Opiates and cocaine are very cheap to produce if they're legal. The cost of producing the drugs required to support a habit is on the scale of dollars a week, not hundreds. Being clubbed to death for the $20 in your wallet is much less likely when a dole check will buy a junkie all the heroin they want.
Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are all more toxic than pure heroin when taken in appropriate doses.
My value judgement is that it's immoral to price-gouge someone based on their addiction (which is what happens currently) but that selling a substance to someone in a mutual understanding that the substance is addictive is the choice of the buyer.
Possibly the most compelling argument for prohibition. Still, while intoxicants may temporarily interfere with the user's free will, it is still the user's free choice to take them.
As a parent you have a right to stop your dependant child from acquiring drugs while you are still their legal guardian. Once they come of age it's their choice. Hopefully you explained your values to them persuasively enough that they agree with you and will continue to follow your example even when you can no longer enforce it.
Does your housing association regulate what you watch on TV in your home at night? What colour tiles you use in your bathroom? What cereal you can eat?
The right to pursue your own happiness, assuming said pursuit doesn't impede anyone else's happiness, is a clear ethical right (again in my view) whether it's constitutionally protected or not (I think it is).
Sadly, contrary to what you said, ordinary Americans are very happy for the government to mandate morality, as long as it's morality _they_ are comfortable with. Witness the recent overturning of the gay marriage bill. People have pushed the rights angle of drug prohibition plenty, but it's a subject that is very susceptible to whipping up moral panic and general hysteria, and so it's generally voted on emotive rather than rational terms.
Making it illegal was a response to a smear campaign by cotton growers, if I recall correctly. Of course, that's no argument that marijuana should be legal... but your post was about hemp.
Back in the 1930's, a smear campaign was created by competing industries including Paper, Petrochemical, and Cotton in order to destroy the hemp industry. A PR campaign was created to lump hemp in with marijuana and the "reefer madness" wave sweeping the nation at the time.
In 1937, this pressure led the U.S. government to ban growing industrial hemp. Even though it has been proven that THC levels are far too low for a person to get high on, over 60 years later the US Government maintains a ludicrous position against growing industrial hemp to continue to benefit the powerful economic interests of these competing industries.
@ moderating this post 'troll' - go look up 'sarchasm'.
What I posted is, however, the general response you'll get from the man on the street. He thinks that because the government's been telling him that for so long that he's come to believe it. He doesn't consider whether it could be true or not because he's never heard a dissenting voice and it's never occurred to him to think about it for himself.
This is very true, but you won't get anyone in power agreeing with you or the morally righteous middle class will declare them to be "soft on drugs" and vote them out without thinking twice about it.
It's like the way that, of MDMA-related deaths, exactly zero that I've found are due to actually taking too much MDMA. They're caused by things like drinking too much water (a 45kg girl drinking 12 liters of water in 4 hours will die regardless of whether she's taken anything psychoactive), taking something completely else that they were told was MDMA (most cases), or dying due to overheating / crowd crush which is again environmental causes rather than the drug. And what do all of these have in common? Yep, the newspaper headline is TEEN DIES IN TRAGIC ECSTASY DEATH. And the people tut-tut and sigh and say "that ecstasy stuff, that's a killer that is".
And from that link you posted, the only risks of using heroin that are not directly caused by its prohibited nature are the physically addictive quality of the drug itself, and constipation. Blood-borne diseases, poisoning via toxic cutting agents, overdoses due to varying purity of black market product, and all of the social problems surrounding drug running gangs are entirely caused by the prohibition of the drug in question.
Specific quote regarding the dangers of overdose in acclimatised users:
There is no upper limit to the amount of tolerance that can occur in a heavy user. Several studies done in the 1920s gave users doses of 1,600â"1,800 mg of heroin, and no adverse effects were reported. Even for a non-user, the LD50 can be placed above 350 mg though some sources give a figure of between 75 and 375 mg for a 75 kg person.[30]
No, I've never considered it and neither should you. Drugs are bad, and only bad people take them. Therefore we should try and stop anyone taking them for their own good.
Well, if DNA proof positive of non-paternity isn't enough to get you out of paying child support, I wouldn't be at all confident that mere medical records could exonerate you from terrerisum. If you claim otherwise then you're obviously supporting terrerisum, you dirty terrerest.
I'm hoping so! I for one can't wait to get a new set of corneas, ones that give me normal or better vision without contacts and that I can use to check my email while I'm driving to work... ok maybe that last bit isn't such a good plan.
I use that excuse a lot. Conversely, it's scary to code something while drunk then come back the next day and think "god, whoever wrote this is clever".
Disk space IS "memory". It's even RAM (Random Access Memory, you can access it in any order). Just because it's not the particular type of memory that you think of when you say that doesn't mean that it's not memory.
You're right, in that the hardware does the work in accessing the actual bits for a given piece of virtual memory. I think what TFA is really asking is, "Why the hell does Windows keep more than half of my 2GB of memory free when it's grinding the hard drive paging things in and out?". I used to get this all the time in XP too - I have two windows open (IE and VC++ or whatever) and whenever I switch between them I have to wait for a second or so of furious disk activity. There's no reason to be paging out any of either of the running applications' address space given that I've got over 1GB of unused physical RAM just sitting there wasting electrons.
Yep, that makes sense in context...although as I said here, the worst possible condition for personhood is some fuzzy and very subjective 'divine right'. I mean, are people "anyone who's genetically human"? "things that can hold a coherent conversation"? "objects that are blessed by god" seems far less meaningful than either of those and they're my second and third least favorite options for said criteria.
And now I direct you to Bob Kringley's definition of "smart" as meaning "can do stuff that I can't do". Intelligent isn't a binary thing, it's a sliding scale - A flower is less intelligent than a mouse is less intelligent than a dog is less intelligent than a chimp is less intelligent than a brickie is less intelligent than me. (CwotIdidthar?:P )
Interesting, I hadn't delved that far into the deeper mythology of Middle-Earth. I was thinking more in real-world terms... I'll have to try and finish the Silmarillion, it was my insomnia material for months; worked every time like a charm.:P
As to Killjoy's response (replying here so as not to flood:P ) - there's a difference between talking and making speech noises. By that definition a tape recorder can "talk" but it's not capable of holding a conversation (unlike the eagles, or Beorn (was he a bear or a 'person'?), or the Ents).
Secondly, that orcs were not "thinking peoples", like elves/men/dwarves; rather they were intelligent beasts in man-shape, of the same theological status as wargs, the talking ravens in _The Hobbit_, as (perhaps) the great eagles, etc.
If they're intelligent beasts that can talk, I'd say that's pretty good evidence that they can think. And if they can think, doesn't that make them people?
This is actually a good question. Defining humanity on the basis of pure genetics is a very bad way to go about it, because you exclude possible new human-type things that deserve human rights. Say if your Down's Syndrome child instead had some heretofore unknown mutation that made them super-intelligent but unlikely to successfully breed with fully human parents?
The answer, which no-one is going to like, is that we need to base these things at least partly on ability rather than genetics or (worse yet) some arbitrarily fabricated 'divine right'. And that means either making the bar low enough to include even your not-too-bright cousin Henry (and affording human rights to dolphins and chimpanzees), or setting it high enough to exclude all animals and opening cousin Henry up to use in live animal testing.
It'd probably end up being an either-or "is of human stock or can demonstrate human-level intelligence". The rules are different for us, sure, but that's because we make them. Even then, I'm sure that the requirements for being a human-rights-deserving entity will be relaxed as time passes. Remember, 'human rights' are a pretty new idea and in the past at various times have been denied to women, children, brown people, red people, yellow people and probably most categories that at some stage have fitted into "are weaker or less numerous than us".
It's a treadmill. As the off-the-shelf software becomes versatile and comprehensive enough to handle any business requirement, the complexity of explaining a given business's requirements to the software you're using increases to the point where you have to be a programmer to do it. When my parents started work in computing, development was done with macro assembler or in COBOL. Now it's done in Access and Flash.
4) Since your code is hobby code and hence the parts of it that aren't badly formatted and terribly obtuse are actually downright hostile to comprehension, and the features you didn't find fun to implement are missing, the mid-sized company that your friend suckered into committing to your "free" software has to pay you a premium consulting rate to add features X, Y and Z.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait till 2035 when they criminalize drouds.
Sadly, contrary to what you said, ordinary Americans are very happy for the government to mandate morality, as long as it's morality _they_ are comfortable with. Witness the recent overturning of the gay marriage bill. People have pushed the rights angle of drug prohibition plenty, but it's a subject that is very susceptible to whipping up moral panic and general hysteria, and so it's generally voted on emotive rather than rational terms.
Back in the 1930's, a smear campaign was created by competing industries including Paper, Petrochemical, and Cotton in order to destroy the hemp industry. A PR campaign was created to lump hemp in with marijuana and the "reefer madness" wave sweeping the nation at the time.
In 1937, this pressure led the U.S. government to ban growing industrial hemp. Even though it has been proven that THC levels are far too low for a person to get high on, over 60 years later the US Government maintains a ludicrous position against growing industrial hemp to continue to benefit the powerful economic interests of these competing industries.
What makes hemp so special?
@ moderating this post 'troll' - go look up 'sarchasm'.
What I posted is, however, the general response you'll get from the man on the street. He thinks that because the government's been telling him that for so long that he's come to believe it. He doesn't consider whether it could be true or not because he's never heard a dissenting voice and it's never occurred to him to think about it for himself.
This is very true, but you won't get anyone in power agreeing with you or the morally righteous middle class will declare them to be "soft on drugs" and vote them out without thinking twice about it.
It's like the way that, of MDMA-related deaths, exactly zero that I've found are due to actually taking too much MDMA. They're caused by things like drinking too much water (a 45kg girl drinking 12 liters of water in 4 hours will die regardless of whether she's taken anything psychoactive), taking something completely else that they were told was MDMA (most cases), or dying due to overheating / crowd crush which is again environmental causes rather than the drug. And what do all of these have in common? Yep, the newspaper headline is TEEN DIES IN TRAGIC ECSTASY DEATH. And the people tut-tut and sigh and say "that ecstasy stuff, that's a killer that is".
Specific quote regarding the dangers of overdose in acclimatised users:
There is no upper limit to the amount of tolerance that can occur in a heavy user. Several studies done in the 1920s gave users doses of 1,600â"1,800 mg of heroin, and no adverse effects were reported. Even for a non-user, the LD50 can be placed above 350 mg though some sources give a figure of between 75 and 375 mg for a 75 kg person.[30]
No, I've never considered it and neither should you. Drugs are bad, and only bad people take them. Therefore we should try and stop anyone taking them for their own good.
Well, if DNA proof positive of non-paternity isn't enough to get you out of paying child support, I wouldn't be at all confident that mere medical records could exonerate you from terrerisum. If you claim otherwise then you're obviously supporting terrerisum, you dirty terrerest.
In fact if it goes ahead in Australia, why not just *move* to China?
I'm hoping so! I for one can't wait to get a new set of corneas, ones that give me normal or better vision without contacts and that I can use to check my email while I'm driving to work... ok maybe that last bit isn't such a good plan.
I use that excuse a lot. Conversely, it's scary to code something while drunk then come back the next day and think "god, whoever wrote this is clever".
Disk space IS "memory". It's even RAM (Random Access Memory, you can access it in any order). Just because it's not the particular type of memory that you think of when you say that doesn't mean that it's not memory.
You're right, in that the hardware does the work in accessing the actual bits for a given piece of virtual memory. I think what TFA is really asking is, "Why the hell does Windows keep more than half of my 2GB of memory free when it's grinding the hard drive paging things in and out?". I used to get this all the time in XP too - I have two windows open (IE and VC++ or whatever) and whenever I switch between them I have to wait for a second or so of furious disk activity. There's no reason to be paging out any of either of the running applications' address space given that I've got over 1GB of unused physical RAM just sitting there wasting electrons.
rofl thanks, yeah that was a typo/thinko, I meant parent *species*.
Yep, that makes sense in context...although as I said here, the worst possible condition for personhood is some fuzzy and very subjective 'divine right'. I mean, are people "anyone who's genetically human"? "things that can hold a coherent conversation"? "objects that are blessed by god" seems far less meaningful than either of those and they're my second and third least favorite options for said criteria.
I can't get dates because I'm married and my wife would object. ;)
And now I direct you to Bob Kringley's definition of "smart" as meaning "can do stuff that I can't do". Intelligent isn't a binary thing, it's a sliding scale - A flower is less intelligent than a mouse is less intelligent than a dog is less intelligent than a chimp is less intelligent than a brickie is less intelligent than me. (CwotIdidthar? :P )
Which is remarkably hard to quantify and test for, sadly.
Interesting, I hadn't delved that far into the deeper mythology of Middle-Earth. I was thinking more in real-world terms... I'll have to try and finish the Silmarillion, it was my insomnia material for months; worked every time like a charm. :P
:P ) - there's a difference between talking and making speech noises. By that definition a tape recorder can "talk" but it's not capable of holding a conversation (unlike the eagles, or Beorn (was he a bear or a 'person'?), or the Ents).
As to Killjoy's response (replying here so as not to flood
Secondly, that orcs were not "thinking peoples", like elves/men/dwarves; rather they were intelligent beasts in man-shape, of the same theological status as wargs, the talking ravens in _The Hobbit_, as (perhaps) the great eagles, etc.
If they're intelligent beasts that can talk, I'd say that's pretty good evidence that they can think. And if they can think, doesn't that make them people?
This is actually a good question. Defining humanity on the basis of pure genetics is a very bad way to go about it, because you exclude possible new human-type things that deserve human rights. Say if your Down's Syndrome child instead had some heretofore unknown mutation that made them super-intelligent but unlikely to successfully breed with fully human parents?
The answer, which no-one is going to like, is that we need to base these things at least partly on ability rather than genetics or (worse yet) some arbitrarily fabricated 'divine right'. And that means either making the bar low enough to include even your not-too-bright cousin Henry (and affording human rights to dolphins and chimpanzees), or setting it high enough to exclude all animals and opening cousin Henry up to use in live animal testing.
It'd probably end up being an either-or "is of human stock or can demonstrate human-level intelligence". The rules are different for us, sure, but that's because we make them. Even then, I'm sure that the requirements for being a human-rights-deserving entity will be relaxed as time passes. Remember, 'human rights' are a pretty new idea and in the past at various times have been denied to women, children, brown people, red people, yellow people and probably most categories that at some stage have fitted into "are weaker or less numerous than us".
Ever heard of a quarter-orc?
Wow, I haven't seen anyone use "Lusers" for aaages. I feel compelled to say "winblows" and "m$" a few times just for old times' sake.
It's a treadmill. As the off-the-shelf software becomes versatile and comprehensive enough to handle any business requirement, the complexity of explaining a given business's requirements to the software you're using increases to the point where you have to be a programmer to do it. When my parents started work in computing, development was done with macro assembler or in COBOL. Now it's done in Access and Flash.
4) Since your code is hobby code and hence the parts of it that aren't badly formatted and terribly obtuse are actually downright hostile to comprehension, and the features you didn't find fun to implement are missing, the mid-sized company that your friend suckered into committing to your "free" software has to pay you a premium consulting rate to add features X, Y and Z.