itanium has not delivered on a single design goal since its inception. intel went full steam ahead on itanium, placing bets on a number of key technologies to pan out in order to sustain itanium development -- all of which never happened.
And which of the world's leading microprocessor companies do you run or even work for?
How do you explain the Itanium failing so badly in its design goals that it is #1 in memory bandwidth? How do you explain their failure when creating 2 of the top 5 computers in the world?
right now amd is eating them for lunch with amd64
Actually, its the Opteron that is competing with the Itanium processor, but you get extra/. bonus points for mentioning that AMD is better than Intel.
back in the early days, the first programmers were women.
Actually, some of the first computers were women. NACA, I guess a precursor to NASA, used to have women whose job title was "computer", because they would do calculations for things such as forces and pressures in wind tunnels.
But this article isn't a surprise. ia64 is just presently a pretty crappy CPU for clustered computing because it's very hot, sucks a lot of power and very expensive.
FWIW, a Xeon uses slightly more power than an Itanium chip, and yes the Itaniums are very expensive. However, I believe that both of these are going to change. The Itanium already has a low power model at 1GHz, and Intel is looking at upping the speed of these low power offerings. And they better start reducing their prices.
And being that the current 2nd and 5th fastest clustered computers are based on the Itanium chip, ovbiously someone with more decision making power than you believes that these processors are OK for clustering. The first AMD offering is at #17.
First, there might be licensed stuff in the Winamp source, codecs for different fileformats or whatnot.
So did Netscape when they first released the code. They had to take all of that out before releasing the source.
Second, iTunes is one if the good guys, we don't wanna kill that!
iTunes may be OK for most people, but it is useless for me because it does not play at least one of the common lossless compression formats. This is a showstopper for me, and it sucks because there is no decent music player for the Mac. I know little about windows, and what I do know I don't like, but I have been considering for some time now to buy a cheap windows based box for one reason -- Winamp.
Winamp and its plugin base, IMHO, is hands down the best music player I have ever seen. I wish it was available for other platforms.
If the mail does come back, the sender is whitelisted...so this will work until spammers add a retry to the mailers - at which time they are whitelisted.
It kills off all of the owned windows machines, and triples the bandwidth of the spamhouses that just so happen to use standard compliant SMTP servers.
Oh, and its not too tough to move someone from a whitelist to the blacklist.
In a nutshell, it simply uses a standard 451 SMTP response that says "Hey, I'm busy now, can you call back in a minute or so?" To my knowledge, all standard SMTP servers respect this request, and little to none of the mass mailers do. And if they do, their bandwidth will triple.
Here's a log example:
Oct 15 15:18:17 example1.example.com sendmail[6955]: [ID 801593 mail.info] i9FJIGH06953: to=, ctladdr= (168/601), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=esmtp, pri=121994, relay=example2.example.com. [123.390.141.456], dsn=4.3.0, stat=Deferred: 451 4.7.1 Greylisting in action, please come back in 00:01:00
If the mail never comes back, then the sender is now blacklisted. If the mail does come back, the sender is whitelisted.
Simplest and most standards compliant thing that I've heard of, and it seems to work.
Why do people think the different methods of committing a crime require different laws?
It gives politicians something to do so they don't feel guilty when they give themselves another raise.
Is murder by using a knife versus a crowbar defined and treated differently in the law books?
No, but murder is different if it is in the course of a crime and its different depending on who you kill. Its a different crime to kill a cop or elected official vs just killing someone like me.
You can't look at the percentage of the populaction incarerated, then just say one way of detering crime doesn't work.
You can look at the percentage of people going back to prison or jail after incarceration and conclude that incarceration has no effect in detering crime.
Seems like the courts could come up with some estimate of costs imposed by spamming -- how many hours do how many people spend "hitting delete" or installing and maintaining spam filters; what's the cost of the bandwidth needed to carry it nationwide. Then figure out what proportion of that this spammer was responsible for, and you have an estimate of how much value he stole from people.
I'm sorry, but this idea make as much sense as the arbitrary method of assigning sentences that we have now.
1st, I'm dissapointed in the/. crowd for thinking that this guy was convicted of "spamming". He wasn't. Its basically a specific form of fraud which is clearly explained in the bolded 1st paragraph of the article.
Sentences for crime and many of the "crimes" themselves are arbitrary. I don't want to get philosophical here, but there simply really isn't a right or a wrong, its only popular opinion (thanks 12 Monkeys:).
I know of someone that was found guilty of stealing abour $40,000 from her employer. It was a cut and dry case, because she was responsible for collecting payments at a doctor's office, and she just told the people to leave the "Payable to" field blank, and she would stamp it, but instead she just put her name on it. A pretty easy paper trail for the crime. Anyway, she got 6 months in jail and has to do pay $50 a month in restitution. To me that is not a punishment at all, and if I were in a similar situation, I would take 6 months in jail and a $50 payment for a $40,000 interest free loan. Maybe, but what I'm getting at is the punishment would not be a deterant for doing this, now my silly sense of morals would probably prevail.
Look at the drug laws and punishments. In 10 states in our country, possession of marijuana in personal quanities is not a crime at all, and only has a fine associated with it like speeding. In the other 40 states, its a misdimeaner from about 30 days to 1 year of jail time.
Look at the differences between different drugs. Especially powder vs rock (crack) cocaine. That makes no sense whatsoever (except its pretty effective in controlling poor uneducated inner city people).
Also, the government is not very good at estimating losses. The estimates of losses from drug use (between 50 and 100 billion a year, depending on which week the question is asked) were based on calling a few people in North Carolina and asking them: 1) do you smoke pot? 2) how much money do you make? Being that a majority of the people that smoke pot are under 30, including many students, one can easily see that these people are going to be at the bottom of most pay scales.
So, how much did it work out *per spam*? A couple of seconds, if that? If "it takes a second" to hit delete, then that's a reasonable sentence for each spam.
I hate to bust everybody's bubble, but this spammer really didn't get sentenced for spam, but rather for fraud. From TFA:
During my opening statement, I explained to the jury that sending spam by itself is not a crime, but when you masquerade your identity, you violate Virginia's law that took effect in July 2003. Spammers run afoul of the law when they use another's IP or domain address without authority or create a fictitious IP or domain address.
Also, what this guy was "selling" was some UPS work-from-home tracking bs where you were supposedly getting paid a good amount of money for sitting at home. This guy made some 8 or 9 million dollars from scamming people with this crap.
Anyway, my point is that he was not really convicted for spamming, but rather for being a greedy deceptive assmunch, and I think his sentence fits the crime.
Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.
Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.
Oh, and yet another simple example of how much of a dumbass bush is, take a look at this url:
A nice quote can be found towards the end of the page:
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
The official policy of the Bush administration is to give foreigners willing/able to displace American workers a shot at citizenship/permanent residency. Just look at the platform-the Republicans want to expand use of H-1b/L-1 visas to match "any willing worker" with "any willing employer".
This is all really a massive program of corporate welfare. Corporations pay _nothing_ for these immigration rights that have considerable economic value.
Yeah, but don't knock the Bush administration completely. Soon we will at least have equality with our (il)legal immigrants for things like Social Security.
The Venezuelan voting process used thumbprints for verification of voters, had heavy international monitors, used voting machines which source code was open and reviewed by thousands of programmers months before the election, and had no less than three paper trails (one which was given to the Carter center, one given to the election board, the other kept for verification purposes). The process of the electronic voting machines was highly scrutinized and available on the web for months for review by anyone interested (in fact, the website is still up right here on the company's website). Diebold did none of this. The source code was not presented for review. The process was highly unknown and obscure. There were no paper trails.
OK, let me digest this. The checklist of requirements needed for the Venezuelan voting process in order to cast a vote via computer took:
Thumprints of those voters that had thumbs
international monitors (heavy)
open source code that was reviewed by thousands of programmers months before (I guess this was the code running on the machines right?)
available on the web for scrutany
Comapare this to my precenct where they
had a known and documented number of ballots
the number of ballots cast should be 1:1 to the number of names crossed off in the register list
a number 2 pencil for choosing from the more popular candidates or i could write in my own
an opscan machine that can sort the ballots into a discrete pile for each candidate
results could be established by weighing, counting, visually inspecting the piles
results could be reestablished by visually inspecting the dots in each pile
Can anyone tell me one thing that is better about the computer system?
We are collecting nominal data here. There is no billions of floating point operations per seconds here. Just a count. The manpower to calculate these data is not taxing. It cannot take long. Casinos count more than two types of cash money all day long and have no issues, and I doubt that they use computers either.
I mean I work with computers for a living, but I don't see all problems as in search of some sort of computer to solve them. Especially when the task at hand is this simple.
And this code would be sent through which secure email-delivery system exactly? Plaintext SMTP on the internet, like all the other emails from your bank?
I see your point, but _anything_ that is an indicator that the back actually knows you would reduce these phishing scams. They are generic, and the only thing that identifies th mail as being sent to you might be the "To:" field in the email, but that may also say something like "dedicated_customer@bank.com".
The ease in making this kind of scam profitable is that one well crafted form letter can be sent identically all over the internet. I bet these are profitable even considering that at best 90% or so of the people being phished don't even have an account with the bank they are posing as.
The seamless intergration between reasonable prices and DMR and synching with the iPod is hard to beat.
iPod owners must be very wealthy. From the iTunes store it would cost on order of $1,000 to fill up an iPod mini, $5,000 and $10,000 for the iPod 20 and 40 giggers respectively.
A software program with a sliding puzzle, and a calculator, and a clock, and a little notepad. Tiny little applets -- little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time.?!
That was my idea! If I had the patent, I'D BE RICH!
I don't count spending all day working in the fields for just enough to feed one's self as being especially productive.
I don't either. Only a moron would work all day in the fields to sustain only themselves.
Most hunting and gathering societies in a good environment like, say a forrest, work about 10 to 20 hours a week to sustain themselves.
How much extra time a week do you spend "being productive"? Be sure to include travel time to and from work, and travel time to and from places to get food and buy other "necessities".
In 1968 Richard Nixon ran at least partly on reducing Crime. After election, he felt it necessary to deliver on his promises. Crimes of finance for drugs were felt to be a large part of the problem, so they were going to attack drugs. He was all set to go on a law'n'order, source-interdiction based drug policy, but his advisor(s) (Name forgotten, but there was a key one, here.) told him that it would never work. He had to work on demand reduction.
They put in place demand reduction, largely in the form of drug treatment. It worked, at least within the timeframe and measurements they used. They reduced crime.
IMHO, drugs should be legalized and regulated like alcohol and tobacco, simply because the budgetary and social cost of "crimes of financing" are exceeding the what the budgetary and social costs would be, if regulated. Simple, pragmatic economics.
Me too, however, I could do without the regulation part, but still.
Drugs are illegal because its an easy way for the government to establish control over its people and its illegality has become almost a necessity for our economy, and the justification for government's existance. If drugs were not illegal, what would the police, judges, and correction's officers do?
The whole drug testing thing is unconstitutional and irrational. A murderer who has no record involving drugs who is out on paroll gets drug screened all the time, but no other invasive test are done to tell if he or she is involved in any other illegal activity like paraffin tests or blood splatter tests.
Its also a little know fact that 10 out of the 50 states laws regarding marijuana for personal use as a fined offense like a speeding ticket. No time, no court, just a fine. Hopefully this is a trend.
people live like Bangladeshi farmers. Short, unproductive lives at that.
Ah, gotta love the arrogance of the Western culture. By loosing that attitude first, we can then start looking at reducing energy intake, otherwise I agree with looking for a new place to live.
Make no bones about it - there is no substantial non-Windows gaming market.
I could have sworn you could still buy game consoles like X-box and PS2.
Speaking of game consoles, I don't understand why there simply isn't a better one out there that you can hook up to a computer monitor, HDTV, or a regular TV. I see no need for a top of the line computer for games.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Sun did. Who do you think pays for the bulk of the work in GNOME to make it meet various usability guidelines?
When the sun guy comes here to talk to us, he brings his PowerBook with him. Hmmm.
itanium has not delivered on a single design goal since its inception. intel went full steam ahead on itanium, placing bets on a number of key technologies to pan out in order to sustain itanium development -- all of which never happened.
/. bonus points for mentioning that AMD is better than Intel.
And which of the world's leading microprocessor companies do you run or even work for?
How do you explain the Itanium failing so badly in its design goals that it is #1 in memory bandwidth? How do you explain their failure when creating 2 of the top 5 computers in the world?
right now amd is eating them for lunch with amd64
Actually, its the Opteron that is competing with the Itanium processor, but you get extra
back in the early days, the first programmers were women.
_ of_Technology/Computers/Tech37.htm
Actually, some of the first computers were women. NACA, I guess a precursor to NASA, used to have women whose job title was "computer", because they would do calculations for things such as forces and pressures in wind tunnels.
More about this here:
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Evolution
But this article isn't a surprise. ia64 is just presently a pretty crappy CPU for clustered computing because it's very hot, sucks a lot of power and very expensive.
FWIW, a Xeon uses slightly more power than an Itanium chip, and yes the Itaniums are very expensive. However, I believe that both of these are going to change. The Itanium already has a low power model at 1GHz, and Intel is looking at upping the speed of these low power offerings. And they better start reducing their prices.
And being that the current 2nd and 5th fastest clustered computers are based on the Itanium chip, ovbiously someone with more decision making power than you believes that these processors are OK for clustering. The first AMD offering is at #17.
What about Audion?
It would be great if it met my original requirements that I said were wrong with iTunes. It does not play any common lossless formats.
First, there might be licensed stuff in the Winamp source, codecs for different fileformats or whatnot.
So did Netscape when they first released the code. They had to take all of that out before releasing the source.
Second, iTunes is one if the good guys, we don't wanna kill that!
iTunes may be OK for most people, but it is useless for me because it does not play at least one of the common lossless compression formats. This is a showstopper for me, and it sucks because there is no decent music player for the Mac. I know little about windows, and what I do know I don't like, but I have been considering for some time now to buy a cheap windows based box for one reason -- Winamp.
Winamp and its plugin base, IMHO, is hands down the best music player I have ever seen. I wish it was available for other platforms.
If the mail does come back, the sender is whitelisted. ..so this will work until spammers add a retry to the mailers - at which time they are whitelisted.
It kills off all of the owned windows machines, and triples the bandwidth of the spamhouses that just so happen to use standard compliant SMTP servers.
Oh, and its not too tough to move someone from a whitelist to the blacklist.
To me greylisting seems like the best thing to do. See:
g .html
http://slett.net/spam-filtering-for-mx/greylistin
and/or:
http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/
In a nutshell, it simply uses a standard 451 SMTP response that says "Hey, I'm busy now, can you call back in a minute or so?" To my knowledge, all standard SMTP servers respect this request, and little to none of the mass mailers do. And if they do, their bandwidth will triple.
Here's a log example:
Oct 15 15:18:17 example1.example.com sendmail[6955]: [ID 801593 mail.info] i9FJIGH06953: to=, ctladdr= (168/601), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=esmtp, pri=121994, relay=example2.example.com. [123.390.141.456], dsn=4.3.0, stat=Deferred: 451 4.7.1 Greylisting in action, please come back in 00:01:00
If the mail never comes back, then the sender is now blacklisted. If the mail does come back, the sender is whitelisted.
Simplest and most standards compliant thing that I've heard of, and it seems to work.
you are simply going to have to keep backing up and backing up
I would imagine that there will be an offsite storage facility for digital data as soon as its not common for ISPs to cap upload limits.
Hmm, new startup idea?
Why do people think the different methods of committing a crime require different laws?
It gives politicians something to do so they don't feel guilty when they give themselves another raise.
Is murder by using a knife versus a crowbar defined and treated differently in the law books?
No, but murder is different if it is in the course of a crime and its different depending on who you kill. Its a different crime to kill a cop or elected official vs just killing someone like me.
Obligatory application of Godwin's law:
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal"
-- Adolf Hitler
You can't look at the percentage of the populaction incarerated, then just say one way of detering crime doesn't work.
You can look at the percentage of people going back to prison or jail after incarceration and conclude that incarceration has no effect in detering crime.
Seems like the courts could come up with some estimate of costs imposed by spamming -- how many hours do how many people spend "hitting delete" or installing and maintaining spam filters; what's the cost of the bandwidth needed to carry it nationwide. Then figure out what proportion of that this spammer was responsible for, and you have an estimate of how much value he stole from people.
/. crowd for thinking that this guy was convicted of "spamming". He wasn't. Its basically a specific form of fraud which is clearly explained in the bolded 1st paragraph of the article.
:).
I'm sorry, but this idea make as much sense as the arbitrary method of assigning sentences that we have now.
1st, I'm dissapointed in the
Sentences for crime and many of the "crimes" themselves are arbitrary. I don't want to get philosophical here, but there simply really isn't a right or a wrong, its only popular opinion (thanks 12 Monkeys
I know of someone that was found guilty of stealing abour $40,000 from her employer. It was a cut and dry case, because she was responsible for collecting payments at a doctor's office, and she just told the people to leave the "Payable to" field blank, and she would stamp it, but instead she just put her name on it. A pretty easy paper trail for the crime. Anyway, she got 6 months in jail and has to do pay $50 a month in restitution. To me that is not a punishment at all, and if I were in a similar situation, I would take 6 months in jail and a $50 payment for a $40,000 interest free loan. Maybe, but what I'm getting at is the punishment would not be a deterant for doing this, now my silly sense of morals would probably prevail.
Look at the drug laws and punishments. In 10 states in our country, possession of marijuana in personal quanities is not a crime at all, and only has a fine associated with it like speeding. In the other 40 states, its a misdimeaner from about 30 days to 1 year of jail time.
Look at the differences between different drugs. Especially powder vs rock (crack) cocaine. That makes no sense whatsoever (except its pretty effective in controlling poor uneducated inner city people).
Also, the government is not very good at estimating losses. The estimates of losses from drug use (between 50 and 100 billion a year, depending on which week the question is asked) were based on calling a few people in North Carolina and asking them: 1) do you smoke pot? 2) how much money do you make? Being that a majority of the people that smoke pot are under 30, including many students, one can easily see that these people are going to be at the bottom of most pay scales.
So, how much did it work out *per spam*? A couple of seconds, if that? If "it takes a second" to hit delete, then that's a reasonable sentence for each spam.
I hate to bust everybody's bubble, but this spammer really didn't get sentenced for spam, but rather for fraud. From TFA:
During my opening statement, I explained to the jury that sending spam by itself is not a crime, but when you masquerade your identity, you violate Virginia's law that took effect in July 2003. Spammers run afoul of the law when they use another's IP or domain address without authority or create a fictitious IP or domain address.
Also, what this guy was "selling" was some UPS work-from-home tracking bs where you were supposedly getting paid a good amount of money for sitting at home. This guy made some 8 or 9 million dollars from scamming people with this crap.
Anyway, my point is that he was not really convicted for spamming, but rather for being a greedy deceptive assmunch, and I think his sentence fits the crime.
We don't have an educated, informed population. Apparently, half of the US really IS made up of Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigots.
4 /html/new_10_21_04.html
Take a look at: http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Election_0
1st two paragraphs says it all:
Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.
Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.
Oh, and yet another simple example of how much of a dumbass bush is, take a look at this url:
A nice quote can be found towards the end of the page:
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
The official policy of the Bush administration is to give foreigners willing/able to displace American workers a shot at citizenship/permanent residency. Just look at the platform-the Republicans want to expand use of H-1b/L-1 visas to match "any willing worker" with "any willing employer".
This is all really a massive program of corporate welfare. Corporations pay _nothing_ for these immigration rights that have considerable economic value.
Yeah, but don't knock the Bush administration completely. Soon we will at least have equality with our (il)legal immigrants for things like Social Security.
Here in Europe most basic plans cost EUR 40 a month. That's a sizeable share of a teenager's allowance. That's at least 3 CDs a month they won't buy.
Yeah, and the poor US teenagers can't seem to find a job in the summers because of all the Eurpeans that are willing to work and stuff.
Point being that Americans are lazy and just expect crap for nothing. Its very frustrating for those that belive in working for a living.
OK, let me digest this. The checklist of requirements needed for the Venezuelan voting process in order to cast a vote via computer took:
- Thumprints of those voters that had thumbs
- international monitors (heavy)
- open source code that was reviewed by thousands of programmers months before (I guess this was the code running on the machines right?)
- available on the web for scrutany
Comapare this to my precenct where theyCan anyone tell me one thing that is better about the computer system?
We are collecting nominal data here. There is no billions of floating point operations per seconds here. Just a count. The manpower to calculate these data is not taxing. It cannot take long. Casinos count more than two types of cash money all day long and have no issues, and I doubt that they use computers either.
I mean I work with computers for a living, but I don't see all problems as in search of some sort of computer to solve them. Especially when the task at hand is this simple.
And this code would be sent through which secure email-delivery system exactly? Plaintext SMTP on the internet, like all the other emails from your bank?
I see your point, but _anything_ that is an indicator that the back actually knows you would reduce these phishing scams. They are generic, and the only thing that identifies th mail as being sent to you might be the "To:" field in the email, but that may also say something like "dedicated_customer@bank.com".
The ease in making this kind of scam profitable is that one well crafted form letter can be sent identically all over the internet. I bet these are profitable even considering that at best 90% or so of the people being phished don't even have an account with the bank they are posing as.
The seamless intergration between reasonable prices and DMR and synching with the iPod is hard to beat.
iPod owners must be very wealthy. From the iTunes store it would cost on order of $1,000 to fill up an iPod mini, $5,000 and $10,000 for the iPod 20 and 40 giggers respectively.
A software program with a sliding puzzle, and a calculator, and a clock, and a little notepad. Tiny little applets -- little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time.?!
That was my idea! If I had the patent, I'D BE RICH!
I don't count spending all day working in the fields for just enough to feed one's self as being especially productive.
I don't either. Only a moron would work all day in the fields to sustain only themselves.
Most hunting and gathering societies in a good environment like, say a forrest, work about 10 to 20 hours a week to sustain themselves.
How much extra time a week do you spend "being productive"? Be sure to include travel time to and from work, and travel time to and from places to get food and buy other "necessities".
In 1968 Richard Nixon ran at least partly on reducing Crime. After election, he felt it necessary to deliver on his promises. Crimes of finance for drugs were felt to be a large part of the problem, so they were going to attack drugs. He was all set to go on a law'n'order, source-interdiction based drug policy, but his advisor(s) (Name forgotten, but there was a key one, here.) told him that it would never work. He had to work on demand reduction.
They put in place demand reduction, largely in the form of drug treatment. It worked, at least within the timeframe and measurements they used. They reduced crime.
Please see http://www.drugwarfacts.org/crime.htm for some data regarding the "War on Drugs(tm)" and its effects on crime.
IMHO, drugs should be legalized and regulated like alcohol and tobacco, simply because the budgetary and social cost of "crimes of financing" are exceeding the what the budgetary and social costs would be, if regulated. Simple, pragmatic economics.
Me too, however, I could do without the regulation part, but still.
Drugs are illegal because its an easy way for the government to establish control over its people and its illegality has become almost a necessity for our economy, and the justification for government's existance. If drugs were not illegal, what would the police, judges, and correction's officers do?
The whole drug testing thing is unconstitutional and irrational. A murderer who has no record involving drugs who is out on paroll gets drug screened all the time, but no other invasive test are done to tell if he or she is involved in any other illegal activity like paraffin tests or blood splatter tests.
Its also a little know fact that 10 out of the 50 states laws regarding marijuana for personal use as a fined offense like a speeding ticket. No time, no court, just a fine. Hopefully this is a trend.
people live like Bangladeshi farmers. Short, unproductive lives at that.
Ah, gotta love the arrogance of the Western culture. By loosing that attitude first, we can then start looking at reducing energy intake, otherwise I agree with looking for a new place to live.
Make no bones about it - there is no substantial non-Windows gaming market.
I could have sworn you could still buy game consoles like X-box and PS2.
Speaking of game consoles, I don't understand why there simply isn't a better one out there that you can hook up to a computer monitor, HDTV, or a regular TV. I see no need for a top of the line computer for games.
But then again, I'm not a gamer.