The authorities have been frustrated in their efforts to crack down on the trade because these sites generally exist on the so-called dark web, where buyers can visit anonymously using special browsers and make purchases with virtual currencies like Bitcoin.
Translation: "Police want the power to intrude on your privacy on the Internet even further and to treat Bitcoin like child pornography." And the reason government hates Bitcoin and other new currencies has little to do with drugs, and a lot with power, control, and the financial interests of crony capitalists.
who died last fall in the wealthy resort town of Park City, Utah, after taking a synthetic opioid known as U-47700 or Pinky
The reason this keeps happening has nothing to do with Bitcoin or Chinese dealers or the "dark web", it has to do with the fact that our insane drug policy creates a demand for designer drugs with highly variable properties.
If you want to reduce harm and drug deaths, stop this cat-and-mouse game with designer drugs and just legalize the traditional, plant-derived drugs (and the plants themselves, of course).
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than bleeding away our civil liberties for a pointless and ineffective war on drugs.
Sure, why should anyone have a problem with an adversarial foreign power meddling in our elections?
The only thing that has been even alleged so far (and we don't even have firm evidence for that) is that Russia placed favorite press coverage for Trump, paid for social media posting, and leaked some E-mails. Those are all protected by US law, and for good reason: they are free speech. Americans can engage in it, and so can foreign nations; how would you even stop it if you wanted to? When you're using weasel words like "meddle", you're trying to hide the fact that you don't even have a specific, plausible accusation.
And if Putin was actually responsible for that (big if), it was evidently because he hated Hillary. You know, the same way many other European leaders and newspapers hated Trump, and before her McCain. How is it different from Hillary and her many foreign friends and supporters? Did you complain of "foreign meddling" then? How would any such actions turn Trump into Putin's puppet? How would that even work?
This Russia-Trump thing is a nutty conspiracy theory, with no evidence to back it up and not even a plausible hypothesis or accusation. Trump isn't even particularly friendly with Putin now, so if Putin tried to get a puppet in the White House, he obviously failed.
Says the guy that never worked on a project with 100+ classes and 100k+ lines of code...
The thing is that if that's a Java project, you can probably rewrite it in a better designed language and cut that down to 10 classes and 10 kloc. Java is just horribly wasteful of programmer time, creates tons of unnecessary complexity, and is wasteful of computer resources on top of that.
Python's widespread adoption is not due to some magic programming language sauce but network effects. In a sense, Python has taken on a niche similar to Visual Basic. But that's also why Python has such a hard time evolving: you can't improve it much without breaking a lot of its libraries.
Python's biggest limitations, the way it represents objects and limited concurrency, actually already have been addressed in a number of Python re-implementations, but people aren't using those because many extensions and libraries don't quite run in those environments.
So, Python won't become "the" dominant programming language, it will just remain one of of a number of popular programming languages.
If there will be a single dominant programming language eventually, it will probably have to look more like Swif: near native speed, garbage collection, some systems programming features, and yet interactive execution via on-the-fly LLVM compilation.
. Russia is a kleptocracy, all of those oligarchs need a way to get their money out of the country so they can spend it on stuff you can't buy in Russia.
Many of the biggest investors in the US real estate market are Europeans with no money laundering needs. Trump's biggest lender is Deutsche Bank, not some Russian oligarch.
The real reason for the massive foreign investment in US assets is simple: our massive consumer spending on imports. Many groups in the US don't want that to stop because it pushes up real estate and share prices in the US. But it's probably not good long term public policy,
Not if your plan is to position yourself on US assets - Russian billionaires in particular have been dropping shitloads of money on real state in the USA.
That's not some secret master plan of Russian billionaires to take over the US, it's the result of our trade imbalance with the rest of the world. It's what happens when you engage in free trade with non-free economies and adopt government policies that favor consumption over investment. I'm glad you are actually recognizing it as a problem.
Getting leverage over the current POTUS is just a perk.
An extremely unlikely one, given how rarely US real estate moguls become POTUS. And, of course, in the case of Trump, there is no evidence that it is happening or that Trump cares: his biggest lenders are German and American, and he is certainly not treating the Germans nicely.
Sure, let's mention a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the topic.
The assertion was that Russia lent money to Trump in some master plan to make the POTUS dependent on Russia. That's ludicrous because a presidential win by Trump was so extremely unlikely.
Hillary was not a good candidate by a long shot but did nothing wrong by legal standards.
So? Did I claim anywhere that she did? I listed the controversies that killed her campaign, a long list of unlikely, self-inflicted wounds that Russia had no way of predicting.
Writing off meddling in our election by an adversarial foreign power is downright treasonous as far as I'm concerned.
Translation: "because I don't like what you say, I think you should be shot", because that's what accusing someone of treason amounts to. Of course, that's pretty much what Democrats believe these days.
For the last two decades no American based bank would loan Trump money due to his shady business practices and so the money he has been using comes from either Russia. Or China (a whole new issue.)
Since Donald Trump became a presidential candidate, journalists and investigators looking at his business holdings have wondered if there are any Russian connections to the complicated and opaque finances of his real estate empire. So far, no solid evidence of a Moscow link has emerged.
A large chunk of his foreign money seems to come from Germany. But Trump doesn't seem to be particularly friendly with Merkel or the Germans. In fact, they hate his guts.
Of course, that's not surprising either: the influx of foreign money and influence is the consequence of our trade imbalance, which Trump fortunately seems to want to address.
I am not sure what the point of your post is
It's to mock bigots, liars, and conspiracy nuts like you. Of course, it's perhaps just easier to call you what you are: a bigot, a liar, and a conspiracy nut, and to tell you to go to hell.
So if no banks will loan Trump money, why would Russia or China take those loans? Surely they know its bad business.
It's because of their secret, long running master plan to make Donald Trump president of the US! Even though the entire US intelligentsia was firmly convinced Trump didn't have a chance right until the election, those Russians already had their perfect master plan constructed years earlier! I mean, in order to make this work out, they had to start years ago, investing billions in Trump's businesses.
They masterfully created the Benghazi controversy, then they tempted Hillary with $250k Wall St speeches, they propped up Sanders and then bribed Democratic delegates to vote against him so that Hillary would be damaged, they paid off Democratic party operatives to send damaging E-mails to Podesta and Hillary! Heck, they even planted the "grab them by the pussy video" so that Trump would have a chance to highlight Bill's sexual harassment! And then they sent over their finest PR handlers and makeup artists to give Donald Trump that winning personality, those eloquent speeches, and that irresistible orange hue! And don't forget the secret mind control rays they must have been beaming into American brains via cell phones and bluetooth headsets for years!
Oh, those masterful Russian manipulators and their devious long-term plans!
Had Comey not done his political stunt with the Weiner's e-mails it wouldn't have flipped the election and I doubt they expected it to
You also believe in the Easter Bunny?
That is what Trump doesn't want you to know and why he has been so eager to stop any investigation regarding Russia.
Except, of course, that Trump hasn't tried to "stop any investigation regarding Russia" and that Comey has consistently stated that Trump is not under investigation.
In other words Putin probably has the power to ruin Trump -- the U.S. President! -- and family financially with just a phone call.
And JFK was killed by space aliens, right? You heard that in the X Files?
It will come up eventually and the only real question is how far Trump will hang on
See the email leak smear attempt just two days before
Well, you're entitled to be upset about it in France because in France, publishing such information is illegal.
In the US, Americans have the legal right to publish "email leak smears" on any candidate they want before an election. Furthermore, Americans have a legal right to access such "email leak smears" when they are published by foreign powers, whether it's RT or Wikileaks, or some European politician. And let's not kid ourselves here, politicians in France, Germany, and the UK were trying to influence the US election massively.
Anybody who claims to be surprised that Russia is trying to spread propaganda or obtain secrets on US government officials obviously has been so out of touch with reality that they have no business being in government. Ditto for any US government official whose computer security is so weak that Russian espionage attempts are successful.
True: the US occupation of Europe since WWII and the close supervision of Germany have been fairly effective in preventing major European atrocities.
You need to realize, though, that Americans are getting tired of paying for Europe's defense or cleaning up the shit that centuries of European colonialism and imperialism have dumped on the world. Whether it's Vietnam, Africa, or the Middle East, it's almost always Europe's fault.
so what is your point?
My point is that Americans couldn't care less whether Europeans laugh at them or throwing temper tantrums in response to US presidents not coddling them anymore.
While the US remains in the Accord, it has some means to shape it. But outside of the Accord, by and large the US will, through commercial and local interests, try to abide by it, but will no longer have a Federal government capable of speaking for US interests.
So you're saying that leaving the accord not only saves tax payer money, it also means that the US government will be more limited in engaging in crony capitalism on behalf of big corporations?
I think you're beginning to figure out why people wanted to leave this accord! Congratulations!
To be fair, the US had already become the international laughing stock when they elected George W. Bush Jr. as their president.
Europeans have been laughing at Americans since the 19th Century, if not earlier; they continued laughing through their dictatorships, monarchies, fascism, and communism.
The Europeans that didn't laugh did something much more sensible: they emigrated to the US.
Well, they supplied most of our breeding stock, financed the initial exploration and development (and plundering and genocide) for our country
Europe has been engaging in an orgy of war, destruction, oppression, and genocide for centuries. And you're right that European elites financed the plundering and genocide of peoples around the world. The people who actually came to the US and settled it were trying to get away from all that.
That's why it's utterly foolish for anybody in the world to give a hoot about what Europeans think of Americans.
I'll start getting really worried if Europeans actually started liking the US or US policies.
The Paris deal isn't a treaty, it's an "accord". Because that's different, it can be agreed to by the president without any buy-in from the legislature.
And the president can also choose not to do anything about its implementation since it's all voluntary anyway, and since there are no penalties.
It comes under the "umbrella" treaty agreement the US has with the UN which *was* ratified by congress.
Push that narrative far enough and the US will simply leave the treaty entirely.
Obama actually taught constitutional law at college,
You're saying that because "he taught constitutional law at college" he is qualified? Even if that were true, Obama is a lawyer, and lawyers don't necessarily use their knowledge and skill for truth or justice; often, they just use it to manipulate and win at any cost.
The situation among Silicon Valley's low-wage contract workers has become so perilous that in January
When the car you want costs more than you can afford, you get a different car.
Likewise, when your job pays less than you need, you get a different job.
What people are trying to do with jobs is the equivalent of buying a car on loan, driving it off the lot, and then try to renegotiate the price while refusing to give it back.
Inkjet printers use the hidden dot serial scheme too, all digital printers do.
When you fabricate facts, try to stick to something that's less easy to falsify.
IIRC it was put in place originally to help protect against counterfeit currency.
That was the political justification; whether it was the actual motivation is anybody's guess. But, I suppose, gullibility goes along with your evident penchant for fabrication.
The CTO and all the people in charge of the backups need to be on the street YESTERDAY though.
I think the company is hopelessly lost. It's not only the CTO that screwed up but the CEO who hired him. At that point, you run out of people to fire, and the company just goes out of business.
And he SHOULD get in a bit of trouble for it.
He should thank his lucky stars that he found out so quickly what a poorly run company had hired him.
You don't want to work at a company where the backups don't work and where a new hire can accidentally delete all their data. Don't beg to stay, instead be happy that you found out quickly how incompetent that company actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: "Police want the power to intrude on your privacy on the Internet even further and to treat Bitcoin like child pornography." And the reason government hates Bitcoin and other new currencies has little to do with drugs, and a lot with power, control, and the financial interests of crony capitalists.
The reason this keeps happening has nothing to do with Bitcoin or Chinese dealers or the "dark web", it has to do with the fact that our insane drug policy creates a demand for designer drugs with highly variable properties.
If you want to reduce harm and drug deaths, stop this cat-and-mouse game with designer drugs and just legalize the traditional, plant-derived drugs (and the plants themselves, of course).
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than bleeding away our civil liberties for a pointless and ineffective war on drugs.
The only thing that has been even alleged so far (and we don't even have firm evidence for that) is that Russia placed favorite press coverage for Trump, paid for social media posting, and leaked some E-mails. Those are all protected by US law, and for good reason: they are free speech. Americans can engage in it, and so can foreign nations; how would you even stop it if you wanted to? When you're using weasel words like "meddle", you're trying to hide the fact that you don't even have a specific, plausible accusation.
And if Putin was actually responsible for that (big if), it was evidently because he hated Hillary. You know, the same way many other European leaders and newspapers hated Trump, and before her McCain. How is it different from Hillary and her many foreign friends and supporters? Did you complain of "foreign meddling" then? How would any such actions turn Trump into Putin's puppet? How would that even work?
This Russia-Trump thing is a nutty conspiracy theory, with no evidence to back it up and not even a plausible hypothesis or accusation. Trump isn't even particularly friendly with Putin now, so if Putin tried to get a puppet in the White House, he obviously failed.
The thing is that if that's a Java project, you can probably rewrite it in a better designed language and cut that down to 10 classes and 10 kloc. Java is just horribly wasteful of programmer time, creates tons of unnecessary complexity, and is wasteful of computer resources on top of that.
Python's widespread adoption is not due to some magic programming language sauce but network effects. In a sense, Python has taken on a niche similar to Visual Basic. But that's also why Python has such a hard time evolving: you can't improve it much without breaking a lot of its libraries.
Python's biggest limitations, the way it represents objects and limited concurrency, actually already have been addressed in a number of Python re-implementations, but people aren't using those because many extensions and libraries don't quite run in those environments.
So, Python won't become "the" dominant programming language, it will just remain one of of a number of popular programming languages.
If there will be a single dominant programming language eventually, it will probably have to look more like Swif: near native speed, garbage collection, some systems programming features, and yet interactive execution via on-the-fly LLVM compilation.
Many of the biggest investors in the US real estate market are Europeans with no money laundering needs. Trump's biggest lender is Deutsche Bank, not some Russian oligarch.
The real reason for the massive foreign investment in US assets is simple: our massive consumer spending on imports. Many groups in the US don't want that to stop because it pushes up real estate and share prices in the US. But it's probably not good long term public policy,
That's not some secret master plan of Russian billionaires to take over the US, it's the result of our trade imbalance with the rest of the world. It's what happens when you engage in free trade with non-free economies and adopt government policies that favor consumption over investment. I'm glad you are actually recognizing it as a problem.
An extremely unlikely one, given how rarely US real estate moguls become POTUS. And, of course, in the case of Trump, there is no evidence that it is happening or that Trump cares: his biggest lenders are German and American, and he is certainly not treating the Germans nicely.
The assertion was that Russia lent money to Trump in some master plan to make the POTUS dependent on Russia. That's ludicrous because a presidential win by Trump was so extremely unlikely.
So? Did I claim anywhere that she did? I listed the controversies that killed her campaign, a long list of unlikely, self-inflicted wounds that Russia had no way of predicting.
Translation: "because I don't like what you say, I think you should be shot", because that's what accusing someone of treason amounts to. Of course, that's pretty much what Democrats believe these days.
Mother Jones:
A large chunk of his foreign money seems to come from Germany. But Trump doesn't seem to be particularly friendly with Merkel or the Germans. In fact, they hate his guts.
Of course, that's not surprising either: the influx of foreign money and influence is the consequence of our trade imbalance, which Trump fortunately seems to want to address.
It's to mock bigots, liars, and conspiracy nuts like you. Of course, it's perhaps just easier to call you what you are: a bigot, a liar, and a conspiracy nut, and to tell you to go to hell.
What I am talking about is that calling the exercise of free speech "interference in elections" is bullshit.
It's because of their secret, long running master plan to make Donald Trump president of the US! Even though the entire US intelligentsia was firmly convinced Trump didn't have a chance right until the election, those Russians already had their perfect master plan constructed years earlier! I mean, in order to make this work out, they had to start years ago, investing billions in Trump's businesses.
They masterfully created the Benghazi controversy, then they tempted Hillary with $250k Wall St speeches, they propped up Sanders and then bribed Democratic delegates to vote against him so that Hillary would be damaged, they paid off Democratic party operatives to send damaging E-mails to Podesta and Hillary! Heck, they even planted the "grab them by the pussy video" so that Trump would have a chance to highlight Bill's sexual harassment! And then they sent over their finest PR handlers and makeup artists to give Donald Trump that winning personality, those eloquent speeches, and that irresistible orange hue! And don't forget the secret mind control rays they must have been beaming into American brains via cell phones and bluetooth headsets for years!
Oh, those masterful Russian manipulators and their devious long-term plans!
You also believe in the Easter Bunny?
Except, of course, that Trump hasn't tried to "stop any investigation regarding Russia" and that Comey has consistently stated that Trump is not under investigation.
And JFK was killed by space aliens, right? You heard that in the X Files?
Hillary will yet be president! It's her turn!
Well, you're entitled to be upset about it in France because in France, publishing such information is illegal.
In the US, Americans have the legal right to publish "email leak smears" on any candidate they want before an election. Furthermore, Americans have a legal right to access such "email leak smears" when they are published by foreign powers, whether it's RT or Wikileaks, or some European politician. And let's not kid ourselves here, politicians in France, Germany, and the UK were trying to influence the US election massively.
I hope the US will never become like France.
That, in fact, is "classic espionage".
Anybody who claims to be surprised that Russia is trying to spread propaganda or obtain secrets on US government officials obviously has been so out of touch with reality that they have no business being in government. Ditto for any US government official whose computer security is so weak that Russian espionage attempts are successful.
True: the US occupation of Europe since WWII and the close supervision of Germany have been fairly effective in preventing major European atrocities.
You need to realize, though, that Americans are getting tired of paying for Europe's defense or cleaning up the shit that centuries of European colonialism and imperialism have dumped on the world. Whether it's Vietnam, Africa, or the Middle East, it's almost always Europe's fault.
My point is that Americans couldn't care less whether Europeans laugh at them or throwing temper tantrums in response to US presidents not coddling them anymore.
So you're saying that leaving the accord not only saves tax payer money, it also means that the US government will be more limited in engaging in crony capitalism on behalf of big corporations?
I think you're beginning to figure out why people wanted to leave this accord! Congratulations!
Europeans have been laughing at Americans since the 19th Century, if not earlier; they continued laughing through their dictatorships, monarchies, fascism, and communism.
The Europeans that didn't laugh did something much more sensible: they emigrated to the US.
Europe has been engaging in an orgy of war, destruction, oppression, and genocide for centuries. And you're right that European elites financed the plundering and genocide of peoples around the world. The people who actually came to the US and settled it were trying to get away from all that.
That's why it's utterly foolish for anybody in the world to give a hoot about what Europeans think of Americans.
I'll start getting really worried if Europeans actually started liking the US or US policies.
Climate change is real. Whether it's something to worry about is another question.
One thing that's crystal clear, however, is that the Paris agreement is not just useless but harmful.
And the president can also choose not to do anything about its implementation since it's all voluntary anyway, and since there are no penalties.
Push that narrative far enough and the US will simply leave the treaty entirely.
You're saying that because "he taught constitutional law at college" he is qualified? Even if that were true, Obama is a lawyer, and lawyers don't necessarily use their knowledge and skill for truth or justice; often, they just use it to manipulate and win at any cost.
When the car you want costs more than you can afford, you get a different car.
Likewise, when your job pays less than you need, you get a different job.
What people are trying to do with jobs is the equivalent of buying a car on loan, driving it off the lot, and then try to renegotiate the price while refusing to give it back.
When you fabricate facts, try to stick to something that's less easy to falsify.
That was the political justification; whether it was the actual motivation is anybody's guess. But, I suppose, gullibility goes along with your evident penchant for fabrication.
And the sky is blue!
Besides that... the sky is blue!
I think the company is hopelessly lost. It's not only the CTO that screwed up but the CEO who hired him. At that point, you run out of people to fire, and the company just goes out of business.
He should thank his lucky stars that he found out so quickly what a poorly run company had hired him.
You don't want to work at a company where the backups don't work and where a new hire can accidentally delete all their data. Don't beg to stay, instead be happy that you found out quickly how incompetent that company actually is.
No, I didn't. You need to read more carefully.
I don't think so, and neither do most European politicians, who insist on the distinction (they simply happen to misrepresent the US).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...