I don’t smoke, not even tobacco, but I don’t understand why tobacco and alcohol should be legal, whereas marijuana can not. Heck, the hemp is a plant, it’s not human-made, and it’s not a chemical product! Here we have some More Evidence That Marijuana Prevents Cancer. I know that back in 1961, more than 100 nations have agreed at the UN to ban marijuana (I guess it was first illegal in Canada in 1923, in the UK in 1928, in the U.S. in 1937), but I very much doubt there is scientific evidence that marijuana would be more addictive and more harmful than tobacco and alcohol. Actually, from the above-mentioned study…

Strikingly, among drinkers and cigarette smokers, those who also used marijuana reduced their cancer risk compared to those who only drank and smoked cigarettes. So marijuana may actually have been countering the known bad effects of booze and cigarettes.

Related and not that related to that, there is a 5:51 video I would like you to see: it’s happening in the United States. Have you watched it to the end?
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• 15 Horrifying Reasons to Never Let Anyone You Love Near a McDonald’s
• Why Does Popular Culture Treat Prison Rape As a Joke?
• Why Are Cops Tasering Grandmothers, Pregnant Women and Kids?

I’m sort of immune to the idiocies that happen all the time in my Vaterland — because they just get worse and worse —, so I felt like reading (and listening) about what happens in the rest of the world. Stupid things too, but at least they’re stupid in a different way.

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Wow, the world Revol… Apocaly… mayhem can start any moment now! Here’s the appetizer: China says 140 killed in riots in west. (FR: Le Xinjiang s’embrase, Internet témoigne.)

Then, not only that Krugman didn’t see it coming, but here’s Biden to say: “We Misread How Bad The Economy Was”.

Isn’t life beautiful? (Not counting Iran, Honduras…) We Romanians too have misread how mischievous our president was. Băsescu, not Ceauşescu.

P.S.: But pornography, we’ll still have it at least for “medical purposes”, right?

Mostly, from my RSS subscriptions, with a few random findings.
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Another collection of links, en vrac.

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Collection of links, en vrac.

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Apparently, there is a chance for a minimal appearance of common sense in the 21st century: Is France on the Verge of Banning Scientology? (Hopefully.) In French: Scientologie : «C’est un procès en hérésie»; Un ex-adepte : «On m’a menti et j’ai aussi menti». There are 45,000 trous de cul members of the Church of Scientology in France. (Of course, there are much many idiots in the United States, but Americans are not known for their rational thinking anyway.)

Mais les bonnes nouvelles s’arrêtent ici. La police va pouvoir pirater les ordinateurs des voyous: “La loi d’orientation pour la sécurité, dite Lospi 2, présentée par Michèle Alliot-Marie en Conseil des ministres mercredi prochain, va donner à la police le droit de pirater, le plus légalement du monde, les données informatiques pour lutter contre le crime organisé.” FUCK.
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Multilingual post:

• The newest financial “innovation”: borrowing from one’s own 401(k)! Caught in a credit crunch? Try borrowing from yourself.
• Women and Nerves (Nov, 1934)
• Eloge de la dénatalité
• Despre criză, altfel + «The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991» by Eric Hobsbawm, on Scribd.com (PDF) — deci papa Djuvara a plagiat niţeluş…
• Comment on Caitlyn’s review of Mandriva 2009.1, here, towards the end.

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Wisdom and wisdom only:

• Science Daily: For Your Health, Pick A Mate Who Is Conscientious And, Perhaps, Also Neurotic. (“Their study, of adults over age 50, also found that women, but not men, get an added health benefit when paired with someone who is conscientious and neurotic.”)
• Science rocks: Rx vs. XXX - What Fixes Low Testosterone Best: Meds or Porn?
• 12 Baffling Medical Conditions include music-induced seizures, persistent sexual arousal syndrome, foreign accent syndrome and much more.
• 10 Truths About Weight Loss: “You Can Eat After 8 P.M.” This is all I needed to know.
• Daydream away — it’s a workout for your brain. Really?
• Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefit. What exercise?
• What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous. That was news. Yeah.
• Cities: How Long a Wait to See a Doctor? Between 7 and 60 days or more.

Nothing special.

• Wolfram Alpha… Like Google, Only Much, Much Worse?
• I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life:
  

  We started out by engaging a pedigreed gentleman baker with Le Bernardin on his résumé. Hercule, as I’ll call him, embodied every French stereotype in existence: He was jovial, enthusiastic, rude, snooty, manic-depressive, brilliant, and utterly unreliable.

• Study Shows “Secret Questions” Are Too Easily Guessed.
• Not a bad idea: Creating new application on top of SSH.
• Brilliant explanation on how public key encryption works  as a principle, taken from a SSH crash course:

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I have now the confirmation that Ladislav Bodnar is banning me by the IP from posting on DWW. Fukya, Ladsilav! You’re such an asshole…

Being upset, I ditched almost all the links and topics I wanted to write about today. The few remainders:
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• The bestest job interviews: The Next Big Thing, “The Best” Interview, & Too Primitive for COBOL.
• Selected part from WANTED:The Best C/C++ Developers in the World!

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That’s the reading of the day for me, in The New Statesman: Don’t sell me your dream, by Tom Hodgkinson. Excerpts:

Far from liberating us, technology isolates us and makes us stupid. I want no part of your sterile, bloodless brave new world.

[...] Perpetually dissatisfied with the present, we have invented spinning jennies, steam power, canals, railways, motor cars, flying machines, the wireless, tele­vision, computers, mobile telephones. We have been taught in schools [...] to revere technology and to place faith in it as a liberator. Soon, soon, it seems to say, soon you will be free.

I have a different view. I hold in supreme contempt 90 per cent of modern technology. The whole sorry shebang is actually a costly distraction, which isolates us, makes us stupid and is never going to free us.

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After having read this, it’s still unclear to me: is he trying to say that a native Dutch was not understood in Amsterdam?! I could à la rigueur accept that a Vlaams speak might be too much for Amsterdam, but as long as Jeroen says that «I’ve been living in the Netherlands all my life», I really don’t know what all those blog posts are trying to say. I’d rather suspect that the waiter was an asshole.

Have the patents become like the mortgage-backed securities that caused the current financial meltdown? I’d be glad to learn that this is indeed the case, because I’ve always considered that protecting an idea with a patent is just immoral. And no, I don’t make any distinction between software patents and “regular industrial” patents: with software, it’s only more obvious why the whole idea of patents is wrong! Heck, but why are people still relying on patents? Ça sert à quoi, given that Thomson owns some 50,000 patents, yet it’s on the edge of the bankruptcy?

Que faut-il désirer pour le Cuba ? Après la lecture d’un article qui n’est pas trop mal, Rapine et débrouille, tout est bon pour survivre à Cuba, je m’attendais aux commentaires du genre “Comment peut-on croire à l’idéal communiste etc. etc.”, mais il y a aussi celui-là :
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On For-Free-on-Internet.com, on the Ashampoo thing.

On OpenNews.ru, kinda translation (with a final advice “better don’t”) on the Jaunty Intel issue.

Geez, this is the toughest one (use Google to get an under-mediocre translation): Akit a mozdony füstje egyszer megcsapott…

OK, the French are temporarily safe: HADOPI was rejected in the Assemblée nationale. I had to mention that. What else was that I’ve read recently?

Not much. An interview with Noam Chomsky on Wikinews (version française disponible également). Excerpts:
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Twitter sucks. 30 possible reasons.

What happened to the Italians is unbelievable. 41 shocking pictures. 13 other pictures.

What happens in Moldova is pure shit. NYT article (user/pass). Check out comment #5! Article NouvelObs. Images. Revoluţia tembelă. E vremea revoluţiilor ce mor.

Loving opulence? Think twice, you jerk. The very, very dark side of Dubai (idiot writer: «democracy’s» is «democracies»; but a good idea: «there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can’t pay, you go to prison.»).

G20 dead: of course the police has pushed him! Just because they’re the police.

HADOPI ? HADOPIRE ! C’est dans toute la presse.

Sur 20minutes.fr, les commentaires doivent « se conformer à la législation en vigueur en France. Sont interdits : [...] la négation des crimes contre l’humanité et l’apologie de crimes de guerre [...] l’incitation au piratage informatique. » Vive la liberté, vive la démocratie, à mort les extrémistes !

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know? One by one, here!

Why not Debian Lenny on the old Omnibook? The idiots banned binary firmware, including snd-maestro3. Only cretinoids would broke what previously worked.

Someone should count how many times Jim Whitehurst ignores the desktop. NYT interview.

Some idiot might try Mint 6 Fluxbox on the old HP. Or maybe not. PulseAudio == premature death.

No Conficker apocalypse, no poisson d’avril… and no reading of “news” today — except that F11-Beta was released yesterday, and CentOS 5.3 was indeed released today.

Bric-à-brac to follow… (bonus: Lawrence Lessig in Playboy).
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In the last 72 hours, I have read a lot of annoying things, and this exactly why I’ll skip 98% of them. They’re boring, if not depressing. Today’s late mini-crop:
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