Many things are bad for you. Unfortunately, some of them are rather pleasant.
Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind.
To the extent that they do not harm others, there is no justification to restrict one's use of them.
This could be extended to marijuana as well, perhaps even to cocaine and heroin.
Of course, the arguments against legalization of many controlled substances is that their use invariably creates those who become a societal risk: either made aggressive through their use, or having to commit crimes to finance their habit. This results in a call for prohibitive legislation, as opposed to after the fact punishment: the risk of committing a crime is so great, that prohibition is justified.
The problem here is asking how much of the purported crime is actually fueled by existing prohibitions? Cocaine and heroin are relatively cheap, made expensive only because of a black market. That they are "bad for you" is without question, but morality should not drive laws aimed at responsible adults -- responsible in the sense that they be held accountable for their actions that adversely affect others.
I would suggest that the bar for prohibitive legislation be set extremely high, with the benefit of the doubt in favor of responsible consumption of unhealthy substances.
While there may be an argument for the prohibition of smoking burning tobacco in public places, because of the effect of second hand smoke, e-cigs do not produce second hand smoke. They vaporize harmless glycerol for visual effect. The nicotine, like all stimulants, can only serve to harm the user.
The only possible justification for their prohibition is if the state is responsible for the health of the individual... Oh, wait! We're heading in that direction, aren't we (which is another really, really, bad idea, in the opinion of one who escaped Canadian health "non-care")?
Even here, private sector insurers compensate by different premiums based on one's health and habits -- even gender, because women statistically live longer than men. There is no reason a public health care system can not operate similarly.
Statutory preemptive prohibition of enjoyable substances and activities requires notoriously expensive policing. Witness the failed "War on Drugs". About the only place where such legislation makes sense is in the protection of children who have not yet demonstrated responsible self-sufficiency in society from harmful substances.
"These children are taught not to engage is sexual activity, but then they are told that sex is safe with a condom. So now little Jimmy may be convinced by his teacher/priest/coach that what they are doing is ok because he/she is going to use a condom.
That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard."
You'd be surprised how kids interpret things.
I always taught my son to ignore verbal taunts, but to defend himself against a physical attack -- the old "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me" mantra.
Well, he took the notion that "names will never hurt" to heart and started having a very filthy mouth, calling other student's mothers "whores" and worse because "those names can't hurt them, so it's O.K."
Er, oops.
I can very well see children who have been taught they are to bend to every teacher's will when in school to submit to sexual abuse because a condom makes it "safe". But, the problem is the establishment of an authority figure without also establishing the LIMITS on that authority.
The courts will generally allow a few minutes grace. Often many cases are on the calender for a specific time, that runs to another time. If someone is not present, the court will usually wait until the end of the session before issuing a bench warrant. If a person turns themselves in expecting that a bench warrant may be, or has been, issued, they can generally expect leniency. You might be held until you can appear before a judge, but if you have a decent excuse (unexpected traffic delay), you will be released on your own recognizance. Perhaps bail might be set if it previously wasn't, or if bail was already set, you might forfeit it.
As for the restraining order example, must places "open to the public" allow owners and their agents to ask anyone to leave for any reason. There is no way to predict they won't like the t-shirt you're wearing, for example. In that case, the solution is to explain why you can't egress and suggest they call the police.
Finally, a defense to breaking the law is that you'd break it if you didn't.
There are, however, more contradictory examples where following the law may result in harm to someone, even death.
In WA, one can not restrain a child to prevent them from running into traffic and possibly getting killed when they are having some kind of tantrum, if the result is that a mark is left on their body,
Fine. I won't write software. I will write books. In a nice OCRable font. About a nice piece of fiction of how to translate the narrative into executable code.
I suppose because 3% (or so) for a Red Savina habanero cultivar does not seem like much, but 577000 Scovilles does.
Then again, 5000 Scovilles seems like a lot for a jalapeno but really isn't.
Of course, it's relative to experience. For someone not used to anything spicy, a jalapeno probably strikes them as "very hot", and the figure of 5000 Scovilles rather reinforces that idea.
The range of hotness does seem to warrant some six orders of magnitude in expressing it, so a range of 0 to 16 million is not unreasonable. If taste response (like hearing) were logarithmic, we'd have something like "decilogScovilles" much akin to decibels and a range of something like 0 to 72. But, it isn't.
When I traveled between the U.S. and Canada, it was typical for me to remove pet cat and guinea pig from carriers and carry them by hand through the metal detectors. Surprisingly, the cat had greater veterinary bill of health requirements than the guinea pig.
Yes, "the best kind of correct," but misleading, because correctness isn't the point of interest here. The useful bit of information is that early subjective experiences fixed a scale that can be correlated with objective measurements.
Modern expressions of pungency in terms of Scoville units set pure capsaicin at either 15,000,000 or 16,000,000, and use HPLC to establish concentration of same (and related compounds). A Scoville rating is then set based on the concentration(s) measured.
So, knowing the reference standard, the measurements are actually quite objective.
Nobody, as far as I know, uses taste testers anymore.
Social networking sites are far more than "informatiuon about a few million people". Their value comes from the relationships between those people. This have value to the people themselves, and, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where one lies on the marketting/privacy divide, to others. It's restricting this access to others and controlling information about one's self, that's the appeal of this device.
However, maintaining all those relationships distributed across they myriad of individual servers in each home will prove problematic: one essentially has a distributed database. The first issues that come to mind are location services, mapping "friend" links to their wall-wart servers (yes, this is DNS, but do you want to be that visible?), as well as backups. The network traffic involved in simple "friend of friend" graphing starts to get significant.
In such an environment Facebook would likely spider all the wall-wart servers in a Googlesque manner for (a) marketting, and (b) convenience.
Still, it's a concept I've pondered for a while: I should control information about me, and who I share it with. Replication and backup becomes a separate problem: perhaps I want some storage service provider to host it... perhaps not: connections to port 25 at a server resolved from my domain name have terminated on a PC in my home for years: if my physical mailbox is outside my house, why should my electronic one not be inside (cursing static IP rental costs aside)?
In this model, "Facebook" becomes an "app", that people download to their home servers and use to establish and publish relationships between their friends.
In 1966. I went to kindergarten. I knew a five year old girl in my class who routinely walked a mile to and from school each day, crossing some rather busy streets. It was not considered unusual.
I grew up in Montreal, Quebec in the 1960s and 70s.
Not only was my school's playground with an asphalt base fenced, the fence was topped with barbed wire. Didn't stop us from climbing it to retrieve balls gone astray (and sometimes ripping our trousers). I'm surprised no kid got seriously injured. Then again, if they did, it'd be "their own damn stupid fault" for trying to "climb the fence".
Bail bondsmen can't help you if you can't post collateral or pay the bond fee.
The problem isn't not having the resources to post bail. (Well, that is a problem, but a different one.) The problem is not being able to execute the steps to do so.
Try posting bail when no one else has access to your money or collateral and no one is willing to advance you a loan for that purpose. You first have to get to your lawyer (assuming you have one, and not a public defender who won't give a crap), have him draw up (or use a boilerplate) power of attorney form so s/he can access your funds, have a notary witness your signature at the jail (often not possible since the only physical (non-video) visitor you can have is your lawyer), and take that to your bank during business hours.
A debit/credit card might work, and you might indeed have it on your person when you are arrested. But, it will be safely stored with your personal possessions, and not provided to anyone other than upon filing in a release form, that your jailer may not approve (generally the deputy overseeing the jail module where you are held). Have you got your debit/credit card number memorized? The expiration date? The code on the back?
Things that can take a few minutes over the phone can take many days when one is in jail.
Right, but the key part of the article was heat and stretch. There are other ways that this can be done to a plastic. Ever see fresh noodles be made by hand, by a master noodle chef?
The chef starts with a large amount of dough, and draws it out, "bouncing" it on the work surface covered with flour. He/she then folds and twists it upon itself and repeats the process many times: 1 very thick noodle, 2 thick noodles, 4, 8, 16, 32... you get the idea. 10 folds and twists give 1024 noodles (often it's folded upon itself twice at a time, to yield 1, 4, 16, 64 noodles). The flour and gluten content in the dough prevents the individual noodles from coalescing. It's an amazing process to watch. Dragon's beard candy is made in a similar fashion, with sugar.
I wonder if a similar technique could be applied here.
I am a gun-rights supporter, and NRA member, and I can't imagine a punishment severe enough for this man and his wife. Criminal negligence at the very least.
1. The gun is always loaded. Always.
2. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
3. Know your target, and what's behind it.
4. Do not point it at anything you are not willing to destroy.
To leave a firearm unattended is the height of idiocy.
The bottom line is that kids will often ignore safety lessons, no matter how much you try to ingrain them into their little heads. A three year old is not capable of understanding them, and the duty of care over a lethal weapon is magnified many times over.
That duty of care does not go away when the weapon is securely stored. The immediacy of it is merely reduced.
They claim to skirt the FDA because they operate solely in state.
The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution serves to ensure that there are no inter-state trade wars (e.g. due to tarrifs at state borders).
However, it has been used broadly within states when an argument can be made that internal commercial activities affect commerce outside the state's borders.
In this case, it could be argued that stem-cell treatment within Colorado affects the markets for prosthetics outside of Colorado and therefore falls within the purvue of the Commerce Clause.
You can read more on the Commerce Clause but the main problem is that the Feds decide what constitutes "commerce". In fact, the Commerce Clause has been use to require sex offender registration outside the states where they were convicted. This is a contentious issue and the circuit courts are split on the matter, leading to a likely ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (expected in 2010).
Well, one inch = 2.54 cm, exactly (by definition). One mile = 5280 feet. One foot = 12 inches. So, one mile = 160934.4 cm = 1609.344 m = 1.609344 km, exactly.
Yes, I know about precision and significant digits. All starting values above should be presumed exact, and not just precise to the number of digits represented.
My car was American-made, manufactured for the Canadian market, and then reimported back into the U.S. The speedometer indicates in mph and kph, with the emphasis on kph. I generally look at the kph figure and multiply by 0.6 in my head to get an approximation of mph, when I have to: 100 is 60, 50 is 30, 40 is 25 (well, 24, close enough).
"Dr Wolfe-Simon has taken samples from the mud and the waters of the lake and is performing a series of multiple dilutions — hugely increasing the levels of arsenic and reducing residual phosphorous to zero." [emphasis mine]
Shouldn't that read "greatly reducing"?
I'm not usually a linguistic pedant, lest I find myself hoist by my own pedantetry, but reading that sentence almost made my brain segfault: wait: diluting, causing an increase in something, toward zero? Arghhhh!
It's not unusual for one party to pay two legal teams to argue amongst themselves. When I divorced, because my then-wife did not work, I had to pay BOTH attorneys. It was quite surreal.
Its easy enough to secure it, using either TKIP or RADIUS authentication and provide access to my kids laptops, netbooks, DSi, phones, etc. but it's becoming a pain.
I'm really thinking of just setting up a captive portal for them to use with their home network credentials. At least that will take care of their web use.
But I wonder if I should make it more open for guests that stop by every so often. I don't really want to set up a guest account, with a password that doesn't change, or changes so frequently that it defeats the purpose of a "guest" account. Frankly, I'm not worried so much about the neighbors stealing wifi, but about some objectionable content they might get via my network connection -- think kiddie porn. (Yes, authentication without site blocking doesn't solve that, but I monitor the use by people that have home network credentials (my kids).)
The idea is that when a friend pops over he should just be able to surf on his phone or make VoIP calls without complicated setup or passwords. If the neighbors get a bit of free bandwidth, as long as they don't hog it, I really wouldn't mind. I'm leaning toward a self-subscribing captive portal with verification by cell phone text message so I can at least get a phone number that I can match to IP logs if necessary on the assumption that so long as I don't store any questionable content, and log access, I should be relatively safe from prosecution (This may be a naive assumption.) My friends all have cell phones, and I don't care if the neighbors don't.
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Many things are bad for you. Unfortunately, some of them are rather pleasant.
Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind.
To the extent that they do not harm others, there is no justification to restrict one's use of them.
This could be extended to marijuana as well, perhaps even to cocaine and heroin.
Of course, the arguments against legalization of many controlled substances is that their use invariably creates those who become a societal risk: either made aggressive through their use, or having to commit crimes to finance their habit. This results in a call for prohibitive legislation, as opposed to after the fact punishment: the risk of committing a crime is so great, that prohibition is justified.
The problem here is asking how much of the purported crime is actually fueled by existing prohibitions? Cocaine and heroin are relatively cheap, made expensive only because of a black market. That they are "bad for you" is without question, but morality should not drive laws aimed at responsible adults -- responsible in the sense that they be held accountable for their actions that adversely affect others.
I would suggest that the bar for prohibitive legislation be set extremely high, with the benefit of the doubt in favor of responsible consumption of unhealthy substances.
While there may be an argument for the prohibition of smoking burning tobacco in public places, because of the effect of second hand smoke, e-cigs do not produce second hand smoke. They vaporize harmless glycerol for visual effect. The nicotine, like all stimulants, can only serve to harm the user.
The only possible justification for their prohibition is if the state is responsible for the health of the individual... Oh, wait! We're heading in that direction, aren't we (which is another really, really, bad idea, in the opinion of one who escaped Canadian health "non-care")?
Even here, private sector insurers compensate by different premiums based on one's health and habits -- even gender, because women statistically live longer than men. There is no reason a public health care system can not operate similarly.
Statutory preemptive prohibition of enjoyable substances and activities requires notoriously expensive policing. Witness the failed "War on Drugs". About the only place where such legislation makes sense is in the protection of children who have not yet demonstrated responsible self-sufficiency in society from harmful substances.
"These children are taught not to engage is sexual activity, but then they are told that sex is safe with a condom. So now little Jimmy may be convinced by his teacher/priest/coach that what they are doing is ok because he/she is going to use a condom.
That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard."
You'd be surprised how kids interpret things.
I always taught my son to ignore verbal taunts, but to defend himself against a physical attack -- the old "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me" mantra.
Well, he took the notion that "names will never hurt" to heart and started having a very filthy mouth, calling other student's mothers "whores" and worse because "those names can't hurt them, so it's O.K."
Er, oops.
I can very well see children who have been taught they are to bend to every teacher's will when in school to submit to sexual abuse because a condom makes it "safe". But, the problem is the establishment of an authority figure without also establishing the LIMITS on that authority.
The courts will generally allow a few minutes grace. Often many cases are on the calender for a specific time, that runs to another time. If someone is not present, the court will usually wait until the end of the session before issuing a bench warrant. If a person turns themselves in expecting that a bench warrant may be, or has been, issued, they can generally expect leniency. You might be held until you can appear before a judge, but if you have a decent excuse (unexpected traffic delay), you will be released on your own recognizance. Perhaps bail might be set if it previously wasn't, or if bail was already set, you might forfeit it.
As for the restraining order example, must places "open to the public" allow owners and their agents to ask anyone to leave for any reason. There is no way to predict they won't like the t-shirt you're wearing, for example. In that case, the solution is to explain why you can't egress and suggest they call the police.
Finally, a defense to breaking the law is that you'd break it if you didn't.
There are, however, more contradictory examples where following the law may result in harm to someone, even death.
In WA, one can not restrain a child to prevent them from running into traffic and possibly getting killed when they are having some kind of tantrum, if the result is that a mark is left on their body,
Fine. I won't write software. I will write books. In a nice OCRable font. About a nice piece of fiction of how to translate the narrative into executable code.
I suppose because 3% (or so) for a Red Savina habanero cultivar does not seem like much, but 577000 Scovilles does.
Then again, 5000 Scovilles seems like a lot for a jalapeno but really isn't.
Of course, it's relative to experience. For someone not used to anything spicy, a jalapeno probably strikes them as "very hot", and the figure of 5000 Scovilles rather reinforces that idea.
The range of hotness does seem to warrant some six orders of magnitude in expressing it, so a range of 0 to 16 million is not unreasonable. If taste response (like hearing) were logarithmic, we'd have something like "decilogScovilles" much akin to decibels and a range of something like 0 to 72. But, it isn't.
When I traveled between the U.S. and Canada, it was typical for me to remove pet cat and guinea pig from carriers and carry them by hand through the metal detectors. Surprisingly, the cat had greater veterinary bill of health requirements than the guinea pig.
Yes, "the best kind of correct," but misleading, because correctness isn't the point of interest here. The useful bit of information is that early subjective experiences fixed a scale that can be correlated with objective measurements.
ER, IIRC, pepper spray is about 10% OC, or around 1.6 million.
Modern expressions of pungency in terms of Scoville units set pure capsaicin at either 15,000,000 or 16,000,000, and use HPLC to establish concentration of same (and related compounds). A Scoville rating is then set based on the concentration(s) measured.
So, knowing the reference standard, the measurements are actually quite objective.
Nobody, as far as I know, uses taste testers anymore.
Negligence, mostly. After the first couple of times, a reasonable person would think to double check this address in the future.
Social networking sites are far more than "informatiuon about a few million people". Their value comes from the relationships between those people. This have value to the people themselves, and, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where one lies on the marketting/privacy divide, to others. It's restricting this access to others and controlling information about one's self, that's the appeal of this device.
However, maintaining all those relationships distributed across they myriad of individual servers in each home will prove problematic: one essentially has a distributed database. The first issues that come to mind are location services, mapping "friend" links to their wall-wart servers (yes, this is DNS, but do you want to be that visible?), as well as backups. The network traffic involved in simple "friend of friend" graphing starts to get significant.
In such an environment Facebook would likely spider all the wall-wart servers in a Googlesque manner for (a) marketting, and (b) convenience.
Still, it's a concept I've pondered for a while: I should control information about me, and who I share it with. Replication and backup becomes a separate problem: perhaps I want some storage service provider to host it... perhaps not: connections to port 25 at a server resolved from my domain name have terminated on a PC in my home for years: if my physical mailbox is outside my house, why should my electronic one not be inside (cursing static IP rental costs aside)?
In this model, "Facebook" becomes an "app", that people download to their home servers and use to establish and publish relationships between their friends.
In 1966. I went to kindergarten. I knew a five year old girl in my class who routinely walked a mile to and from school each day, crossing some rather busy streets. It was not considered unusual.
I grew up in Montreal, Quebec in the 1960s and 70s.
Not only was my school's playground with an asphalt base fenced, the fence was topped with barbed wire. Didn't stop us from climbing it to retrieve balls gone astray (and sometimes ripping our trousers). I'm surprised no kid got seriously injured. Then again, if they did, it'd be "their own damn stupid fault" for trying to "climb the fence".
Bail bondsmen can't help you if you can't post collateral or pay the bond fee.
The problem isn't not having the resources to post bail. (Well, that is a problem, but a different one.) The problem is not being able to execute the steps to do so.
Try posting bail when no one else has access to your money or collateral and no one is willing to advance you a loan for that purpose. You first have to get to your lawyer (assuming you have one, and not a public defender who won't give a crap), have him draw up (or use a boilerplate) power of attorney form so s/he can access your funds, have a notary witness your signature at the jail (often not possible since the only physical (non-video) visitor you can have is your lawyer), and take that to your bank during business hours.
A debit/credit card might work, and you might indeed have it on your person when you are arrested. But, it will be safely stored with your personal possessions, and not provided to anyone other than upon filing in a release form, that your jailer may not approve (generally the deputy overseeing the jail module where you are held). Have you got your debit/credit card number memorized? The expiration date? The code on the back?
Things that can take a few minutes over the phone can take many days when one is in jail.
Right, but the key part of the article was heat and stretch. There are other ways that this can be done to a plastic. Ever see fresh noodles be made by hand, by a master noodle chef?
The chef starts with a large amount of dough, and draws it out, "bouncing" it on the work surface covered with flour. He/she then folds and twists it upon itself and repeats the process many times: 1 very thick noodle, 2 thick noodles, 4, 8, 16, 32... you get the idea. 10 folds and twists give 1024 noodles (often it's folded upon itself twice at a time, to yield 1, 4, 16, 64 noodles). The flour and gluten content in the dough prevents the individual noodles from coalescing. It's an amazing process to watch. Dragon's beard candy is made in a similar fashion, with sugar.
I wonder if a similar technique could be applied here.
There is no excuse for this. None.
I am a gun-rights supporter, and NRA member, and I can't imagine a punishment severe enough for this man and his wife. Criminal negligence at the very least.
1. The gun is always loaded. Always.
2. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
3. Know your target, and what's behind it.
4. Do not point it at anything you are not willing to destroy.
To leave a firearm unattended is the height of idiocy.
The bottom line is that kids will often ignore safety lessons, no matter how much you try to ingrain them into their little heads. A three year old is not capable of understanding them, and the duty of care over a lethal weapon is magnified many times over.
That duty of care does not go away when the weapon is securely stored. The immediacy of it is merely reduced.
The mind boggles.
I can only hope this child did not suffer.
They claim to skirt the FDA because they operate solely in state.
The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution serves to ensure that there are no inter-state trade wars (e.g. due to tarrifs at state borders).
However, it has been used broadly within states when an argument can be made that internal commercial activities affect commerce outside the state's borders.
In this case, it could be argued that stem-cell treatment within Colorado affects the markets for prosthetics outside of Colorado and therefore falls within the purvue of the Commerce Clause.
You can read more on the Commerce Clause but the main problem is that the Feds decide what constitutes "commerce". In fact, the Commerce Clause has been use to require sex offender registration outside the states where they were convicted. This is a contentious issue and the circuit courts are split on the matter, leading to a likely ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (expected in 2010).
Well, one inch = 2.54 cm, exactly (by definition). One mile = 5280 feet. One foot = 12 inches. So, one mile = 160934.4 cm = 1609.344 m = 1.609344 km, exactly.
100 kph therefore is 62.137199 mph, exactly. (1/0.00254 = 39.370079 exactly, surprisingly).
60 mph therefore is 96.56064 kph, exactly.
Yes, I know about precision and significant digits. All starting values above should be presumed exact, and not just precise to the number of digits represented.
My car was American-made, manufactured for the Canadian market, and then reimported back into the U.S. The speedometer indicates in mph and kph, with the emphasis on kph. I generally look at the kph figure and multiply by 0.6 in my head to get an approximation of mph, when I have to: 100 is 60, 50 is 30, 40 is 25 (well, 24, close enough).
"Dr Wolfe-Simon has taken samples from the mud and the waters of the lake and is performing a series of multiple dilutions — hugely increasing the levels of arsenic and reducing residual phosphorous to zero." [emphasis mine]
Shouldn't that read "greatly reducing"?
I'm not usually a linguistic pedant, lest I find myself hoist by my own pedantetry, but reading that sentence almost made my brain segfault: wait: diluting, causing an increase in something, toward zero? Arghhhh!
No, a pyronecrophiliac would be one who sets corpses alight and then has sex with them.
If anything, OP might be a necropyrophiliac: one who has sex with corpses already burning...
In which case, I apologize for my insensitivity to OP's sexual proclivities.
FWIW, The biggest MFM drive I ever had in a PC had 150MB capacity and used an ST-506 controller on an EISA bus.
It's not unusual for one party to pay two legal teams to argue amongst themselves. When I divorced, because my then-wife did not work, I had to pay BOTH attorneys. It was quite surreal.
Well, "open" sort of.
Its easy enough to secure it, using either TKIP or RADIUS authentication and provide access to my kids laptops, netbooks, DSi, phones, etc. but it's becoming a pain.
I'm really thinking of just setting up a captive portal for them to use with their home network credentials. At least that will take care of their web use.
But I wonder if I should make it more open for guests that stop by every so often. I don't really want to set up a guest account, with a password that doesn't change, or changes so frequently that it defeats the purpose of a "guest" account. Frankly, I'm not worried so much about the neighbors stealing wifi, but about some objectionable content they might get via my network connection -- think kiddie porn. (Yes, authentication without site blocking doesn't solve that, but I monitor the use by people that have home network credentials (my kids).)
The idea is that when a friend pops over he should just be able to surf on his phone or make VoIP calls without complicated setup or passwords. If the neighbors get a bit of free bandwidth, as long as they don't hog it, I really wouldn't mind. I'm leaning toward a self-subscribing captive portal with verification by cell phone text message so I can at least get a phone number that I can match to IP logs if necessary on the assumption that so long as I don't store any questionable content, and log access, I should be relatively safe from prosecution (This may be a naive assumption.) My friends all have cell phones, and I don't care if the neighbors don't.
Remember though, its "rape, pillage, and burn" and not "pillage, burn, and rape".