I was there last year and had a great time. Bring something to shoot, something free-standing to shoot at, or just show up. There will be plenty of firearms to try and lots of good folks to show you how.

This was the defiant refusal by the greeks at Thermopylae when told to lay down their arms by Persian invaders. While the defenders were eventually annihilated by overwhelming numbers, the three day battle enabled the evacuation of Athens and saved many lives.

We feed, clothe, house and educate our children so they can eventually fend for themselves. “Cutting the cord” happens in stages. Potty training is an event that signals progress along this path. Getting a drivers license is another as is moving out.

It manifests itself in many ways but the root cause is western culture’s profit-focused determination that forms the core of most of our lives. That desire to be better, to make more profit, to beat the other guy, is why products based on closed source efforts will always beat those based on open source.

Here’s why.

• The Android tablet I bought did not have a front-facing camera, and the user-facing one was only 2 Mpixels. You could certainly criticize my choice of Android tablets in this regard. Indeed, the Samsung pads (also Android-based) are much nicer than the one I selected. Their price is, of course, understandably higher. But when I compared Samsung to Apple, Apple won for several reasons.
• The iPad seemed to be faster. This is a very subjective judgement but when scrolling and resizing, operations on the iPad just seemed snappier. Again, this could largely be attributed to my choice of a low-end Android tablet. But when trying out the Samsung pads, they too seemed not quite as snappy.
• Updates to the Apple OS and applications are frequent. For the Android pad from Best Buy (Insignia Flex, $249), there had been none for the three weeks I was using it. While “updates” may suggest the Apple products were buggy, it also says they are being actively maintained and improved, in Apple’s case, the latter – improvements – were very much the case. The total absence of updates for the Android pad did not bode well for the future.
• Gestures within “apps” (application programs) in the Apple were far more consistent in their support. For example, several of the Android programs would not resize (via the “pinch” gesture) what I felt should be resizable. And while my judgement on what should be resizable might be incorrect. Overall, I felt that my attempts to do something “intuitive obvious” worked more often with the Apple applications than with the Android.
• Most of the Android “apps” are for small screen, phone-oriented devices with the display held vertically and, worse, the Google store did not bundle these in a separate category as does Apple’s store. Also, the Apple “apps” were more inclined to be able to switch between portrait and landscape orientations. (This is not universal, however. There are several Apple “apps” which fail in this regard which I, nonetheless, continue to use because they are otherwise excellent.)
• On the rare occasion I’ve gone into the Apple store to ask a technical question, I’ve always been able to get a workable answer. The same was not true at Best Buy. Even though the latter had some obvious experts, my issues were often with a specific application and neither myself nor the expert were able to guess the solution. At Apple, however, their intuition often proved to be correct about how to do something, and this “betterment” really has to do with Apple’s requirements for consistency of operation. Android strikes me, therefore, as more like the wild west where laws are still being worked out on the frontier.

Having said all that, however, there are some frustrations that remain with Apple and the iPad. In these areas, Android was superior.

Data Points:

• 2402 people died at Pearl Harbor on December 7th.
• 2966 died on September 11th.

Fact: More people died in the terrorist attack on 9/11 than in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Speculation is a double-charge when reloading caused it. (Shooter had no serious injuries … except to his wallet.)

Introduction

A one-time pad is one of the best ways of making truly secret messages. Created and used correctly, it can be mathematically proven that it cannot be broken. While anyone looking at the ciphertext might easily guess it is a secret message, figuring out exactly what the cleartext says is truly impossible.

Looking like it is about to tumble, this rock formation is near a newly opened trail in north Scottsdale.

The electoral college meets and casts votes in two weeks, on December 17th.