What about cafes that serve coffee? You know, the beverage containing a highly addictive drug? Should we ban those too?

The issue with pot cafes is that it's hard for people to work in them without being exposed to passive smoke, but if you can address that then I don't see the difference between them and normal cafes.

I don't see a contradiction (although I'm not an American). I have no problems with people smoking, snorting, injecting, or otherwise consuming any drugs that they want. I do object if they blow smoke in public areas or leave needles (especially used ones) lying around in public places.

I would be in favour of banning smoking anything in public places (including places of work) and permitting people to take any drugs that they want in their own home. There are some difficult areas (for example, should people with children be allowed to smoke whatever they like at home around their children?) but the general rule of thumb should be that you can do whatever you want to your own body and mind, just don't do it to anyone else.

Not really. Whuffle is more sensible as a currency concept - it's fungible. There's no difference in how you can use Whuffle based on who gave it to you. There are some interesting economics papers based on the idea that anyone can create a mint and the value of its currency would be tracked based on the reputation of the person.

It's difficult to rate-limit login attempts from a botnet. The attack pattern I see on my server is one IP making three login attempts, then another IP making three login attempts, and so on. I do rate limit (via temporary IP blocking) attempts from one IP, but it doesn't help much. Of course, they're all doing password-based login attempts and I disable password-based SSH logins for all Internet-connected machines...

Yup. Compiling for the Burroughs architecture was easier than many segment-based systems, because they allowed segment descriptors to be placed in main memory, with the CPU responsible for tracking the value type by updating a tag. We adapt this slightly so that we only require one tag bit per 256 bits of main memory (the paper describes the implementation of this in some detail, but I'm happy to answer questions) to be able to safely store capabilities in main memory. Our design also allows normal C data structures to work as expected. You can mix C code compiled for MIPS and C code compiled for CHERI in the same binary (though you only get coarse-grained protection in the MIPS code).

The Burroughs architecture had very little impact on the computer architecture community, but was enormously influential in the design of VMs for high-level languages. One of our goals is to pull out the aspects of such VMs that are required for memory protection and put them back in the hardware, so a buggy VM has a far more limited security impact. My student's work on JNI dramatically reduced the amount of C code in the trusted computing base for the JVM implementation that he used.

The flippant answer is all that your paranoia deserves. The work was undertaken by SRI and The University of Cambridge. The funding was provided by DARPA, but that's the extent of their involvement (other than creating a program with the goal of being able to redesign any aspect of computing with security in mind).

The code is no more or less meriting an independent audit than any other open source code. Less, actually, because we don't anticipate anyone actually using our open source reference implementation in production, we hope that CPU vendors will take the ISA extensions and apply them to their own chips, but we expect that (if they do) they'll do independent reimplementations. At the ISA levels, we have PVS / SAL proofs that we'll be publishing soon that the ISA does provide the desired security properties and you're welcome to audit those too.

By "vice versa", do you mean that the UN is against whatever the US is in favour of, or do you mean that the US is against whatever the UN is in favour of?

The purpose of the United Nations is:

This does seem to be contrary to the interests of the lobbying interests which run the US government, no?

Interestingly, the event described in the US national anthem would, under current law, be classified as a WMD attack.

We also have a crapload of land which is doing nothing except letting sunlight fall on it and letting wind pass unimpeded across it.

We don't have a lack of sources of energy in Australia. More to the point, we don't have a lack of produced energy, either; we are producing far more power than we use, but thanks to distorted incentives (and not the carbon tax!), we are paying more for it than ever before. Where are you when we need you, o invisible hand?

Australia is unlikely to use nuclear power in the forseeable future for the simple reason that there's no need to. We have precisely the number of nuclear power plants that we need for our own research purposes. As for all that radioactive material, we're better off exporting it to countries that don't have any other realistic options.

No. You can't back up the claim that "most [...] results from a person saying that someone looks nice". Most sexual harassment is nowhere near as simple as that. An isolated instance of someone saying that someone else looks nice is not enough to trigger a sexual harassment complaint in most cases.

Having said that, I'm sure you can see how the context, or constantly commenting on someone's appearance, could easily end up in creepy territory.

Without knowing anything about who these "propagandists" are, or what they exactly said, and in what context they said it, it's hard to say.

"Sexual harassment is required" is a policy.

I'd think you were joking if you hadn't run with it. Of course the law mandates that a policy meets certain minimal criteria.

Systemd definitely solves a problem that exists. Unfortunately, it solves it in the same way that a nuclear warhead solves the problem of rat infestation.

My Windows NT 4.0 disk had a PowerPC installer on it. I never found a CHRP machine to run it on though. I tried it on a PowerPC Mac once, but couldn't get it to boot. Windows 2000 only shipped for IA32.

The most obvious example is the byte-swapping load instructions. There are some other examples if you can find the papers by the VirtualPC authors, which explain them in detail. It's been quite a few years since I paid attention to anything PowerPC related.

You might want to go back and read some press releases from the AIM alliance at that time. Or even look at the ISA: there are a lot of things in there that only make sense if you want to emulate m68k or x86. They were positioning PowerPC as a migration path from m68k and i386 systems and being able to emulate both at a reasonable speed was part of this strategy.