Wouldn’t it be nice to order your medical marijuana the same way you order toiletries online, or the latest best seller? Someone else thought so too, and developed a smartphone application that facilitates the delivery of medical marijuana to Los Angeles residents. But a County Superior Court Judge has shot the app down.
LA Judge Robert O’Brien ruled that all references to marijuana delivery within city limits, including deliveries by the smartphone app, must halt, claiming the company ignored voter-supported Proposition D rules that explicitly ban medical marijuana delivery.
The app was developed by a company called Nestdrop. They have been targeted for over a year by Attorney Mike Feuer, who first filed a complaint accusing the business of violating Prop D.
Nestdrop, which connects medical marijuana patients with dispensaries, said claims that they provide an important service and would continue to facilitate pot delivery in other cities.
Nick Valente, a senior account executive at the company says:
“We are evaluating our options for the future in regards to Los Angeles and hope the city will change its misguided attempt at restricting medicine for patients.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to order your medical marijuana the same way you order toiletries online, or the latest best seller? Someone else thought so too, and developed a smartphone application that facilitates the delivery of medical marijuana to Los Angeles residents. But a County Superior Court Judge has shot the app down.
LA Judge Robert O’Brien ruled that all references to marijuana delivery within city limits, including deliveries by the smartphone app, must halt, claiming the company ignored voter-supported Proposition D rules that explicitly ban medical marijuana delivery.
Wouldn’t it be nice to order your medical marijuana the same way you order toiletries online, or the latest best seller? Someone else thought so too, and developed a smartphone application that facilitates the delivery of medical marijuana to Los Angeles residents. But a County Superior Court Judge has shot the app down.
LA Judge Robert O’Brien ruled that all references to marijuana delivery within city limits, including deliveries by the smartphone app, must halt, claiming the company ignored voter-supported Proposition D rules that explicitly ban medical marijuana delivery.
A Pew Research Center survey of over 2,500 technology industry professionals and experts found that over half believe there will not be a “secure, popularly accepted and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure” in place in 10 years.
The “Future of Privacy” survey found that 55 percent of the 2,511 experts polled do not agree that there will be a system in place allowing people to decide how their information will be shared while also letting companies make money, according to Top Tech News.
This comes as some have claimed that privacy is dead and has been for quite a while. Others are claiming that the public should just accept the lack of privacy as the new norm.
One executive at a top-level domain name operator, who spoke anonymously, reflected that perspective.
“Big data equals big business,” the anonymous executive said to Pew. “Those special interests will continue to block any effective public policy work to ensure security, liberty and privacy online.”
While that may be the case for the United States, some European countries are taking a stand for online privacy and the rights of consumers to control how their personal information is used.
The Netherlands, for instance, recently threatened Google with massive fines if the tech giant does not change their privacy policy to comply with their consumer protection laws.
Another expert said that the very concept of privacy will evolve so much over the next decade that it will be all but unrecognizable compared to the meaning it has today.
“Society’s definitions of ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’ will have changed so much by 2025 that today’s meanings will no longer apply,” Nick Arnett, a business intelligence expert, said.
The notion of ubiquitous surveillance also came up in the Pew research. Today’s technology has allowed for mass surveillance that was previously unimaginable and experts say this problem will only get worse.
“I do not think 10 years is long enough for policy makers to change the way they make policy to keep up with the rate of technological progress,” said John Wilbanks, chief commons officer for Sage Bionetworks. “We have never had ubiquitous surveillance before, much less a form of ubiquitous surveillance that emerges primarily from voluntary (if market-obscured) choices. Predicting how it shakes out is just fantasy.”
A new Senate report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture to extract information from Muslim patsies in Guantanamo Bay and sundry other agency ‘black sites’ reveals Washington’s sheer sadism.
Russia Today’s summary of the damning Senate investigation highlights the CIA’s systemic use of torturous brutality on prisoners held in agency-run jails across the globe.
The Senate’s report acknowledges that the CIA caused an Afghan man, Gul Rahman, to essentially freeze to death in a prison cell at one of their torture centers north of Kabul. RT writes that, “Sometime that November [in 2001], a low-level CIA officer at COBALT ordered that Rahman be stripped naked, except for a sweatshirt, and ‘shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required the detainee to rest on the bare concrete floor,’ according to the Senate committee.”
A particularly cringe-worthy revelation is that the CIA practiced “rectal feeding” where prisoners on hunger strikes were force-fed through their rectum in order to keep them alive. The RT commentary cited above writes that, “At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration,’ or rectal feeding, the Senate report reads, in order to keep prisoners alive who allegedly otherwise refused to eat.”
The CIA also played upon prisoners’ fears to induce them to talk. According to the Senate report, a Saudi man named Abu Zubaydah who had severe entomophobia was put into a confinement box, which was then filled with insects. “In order to try and break them down during interrogations,” the RT summary further explained, CIA officers would threaten to harm prisoners’ family members, often telling them rape and death is what awaited their loved ones if they didn’t start talking. Sleep deprivation was a common tactic as well as prolonged standing, water boarding, ice water baths, suspending prisoners from the wall or ceiling by their limbs, and other inhumane methods.
Despite repeated and incessant violations, CIA officers who participated in the torture program were never reprimanded or punished by the agency, revealing that agency higher-ups were not only negligent but also complicit on every level. “There was no accountability,” the Senate report conceded.
In a display of demented hubris, former President George W. Bush defended the CIA torturers outed in the report, describing them as “patriots.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled malevolence rivals that of Josef Stalin, damned the new report as “full of crap” and said that the CIA’s torture program was “perfectly justified.” “I’d do it again in a minute,” he told CNN.
“Pre-Crime” is a concept that was focus of the movie Minority Report. Now, a new software allowing for predictive policing may be coming to a police department near you. “Beware”, made by telecommunications company Intrado, searches billions of records to find and predict potential crimes.
What is most alarming is that this software will not only scour record’s databases for info on suspects but will pull info from social network pages and look for words that could be deemed as “offensive”. With that information a suspect is assessed a threat level.
All of this coming from a software algorithm. Watch the video to hear the conversation between Ben Swann and Derek A. Smith of Excelsior College to learn more about the program.
Obama’s executive amnesty will hit America hard, but what about Canada? Can we expect a flux of Americans to cross the American-Canadian border when the US becomes overrun with Mexicans? Hard to say, but in this video Dan Dicks breaks down why it’s crucial to reinforce the notion that Mexico, the United States and Canada are not the same country; we are not part of a larger union.
A verdict was returned, and Ferguson burned. Anyone who was really paying attention was hardly surprised.
It brought back memories of similar scenes; the 1965 Watts Riots, the Rodney King verdict and the subsequent 1992 LA Riots, and most recently the aftermath of the Zimmerman-Martin verdict in 2013. But this time it made little, if any sense.
Monday evening in Clayton, Missouri, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that a Grand Jury had delivered its decision for Officer Darren Wilson vs. Michael Brown. Five indictment charges were presented and the jury found “no probable cause” and returned a “no true” bill for all five charges. Tremors began to shake the streets almost immediately after…
Professional street agitator of Freddy’s Fashion Mart fame, FBI supergrass, and (somehow) now a White House ‘advisor’, Al Sharpton, wasted no time getting in front of TV cameras and claiming that street outrage, rioting and looting were somehow ‘warranted’, and proceeded to deliver a veiled threat to the prosecutors office stating, “This is not our first rodeo McCulloch, we will deal with this in a way civil rights leaders have”.
STEPFATHER LOUIS: “Burn this bitch down!”
CNN reported how last night, Louis Head, the stepfather of “gentle giant” Michael Brown, married to Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, was on the streets outside of Ferguson Police Department Headquarters screaming to the angry mobs, “Burn this bitch down!”, following prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s announcement of a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict.
Head himself should be charged with reckless (and brainless) endangerment after such an incitement – at a time when the mob was assembling and ready to boil over. As an ex-con himself, now inciting street violence, Head might just be in violation of his parole. Nonetheless, Head’s approach pretty much embodies the mentality and politics of everyone who jumped onto the cultural Marxist bandwagon for this latest joy ride; lynch mob rules, and to hell with rationality. More balkanization of American society. Divide and Rule. Welcome, to another addition of Thunderdome…
Flash Mobs ‘In Solidarity’, For Solidarity’s Sake
Late last night, St. Louis Police confirmed over 150 gunshots were fired last night – from protesters – towards police, including shots fired at police helicopters. Fire fighters who arrived to put out flames set by Ferguson arsonists also took gunfire from the mob and were forced to retreat, leaving fire hoses laying on the streets at midnight.
We are continuously told the following from activists and community organizers: “the community is shocked and angered by the decision (verdict)”, but if you actually review the facts and full transcripts of the testimonies (read the full PDF below) in what was seems to be a very thorough investigation, then it’s hard to see exactly what the community would be shocked about. In general, protesters cared little about witness testimonies and seemed uninterested about in any evidence presented.
Because the verdict went the wrong way, the mob seems to have even brushed off the testimonies of black witnesses, who were also local residents.
With all the mindless media rhetoric and the flaky ignorance of legal due process, one can only conclude that mobs are not mourning for Michael Brown, nor are that concerned with justice either, and are certainly not interested in the rule of law (that should be pretty obvious by now). They saw a big colorful bandwagon, all gassed-up and ready to go. Another opportunity to ‘organize’...
In the wake of the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Charlie Mcgrath explains how an absolute police state is being trumpeted as the solution to police abuse.
Patrick Henningsen
PN 