I don't think that anyone would be so foolish as to say or suggest that THC does not impair driving skills, although the degree of response to THC is much more varied than with alcohol. I'm sorry you read something in my words which you found to be misleading, but I'm glad that you found the linked article to be informative; my goal was to provide more accurate information about the nature of THC intoxication and not to characterize it myself. It is clearly a complicated subject and I didn't want to either quote-mine or take the time to provide a balanced summary.

If I may be allowed to clarify the sentence to which you object, I would say that the GP's comment (the quoted one) was absurd on its face. As they say, the dose makes the poison. There may be some level of THC intoxication which is equivalent (by some measure) to the effects of a .08 BAC, and research in determining that would presumably be worthwhile. Knee-jerk ignorant anti-cannabis rhetoric (or legislation) does not contribute to a reasoned discussion.

Your link is misleading. Yes, marijuana does not do good things to developing brains — there are much better studies which demonstrate this. There is no similar evidence which suggests that either moderate use or use beginning in adulthood has the same effect.

Here is the actual study in question. Do note that their average test subject started at age 16 and smokes five joints per day. From the article,

One joint does not a pothead make. You've pretty much already missed the boat for pot-related brain damage, but your knee-jerk antagonism against cannabis users is equally as dumb. Even if everything you imagine to be true about cannabis use was in fact the truth,

This does not follow. There is no objective evidence suggesting that marijuana is equally impairing, and suggesting that any amount of use or exposure to THC is equivalent to being dangerously impaired is simple prejudice.

When you can drive a starship through the holes in either theory, get back to me. I don't think we're actually in disagreement; I realize I was speaking imprecisely. I hope that you can forgive me a little hyperbole, and I will totally pick you to double-check my physics papers in the future.

No, I was not wrong, I am well aware that certain effects propagate faster than the speed of light. Note that gravity waves have not been directly observed. There are other quantum effects which propagate faster than c, but the fundamental constraint is that nothing can accelerate to or past c, and classical information cannot propagate faster than c. There are solutions to GR equations which allow for spacetime to be bent to the point where something that *looks* like FTL to fall out, but they tend to require exotic matter, and there's no evidence to suggest that said matter exists.

Finally, one must keep in mind that any form of FTL allows for reference frames in which effects precede their causes. You may feel happy living in a universe where causality isn't a thing, but that to me would put unpleasant limits on what is knowable about our universe.

This kind of comment is deeply ignorant and anti-science. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe. If you would rather believe in your own personal fantasies instead of one of the most well-supported theories in science, congratulations, you are yet another variety of religious loon.

Look, it's pretty simple. Science is not magic, and there is shit that it says that is for real-real not for play-play. We don't know what the future will look like in 2050 or 2100, but we can be completely sure of three things:

1) There will be no violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
2) Nothing (for all important values of nothing) will travel faster than the speed of light.
3) Commercial fusion power will still be 20 years out.

The first two are immutable laws of physics, the final one was proven by a Dr. M. T. Budget. Humor aside, relativity and thermodynamics have been proven at both the largest and smallest scales that humans have been able to observe, and at every level in between. They are not perfect theories, but they do place very hard and very real constraints on what kind of rabbits you can pull out of a given hat. You will not go to intergalactic space today, nor tomorrow, nor while anything recognizable as human exists.

You obviously have no idea why systemd isn't portable. Its whole point of existence is process management using cgroups. Shame on the kernel devs for not writing cgroups into every OS's kernel! Oh wait, that's retarded. And guess what else you can't run on Mac OSX or Windows? Your SysV init scripts. Hell, those aren't usually portable between distributions; systemd is more compatible. You're also wrong about GNOME; their continued policy is to keep the loosest possible dependency on systemd, and that only because they need the features of logind. Write a replacement, and they will use it.

Whenever other kernels support compatible features you can argue about portability. It sounds like you have some code you need to get writing.

Isn't pretty much every vote split along party lines anyway?

Note that while this sometimes fails to happen that does not mean that the problem does not exist.

So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.

If you can't define why this particular (loosely-defined) bundling is bad, then I submit that it's a matter of opinion, and I for one am confused as to why we're focused on one technology giant as opposed to another. Saying something is anti-consumer is easy; any commercial entity is going to be anti-consumer to some degree, most often to whatever degree they can get away with. Why is market competition not a good criterion here?

I've been using Linux Mint lately, and fucking up my system royally. So I've had to fall back on the LiveUSB installation to repair the system. Mint doesn't get a financial kickback from Google, so they ship Yahoo! as the default search engine instead. This has led me, by accident, to use Yahoo! a few times when looking for information.

I'm not saying that I would rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than use Yahoo! search; that wouldn't make my system boot. Was it worth it to continually type in 'google' and hit Ctrl+Enter before entering a search query? Yes, every single time, and I deeply regretted each lapse in memory. The only reason Firefox might care about Google is if they care about the quality of their search results.

For me, as a web developer, even though the built-in tools in Chrome and Firefox have come a long way since 2006, I still prefer debugging in Firebug, and installing Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Tree Style Tabs. Firefox is my web browser of choice. However, Google is still my search engine of choice, and having one without the other is a serious issue for me. I hope that I will remember every time to go to google.com when I need to search for information, but every time I forget, I am sure that I will curse this deal.

Not only is chocolate labor-intensive, it's a terrible excuse for a plant. If its seeds are not spread by animals, it will either rot on the tree, or fall right next to the parent and compete with it. Also, at least in Central America, the primary pollinator of the cacao plant is some sort of tiny sandfly -- locally they call them "chitras". And it's not like they're growing this stuff on nice flat fields in neat rows either. Even after the harvest, you have to hope that the weather stays nice long enough to ferment and dry the beans. And then, as you say, they have to contend with a miserable pay scale. There may be worse occupations, but I can't think of any offhand.

You should have debunked Mandelbrot's Misbehavior of Markets instead. You understand Fama's efficient market hypothesis was a mathematical proof, yes? Where is your math?

Your price theory is obvious bullshit, simplistic on the level of "What comes down must go up." I hope that being a nutcase was worth your "federal conviction and permanent ban from the securities industry."

Damage to roads is usually considered proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. Cars are generally calculated to average 2 tons, even "big" SUVs aren't usually as heavy as their size might imply. I don't like SUVs either, but that's no excuse for bad policy. According to this GAO report, a fully-loaded tractor-trailer does as much damage to the roads as at least 9,600 cars. Fuel consumption is proportional to weight at low speeds, and at higher speeds wind resistance rises as the square of velocity; it is obvious just looking at the exponents that a simple fuel tax will not tax large vehicles in proportion to the damage that they cause. Taxing consumers as opposed to commercial vehicles is a terrible idea; it would have the effect of subsidizing heavy vehicular traffic. If we're going to subsidize freight, we should invest in rail infrastructure.

Many people have babies, fewer breastfeed. You must be using a new definition of the word "fundamental".

It's not what they believe that makes them intellectually dishonest, it's denying and inventing observations. Crackpot is not nice but it is accurate.

EU people have a hard time getting published, and never in reputable journals.

This contradicts the above, and fancying yourself a scientist is enough for what exactly? Enough to lie to people? No, the important part of being a scientist is not dressing in a lab coat, having a PhD (the EU guys are in no danger of that), or making predictions. The important part is being empirical, testing your predictions in a methodical way, and adapting your theory to match those observations. There is no more value to what Thornhill and Talbott's writings than any other lunatic's ravings. If you want to cheer on pyramid energy, crystal therapy, homeopathy, or the Electric Universe, that is your business, but it has no place in science.

There's about as much chance of that happening as you revising your theory when it doesn't match observations: practically none.

I'm wondering what Talbott and Thornhill have been reading, or perhaps I should say what they have been smoking, because their description of the observations does not match the ESA's. It has lots of water and a dust trail, and while there has been some unexpected magnetic activity, there isn't some electrical bogeyman waiting to jump out at the lander — and it's not like the scientists involved aren't paying attention to such things. Apparently in order to believe in EU not only do you need to ignore a century's worth of physics (including Einstein), you also have to ignore current observations and make up your own. This is beyond intellectually dishonest and far into flat-earth crackpot territory.