Coca-Cola’s Glowing Lightsaber Bottles Are the First Flexible OLED Tech I’m Willing to Pay For
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I’m one hundred percent in support of a future where screens are flexible and foldable instead of fragile and easily shatterable. I’m just not willing to spend $2,000 on a folding phone or $10,000+ on a rollable TV. I will, however, happily drop $2 or $3 on a plastic bottle with a glowing lightsaber on the label.
As the marketing machine for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker slowly but surely kicks into hyperdrive ahead of the film’s mid-December release, every section of every store is slowly being taken over by Star Wars-branded merchandise—in addition to a monsoon of toys. But it seems like Singapore is the place to be if you want to snag one of the most interesting pieces of The Rise of Skywalker merchandising: Coca-Cola has wrapped its bottles in a thin flexible OLED panel and electronics, including a battery, allowing images of Rey’s and Kylo Ren’s lightsabers to actually glow.
Flexible OLEDs are currently just a little too expensive when used in consumer products that actually take advantage of their ability to, you know, flex. But this might be the perfect application for the technology at this point in time. OLED is self-illuminating, so no backlight is needed, allowing the ultra-thin panels to be tucked behind a plastic bottle’s label without looking like a bunch of electronics have been poorly hidden. And no matter how much those bottles get tossed around and banged up during shipping, at least most of the panels should survive and continue to work just fine, creating a rather neat effect that will undoubtedly help Coca-Cola sell a lot of fizzy water this month.
There’s a catch, however. These bottles are only being made available in Singapore, just 8,000 of them are being produced for Coca-Cola’s “No Sugar” drinks, and they’re being randomly distributed to 45 secret locations across the country. It’s a strategy that presumably helps deter long lineups full of obsessive fans or professional eBayers, but it’s annoying for legitimate collectors who will potentially have to scour an entire country to score one of these at a reasonable price.
Also, if you do manage to get your hands on one of these bottles, you’ll want to make sure you don’t get too lightsaber happy. The battery life for the OLED is rated for about 40 minutes in total, letting you illuminate the saber roughly 500 times as long as you keep your lightsaber battle shorter than five seconds.
Detailed Analysis of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. Supreme Court Arguments
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By LKB
As previously reported, I had a ringside seat for yesterday’s SCOTUS arguments, and Dan posted some of my quick observations from the argument. Now that I have had a bit more time to digest things (as well as some food and sleep), I want to go into a bit more detail on how I perceived how the argument went down.
Mootness
As has been widely reported, most of the time spent during oral argument involved addressing whether New York City’s last-minute maneuver (i.e., after the Supreme Court granted cert, the City and the State changed the law in a transparent and brazen attempt to evade appellate review) rendered the case at bar moot.
Mootness is a legal doctrine that provides that when there is no longer any actual dispute between the parties for the court to decide, an appellate court should dismiss the case rather than enter advisory or hypothetical opinions. However, it is a complicated area of law that has many exceptions, many of which were discussed yesterday.
Courtesy LKB
Contrary to how the media (and unfortunately some Chicken Littles in the firearms commentariat) have tried to spin the amount of time at argument that was spent discussing mootness, that fact doesn’t really mean anything. In appellate advocacy, you go into oral argument with an outline of points you would like to make…usually a very small subset of the arguments made in your briefs.
However, you are not in control of things, and your argument goes where the most active questioners on the Court want to take it. This is especially true at the Supreme Court, where the van Moltke maxim that “no battle plan survives first contact” is typically the case.
In NYSR&PA, the anti-2A wing of the Court (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagen and Sotomayor) are all known as active questioners at oral argument, as opposed to Thomas, who almost never asks anything at all, and Roberts and Kavanaugh, who tend to ask very few.
As a result, the liberal wing of the Court dominated the time at oral argument with their questioning. However, just because they asked the most questions (and thus made the attorneys spend most of their argument answering them), that simply does not signify anything.
LKB for TTAG
So, how will the Court decide the mootness issue? As I expected, Ginsburg and Sotomayor were more than willing to swallow NYC’s brazen tactical maneuver. While I thought that Kagen and Breyer might have some shred of integrity on this procedural issue (blessing this kind of post-cert gamesmanship would set a horrid precedent for all sorts of cases – especially many that those two justices typically care about), that possibility evaporated at oral argument. Both of those justices were clearly on board with letting the City get away with it in order to avoid a potential expansion of Heller.
On the other hand, both Alito and Gorsuch did not mince words about how they felt about NYC’s chicanery. Gorsuch acidly remarked on NYC’s “Herculean efforts” to evade Supreme Court review after cert was granted. Thomas and Kavanaugh asked no questions, but their positions in past cases leave me with little doubt that they are not going to vote to hold the case moot.
That leaves the deciding vote on the mootness issue with Roberts. Early media reports were crowing that Roberts’ questions indicated that he was leaning toward finding the case moot. From what I saw (and confirmed in the transcript), I simply did not see that.
The Chief Justice asked only two questions, one of which was a bit of a trap that adduced a concession from NYC’s counsel that dismissing the case as moot would prejudice the plaintiffs’ ability to seek damages for violations of their rights. If anything, I think Roberts’ questions cut the other way on which way he may be leaning.
Courtesy Kevin Hulbert
Additionally, if Roberts was going to wimp out on the mootness issue, I suspect he would have already done so. The Court had several earlier opportunities to dismiss the case as moot, and if he was so inclined, Roberts could have voted with the liberals and done so. He did not.
Of course, as the Obamacare decision illustrated, Roberts can certainly be a squish, and thus he could well sell us out on this issue. However, nothing I saw at oral argument supported the spin the media put on it.
Indeed, I suspect the media is pushing the “it’s going to be dismissed as moot” narrative for its own purposes (e.g., to be able to decry a Roberts “change of position” on mootness as evidence that the court is broken and needs to be packed, etc.)
LKB prediction: 5-4 denial of the motion to dismiss the case as moot. However, if we see a cert grant in the next few weeks on another 2A case — there are several being held due to the grant of cert in NYSR&PA — then all bets are off.
The Merits of the Case
Because of the near-monopolization of the oral argument by the liberal wing of the Court on the mootness issue, very little time was spent on the merits (absolutely none on the Commerce Clause or Right to Travel issues). However, there were a few interesting moments.
The highlight of the arguments on the merits was a spectacular trap that Justice Alito sprang on the attorney for the City. Questioning him on NYC’s change of its laws, he asked, “Are people in New York less safe now as a result of the new city and state laws than they were before?”
Clearly surprised at this seemingly out-of-the-blue question, counsel responded that they were not less safe. Alito then pressed him to concede that there was thus no actual basis for the City to claim that the transportation ban was essential to public safety.
Counsel attempted to tap dance away from that, claiming the restriction accorded with the history of acceptable regulations under the Second Amendment.
Alito then pressed counsel on whether a total ban on transportation by premises license holders could possibly be constitutional. The City’s position – and Second Circuit law – “cabin” Heller to possession of a weapon in the home.
I expected him to respond “yes” and then just take the heat. Instead, he admitted that such a complete ban would violate the Second Amendment.
Justice Alito then pounced: “If that’s what it means, you’re conceding that the Second Amendment protects the possession of a firearm outside the home under at least some circumstances?” Counsel again tried to tap dance away, but again conceded that was a “fair way to look at it.“
So much for the City’s argument that Heller applies only to possession inside the home.
Counsel for both NYSR&PA and the Solicitor General pushed application of the “Text, History, and Tradition” test as the applicable standard, rather than strict scrutiny. In what I took as a transparent shot at Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Sotomayor remarked that she viewed the “Text, History, and Tradition” test as a “made-up standard.”
Courtesy Matt Laur
Needless to say, the fact that standards for decision – or even new constitutional rights – might have been “made up” by judges has hardly concerned Sotomayor in the past.
At another point, she remarked that questions about whether certain types of weapons were covered by the Second Amendment was not before the Court yet. I might be reading too much into it, but I took her comment and the way she asked it as a recognition that regardless of what happens in this case, she knows that the votes are there to take other 2A cases.
Near the end of the argument, Justice Ginsburg (who looked very frail, but nevertheless was engaged and asked a number of probative questions in both of Monday’s arguments) asked the City’s counsel whether, because the transportation ban forbade taking a licensed gun to a second house (whether in or out of the city), that would require a license holder who wished to be armed at home to acquire two guns — one for each house — and leave one gun at an unoccupied location at all times, which she seemed to intimate would be less safe than transporting one gun between them.
To me, she plainly was teasing an argument that perhaps the NYC transportation ban could be struck based on intermediate scrutiny, perhaps to try and tempt Roberts into reversing on narrower grounds. (Query why she would do this if she thinks Roberts might squish on mootness.)
At one point in the argument, Justice Breyer made a comment that indicated that he still does not accept that Heller was correctly decided…which caused his neighbor, Justice Thomas, to lean over and engage him in a whispered conversation.
My read on the merits: nothing has changed, and things are as they have been. There is a wing of the Court (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagen, Sotomayor) that is adamantly anti-2A and would gladly reverse Heller if they had the chance. There are four votes (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) who go the other way, and would likely expand Heller significantly.
Roberts is also at least nominally in this camp, but the question remains whether he will succumb to the Beltway social, media, and political pressure as he did in the Obamacare decision.
My prediction: if they reach the merits, 5-4 to reverse. Smart money would be that Roberts will write the opinion, but I’ll go out on a limb and predict that he’ll assign it to Kavanaugh, and will adopt the “Text, History, and Tradition” test for 2A cases. Concurrence by Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, pushing for strict scrutiny and an end to lower court gamesmanship on 2A cases.
Craigslist has long been a staple of the internet since it first launched in 1995—but surprisingly, it hasn’t had an official app in the decade or so since the smartphone era began. Well, that’s all changed. You can now find the official, free app for iOS.
Like the website, the mobile app is extremely simple—no frills, bells, or whistles. The app’s overall design mimics the website as well, meaning its mostly just text and a clean interface. As you’d imagine, that makes the app extremely fast and easy to load. There’s also a post tab that streamlines posting straight from your phone. Not that making a Craigslist post was ever hard, but the app does make the process a lot smoother.
Even the app’s description is the bare minimum. One could say it reads like a haiku or at least some sort of Hemingway-esque musing on internet life.
craigslist – The original online classifieds. Established 1995.
Find jobs. Hire employees. Post your resume. Offer your skills/services.
Offer your services, locate contractors, find short term gigs and odd jobs.
Buy & sell furniture, household items, electronics, computers, clothing, bikes, art, any and all kinds of used items.
Activity partners, artists & musicians, pets for rehoming, local events.
Save your favorite postings for later, save searches, set search alerts.
Post, edit, renew your own ads.
Right now, the app ranks No. 14 in the App Store’s shopping category and has an overall 4.6 out of 5 star rating from 63 reviews. Not too shabby considering version 1.0 dropped just yesterday. It’s only mildly surprising that the launch has been so quiet. The site stealthily launched beta testing for the official app on its website an indeterminate time ago, though it’s not that easy to find the link on the main site. Although a search in the Google Play Store only turns up third-party apps at the moment, you can find a link to the Android beta test here.
Marvel’s new ‘Black Widow’ trailer teases the spy thriller Natasha Romanoff deserves
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Marvel has a trailer out for Black Widow, the story focused on the member of the Avengers team played by Scarlett Johansson. This preview of the movie features a lot of heart-pumping action, and an all-star cast that includes Rachel Weisz, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and of course, Johansson herself.
What we get in this trailer is a look at a movie that appears to span multiple genres – it starts off looking very much like a Bourne-esque spy thriller with exciting, somewhat gritty hand-to-hand fight scenes. Later on, though, it seems to show more superhero vibes in the tradition of the big and glossy Marvel cinematic universe, though leaning more towards Captain America: Winter Soldier than the big tent circus set pieces of the core Avengers lineup, or the wacky, neon glare of the Guardians franchise and the most recent Thor.
Black Widow’s Russian spy background is clearly on display here, and it looks like there’s going to be a very weird ‘family reunion’ on display with some Russian heroes. Overall, it looks entertaining as heck – and it has a lot to live up to, as the first Marvel Studios film after Avengers: Endgame (Spider-Man: Far From Home only gets partial credit because of the shared character ownership with Sony).
The package can be found on GitHub, where the documentation will approach all of the main points of the app. However, during this article, you’ll learn just the basics of caching and clearing cache so you can get started before you will dig deeper.
use Rennokki\QueryCache\Traits\QueryCacheable;class Article extends Model { use QueryCacheable; ... }
Enable the caching behavior by default
By default, the package does not enable query caching. To achieve this, add the $cacheFor variable in your model:
use Rennokki\QueryCache\Traits\QueryCacheable;class Article extends Model { use QueryCacheable; protected $cacheFor = 180; // 3 minutes }
Whenever a query will be triggered, the cache will intervene and in case the cache is empty for that query, it will store it and next time will retrieve it from the caching database; in case it exists, it will retrieve it and serve it, without hitting the database.
// database hit; the query result was stored in the cache Article::latest()->get();// database was not hit; the query result was retrieved from the cache Article::latest()->get();
If you simply want to avoid hitting the cache, you can use the ->dontCache() before hitting the final method.
Article::latest()->dontCache()->firstOrFail();
Enable the caching behavior query-by-query
The alternative is to enable cache query-by-query if caching by default doesn’t sound like a good option to you.
First of all, remove the $cacheFor variable from your model.
On each query, you can call ->cacheFor(...) to specify that you want to cache that query.
Some cache storages, like Redis or Memcached, come up with the support of tagging your keys. This is useful because we can tag our queries in-cache and invalidate the needed cache whenever we want to.
As a simple example, this can be useful if we want to invalidate the articles list cache when one article gets updated.
$articles = Article::cacheFor(60)->cacheTags(['latest:articles'])->latest()->get();$article = Article::find($id); $article->update(['title' => 'My new title']);Article::flushQueryCache(['latest:articles']);
The method flushQueryCache invalidates only the caches that were tagged with latest:articles. If some other queries would have been tagged with tags other than latest:articles, they would be kept in the cache.
Digging deeper
For more about this package, check out the project’s page on GitHub.
Interview With Stephen Willeford, the Hero of Sutherland Springs
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Stephen Willeford, the Hero of Sutherland Springs
Sutherland Springs, TX –-(Ammoland.com)- Stephen Willeford is the epitome of the definition of a “good guy with a gun.”
On November 5, 2017, a mad man entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX, and opened fired on the Church congregation. The attacker killed 26 members of the church and wounded 20 other worshippers. He then fled the house of worship to continue his attacks.
Stephen Willeford, an NRA instructor and firearms enthusiast, knew he must do something to stop the killer’s deadly rampage. He couldn’t sit around and let a maniac attack his community. He grabbed his AR-15 and set out to end the murderer’s violent spree.
Willeford engaged the killer as he was leaving the church. A gunfight erupted in the parking lot. Willeford hit the killer twice, once in the leg and once in the upper left torso under the attacker’s tactical vest. The killer dropped his AR-15 and fired on Willeford with a pistol before speeding off in his Ford Explorer.
Willeford saw a pickup truck driven by Johnnie Langendorff. He approached the truck and jumped in the passenger seat. The two men chased the killer’s Explorer for seven minutes at speeds approaching 95 miles an hour.
Soon the killer lost control of his vehicle and ended up 30 feet into a field on the opposite of the road. Willeford and Langendorff noticed the attacker wasn’t moving and kept the ford covered until police arrived on the scene. The police found the killer dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I had a chance to speak with Stephen about his views on guns and what happened on that fateful day in Sutherland Springs, TX.
John: What is your background with guns?
Stephen: I grew up on a dairy farm where I learned to shoot a .22 Remington Scoremaster when I was five years old. My father taught me how to shoot tin cans and eventually hunt rabbits and shoot snakes and coyotes on the farm. Firearms were an integral part of life on a farm. As an adult, I entered shooting competitions with pistols and rifles at a San Antonio shooting range called Blackhawk. I also helped coach a youth shooting club at Blackhawk, where we trained the youth in firearms safety and marksmanship. I believe teaching the next generation to shoot is essential.
John: How did you find out the shooting in the church was happening?
Stephen: My oldest daughter heard the shots and made me aware of it.
John: What made you engage the shooter?
Stephen: I knew my community needed the shooting to stop. I arrived before law enforcement. He came out of the building, shooting at me. I truly believe God had called me to go there and stop it.
John: A lot of people think you are a hero. Do you believe that you are one?
Stephen: I prefer to consider myself a sheepdog, following my shepherd and protecting his flock. There are a lot of other sheepdogs in this world that would have done the same thing if they had been there.
John: Were you scared?
Stephen: I wasn’t scared at all. I was terrified. But the Holy Spirit was with me, telling me not to concern myself with the bullets coming my way, but to do what he sent me to do.
John: How has your life changed since the incident?
Stephen: I have traveled to places around the nation, speaking to churches and other groups about the need to be vigilant and ready if this were to happen in their communities by forming Safety Response Teams. I have spoken to politicians about good policies to prevent criminals from getting guns instead of the knee-jerk reactions they usually have of penalizing law-abiding citizens by enacting gun control measures that do nothing but make them feel better. I have met with several law enforcement agencies, encouraging their members and letting them know that they are appreciated, in spite of the negative media narrative.
John: What do you think about people that blame the gun for the church shooting?
Stephen: It is easy to blame the gun for the shooting because it takes away the responsibility of each individual for their actions. It is actually a matter of the heart, good vs. evil. That is a lot harder to fix. This country needs to go back to what God values, life. From conception to death. Until we can instill that in our society, these incidents will continue. Life matters — all lives. And individual responsibility is a key to stopping these kinds of things. A firearm is a tool, and nothing more.
John: Were you prepared to be thrown in the spotlight?
Stephen: Not at all. I tried to stay out of it. But now I have a voice that I believe can make a difference.
John: You campaigned with Ted Cruz. Is it important for you to help pro-gun candidates?
Stephen: It is important to help pro-gun candidates and good Godly men and women who are willing to stand up for our rights that are protected by the Constitution.
John: Do you think we can defeat the gun-control movement?
Stephen: I think we HAVE to defeat the gun-control movement if we want to save our Republic. We have to educate those who are uninformed about firearms and our Constitution.
John: Why is the Second Amendment important to you?
Stephen: Without the Second Amendment, the right to defend ourselves and our community, the rest of the Amendments, our Constitution and our Nation as we know it will fall. We need to protect it for our children, our grandchildren, and our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
John: Anything else you want our readers to know?
Stephen: Firearm owners are not the threat that people should be afraid of. Go out and get trained. Even the best of shooters need to continue to train. Start thinking about the mindset of a sheepdog. Look out for your family, your neighbors, your friends, your community. You can make a difference.
Stephen continues to use his voice to advance gun rights
Stephen continues to use his voice to advance gun rights.
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%’ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or at www.crumpy.com.
Justices Hear Arguments In SCOTUS Showdown Over NYC Gun Case
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As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday morning in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v New York City case, gun control activists rallied outside the court in support of gun restrictions, though many of them were oddly silent on the specifics of this case.
Townhall.com’s Julio Rosas joined me from the Court for today’s program, and I also speak with Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League about the surge in Second Amendment Sanctuary counties across the state. I’ll have a separate post on the latest in Virginia but right now let’s talk about the Supreme Court and what it’s likely to do with the case now that justices have heard from both sides.
The biggest question at the moment is whether or not the Court will dismiss the case due to mootness. Transcripts of today’s oral arguments are now now available if you want to read for yourself, but most of the press coverage of the arguments indicates that Chief Justice John Roberts might be the deciding vote on whether the case goes forward and the Court rules on the New York City gun law in question, or if the city’s attempt to moot the case by changing the law a couple of months ago (after defending the law for several years) will end the litigation. From Reuters:
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch were most vocal in advocating for the court to issue a ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts, who could be a pivotal vote in the case, said little but asked whether the city residents who challenged the law would face consequences for violations of the prior regulation.
The legal challenge takes aim at a regulation that had prevented licensed owners from taking their handguns to other homes or shooting ranges outside the confines of the most-populous U.S. city. The regulation was amended in July to allow for such transport.
“What’s left of this case?” asked liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Petitioners got all the relief they sought.”
Not really. As former Solicitor General Paul Clement, who’s representing the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, told the court, some of the provisions of the revised law could still cause city residents to break the law if they so much as stop to get a cup of coffee on the way to the range. Clement also argued that, given the fact that the city didn’t change the law in question until after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, there’s no reason to believe the city was acting in good faith and wouldn’t simply change the law again if the lawsuit is dismissed.
Vox is claiming that Chief Justice John Roberts appeared sympathetic to the city’s position, but I would caution folks from trying to read too much into the questions asked by justices during the oral arguments. Moreover, even Vox acknowledges that if the Supreme Court decides that the New York City gun case is moot, there are other Second Amendment cases queued up and ready for the Court’s attention.
Meanwhile, while New York State Rifle is likely to be declared moot, there is another Second Amendment case — Rogers v. Grewal — that the Supreme Court could take up as soon as Friday. The questions presented in Rogers include “whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a firearm outside the home for self-defense.”
If New York State Rifle is declared moot, the Court could simply take up the Rogers case — and there’s still plenty of time for the Court to decide that case before its current term ends this June.
New York State Rifle, in other words, appears likely to end in the tiniest possible victory for gun control. The case will likely be dismissed as moot, but a Second Amendment reckoning is all but inevitable in the Supreme Court. And it’s likely to come very soon.
That’s the good news for gun owners. The Supreme Court has been holding the Rogers case for months now, and the speculation is that the Court did so pending the outcome of NYSRPA v. NYC. If the Court does decide that the case is still a live issue, the majority opinion could have an impact on the New Jersey carry case, and they could send Rogers back to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals with guidance directed by the NYSRPA v NYC opinion.
If, on the other hand, the Court does moot the New York case, it has Rogers to pick up instead, and the Court would be dealing with a much more explicit challenge to the infringement on the right to bear arms than the New York City case presents.
If the Supreme Court decides that the New York Case is moot, I’d expect a decision to come fairly quickly. If the Court does move forward with the case, expect a ruling in several months.
When the oral argument transcripts are made available, you’ll be able to access them here. In the meantime, check out today’s show with Julio Rosas and VCDL’s Philip Van Cleave, and we’ll be keeping an eye on any future developments at the Supreme Court.
Also on today’s show, we have an armed citizen story from Missouri, a criminal justice fail from Baltimore, and an off-duty officer who performed a very good deed in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Townhall.com’s podcast page. We’ll have much more reaction to today’s oral arguments on tomorrow’s show, so be sure to tune in.
Cam Edwards has covered the 2nd Amendment for more than 15 years as a broadcast and online journalist, as well as the co-author of "Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Start a Family, and Other Manly Advice" with Jim Geraghty. He lives outside of Farmville, Virginia with his family.
