No, actually, possession and manufacture (growing) of marijuana has been legal in Alaska since 1975. I've grown myself, and even had the attention of the authorities called to the matter, which worked out favorably. I've also had friends have growing equipment confiscated by the police, and subsequently returned with an apology. Nota bene: the legal protections applied (almost) exclusively in one's house or primary residence.

There are some cultural differences at work here; Alaskan marijuana was (semi-)legalized under a privacy clause, which mostly stems (ironically) from a far-right desire to be left the hell alone by everyone but especially the Government. Except in the form of pork barrel projects, which everyone knows are necessary in order to compensate for the state's underdeveloped "frontier" status.

Generally speaking, while it was legalized in the sense that cops were not going to bother one for private use, public consumption was strongly discouraged. This was not the first time full legalization has been on the ballot in Alaska, there were similar ballot measures in 2000 and 2004. It's a complicated situation; Alaska is almost ludicrously conservative compared to the other states which have legalized.

One must give credit where credit is due, I think it's significant that after years of effort and a long history of consumption in Alaska, this measure did not succeed until after Colorado and Washington. However, ultimately, I think that the most influential state in marijuana politics would be California: their medical marijuana dispensary system has paved the way for the de-demonization of cannabis. Now, the onus is on all of us to reverse the damage that the War on Drugs has caused, particularly in America's having pushed its drug laws on the entire rest of the world through the UN.

A side note on that: I suspect that this last part will involve the US pushing its drug laws on the rest of the world once more, but it would be nice if there were some process by which the international community could come to sane decisions about these drugs.

Well, that's true to some degree, but it's still possible to do a "clean room" implementation. These sort of things have been done before, perhaps most notably by ReactOS. It's a hell of a lot better than starting with nothing in any case. I suppose it's less common to have a device for which Linux drivers exist but not equivalent Windows drivers, but it's still a little odd for reverse engineering to be normal in Linux-land and completely unheard-of (by myself, at any rate) on the other side of the fence.

Next thing you'll tell me is that I can't run Linux on my clockwork zombie badger. That, sir, is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put!

TBH getting Linux to run on a Chromebook is a bit of a process, too, and some of the drivers just made it to the kernel in 3.17. While we're on the topic of irony, it's strange to think that it's normal for closed-source drivers to be reverse-engineered for Linux, but no one is likely to use the open-source Linux drivers to produce Windows drivers for the Chromebooks.

It's ironic that it doesn't run Linux well, given that [a] Linux can be installed on everything from mechanical watches to dead badgers, and [b] Google insists on the non-release of Windows drivers for their Chromebooks.

Notably including Alan Turing, who was chemically castrated with synthetic estrogen, and eventually committed suicide. I am glad to read that he was formally (royally) pardoned at the end of last year. I cannot imagine who thought castration was an appropriate response, especially given the long traditions of "rum, sodomy, and the lash" in the British Navy, but I suppose one must make allowances for the past, even if it is within living memory.

No, I mean what I said. Whether or not doorknobs should be painted purple is also not a scientific issue, and I take no position on it. I have an opinion about the rhetoric being used in this debate, or should I say the style of demagoguery.

On the one hand, I have no problems describing Monsanto as an evil, duplicitous corporation. If you read the link I provided, their only issue with PCB toxicity was getting all the money they could out of it before the public caught on. On the other hand, there has been and continues to be considerable scientific scrutiny of the dangers of GMO products, which was not the case with PCBs for at least several decades.

With regards to labeling, if it's not an immediate health hazard, I don't really care: it's not going to affect my purchasing habits whether or not it's there. I would support the idea of data being made available to the public on the Internet, and wouldn't you know, there are already several sites where said information can be obtained. Similarly, no one has been able to demonstrate any harm (to humans) from rBST milk; it's not something I am going to loose sleep over. It's not a health issue, it's not a scientific issue, it's just a marketing ploy. I'm not very amenable to marketing, still less so to frenzied, largely factless ranting about hypothetical dangers.

If you want to make this a personal crusade, then I am happy for you. I have enough real problems in my life that I don't have to go looking for more. If you have room in your life to be worried about the genetics of the food on your plate, that puts you ahead of about 90% of humanity. Some day I will have to return to the first world so that I can have those kind of problems too.

As an aside, I don't think "exerts" was the word you were looking for. You maybe meant to use "exhibits"? I could perhaps "push" or "peddle" an opinion, "exhibits" is a little passive.

Yeah, I used the term because you did, it seemed apt. I will more politely request that next time you might lead with data and not diatribe.

Labeling is not an issue I take a position on, actually, except to say that the subject is not itself scientific. We're not talking about data being made available to researchers. Whether the public has a right to know is an important issue, but more of a marketing and commercial interest than a scientific one.

If those studies are all we have to worry about, I will not worry too much. Thank you for providing the links. One question though: on the off chance that GMOs are the significant danger that Taleb thinks is possible, what will labeling help?

Oh, come now, you left out the best story: Monsanto secretly poisons Alabama town.

However, I do think you're completely trolling with this anti-GMO riff. Monsanto being a bunch of evil bastards does not mean that GMO is automatically harmful, and there is a distinct lack of factual evidence in your post to support that idea.

I am not interested in rhetoric. If you cannot show harm, then you are in exactly the same position as anti-vaxxers. If you want to argue that there should be rigorous testing of GMO organisms, sure -- vaccine manufacturers eliminated whatever minute quantities of mercury were used in the manufacturing process based on hypothetical dangers, and there's no reason not to be extra-careful when dealing with possible biological threats. If that's what you're after, maybe you should try mixing in some alternative content with your FUD.

1% is a bad number to use, especially out of context. 1 degree C is better, but the more exact answer is 3.7W/m^2. The Earth receives about 240W/m^2, which gives us a black-body temperature of 255 K, or -18 degrees C. The observed global average temperature is about 33 degrees higher than that, thanks to the atmosphere.

The effect of an increased partial pressure of CO2 is to extend the CO2-rich region further into space. Outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) has a low mean free path (which varies with altitude but is generally in the low tens of meters), so it doesn't make much difference near the surface. The lower atmosphere is already more or less opaque to IR, so the effect is for OLR to take slightly longer to leave the upper atmosphere. Overall this means that the system retains more heat energy, by a tiny amount.

The problem is that CO2 isn't the only gas in the atmosphere, and there happen to be huge reservoirs of a much more effective greenhouse gas covering some 70% of the Earth's surface. It would be nice if either we could figure out another way that heat is transferred to space, or if there were some agent in the upper atmosphere that would counteract the effect of CO2. The first one can be ruled out by the physics of radiation, and the second one has not been observed by satellites. So, that leaves us with a certainty of 3.7W/m^2 per doubling of CO2, plus water vapor feedbacks, which are likely to be strongly positive, because the amount of water vapor that can be held in the atmosphere goes up exponentially with temperature, and as stated, water vapor is a much more effective GHG than CO2.

One supplier does not competition make. Also, Intel isn't necessarily interested in making the chips that the Gov't wants, or this article would probably not exist.

No, the government's job is infrastructure, and other things that can be described as natural monopolies. If the start-up costs for a business are in the tens- to hundreds-of-billions, there isn't going to be much in the way of competition no matter what the industry is. If it's actually vital that said industry exists, it makes sense to nationalize it.

However, if competition is possible, it should be encouraged. There's no reason to nationalize SecureWidgetCo if a dozen people could take their place tomorrow, even if they only sell to the government.

It's clear that if the US Government wants to be sure of its chip supply, it needs to be in business for itself. The ultimate reason is not however that it's inherently inefficient for the government to enter into contracts with private companies, but that large scale microchip fabrication is so expensive that no (private, US) company is willing to do it.

P.S. With respect, if your response to this is that natural monopolies do not exist, please save yourself the trouble of responding.

Socialized does not mean paid with by tax money. Socialized means that the workers or public collectively own the means of production.

You're talking about fascism, which Mussolini was fond of describing as "the union of the Corporation with the State."

It's a matter of perspective. Being able to accurately track processes (via cgroups) is systemd's raison d'etre, and a natural part of this is to be able to start and stop services. In order to do that well, you're going to need to have some sort of idea about service dependencies and system resources. As long as you're going to do all the hard parts of init anyway, you may as well be an init system. Even so, it's not entirely necessary that systemd run as PID1, but it seems to have been coded that way. However, it's not the only service manager that does this: runit, daemontools, and the service managers for OSX and Solaris also handle init.

The other thing that is enabled by accurate process management is tracking user sessions. It's not strictly part of the mission statement, but it's not too much of a stretch, and no other project (besides the moribund ConsoleKit) is providing it. That would be why the major Desktop Environments are dependent on systemd, not because they want to, but because there's no alternative. So, it's not going to be enough to mandate that Debian be init-neutral, someone needs to sit down and either fix ConsoleKit (which was abandoned for a reason), or write something equivalent. I believe Canonical has made some steps forward there.

If you're going to argue against systemd, you should consider learning something about it. There is far more heat than light on the side of the detractors, and it does not help their cause.

There's submodules and subtrees, neither works all that well. SVN can pull down part of a repo, which is (IMO) slightly more sane behavior.

Git's subtree / subproject management is extremely painful. The information manager from hell, indeed. I dislike SVN/CVS extremely, but they make much easier to do sub-repositories. For example, Arch's ABS is entirely under SVN, which works well enough for them, but using git the same way sounds like torture.