In the absence of a true RNG inside your PC then any such programme will use algorithms that'll have some degree of predictability. The government would have access to the same programmes and would be able to use simulated runs of them in order to calibrate their monitoring software and eliminate such accesses as noise.
Also, attempting to send a super high volume of traffic would be enough to get you marked out as suspicious. They'd probably just decide to forgo electronic surveillance if they couldn't keep up with you in that regard and just tail you IRL.
That's true, but if properly educated beforehand, "bad trips" are vanishingly rare.
That really depends on the type of person; I think some people are just more likely to have bad experiences than others. I'm sure you don't want to give people the impression that if they just read lots of reports on Erowid and stay in a controlled environment then everything is certain to be OK because it isn't.
Having said that, anyone who's responsible enough to read up and stay somewhere safe with a sitter for their first trip will almost certainly endure any bad experience and probably even end up having a good trip. Some of my best experiences have resulted from overcoming the fear, I used to be a terribly anxious person (try going to see a doctor about your anxiety when you feel too anxious to talk about it) but now, thanks to chemicals like LSD and a group of good, close friends, I've overcome most of that.
The LD50 for LSD is disputed as there's only one case of someone overdosing on LSD - from Wikipedia, apparently a user injected 1/3g LSD intravenously and died from it.
I think your point about LSD flashbacks being a form of PTSD is spot on. I think it's possible to have flashbacks to any strong emotional event (traumatic or euphoric), in fact I often have brief flashbacks within a week of taking LSD. This often occurs when I encounter some stimulus that I experienced during the trip, like a song, a TV show or a scenic view from a walk, and for a few moments I'm tripping again.
Given that most of my LSD experiences have been positive (I'd rate my bad experiences as "challenging", they felt awful at the time but I learnt something about myself from each one) those little flashbacks were like free trips and I enjoyed them.
As a "bathtub" drug there is no consistency of dosage or quality.
It's damn near impossible to synthesis LSD in a bathtub. You need lots of precursers that are also controlled (most notably ergoline), so you generally have to synthesis those too.
If you don't get it just right for every step then your synthesis will fail, that's why LSD is so hard to find these days (at least in the UK).
Incidentally, crazy runs deep in my family and I've turned out to be one of the most mentally sorted and straight members, a fact I attribute to my responsible use of LSD, mescaline, psylocybin, MDMA and a wide range of other psychotropic drugs. I also know a guy with paranoid schizophrenia who smokes weed because it helps calm him down which contrasts against the stereotype of cannabis making psychotic illness worse.
The point is that psychoactive drugs act differently for different people. Know your body, know your source, know your drug and know your dose.
For those who don't know: BG Trilogy is a method of importing the original BG assets into BG2.
It's possible to do that and add a boatload of other mods (like Dark side of the Sword Coast) to create an epic, continuous game that goes from the escape from Candlekeep all the way through to the Throne of Bhall.
Heh, this is looking a little bit marmite: I liked those bits! It was annoying having to re-equip but I liked their story plus it acted as a nice teaser for the big time-compression finale.
But most people will behave rationally and not buy what they can get for free... I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics.
I think economists should learn more about human behaviour. A large number of people don't act rationally; the idea of the rational self-interested individual who makes rational purchase decisions based on the information available to them is a myth. It's seductive because most economists are geeks (like us) and that's how most geeks behave and it also makes modelling behaviour much simpler but people out there in the real world do all sorts of crazy things for utterly ludicrous reasons.
If you disagree with that then I'd urge you to download the Adam Curtis documentary series' "The Trap" and "Century of the Self". They were paid for by the BBC and I'm not aware of them being available on DVD so I'd say it's ethical to download them.
The biggest selling MP3 album on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails "Ghosts I-IV" which you could download, for free, in better quality, from nin.com [source]. Most people will pay for what they can get free.
The simple fact is that you can't stop piracy. The only sensible business decision you can make when faced with that reality is to target markets where the people are more likely to act as irrationally as NIN fans and, in the case of video-games, you do that by creating great, addictive experiences that people become emotionally attached to.
Don't worry about the pirates, they are irrelevant.
Generally, the material published must be private information that "is not of legitimate concern to the public." Its disclosure must also be "highly offensive to a reasonable person."... The pressing question in public disclosure of private-facts cases is whether the information is newsworthy or of legitimate concern to the public.... "The right to privacy does not prohibit any publication of matter which is of public or general interest."
Intrusion Upon Seclusion. Intrusion upon seclusion occurs where there is an invasion, through conduct offensive to an ordinary person, of an individual's information in which she has a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Amy Boyer's estate argues that she had a reasonable expectation of privacy in her address and social security number, and that Docusearch's action in indiscriminately releasing this information was reasonably offensive.
So basically private information of yours that nobody has any right to should never be published openly unless you can show a public interest angle. That's totally reasonable in my book.
I liked IX and would probably play it again. I disagree about the music too, I still occasionally get random bits of music from IX stuck in my head.
I think most of the hating on VIII is down to the fact that it came after VII and Squall. The scene at Fisherman's Horizon between Squall and Rinoa is the only time I've ever wanted to punch a video-game character in the face; Squall is such a massive dick.
Looking past the fact it came after VII and tolerating Squall are the keys to enjoying VIII.
Windows Server 2k3 (and I assume 2k8) has a pretty secure IE installed by default. It has some NoScript style feature on it that stops it from running javascript & other potential security holes, i.e. it basically functions just as a HTML renderer.
If you're using Windows as a server, it really should be Windows Server!
Let's take the friend system from GTA IV. It was interesting, but took WAY TOO MUCH TIME. The people were way too needy. Everyone I know just gave up on that aspect of the game because of it. It was a good/interesting idea, but it wasn't finished when it was put in.
You can turn your phone off without consequence. Admittedly they should have made that clearer as lots of people had problems in this regard, but still. Turn your phone off!
Correct, Iraq had WMD. The USA knew they had them at some point in the past because the USA sold them to Iraq during the Iran - Iraq war when the USA and Iraq (under Hussein) were allies.
Iraq no longer had WMD when we invaded them however. What seems most likely is that Saddam was telling the truth when he said he'd destroyed them all. This makes sense from a rational perspective because he'd have known that there was no chance of Iraq ever getting normal trade relations whilst he was in possession of them, they were a liability.
You're assuming people have money. The problem is that there was a slight dip in the economy and a few too many people lost their jobs. Those people have no money. Unfortunately those people had mortgages that had been sold as part of complex financial instruments and as soon as investors realised that they were riskier than they were led to believe they all wanted to sell them and buy no more. This led to the collapse of the credit system.
In turn, this caused businesses that were depending on credit for their short term cash flow to go under as their banks called in their loans. This lead to more job cuts, more people with no money and more defaults on loans.
People can't spend what they don't have; expecting people who've just lost their job and don't see a new one coming any time soon to spend their savings for the greater good is madness. The idea that the economy is dependant on confidence is just a form of magical thinking.
That works in the opposite direction too. Part of a physical dependency on caffeine is that without your regular fix your body won't constrict the blood vessels in your neck tight enough leading to an excess amount of blood in your head. This is the main cause of headache in caffeine withdrawal.
That would be three grams all at once, not spread out over the course of ten hours. You also quoted the lower end of the scale, presumably for an anorexic person. I weigh 12stone so, assuming 129mg/kg is holds for humans as well as rats, my LD50 is 14.5g.
LD50 is a crude measure of how much it would take to have a 50% chance of killing someone in the general population; my years of caffeine abuse probably means my lethal dose is higher.
I once visited a friend for a week and they didn't have any coffee. I wasn't too bothered at first as there was plenty of booze but I woke up after two days with a slight hangover (not that much booze the night before) and a pounding migraine. I had no energy and double vision, the migraine got so bad I was sick.
I thought a coffee would help me feel a little better so I dragged myself to the store round the corner and bought some. As soon as I'd drunk a small cup of coffee my migraine started to disappear and I could see straight again.
I was on around ten triple strength cups a day which would be about three grammes of caffeine. I've since cut down to three cups a day!
We managed to deal with the IRA as criminals and not prisoners of war, although we did have the Army deployed in NI - I'll admitted fighting terrorism takes big guns. Spain manages to deal with ETA on the same terms.
Should we instead have declared war on Eire and the USA for their support of the IRA?
The Marines reappear in the game itself, doing pretty much what they did during the war. One tells the story of how he furiously wrote a letter to his wife and begged a chaplain to give it to her if he died. Another, Eddie Garcia (pictured above), talks about how his right leg was shredded in a mortar attack, and how he suffered survivor's guilt after he was taken out of combat. Their actions are recreated in the game as players encounter the soldiers' avatars.
They freely admit that what they're doing is one-sided but that's because they're just trying to tell the troop's stories. Hopefully they'll make the effort to convey some of the horror.
Here in the UK Jack Straw used to make speeches about "ethical foreign policy"; he became foreign secretary and was eventually one of the biggest cheerleaders for our Iraq adventure. Every time someone who espouses those kinds of ideals actually gets in power they always seem to do a complete U-turn.
Are they all just liars? Are they being blackmailed? Or do they realise upon gaining power and seeing the whole sorry mess from the top that changing things would incriminate too many people and bring the whole system down?
Corporate subsidies are not socialism. People like to use terms like "Corporate Welfare" but really it's just a form of state capitalism. Protectionism like that is actually to be expected in liberal market democracies because private firms have huge amounts of money and therefore lobbying power.
Sure the theory is that free societies and markets lead to competition, better quality and more choice for everyone but that's not the reality.
Slashdot Mirror
In the absence of a true RNG inside your PC then any such programme will use algorithms that'll have some degree of predictability. The government would have access to the same programmes and would be able to use simulated runs of them in order to calibrate their monitoring software and eliminate such accesses as noise.
Also, attempting to send a super high volume of traffic would be enough to get you marked out as suspicious. They'd probably just decide to forgo electronic surveillance if they couldn't keep up with you in that regard and just tail you IRL.
You can't escape Big Brother.
That's true, but if properly educated beforehand, "bad trips" are vanishingly rare.
That really depends on the type of person; I think some people are just more likely to have bad experiences than others. I'm sure you don't want to give people the impression that if they just read lots of reports on Erowid and stay in a controlled environment then everything is certain to be OK because it isn't.
Having said that, anyone who's responsible enough to read up and stay somewhere safe with a sitter for their first trip will almost certainly endure any bad experience and probably even end up having a good trip. Some of my best experiences have resulted from overcoming the fear, I used to be a terribly anxious person (try going to see a doctor about your anxiety when you feel too anxious to talk about it) but now, thanks to chemicals like LSD and a group of good, close friends, I've overcome most of that.
The LD50 for LSD is disputed as there's only one case of someone overdosing on LSD - from Wikipedia, apparently a user injected 1/3g LSD intravenously and died from it.
I think your point about LSD flashbacks being a form of PTSD is spot on. I think it's possible to have flashbacks to any strong emotional event (traumatic or euphoric), in fact I often have brief flashbacks within a week of taking LSD. This often occurs when I encounter some stimulus that I experienced during the trip, like a song, a TV show or a scenic view from a walk, and for a few moments I'm tripping again.
Given that most of my LSD experiences have been positive (I'd rate my bad experiences as "challenging", they felt awful at the time but I learnt something about myself from each one) those little flashbacks were like free trips and I enjoyed them.
As a "bathtub" drug there is no consistency of dosage or quality.
It's damn near impossible to synthesis LSD in a bathtub. You need lots of precursers that are also controlled (most notably ergoline), so you generally have to synthesis those too.
If you don't get it just right for every step then your synthesis will fail, that's why LSD is so hard to find these days (at least in the UK).
Incidentally, crazy runs deep in my family and I've turned out to be one of the most mentally sorted and straight members, a fact I attribute to my responsible use of LSD, mescaline, psylocybin, MDMA and a wide range of other psychotropic drugs. I also know a guy with paranoid schizophrenia who smokes weed because it helps calm him down which contrasts against the stereotype of cannabis making psychotic illness worse.
The point is that psychoactive drugs act differently for different people. Know your body, know your source, know your drug and know your dose.
So pay for TiVo and internet just because your ISP doesn't think you should be using the internet that much? Get real.
For those who don't know: BG Trilogy is a method of importing the original BG assets into BG2.
It's possible to do that and add a boatload of other mods (like Dark side of the Sword Coast) to create an epic, continuous game that goes from the escape from Candlekeep all the way through to the Throne of Bhall.
So basically private information of yours that nobody has any right to should never be published openly unless you can show a public interest angle.
You can give your personal information to anyone you want but their rights to use it and redistribute it are limited.
Heh, this is looking a little bit marmite: I liked those bits! It was annoying having to re-equip but I liked their story plus it acted as a nice teaser for the big time-compression finale.
But most people will behave rationally and not buy what they can get for free ... I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics.
I think economists should learn more about human behaviour. A large number of people don't act rationally; the idea of the rational self-interested individual who makes rational purchase decisions based on the information available to them is a myth. It's seductive because most economists are geeks (like us) and that's how most geeks behave and it also makes modelling behaviour much simpler but people out there in the real world do all sorts of crazy things for utterly ludicrous reasons.
If you disagree with that then I'd urge you to download the Adam Curtis documentary series' "The Trap" and "Century of the Self". They were paid for by the BBC and I'm not aware of them being available on DVD so I'd say it's ethical to download them.
The biggest selling MP3 album on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails "Ghosts I-IV" which you could download, for free, in better quality, from nin.com [source]. Most people will pay for what they can get free.
The simple fact is that you can't stop piracy. The only sensible business decision you can make when faced with that reality is to target markets where the people are more likely to act as irrationally as NIN fans and, in the case of video-games, you do that by creating great, addictive experiences that people become emotionally attached to.
Don't worry about the pirates, they are irrelevant.
Yes, and rightfully so. A little Googling:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/Press/faqs.aspx?id=14038&
Generally, the material published must be private information that "is not of legitimate concern to the public." Its disclosure must also be "highly offensive to a reasonable person." ... The pressing question in public disclosure of private-facts cases is whether the information is newsworthy or of legitimate concern to the public. ... "The right to privacy does not prohibit any publication of matter which is of public or general interest."
http://epic.org/privacy/boyer/
Intrusion Upon Seclusion. Intrusion upon seclusion occurs where there is an invasion, through conduct offensive to an ordinary person, of an individual's information in which she has a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Amy Boyer's estate argues that she had a reasonable expectation of privacy in her address and social security number, and that Docusearch's action in indiscriminately releasing this information was reasonably offensive.
So basically private information of yours that nobody has any right to should never be published openly unless you can show a public interest angle. That's totally reasonable in my book.
I liked IX and would probably play it again. I disagree about the music too, I still occasionally get random bits of music from IX stuck in my head.
I think most of the hating on VIII is down to the fact that it came after VII and Squall. The scene at Fisherman's Horizon between Squall and Rinoa is the only time I've ever wanted to punch a video-game character in the face; Squall is such a massive dick.
Looking past the fact it came after VII and tolerating Squall are the keys to enjoying VIII.
Windows Server 2k3 (and I assume 2k8) has a pretty secure IE installed by default. It has some NoScript style feature on it that stops it from running javascript & other potential security holes, i.e. it basically functions just as a HTML renderer.
If you're using Windows as a server, it really should be Windows Server!
One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.
That could simply mean they saw him switching between X and a text console.
I hate how stupid the police can be.
Let's take the friend system from GTA IV. It was interesting, but took WAY TOO MUCH TIME. The people were way too needy. Everyone I know just gave up on that aspect of the game because of it. It was a good/interesting idea, but it wasn't finished when it was put in.
You can turn your phone off without consequence. Admittedly they should have made that clearer as lots of people had problems in this regard, but still. Turn your phone off!
Correct, Iraq had WMD. The USA knew they had them at some point in the past because the USA sold them to Iraq during the Iran - Iraq war when the USA and Iraq (under Hussein) were allies.
Iraq no longer had WMD when we invaded them however. What seems most likely is that Saddam was telling the truth when he said he'd destroyed them all. This makes sense from a rational perspective because he'd have known that there was no chance of Iraq ever getting normal trade relations whilst he was in possession of them, they were a liability.
You're assuming people have money. The problem is that there was a slight dip in the economy and a few too many people lost their jobs. Those people have no money. Unfortunately those people had mortgages that had been sold as part of complex financial instruments and as soon as investors realised that they were riskier than they were led to believe they all wanted to sell them and buy no more. This led to the collapse of the credit system.
In turn, this caused businesses that were depending on credit for their short term cash flow to go under as their banks called in their loans. This lead to more job cuts, more people with no money and more defaults on loans.
People can't spend what they don't have; expecting people who've just lost their job and don't see a new one coming any time soon to spend their savings for the greater good is madness. The idea that the economy is dependant on confidence is just a form of magical thinking.
That works in the opposite direction too. Part of a physical dependency on caffeine is that without your regular fix your body won't constrict the blood vessels in your neck tight enough leading to an excess amount of blood in your head. This is the main cause of headache in caffeine withdrawal.
That would be three grams all at once, not spread out over the course of ten hours. You also quoted the lower end of the scale, presumably for an anorexic person. I weigh 12stone so, assuming 129mg/kg is holds for humans as well as rats, my LD50 is 14.5g.
LD50 is a crude measure of how much it would take to have a 50% chance of killing someone in the general population; my years of caffeine abuse probably means my lethal dose is higher.
I once visited a friend for a week and they didn't have any coffee. I wasn't too bothered at first as there was plenty of booze but I woke up after two days with a slight hangover (not that much booze the night before) and a pounding migraine. I had no energy and double vision, the migraine got so bad I was sick.
I thought a coffee would help me feel a little better so I dragged myself to the store round the corner and bought some. As soon as I'd drunk a small cup of coffee my migraine started to disappear and I could see straight again.
I was on around ten triple strength cups a day which would be about three grammes of caffeine. I've since cut down to three cups a day!
We managed to deal with the IRA as criminals and not prisoners of war, although we did have the Army deployed in NI - I'll admitted fighting terrorism takes big guns. Spain manages to deal with ETA on the same terms.
Should we instead have declared war on Eire and the USA for their support of the IRA?
From TFA:
The Marines reappear in the game itself, doing pretty much what they did during the war. One tells the story of how he furiously wrote a letter to his wife and begged a chaplain to give it to her if he died. Another, Eddie Garcia (pictured above), talks about how his right leg was shredded in a mortar attack, and how he suffered survivor's guilt after he was taken out of combat. Their actions are recreated in the game as players encounter the soldiers' avatars.
They freely admit that what they're doing is one-sided but that's because they're just trying to tell the troop's stories. Hopefully they'll make the effort to convey some of the horror.
Here in the UK Jack Straw used to make speeches about "ethical foreign policy"; he became foreign secretary and was eventually one of the biggest cheerleaders for our Iraq adventure. Every time someone who espouses those kinds of ideals actually gets in power they always seem to do a complete U-turn.
Are they all just liars? Are they being blackmailed? Or do they realise upon gaining power and seeing the whole sorry mess from the top that changing things would incriminate too many people and bring the whole system down?
Adam Curtis did a fantastic documentary series called Century of the Self that explored this topic.
Corporate subsidies are not socialism. People like to use terms like "Corporate Welfare" but really it's just a form of state capitalism. Protectionism like that is actually to be expected in liberal market democracies because private firms have huge amounts of money and therefore lobbying power.
Sure the theory is that free societies and markets lead to competition, better quality and more choice for everyone but that's not the reality.
A guy I know uses a pink DS; he borrows it from his little sister.
No joke!