Ah, the sentry: the gift that keeps on giving. In the hands of a good engineer, this little number is a mechanized fountainhead of suppressing fire and mayhem. Managed by an incompetent, it's a just a big paperweight.

Motley Fool is advising investors away from putting their money into record companies. Why?

Because, in the words of David Boies, "an industry at war with its consumers is an industry in trouble." In the case of Jeffrey Howell, they're prosecuting someone not solely for file-sharing, but also for copies of legally purchased CD's on his computer.

"The Enrichment Center once again reminds you that android hell is a real place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance."

–GLaDOS

No, the site wasn't hacked. Stop asking. I've been using an old version of WordPress (1.6 IIRC) to manage content, and it looks as if it finally gave up the ghost.

To be honest, I hadn't even moved up to 2.0 a year back. I'd stuck with the older version because the bulk of formatting and scripts for this site are handmade, and I was worried that upgrading would make a mess of things.

The number of gun related deaths in this country hovers around 29,000. In 2004, 11,624 of those were homicides. An AMA abstract estimates the financial burden of gunshot …

This is another of Tom Dyer's modified Tom Threepersons holsters. Essentially, it's a cross between the Threepersons and the old Bucheimer Federal Man that we brainstormed together. …

It may come as a surprise, but lots of women own guns. Many of them can shoot quite well, and more than a few can run loops around their male contemporaries.

I teach quite a few, and it's often a refreshing experience. Women are more open to criticism, they're better listeners and eager learners. They're genuinely concerned with safety and technique, and they don't generally have any pre-formed misconceptions about what shooting "should" entail.

This isn't exclusively a man's world anymore, and we're all the better for it.

As we look forward to the Supreme Court's review of District of Columbia vs. Heller, I'd like to take a second look at a 2001 ruling in the Fifth Circuit Court.

At question was Timothy Emerson's divorce, during which his wife filed an unfounded restraining order against him. Despite a complete paucity of evidence proving Emerson was a threat to his wife's welfare, a lower court issued the order, which barred Emerson from legally owning guns while the order was in effect.

The Fifth Circuit Court's ruling took a long look at the context, history and wording of the Second Amendment and concluded that it did in fact protect the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.

I don't know why I keep trying. As Homer Simpson once observed, "trying is the first step towards failure." I think he was onto something.

I had a stylesheet that I liked and almost worked with Explorer. Almost. There are three nagging problems, though.

The first is with linked images. I've defined the default link color as a pleasant green to match the site layout:
a:link {
color: #5e882c;
text-decoration: none;
}

19-year-old Robert Hawkins of Bellevue opened fire with a rifle at the Westroads Mall in Omaha today. Nine people are dead and several others injured. Hawkins then turned the gun on himself.

Westroads Mall has signs posted banning customers from carrying weapons on the premises. Last week, a grenade had been found at the mall.

"The middle classes had been the mainstay of municipal life (…) now they too were weakened by economic decline and fiscal exploitation. Every property owner was subject to rising taxes to support an expanding bureaucracy whose chief function was the collection of taxes. Corruption consumed much of the taxes paid; a thousand laws sought to discourage, detect, or punish the malversation of governmental revenue or property. Many collectors over-taxed the simple, and kept the change; in recompense they might erase the tax burdens of the rich for a consideration."

–Socrates of Constantinople, Ecclesiastical History, c. 439CE