I hate to say it, but I would characterize your definition of "ex post facto" as the reassuring version.
What I worry about is the redefinition of crimes that already exist. For example, treason is currently illegal. It seems all too plausible to suppose that at some future date, acts which are not now considered treasonous may be redefined as high crimes. In fact, an argument can be made that this has already happened in the case of the so-called American Taliban. That poor confused idiot went over there to fight the infidels for Allah back when our government was praising the Taliban for stopping opium cultivation. Our government was cheerfully giving those freaks over 40 million bucks and a bunch of attaboys.
Next thing he knows, he's arrested for treason, even though it's really doubtful he had anything to do with the terrorist attacks, and so far as I know, no one saw him shooting at Americans.
I know, I know. It would still be unConstitutional to arrest a citizen for things that weren't technically illegal when he did them. Unfortunately, this seems not to matter too much to the Justice Department these days, since the Supreme Court has become a rubber stamp for various political agendas. Expedience seems to be more important than justice. After all, We're At Wartm.
I guess it's a good thing no Americans ever use the "international communications lines."
Maybe no real American would wish to communicate privately with any foreigners. Or what about Americans who are so disloyal as to accept employment with offshore corporations? Or foreign offices of American companies. What's the theory here?
we should totally be open to listening to alternative points of view, but is an open source conference really the proper venue for it?
As others have pointed out, it's probably the only place that open source and MS will get compared in a fair and factual manner, or at least as fair and factual as open source zealotry will allow. I doubt open source gets brought up as anything but Satanic Evilness to be Feared and Fought at MS-sponsored events.
But the point I'd like to make is that open source zealots should not oppose MS participation in open source events for one very important reason: in the disputes over the merits of Windows and open source OS like Linux, the open source advocates have the better argument. In any propaganda conflict, those who have the better argument should take every opportunity to contrast their arguments with the opposition's arguments, even if it's on their own dime.
An analogous situation can be found in the drug policy reform movement. When you visit a web site sponsored by a reform group, such as the Media Awareness Project, you'll find many links to drug war propaganda, and to the opinions of those who support the continuation of the war. But if you go to sites that support the government position, such as the Antidrug you'll find no links to the opposition. This is a reflection of the relative strengths of the arguments on both sides. Drug policy reformers want their opponents to be freely heard, because their arguments are so profoundly flawed that they help the reformers, rather than hurting.
I personally believe the same to be true of the MS vs. open source debate.
I'd argue that the more prevalent this becomes, the less value it has. One is less likely to encounter 'differently-thinking' participants, or to be confronted with legitimate ideas that challenge the status quo.
I may be misunderstanding you, but I can't see how blogging beccomes less valuable as it becomes "more prevalent." It may be that it becomes more difficult to locate items of "value," as the choices become more numerous, and of course there's a factor that the early adopters of any art form have an advantage in that they are likely to be more creative than late adopters of the form. Still, more choices seem more valuable, and certainly the odds favor the development of the best talent from the largest group of practitioners. To get back to the music analogy, early rockers were largely rock-a-billy practitioners and bluesmen, and some of them were great. But were any of them as great as, say, Jimi Hendrix, who came along when the art form was older and a lot more musicians participated?
Most dotcom era hippies lauded the advent of the Internet as a strike against The Man and everyone would be a publisher.
They still do, and they're still right. Everybody can be a publisher, but not everyone will be read. As someone here pointed out, writing turns out to be hard work and not every would-be writer has the knack for writing well enough to attract a readership larger than his mother.
What strikes me as odd about this conversation is its time-related sampling problems. Ten years ago there was no/. In another ten years, what new things will crawl over the horizon to make this conversation seem silly and irrelevant?
That's fine, of course, but the original poster asserted that she was writing solely for herself. She implied that she had no "alternative explanations" for putting her journal online.
The problem skeptical folks have with this is that if that were true, there would be no motive to put the journal online. And so why does she do it? She has no other way of keeping a journal except publicly? Unlikely.
I'd like to point out that it's not just Linux that has this problem though. If a new computer user is first introduced to Linux, they'd have just as many problems learning Windows.
I'd have to agree that a lot of it is just familiarity, rather than any great functional difference between the two operating systems, at least from the viewpoint of the average user. For example, my first experience with Linux was Slackware, oh-so-many-years-ago.
I had to go back to Windows, because at that time there wasn't a good substitute available for WordPerfect or Photoshop.
The next time was Redhat, which by 7.1 was a pretty good alternative to Windows. I'd been a Gnome user for a while. One day I switched to KDE, just to see what it was like. I found it seriously demoralizing when I switched back, only to discover that my dualboot system was booting into KDE rather than Gnome. It sounds stupid, but it really bothered me until I figured out how to fix it. And that was nothing more than cosmetics, for the most part.
The point is that familiarity is probably more important than technical merit to many if not most end-users. And not everyone see the ethical merit in having a useful alternative to the MS monopoly, though it's clear enough to me. Some folks just aren't politically motivated.
Weird view. So if you neglect to lock your door, you're just as responsible as the burglar who carries off your stuff, and ought to be prosecuted for willful negligence?
Okay! Yet another federal law enforcement bureaucracy is born: The Patch Enforcement Agency. It can parallel the organization of the Lock Enforcement Agency and the Don't Go Walking In Central Park After Dark Enforcement Agency.
That's what we need. More ways to hold victims responsible for the acts of criminals.
Here's an idea: why not just let nature (or in this case, the free market) take its course? sysadmins who neglect to patch their servers get fired, and those who employ such sysadmins lose business. The problem will take care of itself without introducing any new government meddling to gum up the works and make life harder for everyone.
This is sadly reminiscent of our present foreign policy. We can't catch Osama, we need the Saudis' oil, we're scared of North Korea, so we attack some tinpot dictator we're pretty sure we can beat.
Recycling human manure is not exactly cutting edge technology. In fact, there's actually a fascinating book that covers the subject, among others, called Farmers of Forty Centuries that goes into lots of detail on the Chinese agricultural system that worked so brilliantly for so long.
Actually, as I understand it, it may not be a good idea to use milorganite on edible crops, because the stuff is composted from municipal sewage and contains more heavy metals and dioxins than, say, cow manure. There used to be actively dangerous levels of contaminants, but a great stink was raised (sorry) and now Milwaukee claims the stuff is much safer.
Seems your neighbors tend to dump all manner of evil stuff down the drain. Probably smarter to do your own recycling, if you're going to use manure on your garden.
You've missed the point. It's a lot more economically attractive to just quit cold turkey, and just as effective. Then you don't have to pay for the patches and you get to keep all the money.
The point I was trying to make is that there are lots of folks who like the drug. Why not give them a less dangerous delivery system? If we actually cared about the health of smokers, we'd see that less-harmful delivery systems were available at a cost below the cost of cigarettes. A certain number of tobacco addicts are going to stay addicted. This is reality. We should deal with it.
Furthermore, if you work the cost out on a per-dose basis, you'll see that the cost of the nicotine in patches and gum is a lot more than the cost of a dose of nicotine in a cigarette.
When I was in first grade I was told that drugs were bad, this continued until my graduation 12 years later. When I watched TV I was told that drugs were bad. Cub Scout meetings, parents, school, Mr. Rogers, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, all told me the same thing.
Gee, do you think maybe that's an oversimplification? You might want to give some thought to the possibility that you weren't told the exact truth.
Sucks to be them. Hopefully they won't pass those dumbass genes on.
I'm guessing you haven't passed your genes along yet, because you sound very young. What folks like you don't seem to get is that a sensible drug policy would not just keep addicts alive until they get tired of being addicts, it would cut down the huge cost of drug abuse to the majority of us who don't abuse drugs. It's not just financial costs, either. Forget the many billions of dollars taken from you in taxes to prosecute the war on drugs. The war keeps drug prices artificially high. When heroin could be bought in pharmacies in little pills, it cost no more than aspirin. Now it costs a hundred times as much. That means that junkies have to steal a hundred times as much of your stuff and mine to finance their habits. That means that prostitutes have to turn a hundred times more tricks than they would if heroin and other drugs were sold at a price that reflected their legal production costs. Your home-owners insurance contains a hidden war-on-drugs tax, just like mine. If not for the artificial inflation caused by the drug war, junkies could keep up with the financial cost of their habits by flipping burgers. They could use clean needles or even a less dangerous method of use (injection is a strategy evolved to make the most efficient use of phenomenally expensive substances.) That would save us both money on our health insurance, because destitute junkies wouldn't be dying on the public dime as frequently, and wouldn't be spreading HIV and other dangerous diseases as often as they do now. It's in everyone's best interests to cut down on the number of potentially fatal diseases that move actively through a population. Unless you're absolutely certain that you'll never have sex with anyone who had sex with someone who might have had sex with a junkie, or a junkie's spouse, you are personally vulnerable. No matter how much you personally abstain from drug use, you can't escape the dangerous consequences of our present policy.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
I can never understand why folks who have no sympathy for drug users wouldn't like to see them able to get all the drugs they want, cheap. According to your view, wouldn't they just die off quicker? And aren't you saying that's a good thing?
BTW, I'm a libertarian who doesn't believe in subsidizing poverty with free housing and taxpayer money. Or in subsidizing junkies. But I can't understand why making drugs more dangerous than they already are is a rational and realistic policy.
Interesting product, but like gum, lozenges, and patches, NicoWater is a lot more expensive than cigarettes. Each bottle costs two bucks, and is the nicotine equivalent of two cigarettes. That works out to $20 to replace one pack of cigarettes, which is not going to be attractive to many cigarette addicts.
My argument here is against perverse economic incentives.
They have engineered the reverse, in a sense. Nicotine patches, gum, and so forth. Unfortunately, these are all priced far above the cost of nicotine delivered in a cigarette, so only those who can justify the cost as an aid to quitting will use these products.
I see this as a perfect example of our screwy, chaotic, and counterproductive attitude toward drugs. Cigarettes give you cancer and heart disease, so instead of finding a healthier delivery system for addicts, we tell them they either have to smoke cigarettes or go without their drug. Or use oral tobacco with none of the carcinogens taken out, so addicts can enjoy a new set of cancers.
This doesn't make any sense. Why not grasp the reality that some people are addicted to nicotine and like the effects? Why not provide them with a less-dangerous alternative? Surely a nicotine pill or drink could be made at a competitive price-per-dose. Lives would be saved.
By the way, this isn't entirely a theoretical viewpoint. In Sweden an oral preparation called snus, is used by many Swedish nicotine addicts and Sweden has the lowest rate of male lung cancer in Europe. It does increase oral cancer rates somewhat, but that's a bug, not a feature. With our present pharmaceutical abilities, we ought to be able to come up with a delivery system that has harmful effects no worse than the drug itself. Nicotine, while not harmless, is less harmful than smoking cigarettes or dipping snuff.
Maybe one of these days we'll start treating drug use and abuse realistically, but not yet.
The environmental damage of any new technology needs to be balanced against the environmental damage of the technology it supplants.
For example, the damage done by cars had to be balanced against the damage done by horses. In that case, the tradeoff wasn't so good, because horse manure is biodegradeable. Still, at the time cars began to replace horses, many citizens hailed the newly clean streets, and were pleased that the exhaust of cars blew away on the wind, unlike the exhaust of horses.
In the case of chips, I think their impact has to be weighed against the savings in fuel and other resources that such technologies as just-in-time manufacturing, telecommuting (I know, hasn't happened yet) online shopping and paperless archiving (ditto). Consider that a robot with a screw gun doesn't have to drive an SUV to work, and the usual trip to work burns a lot more than a couple pounds of oil.
Of course, there will be human costs associated with these environmental savings, namely unemployment among former screw gun operators.
I'm cynical too, but I remember several years back, when the powers-that-be were considering a batch of extremely onerous banking regulations. We still got unConstitutional regulations, but the regulatory agency backed off from the worst aspects of the proposed changes, because they got thousands of emails against the proposal, and very few for it.
Of course we weren't "at war" then and so the government didn't have that excuse for ignoring the will of the people.
Having actually read the editorial, I've discovered that the Congressman wants to make it a federal crime to sell a violent video game to someone under 18.
Already I'm looking forward to funding the VGEA (Video Game Enforcement Agency). Oh goody, yet another excuse for the federal government to pry into our private lives, all in the name of the Children. Well, I've got kids, 15, 11, and 9, and while I let them play Quake, I would never allow them to play GTA Vice City. I wouldn't play that game, myself, and I certainly don't think I need the federales' help in keeping such games out of the hands of my children.
Beyond the legal quagmire issues, there is no Constitutional basis for such a law. The areas in which the feds are allowed to make laws are strictly limited by the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution are the feds permitted to make laws against such expressions as books, movies, or games. Of course, that doesn't stop them.
Your discovery of irony in this rests on the dubious device of assuming that "Microsoft" and "Linux" are ethically neutral concepts.
"When the Soviets sent tanks to Berlin to kill Hitler, they were our noble allies. When the Soviets sent tanks to Prague to crush democracy, they were international pariahs."
Oh, the irony.
I don't know how to break this news to you, but persecuting bad guys is Good, and persecuting good guys is Bad.
Okay, the ole "I have nothing to hide" justification for a police state. I can't figure out why more folks don't realize that the definition of a police state is a society in which everyone has something to hide.
Imagine if we could identify everyone who was close to the scene of a murder or rape?
Yeah, just imagine. Imagine that it's you who happened to be parked near the site of a rape-in-progress and that you don't have an alibi. Are you going to enjoy the experience of being taken into custody and questioned? And if they don't come up with a likelier-looking suspect than you and there's a lot of political pressure to solve the case, are you going to enjoy being the fall guy? Of course, that could never happen, because as we all know, no innocent people go to jail.
My view is that it's better for the occasional criminal to escape justice than for innocent people to be punished for crimes they didn't commit. Admirers of police states like it the other way around. Until it's their turn.
Okay! Just like making drugs illegal ended drug abuse!
There may not be much point in arguing against such simplistic ideas. But consider that there will not be the sort of clean simplicity you hope for in any bill crafted by Congress. There will be numerous loopholes designed into the legislation, for the benefit of major corporate campaign contributors, who have their own forms of spam, which are becoming increasingly important to their marketing strategies. Is spam from GM or the IRS really any less annoying than spam from Nigeria?
I fear you underestimate the cleverness of spammers. Were I a spammer faced with a law crafted to your specs, I would hire offshore "retailers," and claim that they were spamming on their own behalf. I would be dropshipping product from my warehouse in the United States, a common legitimate business practice, and I would be unlikely to be selected as a prosecutorial target. If I were charged under the statute, I could argue most convincingly that I was not liable for the sales practices of my retailers in Nigeria, any more than Seagram's is liable for the sales practices of bar owners.
It's a pointless can of worms. Worse than that, we should all fear the creation of a law enforcement bureaucracy dedicated to deciding which email is legitimate, and which is spam. This is at its heart an issue of personal responsibility. It may annoy the dickens out of you that your time is wasted by spammers, but there are personal solutions that will work much better than any government program.
So get some filters working, and quit looking to the government to make life perfect.
Re:Why can't we have legal restrictions on spam?
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Plan for Spam, Version 2
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Because it would have no effect on spam. Making spam illegal in the United States would simply move the points of origin offshore.
Why would that be an improvement? No dedicated spammer would hesitate for more than a nanosecond before getting an account at a host in Panama, or wherever they would be safe from local prosecution.
The only workable solution to spam is to learn to use local filtering. Someday, I hope, we're going to learn that passing laws against stuff that annoys us only leads to unpleasant unforeseen consequences.
Maybe having spamtrap addresses works if you only use the internet as a personal communication medium.
But what if you run an online business, and need to keep email addresses on your websites?
That's why antispam technology is important to me.
I can only be thankful that I live in the land of Freedom to the south. Such behavior would even make people like John Ashcroft blush.
In my opinion, the situation here in the "land of Freedom" is worse. Banning pre-trial publicity is one thing. Preventing a defendant from using his chosen defense is another and far worse thing.
A sad example is the case of the late author Peter McWilliams, who was charged with conspiracy to grow marijuana. He was charged under federal statutes, because the state of California had legalized the growing of marijuana for medical purposes. McWilliams was therefore under the impression that he would be permitted to do so. His publishing company gave an advance to another medical marijuana activist, for the purpose of writing a book on the subject of medical marijuana. The activist rented a big house and filled it with different strains of marijuana, ostensibly to experiment with different strains and their efficacy for different conditions. Though McWilliams himself did not grow any pot, he was arrested and indicted for conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance, because of the advance.
Now the story becomes pretty ugly. The prosecutors petitioned the court to prohibit McWilliams from mentioning anything about medical uses of marijuana, and the judge granted the motion. This effectively prevented McWilliams from making any defense at all. Since he was a medical marijuana user himself (he had AIDS and cancer) the injustice of this seems even more unAmerican.
Because he was prevented from offering the only defense he had, he was obliged to accept a plea bargain, and he was hoping to get house arrest. Though at the time of his indictment, he was in fairly good shape, with a low viral load and his cancer in remission, he was denied the use of marijuana as a condition of his bail (he was frequently tested). The medication that had kept him alive caused severe nausea, which he had treated by smoking pot. He was able to make bail (being such a dangerous criminal) only because his mother and other family put up their houses to guarantee his adherence to the terms of his bail. He was told that his mother would lose her house if he were to be caught smoking pot, so he abstained. His condition rapidly deteriorated, and he died before he received his sentence.
Readers of this forum might find McWilliams' work of interest because he adhered to the free information ethic-- making his books available online for free. My favorite book of his is Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do.
History seems to be repeating itself. Long-time drug policy activist Ed Rosenthal has been indicted on similar charges and like McWilliams, has been informed that he will also not be allowed to mention medical marijuana in his defense.
Contrast this ferocious adherence to the official line here in America with a similar situation in Canada. There a judge ruled that the blanket prohibition of marijuana is illegal because it made no provision for those who felt they had a medical need for the drug.
Much of this dismal contrast in the fairness of the two country's judicial proceeding derives from America's size. It has become too big for democracy; the government's power is unchallengeable. In Canada, it's still possible for the people to influence their government.
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I hate to say it, but I would characterize your definition of "ex post facto" as the reassuring version. What I worry about is the redefinition of crimes that already exist. For example, treason is currently illegal. It seems all too plausible to suppose that at some future date, acts which are not now considered treasonous may be redefined as high crimes. In fact, an argument can be made that this has already happened in the case of the so-called American Taliban. That poor confused idiot went over there to fight the infidels for Allah back when our government was praising the Taliban for stopping opium cultivation. Our government was cheerfully giving those freaks over 40 million bucks and a bunch of attaboys.
Next thing he knows, he's arrested for treason, even though it's really doubtful he had anything to do with the terrorist attacks, and so far as I know, no one saw him shooting at Americans.
I know, I know. It would still be unConstitutional to arrest a citizen for things that weren't technically illegal when he did them. Unfortunately, this seems not to matter too much to the Justice Department these days, since the Supreme Court has become a rubber stamp for various political agendas. Expedience seems to be more important than justice. After all, We're At War tm.
it hardly affects privacy of the American people.
I guess it's a good thing no Americans ever use the "international communications lines."
Maybe no real American would wish to communicate privately with any foreigners. Or what about Americans who are so disloyal as to accept employment with offshore corporations? Or foreign offices of American companies. What's the theory here?
we should totally be open to listening to alternative points of view, but is an open source conference really the proper venue for it?
As others have pointed out, it's probably the only place that open source and MS will get compared in a fair and factual manner, or at least as fair and factual as open source zealotry will allow. I doubt open source gets brought up as anything but Satanic Evilness to be Feared and Fought at MS-sponsored events.
But the point I'd like to make is that open source zealots should not oppose MS participation in open source events for one very important reason: in the disputes over the merits of Windows and open source OS like Linux, the open source advocates have the better argument. In any propaganda conflict, those who have the better argument should take every opportunity to contrast their arguments with the opposition's arguments, even if it's on their own dime.
An analogous situation can be found in the drug policy reform movement. When you visit a web site sponsored by a reform group, such as the Media Awareness Project, you'll find many links to drug war propaganda, and to the opinions of those who support the continuation of the war. But if you go to sites that support the government position, such as the Antidrug you'll find no links to the opposition. This is a reflection of the relative strengths of the arguments on both sides. Drug policy reformers want their opponents to be freely heard, because their arguments are so profoundly flawed that they help the reformers, rather than hurting.
I personally believe the same to be true of the MS vs. open source debate.
I'd argue that the more prevalent this becomes, the less value it has. One is less likely to encounter 'differently-thinking' participants, or to be confronted with legitimate ideas that challenge the status quo.
I may be misunderstanding you, but I can't see how blogging beccomes less valuable as it becomes "more prevalent." It may be that it becomes more difficult to locate items of "value," as the choices become more numerous, and of course there's a factor that the early adopters of any art form have an advantage in that they are likely to be more creative than late adopters of the form. Still, more choices seem more valuable, and certainly the odds favor the development of the best talent from the largest group of practitioners. To get back to the music analogy, early rockers were largely rock-a-billy practitioners and bluesmen, and some of them were great. But were any of them as great as, say, Jimi Hendrix, who came along when the art form was older and a lot more musicians participated?
Most dotcom era hippies lauded the advent of the Internet as a strike against The Man and everyone would be a publisher.
They still do, and they're still right. Everybody can be a publisher, but not everyone will be read. As someone here pointed out, writing turns out to be hard work and not every would-be writer has the knack for writing well enough to attract a readership larger than his mother.
What strikes me as odd about this conversation is its time-related sampling problems. Ten years ago there was no /. In another ten years, what new things will crawl over the horizon to make this conversation seem silly and irrelevant?
That's fine, of course, but the original poster asserted that she was writing solely for herself. She implied that she had no "alternative explanations" for putting her journal online.
The problem skeptical folks have with this is that if that were true, there would be no motive to put the journal online. And so why does she do it? She has no other way of keeping a journal except publicly? Unlikely.
I'd like to point out that it's not just Linux that has this problem though. If a new computer user is first introduced to Linux, they'd have just as many problems learning Windows.
I'd have to agree that a lot of it is just familiarity, rather than any great functional difference between the two operating systems, at least from the viewpoint of the average user. For example, my first experience with Linux was Slackware, oh-so-many-years-ago.
I had to go back to Windows, because at that time there wasn't a good substitute available for WordPerfect or Photoshop.
The next time was Redhat, which by 7.1 was a pretty good alternative to Windows. I'd been a Gnome user for a while. One day I switched to KDE, just to see what it was like. I found it seriously demoralizing when I switched back, only to discover that my dualboot system was booting into KDE rather than Gnome. It sounds stupid, but it really bothered me until I figured out how to fix it. And that was nothing more than cosmetics, for the most part.
The point is that familiarity is probably more important than technical merit to many if not most end-users. And not everyone see the ethical merit in having a useful alternative to the MS monopoly, though it's clear enough to me. Some folks just aren't politically motivated.
And what will become of distributed-on-floppy routers like Coyote when all the old machines don't have floppies anymore?
Weird view. So if you neglect to lock your door, you're just as responsible as the burglar who carries off your stuff, and ought to be prosecuted for willful negligence?
Okay! Yet another federal law enforcement bureaucracy is born: The Patch Enforcement Agency. It can parallel the organization of the Lock Enforcement Agency and the Don't Go Walking In Central Park After Dark Enforcement Agency.
That's what we need. More ways to hold victims responsible for the acts of criminals.
Here's an idea: why not just let nature (or in this case, the free market) take its course? sysadmins who neglect to patch their servers get fired, and those who employ such sysadmins lose business. The problem will take care of itself without introducing any new government meddling to gum up the works and make life harder for everyone.
This is sadly reminiscent of our present foreign policy. We can't catch Osama, we need the Saudis' oil, we're scared of North Korea, so we attack some tinpot dictator we're pretty sure we can beat.
Recycling human manure is not exactly cutting edge technology. In fact, there's actually a fascinating book that covers the subject, among others, called Farmers of Forty Centuries that goes into lots of detail on the Chinese agricultural system that worked so brilliantly for so long.
Actually, as I understand it, it may not be a good idea to use milorganite on edible crops, because the stuff is composted from municipal sewage and contains more heavy metals and dioxins than, say, cow manure. There used to be actively dangerous levels of contaminants, but a great stink was raised (sorry) and now Milwaukee claims the stuff is much safer.
Seems your neighbors tend to dump all manner of evil stuff down the drain. Probably smarter to do your own recycling, if you're going to use manure on your garden.
You've missed the point. It's a lot more economically attractive to just quit cold turkey, and just as effective. Then you don't have to pay for the patches and you get to keep all the money.
The point I was trying to make is that there are lots of folks who like the drug. Why not give them a less dangerous delivery system? If we actually cared about the health of smokers, we'd see that less-harmful delivery systems were available at a cost below the cost of cigarettes. A certain number of tobacco addicts are going to stay addicted. This is reality. We should deal with it.
Furthermore, if you work the cost out on a per-dose basis, you'll see that the cost of the nicotine in patches and gum is a lot more than the cost of a dose of nicotine in a cigarette.
When I was in first grade I was told that drugs were bad, this continued until my graduation 12 years later. When I watched TV I was told that drugs were bad. Cub Scout meetings, parents, school, Mr. Rogers, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, all told me the same thing.
Gee, do you think maybe that's an oversimplification? You might want to give some thought to the possibility that you weren't told the exact truth.
Sucks to be them. Hopefully they won't pass those dumbass genes on.
I'm guessing you haven't passed your genes along yet, because you sound very young. What folks like you don't seem to get is that a sensible drug policy would not just keep addicts alive until they get tired of being addicts, it would cut down the huge cost of drug abuse to the majority of us who don't abuse drugs. It's not just financial costs, either. Forget the many billions of dollars taken from you in taxes to prosecute the war on drugs. The war keeps drug prices artificially high. When heroin could be bought in pharmacies in little pills, it cost no more than aspirin. Now it costs a hundred times as much. That means that junkies have to steal a hundred times as much of your stuff and mine to finance their habits. That means that prostitutes have to turn a hundred times more tricks than they would if heroin and other drugs were sold at a price that reflected their legal production costs. Your home-owners insurance contains a hidden war-on-drugs tax, just like mine. If not for the artificial inflation caused by the drug war, junkies could keep up with the financial cost of their habits by flipping burgers. They could use clean needles or even a less dangerous method of use (injection is a strategy evolved to make the most efficient use of phenomenally expensive substances.) That would save us both money on our health insurance, because destitute junkies wouldn't be dying on the public dime as frequently, and wouldn't be spreading HIV and other dangerous diseases as often as they do now. It's in everyone's best interests to cut down on the number of potentially fatal diseases that move actively through a population. Unless you're absolutely certain that you'll never have sex with anyone who had sex with someone who might have had sex with a junkie, or a junkie's spouse, you are personally vulnerable. No matter how much you personally abstain from drug use, you can't escape the dangerous consequences of our present policy.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
I can never understand why folks who have no sympathy for drug users wouldn't like to see them able to get all the drugs they want, cheap. According to your view, wouldn't they just die off quicker? And aren't you saying that's a good thing?
BTW, I'm a libertarian who doesn't believe in subsidizing poverty with free housing and taxpayer money. Or in subsidizing junkies. But I can't understand why making drugs more dangerous than they already are is a rational and realistic policy.
Interesting product, but like gum, lozenges, and patches, NicoWater is a lot more expensive than cigarettes. Each bottle costs two bucks, and is the nicotine equivalent of two cigarettes. That works out to $20 to replace one pack of cigarettes, which is not going to be attractive to many cigarette addicts.
My argument here is against perverse economic incentives.
They have engineered the reverse, in a sense. Nicotine patches, gum, and so forth. Unfortunately, these are all priced far above the cost of nicotine delivered in a cigarette, so only those who can justify the cost as an aid to quitting will use these products.
I see this as a perfect example of our screwy, chaotic, and counterproductive attitude toward drugs. Cigarettes give you cancer and heart disease, so instead of finding a healthier delivery system for addicts, we tell them they either have to smoke cigarettes or go without their drug. Or use oral tobacco with none of the carcinogens taken out, so addicts can enjoy a new set of cancers.
This doesn't make any sense. Why not grasp the reality that some people are addicted to nicotine and like the effects? Why not provide them with a less-dangerous alternative? Surely a nicotine pill or drink could be made at a competitive price-per-dose. Lives would be saved.
By the way, this isn't entirely a theoretical viewpoint. In Sweden an oral preparation called snus, is used by many Swedish nicotine addicts and Sweden has the lowest rate of male lung cancer in Europe. It does increase oral cancer rates somewhat, but that's a bug, not a feature. With our present pharmaceutical abilities, we ought to be able to come up with a delivery system that has harmful effects no worse than the drug itself. Nicotine, while not harmless, is less harmful than smoking cigarettes or dipping snuff.
Maybe one of these days we'll start treating drug use and abuse realistically, but not yet.
The environmental damage of any new technology needs to be balanced against the environmental damage of the technology it supplants.
For example, the damage done by cars had to be balanced against the damage done by horses. In that case, the tradeoff wasn't so good, because horse manure is biodegradeable. Still, at the time cars began to replace horses, many citizens hailed the newly clean streets, and were pleased that the exhaust of cars blew away on the wind, unlike the exhaust of horses.
In the case of chips, I think their impact has to be weighed against the savings in fuel and other resources that such technologies as just-in-time manufacturing, telecommuting (I know, hasn't happened yet) online shopping and paperless archiving (ditto). Consider that a robot with a screw gun doesn't have to drive an SUV to work, and the usual trip to work burns a lot more than a couple pounds of oil.
Of course, there will be human costs associated with these environmental savings, namely unemployment among former screw gun operators.
I'm cynical too, but I remember several years back, when the powers-that-be were considering a batch of extremely onerous banking regulations. We still got unConstitutional regulations, but the regulatory agency backed off from the worst aspects of the proposed changes, because they got thousands of emails against the proposal, and very few for it.
Of course we weren't "at war" then and so the government didn't have that excuse for ignoring the will of the people.
Having actually read the editorial, I've discovered that the Congressman wants to make it a federal crime to sell a violent video game to someone under 18.
Already I'm looking forward to funding the VGEA (Video Game Enforcement Agency). Oh goody, yet another excuse for the federal government to pry into our private lives, all in the name of the Children. Well, I've got kids, 15, 11, and 9, and while I let them play Quake, I would never allow them to play GTA Vice City. I wouldn't play that game, myself, and I certainly don't think I need the federales' help in keeping such games out of the hands of my children.
Beyond the legal quagmire issues, there is no Constitutional basis for such a law. The areas in which the feds are allowed to make laws are strictly limited by the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution are the feds permitted to make laws against such expressions as books, movies, or games. Of course, that doesn't stop them.
Your discovery of irony in this rests on the dubious device of assuming that "Microsoft" and "Linux" are ethically neutral concepts.
"When the Soviets sent tanks to Berlin to kill Hitler, they were our noble allies. When the Soviets sent tanks to Prague to crush democracy, they were international pariahs."
Oh, the irony.
I don't know how to break this news to you, but persecuting bad guys is Good, and persecuting good guys is Bad.
Okay, the ole "I have nothing to hide" justification for a police state. I can't figure out why more folks don't realize that the definition of a police state is a society in which everyone has something to hide.
Imagine if we could identify everyone who was close to the scene of a murder or rape?
Yeah, just imagine. Imagine that it's you who happened to be parked near the site of a rape-in-progress and that you don't have an alibi. Are you going to enjoy the experience of being taken into custody and questioned? And if they don't come up with a likelier-looking suspect than you and there's a lot of political pressure to solve the case, are you going to enjoy being the fall guy? Of course, that could never happen, because as we all know, no innocent people go to jail.
My view is that it's better for the occasional criminal to escape justice than for innocent people to be punished for crimes they didn't commit. Admirers of police states like it the other way around. Until it's their turn.
Okay! Just like making drugs illegal ended drug abuse!
There may not be much point in arguing against such simplistic ideas. But consider that there will not be the sort of clean simplicity you hope for in any bill crafted by Congress. There will be numerous loopholes designed into the legislation, for the benefit of major corporate campaign contributors, who have their own forms of spam, which are becoming increasingly important to their marketing strategies. Is spam from GM or the IRS really any less annoying than spam from Nigeria?
I fear you underestimate the cleverness of spammers. Were I a spammer faced with a law crafted to your specs, I would hire offshore "retailers," and claim that they were spamming on their own behalf. I would be dropshipping product from my warehouse in the United States, a common legitimate business practice, and I would be unlikely to be selected as a prosecutorial target. If I were charged under the statute, I could argue most convincingly that I was not liable for the sales practices of my retailers in Nigeria, any more than Seagram's is liable for the sales practices of bar owners.
It's a pointless can of worms. Worse than that, we should all fear the creation of a law enforcement bureaucracy dedicated to deciding which email is legitimate, and which is spam. This is at its heart an issue of personal responsibility. It may annoy the dickens out of you that your time is wasted by spammers, but there are personal solutions that will work much better than any government program.
So get some filters working, and quit looking to the government to make life perfect.
Because it would have no effect on spam. Making spam illegal in the United States would simply move the points of origin offshore.
Why would that be an improvement? No dedicated spammer would hesitate for more than a nanosecond before getting an account at a host in Panama, or wherever they would be safe from local prosecution.
The only workable solution to spam is to learn to use local filtering. Someday, I hope, we're going to learn that passing laws against stuff that annoys us only leads to unpleasant unforeseen consequences.
Maybe having spamtrap addresses works if you only use the internet as a personal communication medium. But what if you run an online business, and need to keep email addresses on your websites?
That's why antispam technology is important to me.
In my opinion, the situation here in the "land of Freedom" is worse. Banning pre-trial publicity is one thing. Preventing a defendant from using his chosen defense is another and far worse thing.
A sad example is the case of the late author Peter McWilliams, who was charged with conspiracy to grow marijuana. He was charged under federal statutes, because the state of California had legalized the growing of marijuana for medical purposes. McWilliams was therefore under the impression that he would be permitted to do so. His publishing company gave an advance to another medical marijuana activist, for the purpose of writing a book on the subject of medical marijuana. The activist rented a big house and filled it with different strains of marijuana, ostensibly to experiment with different strains and their efficacy for different conditions. Though McWilliams himself did not grow any pot, he was arrested and indicted for conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance, because of the advance.
Now the story becomes pretty ugly. The prosecutors petitioned the court to prohibit McWilliams from mentioning anything about medical uses of marijuana, and the judge granted the motion. This effectively prevented McWilliams from making any defense at all. Since he was a medical marijuana user himself (he had AIDS and cancer) the injustice of this seems even more unAmerican.
Because he was prevented from offering the only defense he had, he was obliged to accept a plea bargain, and he was hoping to get house arrest. Though at the time of his indictment, he was in fairly good shape, with a low viral load and his cancer in remission, he was denied the use of marijuana as a condition of his bail (he was frequently tested). The medication that had kept him alive caused severe nausea, which he had treated by smoking pot. He was able to make bail (being such a dangerous criminal) only because his mother and other family put up their houses to guarantee his adherence to the terms of his bail. He was told that his mother would lose her house if he were to be caught smoking pot, so he abstained. His condition rapidly deteriorated, and he died before he received his sentence. Readers of this forum might find McWilliams' work of interest because he adhered to the free information ethic-- making his books available online for free. My favorite book of his is Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do.
History seems to be repeating itself. Long-time drug policy activist Ed Rosenthal has been indicted on similar charges and like McWilliams, has been informed that he will also not be allowed to mention medical marijuana in his defense.
Contrast this ferocious adherence to the official line here in America with a similar situation in Canada. There a judge ruled that the blanket prohibition of marijuana is illegal because it made no provision for those who felt they had a medical need for the drug.
Much of this dismal contrast in the fairness of the two country's judicial proceeding derives from America's size. It has become too big for democracy; the government's power is unchallengeable. In Canada, it's still possible for the people to influence their government.