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Cannabis News - Help Keep Peter McWilliams out of Prison...& Alive Peter encourages us to write to Judge King encouraging leniancy in his sentencing. Peter was arrested for growing medical marijuana in his home in Placer County, California. The judge granted a prosecution motion essentially denying Peter the right to defend himself, so he pled guilty to a lesser charge. Peter McWilliams is one of my heroes in the libertarian movement. It was his book, Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do, that introduced me to libertarian thought. Peter has AIDS. He was using cannabis because it allowed him to keep down his AIDS drug cocktail. It was working. Since he was arrested and has been unable to keep down his medicine, his AIDS has rebounded. I have seen recent pictures of him in a wheelchair. Putting him in prison for 5 years would kill him for sure. Claire Wolfe says, Don't Shoot the Bastards (Yet). I'm having a hard time with that already. If they kill Peter, it will become even more difficult to maintain non-violence.
Dave Winer - DaveNet: How to Make Money on the Internet. I don't usually point to Dave's writing because I figure that most of the people who come here read his stuff. But this DaveNet is really good. I'm going to be in Boston on Tuesday morning. Maybe I can convince my wife to hang around until the evening so I can go to Dave's session at the Hynes Auditorium (room 304, 6-7:30pm). I don't think I've said it recently:
Thank You Dave!!
for creating Manilla and making it available to us via editthispage.com.
Arizona Republic - House panel OKs bill to secede from union. I like the chutzpah of this bill. As a practical matter, it probably won't pass the Arizona house, and even if it does, it doesn't take effect unless 34 other states join in. The bill text includes, "when or if the President of the United States, the Congress of the United States or any other federal agent or agency declares the Constitution of the United States to be suspended or abolished, if the President or any other federal entity attempts to institute martial law or its equivalent without an official declaration in one or more of the states without the consent of that state or if any federal order attempts to make it unlawful for individual Americans to own firearms or to confiscate firearms, the State of Arizona, when joined by thirty-four of the other fifty states, declares as follows: that the states resume all state powers delegated by the Constitution of the United States and assume total sovereignty; that the states re-ratify and re-establish the present Constitution of the United States as the charter for the formation of a new federal government, to be followed by the election of a new Congress and President and the reorganization of a new judiciary..."
Anchorage Daily News via Cannabis News - Marijuana Legalization Makes Ballot. Alaskans will vote in November on "an initiative to legalize marijuana and other hemp products". Yay!
UWIRE via Cannabis News - Hemp Legalization Bill Introduced in Nebraska. Double yay!
Mary Kane at DrugSense - Kill the Meth Bill. A good article about this legislative abomination. "S.486 ... is called the Defeat of Methamphetamine Act but will be remembered as the Death of Free Speech Act... I have a web site devoted to industrial hemp... If the Meth bill becomes law, I will be a criminal for posting all of this information! It's a wacky world where one can go to jail not for growing, trafficking or dealing drugs, but by simply talking about them! Today's law-abiding activist is tomorrow's political prisoner... The Defeat of Meth bill should be killed immediately and our representatives need to be reminded that while drug paranoia may come and go, the Constitution is here to stay. As for me, I won't ever shut up - even under lock-down." Bravo!
This quote was in the same issue of the DrugSense newsletter:
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. -- Samuel Stiles
Boston Globe - Vt. Bill targets people without guns. Vermont state representative Fred Maslack has proposed house bill 760, which "would require residents over 18 who do not own guns to register with the secretary of state's office and pay a $500 penalty." Hehe.
SlashDot - Jon Johansen Answers to Your DeCSS Questions. Jon Johansen is the sixteen year-old Norwegian who is getting the credit/blame for writing deCSS, the software that enables playing DVDs on Linux. "the reverse engineering was done by our german member who wrote the decryption code... As many as possible should write their local newspapers [ + other media ] and inform them about this injustice. It's also important to get every computer professional to understand that this is a case of freedom of speech. If the MPAA wins this one, I think DeCSS will become the first computer program in the history to be declared illegal. Banning a combination of assembly instructions... Imagine that!"
Computing
IBM - "Quantum Mirage" May Enable Atom-scale Circuits; IBM Scientists Discover Nanotech Communication Method. Amazing. There are images. One of the image captions: "Some 5,000 times smaller than a human hair, this elliptical ring of 36 cobalt atoms creates a "quantum mirage" that may lead to an efficient way of moving information within future atom-scale circuits and computers, say its IBM Research inventors. When a single cobalt atom (purple peak) is placed at one of the two focus points of the elliptical ring, some of its properties suddenly appear at the other focus (the purple spot in the lower left), where no atom exists. The size and shape of the ellipse determines where information moves within the ring. The scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., used a scanning tunelling microscope to position the atoms. This news was announced in the cover article of the February 3, 2000, issue of Nature, a prestigious scientific journal." It's the cover article in Nature this week (you need to register to access Nature's web site, and can only see part of the content unless you also subscribe to the paper copy).
Andrew Leonard at Salon - The shape of open source to come: "VA Linux purchases Andover.net, corporate parent to Slashdot. Will the "news for nerds" site maintain its editorial independence?"
Sharky Extreme - Transmeta Crusoe Preview At Platform 2000. Silicon photos with major functional units identified. Comparison of die size with common objects. Infrared photos comparing TM5400 with Intel Pentium III. They're skeptical that a 700MHz Crusoe can really emulate a 500MHz Pentium III. A good read. "Transmeta has locked the first generation Crusoe chips into a dying, low-performance video interface" (PCI instead of AGP). "A Transmeta representative even went so far to say that coding software in native Crusoe code does not pay off since the software optimizations the code morphing software applies to x86 code work so well." Conclusion: "Overall, we're glad to see Transmeta and their innovative Crusoe line of CPUs. X86 compatibility, low-power usage and snappy performance all but assure the Crusoe a place somewhere in the future of mobile computing. We look forward eagerly to Crusoe powered web pads and PDAs. However, when it comes to desktop replacements, we'll stick with the good old Pentium III."
whichrpm is a new Linux search service that "aims to provide a central clearing house for Linux software... This site only indexes software that is packaged in the very popular RPM format". This one went on my links page.
