However, the awesome folks over at County Comm have never issued a challenge to the also-awesome folks at BlendTec ending with the phrase, "I mean seriously… what’s the worst that could happen?"

I am not sure I would taunt the folks at BlendTec, but, hey, considering Tuff-Writer‘s pens are machined out of 6061-T6 aluminum or Ti-6Al4V titanium… well, they might survive. Hell if I know. If nothing else, it will be awesome to watch…

I just wish I could rationalize one of their watches, or one of County Comm’s, for that matter. If either of them ever needs an impartial review done on those finely-crafted devices, I am sure I could somehow manage to find the time…

I could also "settle" for this one.

One thing I do not often mention here is that I used to be rather big into creating three-dimensional computer models… not on any "professional" software, or even any kind of software that let you grab individual pixels and push them around, but rather a piece of Japanese software that gave you LEGO-like building blocks from which you could assemble larger things. One of my personal dreams was always to see those little creations come to life in a physical form, but, obviously, trying to get someone to cast or mold them would have been a massively cost prohibitive operation, and such thoughts never really came to pass.

Granted, two thousand dollars or so is not exactly "cheap" by my accounting, but considering how many other things 3D printers can be used for, the cost would be amortized over a variety of objects. And then there is the whole print-your-own-AR-15-at-home thing that could prove to be so very interesting…

Obviously this technology is still in its infancy, and trying to shoot a "printed" AR-15 lower may not be the safest idea in the world, but I am sure you could come up with no shortage of potential uses around the house for a gadget like this, and, really, at-home three-dimensional printing! What more do you want?

(Both courtesy of Uncrate.)

No, really:

Smartphones are constantly getting better at imitating compact cameras, but so far we haven’t seen many cameras that attempt to mimic smartphones. That changes today with the Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera, a 16-megapixel compact camera unveiled at CES. It’s a point-and-shoot camera that’s pretty much a smartphone without the phone. Powered by Android, the camera features a 3x (36-108mmm) optical zoom lens, a 3.2-inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity, 720p video recording, and geotagging. The Android OS means that users can install and use Android Market apps on the camera (e.g. Instagram once it becomes available). It’ll be available starting in April for $300.

I might hold out for a different/better brand than Polaroid, and “16 megapixels” does not necessarily mean anything when those sensors are stacked on top of each other like tribbles, and a 6.5mm lens (am I reading that right?) is freakishly small for point-and-shoots these days, but, yeah, include actual “phone” functionalities in that device, and I will be interested.

As it is, people have largely stopped carrying around point-and-shoots in favor of those strange little devices that can take pictures and make phone calls… slapping a phone’s OS into a camera will not really change that equation significantly.

That is all.

Now, I am fairly certain I know that font and I know those instructions and I know the look of the pieces scattered around our protagonist, and speaking personally, I have never once had a problem with the pictures-only documentation Ikea includes with their flat-pack furniture, so I have to ask – is Leatherman implying that their customers are stupider than average, are they attempting to cater to the "stupider-than-average" consumer segment, or are they just being xenophobic?

If you want a multitool from a company that does not assume you are an idiot, I have heard good things about CRKT’s offerings (they even make one specifically for Picatinny-rail-equipped firearms), and I hear Gerber and SOG make a few, too.

We have actually used the original Square system once before, as customers, and were largely impressed with the simplicity and ease – the vendor (in this case, a butcher) had the little dongle attached to his phone, he punched in how much we owed him, we swiped the card and punched in my cell phone number, and a few minutes later the system texted a receipt to my phone, and the charge posted like any other. That 2.75% per-transaction fee to Square sounds like a lot, but in reality, that is about what most credit card transaction companies charge merchants to allow them to swipe your card – you just never see it, since that charge is just rolled up into the shop’s cost of doing business.

And now, being able to run a "tab" at the stores and shops you frequent that automatically charges your credit card, without having to pull out a wallet, phone, or anything else? Yeah, that is kind of impressive technology, despite the inherent flaws in a system that puts your money payment capabilities on an easily hackable, traceable, and hijackable piece of hardware.

From a purely UI perspective, though, it surely would be nice if Square offered some kind of map/listing on their webpage indicating how many merchants in your area use this tech, so you do not have to download the program and probably provide it all of your interesting, personal information before it tells you that you are out of luck due to living in Podunktown. Of course, that could be the point…

The good news is that you can fix it yourself.

Fellow Incredible users are probably intimately aware of the "Application data space is low…" error that has been afflicting the phone, and the 4.06 update for Gingerbread was supposed to fix that. Unfortunately, and predictably, Verizon/Google/HTC screwed something up in the process, and they had to release the 4.08 update to fix the 4.06 update. The really bad news is that the problems in 4.06 actually prevent you from being able to successfully download and install the 4.08 update.

How is that for customer support?

However, after spending about two hours last night with Better Half’s and my phones, I can offer you the following explanation on how to fix it. I am not an Android technician, I do not work for Verizon, and my understanding of what goes on in these little black boxes of mystery is somewhat limited, so, in short, I offer no guarantee, and everything you do is on you. I would strongly suggest following my links and reading the forum threads there before you embark down this rabbit hole.

1. Clear as much of your phone’s cache as you possibly can. You can do this the hard way through Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications and thumbing through each individual app, or you can download something like Super Box, which can go out and fetch your caches and nuke them all in one convenient spot.

2. Clear as much of your apps’ data as you feel comfortable with. For this, there may be specialized apps available, but we went through Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> All, and picked them out one at a time. Hit Menu again, sort everything by size, and then start selecting and hitting "clear data". Maps, Facebook, your SMS app, Google+, Google Reader, and other apps like that are typically major transgressors, but be aware – when you delete that data, at the very least, you will lose all of that app’s history, and at the very most, you may lose all of your SMS logs, phone logs, etc. I would not recommend clearing Contacts Storage’s data unless you have to, for obvious reasons.

3. Move all of the apps you can to your SD card, and uninstall all of the other apps you can. You may think you can get away with just this step, but "app storage", "cache storage", and "data storage" all seem to be handled differently by Android, and any one of them can trip the "data space is low" error.

Now comes the fun part. Proceed at your own risk. You CAN brick your phone if you are not careful in the next few steps.

4. Per this thread, press and hold power, select "Restart", wait for the screen to turn off, then press and hold Volume Down and Power. Wait for the HBOOT screen to appear – you will know it when you see it, but it will appear, be non-responsive, scroll some text, and then work. Use the volume button to scroll down to "RECOVERY", and press Power. Once the Circle-With-An-Arrow icon appears (the thread recommends Triangle-and-Exclamation-Point, but we had better response with the former), hold Volume Up and Power until the next option screen shows up. Use the Volume button to scroll to "Wipe Cache Partition", and press Power. It will go away for a minute, tell you it is done, take you back to the previous screen, where you should select "Reboot System Now" (by pressing Power again).

5. In an ideal world, when your phone comes back up and connects to the world, you could go to Menu -> Settings -> About Phone -> System Updates, press Back, and then click on System Updates again, and it would be telling you that it is downloading the new update. This is rarely a perfect world.

6. If that did not work, refer to this thread, and be advised that only the third option worked for us. Go to Menu -> Settings -> Date and Time, uncheck Automatic, and roll the date back to at least the beginning of November. Screw around with the phone a little to let everything settle out, then repeat the System Updates, Back, System Updates sequence above. It should be downloading now.

7. Once downloaded and checked, it will ask if you want to install; go ahead and tell it yes. It will start the countdown – if it stops at 8 and says "Rebooting now", and no popup appears, it broke. Press Home, and start over at step 4. If it stops at 7 and says, "Rebooting now", a popup should come up indicating it is actually rebooting. The reboot process takes time (5-10 minutes), and until the normal home screen comes up again, do not worry about your phone. Once that home scree comes up, it will either tell you that it successfully updated, or that you do not have enough memory. You do have enough memory, but that is the 4.06 problem that we are trying to fix. Go back to step 1 and go through it all again.

Yes, you do have to do the Wipe Cache Partition thing every time you attempt to install the update. Yes, we had to change the date every time we were trying to get the update. And, yes, it is a little frightening dorking around on the internal programming guts of our rather expensive phones, but so long as you stay to the proscribed path, you should emerge unscathed. We did have one point where the Triangle-and-Exclamation icon stayed up a little while longer than we would have liked, but trying the Vol-Up-Power button sequence a few times made it chug along.

Why do this? Well, we have not gotten the "out of space" error since updating, and it is entirely possible that the 4.06 update will prevent you from installing any further updates. Alternatively, if you are reading this before the 4.06 patch has been applied to your phone, I would strongly advise against letting it, and see if you can just jump straight to 4.08.

Ain’t technology fun?

Added HTC Incredible "bonus": having your camera store its pictures on the SD card is counterproductive. Your phone came with a 2GB removable SD card, a 1GB onboard memory chip (split 250MB for Android and 750MB for whatever apps you want to install), and a 6GB Embedded Multi-Media Card. This card is basically invisible to everything except your camera, onboard music players, and the Android system itself, so you might as well put its storage space to use for something.

Yes, the car this was built out of is not really the pinnacle of… well… anything, really.

Yes, I know nothing about the people who inspired and built it, which seems an oversight on my part and a shame.

Yes, it still requires some work to get it in the "done" ballpark (especially in regards to the engine and trunk).

And, yes, a heavily-certified mechanic would have to spend a day going over it before I seriously considered forking over money.

But it should come as no surprise to you that if I had a spare $10k (have to talk them down a little, after all), I would happily give this thing a new home:

I mean, just look at that thing… If auto companies made cars that awesomely distinctive any more, they would not have to worry about "bailouts". Although how you change the tires is beyond me…

On the other hand, if the day ever comes where I have to give up my Bullitt for something more "functional", I am going to do my best to hold out for one of these… assuming (and judging from the pictures, it is a big assumption) the back doors/seats are functional.

And, finally, it is about damned time your car starts providing you this data. Most of that stuff either already is, or can easily be, tracked by your onboard computers, and there is scant little reason why I should have to pay another $200-$500 for some stupid gadget to sit on my dash and tell me what my car already knows.

Maybe this is why capitalism supposedly sucks – there never seems to be a shortage of things for you to toss money at…

(Image borrowed from Ebay listing, in case it gets deleted. Found courtesy of Jalopnik.)

Like the Toyota Supra Mk IV, the EV-1 was a car loved by some but ultimately too expensive for massive market acceptance. With that cautionary tale in mind, we are in the process of designing and building the cheapest street legal car in America: the 100% electric ApocalypsEV.

[...]

Our primary goal is creating a vehicle tough enough for an apocalypse, but cheap enough for people to buy using the budget they normally reserve for power toys like boats, ATVs or motorcycles. By combining solar boost charging with cheap plug in charging and low maintenance costs, we plan to make the ApocalypsEV the most affordable vehicle to buy and operate in America.

Ok, yeah, I will grant that it is basically scant more than an intelligently-designed golf cart, and I will further admit that the zombie-niche advertising caught my attention like those kinds of things are wont to do, but the guys behind this product are right – until such time as electric vehicles can be quantified as a worthwhile toy by the masses, they will be nothing more than a flight of fancy for the rich. But if you can make a light, safe, easy-to-drive, road-legal vehicle that can get some/most people to work, the grocery store, and back home again, have it fully recharge overnight at a standard wall receptacle, and keep its pricepoint in the “motorcycle” range, I can guarantee you it will sell.

But, instead, we are faced with, as Michael and Kenny Ham said,

Historically, electric car companies have tried to sell the public the equivalent of the Mustang GT500, the absolute top of the line model with a price tag to match. The Nissan Leaf is a good example of this problem. Incentives aside, Nissan sells the Leaf for $30k on the same lot as the similarly sized, $11k Versa. That $19k buys a lot of gas, approximately 150,000 miles worth. The value isn’t there.

Yeah, the Leaf is pretty slick – you tell it when you are coming back to it, and it starts up its A/C / heat so the cabin is cool / warm by the time you get there. It sends you text messages to let you know its charging status while it is plugged in. Its interior has all of the bells, whistles, and whatnots people expect out of cars today (Including things they might not, including a heated steering wheel. Have we grown so soft?). But good God the price. Score yourself a VW Jetta TDI, and be able to cruise for 700+ miles on a single tank of gas, and you would still have enough money left over to feed it for somewhere north of a hundred fillups… and visit family more than 100 miles away.

But what if your EV was not your primary car, and did not have a price like your primary car? That is what the brothers are hoping to explore… with some funding assistance from you, of course:

ApocalypsEV-1 is an EV that is both street legal and off-road capable. The question is whether it will prove to be usable, which is why we need to build ApocalypsEV-1 as a test mule. If it proves usable, our ultimate goal is to create a company which offers a $5-8k (base price) EV, that can be plugged in or use built in solar to charge its battery pack. At this price, people can afford an ApocalypsEV-1 as a second car for short commutes, errands, and off-road fun.

Now, I have some pretty significant doubts/reservations about this particular project (Specifically: the hope that they do not make that solar panel mandatory on all builds, given its diminutive size; it continues to be scant more than a glorified golf cart; and, really, an open-framed 40HP scooter for the zombie apocalypse? Uh, no.), but I think they are headed in the right direction. Arcimoto could have been the right direction, but they are still focused too much on replacing the existing cars we have, rather than supplementing them.

The future of electric vehicles is promising, but I worry about how much people are expecting out of them in the present… in any case, I keep waiting for an affordable borderline-toy I can secure that would be cheaper to slum around town in than a V-8 Mustang or a four-door Volvo…

(As any aside, does anyone have any experience with these crowd-source sites like “IndieGOGO”? I assume there are no guarantees offered and so forth?)

(You can read more about the ApocalypsEV-1 in Popular Mechanics.)

It is not quite a tablet, but it is not quite an e-reader either. Or is that "it is not just a tablet, but it is not just an e-reader", instead?

Bit hard to say, but if I had to make a baseless assumption, that was probably the point.

A lot of tablet makers have been making the mistake of trying to replace laptops, or even desktops, with their cute little devices, when, in reality, people want something that can idly browse the net, watch movies, play music, show them books, and play games on. This does not require copious power, or massive screens, or complicated front ends, but it does mean the machine has to be smooth, seamless, and responsive, because nothing screws up relaxing on the couch faster than a herky-jerky computer doing anything but what you want it to.

Apparently the Kindle Fire (Really, it should have just been "Fire", but those are semantics for another post.) can do all of that… at all of $200. To be sure, this thing is no iPad-killer, at least not when you compare the raw specs, but the behind-the-surface integration Amazon is promising… well, I do not think we have ever seen anything like that on this scale before, at least not on a mobile platform. That said, I think the decision to not provide any 3G support at all will come back to bite them in the ass for non-city users, given the heavy dependence the system seems to be having on "cloud storage" and the lack of pervasive wifi hotspots outside of metropolitan areas.

I kinda want one. But only kinda. Having an Android phone an dealing with Amazon’s Appstore has engendered a… shall-we-say "wary"… outlook on what Amazon does with my mobile devices, and the software that goes on them, and since I doubt this Fire will be able to access the generic Google Market, one’s options are limited.

If this thing were more "Android" and less "Amazon", I would be all over it, but even as it is, more options are always good things.

And with all of that said and experienced by me, while this idea unquestionably appeals to me, I will remain skeptical:

It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that’ll take some lawyers and time.

Power. Fuel. Drinking water. Food. Waste management. Communications. Maintenance. Security. Transportation. Legalities. Medical emergencies. Oh God, the headaches…

To begin with, all countries that can own the waters, in their entirety, from the upper atmosphere down through the ocean floor, 12 nautical miles out from their shore. If you are inside of those 12 nautical miles, you are inside of whatever country is nearby… which is why those “gambling” cruises head straight out and dawdle at 13 miles. However, even more complicatedly, all countries have Economic Exclusion Zones that extend another 188 nautical miles out from that 12 mile marker, which basically means those countries have exploration, maritime resources, and various other rights to things in that area, but not legal jurisdiction over the water (like I said, it is complicated). This means you could set up a gambling island 13 miles off the coast of Long Island, but you would not be able to set up a sovereign fishery until you hit 200 miles. Bit of a commute, that.

Speaking of, office complexes off the coast of San Francisco? I am really hoping that Patri Friedman is talking about doing that inside of national waters, because even with the quickest personnel ferry scooting along at somewhere around 35 knots, you are still considering at least a 30 minute commute from the dock to the platform, not counting whatever time people will need to get from home to the ferry… And that is all assuming calm waters and no weather. And that people do not get seasick. Which they do.

Again, please do not misunderstand me – I absolutely love this idea, and I do believe that a lot of the societal problems facing us at the moment stem from the cold reality that there are no more undiscovered countries, so there is nowhere for folks to run from the creeping authoritarianism that is slowly infecting our country. However, as much as I know that this idea, at its ideal, would provide that outlet, I also know that the technology and willpower are at least a few decades behind the curve. Of course, they are talking a few decades in the future, so maybe their predictions are spot on.

I mean, hell, what are they going to do about one of the most-basic aspects of any seagoing vessel – fire prevention and combatting? Despite being metal, there are so many things on a modern ship that burn, and burn hot, the last thing you want is an uncontrolled flame scooting around your boat. I am not sure how commercial vessels do it, but every single sailor on every single USN ship is a firefighter, period. Sure, some of us still had to drive the boat, and some of us had to man the sound-powered phones, and so on, so forth, but all of us had basic training with extinguishers, hoses, and Halon, and could wade into the scene and drench the decks if we had to. So are the seafarers going to make firefighting training a requirement for all residents, with the additional mandatory requirement to respond in case of an emergency, or are they going to pay the megabucks to fund an offshore firefighting department?

Dunno. That is apparently not a frequently asked question (though they do touch on the “pirates” topic, but I believe they are being a bit short-sighted on that as well…).

I wish Peter Thiel (though the irony of the founder of notoriously-anti-firearms PayPal founding an offshore libertarian experiment is not lost on me) and Patri the best of luck with their Seasteading Institute, but it is going to take a lot more than a few pretty pictures and some carefully content-free marketing documents to convince me it is going to float…

Just not a useful bulb. 

On a whim, the last time I was at Wal-Mart, I purchased a Feit Electric AccentLED 0.9W 18LED light bulb as a curiosity purchase to see how far along LED bulbs have come in the past few years – after all, my LED flashlights are pretty badass little darksuckers, and I am all about saving money where I can, so why not give them a shot and see if they are worth it? 

They are not. 

Now, my first warning probably should have been the “For Decorative & Accent Use” line right beneath the name, but since when do people but ‘decorative’ lights in ceiling fans?  Anywise, I got home, screwed it into our bathroom fixture along with five other standard 60W incandescent bulbs, threw the switch… and started giggling. 

The below images were taken with the same shutter speed, the same aperture, and at about the same distance from the respective bulbs.  Can you guess which one was the LED? 

That is just gorramed pathetic. 

As you can see from the picture to the right, the LED bulb sucks up 0.9W and puts out around 70 lumens of light.  On the other hand, a 60W incandescent puts out somewhere around 900 lumens.  In order to be even competitive, LED bulb manufacturers are going to have to increase the output of their products by ten times, at least. 

Even better, guess what I paid for that stupid thing?  $7.  For one bulb.  Anyone remember how much standard 60W incandescent were before their 100W equivalents were effectively outlawed and prices started inflating?  Between $0.50 and $1, depending on quality and features.  We pay somewhere around $0.068 per kilowatt-hour – I would have to leave that LED bulb on for 88,000+ hours straight (assuming my drug-addled math is accurate) to make up the price difference between the two, and as its picture shows, its lifespan is maybe 20,000 hours. 

And it cannot even light up its own fixture, much less the room it is in. 

For the time being, compact fluorescent bulbs suck – they contain unsafe levels of mercury and will unquestionably not be disposed of properly, their color and warm-up time is all wrong, their refresh rate can cause problems anywhere there is moving machinery (said problems include spinning things appearing to be still), and we have not noticed that their lifespans are any longer than a normal incandescent.  On the other hand, LEDs may be no healthier, and their output is… well… pathetic. 

So here is to the Glorious and All Knowing Federal Government invading our liberties and telling us what we can and cannot buy and use in our own homes.  If I have the money to spend on the wattage, I should bloody well be permitted to have whatever the hell kind of bulbs I want burning in whatever sized fixtures I want, wherever I want in my house.  Period. 

Hell, I might just go buy a horribly inefficient and wasteful Edison Bulb and leave it running until it dies, just to piss off the Greenies… 

[Edited To Add]  Look, folks, I get that the LED bulb I purchased is not comparable to an average 60W incandescent.  I was not trying to compare them.  I cannot afford an LED that is equivalent to a 60W incandescent, and that is exactly the point I was trying to make – due to their prices, LED bulbs, as replacement for incandescent bulbs in normal fixtures, simply are not ready for primetime.  Trust me, I want them to be, because lighting my entire house off a scant few watts without annoying fluorescents is pretty high on my “shiny” list, but the truth is that most people cannot afford them, and will not bother with them, and, if for no other reason than that, they bloody well should not be being forced down our collective throats by governmental fiat.  [/Edited To Add]

In fact, Amazon seems to be taking the “make cheap electronic accessories” market by storm… 

[Update] As commenters have pointed out, MonoPrice is even cheaper than Amazon.com, with the latter’s only advantage being free shipping over $25. [/Update]

That, my friends, is an officially-licensed-and-endorsed rendition of Lady Vivamus from Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road… and given the choice between it and a KRISS, I would be very hard-pressed to make a decision.

Not as though that is ever going to happen, given their price tags are disturbingly similar.

But, really, 35.25" blade, 2.75 pound weight, double hollow-ground and sharpened blade, 10" reverse edge, hand-hammered bell-guard, black stingray skin molded over a wood grip and traced with silver wire, and, of course, "dum vivimus, vivamus" inscribed on both sides of the blade… It has been years since I picked up a sabre, in anger or not, but that sounds right up my alley.

‘Course, so does having a private 1000-yard range in my back yard and all the fully-automatic toys I can play with, and that is about as likely…

If that will not bring you out of a funk, I do not know what will.

(Courtesy of Roberta X.)

 This would be one of those things.

I have no idea what it is about that car that appeals to me – it rates scant higher than "toy" on a utility scale, does not have any modern amenities (like A/C, air bags, or even a radio), and in any other vehicle its engine would hardly be worth it (especially these days) – but damn it looks like fun to drive, and is actually borderline affordable, unlike some of its more "cultured" cousins.

If only I were less responsible with my money…

Larry Correia needs our help:

So please tell your friends.

That’s the favor. Word of mouth is the best advertising ever. If you guys like MHI and MHV tell your friends to go get Monster Hunter Alpha. (preferably on preorder or the week it comes out) MHA comes out on July 26th. If you’ve got a blog, and you want to plug me there, I will say nice things about you to your friends. Facebook, Twitter, bathroom graffiti, I don’t care. Share the love!

If you want autographed copies, here is where you go to get them. (I’m doing signed bookplate stickers this time, because I can’t afford to fly to Minnesota again, and it is too expensive to ship 10 cases of books to Utah, have me sign them, and then ship them again). If you want personalization, put that in your instructions. I’m flexible like that. (however, keep in mind there is only so much space, okay? Last time I had a few people ask me to write small novellas, and there is only so much space on a book plate!)

If you don’t care about my lightning-like signature or a lovingly handcrafted MH smiley face with horns (or is it a penguin, you decide), you can get it at most bookstores, every B&N, or Amazon.

In fact, you should just do yourself a favor and acquire the entire set so far if you do not have the first two:

Why? Because Correia has produced some of the best modern fantasy you are ever going to have the privilege of reading – where else are you going to find full-blooded Master Vampires being taken down by an accurately-described, fully-automatic, short-barreled Saiga shotgun shooting Dreidels of Doom? I mean, really!

In all seriousness, there seems to be some "gaming" involved in getting your titles to show up on the New York Times Bestsellers list, and the short-and-the-sweet of helping Larry out is "get your pre-orders in now" – he is hoping to max out the sales of Monster Hunter Alpha on its premier week, and I do not see any reason not to help him in this goal. (And if you want a personalized-signed copy, rather than just a signed one, you need to get your order in today!)

All of them.

(Courtesy of Uncrate.)

(Courtesy of Woot.) 

Nothing personal against ITS Tactical – they provide a lot of good information (though in an annoying-as-hell partial-RSS-feed format) and produce what appear to be good products (never having purchased one, I cannot speak to their actual quality) – but if I were attempting to infect my readers with gotta-have-it-itis about a new product, I do not think I would rely, however obliquely, on a feature that largely does not matter, and probably will be revealed as soon as the first person reviews it…  Unless, of course, said pocket has an SBR’d KRISS in it or something.