The next post I think gives more personal info than I could. Also I suggest checking out some ecstasy related boards (such as bluelight.nu) for personal experiences.
Just a quick comment in Dark Agnouti rats 20mg/kg is considered the standard known neurotoxic dose and no one has any fucking clue what that means for humans.
Ohh yah and please if you can find me some articles on LSD causing *physical* damage. If you can't find them I think it is fair to assume that it is because (despite all the governments efforts to fund research that concludes this) there are no such studies.
Do you live in berkeley too? I can't imagine any other place in the world that calling someone a fake liberal is an considered a valid argument tactic.
For the record I am not a `liberal' I am a utilitarian. If you will read my damn comment at no point did I make ANY claims about rights peoples own bodies or any of that crap. Rather I made fact based claims providing good reason to believe the war on drugs was hurting more than it hurt.
Presumably anyone would support ending a policy which was more harmful than it was good.
For physical damage how about these peer reviewed studies.
Reg Anesth 1994 Jul-Aug;19(4):225-30
Survey of opioid use in chronic nonmalignant pain patients.
Jamison RN, Anderson KO, Peeters-Asdourian C, Ferrante FM.
J Pain Symptom Manage 1992 Feb;7(2):69-77
Long-term oral opioid therapy in patients with chronic nonmalignant pain.
Zenz M, Strumpf M, Tryba M.
J Pain Symptom Manage 1996 Apr;11(4):203-17
Opioid therapy for chronic nonmalignant pain: a review of the critical issues.
Portenoy RK.
From the last article we have the following wonderfull quote:
"Long term opiod therapy has not been associated with major organ toxicity in large surveys of cancer patients and methadone-maitened patients"
In fact as you are the one claiming that all drugs cause physical harm you are the one that should be required to provide evidence. Just like if someone tells you whacking off causes you to grow hair on your palms...you don't have to find peer reviewed articles that it does not they should have to produce positive evidence that it does.
That is a nice trick saying "there is enough research to back this up". How the fuck could this possibly be true? There are fucktons of abused drugs out there with ENTIERLY differnt mechanisms of action. It is no more fair to generalize from the conclusions some drugs hurt people to all drugs hurt people than it would be to generalize to all things people swallow hurt them.
Moreover, any good claim in this manner would try to seperate the method of abuse from the effects of the drug. Of course smoking hash is bad for your lungs...but you can also eat it or use a vaporizer...find me a study about eating pot brownies causing physical harm!!
This slavery thing is another stupid argumentitive trick. I mean clearly drug addiction is not a form of slavery. By definition slavery is the state of a person who is a chattel of another. In no none metaphorical sense is a drug addict chattel. They are clearly not in a similar situation to the blacks forced to work on plantations. There is an analogy there but saying A is like B and B is clearly bad simply isn't a valid argument as A is not the SAME AS B. Perhaps what makes B bad is the part which is not analagous. If you have a real argument no analogy to slavery would be necessery.
I mean if you want to win an argument on the net claim its just like hitler...if you can't work that in slavery is the next best thing. I mean cmon either you are just an annoying troll or you realize how absolutely fucking ridiculous this line is:
>Do you condone slavery? Why do you oppose the government clamping down on extremely addictive drugs then?
A two year old could see this is clearly a cheap emotional appeal and not actually an argument. It is also an attempt to get the reader to forget that I am not advocating drug addiction but rather claiming that the decrease in drug addicts is not worth the costs of the drug war. Certainly imprisioning people is *actually* a form of slavery (forcible confinement, work gangs etc..). The drug war imprisions drug users.
Is sexual behavior slavery? Are college women wearing those short summer shorts enslaving men? They certainly inspire huge cravings and often personally harmful behavior in an attempt to "get some ass." What is it exactly that makes drug use slavery and not money, sex, friendship or any other thing which motivates normal individuals. Drug use is merely another way of activating the reward centers.
Of course as we have already mentioned no one is kept in cages by drugs (only by the government) so how addiction is "just as physical" as real slavery is hard to see. Not only this but many drugs do NOT have physical withdrawal symptoms. Cocaine, the amphetamines, and I believe marijuanna have no associated physical withdrawal symptom...sure after you take away these peoples reward methods they are depressed and experince cravings but this happens when their girlfriend dumps them as well.
>Its about protecting those who would perish: the "one-trip" teenagers, the "irreversibly changed" innocents, the ones whose first puffs dragged them uncontrollaby down in a never-ending spiral towards death.
Did you pull this directly from refer madness or an anti-drug ad? Are you making the claim that marijuanna is a gateway drug? Get some dam evidence these claims have been made for years and no one has been able to produce any casual link. Also the question is which is the greater harm so you actually need to prove that it isn't just one person this happens to but a significant fraction.
Also as I am not a drug dealer I fail to see how you get to accuse me of being a booze trading european. It would however be a fair analogy to suggest you would be in favor of going in with guns and draggin all the indians who buy liqour into jail.
No I was just pointing out that Hoover really was a crazy conspiracy bastard.
Secondly Hoovers willingness to release known false "facts" casts doubt on any claim that these people were really soviet agents and didn't just have left leaning political views.
I just disagree. Alcohol has particulary nasty traits in this matter. It is far easier to OD on alcohol both because of its mental stupefying effects, method of ingestion, and toxicity.
If the other drugs were availible in labeled dosages the number of ODs would probably be *very* low. I mean hell all the heroin users would probably be on fentanyl patches all the damn time.
Besides it is nice and easy to reverse ODs of say opiates.
I am well aware of the ecstasy information. Alot of the studies on humans have had methodological problems and there is some debate on how accurate the SERT binding studies they use to estimate neurotoxicity in animals are.
However, the evidence is quite strong that at some dosage regimene the animals are experiencing some sort of neural degeneration (intrestingly enough no toxicity is seen if the MDMA is injected directly into the brain but this is a long topic and we don't need to go into it). In fact in very high doses MDMA produces non-serotonin specific neurotoxicity like the amphetamines but this is probably well outside the normal dose range.
The question that is debatable is whether these degenerative effects are significant in normal users of the drug. I personally and observing my friends use sparingly have seen no ill effects. HOWEVER, if you talk to people who have used excesively (yes there are people who pop 5 pills every weekend or a pill every day for years) they have serious concentration, memory and emotional problems.
No it is pretty clear the shroud of turin was constructed in a similar (but more complicated) manner as rubbing a pencil over a sheet of paper held on top of a credit card. In other words they put the shroud on top of some statue and then imprinted that on the shroud.
The only reason someone would claim the shroud was a photograph is because it is a negative image like negatives are. In no way shape or form was a picture taken involving pinhole cameras and the like. I mean good photosensitive materials were a long way in coming still.
Umm how about the fact that recent FOIA requests have revealed that the FBI knowingly released false information in the background check of University of Califonia president Clark Kerr when he was being appointed to a cabinet level position.
Specifically Hoover did this to aid Reagans career at the expense of Kerr's.
To be technical about it, the drug war started with the passage of the (anti-chinese) opium smoking ordinance in san fransisco. It was either very early 1900s or late 1800s can't rember which.
I say anti-chinese because it was only a law against opium smoking and not against laudinum or other morphine/heroin containg products that were widely used by whites. Opium smoking was culturally restricted to the chinese immigrants.
It is especailly interesting that the Harrison narcotic act wasn't passed until those drugs were more commonly associated with the lower classes than the higher/middle class ones.
Its just your opionion but you should fucking think about it before you post!!
Reforming the war on drugs is one of my principal interests, but I am not entierly blind to opposing positions and there are some reasonable arguments to support the war on drugs. However, these arguments just don't appear in your post. While I have done it many times before let me go through it point by point.
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Would everyone here like to legalize meth labs too? How about legalizing one in the house next door or the apartment below yours?
What's an explosion or two in your neighborhood? --
So let us suppose we legalize meth labs. What do you suppose is more cost efficent? a) cooking meth in your apartment. b) A large chemical production facility which turns out meth. THE SAME WAY ALL OTHER INDUSTRIAL/PHARMACUETICAL CHEMICALS ARE PRODUCED?
Meth labs blow up not because there is anything essentially dangerous about meth production (hell it is way easier than making prozac) but because it is illegal so it is done by someone without chemical traning in a basement.
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Not too mention the utter silliness of the idea that legalizing drugs would drop prices and eliminate drug related crime. It just wouldn't happen. People will charge what the market will bear and addicts will bear anything to get a fix. Don't think so. In N.Y. City cigarettes now cost 7.50 a pack and people still buy them. --
Well for starters cigarettes cost $7.50 a pack not because this is the price the free market has settled on but because of taxation by the city. Thus what the price of cigarettes is set at is hardly relevant.
Yes the drug addicts will pay any price *necessery* to aquire their drugs. However, drugs are the ultimate commodity item. An addict could give a fuck which brand name heroin he scores as long as it is heroin. Now from basic economics we see that in a competitive market the price of a commodity drops to the cost of production (yes in a monopoly it will be increased as high as the market will bear but a legal drug market will have plenty of competition). Take a look at the UK/netherlands plans to prescribe heroin to addicts...legal opiates (and certainly legal synthetic drugs like meth) are cheap as ass to produce. The rarity is caused by police enforcement not any essential high price of precursurs.
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And since addicts can't hold jobs and drugs will never be free- they will always be stealing, mugging, etc. to feed their habit. Not to mention my cost for health care for the drug babies. And that wont stop after they are out of Pediatric ICU. They are damaged. They will grow up and become a burden on society- because their parents made poor life choices. The whole thing is sickening. --
If you had been keeping up with the research you would be aware that "crack babies" were pretty much debunked. The decreased performance seen on babies born to crack addicts and etc.. disappeared as soon as the effects of legal drugs (alcohol and tobacco) were accounted for.
In fact ironically enough it is alcohol which is particularly bad at harming fetuses.
Do drugs deystroy lives. Certainly. However, this is mostly a result of legal and economic consequences of the drug war.
Some drugs such as meth, ecstasy etc.. are never going to be able to be used for long periods of time because they cause neurological damage to the user. However, other drugs which, if readily availible, would be abused instead such as heroin don't have these problems.
Long medical experience with opiates, as well as the large number of upper class mothers who were addicted to laudinum in the early 1900s, show that opiate depence does not cause neurological harm and in fact that opiate users will do work to get their fix. Add to this the wonderful fact that new synthetic opiates are *ridiclously* strong and you have addicts getting their fix for well under a dollar a day. A fucking welfare check would cover this.
There was an interesting article written some time ago (in the mercury news I believe) about heroin addiction amoung programers. Now certainly the individual in question wasnt happy about his heroin habit (alot of this seemed to stem from his excesive spending and need to hide his habit at work) but it was clear that he was able to hold down a high paying programming job to support his habit. If it was cheap and legal no one would be stealing to get a fix.
Another fun fact (though I can't remember my source for this). Of the hundred or so drug related homicides in LA something like 2 of them were related to drug use while the rest somehow involved distribution or sale. In other words the violence simply isn't commited by the drug user but by the illicit dealer. As I have yet to see Hoffman-LaRouche employees do a driveby on Bayer I think it is safe to say in a legal market this would disappear.
Yes, we should be carefull so we don't create a country where kids see glamorous heroin coke commercials and all become addicts at age 10 but this is an entierly differnt issue. Not to mention that a life in jail is certainly far more harmfull and unpleasant than a life addicted to drugs.
Its a code name and as such not used in advertising etc.. Essentially it is what they choose to call the product inside their company. I don't see how any trademark claim would ever be succesfully pursued.
The original post was a joke for fucks sake and it made no such generalization. The joke is funny because we see the flaw in the reasoning anyway...it wouldn't be funny if they were actually building a 3km bridge to drop bodies off of.
That last part bothered me for the entire article. Why bother giving out warning messages to cultures that aren't advanced enough to bore into the vault. The vault is quite deep in my understanding and shouldn't be able to be penetrated with anything simple (like dynamite) and a reasonable amount of effort. If they are this advanced won't they be better at reading the signs If they don't have geiger counters already?
I think I am going to have to disagree with you on almost every point you make.
First of all saying going to an engineering school is the hardest way for a pretty girl to get ahead in life is only really true if get ahead means have more money. Sure marry rich is always the easiest solution to the money problem, however being an engineer isn't exactly the easiest way for a smart guy to get ahead in life (crime/drug manufacture/selling out to become and MBA) under this definition.
I submit what people actually want, rather than merely the most money for the least physical effort is to have a job they find satisfying, respect from their peers, etc. In short people become engineers/scientists for similar reasons that you choose to do so (or thought you were going to at some point in the past). These reasons are the same at caltech for girls and the guys. Unfortunatly (for us and them) women seem to be less interested in these subjects for genetic and/or cultural reasons.
Moreover, I claim you are just wrong about pretty and smart girls not going to caltech. As a caltech alum myself I find that I met more pretty and smart girls (tho not necesserily pretty and smart *single* girls) at caltech than I have at UC Berkeley (to be fair I have met more pretty and fairly intelligent women at berkeley but the combination of really smart and pretty is just very rare).
Also alot of the unprettiness of women at engineering schools is essentially the same as the unprettiness of men..poor personal hygeine/dress (tho this shows more in woman than men this is b/c it isn't as important that a man be well groomed for some reason). Many of the unpretty women at tech given a new haircut new clothes etc.. would be pretty attractive. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that with the ratio she has no incentive to change her appearance.
I think the point the above posters were trying to make is that flash is as well designed for speed/compression etc.. as you can reasonably expect for an *interactive graphics format*. Sure html is way faster (and should be used if all you want to do is communicate text) but it doesn't do animation/processing. If you don't want to do that don't use flash.
>No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Unfortunatly this is simply a limitation of any technology that gives this level of control to the developer. People use flash precisely because it lets them do things like run animations/programs in the web page. If you have some sort of fast changing graphic (for instance a game/educational software) what is "back." The programmer needs to explicitly tell flash how to go back precisely because it has that extra power (if you don't believe this ask the question "why doesn't x-windows have a back button". Flash gives you similar power to an x-windows app.
Searching is similar. Quite simply if you want to display graphic images (which are often buttons or words) you need to tell the program how to do a search otherwise it isn't very usefull.
Of course flash effects can be arbitrarily resizeable. This is the same reason x-windows programs can't simply be resized, it doesn't always make sense. Flash is meant to be used primarily for graphic intensive operations. Its strength is precisely the fact that it lets the author control precisely how the output looks on the computer.
Quite simply all of these are disadvatages of giving the author such a high degree of control over the output. I am not claiming flash is as well designed as possible (maybe it could have more features to encourage authors to add these userfriendly features) however these are all issues endemic to any tool which addresses flashes needs. In fact flash is remarkably good at replicating the same results on differnt platforms.
It mostly seems that your problem is that people often implement flash for the wrong purposes. HTML is better for informational content b/c it has search builtin (esp if you aren't going to bother to implement it yourself). This is no more flashes fault than it is perl's fault that your ray tracer written in perl is too slow.
It is really unfortunate that I know of no good free flash development tools
Okay so what features do we desire that this centralized repository is going to provide us? Presumably it will allow us to specify the amount of data released to third parties, charge fixed amounts without releasing our credit card numbers, and be portable. All of these problems are easily addressed with existing technology.
Specifying how much data is released could be done quite simply with something as easy as a browser plugin. A company would include some code in the webpage to cause a request of certain information that you could then accept or deny. Charging fixed amounts is easily done through schemes like paypal, or even better some sort of digital cash technology. For conveince this too could be implemented as a browser plugin (as it would have to in either case).
The only point where a centralized personal information database has any possible advantage is in portability. Even here though the advantage is fleeting, always on internet access for peoples home PCs is coming so fast that before long simply connecting to your home computer and requesting (possibly with various security levels) your profile will be a viable solution. This is essentially what all of us who ssh to our computers to check our mail are doing.
This is why real companies don't release pre-1.0 products to the general public. Think how buggy your favorite piece of software is and imagine what people would think if they saw something before even the final codefreeze.
While this may sound stupid, why not? I mean you don't incur any additional security risk vs. using a password server (if any machine is hacked to which you later log in the hacker has access to all your machines). Yes if you try to change your passwords all the time this might get to be tiresome...but it would be alot of work to set up this server maybe it would just be better to walk around and change 15 passwords once a month.
This is complete bullshit. The fact that they own their suppliers is really irrelevant. Someone is paying lots of trained people to build shit. These people consume real resources such as food and electricity. The only way it could be self sustaining is if it was entierly paid for by foriegn arms sales.
Your right thats possible. Maybe they will sell it to drug smugllers...they are the ppl with the most to gain from a stealth ship
Do you have any idea how much it costs to develop something like this? It isn't being done for drug interdiction!!
Moreover, presumably all the ships in the US fleet are in constant communication therefore satelite imagery should be availible to all our ships...and in general to most of the first world nations. Those nations without satelite imagery availible probably don't have a navy large enough to really justify this sort of construction. Iraq had one of the larger armies in the world, border on ocean, and yet we didn't even hear a peep about their naval capabilities during gulf war.
Finally I doubt it is really impervious to radar guided weaponry. Stealth only works so well, once they get close enough they should be able to pick it up...satelite images should accomplish this.
So wait is factoring in NP? OR is it that thing which is both NP and co-NP...I don't remember.
Either way P=NP doesnt seem to imply that there are no aysmetric function...just that there are no aysmetric polynomial time functions. There seems to be no theoretical reason why you couldn't build a PK system with an exponential encryption time and a super super exponential decryption time.
Secondly I am unsure if it even gets ride of polynomial time aysmetric functions. It puts a bound on how aysmetric they can be...as to whether this will mean a practical inability to do PK I don't know
Slashdot Mirror
The next post I think gives more personal info than I could. Also I suggest checking out some ecstasy related boards (such as bluelight.nu) for personal experiences.
Just a quick comment in Dark Agnouti rats 20mg/kg is considered the standard known neurotoxic dose and no one has any fucking clue what that means for humans.
Ohh yah and please if you can find me some articles on LSD causing *physical* damage. If you can't find them I think it is fair to assume that it is because (despite all the governments efforts to fund research that concludes this) there are no such studies.
For the record I am not a `liberal' I am a utilitarian. If you will read my damn comment at no point did I make ANY claims about rights peoples own bodies or any of that crap. Rather I made fact based claims providing good reason to believe the war on drugs was hurting more than it hurt.
Presumably anyone would support ending a policy which was more harmful than it was good.
For physical damage how about these peer reviewed studies. From the last article we have the following wonderfull quote:
"Long term opiod therapy has not been associated with major organ toxicity in large surveys of cancer patients and methadone-maitened patients"
In fact as you are the one claiming that all drugs cause physical harm you are the one that should be required to provide evidence. Just like if someone tells you whacking off causes you to grow hair on your palms...you don't have to find peer reviewed articles that it does not they should have to produce positive evidence that it does.
That is a nice trick saying "there is enough research to back this up". How the fuck could this possibly be true? There are fucktons of abused drugs out there with ENTIERLY differnt mechanisms of action. It is no more fair to generalize from the conclusions some drugs hurt people to all drugs hurt people than it would be to generalize to all things people swallow hurt them.
Moreover, any good claim in this manner would try to seperate the method of abuse from the effects of the drug. Of course smoking hash is bad for your lungs...but you can also eat it or use a vaporizer...find me a study about eating pot brownies causing physical harm!!
This slavery thing is another stupid argumentitive trick. I mean clearly drug addiction is not a form of slavery. By definition slavery is the state of a person who is a chattel of another. In no none metaphorical sense is a drug addict chattel. They are clearly not in a similar situation to the blacks forced to work on plantations. There is an analogy there but saying A is like B and B is clearly bad simply isn't a valid argument as A is not the SAME AS B. Perhaps what makes B bad is the part which is not analagous. If you have a real argument no analogy to slavery would be necessery.
I mean if you want to win an argument on the net claim its just like hitler...if you can't work that in slavery is the next best thing. I mean cmon either you are just an annoying troll or you realize how absolutely fucking ridiculous this line is:
>Do you condone slavery? Why do you oppose the government clamping down on extremely addictive drugs then?
A two year old could see this is clearly a cheap emotional appeal and not actually an argument. It is also an attempt to get the reader to forget that I am not advocating drug addiction but rather claiming that the decrease in drug addicts is not worth the costs of the drug war. Certainly imprisioning people is *actually* a form of slavery (forcible confinement, work gangs etc..). The drug war imprisions drug users.
Is sexual behavior slavery? Are college women wearing those short summer shorts enslaving men? They certainly inspire huge cravings and often personally harmful behavior in an attempt to "get some ass." What is it exactly that makes drug use slavery and not money, sex, friendship or any other thing which motivates normal individuals. Drug use is merely another way of activating the reward centers.
Of course as we have already mentioned no one is kept in cages by drugs (only by the government) so how addiction is "just as physical" as real slavery is hard to see. Not only this but many drugs do NOT have physical withdrawal symptoms. Cocaine, the amphetamines, and I believe marijuanna have no associated physical withdrawal symptom...sure after you take away these peoples
reward methods they are depressed and experince cravings but this happens when their girlfriend dumps them as well.
>Its about protecting those who would perish: the "one-trip" teenagers, the "irreversibly changed" innocents, the ones whose first puffs dragged them uncontrollaby down in a never-ending spiral towards death.
Did you pull this directly from refer madness or an anti-drug ad? Are you making the claim that marijuanna is a gateway drug? Get some dam evidence these claims have been made for years and no one has been able to produce any casual link. Also the question is which is the greater harm so you actually need to prove that it isn't just one person this happens to but a significant fraction.
Also as I am not a drug dealer I fail to see how you get to accuse me of being a booze trading european. It would however be a fair analogy to suggest you would be in favor of going in with guns and draggin all the indians who buy liqour into jail.
No I was just pointing out that Hoover really was a crazy conspiracy bastard.
Secondly Hoovers willingness to release known false "facts" casts doubt on any claim that these people were really soviet agents and didn't just have left leaning political views.
I just disagree. Alcohol has particulary nasty traits in this matter. It is far easier to OD on alcohol both because of its mental stupefying effects, method of ingestion, and toxicity.
If the other drugs were availible in labeled dosages the number of ODs would probably be *very* low. I mean hell all the heroin users would probably be on fentanyl patches all the damn time.
Besides it is nice and easy to reverse ODs of say opiates.
I am well aware of the ecstasy information. Alot of the studies on humans have had methodological problems and there is some debate on how accurate the SERT binding studies they use to estimate neurotoxicity in animals are.
However, the evidence is quite strong that at some dosage regimene the animals are experiencing some sort of neural degeneration (intrestingly enough no toxicity is seen if the MDMA is injected directly into the brain but this is a long topic and we don't need to go into it). In fact in very high doses MDMA produces non-serotonin specific neurotoxicity like the amphetamines but this is probably well outside the normal dose range.
The question that is debatable is whether these degenerative effects are significant in normal users of the drug. I personally and observing my friends use sparingly have seen no ill effects. HOWEVER, if you talk to people who have used excesively (yes there are people who pop 5 pills every weekend or a pill every day for years) they have serious concentration, memory and emotional problems.
No it is pretty clear the shroud of turin was constructed in a similar (but more complicated) manner as rubbing a pencil over a sheet of paper held on top of a credit card. In other words they put the shroud on top of some statue and then imprinted that on the shroud.
The only reason someone would claim the shroud was a photograph is because it is a negative image like negatives are. In no way shape or form was a picture taken involving pinhole cameras and the like. I mean good photosensitive materials were a long way in coming still.
Umm how about the fact that recent FOIA requests have revealed that the FBI knowingly released false information in the background check of University of Califonia president Clark Kerr when he was being appointed to a cabinet level position.
Specifically Hoover did this to aid Reagans career at the expense of Kerr's.
By 'dope' don't you mean opium?
To be technical about it, the drug war started with the passage of the (anti-chinese) opium smoking ordinance in san fransisco. It was either very early 1900s or late 1800s can't rember which.
I say anti-chinese because it was only a law against opium smoking and not against laudinum or other morphine/heroin containg products that were widely used by whites. Opium smoking was culturally restricted to the chinese immigrants.
It is especailly interesting that the Harrison narcotic act wasn't passed until those drugs were more commonly associated with the lower classes than the higher/middle class ones.
Its just your opionion but you should fucking think about it before you post!!
Reforming the war on drugs is one of my principal interests, but I am not entierly blind to opposing positions and there are some reasonable arguments to support the war on drugs. However, these arguments just don't appear in your post. While I have done it many times before let me go through it point by point.
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Would everyone here like to legalize meth labs too? How about legalizing one in the house next door or the apartment below yours?
What's an explosion or two in your neighborhood?
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So let us suppose we legalize meth labs. What do you suppose is more cost efficent?
a) cooking meth in your apartment.
b) A large chemical production facility which turns out meth. THE SAME WAY ALL OTHER INDUSTRIAL/PHARMACUETICAL CHEMICALS ARE PRODUCED?
Meth labs blow up not because there is anything essentially dangerous about meth production (hell it is way easier than making prozac) but because it is illegal so it is done by someone without chemical traning in a basement.
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Not too mention the utter silliness of the idea that legalizing drugs would drop prices and eliminate drug related crime. It just wouldn't happen. People will charge what the market will bear and addicts will bear anything to get a fix. Don't think so. In N.Y. City cigarettes now cost 7.50 a pack and people still buy them.
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Well for starters cigarettes cost $7.50 a pack not because this is the price the free market has settled on but because of taxation by the city. Thus what the price of cigarettes is set at is hardly relevant.
Yes the drug addicts will pay any price *necessery* to aquire their drugs. However, drugs are the ultimate commodity item. An addict could give a fuck which brand name heroin he scores as long as it is heroin. Now from basic economics we see that in a competitive market the price of a commodity drops to the cost of production (yes in a monopoly it will be increased as high as the market will bear but a legal drug market will have plenty of competition). Take a look at the UK/netherlands plans to prescribe heroin to addicts...legal opiates (and certainly legal synthetic drugs like meth) are cheap as ass to produce. The rarity is caused by police enforcement not any essential high price of precursurs.
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And since addicts can't hold jobs and drugs will never be free- they will always be stealing, mugging, etc. to feed their habit. Not to mention my cost for health care for the drug babies. And that wont stop after they are out of Pediatric ICU. They are damaged. They will grow up and become a burden on society- because their parents made poor life choices. The whole thing is sickening.
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If you had been keeping up with the research you would be aware that "crack babies" were pretty much debunked. The decreased performance seen on babies born to crack addicts and etc.. disappeared as soon as the effects of legal drugs (alcohol and tobacco) were accounted for.
In fact ironically enough it is alcohol which is particularly bad at harming fetuses.
Do drugs deystroy lives. Certainly. However, this is mostly a result of legal and economic consequences of the drug war.
Some drugs such as meth, ecstasy etc.. are never going to be able to be used for long periods of time because they cause neurological damage to the user. However, other drugs which, if readily availible, would be abused instead such as heroin don't have these problems.
Long medical experience with opiates, as well as the large number of upper class mothers who were addicted to laudinum in the early 1900s, show that opiate depence does not cause neurological harm and in fact that opiate users will do work to get their fix. Add to this the wonderful fact that new synthetic opiates are *ridiclously* strong and you have addicts getting their fix for well under a dollar a day. A fucking welfare check would cover this.
There was an interesting article written some time ago (in the mercury news I believe) about heroin addiction amoung programers. Now certainly the individual in question wasnt happy about his heroin habit (alot of this seemed to stem from his excesive spending and need to hide his habit at work) but it was clear that he was able to hold down a high paying programming job to support his habit. If it was cheap and legal no one would be stealing to get a fix.
Another fun fact (though I can't remember my source for this). Of the hundred or so drug related homicides in LA something like 2 of them were related to drug use while the rest somehow involved distribution or sale. In other words the violence simply isn't commited by the drug user but by the illicit dealer. As I have yet to see Hoffman-LaRouche employees do a driveby on Bayer I think it is safe to say in a legal market this would disappear.
Yes, we should be carefull so we don't create a country where kids see glamorous heroin coke commercials and all become addicts at age 10 but this is an entierly differnt issue. Not to mention that a life in jail is certainly far more harmfull and unpleasant than a life addicted to drugs.
Its a code name and as such not used in advertising etc.. Essentially it is what they choose to call the product inside their company. I don't see how any trademark claim would ever be succesfully pursued.
You can make one as long as you want if you put enough towers in place. Is the longest span of this bridge really +1km the last longest span?
The original post was a joke for fucks sake and it made no such generalization. The joke is funny because we see the flaw in the reasoning anyway...it wouldn't be funny if they were actually building a 3km bridge to drop bodies off of.
at first I thought this was just an incredibly stupid comment now I realize it is just a bad joke aimed at star wars fans
That last part bothered me for the entire article. Why bother giving out warning messages to cultures that aren't advanced enough to bore into the vault. The vault is quite deep in my understanding and shouldn't be able to be penetrated with anything simple (like dynamite) and a reasonable amount of effort. If they are this advanced won't they be better at reading the signs If they don't have geiger counters already?
I think I am going to have to disagree with you on almost every point you make.
First of all saying going to an engineering school is the hardest way for a pretty girl to get ahead in life is only really true if get ahead means have more money. Sure marry rich is always the easiest solution to the money problem, however being an engineer isn't exactly the easiest way for a smart guy to get ahead in life (crime/drug manufacture/selling out to become and MBA) under this definition.
I submit what people actually want, rather than merely the most money for the least physical effort is to have a job they find satisfying, respect from their peers, etc. In short people become engineers/scientists for similar reasons that you choose to do so (or thought you were going to at some point in the past). These reasons are the same at caltech for girls and the guys. Unfortunatly (for us and them) women seem to be less interested in these subjects for genetic and/or cultural reasons.
Moreover, I claim you are just wrong about pretty and smart girls not going to caltech. As a caltech alum myself I find that I met more pretty and smart girls (tho not necesserily pretty and smart *single* girls) at caltech than I have at UC Berkeley (to be fair I have met more pretty and fairly intelligent women at berkeley but the combination of really smart and pretty is just very rare).
Also alot of the unprettiness of women at engineering schools is essentially the same as the unprettiness of men..poor personal hygeine/dress (tho this shows more in woman than men this is b/c it isn't as important that a man be well groomed for some reason). Many of the unpretty women at tech given a new haircut new clothes etc.. would be pretty attractive. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that with the ratio she has no incentive to change her appearance.
I am the only non-bitter male former techer?
I think the point the above posters were trying to make is that flash is as well designed for speed/compression etc.. as you can reasonably expect for an *interactive graphics format*. Sure html is way faster (and should be used if all you want to do is communicate text) but it doesn't do animation/processing. If you don't want to do that don't use flash.
>No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Unfortunatly this is simply a limitation of any technology that gives this level of control to the developer. People use flash precisely because it lets them do things like run animations/programs in the web page. If you have some sort of fast changing graphic (for instance a game/educational software) what is "back." The programmer needs to explicitly tell flash how to go back precisely because it has that extra power (if you don't believe this ask the question "why doesn't x-windows have a back button". Flash gives you similar power to an x-windows app.
Searching is similar. Quite simply if you want to display graphic images (which are often buttons or words) you need to tell the program how to do a search otherwise it isn't very usefull.
Of course flash effects can be arbitrarily resizeable. This is the same reason x-windows programs can't simply be resized, it doesn't always make sense. Flash is meant to be used primarily for graphic intensive operations. Its strength is precisely the fact that it lets the author control precisely how the output looks on the computer.
Quite simply all of these are disadvatages of giving the author such a high degree of control over the output. I am not claiming flash is as well designed as possible (maybe it could have more features to encourage authors to add these userfriendly features) however these are all issues endemic to any tool which addresses flashes needs. In fact flash is remarkably good at replicating the same results on differnt platforms.
It mostly seems that your problem is that people often implement flash for the wrong purposes. HTML is better for informational content b/c it has search builtin (esp if you aren't going to bother to implement it yourself). This is no more flashes fault than it is perl's fault that your ray tracer written in perl is too slow.
It is really unfortunate that I know of no good free flash development tools
Okay so what features do we desire that this centralized repository is going to provide us? Presumably it will allow us to specify the amount of data released to third parties, charge fixed amounts without releasing our credit card numbers, and be portable. All of these problems are easily addressed with existing technology.
Specifying how much data is released could be done quite simply with something as easy as a browser plugin. A company would include some code in the webpage to cause a request of certain information that you could then accept or deny. Charging fixed amounts is easily done through schemes like paypal, or even better some sort of digital cash technology. For conveince this too could be implemented as a browser plugin (as it would have to in either case).
The only point where a centralized personal information database has any possible advantage is in portability. Even here though the advantage is fleeting, always on internet access for peoples home PCs is coming so fast that before long simply connecting to your home computer and requesting (possibly with various security levels) your profile will be a viable solution. This is essentially what all of us who ssh to our computers to check our mail are doing.
This is why real companies don't release pre-1.0 products to the general public. Think how buggy your favorite piece of software is and imagine what people would think if they saw something before even the final codefreeze.
While this may sound stupid, why not? I mean you don't incur any additional security risk vs. using a password server (if any machine is hacked to which you later log in the hacker has access to all your machines). Yes if you try to change your passwords all the time this might get to be tiresome...but it would be alot of work to set up this server maybe it would just be better to walk around and change 15 passwords once a month.
Would you also have an army of similarly dressed henchmen?
This is complete bullshit. The fact that they own their suppliers is really irrelevant. Someone is paying lots of trained people to build shit. These people consume real resources such as food and electricity. The only way it could be self sustaining is if it was entierly paid for by foriegn arms sales.
Your right thats possible. Maybe they will sell it to drug smugllers...they are the ppl with the most to gain from a stealth ship
Do you have any idea how much it costs to develop something like this? It isn't being done for drug interdiction!!
Moreover, presumably all the ships in the US fleet are in constant communication therefore satelite imagery should be availible to all our ships...and in general to most of the first world nations. Those nations without satelite imagery availible probably don't have a navy large enough to really justify this sort of construction. Iraq had one of the larger armies in the world, border on ocean, and yet we didn't even hear a peep about their naval capabilities during gulf war.
Finally I doubt it is really impervious to radar guided weaponry. Stealth only works so well, once they get close enough they should be able to pick it up...satelite images should accomplish this.
So wait is factoring in NP? OR is it that thing which is both NP and co-NP...I don't remember.
Either way P=NP doesnt seem to imply that there are no aysmetric function...just that there are no aysmetric polynomial time functions. There seems to be no theoretical reason why you couldn't build a PK system with an exponential encryption time and a super super exponential decryption time.
Secondly I am unsure if it even gets ride of polynomial time aysmetric functions. It puts a bound on how aysmetric they can be...as to whether this will mean a practical inability to do PK I don't know