For simple possession, unless you get busted by federal agents there is no way you're going to end up facing federal possession charges. Quit scaremongering.

This has been addressed elsewhere, but I'll bring it up, because that meme, while well-intentioned and does convey something important, is problematic in how it's been formulated.

October was the 332nd consecutive month (27 years, 8 months IIRC) with an above-average global average temperature. Local extremes exist, of course, within each global average. So while it is true to say that those of us under 27 have never experienced a month with a global average temperature colder than average, it is not true to say that we personally have never experienced a month which was colder than average.

my permanent move away from GNOME. I am learning to like XFCE!

Yeah, but Obama's no FDR, that's for damn sure.

RTFS, they're talking about getting it onto an iOS device.

Read the first paragraph of the license. It's covered by three patents, two of which are still in effect because they were granted in 1992. You have until September 2012 before they expire, assuming no continuations have been granted, and there is still the matter of copyright.

I don't know about you guys but I like to just keep myself warm. Long johns and a wool sweater do me just fine.

Due to the oversupply; everybody wants in on law and somebody's gotta teach it!

If they hadn't?

Shit, how about once every 9 months? That way when they decide to deploy an entirely new init system they might have some more time for integration and bugsquashing, and they could package PulseAudio properly for release like they initially didn't, or do a decent job packaging KDE4.

Or at least they could shove that extra time between the Beta and RC and spend a lot more time squashing bugs. After about 8.10 or so the bugginess of each release has felt like kind of a constant, and it's higher than it should be.

Kurzweil's argument was

The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil. About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

Meyers' "tangent" about biochemistry is spot-on. In order to simulate a thing you must first understand it, which we are nowhere close to doing when it comes to the gene-brain relationship. Meyers talked about genes and brains only because Kurzweil said it first and made some silly extrapolations about the complexity of the human brain. Kurzweil talks about the genome like it's a long computer printout and you can just read it and understand how to build to a brain -- or at least, deduce the operating principles of the brain. That's not how the genome works at all and in ten years we're not going to be anywhere near close to understanding it.

I found A Scanner Darkly melodramatic and underwhelming anyway.

Well sure, the contents probably will be known in time. But all I'm saying is, until you do know don't be so quick to assume what's in there. You know what happens when you assume things...

Step back out of the land of speculation. What is known about the insurance file:

* It's 1.4 GB
* It's encrypted with AES-256
* If anybody has the key they haven't published it.

What you can reasonably infer: It's information the gov. doesn't want released, providing Assange with "insurance".

Unless you have AES-256 goggles that let you peer through the encryption I would hesitate to comment in further detail on the contents of the file and therefore the moral character of the man who published it.

Especially since part of our solution is lighting it on fire...