14204 ª January 27 1:24 AM. When this appears in newspapers across America tomorrow morning, will dad choke on his Special K and think of his number tucked in the drawer, or will he feel outrage and disgust at the public discussion of drugs ? [MetaFilter]

I’m not advocating the use of drugs, but I often wonder why pot is illegal while alcohol and tobacco are legal. Both are much more harmful, cause many more deaths, and cause much more lost productivity.

14199 ª January 26 4:43 PM. A little beyond shredding documents… According to Human Rights Watch, the irrepressible Enron paid local police to beat, harass, and intimidate farmers and fishermen in India who opposed the building of their new power plant in their backyards. Does this, after Exxon-Mobil was taken to court for building torture centers in Indonesia, call into question the power of small states vis a vis humongous multinational corporations? [MetaFilter]

I couldn’t stand the bright green & gray theme, so I finally decided on this one.

you like games? you like programming? you like Mac OS X? well, here’s an article from StepWise about how to use Mac OS X’s features in entertainment software development. [Radio blogaritaville@scriban.com]

Mac OS X Hints: Using The GIMP with iPhoto. [mac.scripting.com]

Very cool! This uses the trick of calling Unix commands from AppleScript using the command do shell script. It’s also possible to run Unix commands from RU by using sys.unixshellcommand.

Let’s see if this works:

<%sys.unixshellcommand("ps")%>

New Channel: Liberty. I happen to be a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party.

RaiseTheFist.com Raided, Shutdown by Los Angeles FBI. Prominent LA-based website RaiseTheFist.com was raided and shutdown by the local Joint Terrorism Task Force on Jan. 24, as reported by LA and SF Indymedia. The FBI, Secret Service, and LAPD served the search warrant Thursday afternoon based on charges of “computer fraud and abuse” as well as “distribution of information related to explosives, destructive devices, and/or weapons of mass destruction.” LA FBI spokesperson Cheryl Mimura declined to release the name of the individual(s) under investigation, since no one has yet been arrested. Concerned Los Angeles activists are mobilizing support for RaiseTheFist.com. [kuro5hin.org]

14191 ª January 26 12:01 PM. A really cool idea. This is how new technology is born [MetaFilter]

Let’s go beyond do-it-yourself movie commentary tracks… how about do-it-yourself MSTing.

14192 ª January 26 12:22 PM. 28th Amendment to the US constitution? The “Alliance for Marriage” seeks to amend the United States consitution to define Marriage as between a man and a woman only, which would make it a first constitutional amendment to abrogate rather than protect individual freedoms. Bottom of the page has a link to fax your congressperson if you so choose. [MetaFilter]

Sheesh! The government has no right to pass laws like that. What consenting adults do in private is nobody else’s business. Why do these conservatives get so worked up about things like that, when there are much more important issues?