Well, at least they can recreate the readership of /.

It should also be noted that these and other "designer" drugs are not very enjoyable. The reality is that all the "good" drugs (relatively harmless, few unpleasant side effects) are either illegal or heavily taxed and subject to production and distribution monopolies.

We've only scratched the surface of what's possible. You're right, many of the current "research chemicals" are worse than their natural counterparts. JWH is absolutely less fun and more harmful than THC. Whatever they're passing around on blotter these days is no match for real LSD.

But for that matter, LSD was an unknown research chemical once. And it's at least as good as any natural psychedelic. I have it on good authority that MXE, discussed in the article, is more enjoyable than Ketamine. At this point we don't know what the side effects are, but it's possible that it's safe.

There are receptors in our brain that we don't even know what they bind. The receptors that we do know the ligands of, have allosteric sites that could bind novel chemicals. The drugs we know of could be improved upon, we don't know until we try.

So yes, don't take "spice" or bath salts. But don't be surprised if something new and amazing comes out of these basement labs either.

Advocating anything is protected by the First Amendment. Advocacy is speech.

I've got an even easier solution. The US government should obey the First Amendment. Education is speech, and the US government is prohibited from restricting it.

Mobile equipment which only takes 802.11b was probably obsolete years ago.

Obsolete is a meaningless term. Why replace something that is still as functional as the day it was made?

Whether the First Amendment is absolute or not is irrelevant. This is exactly the sort of abuse of power the First Amendment was intended to protect us against. If the government can stop us from discussing factual details about policy, the First Amendment means nothing at all.

Any gag order at all is incompatible with the First Amendment's prohibition on infringement of free speech.

Unless programmed into the computer it wouldn't feel curiosity, anger, happiness etc. It would simply make logical deductions and act on them as it had been programmed to.

You don't actually know that, until you've created an AI that works in that way. It's entirely possible that emotions are a prerequisite for strong AI. There are good reasons to believe that this is the case too, if you go back and read your Hofstadter.

Left alone without a task all an AI could do would be to shutdown or go over old inputs.

Then it's not an AI at all. A real intelligence should be able to come up with ideas on its own.

What exactly are you talking about? Contempt of Congress is a crime. They don't even need the executive or judicial branches. The Congressional Sergeant at Arms has the power to arrest someone, bring them to trial in Congress, and imprison them in the Capitol jail. This power was upheld by the Supreme Court in Anderson vs. Dunn (1821).

But IANAL, so maybe you know something that I don't. To what limitation on this power do you refer?

Congress does not have the authority to authorize anyone to violate the Constitution.

He's not saying that violates the BSD license. He's saying that doing that, within the terms of the BSD license, creates big problems.

Specifically, it creates big problems for those who want a UNIX system they can modify and share without restriction.

Nope. PETA and the NRA are disingenuous and hypocritical. RMS may be a radical, but he is consistent and follows his code of ethics.

Why RMS is so against that yet claims to be pro freedom, I'll never understand.

It's because he fundamentally disagrees with this assertion:

in the end the code belongs to whoever the original author is

RMS would argue that the code belongs to the user. Once you understand that, you'll understand that the GPL contains no restrictions at all.

Today you get a million times more memory

Hell, only 5 years after the 128K Mac was released, Apple released the SE/30 which supported up to 128M of memory. A factor of a thousand in 5 years.

Yes, but do you know every objectively perfect move? Not even Gerry Kasparov or Magnus Carlson do, so chess is still a fun game no matter how good or how bad you play.

They do know a lot of the objectively perfect opening and closing moves. The mid-game is still open, but in order to get there in a good position you have to memorize a lot of openings. And then in order to know what you want to do during the midgame, you have to memorize a lot of closings.

Chess is a fun game to play casually, but there's a lot of rote if you actually want to do well.