I recall past discussions here about a movement to make IP addresses portable, in the way that phone numbers currently are. In other words, the idea would be that you would "own" an IP address, and you could use that address with any ISP you wanted. Granted, it could cause some interesting problems, but that is aside the point for the moment.
As the current system is setup, with IP4 addresses, IP addresses essentially belong to an organization - for most home users that organization is their ISP. If you switch to a different ISP you can expect a different address. However, it would seem that if we did have IP address portability, then addresses would have some relevance for identifying a user (or at least a user's computer).
So while the fans of IP address portability lost their fight years ago, they may have inadvertently won a battle for privacy.
While it seems like a nice car, I hope you realize you are not doing Ford any favors by emphasizing those facts.
I have some news for you - it is no longer 1988. The GM shitbox from the 80s that someone you knew used to drive is not a relevant yardstick anymore.
Read the newest JD Power vehicle owner surveys and see who is on top, you'll find that people who have actually purchased American cars have found they are equal in quality to the Japanese.
Toyota's goal: to make it difficult for other auto makers to develop their own hybrids without seeking licensing from Toyota
I would like to introduce to you the Ford Fusion Hybrid, which has been rated above the Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima hybrids in numerous reviews.
And while Nissan did license Toyota's hybrid technology, Ford did not. The Ford Fusion Hybrid is the first automotive hybrid drive train to be developed in the US, by a US auto company, and built in North America for an American car. So if Toyota is trying to preemptively squash competition with their patents, they are too late.
So you bring in a website from a biased organization to try to prove your point?
I'm guessing you didn't read my post very well. Allow me to reiterate.
The perpetual pushers of pro-pot propaganda want us to believe that these raids involving cops armed with fully-automatic machine guns, RPGs, and surface-to-air missiles occur everyday. Furthermore they want us to believe it happens all over the place, in your neighborhood, based on anonymous phone calls made to the police precinct by twisted individuals.
Neither of those points are true. Sure, there have been some raids where doors have been kicked in. It happens for a lot of things beyond pot. And when all we see is the account of the person who lived there - because the police report is conveniently not posted on those web sites - we get a viewpoint that is way beyond biased.
I don't know who's talking about evil, evil cops or hourly raids
That would be the propaganda pushers who tell us about that. That was the whole purpose of my post, in case you weren't paying attention.
(maybe you should smoke a little bit less)
If you know a way to smoke less than none at all, feel free to let me know.
but do you really have to be a pro-pot propaganda pusher to question no-knock SWAT raids based on shaky drug informants' information?
My questioning here is to the existence of them. The propagandists would like us to believe that the SWAT goes out with fully automatic rifles and damned near everything but F-16 strike jets when a little old lady calls the local PD because she heard a local teenager mention pot in reference to a nearby house.
people ('evil' police included) even sometimes die as a result
First of all, I'm not calling the police evil myself. I'm using that description in reference to the way that the propagandists portray them.
Second, the wikipedia article you link to is terribly short on information. The only legitimate news sources they link to agree that a murder was committed by the man sentenced to 10 years. Beyond that is blog hearsay.
Oh, yeah, from the perpetual pro-pot propaganda pushers.
Who would like everyone to believe that every hour of every day, in every city in every state in this country, there are evil, evil, police officers armed to the teeth kicking down doors of houses and apartments based on individual rumors of the presence of pot. Where of course then the innocent pot smokers are immediately hauled off to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and sentenced to 5*10^30 years in prison for possession and repeatedly assaulted and ass-raped by gorillas, ostriches, elephants, and of course their cell mates - all of whom are convicted serial killers who will be released next week.
The one of the news tickers in the video is describing the impeachment of the governor of Illinois a while back... will the same thing happen to you if you pirate music?
Hell, they might not even be in the right forest, for that matter. Google should know well enough that spam is an economic problem, not a software one. They can write all the fancy filters they want, they will never win the war that way.
They have the resources, they should fight the war the right way - by going after the people who sponsor spam. They are electronically reading our gmail email, they can see the headers. They know where the spam comes from, and when. They know what domains are being spamvertised, and they can determine who owns those domains. They should be going after the registrars, the ISPs, and the owners of the mail relays. Only when spam becomes too expensive to be a viable business model for the spammers will it go away. Until then we will only continue to play spam filter whack-a-mole.
The summary ends by jumping straight from IVF to artificial insemination; those are two different (though overlapping) procedures. While IVF does essentially require artificial insemination to occur, artificial insemination can happen inside the uterus as well. Artificial insemination is a commonly employed technique for infertile couples who aren't willing, interested, or financially capable of undergoing IVF.
If your in your car on a public road why would you have an expectation of privacy?
That is a valid question. And admittedly, when you are driving you are (generally) in public.
Really, as I tried to indicate with the emphasis in that post, my problem was with the gun-toting, badge-wearing egomaniac who is supposed to be responsible for "defending" the public. When they go around with such arrogance as that, it can be hard to believe that they are truly keeping our own interests at heart. His statement about privacy was in response to my asking him about the cell phone law that he pulled me over for; I previously resided in Minnesota where you could not be pulled over only for talking on the phone while driving (which was exactly what he stated he was doing when he pulled me over).
I'm not aware of many keyboards from the 19th century. Sure, the QWERTY layout came about at the end of the 19th century, but was used on typewriters as best I know.
As text responses just invite flamewars and shouting matches. One person on a decent connection could post several replies a minute in a text-based system and make their opinion seem more reflective of the population. Granted, video responses aren't a great deal better; but by limiting it to that they can at least give everyone a (semi) equal opportunity to post.
They could put a inanimate carbon rod in charge of ICANN and it couldn't do much worse than the current trajectory. ICANN is dead set on unleashing possibly one of the worst ideas in the history of the internet - gTLDs for sale - and nobody is doing shit to stop it. If you thought ICANN was a tremendous waste of space, resources, and human lives, just wait till you see what they won't do for you next year when the real shit hits the fan (and the new CEO starts raking in even more money).
... after the new TLDs are sold and name resolution turns to arbitrary mish-mash. Add to that the fantastic new spamming opportunities and just wait to see what a fantastic clusterfuck ICANN is about to unleash upon us. Why on earth we aren't storming the compound with torches and picks I don't know; once this goes down there is no undoing the damage.
Perhaps I am the only one bothered by how abcnews.com has become a tabloid; here is the MSNBC story for the same, nicely packaged into a single page without news on people living in trees.
I have a friend who smokes several times a week. He is a psychological disaster
He is the exception. It's likely he started smoking at a young age,
I don't expect that all frequent pot smokers are the same. However I don't care to see people claim it to be inherently perfectly safe, either.
And I was with my friend the very first time he smoked pot. I didn't want it myself but I was there (I just passed it on). We were about 18. At the time we all were in college or working full-time.
Since then he has lost his job due to psychological distress (his paranoia prevents him from being around people unless he is stoned). He subsequently lost his apartment and his car as well. He is now on social security disability and uses his checks to pay for rent in the projects, the rest goes to video games and pot.
Naturally, as he is unemployed he has lost his insurance as well (go Team America), so he cannot afford to be seen by mental health professionals. So any time he feels sorry for himself he lights up again.
I know a lot of people who smoke it. A few are like your friend, but most of them are gainfully employed and no different from anyone else.
I know there are plenty of people who can manage a normal existence while smoking pot on the side.
Which is why I support keeping consumption enforcement at the same level as alcohol consumption enforcement. Do all you want at home, but be mindful of the public.
Aside from allowing him to kill himself by lung cancer a little faster
They have jumped to the conclusion that pot causes cancer because it has some of the same carcinogenic compounds found in tobacco, but a study I read about a couple years ago in New Scientist refutes it.
I'll have to look over that study some time.
What I can tell you is that exposure to products of incomplete combustion is never good for living tissue. It could be that the disturbed tissue goes apoptotic faster or something else is discouraging the development of lung cancer in pot smokers; I haven't seen the data myself.
They studied American baby boomers and looked at four groups: long term cigarette smokers, long term marijuana smokers, long time users of both, and people who didn't smoke anything.
I will also need to look over how those groups were classified, there is a lot of wiggle room in those definitions. And it would be more meaningful statistically to group them by exposure level as well (in terms of grams smoked per day); I know plenty of people who smoke a full pack or more of cigarettes a day but I don't think I've ever known anyone to smoke that volume of weed everyday for a significant period of time.
Have fun living in your dream world where you see everyone getting free (lol), quality health care
Who said anything about free? This is a fallacy from the people who are trying to defend the current profit-driven system, claiming that people expect the government to provide free health care. I am not aware of anyone who wants to see a universal system that is unaware taxes will have to be increased to pay for it.
If you oppose the taxation, that's fine, just say so. But don't try to insert words into the mouths of those who you disagree with in your attempt to belittle their cause.
Do you really have enough information to support your claim?
Do you?
Actually, yes, I do.
I've seen some pretty solid evidence that a lot of spamvertised domains don't actually profit from it, but there's no shortage of new customers so the spammers keep making profits without having to worry about retaining customers.
I would like to see the evidence you speak of. In support of my claim, I offer The SpamHaus entry of Leo Kuvayev. We see that Mr. Kuvayev (who uses several aliases as well) repeatedly uses spam for the same companies, using the same web pages. The contact info all goes back to the same place for his new customers. Whoever is paying him for his spamming services is buying his services repeatedly.
The Letterman video that the story links to is terrible, to put it kindly. No meaningful specifications given:
How much does it cost?
Where can it be purchased?
When can it be purchased?
How long to charge the batteries?
How long do the batteries last?
How fast does it go?
What is the warranty?
Where is it serviced?
Are just a few of the pertinent questions that weren't even brought up in that lousy clip. Instead they showed us a bunch of people drinking (some of them seemed a bit tipsy on camera) and talking in vague generalizations.
That ad video was so bad, I can't help but wonder if it was done by IBM employees.
It's an education problem.
Educate people not to reply.
That is a pie-in-the-sky approach. You cannot possibly "educate" every person with an email address in the world to not reply to spam.
If you can remove the economic incentive of spam, then - and only then - will spam go away. Until then spammers will always make sales for the spamvertised domains, and hence the spammers will always get paid for their work. Which means we will all continue to see more spam.
Oh I know what the goal was. It was to prove that marijuana causes lung cancer
Do you have a source for that claim? Do you have access to the grant application that was funded by the NIH? I haven't seen it; so if you have it, please share it. I described the most common funding mechanisms of the NIH in another post; please read it if you are not familiar with how NIH work is funded.
which they found the opposite to be true
I'm pretty sure the opposite of causing lung cancer would be curing lung cancer. I don't know of any study that has had lung cancer patients start smoking pot and found them to be cured.
research from the Hutchinson Institute (I think that's the name) supposedly proving all sorts of harms associated with marijuana nobody else in the world seems to be discovering
I'm not familiar with their work. Could you provide a source for this?
I wonder who's funding them?
I don't know who is funding them, I am not familiar with them. You seem to believe yourself to be familiar with their results, please show them so we can discuss the matter in better detail.
I have my theory that they couldn't trust real science to demonize marijuana since it's not that dangerous to begin with, and they had to move to private institutions where it's easier to formulate false research.
Ah hah. A conspiracy theory. Now if only you had some actual data to backup your theory.
Which really, with no data, is at best a hypothesis. If you knew more about scientific research you would know that.
I have a problem with the continued distribution of mistruth by both sides. The pro-pot-propagandists try to portray themselves as having the moral high ground and the only purveyors of accurate information. It should be pointed out when they are spreading mistruths, whether by malicious intent or not.
The exaggeration of the researcher to the title of "government expert" is on par with the exaggerations from those who want us to believe that there are no negative effects whatsoever to the use of marijuana. While some negative effects that have been reported before may be open to debate, anyone who claims it to be without any negative effects is either dreaming or an idiot.
the fact remains that the government wanted to discover marijuana's harms
That may or may not be true, we would have to find the details of the funding mechanism that was used for that study.
While I am by no means an expert on pot, I do know NIH funding fairly well (though I wouldn't call myself an expert on it, either as there are legions of people who know a lot more than I about that as well).
What I can tell you is this. There are numerous funding mechanisms through the NIH. The NIH itself is divided into several different institutes that each have their own budgets; most funding applications go to one of those rather than the NIH itself. We could speculate on which of them would be most likely to fund this but that isn't as important as the fact that the NIH has these subdivisions that handle grant applications.
That said, the subdivisions review applications on regular schedules for new research. Many of these applications come in from established researchers who are looking to renew their ongoing work, or extend it in new directions. Others are coming from new researchers who are just getting going after finishing their PhD work. Yet others come from groups of researchers. The commonality of these applications is that they are generally not responses to the NIH saying "we want to answer this specific question", rather they are researchers who are effectively saying "I have done some work on X, with Y more dollars I can extend it to Z". The subdivision of NIH will review these applications against each other and a committee of scientists who do related work will evaluate the applications and score them for funding determination.
Yet other applications do come in as a response to the NIH or a subdivision saying "we want to answer this specific question" or "we want to explore new techniques for this specific problem". This is a funding mechanism that was particularly popular immediately after the stimulus bill was signed by President Obama and the NIH was awarded significant short-term money on top of their annual budget.
the government is far less than ready to admit the findings of this research they paid for.
You are correct that the government - by way of the NIH - paid for that research. We don't know what the mechanism was for that funding or what the goal of it was. And just because the NIH paid for the research does not mean that it endorses the findings or that the government agrees with them. That is a separate matter.
Slashdot Mirror
He lives in Davis, California with his wife and son
They don't really expect us to believe that, do they?
I recall past discussions here about a movement to make IP addresses portable, in the way that phone numbers currently are. In other words, the idea would be that you would "own" an IP address, and you could use that address with any ISP you wanted. Granted, it could cause some interesting problems, but that is aside the point for the moment.
As the current system is setup, with IP4 addresses, IP addresses essentially belong to an organization - for most home users that organization is their ISP. If you switch to a different ISP you can expect a different address. However, it would seem that if we did have IP address portability, then addresses would have some relevance for identifying a user (or at least a user's computer).
So while the fans of IP address portability lost their fight years ago, they may have inadvertently won a battle for privacy.
While it seems like a nice car, I hope you realize you are not doing Ford any favors by emphasizing those facts.
I have some news for you - it is no longer 1988. The GM shitbox from the 80s that someone you knew used to drive is not a relevant yardstick anymore.
Read the newest JD Power vehicle owner surveys and see who is on top, you'll find that people who have actually purchased American cars have found they are equal in quality to the Japanese.
Toyota's goal: to make it difficult for other auto makers to develop their own hybrids without seeking licensing from Toyota
I would like to introduce to you the Ford Fusion Hybrid, which has been rated above the Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima hybrids in numerous reviews.
And while Nissan did license Toyota's hybrid technology, Ford did not. The Ford Fusion Hybrid is the first automotive hybrid drive train to be developed in the US, by a US auto company, and built in North America for an American car. So if Toyota is trying to preemptively squash competition with their patents, they are too late.
So you bring in a website from a biased organization to try to prove your point?
I'm guessing you didn't read my post very well. Allow me to reiterate.
The perpetual pushers of pro-pot propaganda want us to believe that these raids involving cops armed with fully-automatic machine guns, RPGs, and surface-to-air missiles occur everyday. Furthermore they want us to believe it happens all over the place, in your neighborhood, based on anonymous phone calls made to the police precinct by twisted individuals.
Neither of those points are true. Sure, there have been some raids where doors have been kicked in. It happens for a lot of things beyond pot. And when all we see is the account of the person who lived there - because the police report is conveniently not posted on those web sites - we get a viewpoint that is way beyond biased.
I don't know who's talking about evil, evil cops or hourly raids
That would be the propaganda pushers who tell us about that. That was the whole purpose of my post, in case you weren't paying attention.
(maybe you should smoke a little bit less)
If you know a way to smoke less than none at all, feel free to let me know.
but do you really have to be a pro-pot propaganda pusher to question no-knock SWAT raids based on shaky drug informants' information?
My questioning here is to the existence of them. The propagandists would like us to believe that the SWAT goes out with fully automatic rifles and damned near everything but F-16 strike jets when a little old lady calls the local PD because she heard a local teenager mention pot in reference to a nearby house.
people ('evil' police included) even sometimes die as a result
First of all, I'm not calling the police evil myself. I'm using that description in reference to the way that the propagandists portray them.
Second, the wikipedia article you link to is terribly short on information. The only legitimate news sources they link to agree that a murder was committed by the man sentenced to 10 years. Beyond that is blog hearsay.
Oh, yeah, from the perpetual pro-pot propaganda pushers.
Who would like everyone to believe that every hour of every day, in every city in every state in this country, there are evil, evil, police officers armed to the teeth kicking down doors of houses and apartments based on individual rumors of the presence of pot. Where of course then the innocent pot smokers are immediately hauled off to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and sentenced to 5*10^30 years in prison for possession and repeatedly assaulted and ass-raped by gorillas, ostriches, elephants, and of course their cell mates - all of whom are convicted serial killers who will be released next week.
The one of the news tickers in the video is describing the impeachment of the governor of Illinois a while back ... will the same thing happen to you if you pirate music?
Hell, they might not even be in the right forest, for that matter. Google should know well enough that spam is an economic problem, not a software one. They can write all the fancy filters they want, they will never win the war that way.
They have the resources, they should fight the war the right way - by going after the people who sponsor spam. They are electronically reading our gmail email, they can see the headers. They know where the spam comes from, and when. They know what domains are being spamvertised, and they can determine who owns those domains. They should be going after the registrars, the ISPs, and the owners of the mail relays. Only when spam becomes too expensive to be a viable business model for the spammers will it go away. Until then we will only continue to play spam filter whack-a-mole.
The summary ends by jumping straight from IVF to artificial insemination; those are two different (though overlapping) procedures. While IVF does essentially require artificial insemination to occur, artificial insemination can happen inside the uterus as well. Artificial insemination is a commonly employed technique for infertile couples who aren't willing, interested, or financially capable of undergoing IVF.
If your in your car on a public road why would you have an expectation of privacy?
That is a valid question. And admittedly, when you are driving you are (generally) in public.
Really, as I tried to indicate with the emphasis in that post, my problem was with the gun-toting, badge-wearing egomaniac who is supposed to be responsible for "defending" the public. When they go around with such arrogance as that, it can be hard to believe that they are truly keeping our own interests at heart. His statement about privacy was in response to my asking him about the cell phone law that he pulled me over for; I previously resided in Minnesota where you could not be pulled over only for talking on the phone while driving (which was exactly what he stated he was doing when he pulled me over).
Anything we can see you doing in your car, we can pull you over for
He so kindly said.
You have no expectation of privacy in your car in NY state
He said after that (his emphasis).
I'm not aware of many keyboards from the 19th century. Sure, the QWERTY layout came about at the end of the 19th century, but was used on typewriters as best I know.
As text responses just invite flamewars and shouting matches. One person on a decent connection could post several replies a minute in a text-based system and make their opinion seem more reflective of the population. Granted, video responses aren't a great deal better; but by limiting it to that they can at least give everyone a (semi) equal opportunity to post.
They could put a inanimate carbon rod in charge of ICANN and it couldn't do much worse than the current trajectory. ICANN is dead set on unleashing possibly one of the worst ideas in the history of the internet - gTLDs for sale - and nobody is doing shit to stop it. If you thought ICANN was a tremendous waste of space, resources, and human lives, just wait till you see what they won't do for you next year when the real shit hits the fan (and the new CEO starts raking in even more money).
... after the new TLDs are sold and name resolution turns to arbitrary mish-mash. Add to that the fantastic new spamming opportunities and just wait to see what a fantastic clusterfuck ICANN is about to unleash upon us. Why on earth we aren't storming the compound with torches and picks I don't know; once this goes down there is no undoing the damage.
Perhaps I am the only one bothered by how abcnews.com has become a tabloid; here is the MSNBC story for the same, nicely packaged into a single page without news on people living in trees.
I have a friend who smokes several times a week. He is a psychological disaster
He is the exception. It's likely he started smoking at a young age,
I don't expect that all frequent pot smokers are the same. However I don't care to see people claim it to be inherently perfectly safe, either.
And I was with my friend the very first time he smoked pot. I didn't want it myself but I was there (I just passed it on). We were about 18. At the time we all were in college or working full-time.
Since then he has lost his job due to psychological distress (his paranoia prevents him from being around people unless he is stoned). He subsequently lost his apartment and his car as well. He is now on social security disability and uses his checks to pay for rent in the projects, the rest goes to video games and pot.
Naturally, as he is unemployed he has lost his insurance as well (go Team America), so he cannot afford to be seen by mental health professionals. So any time he feels sorry for himself he lights up again.
I know a lot of people who smoke it. A few are like your friend, but most of them are gainfully employed and no different from anyone else.
I know there are plenty of people who can manage a normal existence while smoking pot on the side.
Which is why I support keeping consumption enforcement at the same level as alcohol consumption enforcement. Do all you want at home, but be mindful of the public.
Aside from allowing him to kill himself by lung cancer a little faster
They have jumped to the conclusion that pot causes cancer because it has some of the same carcinogenic compounds found in tobacco, but a study I read about a couple years ago in New Scientist refutes it.
I'll have to look over that study some time.
What I can tell you is that exposure to products of incomplete combustion is never good for living tissue. It could be that the disturbed tissue goes apoptotic faster or something else is discouraging the development of lung cancer in pot smokers; I haven't seen the data myself.
They studied American baby boomers and looked at four groups: long term cigarette smokers, long term marijuana smokers, long time users of both, and people who didn't smoke anything.
I will also need to look over how those groups were classified, there is a lot of wiggle room in those definitions. And it would be more meaningful statistically to group them by exposure level as well (in terms of grams smoked per day); I know plenty of people who smoke a full pack or more of cigarettes a day but I don't think I've ever known anyone to smoke that volume of weed everyday for a significant period of time.
Have fun living in your dream world where you see everyone getting free (lol), quality health care
Who said anything about free? This is a fallacy from the people who are trying to defend the current profit-driven system, claiming that people expect the government to provide free health care. I am not aware of anyone who wants to see a universal system that is unaware taxes will have to be increased to pay for it.
If you oppose the taxation, that's fine, just say so. But don't try to insert words into the mouths of those who you disagree with in your attempt to belittle their cause.
Do you really have enough information to support your claim?
Do you?
Actually, yes, I do.
I've seen some pretty solid evidence that a lot of spamvertised domains don't actually profit from it, but there's no shortage of new customers so the spammers keep making profits without having to worry about retaining customers.
I would like to see the evidence you speak of. In support of my claim, I offer The SpamHaus entry of Leo Kuvayev. We see that Mr. Kuvayev (who uses several aliases as well) repeatedly uses spam for the same companies, using the same web pages. The contact info all goes back to the same place for his new customers. Whoever is paying him for his spamming services is buying his services repeatedly.
And this is very common in the spam enterprise.
Are just a few of the pertinent questions that weren't even brought up in that lousy clip. Instead they showed us a bunch of people drinking (some of them seemed a bit tipsy on camera) and talking in vague generalizations.
That ad video was so bad, I can't help but wonder if it was done by IBM employees.
It's an education problem. Educate people not to reply.
That is a pie-in-the-sky approach. You cannot possibly "educate" every person with an email address in the world to not reply to spam.
If you can remove the economic incentive of spam, then - and only then - will spam go away. Until then spammers will always make sales for the spamvertised domains, and hence the spammers will always get paid for their work. Which means we will all continue to see more spam.
Oh I know what the goal was. It was to prove that marijuana causes lung cancer
Do you have a source for that claim? Do you have access to the grant application that was funded by the NIH? I haven't seen it; so if you have it, please share it. I described the most common funding mechanisms of the NIH in another post; please read it if you are not familiar with how NIH work is funded.
which they found the opposite to be true
I'm pretty sure the opposite of causing lung cancer would be curing lung cancer. I don't know of any study that has had lung cancer patients start smoking pot and found them to be cured.
research from the Hutchinson Institute (I think that's the name) supposedly proving all sorts of harms associated with marijuana nobody else in the world seems to be discovering
I'm not familiar with their work. Could you provide a source for this?
I wonder who's funding them?
I don't know who is funding them, I am not familiar with them. You seem to believe yourself to be familiar with their results, please show them so we can discuss the matter in better detail.
I have my theory that they couldn't trust real science to demonize marijuana since it's not that dangerous to begin with, and they had to move to private institutions where it's easier to formulate false research.
Ah hah. A conspiracy theory. Now if only you had some actual data to backup your theory.
Which really, with no data, is at best a hypothesis. If you knew more about scientific research you would know that.
I have a problem with the continued distribution of mistruth by both sides. The pro-pot-propagandists try to portray themselves as having the moral high ground and the only purveyors of accurate information. It should be pointed out when they are spreading mistruths, whether by malicious intent or not.
The exaggeration of the researcher to the title of "government expert" is on par with the exaggerations from those who want us to believe that there are no negative effects whatsoever to the use of marijuana. While some negative effects that have been reported before may be open to debate, anyone who claims it to be without any negative effects is either dreaming or an idiot.
the fact remains that the government wanted to discover marijuana's harms
That may or may not be true, we would have to find the details of the funding mechanism that was used for that study.
While I am by no means an expert on pot, I do know NIH funding fairly well (though I wouldn't call myself an expert on it, either as there are legions of people who know a lot more than I about that as well).
What I can tell you is this. There are numerous funding mechanisms through the NIH. The NIH itself is divided into several different institutes that each have their own budgets; most funding applications go to one of those rather than the NIH itself. We could speculate on which of them would be most likely to fund this but that isn't as important as the fact that the NIH has these subdivisions that handle grant applications.
That said, the subdivisions review applications on regular schedules for new research. Many of these applications come in from established researchers who are looking to renew their ongoing work, or extend it in new directions. Others are coming from new researchers who are just getting going after finishing their PhD work. Yet others come from groups of researchers. The commonality of these applications is that they are generally not responses to the NIH saying "we want to answer this specific question", rather they are researchers who are effectively saying "I have done some work on X, with Y more dollars I can extend it to Z". The subdivision of NIH will review these applications against each other and a committee of scientists who do related work will evaluate the applications and score them for funding determination.
Yet other applications do come in as a response to the NIH or a subdivision saying "we want to answer this specific question" or "we want to explore new techniques for this specific problem". This is a funding mechanism that was particularly popular immediately after the stimulus bill was signed by President Obama and the NIH was awarded significant short-term money on top of their annual budget.
the government is far less than ready to admit the findings of this research they paid for.
You are correct that the government - by way of the NIH - paid for that research. We don't know what the mechanism was for that funding or what the goal of it was. And just because the NIH paid for the research does not mean that it endorses the findings or that the government agrees with them. That is a separate matter.