French highschool. Our class was a mix of TI-92 and Casio 9850's (or variations thereof -- but you had to admit, color screens were pretty cool for writing games. Oh, and math. Yeah. And physics. And chemistry.) I swear nobody's seen a Casio calculator in the States that has more than four functions... bizarre.
Our calculators were never wiped; I don't recall there being any policy about which kinds you could use, teachers (profs) didn't necessarily know how to use each kind and you were on your own. The rules for tests (including the Bac S that I took) allowed you to bring anything in that fit in the calculator's memory. That still didn't prevent you from needing to know the material. Unlike american tests I experienced in college after that, you had to show your work -- all of it -- and it mattered more than the result. I wasn't prepared for the stupidity of scantron tests.
Not being a user myself, I tried to look that up, and saw two implementations. xdocdiff, which uses xdoc2txt to convert documents to plaint-text, then diff's the results; and some scripts that will convince Word to launch and compare two files as if they were versions of the same file. The latter would give you the ability to diff complicated stuff (tables, diagrams), but does either allow any sort of auto-merge when contributors make simultaneous changes, or useful conflict-resolution?
Your response interestingly demonstrates the cognitive dissonance required by the question. In the first paragraph, you blame the owner. In the second, the programmer. That's like saying on the one hand it's the property owner's fault for having a bad lock, and on the other it's the fault of the contractor he hired to build/install it. Both are true, from a certain point of view (Luke). The general public, cops, insurance company and the wife blame the guy who hired the contractor; the guy blames the contractor (and the contractor blames the manufacturer.) For the purposes of the discussion, when assigning blame, we should clearly define who is doing the assigning -- the guest users of the sites, the paying users, the ones who get data stolen, the site maintainers,... ?
Exactly -- why go into space for zero gravity, when we've got an area of zero gravity right here inside our own planet? We should drill down, not rocket up!
And yet, a small / primordial-enough black hole, after evaporating down to (and just below) its critical mass, could be seen as exploding back into flat-space, no? So the phrase could make sense?
But I care about you, as a member of the slashdot community. I want to improve you, so that when you're right, you'll be a more effective voice, more convincing. Being right once is great; but having a method by which you can be right time and time again is better. That's the point of rigor. You say you reached your objective; how did you measure that? How do we know you didn't delude yourself into thinking you improved? The article gives examples of people thinking they're great at multitasking when they're not, could that not be the case with you, too? How have you made sure you're not fooling yourself? After all, you've put effort into improving your skills, so you have a motive for believing in your own success. It's not a matter of choosing who I want to believe -- that leads to error. It's a matter of choosing who has the right methods in place to avoid error -- that leads to fewer errors.
There's a difference between anecdotes used to explain or make more personal a point already made more fully in a study, and using them as examples of your own a priori reasoning. Journalists have to find a way to make otherwise dry material more palatable, by "bringing it home" to the readers. So yes, the article does use one long-running anecdote for structure, but it's not the true source material. Note that I'm not saying you're wrong -- but at this point, the opposition has provided more evidence than you have.
As to ADD -- yeah, they do appear to have that. But that's kind of the point, no? That multitaskers are actually incapable of ignoring the irrelevant, can't stay focused, are driven to multitask more than they're actually capable of, or would otherwise desire to? That would result in ADD-like symptoms. There's no dichotomy. Multiple causes can have the same apparent effects, particularly to the lay public (of which I am myself a member, I'll completely admit.)
For those too lazy to read the parent's links: anecdotes, personal experience, a priori reasoning, and asking for experiments. In the actual article, you'll find references to actual scientific studies on the subject already done. One of the cool things about science is that it often comes across counter-intuitive results, as seems to have been the case here; maybe you're having trouble accepting their conclusions, or you didn't notice, or you have other evidence (real, this time) you'd care to share with us. The article states that most people aren't good at multi-tasking, only 3% are considered "super-taskers". Maybe you're one of them. Congratulations. But just because that doesn't jive with your personal experience doesn't justify responding to a call for evidence with:
a) poor-form arguments (it's also poor form to spew opinions without backup in the first place [woah, citation needed!]), and b) anecdotal evidence as if it were the evidence being requested
Can always move? Yeah, see, that's pretty simplistic. Someone will decide we need to secure our borders -- all of them. Jobs and natural resources don't just up and move when some of their workers move. Whole families don't move when some of their members move. Housing prices don't stay stable when everyone wants to leave a red state. Sometimes you have responsibilities, caring for the elderly who don't want to move, for example. Sometimes you can't move, because as much as the laws suck as a matter of principle, it's not worth the economic cost to you. Nobody's going to unemploy themselves so their neighbors can have gay marriage, especially when it'll be seen as voluntary and not worthy of help in any way. States with better laws can't necessarily absorb the influx, either. Laws can be passed pretty quickly; the economy takes forever to recover from large-scale changes though. But here's the thing -- most "blue states" and "red states" aren't 90% in agreement. It's more like 55% everywhere. You know we have large populations, in every state, that disagree with the overall direction, and certainly some of the specifics, of their state governments, yet don't move. That won't change. People will just put up with it. Democracy will fail to bring laws back in line with what the population really wants. If people do start moving, you'll have areas that just ossify -- most people get a large portion of their beliefs from their parents and peers, so concentrating them just makes matters worse: their positions will get stronger over time, they'll be even less willing to negotiate, compromise, meet in the middle, whatever. You'll get good ol' boy networks in every locality.
Better solution: keep us together, so we keep fighting over the issues, so they stay in the news, stay at the forefront of everyone's mind, keep people thinking and knowing and talking and arguing and progressing. And run public-service ads that promote leaving people the hell alone if you can. Promote tolerance. Regions mainly differ by resources, climate, environment, topology, connectedness (borders) -- local legislation should be about those matters. Farming. Water rights. Borders. Parks. Mining. The rest is part of the millenia-old human discussion on virtue and vice, and isn't a local matter.
If I were to predict that a bridge would collapse because its structural integrity has been compromised by an earthquake in the region and this leads to a massive overhaul of the bridge which then prevents its collapse for the next 20 years, have I actually failed?
More accurately: your prediction would lead people to avoid the bridge like the plague for fear of imminent collapse, thus reducing stresses on the bridge, thus keeping it intact longer than you predicted (so you look like a fool) or even forever (really big fool), frustrating everyone, especially city planners who can't decide if it really is or isn't going to fail now that the load has changed, or also can't figure out if it's economically beneficial to fix it now that nobody uses it and has probably already found another solution, so they can't decide to either fix it or not fix it, so it just lingers on, unused but unbroken... or something like that.
Of course, if they find this similar chemical in a plant, you can sell it as "herbal" straight away, with zero testing or oversight, since it's considered neither a food nor a drug, and the FDA has no jurisdiction
Yeah, that worked out really well for THC/cannabis and cocaine/coca.
Yes. The universe is actively only supplying 2.7 kelvin to your space-borne object -- so it's not being heated much. However said object carries heat with it from its home on Earth, and cannot shed that heat very quickly. In a few years, centuries, maybe millenia, it will finally manage to slowly bleed away the excess heat via radiation only, not convection, and reach 2.7 kelvin. Maybe.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone abusing kids just to make a profit off the resulting videos. Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence. But my gut tells me that even if you kill the trade entirely, 99% of the abuse will continue, only there won't even be a convenient trail of evidence to lead police to them anymore. Stats may go down, but only because we're not catching as many, while the abuse rate stays constant. This income may be a "nice addition" but I've seen no evidence it's the main motivator.
I think you could make the argument that viewers are as responsible as distributors -- you're unlikely to distribute if nobody cares. But I agree there's a difference between distribution and the original abuse.
You can make the argument that the child porn causes harm to the children pictured, but I think that harm is separate and distinct from the actual abuse pictured. The abuse is... abuse, whether documented or not. The distribution of the images is sort of (very vaguely) like a smear campaign, if you take the position that the distributor is trying to cause further harm to the victim by telling everyone about it. It's adding insult to injury, I think. The victim can't just deal with the abuse by itself, because now there's a constant nagging feeling that someone is continually re-discovering the abuse -- it won't go away. At any time, someone could say "hey, I recognize you from somewhere" and bring all those memories back. But I think that should be treated as a separate form of harm, at least. Kind of like... libel? Except it's truth. Truth, in this case, is the enemy.
a) There are definitions of CP that do not include real children, and therefore cannot directly involve child abuse. You could argue that it does so indirectly, by warping the minds of blah blah blah, but please consider that CP, as a phrase, may include more than you might think.
b) How do you have images of murder without a victim? You don't. Yet people possess said images, distribute said images, even broadcast them on the evening news. It's no crime to have video of Kennedy being assassinated. We do not have a rule, that I know of, that makes it illegal to have images, video, or audio evidence of a crime. You are not made a criminal, and certainly not a co-conspirator, by said possession. This is treated as a special case. (I'm thinking that images of any rape, child or not, would fall under this category, but I'm not sure of that.) Two arguments are commonly used:
1) That there's a special market for these images, and that we need to kill the demand in order to kill the supply.
a) I haven't seen evidence that killing the demand, or at least the market, will kill the supply. If someone's going to abuse a child, they'll probably do so whether they can distribute the images (for free or for profit) or not.
b) That's a bit like saying that we can justify our war on drugs based on the violence our war on drugs has caused -- that we need to completely kill the demand and market in order to stop the killings in south america. I'm not saying the violence is good, but that argument wouldn't fly.
2) That it causes long-term harm to the children involved.
This, I understand on an emotional level. It's like someone having video of you taking an embarrassing tumble, only a billion times worse. Even if noone who sees the video knows who you are personally, just knowing that it's out there will hurt you, for the rest of your life. Then again, you'll never know that it's been completely wiped off the face of the internet, so even with the best enforcement, you'll never really get your *sense* of privacy and dignity back, even if you did actually get it back (in the sense that nobody can know, ever again.) You'll always feel that shame (not from guilt, but from powerlessness) and all you can do is get some sense of revenge with each viewer you punish. But that's all it will ever be, blind revenge against the anonymous public who might have seen the video. What you deserve is revenge against whoever abused you. But I guess that's not enough. There are some things the law will never set right, but legislators will keep trying to find *something* to give you. Victims need help and justice. I don't know that this is really it, because maybe there's no such thing.
Humans are naturally curious. About everything. Even things they think won't interest them. They try drugs, sometimes just to see what it's *really* like, not because they think they'll enjoy them. Some people try pricking their fingers with pins, just to see if it hurts as much as they're told it does / doesn't. Some are curious what it feels like to drive 100mph down the highway, just once, even though they know they'll never want to try again. I'm not surprised someone would want to find out for themselves what CP looks like.
I recently saw an argument about breastfeeding where it seemed half the posters thought "nice restaurant" meant $200/plate, while the other half thought it meant $20/plate. They talked past each other, accusing each other of the worst kinds of stupidity. They clearly didn't realize they had different definitions of "nice restaurant." I could see someone wanting to find out, for themselves, what got classified as CP, just so they'd know, for sure, what they were / weren't arguing for or against. It's easy to argue about words without samples to back them up. CP is so far out of most people's daily experience, it's not even something they'd have a vague idea about. Pictures of women being raped? They can probably fathom what that'd look like. CP? There are so many things that get counted as non-child "porn", I wouldn't be surprised by a very, very broad definition of CP, too. So yeah, I could see someone being curious about what gets labeled that way.
Of course, finding out is tantamount to being an offender, so yes, it's kind of stupid from a practical point of view. Like being curious what it's like to shoot yourself in the head. But that doesn't eliminate the curious nature of humanity.
[Not posting anonymously. But that doesn't mean I don't think this is a good example of communication people would want to keep anonymized, relating back to the story today about tracking prepaid cellphones. There are things people legitimately want to talk about anonymously, because even talking about it is stigmatized.]
I think the GP was just trying to say that drugs are a large part of today's criminal market, and legalizing them would greatly reduce the need for criminal activities (in the long run -- it'd likely be a slow transition) and therefore reduce... that's where it gets fuzzy... the desire to know the names of prepaid phone users in order to hunt down criminals. There would be fewer, but that doesn't change the desire to know who they are via their phones. Maybe it changes how much the leftover criminals use phones at all, and therefore how much this approach would work. Or maybe reducing criminality this way would be easier, more sensible, and in some ways cheaper than tracking the names of all prepaid phone users, and therefore the better idea. As I said, fuzzy. But I think the general theme was about reducing criminality in general, not justifying the loss of anonymity.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not an advanced user, you're a masochist. And so's your mom.
Would you happen to have her number?
Result of programming in G: several hits. Maybe wikipedia needs to be updated?
French highschool. Our class was a mix of TI-92 and Casio 9850's (or variations thereof -- but you had to admit, color screens were pretty cool for writing games. Oh, and math. Yeah. And physics. And chemistry.) I swear nobody's seen a Casio calculator in the States that has more than four functions... bizarre.
Our calculators were never wiped; I don't recall there being any policy about which kinds you could use, teachers (profs) didn't necessarily know how to use each kind and you were on your own. The rules for tests (including the Bac S that I took) allowed you to bring anything in that fit in the calculator's memory. That still didn't prevent you from needing to know the material. Unlike american tests I experienced in college after that, you had to show your work -- all of it -- and it mattered more than the result. I wasn't prepared for the stupidity of scantron tests.
He named one apologist. You named zero bashers. I don't see how that proves that he's wrong and you're right.
Not being a user myself, I tried to look that up, and saw two implementations. xdocdiff, which uses xdoc2txt to convert documents to plaint-text, then diff's the results; and some scripts that will convince Word to launch and compare two files as if they were versions of the same file. The latter would give you the ability to diff complicated stuff (tables, diagrams), but does either allow any sort of auto-merge when contributors make simultaneous changes, or useful conflict-resolution?
so ... you're saying Knuth finished calculating every digit of Pi?
Certainly wasn't saying it was valid in-context ...
I was going to reply that Larry Niven's rings are unstable (pointed out by MIT students) and that therefore shells should be as well, but ... came across this instead: http://www.alcyone.com/max/writing/essays/why-niven-rings-are-unstable.html (Dyson spheres aren't dynamically unstable, rings are.)
Your response interestingly demonstrates the cognitive dissonance required by the question. In the first paragraph, you blame the owner. In the second, the programmer. That's like saying on the one hand it's the property owner's fault for having a bad lock, and on the other it's the fault of the contractor he hired to build/install it. Both are true, from a certain point of view (Luke). The general public, cops, insurance company and the wife blame the guy who hired the contractor; the guy blames the contractor (and the contractor blames the manufacturer.) For the purposes of the discussion, when assigning blame, we should clearly define who is doing the assigning -- the guest users of the sites, the paying users, the ones who get data stolen, the site maintainers, ... ?
Exactly -- why go into space for zero gravity, when we've got an area of zero gravity right here inside our own planet? We should drill down, not rocket up!
And yet, a small / primordial-enough black hole, after evaporating down to (and just below) its critical mass, could be seen as exploding back into flat-space, no? So the phrase could make sense?
But I care about you, as a member of the slashdot community. I want to improve you, so that when you're right, you'll be a more effective voice, more convincing. Being right once is great; but having a method by which you can be right time and time again is better. That's the point of rigor. You say you reached your objective; how did you measure that? How do we know you didn't delude yourself into thinking you improved? The article gives examples of people thinking they're great at multitasking when they're not, could that not be the case with you, too? How have you made sure you're not fooling yourself? After all, you've put effort into improving your skills, so you have a motive for believing in your own success. It's not a matter of choosing who I want to believe -- that leads to error. It's a matter of choosing who has the right methods in place to avoid error -- that leads to fewer errors.
There's a difference between anecdotes used to explain or make more personal a point already made more fully in a study, and using them as examples of your own a priori reasoning. Journalists have to find a way to make otherwise dry material more palatable, by "bringing it home" to the readers. So yes, the article does use one long-running anecdote for structure, but it's not the true source material. Note that I'm not saying you're wrong -- but at this point, the opposition has provided more evidence than you have.
As to ADD -- yeah, they do appear to have that. But that's kind of the point, no? That multitaskers are actually incapable of ignoring the irrelevant, can't stay focused, are driven to multitask more than they're actually capable of, or would otherwise desire to? That would result in ADD-like symptoms. There's no dichotomy. Multiple causes can have the same apparent effects, particularly to the lay public (of which I am myself a member, I'll completely admit.)
For those too lazy to read the parent's links: anecdotes, personal experience, a priori reasoning, and asking for experiments. In the actual article, you'll find references to actual scientific studies on the subject already done. One of the cool things about science is that it often comes across counter-intuitive results, as seems to have been the case here; maybe you're having trouble accepting their conclusions, or you didn't notice, or you have other evidence (real, this time) you'd care to share with us. The article states that most people aren't good at multi-tasking, only 3% are considered "super-taskers". Maybe you're one of them. Congratulations. But just because that doesn't jive with your personal experience doesn't justify responding to a call for evidence with:
a) poor-form arguments (it's also poor form to spew opinions without backup in the first place [woah, citation needed!]), and
b) anecdotal evidence as if it were the evidence being requested
Can always move? Yeah, see, that's pretty simplistic. Someone will decide we need to secure our borders -- all of them. Jobs and natural resources don't just up and move when some of their workers move. Whole families don't move when some of their members move. Housing prices don't stay stable when everyone wants to leave a red state. Sometimes you have responsibilities, caring for the elderly who don't want to move, for example. Sometimes you can't move, because as much as the laws suck as a matter of principle, it's not worth the economic cost to you. Nobody's going to unemploy themselves so their neighbors can have gay marriage, especially when it'll be seen as voluntary and not worthy of help in any way. States with better laws can't necessarily absorb the influx, either. Laws can be passed pretty quickly; the economy takes forever to recover from large-scale changes though. But here's the thing -- most "blue states" and "red states" aren't 90% in agreement. It's more like 55% everywhere. You know we have large populations, in every state, that disagree with the overall direction, and certainly some of the specifics, of their state governments, yet don't move. That won't change. People will just put up with it. Democracy will fail to bring laws back in line with what the population really wants. If people do start moving, you'll have areas that just ossify -- most people get a large portion of their beliefs from their parents and peers, so concentrating them just makes matters worse: their positions will get stronger over time, they'll be even less willing to negotiate, compromise, meet in the middle, whatever. You'll get good ol' boy networks in every locality.
Better solution: keep us together, so we keep fighting over the issues, so they stay in the news, stay at the forefront of everyone's mind, keep people thinking and knowing and talking and arguing and progressing. And run public-service ads that promote leaving people the hell alone if you can. Promote tolerance. Regions mainly differ by resources, climate, environment, topology, connectedness (borders) -- local legislation should be about those matters. Farming. Water rights. Borders. Parks. Mining. The rest is part of the millenia-old human discussion on virtue and vice, and isn't a local matter.
If I were to predict that a bridge would collapse because its structural integrity has been compromised by an earthquake in the region and this leads to a massive overhaul of the bridge which then prevents its collapse for the next 20 years, have I actually failed?
More accurately: your prediction would lead people to avoid the bridge like the plague for fear of imminent collapse, thus reducing stresses on the bridge, thus keeping it intact longer than you predicted (so you look like a fool) or even forever (really big fool), frustrating everyone, especially city planners who can't decide if it really is or isn't going to fail now that the load has changed, or also can't figure out if it's economically beneficial to fix it now that nobody uses it and has probably already found another solution, so they can't decide to either fix it or not fix it, so it just lingers on, unused but unbroken ... or something like that.
Note to future self: avoid car analogies, use gun analogies instead. Example: "They use the same gun to shoot your dinner."
I use a car to get to work. Terrorists use cars to blow things up. Clearly, the tool is equal to the usage.
Of course, if they find this similar chemical in a plant, you can sell it as "herbal" straight away, with zero testing or oversight, since it's considered neither a food nor a drug, and the FDA has no jurisdiction
Yeah, that worked out really well for THC/cannabis and cocaine/coca.
Yes. The universe is actively only supplying 2.7 kelvin to your space-borne object -- so it's not being heated much. However said object carries heat with it from its home on Earth, and cannot shed that heat very quickly. In a few years, centuries, maybe millenia, it will finally manage to slowly bleed away the excess heat via radiation only, not convection, and reach 2.7 kelvin. Maybe.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone abusing kids just to make a profit off the resulting videos. Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence. But my gut tells me that even if you kill the trade entirely, 99% of the abuse will continue, only there won't even be a convenient trail of evidence to lead police to them anymore. Stats may go down, but only because we're not catching as many, while the abuse rate stays constant. This income may be a "nice addition" but I've seen no evidence it's the main motivator.
I think you could make the argument that viewers are as responsible as distributors -- you're unlikely to distribute if nobody cares. But I agree there's a difference between distribution and the original abuse.
You can make the argument that the child porn causes harm to the children pictured, but I think that harm is separate and distinct from the actual abuse pictured. The abuse is ... abuse, whether documented or not. The distribution of the images is sort of (very vaguely) like a smear campaign, if you take the position that the distributor is trying to cause further harm to the victim by telling everyone about it. It's adding insult to injury, I think. The victim can't just deal with the abuse by itself, because now there's a constant nagging feeling that someone is continually re-discovering the abuse -- it won't go away. At any time, someone could say "hey, I recognize you from somewhere" and bring all those memories back. But I think that should be treated as a separate form of harm, at least. Kind of like ... libel? Except it's truth. Truth, in this case, is the enemy.
a) There are definitions of CP that do not include real children, and therefore cannot directly involve child abuse. You could argue that it does so indirectly, by warping the minds of blah blah blah, but please consider that CP, as a phrase, may include more than you might think.
b) How do you have images of murder without a victim? You don't. Yet people possess said images, distribute said images, even broadcast them on the evening news. It's no crime to have video of Kennedy being assassinated. We do not have a rule, that I know of, that makes it illegal to have images, video, or audio evidence of a crime. You are not made a criminal, and certainly not a co-conspirator, by said possession. This is treated as a special case. (I'm thinking that images of any rape, child or not, would fall under this category, but I'm not sure of that.) Two arguments are commonly used:
1) That there's a special market for these images, and that we need to kill the demand in order to kill the supply.
a) I haven't seen evidence that killing the demand, or at least the market, will kill the supply. If someone's going to abuse a child, they'll probably do so whether they can distribute the images (for free or for profit) or not.
b) That's a bit like saying that we can justify our war on drugs based on the violence our war on drugs has caused -- that we need to completely kill the demand and market in order to stop the killings in south america. I'm not saying the violence is good, but that argument wouldn't fly.
2) That it causes long-term harm to the children involved.
This, I understand on an emotional level. It's like someone having video of you taking an embarrassing tumble, only a billion times worse. Even if noone who sees the video knows who you are personally, just knowing that it's out there will hurt you, for the rest of your life. Then again, you'll never know that it's been completely wiped off the face of the internet, so even with the best enforcement, you'll never really get your *sense* of privacy and dignity back, even if you did actually get it back (in the sense that nobody can know, ever again.) You'll always feel that shame (not from guilt, but from powerlessness) and all you can do is get some sense of revenge with each viewer you punish. But that's all it will ever be, blind revenge against the anonymous public who might have seen the video. What you deserve is revenge against whoever abused you. But I guess that's not enough. There are some things the law will never set right, but legislators will keep trying to find *something* to give you. Victims need help and justice. I don't know that this is really it, because maybe there's no such thing.
Humans are naturally curious. About everything. Even things they think won't interest them. They try drugs, sometimes just to see what it's *really* like, not because they think they'll enjoy them. Some people try pricking their fingers with pins, just to see if it hurts as much as they're told it does / doesn't. Some are curious what it feels like to drive 100mph down the highway, just once, even though they know they'll never want to try again. I'm not surprised someone would want to find out for themselves what CP looks like.
I recently saw an argument about breastfeeding where it seemed half the posters thought "nice restaurant" meant $200/plate, while the other half thought it meant $20/plate. They talked past each other, accusing each other of the worst kinds of stupidity. They clearly didn't realize they had different definitions of "nice restaurant." I could see someone wanting to find out, for themselves, what got classified as CP, just so they'd know, for sure, what they were / weren't arguing for or against. It's easy to argue about words without samples to back them up. CP is so far out of most people's daily experience, it's not even something they'd have a vague idea about. Pictures of women being raped? They can probably fathom what that'd look like. CP? There are so many things that get counted as non-child "porn", I wouldn't be surprised by a very, very broad definition of CP, too. So yeah, I could see someone being curious about what gets labeled that way.
Of course, finding out is tantamount to being an offender, so yes, it's kind of stupid from a practical point of view. Like being curious what it's like to shoot yourself in the head. But that doesn't eliminate the curious nature of humanity.
[Not posting anonymously. But that doesn't mean I don't think this is a good example of communication people would want to keep anonymized, relating back to the story today about tracking prepaid cellphones. There are things people legitimately want to talk about anonymously, because even talking about it is stigmatized.]
I think the GP was just trying to say that drugs are a large part of today's criminal market, and legalizing them would greatly reduce the need for criminal activities (in the long run -- it'd likely be a slow transition) and therefore reduce ... that's where it gets fuzzy ... the desire to know the names of prepaid phone users in order to hunt down criminals. There would be fewer, but that doesn't change the desire to know who they are via their phones. Maybe it changes how much the leftover criminals use phones at all, and therefore how much this approach would work. Or maybe reducing criminality this way would be easier, more sensible, and in some ways cheaper than tracking the names of all prepaid phone users, and therefore the better idea. As I said, fuzzy. But I think the general theme was about reducing criminality in general, not justifying the loss of anonymity.