And that's why confiscation will never work. I don't think anyone really even KNOWS how many guns exist in American hands... Obviously hundreds of millions of guns. Even if half the people turned theirs in, rounding up the other half would probably take a decade.


And, unfortunately for people who want to do this, that percentage of people who don't comply? They're going to resist. I'm typically always armed, and I'll certainly kill your sons and daughters who come to take my guns. Living in a free country with freedoms that include the 2nd means more to me than my life, so I'll very gladly lay it down along with as many jack-booted thugs as possible before I do. If that makes me a home-grown terrorist, so be it.

It is hard to believe there aren't more people including at least one firearm on this list of necessities. I live and work in the Memphis area, and while I might not be the best prepared person in the event of an emergency even I have a selection of handguns and rifles that would be at the TOP of any list of emergency supplies. You can't get more basic than a simple tool that will allow you to feed your family as well as defend whatever emergency supplies you have gathered.

Is this crowd really so anti-gun that such a basic, life-saving tool would be scratched off the list completely?

You may be trying to cast your net a little wide looking for a single (or even a few) books, articles, and movies that illustrate technology and its impact on our lives, privacy, culture, etc. You might be better off giving them a laundry list of books (I would stick to books for a high school level course) and giving them the opportunity to answer that extremely broad question in the form of a 5 page paper, or something along those lines. Almost none of them are under 200 pages... You're well within "short story / novella" lengths there, and you REALLY need to rethink that, even if it means turning this into an extra credit assignment. Is it possible that you're vastly underestimating the amount of reading time your teenage students have?

You've got a lot of material to potentially choose from, so why not let the students make their own choices? Besides, it makes reading 30 "original" responses that much more interesting when they're not all saying the exact same thing.

Some of my choices would include:

Gibson's Neuromancer
Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties (actually the whole trilogy would be okay here)
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson's Anathem (for the really brave students...)
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and probably Ender's Shadow too
Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch
Tad William's Otherland series, although this is probably too bulky to be feasible
Daniel Keys Moran's Long Run and The Last Dancer
Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Heinlein's Door into Summer

If you open up your page limit the options are almost endless. If you don't, you'll never find a single work under 200 pages that illustrates the things you want to illustrate. Especially not in fiction.

Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They're called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way ... -The Neverending Story

You're in luck, dkleinsc. The Expendables 2 comes out next month.

Shiras' Children of the Atom is a whole lot of fun, although I didn't stumble onto it until I was in college.

It's obvious that there is nothing we can do to bring a peaceful end to the TSA. Voting didn't work. A widespread campaign of ridicule didn't work. Refusing to fly didn't work, and simply leads to the government propping up at-risk airlines. It is time to try something a little different:

Publicly document the names of people employed by the TSA. Every single one of them, from their administration (John Pistole) all the way down to the nameless, faceless front-line gropers. It won't take long for a document like that to spread in the wild.

That's step one. It becomes unnecessary once the following step starts to gather momentum because these people wear uniforms, drive to work everyday, and are self-identified. They don't wear masks (yet).

Step 2: Make their lives as TSA agents unbearable. Everything from denying them loans and refusing to do business with them personally to stealing their cars and vandalizing their property. Hurt them, hurt their families, hurt them financially. Humiliate them and make them legitimately afraid for their lives and those of their wives, husbands, and children. Socially ostracize them completely or make them targets, whichever your morals and conscience dictates, but start such a campaign of fear that the TSA will never see another willing job applicant.

Make them ashamed and afraid of doing their job, because they should be.

"And it came into Hooch's mind that when both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth." -Orson Scott Card, Red Prophet

Very nice reference. Dan is amazing.

In the words of Bill Hicks, "you're not a human until you're in my phone book."

That's a sucker's bet. These people are PROFESSIONALS. They'll go with the tried-and-true method and round up some scapegoats, of course.

You really are a dense, humorless, asshole, aren't you? I think it's safe to say that most people think life is sacred and important. The fact that lives were in peril wasn't the funny part... the funny part was situational. For instance, if you were severely beaten by a gang of feral comedians, that would (at first blush) be funny. Yes, we are all terribly sad that you had 4 ribs broken and your jaw wired shut--that's not the funny part. It's a fucking riot that a gang of comedians was responsible for randomly beating the shit out of a humorless stick in the mud, though. It would be less funny if you were beaten by accountants.

High pressure water has been used to disperse crowds and break up riots for longer than I've been alive. It's very effective and relatively safe, but here in America we've been reluctant to use it because of it's ties to the race riots of the 1960s. So we shun a cheap, effective, and easy to deploy system of crowd control because nobody wants to be seen as a ruthless dictator as they clamp down on the masses, and yet we pursue other less-well-tested methods of doing the exact same thing.

Does no one else see the irony?

In all seriousness, I think the really far out there geeks (not your average, run of the mill slashdotter, but maybe close!) would make EXCELLENT space travelers. The only real downside is that after years of increasingly disturbing porn, a COMPLETE lack of social interaction (and this is coming from someone who once thought "dressing up" was putting on pants so the drive-through people won't freak out), and the subsequent lack of feedback about their behavior and thoughts, they'll leave a very rough impression on the first person they run into afterward. Alien or cosmonaut.

"Greetings people of earth! We have met with your represenative and found him wholly agreeable with our culture! Where's the women at, bitches?"

Oh, shi---

Just as an aside: Condoms don't necessarily prevent exposure to HPV. They reduce the chances, but obviously not all that much (as you said, HPV is a raging epidemic, with something like 90% of sexually active women getting some strain or other eventually). It can be transferred by contact with a lot of surface area that condoms don't cover at all (like the scrotum), and as such doesn't even require actual intercourse to transmit from person to person.