by manufacturing metric assloads of counterfeit money, speed, opiates, cocaine, viagra, etc...
What makes you think they don't already do this? In fact, I've read elsewhere that exporting methamphetamine is indeed one of the other ways NK gets money - and I don't mean pharmaceuticals, this is high quality powder sold in bulk directly to drug dealers. Not much of a step from there to opiates or cocaine, so maybe they're already doing that too, who knows... This is a very scary regime.
A good case can be made that drug prohibition has actually increased the availability and use of drugs, so probably this is not the best comparison you could make. Also, one could easily argue that making CP illegal increases its scarcity and thus the value actually goes up, not down, to those who really want it. Just because we find something unwholesome, that does not automatically mean that making it illegal is the right policy. It's pretty clear that there are often major unintended consequences of legally prohibiting stuff - whatever it may be - that a significant percentage of the population truly desires to have.
Huh? Sorry, but after the third exquisite description of a cloud, his beautiful imagery made me learn how to scan paragraphs to skip to extraneous bits. Kind of like porn in a way. The first thrust is arousing to watch. The second through tenth are titillating. The eleventh through ninetieth are increasingly routine. Eventually you may find yourself desperately bored, hoping the actors change position or fall in a vat of boiling lead, or something interesting.
I call BS, there are no descriptions of clouds, exquisite or otherwise, anywhere in the TLOTR, except near the end when the black clouds come out of Mordor, a phenomenon that needs describing as it is a major thematic element. You sound like you haven't really attempted to read the book. To give you credit, you clearly know your porn, though.
The reality is that crime hasn't really skyrocketed and by all accounts might actually be rising at a much lower rate when compared with the population. We just have a distorted perception of rampant crime and danger as a result of what the media reports.
Crime isn't even rising, it's actually been going down for many years, but you'd never know that from today's media. It all about fear, make the people afraid enough and you can get away with almost anything. The America I grew up with, that I knew was the greatest country on earth, is fast becoming a memory. Parent should be modded up.
Hang on, how is a crack-head's addiction a consequence of the war on drugs?
It's a direct consequence of the war on drugs, because crack itself exists only as a result of the drug war, read up on the history of the drug if you don't believe me. Under prohibition drugs of all kinds have gotten more potent and/or been reformulated into newer and more potent forms - this is driven entirely by prohibition, no cokehead would have ever thought to take his drug of choice and mess with it chemically to make the freebase form and then smoke it, not if he was already happily getting grams of pure cocaine HCL at the local pharmacy whenever he wanted. Crack was a result of the naked greed of some very clever drug dealers - dealers, not users - who created it specifically as a means of getting more people hooked on more cocaine faster than ever, and guess what, it worked like a charm. This is what happens when you make things illegal, you lose all control of the problem. Of course, with some drugs, heroin being the best example, there simply WAS no problem before the drug was made illegal. Before prohibition the main users of heroin were bored housewives, who consumed it in the form of a variety of patent medicine "tonics", and because these tonics were very cheap and easily available there was no crime involved, and virtually no health problems. These things only became associated with the drug after it was made illegal.
I really doubt that the people of Switzerland, Denmark, and the Netherlands are all that much different from the people in the USA in their approach to entertainment. Let's face it, people are people. All of these countries are basically majority-white, Western, capitalist democracies... Whatever elements of socialism exist aren't enough to create any serious cultural divisions, especially when you're talking about behaviors involving the internet. Sure, there might be small differences, but nothing that would have a significant impact on downloading/spending habits.
Actually, assuming this ruling stands, it could finally serve as a serious real-world test of the hypothesis that downloading costs artists and labels big money. Will CD and legal download sales plummet in Switzerland, compared to countries that don't allow downloading, or will we see something else entirely happen? Up til now, AFAIK, there has never been any good way to actually measure these things directly, but now maybe we can just sit back and see what happens. Will we now see the scary scenarios put forward by the MAFIIAs of the world actually play out in Switzerland? Or, as I believe, and apparently the Swiss Court agrees with me, will the result prove much more benign? It would be nice to finally have this settled one way or the other, although I suspect the debate would just go on, regardless. The big record Labels have a long track record of denying reality.
you can't do 'just a little' meth or be an occasional user. You get hooked, hardcore
Fact: There is very little in the way of withdrawal symptoms from meth, mostly you just sleep for days. Many people use amphetamines casually without getting addicted, in fact our armed services gives it to the troops in certain situations to promote wakefulness, they're called 'go pills'.
some like heroin can have fatal withdrawal symptoms
Fact: Nobody ever dies directly from heroin withdrawal. The perfectly legal drug alcohol, on the other hand, can indeed cause death upon withdrawal.
Actually, using just about any measure of "harmfulness" you want, alcohol is far and away THE most dangerous drug, whether you look at addiction potential, severity of withdrawal, harm to the body, cost and/or danger to society, whatever you look at... Good old booze is number one. This inconvenient fact is a big reason why our current drugs laws are so pathetically hypocritical. If there were any rhyme or reason to the law alcohol would be illegal and heroin would be easily available at the local drugstore. The reality is that the laws are completely arbitrary in their approach as to what's dangerous and what isn't.
Interstate roadblocks? Uh, they've been doing exactly this for many years. I drove through one of those roadblocks on I-91 southbound in White River Junction VT years ago. Every single car on the interstate was stopped and examined by an official looking dude with a big flashlight. Most cars were waved through, but not all. I don't know how they chose who to give the full search treatment to... Drivers certainly didn't get a pass for being crew, that's for sure. This was a DHS operation that ran on and off in the same location for years. Guess how many terrorists they caught? Yep, zero. Haven't seen that roadblock lately, not since the economy tanked. Maybe the good people of VT finally got fed up and demanded an end to this kind of wasteful idiocy, but I wouldn't bet on it. As soon as there's federal funding available again, that roadblock will probably be back. Welcome to the new America. You voted for it, enjoy!
Also, no Ellison? No Delany? No Fredric Brown? Not to mention del Rey, Simak, Sprague de Camp , any of which should have been there instead of Brooks or Eddings.
Also 4 Gaimans, but only 2 Pratchetts? Come on, I like Gaiman, but he can't hold a candle to Pratchett, especially if you consider the whole oeuvre.
If your talking about "older" authors the biggest omission by far, IMHO, has to be Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination was written in the '50s but reads like something just published. No list of the supposedly all time greatest SF is complete without it.
Also, no Jack Vance?? Granted, Vance is not to everyone's taste, but he's indisputably one of the genre's most influential writers and for god sakes, he at least outranks Goodkind!
I beg to differ. Battlezone 2 was and still is one of the best games ever made, easily one of the most immersive games around, one that never gets stale, which is maybe why it still has a loyal following. What other game from 10 years ago still has new mods coming out, to say nothing of substantial revisions to the original game done by some of the original programmers working on their own time?
First they came for the porn stars, but I did nothing because I was not a porn star. Then they came for the dirty magazine publishers, but I did nothing because I am not a dirty magazine publisher. Then they came for the pin-up girls, but I did nothing because I am not a pin-up girl...
If you really need to close that first tab, open another tab and move the first one to the right. You will now be able to close the 1st tab... But the newer tab will be open until you repeat the procedure, and so on. Yeah, this is clunky and a bit tedious, but it does let you close ANY tab you want to, even though there will still be at least one tab open at all times.
People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
I bought into this argument and bought a Sony VAIO with a Bluray player recently when I needed a new laptop. The Sony's a great machine, it has everything I was looking for in a computer including a superb display. The bluray player was really just icing on the cake, not something I really cared a lot about, but I won't deny I thought it was a pretty nice piece of icing. Well, that was 6 months ago and I have used the damn thing exactly once to watch a bluray movie. The HD is nice and crisp on still shots, but movement is handled so badly, with noticeably jerky playback, that I have absolutely no desire to ever use the player again at the resolution it was built for. Regular DVDs play just fine. But hey, at least I can point to the bluray player and say, "See, my computer isn't junk, it's got bluray!"
Moral of the story: not all bluray players implement the standard well. If you really care about having a bluray player, watch it personally before you buy it, don't order online like I did and assume hey, it's bluray, it's got to be good.
You do know that crack, being insoluble, can't be snorted?
Of course you did! How silly of me, delivering a product by the most inefficient means possible is an riaa specialty. I have to say, it's good to see they live their personal lives by the same rules they want to foist off on the rest of us.
That 11 day record has surely been exceeded by addicts detoxing from drugs like heroin and methadone. I have heard anecdotal evidence from high-dose methadone patients who were arrested and jailed - most prisons will not treat such cases with anything other than cold turkey - of continuing sleep deprivation lasting as long as a month or more. There is of course presently no way to confirm such claims, but detoxing addicts might be a place where scientists could study extreme sleep deprivation without being personally responsible for keeping their subjects awake for long periods, which would be unethical. Of course, many would consider the withholding of any kind of treatment from withdrawing addicts to be unethical also, but that doesn't stop jails from doing it on a routine basis.
But a gene by definition MUST have some reality as an isolated entity, otherwise the cellular coding machinery that turns genes into proteins (and I admit that's a simplification of what happens) wouldn't be able to recognize it. In other words, if it's a gene it must code for something, and since the body is in fact able to read that code and decode it into a specific protein, arguing that the gene doesn't exist on its own is disingenuous at best. Functionally it is indeed isolated, otherwise it wouldn't be a gene.
I think. This is not my field at all. I'm going mostly on what little I can remember being taught about this stuff decades ago.
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by manufacturing metric assloads of counterfeit money, speed, opiates, cocaine, viagra, etc...
What makes you think they don't already do this? In fact, I've read elsewhere that exporting methamphetamine is indeed one of the other ways NK gets money - and I don't mean pharmaceuticals, this is high quality powder sold in bulk directly to drug dealers. Not much of a step from there to opiates or cocaine, so maybe they're already doing that too, who knows... This is a very scary regime.
A good case can be made that drug prohibition has actually increased the availability and use of drugs, so probably this is not the best comparison you could make. Also, one could easily argue that making CP illegal increases its scarcity and thus the value actually goes up, not down, to those who really want it. Just because we find something unwholesome, that does not automatically mean that making it illegal is the right policy. It's pretty clear that there are often major unintended consequences of legally prohibiting stuff - whatever it may be - that a significant percentage of the population truly desires to have.
The cake is a lie!
Huh? Sorry, but after the third exquisite description of a cloud, his beautiful imagery made me learn how to scan paragraphs to skip to extraneous bits. Kind of like porn in a way. The first thrust is arousing to watch. The second through tenth are titillating. The eleventh through ninetieth are increasingly routine. Eventually you may find yourself desperately bored, hoping the actors change position or fall in a vat of boiling lead, or something interesting.
I call BS, there are no descriptions of clouds, exquisite or otherwise, anywhere in the TLOTR, except near the end when the black clouds come out of Mordor, a phenomenon that needs describing as it is a major thematic element. You sound like you haven't really attempted to read the book. To give you credit, you clearly know your porn, though.
The reality is that crime hasn't really skyrocketed and by all accounts might actually be rising at a much lower rate when compared with the population. We just have a distorted perception of rampant crime and danger as a result of what the media reports.
Crime isn't even rising, it's actually been going down for many years, but you'd never know that from today's media. It all about fear, make the people afraid enough and you can get away with almost anything. The America I grew up with, that I knew was the greatest country on earth, is fast becoming a memory. Parent should be modded up.
Hang on, how is a crack-head's addiction a consequence of the war on drugs?
It's a direct consequence of the war on drugs, because crack itself exists only as a result of the drug war, read up on the history of the drug if you don't believe me. Under prohibition drugs of all kinds have gotten more potent and/or been reformulated into newer and more potent forms - this is driven entirely by prohibition, no cokehead would have ever thought to take his drug of choice and mess with it chemically to make the freebase form and then smoke it, not if he was already happily getting grams of pure cocaine HCL at the local pharmacy whenever he wanted. Crack was a result of the naked greed of some very clever drug dealers - dealers, not users - who created it specifically as a means of getting more people hooked on more cocaine faster than ever, and guess what, it worked like a charm. This is what happens when you make things illegal, you lose all control of the problem. Of course, with some drugs, heroin being the best example, there simply WAS no problem before the drug was made illegal. Before prohibition the main users of heroin were bored housewives, who consumed it in the form of a variety of patent medicine "tonics", and because these tonics were very cheap and easily available there was no crime involved, and virtually no health problems. These things only became associated with the drug after it was made illegal.
I really doubt that the people of Switzerland, Denmark, and the Netherlands are all that much different from the people in the USA in their approach to entertainment. Let's face it, people are people. All of these countries are basically majority-white, Western, capitalist democracies... Whatever elements of socialism exist aren't enough to create any serious cultural divisions, especially when you're talking about behaviors involving the internet. Sure, there might be small differences, but nothing that would have a significant impact on downloading/spending habits.
Actually, assuming this ruling stands, it could finally serve as a serious real-world test of the hypothesis that downloading costs artists and labels big money. Will CD and legal download sales plummet in Switzerland, compared to countries that don't allow downloading, or will we see something else entirely happen? Up til now, AFAIK, there has never been any good way to actually measure these things directly, but now maybe we can just sit back and see what happens. Will we now see the scary scenarios put forward by the MAFIIAs of the world actually play out in Switzerland? Or, as I believe, and apparently the Swiss Court agrees with me, will the result prove much more benign? It would be nice to finally have this settled one way or the other, although I suspect the debate would just go on, regardless. The big record Labels have a long track record of denying reality.
you can't do 'just a little' meth or be an occasional user. You get hooked, hardcore
Fact: There is very little in the way of withdrawal symptoms from meth, mostly you just sleep for days. Many people use amphetamines casually without getting addicted, in fact our armed services gives it to the troops in certain situations to promote wakefulness, they're called 'go pills'.
some like heroin can have fatal withdrawal symptoms
Fact: Nobody ever dies directly from heroin withdrawal. The perfectly legal drug alcohol, on the other hand, can indeed cause death upon withdrawal. Actually, using just about any measure of "harmfulness" you want, alcohol is far and away THE most dangerous drug, whether you look at addiction potential, severity of withdrawal, harm to the body, cost and/or danger to society, whatever you look at... Good old booze is number one. This inconvenient fact is a big reason why our current drugs laws are so pathetically hypocritical. If there were any rhyme or reason to the law alcohol would be illegal and heroin would be easily available at the local drugstore. The reality is that the laws are completely arbitrary in their approach as to what's dangerous and what isn't.
Interstate roadblocks? Uh, they've been doing exactly this for many years. I drove through one of those roadblocks on I-91 southbound in White River Junction VT years ago. Every single car on the interstate was stopped and examined by an official looking dude with a big flashlight. Most cars were waved through, but not all. I don't know how they chose who to give the full search treatment to... Drivers certainly didn't get a pass for being crew, that's for sure. This was a DHS operation that ran on and off in the same location for years. Guess how many terrorists they caught? Yep, zero. Haven't seen that roadblock lately, not since the economy tanked. Maybe the good people of VT finally got fed up and demanded an end to this kind of wasteful idiocy, but I wouldn't bet on it. As soon as there's federal funding available again, that roadblock will probably be back. Welcome to the new America. You voted for it, enjoy!
No Lovecraft, Dunsany or Olaf Stapleton?
Also, no Ellison? No Delany? No Fredric Brown? Not to mention del Rey, Simak, Sprague de Camp , any of which should have been there instead of Brooks or Eddings. Also 4 Gaimans, but only 2 Pratchetts? Come on, I like Gaiman, but he can't hold a candle to Pratchett, especially if you consider the whole oeuvre.
If your talking about "older" authors the biggest omission by far, IMHO, has to be Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination was written in the '50s but reads like something just published. No list of the supposedly all time greatest SF is complete without it. Also, no Jack Vance?? Granted, Vance is not to everyone's taste, but he's indisputably one of the genre's most influential writers and for god sakes, he at least outranks Goodkind!
Pandemic studios never made anything worth having
I beg to differ. Battlezone 2 was and still is one of the best games ever made, easily one of the most immersive games around, one that never gets stale, which is maybe why it still has a loyal following. What other game from 10 years ago still has new mods coming out, to say nothing of substantial revisions to the original game done by some of the original programmers working on their own time?
First they came for the porn stars, but I did nothing because I was not a porn star. Then they came for the dirty magazine publishers, but I did nothing because I am not a dirty magazine publisher. Then they came for the pin-up girls, but I did nothing because I am not a pin-up girl...
...and then we had no porn, and no one came.
There, fixed that for ya.
If you really need to close that first tab, open another tab and move the first one to the right. You will now be able to close the 1st tab... But the newer tab will be open until you repeat the procedure, and so on. Yeah, this is clunky and a bit tedious, but it does let you close ANY tab you want to, even though there will still be at least one tab open at all times.
People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
I bought into this argument and bought a Sony VAIO with a Bluray player recently when I needed a new laptop. The Sony's a great machine, it has everything I was looking for in a computer including a superb display. The bluray player was really just icing on the cake, not something I really cared a lot about, but I won't deny I thought it was a pretty nice piece of icing. Well, that was 6 months ago and I have used the damn thing exactly once to watch a bluray movie. The HD is nice and crisp on still shots, but movement is handled so badly, with noticeably jerky playback, that I have absolutely no desire to ever use the player again at the resolution it was built for. Regular DVDs play just fine. But hey, at least I can point to the bluray player and say, "See, my computer isn't junk, it's got bluray!" Moral of the story: not all bluray players implement the standard well. If you really care about having a bluray player, watch it personally before you buy it, don't order online like I did and assume hey, it's bluray, it's got to be good.
5 out of 10 RIAA employees snort crack.
You do know that crack, being insoluble, can't be snorted? Of course you did! How silly of me, delivering a product by the most inefficient means possible is an riaa specialty. I have to say, it's good to see they live their personal lives by the same rules they want to foist off on the rest of us.
That 11 day record has surely been exceeded by addicts detoxing from drugs like heroin and methadone. I have heard anecdotal evidence from high-dose methadone patients who were arrested and jailed - most prisons will not treat such cases with anything other than cold turkey - of continuing sleep deprivation lasting as long as a month or more. There is of course presently no way to confirm such claims, but detoxing addicts might be a place where scientists could study extreme sleep deprivation without being personally responsible for keeping their subjects awake for long periods, which would be unethical. Of course, many would consider the withholding of any kind of treatment from withdrawing addicts to be unethical also, but that doesn't stop jails from doing it on a routine basis.
But a gene by definition MUST have some reality as an isolated entity, otherwise the cellular coding machinery that turns genes into proteins (and I admit that's a simplification of what happens) wouldn't be able to recognize it. In other words, if it's a gene it must code for something, and since the body is in fact able to read that code and decode it into a specific protein, arguing that the gene doesn't exist on its own is disingenuous at best. Functionally it is indeed isolated, otherwise it wouldn't be a gene. I think. This is not my field at all. I'm going mostly on what little I can remember being taught about this stuff decades ago.