Links for Sunday April 19^th, 2009

• U.S. Soldiers' New Weapon: an iPod - Newsweek.com: The iPod Touch is one of Apple's more brilliant (and under-rated) innovations. Stripping out the phone part also strips out the long term contract, allowing the iPhone software infrastructure to be used in a lot more places, in more interesting ways. And it raises the bar for competitors -- now, to compete with the iPhone, you also have to compete with the iPod Touch as well. Brilliant.

• The Real Pirate Bay - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org: Well when you put it this way, now I'm (even more) pissed off about this banking scandal.

• Switch and bait — Crooked Timber: While there can be some cognitave dissonance when switching from Windows to Mac (some shortcuts are different, etc.), I like the idea of letting people who are "on the fence" use a Mac for a few days. I think that a lot of people would switch after trying the ultimate taste test.