Sketches and news

More sketches over on sketchblogs.

This has been a heck of a news-filled day. There was the announcement that Apple is switching over to Intel x486 processors, which screws over my plans to buy a new computer this summer. Two notes that you might not have heard: Classic (OS9 and earlier) Mac apps will not be supported in the emulation layer of the new system, and Apple is not going to be keeping Windows from running on Intel Macs.

The Washington governor’s race looks finally settled, with Republican Rossi having not only had his claims of vote fraud dismissed for lack of evidence, but Gregoire’s margin of victory increased by four votes.

And a decision’s been handed down in Gonzales v Raich, the medical marijuana case. By a 6-to-3 margin, the Supreme Court upheld the notion that crops grown within a state, for use within that same state, fall under the purview of the infinitely elastic interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution. The precedent in this case is Wickard v Filburn (1942), in which a farmer growing wheat for his own family’s consumption was found in violation of federal wheat quotas because the mere existence of his wheat affected market prices in the national market. The state laws are not overturned, but users of medical marijuana still risk persecution by federal authorities. There are a couple of bills pending in Congress to help fix matters; Radley Balko has the details.