided luggage; if I could put it in a pocket and not worry about it..that would be amazing. What's interesting about this is that the basic e-ink display technology can be flexible...

3) ability to easily -- and I mean easily -- send a book I've finished to my wife's device. Like, if me and her are in the same room, with both of our devices, I ought to be able to send a book on my device to her device. For free. Without any nonsense/bullshit.

Totally dude. If only Alan Turing had done some whistle blowing on how the privacy of German U boat captains was being violated the world would be a much better place.

You go out there and fight the cops. I'll just finish my beer and then I'll join you.