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Canadian Liquor Stores Want You to Be Able to Buy Weed with Your Six Pack

Liquor stores in British Columbia and Ontario want to start selling weed once it becomes legal in Canada.

The two unions representing BC's public and private liquor stores announced a partnership this week—the Responsible Marijuana Retail Alliance of BC—through which they're advocating to sell recreational pot at retail locations by next Christmas.

Their logic seems to be that liquor stores already sell a controlled substance that gets people fucked up, so adding weed to their mix just makes sense.

"Just as with alcohol, there are legitimate concerns about access to marijuana by youths. Our stores are an over-19, age-controlled environment and our industry has demonstrated the strongest compliance with identification checks," said Stephanie Smith, president of the BC Government and Service Employees' Union, which represents the province's 200 public liquor stores.

It would also be cost effective. Because liquor stores already have a warehousing and retail system in place "there is no need to reinvent the wheel," she said.

Last month, Warren "Smokey" Thomas, head of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents LCBO employees, said LCBO outlets would be ideal weed retailers because they already have "social responsibility" covered.

"They do age checks, they do refusals if somebody's intoxicated."

[...]

Lobbyists, in Strategy Session, Conclude That Refugee Crisis “Helps Us” Defeat Regulations

In an audio recording of a strategy session obtained by The Intercept, major trade association lobbyists discussed how the refugee crisis has changed the political dynamics in Washington to their advantage.

In the conference call held last week, lobbyists representing a number of high-polluting industries agreed that the battle between Congress and President Obama on refugee policy will give them the cover they need to attach a legislative rider to the omnibus budget bill that rolls back newly expanded clean water regulation.

“I think that probably helps us,” one participant said, referring to the coming confrontation over refugee policy.

[...] “We’re suddenly not the big issue,” said one call participant. “I mean, this is all going to turn on refugees.”

“I think that helps us,” said another call participant. “I think it helps us with the White House being on defense,” another legislative strategist on the call said.

The remarks were made during a political strategy call hosted last week by energy utility industry lobbyists. A recording was sent to The Intercept by someone on the call.

Coal CEO Thanks Lamar Smith, Asks Him to Expand Probe of Climate Scientists

Koch "Alliance" on Criminal Justice Reform Exposed as Trojan Horse

How the Gates Foundation Reflects the Good and the Bad of "Hacker Philanthropy"

I've been planning the architecture and design goals of the first to-be-public release of SubLinux for about half a year.
SubLinux is the personal XFCE i586+ distro I built from source, and from which I am writing this. Generally, only me, family and friends are ever given copies of SubLinux. Source for SubLinux 1 has been lost.

Some background
SubLinux 1 was released in mid-2012, and was also an i586 distro. However, it had many severe flaws, and while functional, bugs were often encountered. It had a busybox/GNU hybrid userland, and while efficient, this frequently caused problems with software compilation. It was a small system, less than 2GB big once installed. It came with the Midori browser.
It was mostly used as a Fedora substitute on machines with no i686/CMOV support, and on thumbdrives as a portable system.
It used the syslinux bootloader instead of GRUB, which is used by most distributions. It did not support UEFI.

SubLinux 2 was released in early 2014, and has replaced Fedora on all of my desktops, excluding my server.
It's also i586-based, but has a true GNU userland. It shipped with XFCE 4.10, but has since been upgraded to 4.12, and has had numerous kernel upgrades. It has no package manager, was built from source, and provides both a PAE and non-PAE kernel. Unlike SubLinux 1, it has debugging symbols stripped from all binaries, yet provides both static and shared libraries of all system libraries, and all headers are present at installation, and thanks to the stability of the GNU userland, SubLinux 2 has proven to be an outstanding system for software development. It has a GCC 4.8.2 based toolchain. Like SubLinux 1, it also uses the syslinux bootloader. SubLinux 2 does not support UEFI. Systems wishing to use it must boot in "legacy" mode.

Moving forward
There are a handful of reasons I want to make SubLinux 3 a public, supported distribution.
* I am spoiled now that I've had a distribution that suits my tastes precisely, and I'd like to share it with the like-minded.
* It will showcase my Epoch Init System, my anti-systemd vaccine.
* There is a lack of distributions with the desired "vibe" of freedom, catering to power users, and enabling development.

Major design goals:
* Support for both i586 and x86_64, possibly in one single build, with the userland being primarily i586, but containing all libraries necessary to execute x86_64 code, and providing an optional x86_64 kernel. This would guarantee that no matter which system you boot it on, it will indeed boot. And, if the system supports x86_64, such applications will be able to run.
The compiler toolchain should also support both i586 and x86_64.
* Great for development, making it easy to deal with a large variety of programming languages.
* Vanilla software, only adding patches to software that are required to compile it. This includes the kernel.
* A complete graphical desktop, probably XFCE.
* Includes other power user tools, like terminator, isomaster, etc.
* No unnecessary duplicate applications in the default installation. One that runs in the CLI, one that runs in GUI. For example, mousepad will be installed, but leafpad will not.
* Efficient, with a focus on keeping system resource usage down to a minimum while still providing the aforementioned complete GUI and desktop.
* Annual release, with updates provided over the internet periodically.

SubLinux 3 will be a desktop-oriented distribution, with a full GUI. It will, again, include all development related files (excluding complete source) in each default package, so you'll never need to install some "-devel" package. And like SubLinux 2, it will include both static and shared libraries for every package. It will likely ship with XFCE as the default desktop, and will rely on (me-endorsed) community builds for other desktops. And that's where our next piece of the puzzle comes in.

packrat, a new package manager
I've been writing a package manager called packrat. It has one major design goal: Make it really easy to create packages.
As a consequence of this, it does not include dependency resolution support, making it similar to Slackware's package management scheme. You can, at present, in the unstable builds of packrat, create a package with one command. It uses tarballs for storage, and has metadata and sha1 checksum file verification. Packages will likely not support signing.
It will support downloading "action lists" from the internet for updates and deprecations, and will include a *built in* GTK frontend, eliminating the need for 3rd party tools for graphical package management.

That's about it for now guys. I'll let you know if I come up with any other brilliant ideas. :^)

-Subsentient

Black Friday 2015

Laptops

• $99: 11.6 inch Chromebook, Best Buy
• $300: Core i3, 15.6 inch, Best Buy
• $140: Celeron, 15.6 inch, Best Buy

Storage

• $100: 4 TB Western Digital My Book external hard drive, Best Buy
• $100: 4 TB Toshiba Canvio external hard drive, Office Max and Office Depot
• $120: 5 TB Seagate external hard drive, Costco
• $120: 5 TB Toshiba Canvio external hard drive, Office Max and Office Depot
• $40: 1 TB Seagate portable hard drive, Staples
• $200: SanDisk Ultra II 2.5" SSD 960GB, Newegg

Consoles

• $300: Dell Home & Office Black Friday: Xbox One Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Bundle Plus Fallout 4 & Extra Controller
• $300: Target Black Friday: 500GB Xbox One Console w/ Gears of War Digital Download Code + $60 Target Gift Card

Categories

• Blank Media (CDs, DVDs)
• USB Flash Drives
• Hard Drives

Articles

Best Laptops: Holiday 2015
Best SSDs: Holiday 2015

I've recently done some touchups to my SubStrings library, and have reminded myself of my own undying glory, er, I mean, come to the conclusion that it's useful enough to warrant me advertising it a little bit. I use it in a large percentage of my projects nowadays. I thought I'd showcase part of what makes it awesome to me.

Before we begin, there is one thing I must mention: SubStrings is only designed to work well with null terminated strings only. It's almost certainly unsafe to use it for anything else.
And, one last thing: This is indeed a C library, written in C89 and works in C. The OOP appearance, such as SubStrings.Length(), is function pointer trickery for cleanliness' sake. SubStrings is also a non-hosted library, meaning it has no dependencies, and can thus even be used in your bootloader's source code.

String copy and concatenation, truly safe
SubStrings copy and concatenation functions have precise bounds checking, and always result in a null terminated string, and, if the size parameter is given accurately, SubStrings never has buffer overflows. Let's illustrate.

#include "substrings/substrings.h"

void MyFunc(void)
{
   char Array[1024];

   //So, the maximum string data copied will be sizeof Array - 1, so there is room for the '\0'.
   SubStrings.Copy(Array, "My string is awesome!", sizeof Array);

   /*SubStrings.Cat's size parameter needs to be the *maximum capacity* of the destination. You don't need to subtract from
   the max size each iteration of a loop. SubStrings knows how to do it.*/
   SubStrings.Cat(Array, " And it merges really nice too!", sizeof Array);
}

strcpy and strcat() are in general, unsafe, and strncat and strncpy have differing and confusing behavior. SubStrings eliminates these problems with one consistent approach for concatenation and copy operations.

All the necessities provided

SubStrings also provides all the other functions you might want for basic string operations, including Length(), Compare(), NCompare() [analogous to strncmp()], Find(), and CFind() [Find a single character], and FindAnyOf() [Analogous to strchr()].
Find() and CFind() accept another, new argument, allowing you to directly request the N-th occurrence of the matching string/characters. There is also IsLowerS, IsLowerC, IsUpperC, and conversion functions like LowerS, LowerC, UpperS, and UpperC.

In general, functions ending in S deal with strings, and functions ending in C deal with single characters.

High level stuff is here too
Some of the cooler stuff is stuff you might expect to find in Python.
Stuff like StartsWith, EndsWith, Replace, Strip, Reverse, and StripLeadingChars and StripTrailingChars.

And some original ideas too
There are other functions, like Extract(), which pulls the string content that's in between two sequences.
Let's have an example.

#include "substrings/substrings.h"

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int Inc = 1;
    char Buf[256];

    for (; Inc < argc; ++Inc)
    {
        if (SubStrings.StartsWith("--config=", argv[Inc]))
        {
             SubStrings.Extract(Buf, sizeof Buf, "=", NULL, argv[Inc]);
             DoSomething(Buf);
         }
     }
}

What's happening here is that Extract is pulling the data that starts after the =, and since the next parameter is NULL, it reads on until the end of the string. This makes handling command line arguments marginally simpler.

There's other goodies, like SubStrings.CopyUntil(). Let's take a look.

#include "substrings/substrings.h"

void MyFunc(void)
{
    const char *const String = "Wibble[END]Nurble[END]Aburble[END]Farts";
    const char *Iter = String;
    char Buf[256];
    while (SubStrings.CopyUntil(Buf, sizeof Buf, &Iter, "[END]", true))
    {
         puts(Buf);
    }
}

This produces the output:

Wibble
Nurble
Aburble
Farts

I actually find myself using CopyUntil and its sister function CopyUntilC quite often. Then there's SubStrings.Line.GetLine(), which is a specialized CopyUntil that helps with processing multi-line C strings.

Lastly, there's another useful function, Split().

#include "substrings/substrings.h"

void MyFunc(void)
{
    const char *String = "Gerbil|Wibble";
    char One[256], Two[256];

    SubStrings.Split(One, Two, "|", String, SPLIT_HALFONE);
}

Now, One[] contains "Gerbil|" and Two[] contains "Wibble". You can specify to discard the split tokens, or put them in half one or two. The options are SPLIT_NOKEEP, SPLIT_HALFONE, and SPLIT_HALFTWO. Because Split() doesn't ask for buffer sizes for the sake of convenience, the way to do it safely is to make sure that both One and Two will be able to hold the entire length of String, if needed.

This library is getting more touchups. You can find the github here, and the SubStrings homepage here.

Thoughts, ideas or suggestions? Let me know.

Well, it finally happened. Last night, I had sex with someone new for the first time in 13 years.

I've been seeing this girl for about a month now, and it's been going surprisingly well. I've been seeing her once a week and she has been coming over to my place and I make her dinner and then we cuddle on the couch and talk. Last night we moved things to the bedroom.

It wasn't as awkward as I though it was going to be. After having sex with the same person for 13 years, I was really nervous to experience someone new. Anyways, I guess sex is sex. It all felt familiar, so it didn't feel as weird as I thought.

I haven't used a condom in a LONG time, and I remember how much condoms suck. I needed to pick up some non-latex ones, so that might be a factor. I also think that the condom was maybe too small, and also I think that it might be better if I add some lube to the inside. If anyone has a suggestion of a good non-latex condom, please recommend below.

We cuddled in bed after and talked, which was really nice.

After she left, I changed she sheets on the bed, and waited for my wife to come home. When she did some home, it wasn't really a big deal at all. I told her how things went (basically what I said above) and that I had already changed the sheets. We hugged, and then it was back to the routine. It really was like nothing had changed. (Thank god!)

We have been talking about this for so long, that it was nice to actually have something happen and see that everything is still okay. I showered before bed, and then cuddled with my wife as we fell asleep -- just like normal.

So far, so good.

Didn't watch this time. Ben Carson sure is popular isn't he?

Wikipedia
Fireworks Fly In Unruly Third GOP Presidential Debate
Four Republicans Battle For Attention At Undercard Debate
PolitiFact

Bizarre, campy song explains China's 13th 5-year plan
Song (low information content)

Five-year plans of China
Timeline

Uses of Force Abroad 1798-2015, and More from CRS

A newly updated tabulation of U.S. military actions has been prepared by the Congressional Research Service, up to and including the October 14, 2015 deployment of 90 U.S. troops to Cameroon. The CRS listing does not include covert actions, disaster relief operations or training exercises. See Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2015, October 15, 2015.

[other CRS reports listed at source]

The PDF is 38 pages.

Congressional Research Service

I've just installed Windows 10 on an i3 laptop and am looking for suggestions on how to do an in depth traffic analysis of Windows 10 after the "stop spying" program has been used to see if its possible to "de-fang" Windows 10. The requirements will be 1.- It has to be software based as I no longer have any hardware firewalls capable of logging IP addresses, 2.- If its Linux based I'm gonna need a link to a how-to as I've never used Linux for networking, only web servers, and 3.- If it works off a stick or live CD so much the better, I really don't want to have to reinstall the OS on the test box afterwards.

Anyway I figure I'll disable the wireless and run the ethernet into a second box with 2 ethernet ports as a pass-through to do the logging. I figure it will have some sort of net connection test so merely plugging into another box won't work, but by using the second box as a bridge we should be able to capture exactly what is going out and see if its truly possible to kill Win 10 spying. The pass through box is a Phenom I quad with 4GB of RAM so it should have no issues running whatever we need to run, and all results will be published here.

  So other than Wireshark any suggestions?