You've still not identified harm. Who is hurt, and how much are they hurt by? Are you talking about potential being wasted? In that case, are you also willing to outlaw anything else that might distract people from being productive?
I don't think anything I've said in this discussion could be construed as an endorsement for the criminal prosecution of distractions that might impair productivity.
Still, that doesn't mean I approve of senselessly wasted opportunity. But this is the problem with a narrowly legalistic understanding such as yours. A crime without a victim might still be an evil.
People like you and I can choose to ignore these other people who just waste their lives from our perspective. It's when they start fighting or stealing from others to supply themselves, that the harm begins.
No, we can't ignore it, and no, the harm is not limited to that which we can readily identify as being a public nuisance. The peaceful and socially accepted qat-chewers of Yemen, in their passive stupor, pose a serious obstacle to the development of their country and the emancipation of women. The deeply ingrained alcohol abuse among the hospitable Russians have impacted the average male life expectancy to the point where it's lower than it was under Soviet Communist rule. Whereas on the other hand, abstinence organizations like "De Blauwe Knoop" (The Blue Button), founded in the 1880's and recently disbanded, have effected a hugely positive influence in improving the lives of working class families, by combatting the detrimental effects of a culture which condoned and encouraged structural abuse of alcohol.
The point to all this is that it is evidently the case that cultural attitudes matter a great deal. As such the position "we can ignore them" is untenable, except as a kind of irresponsible bullshit statement or as a sophisticated expression of "I don't care". This is a seperate issue from whether the abuse should be criminally prosecuted, which, again, I do not support.
However, neither one is demonstrably better than abstaining from both. Given organically grown sources for both (eliminating pesticides, additives, and radioactive fertilizer): consider the amount of weed the average weed smoker smokes, compared to the average tobacco smoker. The sheer volume of tar is incomparable. Also consider the different natures of the substances. Tobacco tar infiltrates small airways, causing emphysema. Weed smoke does not. Nicotine causes heart and circulatory disease. THC does not. You can vaporize either, leaving you with the effects of nicotine compared to THC; nicotine is obviously the more damaging substance.
That's as may be, but this little lecture of yours ignores the fact that cannabis (since THC is far from being the only active substance) adversely affects your T-cell count, making one more susceptible to infections, as well as the fact that cannabis smokers, pretty much opposite from cigarette smokers, tend to keep the smoke in their lungs for a much longer time. And then there are the psychological effects to consider. On balance it seems cannabis is just as bad or good as any other drug, and it's primary benefit recreational.
No, what lends moral authority to the legalization movement is that prohibition causes more harm than weed causes, and it has proven completely ineffective at erasing weed usage, so now you have the harm that weed causes plus the harm that prohibition causes.
The point is, that in an age where it becomes more and more difficult for smokers such as myself to find a place to light up, and tobacco manufacturers are subjected to ever tighter scrutiny, what's the argument to legalize weed?
Secondarily, what lends moral authority to the medical cannabis movement is that sick people are being denied access to a substance that they believe helps them and that some medical professionals and societies even recommend. The only arguments the government presents to the contrary are based on lies
The PC didn't win because it was more "open." It won because it was cheaper than the $2000+ priced Macintosh, fueled by commodity PC-clones (remember the phrase "PC-compatible"?) that competed with each other and brought prices down each year.
You do realize that the commodity PC-clones and the pricewars are aspects of "openness", right?
I'd say you have a strange definition of harm if it includes withdrawal. Yes, in _certain_ cases, this can be harmful, like if the person leaves a family behind for drugs. But to have harm, there must be at least one identifiable victim and a measureable amount of damage. A person smoking their days away in their apartment hardly qualifies.
I disagree. Withdrawal damages the social fabric and hurts productivity. But more importantly, sadness and despair don't confine themselves to the addict's room. They emanate out of his dirty windows into the street below. It's quite palpable.
In fact, I think "prohibition causes more harm than good" would be a more accurate summary of legalization efforts today.
I agree. But you know as well as I do that this is only because pretty much all the claims as to the miraculous nature of hemp and weed have been thoroughly debunked.
Some of these survive as urban myths, such as that weed is better for you than tobacco, or that cannabis smoke cleans your lungs, or that cannabis is harmless, or that cannabis cures disease.
Many if not most of these sorts of myths were at one time marshalled to support legalization. They were, in fact, what lent moral authority to the movement. In the absence of them, the legalization movement becomes hard to distinguish from the tobacco lobby.
We have the same statistic quoted in the USA as proof of a cannabis epidemic. Unfortunately, this rise in patients at treatment centers is also strongly correlated with increased prohibition enforcement.
That's as may be, but as you are no doubt aware nobody gets prosecuted for using cannabis in Amsterdam. Still the number of people seeking help steadily increases.
But this is more of an argument for a regulated legal market than anything.
Perhaps. It could just as well be argued that in a regulated market that provides "weak" stuff, cannabis users will flock to the highly potent illegal stuff. There is no question that that's where most of the demand as well as profits are.
And high concentrations of THC are nothing new - haschish has been around history for quite a while.
Hash and weed have rather different effects and usage patterns, to the point where they actually attract different kinds of users. Moreover, hash is undergoing the same kind of enhancement and development as weed: Dutch "skuff" makes Maroc and even Afghan feel quaint in comparison.
Of course. But in any case, the harm is limited to the user. It remains a poor rationale for criminal prohibition.
The harm is certainly not limited to the user. IMHO that's a solipsistic and naive view. Many compulsive users succumb to a sort of vegetative numbness which hurts their ability to grow and interact with the environment around them, thereby impoverishing it. Sometimes you just need one bad apple to spoil the batch.
In any case, I agree with you that that's probably not an argument for criminal prohibition. But the legalization movement needs to find a message which goes beyond "cannabis leads to world peace".
Usually, the claimed effect by drug warriors is "psychosis" or "psychotic symptoms". This sounds terrible at first and has fueled many a hysterical rant at the podium.
I appreciate the need to counter drug-war propaganda, but questioning the adverse effects of sustained, high-dose cannabis use is probably not the best way to do that.
William Burroughs, the archetypal junkie himself has posited the possibility of cannabis inciting "drug psychosis" after prolonged and heavy (at least daily for several years) use.
Here in Amsterdam where the stuff is widely available and (by my estimations) probably 5% of 16 to 24 year olds uses cannabis daily, it's pretty common to hear people talk about the fear, paranoia, and severe depersonalization caused by long-term cannabis use.
The Jellinek clinic for drug rehabilitation has found that cannabis addicts are about as hard to treat, and more likely to experience a relapse, than cocaine addicts. Also, the number of people seeking help to overcome their cannabis habit has skyrocketed in recent years. This is tentatively attributed, in part, to new, powerful skunk strains like Northern Light, Kali Mist, AK47, etc.
It's also been established beyond doubt that people who are under psychiatric treatment for suffering a psychotic episode, and who keep smoking cannabis, are something like an order of a magnitude more likely to experience another psychotic episode than people who refrain from smoking.
There's a big difference between the effects of the occassional toke and structural cannabis abuse.
Even if context switching is really fast, a large number of threads still require the scheduler to do more work. Which leads to issues such as to how to ensure fairness and timeliness. Which may require OS dependant or library dependant solutions, making the code less portable.
There is little benefit to spreading the threads across CPUs since the transfer code is I/O bound. In fact it can be positively harmful since you're blowing away the CPU caches. You might get improved responsiveness, but this is wasted on a protocol like BitTorrent.
The use of threads also introduces the possibility of deadlocks and race conditions, which can be hard to reproduce and therefore debug.
Finally, well, you have to check the return value of read/write regardless of whether the fd is blocking or not.
Re:AI community convenes, stale ideas emerge
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Exactly what does qualify as emergent behavior in your mind, then?
It's a marketing term. As such it is intentionally vague and ambiguous. If pressed on the matter I would say emergent behavior covers any kind of non-trivial pattern that emerges in a non-obvious way from the application of a small set of simple rules.
And the Internet is far from a "purposefully built network." It's a chaotic conglomerate of individual computers which have been connected to other individual computers with no roadmap dictating what goes where.
The IP4 address space and various assorted RFCs, steering committees and standards bodies make up the roadmap and determine what goes where.
No individual computer or piece of software contains a representation of the network as a whole, and yet packets can get from one place to another based on the simple rules (protocols) implemented on individual machines.
First, the rules are not simple at all. Second, the rules have been purposefully designed and honed with experience to guarantee timely delivery under certain constraints. That the system as a whole should then exhibit this property is not a surprise.
Ants following chemical trails is a much better analogy for network traffic than a postman delivering a letter.
Yet ants manage only to build anthills.
Re:AI community convenes, stale ideas emerge
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the study of emergent behavior has important practical implications in fields as diverse as economics, city planning, and telecommunications.
Unless it can predict the stock market and prevent traffic jams; not really.
The infrastructure of the Internet itself depends on decentralized decision-making.
Which is orthogonal to emergent behavior as such.
Thanks to this "terribly boring" stuff, your message was reliably transported from your computer, to slashdot, to everyone else's computers, without any centralized authority directing traffic.
There is nothing emergent about a handful of purposefully crafted packets travelling over a purposefully built network arriving at their intended destination.
AI community convenes, stale ideas emerge
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This stuff has grown terribly, terribly boring.
As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"
If our hearts begin to flutter and our imagination begins to soar at the sight of an anthill, it's depressing.
This must be the latest confaddled confabulation floating around on the Mac forums. You can always tell, because while they feign some concern for cold hard technical facts, they provide no data to back it up, and are sufficiently vague as to be meaningless. This latest fable, for example, ignores the fact that MP3 takes more resources to decode than FLAC, yet the iPod and Airport Express have no problem decoding MP3.
There's undoubtedly a perfectly valid reason why Apple doesn't support FLAC, but this isn't one of them.
It's not unavoidable though, because they were able to avoid it in 2.4.
That's not really true. It took ages for 2.4 to stabilize. Only after Linus replaced virtually the entire VM subsystem around the 2.4.10 timeframe did the kernel finally begin to stabilize.
The FAI's rules state that a record attempt like this must start and finish at the same airfield and cross all meridians of the globe. What's more the course must not be less than the very precise figure of 36,787.559 kilometres (around 23,000 miles) which is equal in length to the Tropic of Cancer. To allow the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer to catch the vital jet stream winds, the FAI rules don't oblige that record attempts follow the imaginary line of the Tropic itself but simply that the distance flown exceeds it.
You have to admit beginning a reply with "I will ignore most of what you said" is not the best way to ensure willingness to listen to you on the part of the other person. Why should two parties communicate if one decides to ignore the other? Sounds too much like marriage...
Thanks for your response. I felt your original post was rather defensive and that a point-by-point reply would just antagonize you further. I worried that the discussion might degenerate into a trench warfare of sorts. I did not mean to offend you.
A baby cannot tell the doctor "disconnect my life support" or "I want to continue treatment" or "My parents are Jehova's witnesses but I really want that blood transfusion so I can live.". Because they are human beings, and therefore have rights. But they are not persons - they cannot give consent under the law. Get a baby, a mentally handicapped person, a senile person or a demented person sign to a contract and see how legally binding it is.
If even unconscious and severely incapacitated humans are afforded protection against involuntary testing, then how can one justify using healthy, conscious animals (and again, I really mean the large primates) as test subjects?
Saying that humans have rights by virtue of being human opens up the question; why do we believe humans (themselves being a kind of animal) have these rights? Is it because they are capable of suffering? But anyone who has ever seen a worm wriggle on a fish-hook knows that suffering is not limited to humans. So is it because humans are so intelligent? But then what about those humans which are not? And so on.
We can always appeal to "common sense" or tradition, but then we must remember that common sense and tradition have also been and are still being used to justify slavery and genocide. (And I regret dragging these into the discussion -- please understand that I do not wish to draw a comparison between these atrocities and your line of work -- just trying to illustrate the general inadequacy of common sense and tradition as an ethical foundation.)
We don't ask their pets, though.
This made me smile.
Now, on the other hand, there is a need for animal research.
Well, there is a need for research, and this entails experimentation. But since these experiments cannot, for legal and ethical and perhaps other reasons, be performed on humans, animals are used instead. The question is whether it is possible to present a coherent, rational argument (i.e. not one which appeals to "common sense", the authority of the law, or God) that can justify the use of highly developed animals such as large primates, but not the use of (say) severely incapacitated humans.
Your argument seems to be - let's skip the animal part, and go straight from the test tube to the human.
The argument is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. Since we obviously should not subject humans to involuntary testing, then since humans are a kind of animal, we are led to the question whether this reservation applies (or should apply) to other animals as well, and if so, which.
(We might alternatively take the matter to its logical extreme and say that if no animals are to be exempted from involuntary testing, then there is no reason why not also at least some humans should be subjected to involuntary tests, but obviously this is a revolting proposition.)
My argument is a very philosophical one, and as most such arguments it wallows in the luxury afforded by a lack of direct experience. I'm not even prepared to claim that my argument, if sound, has or should have practical consequences.
However, I do think the (apparent) lack of a rational, ethical justification should give us pause. Again, I'm not saying we should stop experimenting on primates (at least not right now). Just that it is a bit frightening if we cannot logically justify it.
I'm going to be rude and ignore most of what you posted.
OK. So will I. End of dialogue.
Pathetic. Your post was reasoning in circles ("it's not torture [...], otherwise the experiment would not never approved"), begging the question ("monkeys are not persons"), littered with canned responses ("only in your uninformed mind", "of course a monkey is worth less than humans"), and lapses into an argument from authority when it is exactly that authority which the Guardian article (no matter how tendentious it may be) calls into question. And it was badly formatted to boot.
I do not oppose animal testing. I have tried to outline the grounds on which we can justify it. I have tentatively concluded that such a justification is hard to provide on the basis of reason alone. Unless we accept the justification to be simply "because we can".
I do believe I should be more careful applying the word "torture". However if the procedure is as benign as you make it out to be, then why not just use humans. The observation that monkeys (by which I mean the large primates) are not persons begs the question, why not? Their agency is not inferior to that of babies, retards, and the senile and demented. On the contrary, it is exactly their close likeness to humans which makes them so suitable for experimentation in the first place.
I'm going to be rude and ignore most of what you posted. Some of which I felt was useful, most of which I felt was unnecessarily defensive and pedantic.
I will just lift the one point from your post which I feel is central to the discussion. I would appreciate it if you could respond to it.
We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys
Yes there is. Monkeys are not persons, and do not have "human rights". They now have "animal rights" in some countries, and no experiment will be permitted that does not take into account steps to prevent or minimize suffering of animals.
This is not an answer. Saying that monkeys and humans are different because humans are persons and monkeys are not sidesteps the issue. It does not explain on what basis this distinction can be made. The mere fact that one is human and the other is not sufficient. It does not answer the question of what it is that distinguishes humans from monkeys. If the distinguishing factor is some mental faculty like the capacity for language then where does that put people who are (severely) retarded, babies, etc. Thanks.
This is pretty ghoulish and a bit disturbing, even though there is every indication that this kind of stuff probably happens every day.
It got me thinking, why are we doing this? Why is it alright to saw the skull off an ape but not a human? As far as I can tell this question can be answered in three ways.
The first answer is that there is some huge insurmountable difference in kind between apes and humans, which makes it alright to subject apes to torture for the purpose of research, but not humans. This is basically the religious argument, because so far nobody has succeeded in providing a measure of this difference, much less in quantifying it. Meanwhile all the differences which can be measured, such as genetic difference, seem to point overwhelmingly in the other direction, namely that the difference is small and quite surmountable. Note that all the answers of the form "apes don't really suffer" or "it would violate the integrity of the human" and "it is against the law" all belong in this class.
The second answer tries to qualify the conditions under which it is alright to saw a monkey's skull off. We know the apes suffer, we may try to minimize their suffering, but ultimately we judge that the benefits from research warrant whatever suffering we subject the monkeys to. But there are two huge problems with this answer. First, if the research is really so important, then why don't we sacrifice a few humans instead? We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys (which brings us very close to the first answer), or we can answer this question quantitively by saying that although monkeys and humans are both part of the same continuum, monkeys are simply worth less than humans, since they lack the mental acuity or dexterity of humans, or some such. But if mental acuity or dexterity are the criteria, then why not use retarded or disabled humans? Second, who determines the value of the research and on what grounds? And does this mean that some research might turn out to be so vital that it requires human guinea pigs?
Finally the third answer just posits that it's alright because we can. This is the position that might makes right. This is the most logically consistent position, even though it is ethically bankrupt (since all ethics are the ethics of the weak -- the strong need no ethics).
While none of these answers is entirely satisfying, generally the second answer seems to be the most palatable as well as the most common, since at least it tries to address what many people feel are legitimate issues. The catch is that it enshrines often questionable research on the backs and skulls of living, breathing monkeys. Although research for the sake of research has frequently enhanced our lives in unexpected ways, it has also frequently been a dead end. And while modern medical science can pull some amazing rabbits out of its high tech hat, the significance of these accomplishments can sometimes seem shallow when compared to that of mundane technology such as penicillin, antibacterial soap, and tap water.
I just hope this isn't another oversold "breakthrough" which turns out to have little practical use other than to funnel more funds into the departmental cash register.
I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API.
The point is that, depending on the kind of UI, you have to do a lot of work before you can even call SetSomeRandomProperties(). And the better (or more abstract) the UI, the more work you have to do.
Decoupling core logic from the UI logic makes for a cleaner design that is easier to adapt simply by virtue of being cleaner, but it doesn't dramatically reduce the amount of code you have to write and test when you implement a new UI.
For example, take a look at a real world example like giftd. giftd is a highly modular file transfer daemon which supports pluggable file transfer protocols (like Gnutella and Kazaa) as well as pluggable frontends. The frontends communicate with the daemon through a socket using the giftd UI protocol.
The giftd core code weighs in at 25608 lines. The giFTcurs frontend (an ncurses driven UI) weighs in at 12376 lines, and the code for the Apollon frontend (which is Qt based) is 14541 lines.
So the UI code makes up something like half of the core code. That's a significant amount based on lines of code alone, which doesn't even account for the work that has to go into the actual design of the UI.
So even though giftd is highly decoupled and modular, if you want to write a new UI for it, it still means you have to do lots of work. And that's without considering hidden costs; e.g. giftd's UI protocol might be restricting in ways which limit the frontend's capabilities.
So your argument, that swapping around UI's becomes easy once you've decoupled the UI logic from the core logic, well, I just don't see it. It becomes slightly easier, sure, but the bulk of the work is still there.
I know what you mean, I do it myself, but this adds/changes relatively little to the flexibility of the apps user interface. It makes it possible to move widgets around a bit and to change the appearance to some extent, but it doesn't make fundamental changes to the UI any easier.
If you currently have a dialog where the user can edit some properties, you cannot use this technique to get rid of the dialog altogether and instead employ a floating control which appears depending on context. It makes it real easy to move the deck chairs all over the place but that doesn't stop the ship from sinking (please excuse the metaphor).
Riiight. And such a challenge it must have been. Connect wire 1 to wire 1. Connect wire 2 to wire 2. Connect wire 3 to wire 3. Repeat. What a testament to man's ingenuity.
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You've still not identified harm. Who is hurt, and how much are they hurt by? Are you talking about potential being wasted? In that case, are you also willing to outlaw anything else that might distract people from being productive?
I don't think anything I've said in this discussion could be construed as an endorsement for the criminal prosecution of distractions that might impair productivity.
Still, that doesn't mean I approve of senselessly wasted opportunity. But this is the problem with a narrowly legalistic understanding such as yours. A crime without a victim might still be an evil.
People like you and I can choose to ignore these other people who just waste their lives from our perspective. It's when they start fighting or stealing from others to supply themselves, that the harm begins.
No, we can't ignore it, and no, the harm is not limited to that which we can readily identify as being a public nuisance. The peaceful and socially accepted qat-chewers of Yemen, in their passive stupor, pose a serious obstacle to the development of their country and the emancipation of women. The deeply ingrained alcohol abuse among the hospitable Russians have impacted the average male life expectancy to the point where it's lower than it was under Soviet Communist rule. Whereas on the other hand, abstinence organizations like "De Blauwe Knoop" (The Blue Button), founded in the 1880's and recently disbanded, have effected a hugely positive influence in improving the lives of working class families, by combatting the detrimental effects of a culture which condoned and encouraged structural abuse of alcohol.
The point to all this is that it is evidently the case that cultural attitudes matter a great deal. As such the position "we can ignore them" is untenable, except as a kind of irresponsible bullshit statement or as a sophisticated expression of "I don't care". This is a seperate issue from whether the abuse should be criminally prosecuted, which, again, I do not support.
However, neither one is demonstrably better than abstaining from both. Given organically grown sources for both (eliminating pesticides, additives, and radioactive fertilizer): consider the amount of weed the average weed smoker smokes, compared to the average tobacco smoker. The sheer volume of tar is incomparable. Also consider the different natures of the substances. Tobacco tar infiltrates small airways, causing emphysema. Weed smoke does not. Nicotine causes heart and circulatory disease. THC does not. You can vaporize either, leaving you with the effects of nicotine compared to THC; nicotine is obviously the more damaging substance.
That's as may be, but this little lecture of yours ignores the fact that cannabis (since THC is far from being the only active substance) adversely affects your T-cell count, making one more susceptible to infections, as well as the fact that cannabis smokers, pretty much opposite from cigarette smokers, tend to keep the smoke in their lungs for a much longer time. And then there are the psychological effects to consider. On balance it seems cannabis is just as bad or good as any other drug, and it's primary benefit recreational.
No, what lends moral authority to the legalization movement is that prohibition causes more harm than weed causes, and it has proven completely ineffective at erasing weed usage, so now you have the harm that weed causes plus the harm that prohibition causes.
The point is, that in an age where it becomes more and more difficult for smokers such as myself to find a place to light up, and tobacco manufacturers are subjected to ever tighter scrutiny, what's the argument to legalize weed?
Secondarily, what lends moral authority to the medical cannabis movement is that sick people are being denied access to a substance that they believe helps them and that some medical professionals and societies even recommend. The only arguments the government presents to the contrary are based on lies
The PC didn't win because it was more "open." It won because it was cheaper than the $2000+ priced Macintosh, fueled by commodity PC-clones (remember the phrase "PC-compatible"?) that competed with each other and brought prices down each year.
You do realize that the commodity PC-clones and the pricewars are aspects of "openness", right?
I'd say you have a strange definition of harm if it includes withdrawal. Yes, in _certain_ cases, this can be harmful, like if the person leaves a family behind for drugs. But to have harm, there must be at least one identifiable victim and a measureable amount of damage. A person smoking their days away in their apartment hardly qualifies.
I disagree. Withdrawal damages the social fabric and hurts productivity. But more importantly, sadness and despair don't confine themselves to the addict's room. They emanate out of his dirty windows into the street below. It's quite palpable.
In fact, I think "prohibition causes more harm than good" would be a more accurate summary of legalization efforts today.
I agree. But you know as well as I do that this is only because pretty much all the claims as to the miraculous nature of hemp and weed have been thoroughly debunked.
Some of these survive as urban myths, such as that weed is better for you than tobacco, or that cannabis smoke cleans your lungs, or that cannabis is harmless, or that cannabis cures disease.
Many if not most of these sorts of myths were at one time marshalled to support legalization. They were, in fact, what lent moral authority to the movement. In the absence of them, the legalization movement becomes hard to distinguish from the tobacco lobby.
We have the same statistic quoted in the USA as proof of a cannabis epidemic. Unfortunately, this rise in patients at treatment centers is also strongly correlated with increased prohibition enforcement.
That's as may be, but as you are no doubt aware nobody gets prosecuted for using cannabis in Amsterdam. Still the number of people seeking help steadily increases.
But this is more of an argument for a regulated legal market than anything.
Perhaps. It could just as well be argued that in a regulated market that provides "weak" stuff, cannabis users will flock to the highly potent illegal stuff. There is no question that that's where most of the demand as well as profits are.
And high concentrations of THC are nothing new - haschish has been around history for quite a while.
Hash and weed have rather different effects and usage patterns, to the point where they actually attract different kinds of users. Moreover, hash is undergoing the same kind of enhancement and development as weed: Dutch "skuff" makes Maroc and even Afghan feel quaint in comparison.
Of course. But in any case, the harm is limited to the user. It remains a poor rationale for criminal prohibition.
The harm is certainly not limited to the user. IMHO that's a solipsistic and naive view. Many compulsive users succumb to a sort of vegetative numbness which hurts their ability to grow and interact with the environment around them, thereby impoverishing it. Sometimes you just need one bad apple to spoil the batch.
In any case, I agree with you that that's probably not an argument for criminal prohibition. But the legalization movement needs to find a message which goes beyond "cannabis leads to world peace".
Usually, the claimed effect by drug warriors is "psychosis" or "psychotic symptoms". This sounds terrible at first and has fueled many a hysterical rant at the podium.
I appreciate the need to counter drug-war propaganda, but questioning the adverse effects of sustained, high-dose cannabis use is probably not the best way to do that.
William Burroughs, the archetypal junkie himself has posited the possibility of cannabis inciting "drug psychosis" after prolonged and heavy (at least daily for several years) use.
Here in Amsterdam where the stuff is widely available and (by my estimations) probably 5% of 16 to 24 year olds uses cannabis daily, it's pretty common to hear people talk about the fear, paranoia, and severe depersonalization caused by long-term cannabis use.
The Jellinek clinic for drug rehabilitation has found that cannabis addicts are about as hard to treat, and more likely to experience a relapse, than cocaine addicts. Also, the number of people seeking help to overcome their cannabis habit has skyrocketed in recent years. This is tentatively attributed, in part, to new, powerful skunk strains like Northern Light, Kali Mist, AK47, etc.
It's also been established beyond doubt that people who are under psychiatric treatment for suffering a psychotic episode, and who keep smoking cannabis, are something like an order of a magnitude more likely to experience another psychotic episode than people who refrain from smoking.
There's a big difference between the effects of the occassional toke and structural cannabis abuse.
More use than hypothetical open source software that either doesn't exist or doesn't work.
Anything is better than cookie-cutter Photoshop art.
If a commercial software vendor doesn't support linux people bitch.
Those people are using the wrong operating system.
If a commercial software vendor does support it people bitch that the software isn't GPL.
Of course. What use is software that needs a serial number to start up, can't be used on more than 1 computer, and can't be modified?
If the software gets GPL'd, people bitch that it hasn't been ported to their distros of choice.
But since it is GPL'd, so anyone can have a go at porting it.
More bullshit?
A friend of mine has had similar experiences here in Europe. His iBook(s) died on him three or four times in the past two years.
Even if context switching is really fast, a large number of threads still require the scheduler to do more work. Which leads to issues such as to how to ensure fairness and timeliness. Which may require OS dependant or library dependant solutions, making the code less portable.
There is little benefit to spreading the threads across CPUs since the transfer code is I/O bound. In fact it can be positively harmful since you're blowing away the CPU caches. You might get improved responsiveness, but this is wasted on a protocol like BitTorrent.
The use of threads also introduces the possibility of deadlocks and race conditions, which can be hard to reproduce and therefore debug.
Finally, well, you have to check the return value of read/write regardless of whether the fd is blocking or not.
Exactly what does qualify as emergent behavior in your mind, then?
It's a marketing term. As such it is intentionally vague and ambiguous. If pressed on the matter I would say emergent behavior covers any kind of non-trivial pattern that emerges in a non-obvious way from the application of a small set of simple rules.
And the Internet is far from a "purposefully built network." It's a chaotic conglomerate of individual computers which have been connected to other individual computers with no roadmap dictating what goes where.
The IP4 address space and various assorted RFCs, steering committees and standards bodies make up the roadmap and determine what goes where.
No individual computer or piece of software contains a representation of the network as a whole, and yet packets can get from one place to another based on the simple rules (protocols) implemented on individual machines.
First, the rules are not simple at all. Second, the rules have been purposefully designed and honed with experience to guarantee timely delivery under certain constraints. That the system as a whole should then exhibit this property is not a surprise.
Ants following chemical trails is a much better analogy for network traffic than a postman delivering a letter.
Yet ants manage only to build anthills.
the study of emergent behavior has important practical implications in fields as diverse as economics, city planning, and telecommunications.
Unless it can predict the stock market and prevent traffic jams; not really.
The infrastructure of the Internet itself depends on decentralized decision-making.
Which is orthogonal to emergent behavior as such.
Thanks to this "terribly boring" stuff, your message was reliably transported from your computer, to slashdot, to everyone else's computers, without any centralized authority directing traffic.
There is nothing emergent about a handful of purposefully crafted packets travelling over a purposefully built network arriving at their intended destination.
This stuff has grown terribly, terribly boring.
As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"
If our hearts begin to flutter and our imagination begins to soar at the sight of an anthill, it's depressing.
This must be the latest confaddled confabulation floating around on the Mac forums. You can always tell, because while they feign some concern for cold hard technical facts, they provide no data to back it up, and are sufficiently vague as to be meaningless. This latest fable, for example, ignores the fact that MP3 takes more resources to decode than FLAC, yet the iPod and Airport Express have no problem decoding MP3.
There's undoubtedly a perfectly valid reason why Apple doesn't support FLAC, but this isn't one of them.
It's not unavoidable though, because they were able to avoid it in 2.4.
That's not really true. It took ages for 2.4 to stabilize. Only after Linus replaced virtually the entire VM subsystem around the 2.4.10 timeframe did the kernel finally begin to stabilize.
A lot of the stuff we are finding equations for now is what many indegenous cultures have taught for thousands and thousands of years.
Who knows? The moon may be made of cheese, for sufficiently large values of "cheese".
They may have communicated the ideas differently, but they strike me as having the same message.
Indeed. Everything is everything!
Thanks for your response. I felt your original post was rather defensive and that a point-by-point reply would just antagonize you further. I worried that the discussion might degenerate into a trench warfare of sorts. I did not mean to offend you.
If even unconscious and severely incapacitated humans are afforded protection against involuntary testing, then how can one justify using healthy, conscious animals (and again, I really mean the large primates) as test subjects?
Saying that humans have rights by virtue of being human opens up the question; why do we believe humans (themselves being a kind of animal) have these rights? Is it because they are capable of suffering? But anyone who has ever seen a worm wriggle on a fish-hook knows that suffering is not limited to humans. So is it because humans are so intelligent? But then what about those humans which are not? And so on.
We can always appeal to "common sense" or tradition, but then we must remember that common sense and tradition have also been and are still being used to justify slavery and genocide. (And I regret dragging these into the discussion -- please understand that I do not wish to draw a comparison between these atrocities and your line of work -- just trying to illustrate the general inadequacy of common sense and tradition as an ethical foundation.)
This made me smile.
Well, there is a need for research, and this entails experimentation. But since these experiments cannot, for legal and ethical and perhaps other reasons, be performed on humans, animals are used instead. The question is whether it is possible to present a coherent, rational argument (i.e. not one which appeals to "common sense", the authority of the law, or God) that can justify the use of highly developed animals such as large primates, but not the use of (say) severely incapacitated humans.
The argument is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. Since we obviously should not subject humans to involuntary testing, then since humans are a kind of animal, we are led to the question whether this reservation applies (or should apply) to other animals as well, and if so, which.
(We might alternatively take the matter to its logical extreme and say that if no animals are to be exempted from involuntary testing, then there is no reason why not also at least some humans should be subjected to involuntary tests, but obviously this is a revolting proposition.)
My argument is a very philosophical one, and as most such arguments it wallows in the luxury afforded by a lack of direct experience. I'm not even prepared to claim that my argument, if sound, has or should have practical consequences.
However, I do think the (apparent) lack of a rational, ethical justification should give us pause. Again, I'm not saying we should stop experimenting on primates (at least not right now). Just that it is a bit frightening if we cannot logically justify it.
(And no, there is
I do not oppose animal testing. I have tried to outline the grounds on which we can justify it. I have tentatively concluded that such a justification is hard to provide on the basis of reason alone. Unless we accept the justification to be simply "because we can".
I do believe I should be more careful applying the word "torture". However if the procedure is as benign as you make it out to be, then why not just use humans. The observation that monkeys (by which I mean the large primates) are not persons begs the question, why not? Their agency is not inferior to that of babies, retards, and the senile and demented. On the contrary, it is exactly their close likeness to humans which makes them so suitable for experimentation in the first place.
I will just lift the one point from your post which I feel is central to the discussion. I would appreciate it if you could respond to it.
This is not an answer. Saying that monkeys and humans are different because humans are persons and monkeys are not sidesteps the issue. It does not explain on what basis this distinction can be made. The mere fact that one is human and the other is not sufficient. It does not answer the question of what it is that distinguishes humans from monkeys. If the distinguishing factor is some mental faculty like the capacity for language then where does that put people who are (severely) retarded, babies, etc. Thanks.
This is pretty ghoulish and a bit disturbing, even though there is every indication that this kind of stuff probably happens every day.
It got me thinking, why are we doing this? Why is it alright to saw the skull off an ape but not a human? As far as I can tell this question can be answered in three ways.
The first answer is that there is some huge insurmountable difference in kind between apes and humans, which makes it alright to subject apes to torture for the purpose of research, but not humans. This is basically the religious argument, because so far nobody has succeeded in providing a measure of this difference, much less in quantifying it. Meanwhile all the differences which can be measured, such as genetic difference, seem to point overwhelmingly in the other direction, namely that the difference is small and quite surmountable. Note that all the answers of the form "apes don't really suffer" or "it would violate the integrity of the human" and "it is against the law" all belong in this class.
The second answer tries to qualify the conditions under which it is alright to saw a monkey's skull off. We know the apes suffer, we may try to minimize their suffering, but ultimately we judge that the benefits from research warrant whatever suffering we subject the monkeys to. But there are two huge problems with this answer. First, if the research is really so important, then why don't we sacrifice a few humans instead? We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys (which brings us very close to the first answer), or we can answer this question quantitively by saying that although monkeys and humans are both part of the same continuum, monkeys are simply worth less than humans, since they lack the mental acuity or dexterity of humans, or some such. But if mental acuity or dexterity are the criteria, then why not use retarded or disabled humans? Second, who determines the value of the research and on what grounds? And does this mean that some research might turn out to be so vital that it requires human guinea pigs?
Finally the third answer just posits that it's alright because we can. This is the position that might makes right. This is the most logically consistent position, even though it is ethically bankrupt (since all ethics are the ethics of the weak -- the strong need no ethics).
While none of these answers is entirely satisfying, generally the second answer seems to be the most palatable as well as the most common, since at least it tries to address what many people feel are legitimate issues. The catch is that it enshrines often questionable research on the backs and skulls of living, breathing monkeys. Although research for the sake of research has frequently enhanced our lives in unexpected ways, it has also frequently been a dead end. And while modern medical science can pull some amazing rabbits out of its high tech hat, the significance of these accomplishments can sometimes seem shallow when compared to that of mundane technology such as penicillin, antibacterial soap, and tap water.
I just hope this isn't another oversold "breakthrough" which turns out to have little practical use other than to funnel more funds into the departmental cash register.
I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API.
FUD FUD FUD.
Proof for this claim? Evidence for this claim?
You're forgetting that under the current, tightly-coupled design that they are using in products like Gimp, a new UI is impossible without forking.
The Gimp isn't tightly coupled at all. Not that I can see at least. Can you give an example of the Gimp's tight coupling?
The point is that, depending on the kind of UI, you have to do a lot of work before you can even call SetSomeRandomProperties(). And the better (or more abstract) the UI, the more work you have to do.
Decoupling core logic from the UI logic makes for a cleaner design that is easier to adapt simply by virtue of being cleaner, but it doesn't dramatically reduce the amount of code you have to write and test when you implement a new UI.
For example, take a look at a real world example like giftd. giftd is a highly modular file transfer daemon which supports pluggable file transfer protocols (like Gnutella and Kazaa) as well as pluggable frontends. The frontends communicate with the daemon through a socket using the giftd UI protocol.
The giftd core code weighs in at 25608 lines. The giFTcurs frontend (an ncurses driven UI) weighs in at 12376 lines, and the code for the Apollon frontend (which is Qt based) is 14541 lines.
So the UI code makes up something like half of the core code. That's a significant amount based on lines of code alone, which doesn't even account for the work that has to go into the actual design of the UI.
So even though giftd is highly decoupled and modular, if you want to write a new UI for it, it still means you have to do lots of work. And that's without considering hidden costs; e.g. giftd's UI protocol might be restricting in ways which limit the frontend's capabilities.
So your argument, that swapping around UI's becomes easy once you've decoupled the UI logic from the core logic, well, I just don't see it. It becomes slightly easier, sure, but the bulk of the work is still there.
I know what you mean, I do it myself, but this adds/changes relatively little to the flexibility of the apps user interface. It makes it possible to move widgets around a bit and to change the appearance to some extent, but it doesn't make fundamental changes to the UI any easier.
If you currently have a dialog where the user can edit some properties, you cannot use this technique to get rid of the dialog altogether and instead employ a floating control which appears depending on context. It makes it real easy to move the deck chairs all over the place but that doesn't stop the ship from sinking (please excuse the metaphor).
Riiight. And such a challenge it must have been. Connect wire 1 to wire 1. Connect wire 2 to wire 2. Connect wire 3 to wire 3. Repeat. What a testament to man's ingenuity.