gives me a terrible, sinking feeling.

Where the hell did you get these numbers? Acid back in the 60s and 70s was typically in the range of 300-400mcg per hit. Today, it varies between around 75-150mcg for a standard dose. Links to erowid have already been posted, and they've got articles detailing this information, plus further links to the DEA testing data they got their numbers from, so I'm not going to bother reposting it. There's some conflicting data on what a "standard" dose would be today, but very little of the seized and tested samples even go above 150mcg of LSD

Also, LSD is one of the most potent psychoactives know the man. Out of potential impurities or additives used to cut it, almost none of them are active at the miniscule doses they would be able to be added in. Of those that would be active, the overwhelming majority are expensive enough that it simply makes no sense to use them for this purpose. LSD is one of the purest street drugs you can buy, simply because cutting it is basically a waste of money. You could try and add stuff to it, but it would have little effect, if any, and the tiny amounts you could add wouldn't justify any significant increase in price. Cutting acid is basically pissing away money on additives for no reason.

And what is it exactly that he has accomplished with this? He's certainly a succesful businessman, but what in this article is actually supposed to impress me with its pioneering vision? This man has meticulously documented the minutiae of his day to day life for years and years, then taken this data and produced graphs which tell us...not much of anything, actually. We can tell he wakes up and goes to sleep at largely the same times most days, and also eats dinner at the same time. But please, I'm just an ignorant plebian, share some of your knowledge with me and reveal how he has documented something profound.

As I said in another post, cool for him if he wants to do this with his life. Hope he has fun with it, and I wouldn't do it myself. But he's simply built a great amount of data about absolutely mundane tasks. Possibly the single interesting thing you could glean from what he published was being able to see how his book came together. That aside, he just obsessively compiled data on how he performed tasks that millions of people do everyday. I can't help but feel like the only reason why this seems like such an awesome, world-changing idea to him is because it's his data. You probably don't care how many sheets of toilet paper I use in a typical year, and I don't care how many emails you sent between 6AM-8AM on average for the month of May in 1993. This guy has done some impressive stuff with his life, but I don't think this is one of them.

Yeah, it really seems like a terribly longwinded way of saying, "I went OCD and started tracking all this stuff, and I graphed it. Pretty cool, huh?" He doesn't draw any conclusions about it, or even provide some sort of practical uses for it. If my memory is fuzzy about something, I've got a way less time consuming method of getting the info about it. I call up the friends I was with at the time and ask them if they remember whatever it is I forgot. Of course, this method assumes you have friends, and you're not some strange guy who obsessively notes every tiny event in his life in detail, so it won't work for everyone.

Sure, my memory will fail me in the future (it's already crap now), but I'm okay with that. If I were living in a time where this sort of detailed breakdown and analysis were applied to everyone, I'd much rather forget things and not understand the reasons behind events 100% than have a database of every little detail of my life in it for anyone who'd pay to check it out. If one guy decides to do it for himself, I guess that's cool for him. But when you take this idea to its logical conclusion and start applying this to large groups of people, it sounds much too like Big Brother for me to be comfortable with at all.

It also strikes me as the most likely way people would wind up living in some sort of Orwellian, totalitarian state. At first, they'll tell us of all the benficial things this could give us, and phase it in gradually. They might tell us of how it could help medicine, and we agree to let them start monitoring our food and drink consumption, along with our exercise habits. And when something good, such as a cure for some difficult to vanquish disease, comes as a result, people will see that it provided them some tangible benefit this time. And from there it will slowly bleed out into other areas of life. This slow, creeping invasion of privacy strikes me as a much more likely route to such a future than such a government having a revolution and things changing overnight.

Personal analytics on large populations will ultimately suffer from the same problem so many schemes involving information and power do. If it happens, we'll probably have welcomed it for the perceived benefits to society we can get from it on a small scale, naively believing individuals in positions of power will be benevolent rulers. Most people will act shocked when this power is abused and steadily has its limits expanded. The rest of us will sit down and say, "When we were talking about this happening 20 years ago, we were the conspiracy nutjobs, eh? I'd say I told you so and leave you to deal with it, but instead I'll thank you for screwing me over too."

I don't think there's actually too many people who are opposed to the principle behind patents. Most people can probably agree that if someone invents something useful that helps people out, they deserve to have the opportunity to be compensated for it if they so desire. I'd say most people take issue with the many serious abuses of the system, and silly laws around it. This isn't just restricted to patents, but is a broader issue with the current state of intellectual property laws in general. Looks at how many things get their copyright extended again and again which would have been out of copyright long ago in a sane system.

There's also plenty of situations where it genuinely interferes with people trying to advance technologies. Between its impeding progress, excessive extensions and horrible abuses by IP rights holders, it's hard for me to resist saying, "To hell with this. Let's just scrap the whole damn system and start over from scratch, we've screwed it up too much." I'm not entirely opposed to the ideas behind it, but I'm increasingly becoming of the opinion that our current system has just been messed up to much to save it. In my opinion, it'd be a waste of time trying to simply reform it, and the easiest course of action would just be rebuilding it from the ground up, and trying not to make the same mistakes next time.

They'll get no pity from me. People have been telling them for years now that they need to get with the times and change. They've chosen not to, so as far as I'm concerned, they can rot. If you can't be bothered to make necessary changes to your business model, when everyone is telling you that you will die if you don't, no amount of legislation and lawsuits are going to save you. They're only prolonging their miserable death at this point.

of how weak his own position is that his only response is the cry foul and claim everyone who opposed the bill had been misled. We weren't misled. We knew exactly why this bill was such a horrible piece of legislation. If anyone, it was him and the bills backers who were deluded in thinking that people would not get pissed off by such horribly half-baked legislation. We're talking about something that would have essentially made him and his friends judge and jury on copyright infringement online, will little to no recourse for the accused to defend themselves, and even then only after the fact.

We've seen how well they handled even lesser power in these matters, between frivolous DMCA takedown notices (sometimes on stuff they didn't even own the rights to), and more recently the case of a company claiming birdsong was in violation of its copyrights. The bill demonstrated a blatant disregard for internet security, by potentially crippling DNSSEC. And their response was simply, "Well, you're just going to have to scratch that plan and come up with something else, now aren't you?"

Given their practical disdain for how the internet works, and a plethora of precedents demonstrating they will not hesitate to abuse any power given them, we simply must have been misled into believing they didn't have our best interests at heart. I find this patronizing, "You just don't worry about it, we know what's best for you." attitude completely offensive. I'll be watching for the next time they try and slip garbage like this through, and you can be damn sure I'll be opposed to it then. Don't call me misled when you're lying through your teeth to me. I don't take kindly to it, and I would hope no one else would either. I'd love to see this inane series of statements by him blow up in his face and lead to even greater opposition next time he and his friends try to force something like SOPA down our throats.

It's somewhat difficult to really propose any "ideal" solution with anarchism anyway, seeing as it splits off into a million different splinter factions. I was more responding to the notion I saw as implied in that post as anarchism basically being a free for all with no notion of justice. I also saw some irony in this interpretation, since for most people who go with a knee-jerk reaction, libertarianism comes off as being anarchy, but only for certain individuals or corporations. And so it gets the same sort of criticism lobbed at it. Perhaps I misinterpreted your intent, but that's how it came off to me. That idea of, "Screw it all, let's go wild. No rules, no consequences, isn't anarchy awesome!" seems to really only exist for the high school punk crowd that appropriate it as a quick and dirty way of excusing their own misbehaviour. Once you start looking at individuals who are giving it serious thought as a way of organizing society, like Kropotkin, they try to incorporate some form of punishment of individuals who act against the wishes or morals of society, while minimally restricting their freedom.

If you read into it more, there's some pretty interesting ideas out there about it. There is the splintering issue I mentioned to watch out for, which you can easily see just by clicking 'show' for the Schools of thought and Theory/Practice section of the box on the right. To a certain extent, anarchism is really just libertarianism stripped of the idea that a government of any size is good or necessary. A good chunk of the ideals and stated goals are largely the same. Again, part of the reason I was poking fun at a libertarian criticizing anarchism for a topic where they're basically on the same exact page.

Not really true. Anarchists would simply argue that there are better ways to deal with asshole punching everyone in the face than governments. For example, if you ran around punching people in the face, a town organized around anarchist principals might simply get together and say, "Hey, this guy really sucks. How about we agree that we'll all keep him out of the town? Alright, he comes back, we'll just tie him up, and take him away to set him loose 20 miles away from here."

I find it rather amusing that someone defending an ideology that sees the exact same inappropriate criticism levied at it would hastily turn around and wing that criticism back at another ideology that really only differs in how it suggests the goals (personal freedom) would be best obtained. I can't say I buy into it myself, but anarchy doesn't say, "Okay, all bets are off, go crazy people. Kill, rape, whatever, we don't care." If you look past teenagers trying to look rebellious and read some stuff by genuinely intelligent, and mature people who've written on the topic, the idea tends to be more along the lines of thinking that having a government in order to protect yourself against crimes often leads to more severe restrictions of freedom and other problems than the protection they offer you. The benefits of government are supposed to be implemented at a community or personal level instead. I'd suggest it's naive, but it's hardly the absurd ideology you paint it as.

For making this work in open source browsers is to use hardware with closed binary-blobs in charge of implementing it? Yeah that'll really go over well with the open source crowd. It totally doesn't defeat the purpose... Seems like a pretty bad way to get what they want. I'd like to be able to get Netflix streaming on my linux machines, but not with this sort of half-baked concept.

Just because the average person has no clue about something doesn't render it unimportant. The average person probably also has no clue how any number of functions, like updates, of their shiny Windows 7 or OS X machines are actually implemented, but that doesn't mean it's any less important how system tasks are carried out. This article is just sensationalist garbage. For your average person, linux will simply remain one monolithic entity like it has been to most people for ages now, "Linux." For the people who actually use it and interact with it on a day to day basis, the notion that we're close to the point where it's only a choice of DE is just laughable.

No one who knew what they were doing with a computer would do anything other than tip them into the trash immediately. You can't underestimate the amount of money they make off clueless people like my mother who would be ecstatic to have gotten those disks, and likely consider it practically necessary to buy and install the full version of all those stupid programs if she were given free disks. Until someone like you or I comes along and point out that those programs are unnecessary crap, there are plenty of people who feel as if they're getting a great value out of this garbage software that comes bundled in, and would happily pay the extra themselves if they only received demo disks.

It's a bit different with Macs, though. You got effectively one vendor as your sole source for Macs. It'd be different if Dell, Lenovo and all the others were free to ship computers with OS X installed, but that's not the case. So if you intentionally choose that one vendor that whose product is in large part the OS that it ships with and you brought a suit like this, the judge would probably laugh at you and ask why you didn't just purchase from someone else and get a computer with Windows installed on it or something. With Windows, nearly every company is bundling Windows, so even if you chose a different vendor, you're likely going to wind up stuck with Windows anyway. Though I don't know why you chose to respond to me in particular, as I'm not even really arguing in favour of this ruling.

than any inability to have avoided this situation. Can't the French just order from a vendor that offers laptops with either some variety of Linux they like installed, or no OS at all? Even if there aren't French sites out there for that purpose, it wouldn't have been that hard to order from the US or somewhere. Unless there's something I'm unaware of preventing them from doing this, it would seem to me that he could have just done that and avoided the lawsuit altogether. Seems to me as if he intentionally chose to do this and brought the lawsuit simply as a matter of principle rather than from any pressing need to do so. I'm sure there's a linux friendly vendor or someone willing to ship a machine with a blank drive where he could have purchased something comparable.