Making cannabis semi-legal is a huge mistake. It attracts a lot of drugs tourism, from the US and UK, Germany, Belgium and France.
The result is that 4 billion euros are pumped into a half-legal economy yearly. The stores that sell it (the coffeeshops) are mostly legal, but everything else, from distributors to growers is illegal.
Some city districts have been tranformed into cannabis growing plantations. People grow large scale cannabis in their lofts and in their cellars and they can make quite a lot of money with it (usually to supplement their unemployment benefit). Of course, it's still illegal...
So if you get into trouble. You distributor won't pay you, or you get ripped off by someone who specializes in this, you have nowhere to go but to hire other criminals to protect you and your business. More and more deaths are turning up in and around cannabis plantations.
It's legal to grow up to five plants in Holland, so perfectly ordinary people start out that way. Make some money and then want to make more. To avoid detection they normally tap illegal electricity for the necessary lamps.
So what have we got here? A nice system for turning ordinary citizens into criminals. What a great idea!
It's madness in my opinion. I have nothing against legalizing cannabis, but do it the right way. Legalize everything so that professional growers (or amateurs turning professional) can make legal money with it or don't legalize it at all.
Also do it *at least* Europe-wide. We really don't need all European losers to come here to get high.
The Dutch solution is not sensible at all. It's cowardly and stupid.
BTW: One of your favourite bunch of people just killed five innocent people celebrating the queen's birthday. Perhaps you need a reality check.
If I run cable from my patch panel to my wall boxes (thru conduits) I connect them myself with a punch tool. In my experience that usually works well and reliable.
But my experiences with putting RJ connectors on cables are pretty bad. Too often I end up with problematic cables.
So I buy patch cables from the store, but in the back-end I punch them into the connectors myself. That's my winning combination;)
"Here in Europe?" Here in Holland they're very restrictive with antibiotics. In Greece, however, you just point at your throat and make a painful face at the drugstore and they give you a pack of wide-spectrum AB's.
It's not that simple with sore throats. Some are viral and some (very painful) are bacterial. With the latter AB's work well. I understand in the US they take a sample and analyse it. In Holland they don't seem to think that's worth while.
During my last two week bout with a bad sore throat, I demanded AB's from my MD and got them. The throat cleared up within a day, fever dropped. When I was young and had regular painful sore throats the AB's always seemed to work as well. Could be placebo I guess, but I don't think so.
So, my conclusion is that, as usual, Dutch doctors go too far where perhaps others don't go far enough.
The difference is that you take extra special care to take as much of the delicious tobacco smoke in your lungs as possible. Your neighbour's chimney was designed specifically to keep the smoke out of his lungs. And when you're burning grasses you get out of the way of the smoke.
So, yes, in theory natural tobacco smoke is probably not more toxic than any other organic smoke, but in practice smokers and people who stay in the same rooms tend to inhale much more of the latter. Sniffing smoke from your neighbour's chimney 20 times a day would probably also be very bad for your health.
I'll look into that sometime. I've built enough PHP stuff already without a framework to be comfortable without one, but I recently got into the jquery javascript framework and that was a very pleasant experience compared to plain javascript.
Maybe CodeIgniter would provide a similar experience to plain old PHP.
HIV is a bastard of a virus. Our immune systems can usually handle most viruses without intervention. You cant win on your own against HIV. It will destroy the immune system eventually.
HIV is a bastard because it's relatively benign and very hard to transmit. A normal deadly virus like Ebola kills you quickly, HIV keeps you healthy and able to infect others for years. It's mainly transferred by sex, which is a big bummer for all of us who like to sleep around which includes lots of gay men.
But once you have it, you won't get rid of it. Nothing special either, because most people live with the chicken pox virus for most of their lives. That usually doesn't kill you, though...
I dunno about the US, but I can buy a 720p 32" LCD TV for 550 EURO's in Holland. I also just bought a 1080p capable HDX-1000 Network Media Player for 275 EURO's so for 825 EURO's ($1062) I have a HD setup that does a great job at playing my HD torrents. Pretty good value me thinks.
I've been very annoyed with the Dutch newspaper reports on this issue. All the headlines I've seen were talking about 'Virtual theft punished for the first time', which is, of course, nonsense. I'm glad/. did better.
Theft of 'virtual property' is nothing special. Lot's of things, like my bank balance, are only represented by bits and bytes these days. If you steal it, you're still a real life thief.
The theft, intimidation and violence were very real and very punishable. Any other decision would've been an outrage.
Killing someone in Quake (or whatever FPS is fashionable these days) is obviously virtual murder and not punishable outside the game.
Home movies as well, although I wouldn't call them hi-def. I also backup my music collection. I may have lost some of the original CD's;)
I don't do the -c thing either, but I keep thinking I should. It's probably going to take a real long time indeed. Perhaps it's worth keeping an MD5 database in both locations and checking them regularly. Wouldn't the tripwire tool be good for that?
That's smilar to what I do for my home data (I back up to a colo server though), but I think you might be missing one possibly important thing. You should guard against corrupted files in your backup, which could propagate through your snapshots by running rsync with the -c flag (compares files by a hash of their contents instead of just size and timestamp).
I leave my MythTV shows in the considerably less secure hands of a Linux MD RAID 5 array. I'm surprised you have only 3GB to backup, My digital photo's alone are 29GB and I'm not a big photographer. The size of each of my snapshots is 162 GB.
I'll tell my Russian friend, she must be prejudiced then.
One of her friends - an old university professor - is forced (by poverty) to write the assignments for his own students (the ones who have money but are too stupid to write them themselves).
I've been using them for more than 4 years. I have an enhanced account. Before that I did my own mail server, but that's just too much hassle. They give me all the flexibility without the bother.
BTW, the downtimes were worse than that IIRC, but that was years ago. They since fixed their infrastructure and I haven't had a problem since.
Well, I think it sucks and how anyone can call this a competitive advantage escapes me. Imagine if Nokia phone owners could only talk to other Nokia phone users.
There used to be a time when you read tech-news first on slashdot. Nowadays I read it in my (Dutch) newspaper first (yep, the paper one that they actually have to print and deliver first) end a few days later it appears in/.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're not sensible. We aren't a race either.
Making cannabis semi-legal is a huge mistake. It attracts a lot of drugs tourism, from the US and UK, Germany, Belgium and France.
The result is that 4 billion euros are pumped into a half-legal economy yearly. The stores that sell it (the coffeeshops) are mostly legal, but everything else, from distributors to growers is illegal.
Some city districts have been tranformed into cannabis growing plantations. People grow large scale cannabis in their lofts and in their cellars and they can make quite a lot of money with it (usually to supplement their unemployment benefit). Of course, it's still illegal...
So if you get into trouble. You distributor won't pay you, or you get ripped off by someone who specializes in this, you have nowhere to go but to hire other criminals to protect you and your business. More and more deaths are turning up in and around cannabis plantations.
It's legal to grow up to five plants in Holland, so perfectly ordinary people start out that way. Make some money and then want to make more. To avoid detection they normally tap illegal electricity for the necessary lamps.
So what have we got here? A nice system for turning ordinary citizens into criminals. What a great idea!
It's madness in my opinion. I have nothing against legalizing cannabis, but do it the right way. Legalize everything so that professional growers (or amateurs turning professional) can make legal money with it or don't legalize it at all.
Also do it *at least* Europe-wide. We really don't need all European losers to come here to get high.
The Dutch solution is not sensible at all. It's cowardly and stupid.
BTW: One of your favourite bunch of people just killed five innocent people celebrating the queen's birthday. Perhaps you need a reality check.
X. (yeah Dutch)
If I run cable from my patch panel to my wall boxes (thru conduits) I connect them myself with a punch tool. In my experience that usually works well and reliable.
But my experiences with putting RJ connectors on cables are pretty bad. Too often I end up with problematic cables.
So I buy patch cables from the store, but in the back-end I punch them into the connectors myself. That's my winning combination ;)
X.
True. But before that it wasn't improving at all. Sadly, I don't have the resources to do a double blind test with my own health.
I think the viral varieties usually come with cold-like symptoms and coughing. That feels quite different.
X.
"Here in Europe?" Here in Holland they're very restrictive with antibiotics. In Greece, however, you just point at your throat and make a painful face at the drugstore and they give you a pack of wide-spectrum AB's.
It's not that simple with sore throats. Some are viral and some (very painful) are bacterial. With the latter AB's work well. I understand in the US they take a sample and analyse it. In Holland they don't seem to think that's worth while.
During my last two week bout with a bad sore throat, I demanded AB's from my MD and got them. The throat cleared up within a day, fever dropped. When I was young and had regular painful sore throats the AB's always seemed to work as well. Could be placebo I guess, but I don't think so.
So, my conclusion is that, as usual, Dutch doctors go too far where perhaps others don't go far enough.
X.
The difference is that you take extra special care to take as much of the delicious tobacco smoke in your lungs as possible. Your neighbour's chimney was designed specifically to keep the smoke out of his lungs. And when you're burning grasses you get out of the way of the smoke.
So, yes, in theory natural tobacco smoke is probably not more toxic than any other organic smoke, but in practice smokers and people who stay in the same rooms tend to inhale much more of the latter. Sniffing smoke from your neighbour's chimney 20 times a day would probably also be very bad for your health.
X.
Yeah, I've noticed this argument before. "Natural tobacco is perfectly safe, because it's pure".
Pure hogwash, you mean...
Don't forget oil is natural too. Problem is, the gases it produces when you burn it are toxic.
Same problem with all natural plants and woods. When you burn them, you create lots of complicated carbon based molecules and many of them are toxic.
Sap from the natural taxus tree kills you dead. They even use it to treat some forms of cancer. They call it chemo-therapy then...
Your ideas about 'natural' things need some adjustment. Some people have a borderline religious attitude towards nature. It's almost unnatural... ;)
X.
Oh yes. I upgraded because I needed Firebug features that required it. But I'm still daily annoyed by it. I hate it!
X.
I'll look into that sometime. I've built enough PHP stuff already without a framework to be comfortable without one, but I recently got into the jquery javascript framework and that was a very pleasant experience compared to plain javascript.
Maybe CodeIgniter would provide a similar experience to plain old PHP.
X.
The easiest way to prevent SQL injection is to use a library like MBD2 ( http://pear.php.net/package/MDB2 ) and use placeholders.
That way any data you use in SQL statements is automatically quoted.
Perl users have had this for ages with the DBI module, so SQL injection is much less likely in Perl than in PHP. Hackers like PHP ;)
Also AFAIK PHP has no convenient way of stripping Javascript from user input which also creates a risk.
X.
What's the URL? ;)
HIV is a bastard of a virus. Our immune systems can usually handle most viruses without intervention. You cant win on your own against HIV. It will destroy the immune system eventually.
HIV is a bastard because it's relatively benign and very hard to transmit. A normal deadly virus like Ebola kills you quickly, HIV keeps you healthy and able to infect others for years. It's mainly transferred by sex, which is a big bummer for all of us who like to sleep around which includes lots of gay men.
But once you have it, you won't get rid of it. Nothing special either, because most people live with the chicken pox virus for most of their lives. That usually doesn't kill you, though...
X.
I was waiting for someone to write that. Thanks, saves me the trouble. Don't think you can win over people by being rude.
I dunno about the US, but I can buy a 720p 32" LCD TV for 550 EURO's in Holland. I also just bought a 1080p capable HDX-1000 Network Media Player for 275 EURO's so for 825 EURO's ($1062) I have a HD setup that does a great job at playing my HD torrents. Pretty good value me thinks.
X.
We used to call it polymorphic code. A much prettier name if you ask me.
Been around since 1990:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1260_(computer_virus)
I've been very annoyed with the Dutch newspaper reports on this issue. All the headlines I've seen were talking about 'Virtual theft punished for the first time', which is, of course, nonsense. I'm glad /. did better.
Theft of 'virtual property' is nothing special. Lot's of things, like my bank balance, are only represented by bits and bytes these days. If you steal it, you're still a real life thief.
The theft, intimidation and violence were very real and very punishable. Any other decision would've been an outrage.
Killing someone in Quake (or whatever FPS is fashionable these days) is obviously virtual murder and not punishable outside the game.
X.
Home movies as well, although I wouldn't call them hi-def. I also backup my music collection. I may have lost some of the original CD's ;)
I don't do the -c thing either, but I keep thinking I should. It's probably going to take a real long time indeed. Perhaps it's worth keeping an MD5 database in both locations and checking them regularly. Wouldn't the tripwire tool be good for that?
That's smilar to what I do for my home data (I back up to a colo server though), but I think you might be missing one possibly important thing. You should guard against corrupted files in your backup, which could propagate through your snapshots by running rsync with the -c flag (compares files by a hash of their contents instead of just size and timestamp).
I leave my MythTV shows in the considerably less secure hands of a Linux MD RAID 5 array. I'm surprised you have only 3GB to backup, My digital photo's alone are 29GB and I'm not a big photographer. The size of each of my snapshots is 162 GB.
X.
Come on! We must be able to link this to some kind of human activity!
I'll tell my Russian friend, she must be prejudiced then.
One of her friends - an old university professor - is forced (by poverty) to write the assignments for his own students (the ones who have money but are too stupid to write them themselves).
You know any western countries like that?
I've been using them for more than 4 years. I have an enhanced account. Before that I did my own mail server, but that's just too much hassle. They give me all the flexibility without the bother.
BTW, the downtimes were worse than that IIRC, but that was years ago. They since fixed their infrastructure and I haven't had a problem since.
Support is excellent.
X.
I'll bet it's funded by the people who leave their dog's shit in the road.
They pay a fine and the cost of the DNA test.
Great plan, I wish they did it in my town. It's full of shit :(
X.
That's why I tunnel over OpenVPN...
Well, I think it sucks and how anyone can call this a competitive advantage escapes me. Imagine if Nokia phone owners could only talk to other Nokia phone users.
X.
Is there an iChat for Windows, Linux?
There used to be a time when you read tech-news first on slashdot. Nowadays I read it in my (Dutch) newspaper first (yep, the paper one that they actually have to print and deliver first) end a few days later it appears in /.
What the hell is wrong?