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Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?
gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?
Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"
Interesting thing about peaches is that they contain cyanide. From that respect I could see why the scanner would go off...
In Delaware, they've spent a lot of time and money getting products containing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine out of the hands of teenagers who might use them to make methamphetamine.
* Most meth doesn't come from these sources.
* These sources are hard to use if they have a lot of other ingredients (like dayquil does)
* It's much easier to make things like methcathinone than methamphetamine, and methcathinone doesn't have a big market.
* Methamphetamine production requires a lot of other reagents and laboratory equipment, and these are already on DEA watchlists...
* Only an idiot would attempt to run a meth lab by grinding up Sudafed. It's way too expensive. It's better to just order a bunch of ephedrine from a chemical supply co.
They're trying to "stop a problem before it starts" or something.
* The last time a "source chemical" was regulated, meth lab chemists found an alternate, cheaper, easier-to-obtain source which produced much stronger product (I believe it was levorotatory versus dextrorotatory, and had much more recreational potential)---the DEA's actions backfired (*coughcoughPROHIBITIONNEVERWORKEDcoughcough*) before, why won't they backfire now? (Actually, it's a collection of state governors that are doing this, not the DEA, afaik.)
We don't have a needle exchange program here, despite having tons of HIV+ needle users and a huge heroin market (and a significant number of people who shoot coke). That *IS* a problem that is right in our faces and nothing seems to be happening. Of course, when it's a bunch of low-income, inner-city folk from run-down areas that are at stake, versus potential problems for "our children, our future", maybe one group gets precedence.
even 1/2-strength ricin is more lethal than many toxins.
"half -strength" may be an exceptionally optimistic yield. The patent doesn't address the efficiency of the process.