There really isn't any problem with video surveilance in a mall or another public area where there are lots of people. If there are already crowds around you, then you have no expectation of privacy, and you already know you're being observed directly by the crowd around you. The problem only comes into play when this technology crosses the thin line and starts monitoring private encounters. Two people slip into a back ally and start kissing, or maybe two people standing in a bathroom start discussing politics or their dislike of a particular security guard's wife. That's when freedom starts to plummet, and surveillance starts to permeate our private lives.
DNA databases are an entirely different issue. A DNA database can be used to match repeat offenders of crimes, provided strict rules are in place to prevent the usage of this database for anything other than crime solving. (Yes, even convicted criminals have rights, that's necessary for the entire concept of rehabilitation to work.) But DNA databases of innocent civilians? This is unacceptable. The only acceptable use of DNA by government would be in solving crimes, but when government begins an investigation with a presumption of guilt, then a lot of innocent people are sent to prison. Is it justice to send a person to prison for murder because one of their hairs fell onto the murderer earlier that day and was carried to the crime scene?
We have no need to catalogue and number the general population using the body's serial number. This is no different from branding a person with a serial number on the arm and setting up a device that can track everyone wherever they go by their serial number. It serves no greater good, only abuse.
Re:Could be a weapon?
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 2
Not in a super cold bose-einstein condensate. Putting anything close to a super-intense pulse of laser light into it would overheat the gas beyond the condensate point, and all the magic would leak out.
The key word in what you said is that for heisenberg's uncertainty principle to be relevant you must "know" the position or momentum of a particle. In other words, that knowledge must escape to the outside world. If that knowledge is just stored inside of an opaque bose-einstein condensate, then no knowledge has escaped to the outside world, and hence, the wavefunction does not collapse.
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 2
In theory, there is already a non-zero possibility that as you read this you will be spontaneously teleported in entirety to the inner ring of Neptune. Unfortunately, the problem with this is that the probability of this happening is of course so astronomically remote that it will never happen anywhere in the expanse of the universe within whatever lifespan the universe may have. So the only way we would ever achieve teleportation of a complete human-sized object would be if we found some way to modify the quantum probability of where an individual particle's position ends up, so that we could say with certainty what the end position would be in order to keep every particle in a human together, while at the same time, keeping the human from exploding in a huge burst of particles flying in every direction. In other words, we have to find a way to violate everything we've found to be true about quantum mechanics, but keep your fingers crossed, I have hope.:)
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 5
Technically, taking a quantum snapshot of a photon and then recreating it is the same thing as stopping it and restarting it. When we get down to such a level, we sacrifice the idea that a particle has an individual identity, and instead only acknowledge the existence of a set of properties for the particle. If the experiment simply resulted in light of the same frequency being emitted, then this would still be interesting as a means of optical storage, but by no means would it be as interesting from a theoretical perspective. What makes it interesting is that the imprint of the light is stored in the quantum spin states of the gas atoms, which means there is a theoretical possibility (which can't be determined too well from a nytimes article) that all the "uncertainty information" inherent in the photon is preserved across the restart. That would make this a true stopping and restarting of a photon.
1) It is necessary some more to dismount Catherine Tasca.
2) A boob... summarized well here the general feeling on the left.
3)" We fell from naked ", slipped one in Bercy.
While interesting in an academic sense, such a discovery is rather trivial in a practical sense. Superconductivity itself has a number of astonishing uses that can sometimes look like magic, but they're only useful when we can get them to occur at useful temperatures. Unfortunately, cooling something to 1K will require something along the lines of laser cooling in order to achieve, and this turns out to not be very practical. Superconductors with a very low critical temperature cannot conduct much current before they exceed their critical energy level and "go normal".
Useful superconductors are more in the line of HTC's, high temperature superconductors. The simplest of these are the superconductors that work when cooled to the order of 70 degrees Kelvin (-200C) by liquid nitrogen (which is cheaper than beer). If I recall correctly, the highest published HTC was around 175K, which is only 100 degrees below freezing. I've heard rumors of higher temperature superconductors, but haven't seen any referreed publications of results yet. Keep your eyes peeled, we'll see room-temperature superconductors within the lifetimes of most slashdotters.
To be fair to lower temperature superconductors, I believe the maglev train in Japan uses a lower temperature superconductor cooled by liquid helium, which is somewhere down on the order of 10K.
Superconductors aren't too useful for their property of not conducting current, since they have a critical maximum current level anyway. They are mostly used for their diamagnetic properties (they repel magnetic flux lines). This is the basis for how an MRI works, or for how super-fast magnetic trains work.
I was one of those child prodigies. I was already a solid programmer by the time I was that kid's age. One thing I wish I had learned before the double-digit years is psychology. I could make a computer do whatever I wanted, but people were a baffle for a number of years until I caught up on that front. Had I studied psychology on the side when I was that age, I think it might have gone differently.
Beyond that recommendation, follow two simple rules. Present him with ready access to core information that he wants and needs, such as programming information, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. And then just let his inherent curiosity drive him. If you feed curiosity, you will strengthen it, and THAT will make him great someday more than learning a particular aspect of technology.
I would expect a book titled, "Perl for System Administrators" to assume no knowledge of Perl. The language has it's system administrative niche in the ability to create small programs between maybe 1 and 100 lines for tasks involving some quick text processing or glueing two applications together. In other words, the tasks you would most likely find Perl applicable for involving System Administration are the tasks that wouldn't require in-depth knowledge of Perl, but would instead simply require a foundation in Perl, a thorough grounding in regular expressions, and most importantly, a solid description of how to program secure Perl code.
Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever?
The fact that modern people are impatient and demand a reaction to any problem that's discussed. This results in countless knee-jerk reactions on the part of politicians who want to be able to say they did "something" about a problem. I reference the ever successful war on drugs.
> "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose.
I don't take this analogy very seriously.
That happens to be a quote of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Holmes, and is one of the defining political statements that clarify the meaning and interpretation of the freedoms expressed in the Bill of Rights.
Democracy needs self-imposed limitations to function even moderately well. The US used areas of the constitution and bill of rights as its first basis of such self-imposed limitations. Long ago we set a general principle, "People will have freedom of speech," and since then we've been interpreting and reinterpreting it.
Technology is experiencing exponential growth, and sooner or later, we're going to have to address that by laying down some fundamental self-imposed limitations of government dealing with technology, because it is clear that government does not move fast enough for politicians to keep up with technology.
I would rather see a freedom of technology clause, and have such battles of government move into the court system, where someone could invoke freedom of technology as grounds for innocence. Then simple laws regulating certain use of technology could be formulated, but no laws restricting the development of technology could be created. It would have made the entire crypto debate a moot point, as most of us knew it should have been.
It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.
Precisely. The fact that they have such a huge say about that which they don't understand is exactly why we need to make sure they say nothing about its future.
Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous. It's about as dangerous as political discussion about the internet or computers. Anytime a bunch of stiff-assed politicians sit around a fancy table with leather seats and talk about some form of technology they don't understand, the innevitable result is that they are afraid of it! And anything they're afraid of, they pass irrational and unreasonable legislation against. Cloning doesn't work like in Arnold's little movie. Hollywood has to make some "alterations" to how cloning really works in order to make it interesting enough for the big screen. In reality, a clone is no different from an identical twin that must grow up from birth, there is no transfer of thought, memory, etc. Unfortunately, there is nothing interesting about an identical twin growing up while someone is going through a mid-life crisis, so no movies exist to match reality. And double plus unfortunately, our politicians have no exposure to this technology EXCEPT the media, so they get the mistaken impression that it actually works like Arnold's movie, and thus get even more terrified of it.
We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."
I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
Government web sites should be there for two purposes. One, to provide information, and two, to provide service. The main hinderence to this is that sites are not designed so that information and services can be found. So many sites make grand assumptions about what the user is looking for, and try to lead the user on a grand goose chase around a mess of hyperlinks leading nowhere but in circles. Simply present a simple main page (with FEW graphics!) containing subcategories which a person can identify with what they're looking for. Then, in the pages referred to in these subcategories, do the same, and eventually list the appropriate services and information. There is no money to be made, and thus no need to "promote" or "advertise" a particular government service. Simply provide the information and services in a well-ordered manner.
No, it will simply motivate the Debian developers to advance other aspects of Debian in order to maintain its status as the technological leader of Linux distributions.
Definitely! Reading the headline, I was hoping someone had voiced this view. Personally, I prefer to stay lightyears from most Microsoft products, but this is definitely a positive step forward for Microsoft users, under one condition... That condition being that Microsoft opens up the ability for system administrators to declare other authenticating agents besides Microsoft as authorized binary signers. I wouldn't want Microsoft to be the only agent who can authorize what software I run on my system, but if I can declare, say, Microsoft, Symantec, CERN, etc, then maybe I have a wonderful useful system that can protect or immunize against unwanted viruses and downloaded trojans that pretend to be real software.
The hardwork of the Mozilla team isn't lining Netscape's pockets at all. Those of us who want Mozilla have downloaded Mozilla and are using it. Yet there are still people who are downloading Netscape. Why? Brand name recognition. That's what's lining Netscape's pockets, a brand name they've earned for themselves over the years. There was a time when a lot of people you talked to would call the web "netscape". (I hope this time has passed.) Mozilla doesn't have this brand name recognition, it just has a beautiful piece of software. Since I'm looking for beautiful software, I download mozilla and use it. If I were looking for commercial advertising and a brand name, I would be punching up netscape.com right now and downloading netscape. It's that simple.
I hear so many people whine on a day-to-day basis about how they have to vote for either a republican or a democrat to avoid throwing their vote away. Bullcrap. Do a little math... Voting for a republican or a democrat isn't going to swing the vote one way or the next. On the order of tens of millions of people will vote for each of Gore and Bush, and your singular vote will not sway either of these. But that's not what voting is about, one person's vote has never determined the next president. Put your vote where it will be useful, and make a statement about how you want your government to be run. Find a third party candidate who supports how YOU feel your government should be run, and cast your vote for them.
The majority of the people I know want a third party candidate to win, and the majority of those people are afraid to vote for a third party candidate for the above stated irrational fears. Well I have news for you that does matter; if everyone who wanted a third party candidate to win had the courage to vote by their heart, we would have a strong government by the people. Instead, we have a situation where the majority of the U.S. population votes like sheep, and we keep putting the same criminals back in office. Wake up and stand up, people!
Please find out what you're really voting for before you do: www.issues2000.org
I hear so many people whine on a day-to-day basis about how they have to vote for either a republican or a democrat to avoid throwing their vote away. Bullcrap. Do a little math... Voting for a republican or a democrat isn't going to swing the vote one way or the next. On the order of tens of millions of people will vote for each of Gore and Bush, and your singular vote will not sway either of these. But that's not what voting is about, one person's vote has never determined the next president. Put your vote where it will be useful, and make a statement about how you want your government to be run. Find a third party candidate who supports how YOU feel your government should be run, and cast your vote for them.
The majority of the people I know want a third party candidate to win, and the majority of those people are afraid to vote for a third party candidate for the above stated irrational fears. Well I have news for you that does matter; if everyone who wanted a third party candidate to win had the courage to vote by their heart, we would have a strong government by the people. Instead, we have a situation where the majority of the U.S. population votes like sheep, and we keep putting the same criminals back in office. Wake up and stand up, people!
Please find out what you're really voting for before you do: www.issues2000.org
> Should we be giving kids a long list of what "OK" drugs are what "bad" drugs are?
We ALREADY do this, it's just rather arbitrary. Don't do pot, it numbs you! Awww, have a headache? Here, take this Tylenol, have an Advil. Oh, you can't behave in class? Maybe we need to put you on Ridilin, yeah, it's in your best interest. No, don't drink, alcohol is evil! It changes your behavior.
Think about it. What's a gateway to what? Why are some drugs "bad" and some drugs "good"? All that really exists is a set of truthful cause:effects. Drug A causes effect B on your body. In most environments, children can get access to anything they want access to, so they're going to need to know factually what drugs cause what effects if they're ever going to learn how to make responsible decisions as adults.
Slashdot Mirror
There really isn't any problem with video surveilance in a mall or another public area where there are lots of people. If there are already crowds around you, then you have no expectation of privacy, and you already know you're being observed directly by the crowd around you. The problem only comes into play when this technology crosses the thin line and starts monitoring private encounters. Two people slip into a back ally and start kissing, or maybe two people standing in a bathroom start discussing politics or their dislike of a particular security guard's wife. That's when freedom starts to plummet, and surveillance starts to permeate our private lives.
DNA databases are an entirely different issue. A DNA database can be used to match repeat offenders of crimes, provided strict rules are in place to prevent the usage of this database for anything other than crime solving. (Yes, even convicted criminals have rights, that's necessary for the entire concept of rehabilitation to work.) But DNA databases of innocent civilians? This is unacceptable. The only acceptable use of DNA by government would be in solving crimes, but when government begins an investigation with a presumption of guilt, then a lot of innocent people are sent to prison. Is it justice to send a person to prison for murder because one of their hairs fell onto the murderer earlier that day and was carried to the crime scene?
We have no need to catalogue and number the general population using the body's serial number. This is no different from branding a person with a serial number on the arm and setting up a device that can track everyone wherever they go by their serial number. It serves no greater good, only abuse.
Not in a super cold bose-einstein condensate. Putting anything close to a super-intense pulse of laser light into it would overheat the gas beyond the condensate point, and all the magic would leak out.
The key word in what you said is that for heisenberg's uncertainty principle to be relevant you must "know" the position or momentum of a particle. In other words, that knowledge must escape to the outside world. If that knowledge is just stored inside of an opaque bose-einstein condensate, then no knowledge has escaped to the outside world, and hence, the wavefunction does not collapse.
In theory, there is already a non-zero possibility that as you read this you will be spontaneously teleported in entirety to the inner ring of Neptune. Unfortunately, the problem with this is that the probability of this happening is of course so astronomically remote that it will never happen anywhere in the expanse of the universe within whatever lifespan the universe may have. So the only way we would ever achieve teleportation of a complete human-sized object would be if we found some way to modify the quantum probability of where an individual particle's position ends up, so that we could say with certainty what the end position would be in order to keep every particle in a human together, while at the same time, keeping the human from exploding in a huge burst of particles flying in every direction. In other words, we have to find a way to violate everything we've found to be true about quantum mechanics, but keep your fingers crossed, I have hope. :)
Technically, taking a quantum snapshot of a photon and then recreating it is the same thing as stopping it and restarting it. When we get down to such a level, we sacrifice the idea that a particle has an individual identity, and instead only acknowledge the existence of a set of properties for the particle. If the experiment simply resulted in light of the same frequency being emitted, then this would still be interesting as a means of optical storage, but by no means would it be as interesting from a theoretical perspective. What makes it interesting is that the imprint of the light is stored in the quantum spin states of the gas atoms, which means there is a theoretical possibility (which can't be determined too well from a nytimes article) that all the "uncertainty information" inherent in the photon is preserved across the restart. That would make this a true stopping and restarting of a photon.
1) It is necessary some more to dismount Catherine Tasca.
2) A boob... summarized well here the general feeling on the left.
3)" We fell from naked ", slipped one in Bercy.
What was this supposed to be about again?
After testing it on the comet, Nasa plans on using this technology to properly remove Janet Reno from office.
While interesting in an academic sense, such a discovery is rather trivial in a practical sense. Superconductivity itself has a number of astonishing uses that can sometimes look like magic, but they're only useful when we can get them to occur at useful temperatures. Unfortunately, cooling something to 1K will require something along the lines of laser cooling in order to achieve, and this turns out to not be very practical. Superconductors with a very low critical temperature cannot conduct much current before they exceed their critical energy level and "go normal".
Useful superconductors are more in the line of HTC's, high temperature superconductors. The simplest of these are the superconductors that work when cooled to the order of 70 degrees Kelvin (-200C) by liquid nitrogen (which is cheaper than beer). If I recall correctly, the highest published HTC was around 175K, which is only 100 degrees below freezing. I've heard rumors of higher temperature superconductors, but haven't seen any referreed publications of results yet. Keep your eyes peeled, we'll see room-temperature superconductors within the lifetimes of most slashdotters.
To be fair to lower temperature superconductors, I believe the maglev train in Japan uses a lower temperature superconductor cooled by liquid helium, which is somewhere down on the order of 10K.
Superconductors aren't too useful for their property of not conducting current, since they have a critical maximum current level anyway. They are mostly used for their diamagnetic properties (they repel magnetic flux lines). This is the basis for how an MRI works, or for how super-fast magnetic trains work.
Can we continually fork each release of Ximian and name it Helix again?
Sounds like a game of tag gone horribly awry...
I was one of those child prodigies. I was already a solid programmer by the time I was that kid's age. One thing I wish I had learned before the double-digit years is psychology. I could make a computer do whatever I wanted, but people were a baffle for a number of years until I caught up on that front. Had I studied psychology on the side when I was that age, I think it might have gone differently.
Beyond that recommendation, follow two simple rules. Present him with ready access to core information that he wants and needs, such as programming information, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. And then just let his inherent curiosity drive him. If you feed curiosity, you will strengthen it, and THAT will make him great someday more than learning a particular aspect of technology.
I would expect a book titled, "Perl for System Administrators" to assume no knowledge of Perl. The language has it's system administrative niche in the ability to create small programs between maybe 1 and 100 lines for tasks involving some quick text processing or glueing two applications together. In other words, the tasks you would most likely find Perl applicable for involving System Administration are the tasks that wouldn't require in-depth knowledge of Perl, but would instead simply require a foundation in Perl, a thorough grounding in regular expressions, and most importantly, a solid description of how to program secure Perl code.
Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever?
The fact that modern people are impatient and demand a reaction to any problem that's discussed. This results in countless knee-jerk reactions on the part of politicians who want to be able to say they did "something" about a problem. I reference the ever successful war on drugs.
> "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose.
I don't take this analogy very seriously.
That happens to be a quote of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Holmes, and is one of the defining political statements that clarify the meaning and interpretation of the freedoms expressed in the Bill of Rights.
This happens to my inbox all the time.
Democracy needs self-imposed limitations to function even moderately well. The US used areas of the constitution and bill of rights as its first basis of such self-imposed limitations. Long ago we set a general principle, "People will have freedom of speech," and since then we've been interpreting and reinterpreting it.
Technology is experiencing exponential growth, and sooner or later, we're going to have to address that by laying down some fundamental self-imposed limitations of government dealing with technology, because it is clear that government does not move fast enough for politicians to keep up with technology.
I would rather see a freedom of technology clause, and have such battles of government move into the court system, where someone could invoke freedom of technology as grounds for innocence. Then simple laws regulating certain use of technology could be formulated, but no laws restricting the development of technology could be created. It would have made the entire crypto debate a moot point, as most of us knew it should have been.
It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.
Precisely. The fact that they have such a huge say about that which they don't understand is exactly why we need to make sure they say nothing about its future.
Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous. It's about as dangerous as political discussion about the internet or computers. Anytime a bunch of stiff-assed politicians sit around a fancy table with leather seats and talk about some form of technology they don't understand, the innevitable result is that they are afraid of it! And anything they're afraid of, they pass irrational and unreasonable legislation against. Cloning doesn't work like in Arnold's little movie. Hollywood has to make some "alterations" to how cloning really works in order to make it interesting enough for the big screen. In reality, a clone is no different from an identical twin that must grow up from birth, there is no transfer of thought, memory, etc. Unfortunately, there is nothing interesting about an identical twin growing up while someone is going through a mid-life crisis, so no movies exist to match reality. And double plus unfortunately, our politicians have no exposure to this technology EXCEPT the media, so they get the mistaken impression that it actually works like Arnold's movie, and thus get even more terrified of it.
We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."
I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
Government web sites should be there for two purposes. One, to provide information, and two, to provide service. The main hinderence to this is that sites are not designed so that information and services can be found. So many sites make grand assumptions about what the user is looking for, and try to lead the user on a grand goose chase around a mess of hyperlinks leading nowhere but in circles. Simply present a simple main page (with FEW graphics!) containing subcategories which a person can identify with what they're looking for. Then, in the pages referred to in these subcategories, do the same, and eventually list the appropriate services and information. There is no money to be made, and thus no need to "promote" or "advertise" a particular government service. Simply provide the information and services in a well-ordered manner.
No, it will simply motivate the Debian developers to advance other aspects of Debian in order to maintain its status as the technological leader of Linux distributions.
Nah, they would have had to rename her once she started "developing".
Definitely! Reading the headline, I was hoping someone had voiced this view. Personally, I prefer to stay lightyears from most Microsoft products, but this is definitely a positive step forward for Microsoft users, under one condition... That condition being that Microsoft opens up the ability for system administrators to declare other authenticating agents besides Microsoft as authorized binary signers. I wouldn't want Microsoft to be the only agent who can authorize what software I run on my system, but if I can declare, say, Microsoft, Symantec, CERN, etc, then maybe I have a wonderful useful system that can protect or immunize against unwanted viruses and downloaded trojans that pretend to be real software.
The hardwork of the Mozilla team isn't lining Netscape's pockets at all. Those of us who want Mozilla have downloaded Mozilla and are using it. Yet there are still people who are downloading Netscape. Why? Brand name recognition. That's what's lining Netscape's pockets, a brand name they've earned for themselves over the years. There was a time when a lot of people you talked to would call the web "netscape". (I hope this time has passed.) Mozilla doesn't have this brand name recognition, it just has a beautiful piece of software. Since I'm looking for beautiful software, I download mozilla and use it. If I were looking for commercial advertising and a brand name, I would be punching up netscape.com right now and downloading netscape. It's that simple.
I hear so many people whine on a day-to-day basis about how they have to vote for either a republican or a democrat to avoid throwing their vote away. Bullcrap. Do a little math... Voting for a republican or a democrat isn't going to swing the vote one way or the next. On the order of tens of millions of people will vote for each of Gore and Bush, and your singular vote will not sway either of these. But that's not what voting is about, one person's vote has never determined the next president. Put your vote where it will be useful, and make a statement about how you want your government to be run. Find a third party candidate who supports how YOU feel your government should be run, and cast your vote for them.
The majority of the people I know want a third party candidate to win, and the majority of those people are afraid to vote for a third party candidate for the above stated irrational fears. Well I have news for you that does matter; if everyone who wanted a third party candidate to win had the courage to vote by their heart, we would have a strong government by the people. Instead, we have a situation where the majority of the U.S. population votes like sheep, and we keep putting the same criminals back in office. Wake up and stand up, people!
Please find out what you're really voting for before you do: www.issues2000.org
I hear so many people whine on a day-to-day basis about how they have to vote for either a republican or a democrat to avoid throwing their vote away. Bullcrap. Do a little math... Voting for a republican or a democrat isn't going to swing the vote one way or the next. On the order of tens of millions of people will vote for each of Gore and Bush, and your singular vote will not sway either of these. But that's not what voting is about, one person's vote has never determined the next president. Put your vote where it will be useful, and make a statement about how you want your government to be run. Find a third party candidate who supports how YOU feel your government should be run, and cast your vote for them.
The majority of the people I know want a third party candidate to win, and the majority of those people are afraid to vote for a third party candidate for the above stated irrational fears. Well I have news for you that does matter; if everyone who wanted a third party candidate to win had the courage to vote by their heart, we would have a strong government by the people. Instead, we have a situation where the majority of the U.S. population votes like sheep, and we keep putting the same criminals back in office. Wake up and stand up, people!
Please find out what you're really voting for before you do: www.issues2000.org
> Should we be giving kids a long list of what "OK" drugs are what "bad" drugs are?
We ALREADY do this, it's just rather arbitrary. Don't do pot, it numbs you! Awww, have a headache? Here, take this Tylenol, have an Advil. Oh, you can't behave in class? Maybe we need to put you on Ridilin, yeah, it's in your best interest. No, don't drink, alcohol is evil! It changes your behavior.
Think about it. What's a gateway to what? Why are some drugs "bad" and some drugs "good"? All that really exists is a set of truthful cause:effects. Drug A causes effect B on your body. In most environments, children can get access to anything they want access to, so they're going to need to know factually what drugs cause what effects if they're ever going to learn how to make responsible decisions as adults.