Comprehensive phone tapping is a piece of cake compared to comprehensive sewer tapping. I certainly have never claimed the former was impossible, so don't blame me.
But, you can not put sewer sampling units in every house without attracting attention. And, you can not reliably separate sewage once it's been mixed up - and if there comes some science fiction technology to do that, it can't be kept hidden for long.
"The money these healthy people spend on drugs should easily outweigh the money required to rehabilitate and treat the unfortunate victims."
No way. As I said, treatment is horribly expensive and inefficient.
1) Yes, but under a legalization regime they would be a key source of income for seriously crooked and evil corporations, people willing to earn big money from wrecking people. Think the tobacco companies are evil? Wait until you see heroin companies.
2) No, not really. There are proposals around to give drug users legal ways to test quality. But I'm not so sure quality is that big a problem anyway, the criminals have an interest in not killing off their customers.
3) This point is denying supply and demand. Is it hard to get coca-cola? No. Is consumption of coca-cola affected if you remove it from 9 out of 10 stores, or put vending machines on every corner? Yes. Even the amount of toilet paper you use is affected by increased avaliability, do you really think addictive drugs are an exception to this very broad pattern?
4) Depends on the drugs, I suppose. Some drugs are hard to combine with a productive lifestyle. As to contributing to the criminal underworld, is that really so horribly much worse than contributing to the mega-drug corporations that would appear? Sure, they might break less kneecaps, but they would get easier access to lobbyists, easier ways of producing bad science or suppressing science they don't like, and they could more easily ally with various labels and brands to sell their wares. In short, they could do all the tobacco companies did (and do), and then some.
5) Was it Levitt who commented that a typical drug dealer earns less than he would working at McDonalds? No, gangs wouldn't go away. They might be hurt somewhat economically, but they have a infrastructure for violence and extortion, and they would probably find new ways of capitalising on it. Plus, we'd get gangs in suits instead, as I've explained. (Also, didn't you say you wanted a tax to fund addiction treatment? Well, there's a market opportunity for the gangs right there. Tax-free drugs.)
Yes, trying to rein in the profit motive is a sensible strategy for dealing with sale of harmful products. It has been very successful against alcohol when implemented on a local level, and also reasonably successful on a national level (anything stronger than beer is sold at state-run non-profits in Norway and Sweden, and a lot of districts used to have similar beer monopolies).
But it's not a cure-all. The "rehabilitation tax" to be levied at the drugs sold from the non-profit government store would have to be prohibitively high. This would create a flourishing black market for untaxed drugs - as there indeed is in countries with high taxes on alcohol or tobacco. Coupled with the increased use that _would_ come from increased supply (drugs obey market forces like everything else), it's not at all clear that the government monopoly solution is better than all-out criminalization.
Making adults take responsibility for their own actions? Sure, great. But not easy. After all, evading responsibility is usually the reason people use drugs. And what you do to yourself may still incur a cost to me. For instance, if I find your overdosed body on my doorstep, I'm materially quite harmed, and I think I'm entitled to try to protect myself from that.
Worry about that when it happens. It's not as if these systems scale up to the house level automatically, or to your example: hardware doesn't upgrade by itself.
Less intrusive than mandatory drug testing. At least if no one in the office is snorting cocaine, they'll know without shoving a drug test up your nose.
Poor example, since LSD is apparently pretty hard to overdose on...
Anyway, it's already legal to make nutmeg tea, which is both hallucinogenic and extremely easy to overdose on (if you try to use it as a drug - as a spice, it's pretty harmless, although I'd be careful with giving it to very small children). The reason you don't see many "nutmeg murders" is that it's not a popular way of smashing your brains out... but if today's illegals become common enough for such extreme scenarios (and I do think legalisation could cause that), their use would already be a much worse problem than a couple of odd murders.
Sewer epidemiology is the wave of the future! ick...
Seriously, there are a lot of legitimate uses for data extracted from sewage plants. As long as they serve enough people, and don't check for things rare enough to track back to any individual, I see no problems with it, and plenty of useful ones.
They already know quite well how much is sold on their turf, and probably a lot more than government about the overall market. No, it's the good guys (well, marginally better) who have an interest in this; it allows them to get accurate data for something notoriously difficult to get accurate data on.
"it really is only a problem for the rest of society because of the high cost of those drugs and the dangerous criminal element associated with distributing those substances"
I'd say there is another problem, which people don't appreciate. It's that if you sell these things at any large scale, you know very well what it does to people's lives. Even sellers of tobacco and alcohol know that. Still, they do it, because they figure someone else would if they didn't... it's a huge "moral hazard", in market failure speak.
So, do you make $$$ by wrecking people's lives, or do you go out of business? I don't think people should have to face that dilemma, and therefore I think it's perfectly acceptable for us as a society to collectively say "no, we won't accept that way of getting rich". It's not a perfect solution, because laws are hard to enforce (especially with eroding support), but it's legitimate, that's my point.
No, you're wrong. Treating addicts is extremely expensive and unreliable. It takes months to years of treatment by highly eductaed personnel, and it usually only works for a brief period. One dollar in prevention is worth a lot of dollars in treatment.
Whether the various government attempts at prevention (through PR campaigns, harsh penalties, intelligence efforts to track down key members in the supply chain etc.) work as well as they could is a separate question, but there's no question that treating addicts is not enough. I'd almost go so far as saying treating addicts is something governments (and charities) do because they feel they should help individuals, not because they think it makes any significant difference in the whole.
I'm stuck with an old version of Builder at work due to lock-in and porting issues. I would not touch that proprietary piece of evil with a ten foot pole.
The ultimate difference between a text editor and and IDE as far as I'm concerned, is that a text editor doesn't really parse your code like a compiler does. Oh, it does a little parsing for syntax highlighting, and if you strap in some extra applications you can get some cross-referencing, documentation access and even a little autocompletion... but an IDE knows what type that variable is.
I tried a very-beta haskell plugin for Visual Studio. It was a real shock (I've just used editors for haskell before). When you've got a type system as powerful as Haskell's, and the IDE instantly tells you when you make a type mistake... In Haskell just about _all_ errors in your thinking will show up as type errors, so it's like having a guru by your side patiently explaining things to you.
That's when I switched from a small, fast editor (Nedit) to a slow, plugin-heavy one for regular editing (jEdit), and started making serious efforts towards groking Eclipse. I understand now what an IDE can potentially do for you.
Netbeans no, I don't think so, Eclipse, definitively. There are extreme amounts of eclipse plugins out there, the problem is getting them to work, setting them up and understanding them.
A GPL violator can be forced to compensate, just like with any other copyright infringement. That it hasn't happened yet just shows that copyright holders aren't very interested in pursuing that avenue. However, if you look at gplviolations.org, you'll see that most companies make a donation in addition to moving into compliance, as part of the agreement to drop charges.
"When you violate the GPL, you immediately lose your license to the GPL'ed code and you are liable for your past and future license violations. You cannot make up for that past violation by coming into compliance, and you cannot restore your license to use the code under the GPL license by coming into compliance."
Right. Which is why companies caught by projects like gplviolations usually give a "voluntary donation" to a free software project in addition to moving into compliance.
Here in Norway the absolute maximum speed limit is 100 km/h (ca 62 mph). I know only one road that has that. For most roads, it's 70 km/h (43 mph), when a major road goes through a town it's down to 50 km/h (31 mph).
You are right about the roundabouts, though. People take some time getting used to them, but they prevent deadlocks and makes traffic flow much more efficiently. In just twenty years, just about all red lights have been replaced where I live (except those for zebra stripes, of course).
> There has got to be at least a reasonable chance of me driving to the DMV to get an expired license or tags renewed without being pulled over on my way there.
If everyone who breaks a law gets caught, there is less excuse for stiff penalties. If every drunk driver was certain to be stopped within a hundred yards of driving, there would be no need for heavy fines, because drunk driving just wouldn't be much of a problem anymore.
I think severe penalties are a worse intrusion on liberty than some limited tracking of your public movements. If that's part of the deal (and it should be) I think this system is a net gain.
Seems to me after the bitkeeper fiasco, the defense of tivoisation and now something that looks like unreasonable disfavoisation, Linus is increasingly a somewhat cranky dictator rather than a benevolent one.
It's about time he got some competition. GPL3 Solaris would be fun.
Anyway, it goes way beyond that, too. My wife's great-grandfather had an oyster company, some years after his death (and many years after the closing of the oyster company), his daughter recieved a nigeria letter adressed to the company.
We are talking about advance payment scams here, not herbal viagra.
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Comprehensive phone tapping is a piece of cake compared to comprehensive sewer tapping. I certainly have never claimed the former was impossible, so don't blame me.
But, you can not put sewer sampling units in every house without attracting attention. And, you can not reliably separate sewage once it's been mixed up - and if there comes some science fiction technology to do that, it can't be kept hidden for long.
No, not the same at all.
"The money these healthy people spend on drugs should easily outweigh the money required to rehabilitate and treat the unfortunate victims."
No way. As I said, treatment is horribly expensive and inefficient.
1) Yes, but under a legalization regime they would be a key source of income for seriously crooked and evil corporations, people willing to earn big money from wrecking people. Think the tobacco companies are evil? Wait until you see heroin companies.
2) No, not really. There are proposals around to give drug users legal ways to test quality. But I'm not so sure quality is that big a problem anyway, the criminals have an interest in not killing off their customers.
3) This point is denying supply and demand. Is it hard to get coca-cola? No. Is consumption of coca-cola affected if you remove it from 9 out of 10 stores, or put vending machines on every corner? Yes. Even the amount of toilet paper you use is affected by increased avaliability, do you really think addictive drugs are an exception to this very broad pattern?
4) Depends on the drugs, I suppose. Some drugs are hard to combine with a productive lifestyle. As to contributing to the criminal underworld, is that really so horribly much worse than contributing to the mega-drug corporations that would appear? Sure, they might break less kneecaps, but they would get easier access to lobbyists, easier ways of producing bad science or suppressing science they don't like, and they could more easily ally with various labels and brands to sell their wares. In short, they could do all the tobacco companies did (and do), and then some.
5) Was it Levitt who commented that a typical drug dealer earns less than he would working at McDonalds? No, gangs wouldn't go away. They might be hurt somewhat economically, but they have a infrastructure for violence and extortion, and they would probably find new ways of capitalising on it. Plus, we'd get gangs in suits instead, as I've explained. (Also, didn't you say you wanted a tax to fund addiction treatment? Well, there's a market opportunity for the gangs right there. Tax-free drugs.)
Yes, trying to rein in the profit motive is a sensible strategy for dealing with sale of harmful products. It has been very successful against alcohol when implemented on a local level, and also reasonably successful on a national level (anything stronger than beer is sold at state-run non-profits in Norway and Sweden, and a lot of districts used to have similar beer monopolies).
But it's not a cure-all. The "rehabilitation tax" to be levied at the drugs sold from the non-profit government store would have to be prohibitively high. This would create a flourishing black market for untaxed drugs - as there indeed is in countries with high taxes on alcohol or tobacco. Coupled with the increased use that _would_ come from increased supply (drugs obey market forces like everything else), it's not at all clear that the government monopoly solution is better than all-out criminalization.
Making adults take responsibility for their own actions? Sure, great. But not easy. After all, evading responsibility is usually the reason people use drugs. And what you do to yourself may still incur a cost to me. For instance, if I find your overdosed body on my doorstep, I'm materially quite harmed, and I think I'm entitled to try to protect myself from that.
Worry about that when it happens. It's not as if these systems scale up to the house level automatically, or to your example: hardware doesn't upgrade by itself.
Less intrusive than mandatory drug testing. At least if no one in the office is snorting cocaine, they'll know without shoving a drug test up your nose.
Poor example, since LSD is apparently pretty hard to overdose on...
Anyway, it's already legal to make nutmeg tea, which is both hallucinogenic and extremely easy to overdose on (if you try to use it as a drug - as a spice, it's pretty harmless, although I'd be careful with giving it to very small children). The reason you don't see many "nutmeg murders" is that it's not a popular way of smashing your brains out... but if today's illegals become common enough for such extreme scenarios (and I do think legalisation could cause that), their use would already be a much worse problem than a couple of odd murders.
Sewer epidemiology is the wave of the future! ick...
Seriously, there are a lot of legitimate uses for data extracted from sewage plants. As long as they serve enough people, and don't check for things rare enough to track back to any individual, I see no problems with it, and plenty of useful ones.
They already know quite well how much is sold on their turf, and probably a lot more than government about the overall market. No, it's the good guys (well, marginally better) who have an interest in this; it allows them to get accurate data for something notoriously difficult to get accurate data on.
"it really is only a problem for the rest of society because of the high cost of those drugs and the dangerous criminal element associated with distributing those substances"
I'd say there is another problem, which people don't appreciate. It's that if you sell these things at any large scale, you know very well what it does to people's lives. Even sellers of tobacco and alcohol know that. Still, they do it, because they figure someone else would if they didn't... it's a huge "moral hazard", in market failure speak.
So, do you make $$$ by wrecking people's lives, or do you go out of business? I don't think people should have to face that dilemma, and therefore I think it's perfectly acceptable for us as a society to collectively say "no, we won't accept that way of getting rich". It's not a perfect solution, because laws are hard to enforce (especially with eroding support), but it's legitimate, that's my point.
No, you're wrong. Treating addicts is extremely expensive and unreliable. It takes months to years of treatment by highly eductaed personnel, and it usually only works for a brief period. One dollar in prevention is worth a lot of dollars in treatment.
Whether the various government attempts at prevention (through PR campaigns, harsh penalties, intelligence efforts to track down key members in the supply chain etc.) work as well as they could is a separate question, but there's no question that treating addicts is not enough. I'd almost go so far as saying treating addicts is something governments (and charities) do because they feel they should help individuals, not because they think it makes any significant difference in the whole.
Still, they decide, it seems. Why shouldn't there be a vote?
I can't seem to find it in their FAQ. Supporting Free software, but no openness about the selection process? Come on.
I'm stuck with an old version of Builder at work due to lock-in and porting issues. I would not touch that proprietary piece of evil with a ten foot pole.
The ultimate difference between a text editor and and IDE as far as I'm concerned, is that a text editor doesn't really parse your code like a compiler does. Oh, it does a little parsing for syntax highlighting, and if you strap in some extra applications you can get some cross-referencing, documentation access and even a little autocompletion... but an IDE knows what type that variable is.
I tried a very-beta haskell plugin for Visual Studio. It was a real shock (I've just used editors for haskell before). When you've got a type system as powerful as Haskell's, and the IDE instantly tells you when you make a type mistake... In Haskell just about _all_ errors in your thinking will show up as type errors, so it's like having a guru by your side patiently explaining things to you.
That's when I switched from a small, fast editor (Nedit) to a slow, plugin-heavy one for regular editing (jEdit), and started making serious efforts towards groking Eclipse. I understand now what an IDE can potentially do for you.
Netbeans no, I don't think so, Eclipse, definitively. There are extreme amounts of eclipse plugins out there, the problem is getting them to work, setting them up and understanding them.
> Visual Studio is hardly "perfect" but it is BY FAR in advace of /anything/ I've used on Linux that calls itself an "IDE".
What about eclipse?
What they typically mention until you fall asleep is that "it's free as in speech, not as in beer". So I'd say you're wrong.
A GPL violator can be forced to compensate, just like with any other copyright infringement. That it hasn't happened yet just shows that copyright holders aren't very interested in pursuing that avenue. However, if you look at gplviolations.org, you'll see that most companies make a donation in addition to moving into compliance, as part of the agreement to drop charges.
"When you violate the GPL, you immediately lose your license to the GPL'ed code and you are liable for your past and future license violations. You cannot make up for that past violation by coming into compliance, and you cannot restore your license to use the code under the GPL license by coming into compliance."
Right. Which is why companies caught by projects like gplviolations usually give a "voluntary donation" to a free software project in addition to moving into compliance.
Yeah, right. It's so easy to get spyware on 64-bit Mandriva.
Here in Norway the absolute maximum speed limit is 100 km/h (ca 62 mph). I know only one road that has that. For most roads, it's 70 km/h (43 mph), when a major road goes through a town it's down to 50 km/h (31 mph).
You are right about the roundabouts, though. People take some time getting used to them, but they prevent deadlocks and makes traffic flow much more efficiently. In just twenty years, just about all red lights have been replaced where I live (except those for zebra stripes, of course).
> There has got to be at least a reasonable chance of me driving to the DMV to get an expired license or tags renewed without being pulled over on my way there.
If everyone who breaks a law gets caught, there is less excuse for stiff penalties. If every drunk driver was certain to be stopped within a hundred yards of driving, there would be no need for heavy fines, because drunk driving just wouldn't be much of a problem anymore.
I think severe penalties are a worse intrusion on liberty than some limited tracking of your public movements. If that's part of the deal (and it should be) I think this system is a net gain.
Can you please explain why your links point to a file called "spybotsd14.exe" instead of the announced jpeg images?
Seems to me after the bitkeeper fiasco, the defense of tivoisation and now something that looks like unreasonable disfavoisation, Linus is increasingly a somewhat cranky dictator rather than a benevolent one.
It's about time he got some competition. GPL3 Solaris would be fun.
?
Anyway, it goes way beyond that, too. My wife's great-grandfather had an oyster company, some years after his death (and many years after the closing of the oyster company), his daughter recieved a nigeria letter adressed to the company.
We are talking about advance payment scams here, not herbal viagra.