We should be glad that it's Microsoft, so it's someone with deep enough pockets to fight this as long as the courts allow. As you say, it would be a terrible precedent, and too easily extensible to anything a government wished to see (or seize) worldwide.

You can only judge by the samples you've got. I suspect they're pretty durn representative, and they seem to be reasonably consistent.

But if selective breeding works for other plants, why not for pot? Considering the variation known in marijuana, and that anyone can do a "smoke test" of their own crop, how difficult could it be to select toward higher THC content? Why wouldn't they, when it can be done rapidly and easily, and best of all increases your profits?

It would probably take 20 years for the conceptual designs, material selection, laboratory testing of the materials, CAD design, prototype building (a dozen or so), THEN come the lawsuits, Congressional hearings, de-funding, re-funding, de-funding again, re-funding again, route selection, more lawsuits, different route selections ( Repeat ) and finally protestors chaining themselves to everything in the way before the first load of wastes is ready to go anywhere.

Somehow I'm reminded of how when the horseless carriage came along, in some towns they were required by law to be preceded by a man on foot, carrying a lantern or other form of warning to others.

Being able to prescribe a set dosage in a pill one gets from the pharmacy would do a lot to dispel the perception of OMG DRUGS.

(I don't use, but I'm all for legalization if only to kill the 'war on drugs'.)

I assume the medical pot folks have a clue, and they say it tests quite a lot stronger than in the past -- more than six times stronger on average:

http://medicalmarijuana.procon...
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The average potency of all marijuana in the US, according to the UMPMC's Dec. 2008 â" Mar. 2009 quarterly report, was 8.52% (5.62% domestic and 9.57% nondomestic).

The highest tested sample had 22.04% THC (domestic) and 27.30% THC (nondomestic). The highest tested sample ever tested between 1975 and 2009 had 33.12% THC (domestic) and 37.20% THC (nondomestic).

For comparison, the national average of marijuana's THC content in 1978 was 1.37%, in 1988 it was 3.59%, in 1998 4.43%, and in 2008 8.49%.
======

They also point out that today's joints are typically smaller, so the total dosage may be about the same, or at least not much higher. However, that also means it may be harder for a novice to determine his limits -- kinda like being handed a bottle of vodka for your first drink.

A great deal of a PC's heat exchange happens through the case. Plastic shells are therefore not a good idea. (If you don't believe me, wrap your machine in a towel, leaving the front and back open, and watch the temperature go up.) And this one has less surface area. My guess is it will actually run hotter than the same equipment in a standard case.

As to Dell's engineering for temperature mitigation -- a few years ago someone gift me a top-of-the-line Dell that had a chronic overheating issue. It had the hood-and-distant-fan arrangement that OEMs seem to like, but no CPU fan and only the most minimal heatsink, like we mighta used on a 486. I removed the hood and the crappy heatsink, added a standard CPU heatsink/fan (nothing special, just a cheap stock model) and the machine's operating temperature dropped by 40F degrees (yes, FORTY degrees Fahrenheit).

So much for all the engineering that's supposed to enhance cooling, eh? This was when I concluded that, given that excess heat kills a machine in about 3 years, these damn things are *designed to die*.

It was supposed to be 12 monkeys. Idiots!

A year or so ago an article on this very thing was discussed here on /. -- the upshot was that when you watch how kids behave, girls pack up as a dominant female, her immediate crony, and a bunch of hangers-on who are treated as underlings, while boys pack up as an amorphous group where all are more or less equal in status, despite one perhaps being the leader.

BTW it's pretty much the same with dogs, if you have enough to observe pack behavior.

Right now Walmart has 16GB Sandisk flash drives for $9 (look in the School Supplies section, same damn thing as in Electronics but in a garish case for half the money). Last year they had 64GB Sandisk flash drives for $8. Costco has 64GB drives right now for $24. This sort of pricing is tempting me away from DVDs as my backup medium, because flash is more reliable in long-term storage and takes up a lot less space. Yeah, DVDs are cheaper and faster to make, but reliability in storage isn't the best.

If you want to buy in real quantity, go to alibaba.com and you'll see what they really cost at wholesale.

As to old tech, I still have a machine with a 5" floppy and a QIC-80 tape drive. It often goes years unused, but when I need it, I'm glad to have it.

Not only that, but modern Americans don't generally live in flea-infested houses anymore. Bubonic plague is endemic in the squirrel population in Los Angeles, yet everyone who goes to a park doesn't come down with it. We just don't have enough exposure to fleabites.

But the problem isn't the cables in most cases, its the service. I no longer have to deal with Cogeco's policies, I get Teksavvy's instead.

Sure, I understand, I had the same deal — with Verizon in place of Cogeco and SpeakEasy in place of Teksavvy. While it worked things were fine. When something went wrong, figuring out, which of the two is responsible was rather difficult.

Because Verizon was selling their DSL service — direct competition with SpeakEasy — they weren't exactly anxious to help SpeakEasy resolve problems...