If your troubles evade the skillful minds of both Microsoft Tech Support and Psychic Friends Network, just call your friendly neighborhood Church of Scientology. Start some auditing sessions and after about $300,000, your computer will be "clear" again.
I just cut two slots into the side of my Enlight case, right above my heatsink/fan attached to my P-IV. There's just enough room to slide in two pieces of bread. Right before my shower, I load it up and connect to Seti@Home. I emerge from the shower to the pleasing scent of warm toast.
Some people get upset that their 1.5GHz runs at 750MHz. Others make toast.
Check out this link, which points to a story on Project Censored's list of under-reported stories of 2000. Yes, THC impaired tumor growth in most cases and actually cured the tumors in a few. Similar results were found years before, but the Reagan/Bush administration asked researchers to destroy all marijuana-related research performed between 1966-1976.
This is prong #2 of The Man's two-pronged approach: suppression of truth.
That's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Most popular art and literature was influenced by drugs. Same goes for many movies, TV shows, and stand-up comedy. The notion of the Personal Computer was conceived under the influence of drugs. I've done drugs with a Fortune 100 Executive who will not be named.
You are the victim of another popular misconception, too. You ranted about having to pay the cost of a lifetime of drug abuse. The top three killers in America and probably any other country not at war are: heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. There is no close fourth. According to the AMA, 80% of these cases are directly related to lifestyle--overconsumption of meat and dairy products, lack of exercise, dependence on alcohol, consumption of junk food. So, we all have to pay for Mr. Fatass' heart attack, etc... It all gets figured into the cost of your health insurance premium and our taxes.
Since these other lifestyle choices are much more noxious than the lifestyle choice of using Some drugs, would you like to see any of the following:
SWAT teams raiding your McDonald's and shooting someone because "it looked like he had a gun"?
Nazi Germany-style rallies in your school stadium where administrators rant about the evils of dairy products?
pre-employment poop tests so the employer will know if you don't get enough fiber?
cops coming around the classroom holding a hamburger and innocently asking kids "Do you ever see your parents with one of these?" so they can separate the families to protect the children?
Posters on the walls at your school titled "How to tell if someone you know is on hamburgers"?
You try to explain to someone that it's okay to eat a hamburger now and then. You are ostracized or reported to the police.
Truth is the first casualty of war. We should all mourn its demise.
Virtually all anti-drug people I have ever had a conversation with will spout an endless litany of lies and half-truths. Most of this 'info' comes straight from the media and is parroted by its reporters/editors on a regular basis.
Case in point: Ecstacy. Last summer a group of four people was arrested here (Gainesville,FL) for selling Ecstacy. The DEA said that the group dealt about 10,000 doses in town over the previous year. We have about 60,000 students and as many regular folks. Every article on the bust and resulting court cases used the phrase "the deadly drug Ecstacy" over and over. Near the end of the saga, towards the bottom of one article, was the total number of deaths in Alachua county due to Ecstacy or imposters: 0. Yep, nobody has died here from Ecstacy. Many people have died in other cities, but due only to imposter drugs--which didn't exist until after Ecstacy was banned--and from intentially overdosing, which people have been known to do on alcohol or their own prescriptions.
Recently there were hearings in Washington on the "Ecstacy problem" (sounds like Germany early last century...). A couple of high-school kids gave patently false testimony about being caught in the grip and it being the worst drug, yada yada. What they said has nothing to do with reality. Sure, some people become psychologically addicted to the feeling, but these kids made it seem like crack, which the user has to score & use constantly. That is 100% impossible with Ecstacy. I've only done it twice, but have been in the company of people who, IMHO, abused the fuck out of it. Their experience was nothing even close to what the kids gave testimony to in Congress. For Congress to get a fair picture, they should have interviewed Dr. Alexander Shulgin, author of PIKHAL: A Chemical Love Story. Dr. Shulgin synthesized Ecstacy and hundreds of other drugs and tested them in his home with close friends--all with very few negative experiences. The negative experiences with any drug seem to happen when people don't respect the drug's power and fail to take account of their 'set' (mental state) and 'setting' (physical environment). Dr. Shulgin's essays on his life, his relationships, and his experiences are truly beautiful and, unlike the anti-drug propaganda, actually true!
You have been warned. The pols and the media are lying to you. Next time a bunch of thugs in body armor bust in to a home in your city armed with submachine guns and riot shotguns to bust the 'evil drug dealers', pay close attention. The cops always say that they have to out-arm the drug dealers, and the media concurs. Nevermind that the dealers are virtually always unarmed (except street-level crack dealers) and the media will report them as armed if any weapon is found, even locked up in the nightstand. When was the last time the cops got into a gun battle with dealers? Anywhere?
The sole purpose of the media is to write outrageous stories that sell newspapers (sorry Dr. Wilson...).
An employee provides labor in return for compensation from the employer. It is a bilateral transaction, an implied contract.
During the 1980's, some paranoid person (I wish I knew whom...) determined that usage of illegal drugs by employees was responsible for high business costs such as insurance claims, etc... This is actually ridiculous considering that marijuana affects the user for a matter of hours, but its byproducts are detectable by tests for a month or longer. Other people were convinced and this whole notion of "employer's rights" spread like the meme it is. No one seemed to remember, or stress assertively, that the employer-employee relationship is a satisfied contract in itself. The employer doesn't have a right to any additional information not present in observed, objective analysis of the employee's actual job.
However, in spite of an unproven relationship between casual drug use and employment costs, millions of Americans stepped up to the toilet and gave a sample of warm pee. The worker's compensation carriers made drug testing ubiquitous by offering insane discounts to employers who sample urine. IANAL, but it seems illegal for one industry to tell all other industries how to hire their employees.
All this "New World Order" shit is getting out of hand already. The whole purpose of insurance is to share the financial burden of health care across society. Now the employers and insurance companies are moving toward specific identification, which nullifies the point of shared burden. What will happen once the PACs from all industries have convinced Washington of the validity of their "rights"? I think we will have a large number of unemployable individuals, who will have to steal in order to eat. This will result in overflowing prisons, where the prisoners will be forced to work for companies who want first-world labor at third-world prices. It would be ironic to see people doing the same types of labor in prison that they wanted to do for Burlington or whatever company before they were turned into a physical reject and then a criminal.
I remember that in the days leading up to the French Revolution there were a large number of people languishing and dying in the Bastille for the sole crime of being hungry in a heartless nation. For how long will we resist the inevitable?
I've had some of the early symptoms of CTS from time to time. Dunno if I actually have it, b/c I don't work for anyone who requires a blood or urine sample; i.e., I haven't had my genes surreptitiously sampled.
Anybody predisposed to CTS or suffering from it should take up Hatha Yoga or some other practice that increases body awareness while slowly building strength and flexibility. For me, we got into wrist-strengthening poses about six months after I started yoga. After about six months of trying, I can finally balance my whole body over the fulcrum of my wrist. That pose, called Crow pose in English, strengthens the forearms through countering the computer user's typical wrist position, which is curled forward. No matter what your profession, there is a set of yoga poses that will correct the maladapted motions and posture errors that your profession requires of you. It's not for the lazy though.
I spend 8 - 12 hours a day attached to a kb/mouse, much more than I have in the past, but have no CTS symptoms after a year of practicing yoga.
Oops, forgot a few. Alcohol causes agression, even in small doses. When considering the social cost of alcohol, you should count all the fights (two people were beaten to death in the same weekend by drunks at UF last fall...), property damage, rapes, etc... perpetrated by people on alcohol.
I'll join you in conjecture. I think the driving-related deaths are around 20,000 annually. You forgot to consider cancer of the stomach/esophagus/liver, other liver disease, brain degeneration, and of course lethal overdoses, which are impossible with pot. The only physical malady linked to pot is lung cancer, which can be avoided by eating it. By the way, there is no high finer nor safer than eating food made with God's Beautiful Flower.
On a side note, have you heard of the DSM? It stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's used by shrinks to diagnose mental disorders. I perused it once and remember about ten disorders primarily due to alcohol. There was only one primarily due to other drugs.
Yet another side note. I really wish I had a link for this one: Recently a government-funded study was performed to assess factors which impair the ability to drive. Fatigue (not a substance) was highest, then alcohol. Pot was next, but it only caused a marginal impairment, even at high doses. That is because marijuana, unlike alcohol, is not a CNS depressant. Anecdotally, pot smokers are much more cautious while driving. They are much less likely to speed, change lanes frequently, or run red lights--actions that cause a majority of accidents.
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts. That line of thought is completely invalid when discussing the War on (Some) Drugs. The DEA and other police agencies typically sieze the cash upon any suspicion of drug activity. If the person is arrested and acquitted, or not arrested at all, the DEA/pigs get to keep the cash. There are many documented instances available online (no link--I'm lazy), even through the rightist Cato Institute.
It is estimated that a conviction is not obtained in 80% of cases where cash/assets are siezed due to suspicion of drugs. That means that money is stolen by the government in 80% of seizure cases. I have read testimony given before our Congress by experts on the law; they don't seem to care. Since the speed-freak president Nancy Reagan declared a War on (Some) Drugs nearly twenty years ago, billions of dollars have been stolen from innocent people. This money has been used to arm every police department with machine guns, riot shotguns, body armor, armored carriers, etc...
Meanwhile, most of the "facts" used by the anti-drug people have been debunked. However, bullshit is often more persistent than reality, so the general public is still convinced that (some) drugs are totally evil.
The DEA sucks, too. One of their agents shot and killed an unarmed guy while making a buy in Jacksonville, Florida last year. The agent said it was an accident--he will never be prosecuted. It is 100% legal, if you wear a badge, to murder someone selling a plant that has been used safely by millions of people. Meanwhile, alcohol is blamed for over 100,000 deaths annually.
Are you kidding me? Drugs aren't made out of metal.
Besides, if they really wanted to "stop drugs", they would close down every liquor store, tobacco shop, and pharmacy. They have instead made arbitrary decisions based on junk science--this drug will be legal, and therefore "good" and "this drug will be illegal, and therefore "bad"
Maybe I've been reading too much about The Semantic Web and some of the other things going on at M.I.T. with Berners-Lee and Dertouzos, but I believe this disparity between hardware capability and software capability will bring about the mythical "Next Big Thing".
Yes, I'm talking about Star Trek. Maybe not the inter-galactic brouhaha, but definitely the human-computer interaction. We already have decent speech-to-text software; now the folks at M.I.T. and Big Blue (and others) are making advances in speech recognition. It won't be too long before your computer can "understand" what you want it to do, act on it, and give you the results--all with a mere fraction of the effort today's "user-friendly" apps require of you.
I'm making the assumption that there will be enough capital to finance this intensive research. If that fails, then the hardware manufacturers can fall back on their current model, which consists of salespersons telling naive consumers that their pc will run MS Word 50% faster with the new Pentium XX chip...
`At this point it will be at least a three-week delay and it could be more than two months,''
Perhaps the peak of the solar cycle will have passed by then. IANAA (A=Astronomer), but I gotta wonder what a Coronal Mass Ejection would do to a thin sheet of mylar. Imagine not being able to AIM SolarSail1...
I'll bite (gotta love trollbait). Car rental companies rent commodities. A software company has exclusive rights to distribute its product.
Still wondering about my point? If a car rental company goes out of business, you can still rent cars from a competitor--other car rental companies are allowed to rent the same cars. If a software company goes out of business, what happens? That is the whole point of this discussion. Very often, software rentees depend on the software in question for running day-to-day aspects of their business.
The answer probably lies in standardized legislation. In all American states (except Louisiana--Napoleonic Code still rules their land...), the rights/responsibilities of all parties in commercial transactions are spelled out in the Uniform Commercial Code, or UCC. This piece of legislation is now outdated. It will need to be revamped soon, as the industry is moving obstinately towards software rental. My only suggestion is this: if a software rentor goes out of business and no successor is found, the company should be forced to make permanent keys available to all customers. The company can not be harmed, as it no longer exists. The rentees are stuck with the unforeseen responsibility and cost of migrating to viable software products, so the free permanent key constitutes a financial remedy for the rentors transgression. IANAL, just a/. reader.
Frankly, I notice more knee-jerk reactions on/. lately; i.e. "if you don't like it, go with another vendor", and "blah blah blah..." Readers are obviously posting before thinking. It's becoming a Rush Limbaugh-style forum.
This was even funnier: The Onion ran a STATShot shortly after the Columbine incident. It was titled "Most Dangerous Rock Songs". At the top of the list was "Open Fire on Columbine High School" by Marilyn Manson.
Thank you for your explanation. I'm not sure we have been discussing the same thing. Within the digestive tract, mucus[sic] is formed to encapsulate certain foods--probably to protect the human host from them. This slows down digestion significantly. As a result, a person who eats foods that produce excessive mucus may have up to a week's worth of food putrefying in his intestines! The hormones, biocides, and novel proteins (from GM foods) are in your body up to five times longer than they would be in a digestive tract not taxed my excess mucus (seven days vs. one and a half). I'm sure you are aware of the potential effects, as matter from the intestines is still passed into the bloodstream. A slow colon causes problems for the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas. The relationship between mucus production, the food ingested, and the individual's blood type has been clearly established by Dr. D'Adamo, the Naturopath who developed this methodology. He has over twenty years of quantitative/qualitative data to back up his assertions.
I can imagine that our ancient ancestors were probably quite body-aware, since they didn't spend all their time chasing after material possessions 24/7 as does modern man. The foods they chose to eat defined the foods we ate until the end of regionalism. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for ethnic diversity and mixing. I will say that we now have to stop blindly accepting outdated dining traditions and start listening to our bodies. Dr. D'Adamo's literature is an excellent guide for anyone wishing to reach stasis.
I admire your educational aspirations (I'm a grad student in another field), but must caution you about the dangers of indoctrination--you will be taught what the disease care industry wants you to "know". Blood type has everything to do with food.
Thank you for sharing. Please follow up about six months after you finish your modified Atkins Diet. I bet 10USD you will have gained back all of your weight. Better yet, let's wait about ten years, so you can describe in detail your colon cancer.
The answer is to stop listening to major media outlets. When scientists announced links between high consumption of saturated fat and obesity, the media basically announced "Fat is Bad!". Now we have all these "low-fat" products, which contain engineered fats or weirdo carbs. The problem is that evolution is slow and the human body doesn't know what to do with these chemicals. Hang out for a few minutes in the snack food aisle of a grocery store and you'll see that the people who buy the low-fat stuff are quite obese.
Fad diets like Atkins, the Zone, and Sugar Busters have a fundamental problem--they can't be maintained for life. At some point, you have to stop the diet (with Atkins, it's when you are hospitalized with kidney failure, diabetes, or gout). You will immediately start to put on weight, possibly more than you took off while on the diet.
If you are overweight and trying to lose the extra weight, you need to modify your lifestyle. Follow an eating habit that you can maintain for the rest of your life, such as Dr. D'Adamo's Eat Right 4 Your Type, which is a meal plan designed around your genetic makeup.
What Dr. D'Adamo has found is that blood types emerged in different phases of human evolution, when humans lived in markedly different regions and ate indigineous foods. You may be unaware, but blood type is relevant outside of the bloodstream. Consumption of certain foods will cause immune system reactions, much like getting a transfusion from an imcompatible blood type! In America, we consume a large quantity of wheat, which most people have problems digesting. We also eat way too much dairy, another source of digestive troubles. And of course, we eat too much meat.
Give it an honest try. Chances are you will have to give up some of the foods you love. The benefits: you will reach the ideal weight for your frame, you will have a lessened risk of heart disease and cancer (the major killers in the West...), and you will have a higher level of physical comfort due to an efficient digestive tract.
I can't picture that beast celebrating anything. Hasn't it been mothballed/dismantled? Besides, what does one buy for an aged computer's anniversary? Vacuum tubes?
I'm not sure, but you may be violating the EULA that came with your soap. What brand did you use? Hey, gotta be careful these days with WIPO, DMCA et cetera...
Slashdot Mirror
If your troubles evade the skillful minds of both Microsoft Tech Support and Psychic Friends Network, just call your friendly neighborhood Church of Scientology. Start some auditing sessions and after about $300,000, your computer will be "clear" again.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Not compared to WinTel.
I just cut two slots into the side of my Enlight case, right above my heatsink/fan attached to my P-IV. There's just enough room to slide in two pieces of bread. Right before my shower, I load it up and connect to Seti@Home. I emerge from the shower to the pleasing scent of warm toast.
Some people get upset that their 1.5GHz runs at 750MHz. Others make toast.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Check out this link, which points to a story on Project Censored's list of under-reported stories of 2000. Yes, THC impaired tumor growth in most cases and actually cured the tumors in a few. Similar results were found years before, but the Reagan/Bush administration asked researchers to destroy all marijuana-related research performed between 1966-1976.
This is prong #2 of The Man's two-pronged approach: suppression of truth.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
That's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Most popular art and literature was influenced by drugs. Same goes for many movies, TV shows, and stand-up comedy. The notion of the Personal Computer was conceived under the influence of drugs. I've done drugs with a Fortune 100 Executive who will not be named.
You are the victim of another popular misconception, too. You ranted about having to pay the cost of a lifetime of drug abuse. The top three killers in America and probably any other country not at war are: heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. There is no close fourth. According to the AMA, 80% of these cases are directly related to lifestyle--overconsumption of meat and dairy products, lack of exercise, dependence on alcohol, consumption of junk food. So, we all have to pay for Mr. Fatass' heart attack, etc... It all gets figured into the cost of your health insurance premium and our taxes.
Since these other lifestyle choices are much more noxious than the lifestyle choice of using Some drugs, would you like to see any of the following:
SWAT teams raiding your McDonald's and shooting someone because "it looked like he had a gun"?
Nazi Germany-style rallies in your school stadium where administrators rant about the evils of dairy products?
pre-employment poop tests so the employer will know if you don't get enough fiber?
cops coming around the classroom holding a hamburger and innocently asking kids "Do you ever see your parents with one of these?" so they can separate the families to protect the children?
Posters on the walls at your school titled "How to tell if someone you know is on hamburgers"?
You try to explain to someone that it's okay to eat a hamburger now and then. You are ostracized or reported to the police.
Truth is the first casualty of war. We should all mourn its demise.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
I blame the media.
Virtually all anti-drug people I have ever had a conversation with will spout an endless litany of lies and half-truths. Most of this 'info' comes straight from the media and is parroted by its reporters/editors on a regular basis.
Case in point: Ecstacy. Last summer a group of four people was arrested here (Gainesville,FL) for selling Ecstacy. The DEA said that the group dealt about 10,000 doses in town over the previous year. We have about 60,000 students and as many regular folks. Every article on the bust and resulting court cases used the phrase "the deadly drug Ecstacy" over and over. Near the end of the saga, towards the bottom of one article, was the total number of deaths in Alachua county due to Ecstacy or imposters: 0. Yep, nobody has died here from Ecstacy. Many people have died in other cities, but due only to imposter drugs--which didn't exist until after Ecstacy was banned--and from intentially overdosing, which people have been known to do on alcohol or their own prescriptions.
Recently there were hearings in Washington on the "Ecstacy problem" (sounds like Germany early last century...). A couple of high-school kids gave patently false testimony about being caught in the grip and it being the worst drug, yada yada. What they said has nothing to do with reality. Sure, some people become psychologically addicted to the feeling, but these kids made it seem like crack, which the user has to score & use constantly. That is 100% impossible with Ecstacy. I've only done it twice, but have been in the company of people who, IMHO, abused the fuck out of it. Their experience was nothing even close to what the kids gave testimony to in Congress. For Congress to get a fair picture, they should have interviewed Dr. Alexander Shulgin, author of PIKHAL: A Chemical Love Story. Dr. Shulgin synthesized Ecstacy and hundreds of other drugs and tested them in his home with close friends--all with very few negative experiences. The negative experiences with any drug seem to happen when people don't respect the drug's power and fail to take account of their 'set' (mental state) and 'setting' (physical environment). Dr. Shulgin's essays on his life, his relationships, and his experiences are truly beautiful and, unlike the anti-drug propaganda, actually true!
You have been warned. The pols and the media are lying to you. Next time a bunch of thugs in body armor bust in to a home in your city armed with submachine guns and riot shotguns to bust the 'evil drug dealers', pay close attention. The cops always say that they have to out-arm the drug dealers, and the media concurs. Nevermind that the dealers are virtually always unarmed (except street-level crack dealers) and the media will report them as armed if any weapon is found, even locked up in the nightstand. When was the last time the cops got into a gun battle with dealers? Anywhere?
The sole purpose of the media is to write outrageous stories that sell newspapers (sorry Dr. Wilson...).
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Two words: slippery slope.
An employee provides labor in return for compensation from the employer. It is a bilateral transaction, an implied contract. During the 1980's, some paranoid person (I wish I knew whom...) determined that usage of illegal drugs by employees was responsible for high business costs such as insurance claims, etc... This is actually ridiculous considering that marijuana affects the user for a matter of hours, but its byproducts are detectable by tests for a month or longer. Other people were convinced and this whole notion of "employer's rights" spread like the meme it is. No one seemed to remember, or stress assertively, that the employer-employee relationship is a satisfied contract in itself. The employer doesn't have a right to any additional information not present in observed, objective analysis of the employee's actual job.
However, in spite of an unproven relationship between casual drug use and employment costs, millions of Americans stepped up to the toilet and gave a sample of warm pee. The worker's compensation carriers made drug testing ubiquitous by offering insane discounts to employers who sample urine. IANAL, but it seems illegal for one industry to tell all other industries how to hire their employees.
All this "New World Order" shit is getting out of hand already. The whole purpose of insurance is to share the financial burden of health care across society. Now the employers and insurance companies are moving toward specific identification, which nullifies the point of shared burden. What will happen once the PACs from all industries have convinced Washington of the validity of their "rights"? I think we will have a large number of unemployable individuals, who will have to steal in order to eat. This will result in overflowing prisons, where the prisoners will be forced to work for companies who want first-world labor at third-world prices. It would be ironic to see people doing the same types of labor in prison that they wanted to do for Burlington or whatever company before they were turned into a physical reject and then a criminal.
I remember that in the days leading up to the French Revolution there were a large number of people languishing and dying in the Bastille for the sole crime of being hungry in a heartless nation. For how long will we resist the inevitable?
Ewige Blumenkraft!
I've had some of the early symptoms of CTS from time to time. Dunno if I actually have it, b/c I don't work for anyone who requires a blood or urine sample; i.e., I haven't had my genes surreptitiously sampled.
Anybody predisposed to CTS or suffering from it should take up Hatha Yoga or some other practice that increases body awareness while slowly building strength and flexibility. For me, we got into wrist-strengthening poses about six months after I started yoga. After about six months of trying, I can finally balance my whole body over the fulcrum of my wrist. That pose, called Crow pose in English, strengthens the forearms through countering the computer user's typical wrist position, which is curled forward. No matter what your profession, there is a set of yoga poses that will correct the maladapted motions and posture errors that your profession requires of you. It's not for the lazy though.
I spend 8 - 12 hours a day attached to a kb/mouse, much more than I have in the past, but have no CTS symptoms after a year of practicing yoga.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
For the naive among you, this isn't better than acid. However, it certainly is better on acid.
If you love God, burn a church!
Oops, forgot a few. Alcohol causes agression, even in small doses. When considering the social cost of alcohol, you should count all the fights (two people were beaten to death in the same weekend by drunks at UF last fall...), property damage, rapes, etc... perpetrated by people on alcohol.
If you love God, burn a church!
I'll join you in conjecture. I think the driving-related deaths are around 20,000 annually. You forgot to consider cancer of the stomach/esophagus/liver, other liver disease, brain degeneration, and of course lethal overdoses, which are impossible with pot. The only physical malady linked to pot is lung cancer, which can be avoided by eating it. By the way, there is no high finer nor safer than eating food made with God's Beautiful Flower.
On a side note, have you heard of the DSM? It stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's used by shrinks to diagnose mental disorders. I perused it once and remember about ten disorders primarily due to alcohol. There was only one primarily due to other drugs.
Yet another side note. I really wish I had a link for this one: Recently a government-funded study was performed to assess factors which impair the ability to drive. Fatigue (not a substance) was highest, then alcohol. Pot was next, but it only caused a marginal impairment, even at high doses. That is because marijuana, unlike alcohol, is not a CNS depressant. Anecdotally, pot smokers are much more cautious while driving. They are much less likely to speed, change lanes frequently, or run red lights--actions that cause a majority of accidents.
If you love God, burn a church!
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts. That line of thought is completely invalid when discussing the War on (Some) Drugs. The DEA and other police agencies typically sieze the cash upon any suspicion of drug activity. If the person is arrested and acquitted, or not arrested at all, the DEA/pigs get to keep the cash. There are many documented instances available online (no link--I'm lazy), even through the rightist Cato Institute.
It is estimated that a conviction is not obtained in 80% of cases where cash/assets are siezed due to suspicion of drugs. That means that money is stolen by the government in 80% of seizure cases. I have read testimony given before our Congress by experts on the law; they don't seem to care. Since the speed-freak president Nancy Reagan declared a War on (Some) Drugs nearly twenty years ago, billions of dollars have been stolen from innocent people. This money has been used to arm every police department with machine guns, riot shotguns, body armor, armored carriers, etc...
Meanwhile, most of the "facts" used by the anti-drug people have been debunked. However, bullshit is often more persistent than reality, so the general public is still convinced that (some) drugs are totally evil.
The DEA sucks, too. One of their agents shot and killed an unarmed guy while making a buy in Jacksonville, Florida last year. The agent said it was an accident--he will never be prosecuted. It is 100% legal, if you wear a badge, to murder someone selling a plant that has been used safely by millions of people. Meanwhile, alcohol is blamed for over 100,000 deaths annually.
We now have the police state we asked for.
If you love God, burn a church!
Are you kidding me? Drugs aren't made out of metal.
Besides, if they really wanted to "stop drugs", they would close down every liquor store, tobacco shop, and pharmacy. They have instead made arbitrary decisions based on junk science--this drug will be legal, and therefore "good" and "this drug will be illegal, and therefore "bad"
If you love God, burn a church!
I think you missed the point. How about "show me the new articles on slashdot". That's the direction computing is heading in.
If you love God, burn a church!
Maybe I've been reading too much about The Semantic Web and some of the other things going on at M.I.T. with Berners-Lee and Dertouzos, but I believe this disparity between hardware capability and software capability will bring about the mythical "Next Big Thing".
Yes, I'm talking about Star Trek. Maybe not the inter-galactic brouhaha, but definitely the human-computer interaction. We already have decent speech-to-text software; now the folks at M.I.T. and Big Blue (and others) are making advances in speech recognition. It won't be too long before your computer can "understand" what you want it to do, act on it, and give you the results--all with a mere fraction of the effort today's "user-friendly" apps require of you.
I'm making the assumption that there will be enough capital to finance this intensive research. If that fails, then the hardware manufacturers can fall back on their current model, which consists of salespersons telling naive consumers that their pc will run MS Word 50% faster with the new Pentium XX chip...
If you love God, burn a church!
Perhaps the peak of the solar cycle will have passed by then. IANAA (A=Astronomer), but I gotta wonder what a Coronal Mass Ejection would do to a thin sheet of mylar. Imagine not being able to AIM SolarSail1...
If you love God, burn a church!
I'll bite (gotta love trollbait). Car rental companies rent commodities. A software company has exclusive rights to distribute its product.
Still wondering about my point? If a car rental company goes out of business, you can still rent cars from a competitor--other car rental companies are allowed to rent the same cars. If a software company goes out of business, what happens? That is the whole point of this discussion. Very often, software rentees depend on the software in question for running day-to-day aspects of their business.
The answer probably lies in standardized legislation. In all American states (except Louisiana--Napoleonic Code still rules their land...), the rights/responsibilities of all parties in commercial transactions are spelled out in the Uniform Commercial Code, or UCC. This piece of legislation is now outdated. It will need to be revamped soon, as the industry is moving obstinately towards software rental. My only suggestion is this: if a software rentor goes out of business and no successor is found, the company should be forced to make permanent keys available to all customers. The company can not be harmed, as it no longer exists. The rentees are stuck with the unforeseen responsibility and cost of migrating to viable software products, so the free permanent key constitutes a financial remedy for the rentors transgression. IANAL, just a /. reader.
Frankly, I notice more knee-jerk reactions on /. lately; i.e. "if you don't like it, go with another vendor", and "blah blah blah..." Readers are obviously posting before thinking. It's becoming a Rush Limbaugh-style forum.
If you love God, burn a church!
This was even funnier: The Onion ran a STATShot shortly after the Columbine incident. It was titled "Most Dangerous Rock Songs". At the top of the list was "Open Fire on Columbine High School" by Marilyn Manson.
If you love God, burn a church!
I believe that resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Dubya just recently visited Mexico for a "summit" after all. Ahem.
If you love God, burn a church!
Thank you for your explanation. I'm not sure we have been discussing the same thing. Within the digestive tract, mucus[sic] is formed to encapsulate certain foods--probably to protect the human host from them. This slows down digestion significantly. As a result, a person who eats foods that produce excessive mucus may have up to a week's worth of food putrefying in his intestines! The hormones, biocides, and novel proteins (from GM foods) are in your body up to five times longer than they would be in a digestive tract not taxed my excess mucus (seven days vs. one and a half). I'm sure you are aware of the potential effects, as matter from the intestines is still passed into the bloodstream. A slow colon causes problems for the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas. The relationship between mucus production, the food ingested, and the individual's blood type has been clearly established by Dr. D'Adamo, the Naturopath who developed this methodology. He has over twenty years of quantitative/qualitative data to back up his assertions.
I can imagine that our ancient ancestors were probably quite body-aware, since they didn't spend all their time chasing after material possessions 24/7 as does modern man. The foods they chose to eat defined the foods we ate until the end of regionalism. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for ethnic diversity and mixing. I will say that we now have to stop blindly accepting outdated dining traditions and start listening to our bodies. Dr. D'Adamo's literature is an excellent guide for anyone wishing to reach stasis.
I admire your educational aspirations (I'm a grad student in another field), but must caution you about the dangers of indoctrination--you will be taught what the disease care industry wants you to "know". Blood type has everything to do with food.
If you love God, burn a church!
Thank you for sharing. Please follow up about six months after you finish your modified Atkins Diet. I bet 10USD you will have gained back all of your weight. Better yet, let's wait about ten years, so you can describe in detail your colon cancer.
If you love God, burn a church!
The answer is to stop listening to major media outlets. When scientists announced links between high consumption of saturated fat and obesity, the media basically announced "Fat is Bad!". Now we have all these "low-fat" products, which contain engineered fats or weirdo carbs. The problem is that evolution is slow and the human body doesn't know what to do with these chemicals. Hang out for a few minutes in the snack food aisle of a grocery store and you'll see that the people who buy the low-fat stuff are quite obese.
Fad diets like Atkins, the Zone, and Sugar Busters have a fundamental problem--they can't be maintained for life. At some point, you have to stop the diet (with Atkins, it's when you are hospitalized with kidney failure, diabetes, or gout). You will immediately start to put on weight, possibly more than you took off while on the diet.
If you are overweight and trying to lose the extra weight, you need to modify your lifestyle. Follow an eating habit that you can maintain for the rest of your life, such as Dr. D'Adamo's Eat Right 4 Your Type, which is a meal plan designed around your genetic makeup.
What Dr. D'Adamo has found is that blood types emerged in different phases of human evolution, when humans lived in markedly different regions and ate indigineous foods. You may be unaware, but blood type is relevant outside of the bloodstream. Consumption of certain foods will cause immune system reactions, much like getting a transfusion from an imcompatible blood type! In America, we consume a large quantity of wheat, which most people have problems digesting. We also eat way too much dairy, another source of digestive troubles. And of course, we eat too much meat.
Give it an honest try. Chances are you will have to give up some of the foods you love. The benefits: you will reach the ideal weight for your frame, you will have a lessened risk of heart disease and cancer (the major killers in the West...), and you will have a higher level of physical comfort due to an efficient digestive tract.
If you love God, burn a church!
If you love God, burn a church!
Use your cell phone all you want in space. There will be no medium to carry the sound waves, so no one will ask you to "step outside".
If you love God, burn a church!
I'm not sure, but you may be violating the EULA that came with your soap. What brand did you use? Hey, gotta be careful these days with WIPO, DMCA et cetera...
If you love God, burn a church!
I wonder if it is one of those Thetans that everyone has been talking about lately. Is it operating?
If you love God, burn a church!