Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 28

Washington marijuana legalization includes unscientific DUID provision

While legalization in Washington and Colorado is likely to bring prices down and hurt Mexican drug cartels, it looks like the authorities in Washington will keep the flow of people to prison healthy. In California, the police must have evidence of impaired driving first and have reason to rule out alcohol. It sounds like in Washington they only need to stop you and ask you to give blood. The result will be to make it a lot easier to round people up.

What no one is telling you about Washington’s marijuana legalization – Seattle Political Buzz | Examiner.com

One of the worst parts is the DUID (driving under the influence of drugs) provision and the zero tolerance clause for those under the age of 21 despite that people under 21 can legally possess medical marijuana. Medical marijuana patients and recreational users can now be charged with DUID for being above the designated 5 ng (nano-gram) / ml (milliliter) THC blood content limit (or a ZERO tolerance 0 ng/ml limit for those under 21) which means users will be instantly guilty of a DUID and will have their constitutional right to a fair trial revoked if they refuse a police blood draw. Under previous laws the system required law enforcement to prove impairment in court for a guilty verdict to occur.

This blood limit is not supported by any legitimate science either. The U.S. Department of Transportation concluded that “it is not possible to conclude anything about a drivers impairment on the basis of his/her plasma concentrations.” Other government studies from the National Library of Medicine have gone to show this 5 ng amount can be present in your blood days after using marijuana making arrest for being completely sober while driving a large possibility.

3D Portraits

It looks like it won’t be too much longer until we can make lifecasts of ourselves on demand.

World’s First 3D Printing Photo Booth to Open in Japan | Spoon & Tamago

3D printers – it’s a word that offers glimpses into the future that seems so far, and yet is so close. The technology, which allows you to replicate 3D objects the same way you make a photo copy, has been around for a couple years now, but, for the most part, has been far too expensive and inaccessible to the public.

But now, what’s being called the world’s first 3D printing photo booth is set to open for a limited time at the exhibition space EYE OF GYRE in Harajuku. From November 24 to January 14, 2013, people with reservations can go and have their portraits taken. Except, instead of a photograph, you’ll receive miniature replicas of yourselves.

8 million fewer voters in 2012

8 million fewer people voted this time around. That’s a 7% drop from 2008. I’d like to think many of those people realized how useless it is to vote.

Turnout Steady in Swing States and Down in Others, But Many Votes Remain Uncounted – NYTimes.com

In many of the states where the campaigns focused most of their attention, more people voted than in 2008. Turnout is likely to have declined in many non-battleground states, however.

National Debt exceeds all the gold ever mined

Of course, gold is not the only thing of value. There’s plenty of less durable goods to be had, like livestock. The two-legged kind are particularly valuable.

Converting the National Debt into Gold | MyGovCost | Government Cost Calculator

What we find when we plug in the numbers as of 1 November 2012 is that the entire national debt of the United States is the equivalent of a solid gold cube that is nearly 80 feet tall by 80 feet long by 80 feet wide. Transporting all that gold would require over 431 of those standard 20-foot long shipping containers.

The only problem with that is that all of the gold that has ever been mined on Planet Earth would only make a solid gold cube that is 66.1 feet high by 66.1 feet long by 66.1 feet wide, which would work out to fill just over 249 of those 20-foot standard shipping containers. Even if Fort Knox held all the gold in the world, the U.S. Treasury would still be more than 182 shipping containers short of being able to pay off the national debt in gold at today’s spot prices.

Samsung to Apple: apology accepted

Obvious. And by the way, as the titles of the related articles below show, it seems like a certain D-Generation X catch phrase came to mind for several other people.

Samsung hits Apple with 20% price hike: report – MarketWatch

Samsung Electronics , the world’s largest technology firm by revenue, raised the price of mobile processor supplied to Apple Inc. AAPL -0.77% by 20% recently, Chosun Ilbo reported Monday, citing a person familiar with negotiations between the two tech giants.

“Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in (the mobile processor known as) application processor,” the person was quoted as saying in the report. “Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)”

Related articles

Apple Reportedly Swallows A 20% Price Hike For Its Samsung-Supplied Mobile Processors
Cloud Computing: Apple Forced to Swallow Samsung’s 20% Price Hike
Apple Reportedly Swallows A 20% Price Hike For Its Samsung-Supplied Mobile Processors

Run Flash with JavaScript library Shumway

Mozilla released an experimental project, a SWF runtime implemented in JavaScript. Try out the racing game demo. Flash has taken some hits. Apple won’t support it on iOS. It’s not in Android 4. And Chrome provides its own runtime to replace the buggy version offered by Adobe. Shumway works well in Chrome but not IE9. Still, the actual use cases for this might be rare. If it’s something worthwhile, you probably will want to remake it in HTML5 anyway. Maybe if you had some SWF content and none of the source files, it could get you by for a short time.

Related articles

Benjamin Smedberg: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript
The Shumway Open SWF Runtime Project

Chevron’s network infected by Stuxnet

How long until a virus is found to have infected computers that control large industrial machines in the U.S.? What if the virus authors already read everything written by the CIA? What if a botnet controlled drones and dropped bombs on Tel Aviv, New Delhi or Moscow?

Virus Aimed at Iran Infected Chevron’s Network – WSJ.com

Stuxnet, a computer virus that former U.S. officials say was created by the U.S. and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities, also infected Chevron’s network in 2010, shortly after it escaped from its intended target

Related articles

Crippling Stuxnet virus infected Chevron’s network too
Why David Petraeus’s Gmail account is a national security issue: “enormous value to foreign hackers”

How Barack Obama Secured the Most Important Voting Demographic: The Idiots

I have seen our future, and it’s a movie by Mike Judge.

How Barack Obama Secured the Most Important Voting Demographic: The Idiots

You Can’t Fix Stupid, But You Can Buy It For $8 Billion

The Peter Schiff Show (11/7/2012)

The founding fathers warned us years ago about the dangers inherent in democracy. They considered democracy to be tyranny of the majority. In fact, they actually referred to democracy as “mobocracry.” That is why they established the United States as a Republic. The Constitution guarantees to each state in the union a Republican form of government, and contains all sorts of safeguards to protect us from the evils of democracy. Unfortunately over the years, little by little, those safeguards have been torn down. The result has been every bit as disastrous as the founders feared.

MS Messenger Gone in January

OK, whatever. I think have as many friends on MSN as I do on ICQ.

Microsoft and Skype to axe world’s most popular IM client early 2013 • The Register

Microsoft’s Instant Messenger will be sacrificed for Skype by the end of March 2013, it has finally emerged.

The software giant’s Skype business has blogged Windows Live Messenger will be “retired” in the first quarter of 2013, except in mainland China.

Skype said it will work with Windows Live Messenger users during the next few months to help with the transition and “offer information and help along the way”.

Microsoft began moving users with Skype 6.0 for Mac and Windows, which allows you to sign into the service using a Microsoft account.

Stalker, a JQuery Plugin for Sticky Elements

This looks like a handy tool for implementing a sticky nav bar.

Box Tech Blog » Stalker, a JQuery Plugin That Follows Users on a Page

When we designed the new header for the Box Webapp, one of the goals was to make navigating the site easier and more intuitive, which we decided could be achieved by putting search front and center alongside access to the main areas of the application.  In order to have those controls readily at hand and for an enhanced user experience, we decided to have the header follow users as they scroll down a page.

(You can see a very simple demo of how the plugin works here.)