When he says "witchcraft is not a religion" he is making clear that he has deep bigotry and a total lack of understanding of what Wicca is and is about. Since it's not a religion by his definition, my freedom to practice it is in question. That is unacceptable.
You may say "no it's not" but tell that to american indians whose religion includes taking ritual peyote (i.e. NOT TO GET OFF, BUT AS A SACRAMENT) who have been denied freedom of religion ('cos it's not really religion after all). Oh wait, they can do it, they just can't keep their jobs if they do 'cos of the war on some drugs.....
The genius of NetInfo is that it provides a uniform way of accessing and manipulating all system and network
configuration information.
This shows a complete lack of any serious unix experience, since most of the major vendors have some way of accomplishing this. Sun's been doing with with NIS for around the same amount of time as NetInfo has been around.
Perhaps BSD has ignored NIS, but Linux certainly hasn't.
No, I don't troll. If I want to troll I will post as an AC. Marijuana is a bullshit drug on-par with tobacco and alcohol. My concern is
with harder drugs like crack, acid, heroin, opium, etc. It's that shit the cops cart off out of a crackhouse by the wheelbarrel-full. You
know the places.. you watch them on Cops. They break down the door and find a bunch of stoned out lusers with little 5 year old kids
running around with guns laying on the couch. Nice environments.
So when was the last time this occurred with alcohol? About 70 years ago. Same things happened; little kids were recruited to do lots of the dirty work 'cos they couldn't go to jail. Rival factions killed each other in the streets. It was called Prohibition, and the crime and violence etc. are a factor of it being illegal (the people who WOULD use the drugs responsibly either don't, or don't get caught so you don't hear about them). You're just offering more arguments about why prohibition is worse than regulation.
You must be hanging with the wrong crowd then. Quit acting like your experience defines the entire world. Lots of us have used (not abused) illegal drugs and not had horrible experiences. It's about being mature and educated about the drug, and the "why" that you're using the drug.
If you're running away from stuff that's going to drive you into abuse or borderline abuse situations, or if you are irresponsible and don't take adequate steps to protect yourself and those around you, of course bad things are going to happen. Chances are, even if all you ever did was legal drugs (aka alcohol), those exact same bad things would have happened. This is the fault of the drugs how?
First rule of debate: if things aren't going your way, getting abusive doesn't help.
Now that we have the unpleasantries out of the way, let's try another approach.
The only blackouts and memory loss I ever had were from (guess?) alcohol. The woman I was dating when I started taking acid is the woman I married. I never drove any friends away, never had any work problems to speak of (I even recall repairing a servers failed hard disk quite effectively out of necessity in the middle of a trip. Not a fun experience, but not one that damaged my work). While I dated several different people during the period I was intermittently smoking pot, none of them were broken up with over the issue of drugs (in fact I was a very light smoker most of the time except when I was dating someone who smoked with me). The only bad trip I've had wasn't a trip, it was an unexpectedly strong batch of pot that left me very messed up in my time sense, and it scared me more than anyone, because it was all inside my head. I didn't "quit" so much as lost my last trusted connection and don't have an addiction driving me to go talk to strangers about something that could get me arrested if I talk to the wrong stranger. I have enough other good things going on in my life that drugs (aside from alcohol) have never been my refuge, so I've never overdone them (again, except alcohol).
As for the whole argument about outlawing drug use, sorry but it's typically either you're for or against. You were arguing that DARE, despite it's well documented failures (read the other posts here), is still a good thing, and claiming that drug use is always bad. The fact is, it is not always bad, and I would argue that pot and LSD in particular are not often bad at all, when used by adults who are informed of their effects and the relatively few risks (compared to alcohol & tobacco) they do pose.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is pretty nasty stuff. Lucky for me, it didn't kill me when it had the chance to (well before most of my other drug experiences actually). The right thing to do is to spend the most time on the things that are the worst: Alcohol, Methamphetamine, Heroin, and Cocaine (and quit pretending that Crack is special, 'cos it's just cocaine with exactly the same effects, just cheaper to produce).
Finally, the point is this: if your definition of bad is anything that negatively affects the lives of the people around me, then you better be out there preventing lots of things that are many times more pervasive than drug abuse.
dude, I would say that LSD is WORSE than crack and heroin, simply for its longterm effects.
And exactly what, aside from rumor and government scare mongering, do you have to base this claim on?
The only credible accounts of "flashbacks" are akin to the same phenomenon among soldiers: if you have an extremely intense experience, particularly if it was negative, you may find yourself reliving it when something in the environment triggers your memory.
However, any educated tripper is going to make sure their set and setting are safe, as Dr. Leary stressed for decades. That minimizes your chances for a bad trip and hence your chances of any kind of flashback. As someone who has tripped a LOT (though not at high dosages) in the past, I can say I have never had a flashback, and only one person I knew in the scene ever claimed to have had a flashback, and her experience was a positive one (a very intense memory of a very loving moment in her life).
Poster enjoys alcohol, but has never gotten a DWI because he does not drink and drive (duh!). Sleep in your car! Plan your
evenings. Walk! Don't drink so damn much. Never, ever waste time with illegal drugs.
You had me up till that last one, 'cos everything you say applies exactly the same to any other drug, except the ones that are really addictive and unpredictably dangerous (i.e. heroin and cocaine and meth).
The only reason LSD or pot are significant risks to a properly educated person is because the State will can your ass if they catch you doing them.
Hm, I bet those burned out old hippies only ever did pot. No way they did coke or alcohol or anything else that is known to have physical effects that degrade your brain.
On a more serious note, you should check out studies of Rastafarians and Coptic Christians, both of whom use marijuana as a sacrement, long term, and both of whom don't show long term negative effects from their use.
Pot is a crime because it's obnoxious. Like I said, it's an airborn intoxicant. You can't keep it to yourself, and
you might just want to share it more freely if it were legal. It's outlawed for the same reasons concealed firearms,
special nuclear materials and unliscenced explosives are outlawed (think principle, not scale here). People who
mess around with these things can inadvertantly harm others.
No, it's illegal because Harry Anslinger was looking for something to do with his thugs after alcohol prohibition ended. Go read some history, it's enlightening. The two main factors in the prohibition of drugs were 1) a government agency looking for a new charter and 2) racism--to wit, dope was only smoked by "wetbacks and negro jazz musicians". To justify the crusade against dope, they made a big deal about black men smoking a joint and then *daring* to look at a white woman. Claims were made that it made the underclass agressive, despite the fact that anyone familiar with Cheech & Chong knows it makes you silly & kinda stupid (and a lot less agressive than alcohol does).
DARE is bs because, as many other people have pointed out, it basically lies to kids, and when they realize they've been lied to about one thing, they don't have the maturity to realize that they weren't lied to about some of the others (like cocaine will kill you dead, even if it's the same dose you took yesterday, for reasons that have not been adequately researched; like heroin WILL mess you up badly).
And zero tolerance just teaches you that the adults want to control the world and don't give a shit about what makes sense. And puts people in jail whose only crime has been against themselves (if that).
I hear that most crimes are committed by young men between 16 and 25. Let's put them all in jail up front so they can't hurt anyone, that'd be an effective deterrent. That's the equivalent of your line of reasoning. The main reason drug use is associated with crime is because tada! drug use is defined to be a crime. Go figure.
I suppose the difference between killing others and killing oneself is lost on you? Last time I checked, suicide was illegal most places too, but that doesn't stop people....
For the record, LSD is *not* something to play around with. It's not something I would want a 16 year old playing with any more than I'd want them drinking or anything else. Typically what happens is people end up in "bad setting" situations, and they are altered so much that they can't deal with the results. Of course one of the major "bad settings" would be getting caught by the authorities.
I'm extremely offended by the comment that the girl "basically OD'd". There is no typical overdose level. People have eaten whole sheets of blotter, and while the experience will certainly warp you some, it doesn't kill you and doesn't make you crazy unless you were already latently crazy anyway.
And of course the parents blame the drug, since there's no way their sweet little girl could possibly have wanted to kill herself. Let's lock up all the cars too, there's no way little Janey would have driven into that tree deliberately.....
Now, as to ADDICTS, you didn't SAY addicts in your original post. Furthermore, LSD is not addictive. Neither is pot. Addictive means that it causes you withdrawal symptoms etc and you have to have it just to feel "normal". Heroin is addictive, nicotine is addictive, alcohol is addictive. Psychedelics are not addictive, nor is pot. You might hear someone on the pro-drug-war side saying "well they're PSYCHOLOGICALLY addictive." That's just bullshit. If psychologically addictive means anything, then I'm addicted to dark chocolate. Actually, given the caffiene in chocolate that's probably a bad example, but you get the point. What it takes to beat psychological addiction is motivation to quit. Real addiction is somewhat harder, given that you feel like you're going to die in the meantime (ok, maybe nicotine isn't like that, but I've never been a smoker to say; I know from accounts I've heard that heroin and alcohol definitely feel like that).
So. Why do you think addicts commit crimes? 9 out of 10 are so they can pay for their habit. Why do they have to pay so much for their habit (which is easily interpreted into why don't you hear of cigarette smokers doing crimes for their habit)? Because it's illegal. Legalize, regulate, treat people who make it clear they can't deal medically, and you solve a host of societal problems. But since drugs are evil, you won't ever get the powers that be to be rational enough to take that course.
Uh...you need a basic logic course. To say something is possible is not to say it is always the case. Having seen "way too many people" screw up their lives with drugs is not a disproof that it is possible. As someone who has spent considerable stretches of my life doing LSD and pot (though I've been drug free for quite a while now for unrelated reasons), I'm one of those who is living proof that it is possible. Of course you are only taking my word for it, but then I'm only taking your word on the counter examples.
More to the point; are you going to outlaw anything that is "affecting the lives of those that care for them and love them, in a negative way"?? Hm. Let's see. Where do you start....spending too much time on slashdot? Spousal neglect! Make it illegal!! Alcohol use? Wait, been there tried that, didn't work. What makes you think drug prohibition is going to be any more successful?
Pot is worse than cigarettes and alcohol combined.
BZZZT.
Thank you for playing. Repeat after me. Cigarettes & alcohol are PHYSICALLY ADDICTIVE. Pot is NOT. You need to go read a book by a Harvard Medical Doctor (No, not Dr. Leary), Dr. Lester Grinspoon, titled Marihuana Reconsidered. He started out trying to provide medical proof that your assertion is correct and ended up proving exactly the opposite.
..until someone on LSD goes off and kills a bunch of people
You obviously think that Manson was a killer because of LSD. As someone who's tripped more times than I can count and NEVER killed anyone or had any urge to do so, and as someone who had researched the hell out of this drug BEFORE embarking on my first trip, I can categorically guarantee you that LSD does NOT make people want to go off and kill people.
The other alternative, which seems just as obvious, is that Manson was a killer who liked to do LSD. He used LSD's effects to help hold sway over his followers; after all, if your leader could provide you with a peak experience at will (I've had trips that had stretches that felt like hours long orgasms) wouldn't you be a bit inclined to suspend your disbelief?
Besides, that seems like what a lot of religions do already:-/.
If you're talking about someone besides Manson, please cite definitive evidence that anyone has been guided by LSD to go kill a bunch of people when they wouldn't have done so otherwise. I've followed that kind of thing for a long time and don't recall ever hearing of anything but anecdotal stories (aka RUMORS).
SO. I'm a productive member of society. I contribute to my company, I contribute to my community, I bust my ass to do the right thing and be a responsible adult (including taking appropriate measures to prevent me from hurting myself or others when I'm incapacitated, be it via LSD or via beer). Tell me again why I should be thrown in jail because I enjoy different recreational drugs than everyone else (aka alcohol).
Of course, Drugs could not be outlawed at a federal level by any means short of a constitutional amendment either. Seem like there are some loopholes there, maybe?
Of course. That strategy being the desperate effort to convince people that solaris is a viable OS. A strategy that stands
about as much chance as Microsoft's to do the same for windows 2000.
Excuse me? Which OS is more scalable than Solaris, please? Sure as hell not Linux, with Linus refusing big iron patches. Sure as hell not NT, they can't manage more then 4 processors properly. What in particular is not viable about Solaris? Oh wait "slower than glacial flow". I guess if you want to run it on your old 486 it might be.
It seems to me (as an interested outsider) that, while it makes sense to have the kernel be as accessable to all levels of machines as possible, that Linus will have to bend eventually in some way.
One problem is that #ifdefs have no way to tell what the memory size of your machine is going to be, and it seems (to me at least) a bit excessive to expect a recompile just to get a kernel that's efficient for a given sized machine.
I realize this is probably the wrong hammer (possibly too big) but what prevents the possibility of having two sets of memory management code, the "standard" set and the "wait we've got >256 Meg of RAM" set? Yah, very complex, but if kernel forking is a Bad Thing (tm) then what prevents that approach from working?
First, the program does ASK you if it's ok to send messages to your contacts informing them of your address change. You actually have to press a button to get it to send the notifications. So is it really spam?
Yep it is.
It doesn't ask you if you want to send a TESTAMONIAL to all your friends.
Slashdot Mirror
You may say "no it's not" but tell that to american indians whose religion includes taking ritual peyote (i.e. NOT TO GET OFF, BUT AS A SACRAMENT) who have been denied freedom of religion ('cos it's not really religion after all). Oh wait, they can do it, they just can't keep their jobs if they do 'cos of the war on some drugs.....
Which part of "Congress shall make NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion" do you have difficulty with?
This shows a complete lack of any serious unix experience, since most of the major vendors have some way of accomplishing this. Sun's been doing with with NIS for around the same amount of time as NetInfo has been around.
Perhaps BSD has ignored NIS, but Linux certainly hasn't.
So when was the last time this occurred with alcohol? About 70 years ago. Same things happened; little kids were recruited to do lots of the dirty work 'cos they couldn't go to jail. Rival factions killed each other in the streets. It was called Prohibition, and the crime and violence etc. are a factor of it being illegal (the people who WOULD use the drugs responsibly either don't, or don't get caught so you don't hear about them). You're just offering more arguments about why prohibition is worse than regulation.
If they had those weapons then, they would have used them. Tommy guns were the automatic weapon of the day, after all.
If you're running away from stuff that's going to drive you into abuse or borderline abuse situations, or if you are irresponsible and don't take adequate steps to protect yourself and those around you, of course bad things are going to happen. Chances are, even if all you ever did was legal drugs (aka alcohol), those exact same bad things would have happened. This is the fault of the drugs how?
Now that we have the unpleasantries out of the way, let's try another approach.
The only blackouts and memory loss I ever had were from (guess?) alcohol. The woman I was dating when I started taking acid is the woman I married. I never drove any friends away, never had any work problems to speak of (I even recall repairing a servers failed hard disk quite effectively out of necessity in the middle of a trip. Not a fun experience, but not one that damaged my work). While I dated several different people during the period I was intermittently smoking pot, none of them were broken up with over the issue of drugs (in fact I was a very light smoker most of the time except when I was dating someone who smoked with me). The only bad trip I've had wasn't a trip, it was an unexpectedly strong batch of pot that left me very messed up in my time sense, and it scared me more than anyone, because it was all inside my head. I didn't "quit" so much as lost my last trusted connection and don't have an addiction driving me to go talk to strangers about something that could get me arrested if I talk to the wrong stranger. I have enough other good things going on in my life that drugs (aside from alcohol) have never been my refuge, so I've never overdone them (again, except alcohol).
As for the whole argument about outlawing drug use, sorry but it's typically either you're for or against. You were arguing that DARE, despite it's well documented failures (read the other posts here), is still a good thing, and claiming that drug use is always bad. The fact is, it is not always bad, and I would argue that pot and LSD in particular are not often bad at all, when used by adults who are informed of their effects and the relatively few risks (compared to alcohol & tobacco) they do pose.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is pretty nasty stuff. Lucky for me, it didn't kill me when it had the chance to (well before most of my other drug experiences actually). The right thing to do is to spend the most time on the things that are the worst: Alcohol, Methamphetamine, Heroin, and Cocaine (and quit pretending that Crack is special, 'cos it's just cocaine with exactly the same effects, just cheaper to produce).
Finally, the point is this: if your definition of bad is anything that negatively affects the lives of the people around me, then you better be out there preventing lots of things that are many times more pervasive than drug abuse.
And exactly what, aside from rumor and government scare mongering, do you have to base this claim on?
The only credible accounts of "flashbacks" are akin to the same phenomenon among soldiers: if you have an extremely intense experience, particularly if it was negative, you may find yourself reliving it when something in the environment triggers your memory.
However, any educated tripper is going to make sure their set and setting are safe, as Dr. Leary stressed for decades. That minimizes your chances for a bad trip and hence your chances of any kind of flashback. As someone who has tripped a LOT (though not at high dosages) in the past, I can say I have never had a flashback, and only one person I knew in the scene ever claimed to have had a flashback, and her experience was a positive one (a very intense memory of a very loving moment in her life).
You had me up till that last one, 'cos everything you say applies exactly the same to any other drug, except the ones that are really addictive and unpredictably dangerous (i.e. heroin and cocaine and meth).
The only reason LSD or pot are significant risks to a properly educated person is because the State will can your ass if they catch you doing them.
On a more serious note, you should check out studies of Rastafarians and Coptic Christians, both of whom use marijuana as a sacrement, long term, and both of whom don't show long term negative effects from their use.
It's called capitalism. The key to success in a capitalistic world is self-education. Be smart, caveat emptor. Get over it.
last time I checked smoking and drinking were both physically addictive, and LSD and pot were not.
No, it's illegal because Harry Anslinger was looking for something to do with his thugs after alcohol prohibition ended. Go read some history, it's enlightening. The two main factors in the prohibition of drugs were 1) a government agency looking for a new charter and 2) racism--to wit, dope was only smoked by "wetbacks and negro jazz musicians". To justify the crusade against dope, they made a big deal about black men smoking a joint and then *daring* to look at a white woman. Claims were made that it made the underclass agressive, despite the fact that anyone familiar with Cheech & Chong knows it makes you silly & kinda stupid (and a lot less agressive than alcohol does).
DARE is bs because, as many other people have pointed out, it basically lies to kids, and when they realize they've been lied to about one thing, they don't have the maturity to realize that they weren't lied to about some of the others (like cocaine will kill you dead, even if it's the same dose you took yesterday, for reasons that have not been adequately researched; like heroin WILL mess you up badly).
And zero tolerance just teaches you that the adults want to control the world and don't give a shit about what makes sense. And puts people in jail whose only crime has been against themselves (if that).
I hear that most crimes are committed by young men between 16 and 25. Let's put them all in jail up front so they can't hurt anyone, that'd be an effective deterrent. That's the equivalent of your line of reasoning. The main reason drug use is associated with crime is because tada! drug use is defined to be a crime. Go figure.
Ok, so you did say addicts. Bad me. Point remains that psychedelics and marijuana are not addictive.
I suppose the difference between killing others and killing oneself is lost on you? Last time I checked, suicide was illegal most places too, but that doesn't stop people....
For the record, LSD is *not* something to play around with. It's not something I would want a 16 year old playing with any more than I'd want them drinking or anything else. Typically what happens is people end up in "bad setting" situations, and they are altered so much that they can't deal with the results. Of course one of the major "bad settings" would be getting caught by the authorities.
I'm extremely offended by the comment that the girl "basically OD'd". There is no typical overdose level. People have eaten whole sheets of blotter, and while the experience will certainly warp you some, it doesn't kill you and doesn't make you crazy unless you were already latently crazy anyway.
And of course the parents blame the drug, since there's no way their sweet little girl could possibly have wanted to kill herself. Let's lock up all the cars too, there's no way little Janey would have driven into that tree deliberately.....
Now, as to ADDICTS, you didn't SAY addicts in your original post. Furthermore, LSD is not addictive. Neither is pot. Addictive means that it causes you withdrawal symptoms etc and you have to have it just to feel "normal". Heroin is addictive, nicotine is addictive, alcohol is addictive. Psychedelics are not addictive, nor is pot. You might hear someone on the pro-drug-war side saying "well they're PSYCHOLOGICALLY addictive." That's just bullshit. If psychologically addictive means anything, then I'm addicted to dark chocolate. Actually, given the caffiene in chocolate that's probably a bad example, but you get the point. What it takes to beat psychological addiction is motivation to quit. Real addiction is somewhat harder, given that you feel like you're going to die in the meantime (ok, maybe nicotine isn't like that, but I've never been a smoker to say; I know from accounts I've heard that heroin and alcohol definitely feel like that).
So. Why do you think addicts commit crimes? 9 out of 10 are so they can pay for their habit. Why do they have to pay so much for their habit (which is easily interpreted into why don't you hear of cigarette smokers doing crimes for their habit)? Because it's illegal. Legalize, regulate, treat people who make it clear they can't deal medically, and you solve a host of societal problems. But since drugs are evil, you won't ever get the powers that be to be rational enough to take that course.
More to the point; are you going to outlaw anything that is "affecting the lives of those that care for them and love them, in a negative way"?? Hm. Let's see. Where do you start....spending too much time on slashdot? Spousal neglect! Make it illegal!! Alcohol use? Wait, been there tried that, didn't work. What makes you think drug prohibition is going to be any more successful?
BZZZT.
Thank you for playing. Repeat after me. Cigarettes & alcohol are PHYSICALLY ADDICTIVE. Pot is NOT. You need to go read a book by a Harvard Medical Doctor (No, not Dr. Leary), Dr. Lester Grinspoon, titled Marihuana Reconsidered. He started out trying to provide medical proof that your assertion is correct and ended up proving exactly the opposite.
You obviously think that Manson was a killer because of LSD. As someone who's tripped more times than I can count and NEVER killed anyone or had any urge to do so, and as someone who had researched the hell out of this drug BEFORE embarking on my first trip, I can categorically guarantee you that LSD does NOT make people want to go off and kill people.
The other alternative, which seems just as obvious, is that Manson was a killer who liked to do LSD. He used LSD's effects to help hold sway over his followers; after all, if your leader could provide you with a peak experience at will (I've had trips that had stretches that felt like hours long orgasms) wouldn't you be a bit inclined to suspend your disbelief?
Besides, that seems like what a lot of religions do already :-/.
If you're talking about someone besides Manson, please cite definitive evidence that anyone has been guided by LSD to go kill a bunch of people when they wouldn't have done so otherwise. I've followed that kind of thing for a long time and don't recall ever hearing of anything but anecdotal stories (aka RUMORS).
SO. I'm a productive member of society. I contribute to my company, I contribute to my community, I bust my ass to do the right thing and be a responsible adult (including taking appropriate measures to prevent me from hurting myself or others when I'm incapacitated, be it via LSD or via beer). Tell me again why I should be thrown in jail because I enjoy different recreational drugs than everyone else (aka alcohol).
Of course, Drugs could not be outlawed at a federal level by any means short of a constitutional amendment either. Seem like there are some loopholes there, maybe?
Can the "editors" actually fix the review so that it isn't truncated every other paragraph, please?
Excuse me? Which OS is more scalable than Solaris, please? Sure as hell not Linux, with Linus refusing big iron patches. Sure as hell not NT, they can't manage more then 4 processors properly. What in particular is not viable about Solaris? Oh wait "slower than glacial flow". I guess if you want to run it on your old 486 it might be.
So used the forked small kernel then! Why is this a problem? It makes good sense to me...
One problem is that #ifdefs have no way to tell what the memory size of your machine is going to be, and it seems (to me at least) a bit excessive to expect a recompile just to get a kernel that's efficient for a given sized machine.
I realize this is probably the wrong hammer (possibly too big) but what prevents the possibility of having two sets of memory management code, the "standard" set and the "wait we've got >256 Meg of RAM" set? Yah, very complex, but if kernel forking is a Bad Thing (tm) then what prevents that approach from working?
Yep it is.
It doesn't ask you if you want to send a TESTAMONIAL to all your friends.