Chicago Boyz

What do you get when you mix these three things?

The Heckler & Koch G36 Assault Rifle (currently fielded by the German and Spanish armies)

The M41-A Pulse Rifle (used by Colonial Marines in the movie Aliens)

The Lazer Tag StarLyte Pro Toy (used by me in my 80’s childhood)

The answer is the Army’s new XM-8 Carbine / Assualt Rifle.StrategyPage says the new rifle is getting good reviews. It currently fires NATO standard 5.56mm rounds, but may be rechambered for the new 6.8mm ammo the Army is considering.

Now the M-16 / M-4 family looks cool and all, but the XM-8 looks like the guns we were promised for “The Future”, along with all the flying cars, despotic coporate police states, and zero-G brothels. The rest of civilization may be failing us, but at least the military is keeping up its end of things. If only they could get those orbital weapons platforms working, we’d be all set…

An acquaintance of mine who is ignorant about computers wanted to buy one and asked for a recommendation. Like an idiot I suggested Apple — it’s supposed to be easy to use, right? Well, he bought one, and the experience has underscored for me the wisdom of not making recommendations based on second-hand information.

There’s nothing wrong with the computer, it works fine. It’s just that it doesn’t seem to have any ease-of-use advantage over recent Windows machines. And since I’m not an Apple person, my every attempt to help my friend use his computer is accompanied by a lot of time spent researching how to do things that are second nature for me in Windows. And because few people in my circle use Apples, it can be difficult to find someone who can answer a simple question.

So, for example, my friend receives important emails with Microsoft Office file attachments. He clicks on them and the computer informs him that his trial version of Office for Mac has expired, and would he like to buy a full version for $400? That seems like a high price to read a spreadsheet now and again. It took me a long phone call to Apple, and a long trip to my friend’s place to fiddle with the computer, to determine that he can view these files using the AppleWorks software he already has. (And of course I wasn’t successful in setting the file associations to make AppleWorks the default software for opening Excel files, so my friend has to do the {ctrl + click + menu} thing every time he wants to open an MS-formatted attachment. And I still don’t know how to resize the spreadsheet to make it legible on the screen.) What a nuisance for both of us.

And I have no choice but to continue to help, if only because I got him into this situation. It’s as if I saved his life and am now responsible for him, except that I am trying to save him mainly from the effects of my own poor judgment.

Via AtlanticBlog comes this link to an online test of libertarian purity. It’s not bad as such tests go, though some of the questions are ambiguous (e.g., “Should the Fed be abolished and the monetary base frozen?” — yes and no). I scored about 100, which seems high considering my positions on foreign-affairs and national-defense issues (to the right of Attila the Hun). I speculate that most of the non-blogging-type people I know would score between 10 and 40.

I have been considering moving to Virginia for various reasons, one of which is to get out of California. But it seems Virginia’s state of affairs ain’t much better than California’s…

Good summary article by Paul Jacob.

In 1871, that is.