Events

Yet another Chicago-based medical marijuana company has merged with an out-of-state company ahead of an expected legalization of recreational pot this summer: Chicago’s Cresco Labs on Monday unveiled a $120 million merger that allows it to expand into Florida, where analysts predict demand for medical marijuana will significantly grow in the coming years. By 2022, the market for medical pot could reach a whopping $1.7 billion, according to analysts’  projections. Under the agreement, Cresco will acquire...

Pilot and author James Fallows points out this Seattle Times article as a good explanation of how the Boeing-led safety process for the 737 MAX 8 airplane may have contributed to their recent accidents: The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. Early on in certification of the 737 MAX, the FAA safety engineering team divided up the technical assessments that would...

Program included Vierne, Messe solennele, Duruflé, Requiem, Mozart, Vespere Solennes de Confessore, K339

On March 4th, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases that change how copyright infringement cases work in the U.S. In Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation v. Wall-Street.com, the Court held that a copyright owner must wait for the Copyright Office to accept or reject a registration application before the owner can sue for infringement: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who had not attended the oral argument because she was home recovering from surgery) delivered the court’s opinion. She analogized the...

Alexis Madrigal takes a look at criticisms of the World Wide Web from when it was new: Thirty years ago this week, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN, the European scientific-research center. Suffice it to say, the idea took off. The web made it easy for everyday people to create and link together pages on what was then a small network. The programming language was simple, and publishing was as painless as uploading something to a server with a few tags in it. Just...

First, Bruce Schneier takes a look at Facebook's privacy shift: There is ample reason to question Zuckerberg's pronouncement: The company has made -- and broken -- many privacy promises over the years. And if you read his 3,000-word post carefully, Zuckerberg says nothing about changing Facebook's surveillance capitalism business model. All the post discusses is making private chats more central to the company, which seems to be a play for increased market dominance and to counter the Chinese company...

I moved into my current place back in October. For the first time since then, just now, I opened one of the windows in my office. (I'll have to close it again pretty soon because of the squall line coming this way.) That's because, for the first time since October 31st—when I wasn't home during the day to open it—it's 16°C at O'Hare. It's about time.