I find it disgusting that the author of the NYT piece lumped cannabils legalisation together with UFO and the Obama birth-certificate conspiracy.
Whether or not you feel that marijuana should be legalized, the subject is a legitimate subject for political discourse, and there's overwhelming evidence that:
I personally hold that the evidence overwhelmingly supports decriminalizing Cannabis, implementing a system something like in the Netherlands, but I can understand that less informed, more indoctrinated souls might not be convinced. However no sane, rational, honest person can look at the evidence and claim that this is not a subject which needs to be considered.
Lumping cannabis legalisation together with UFO conspiracies and the Obama birth conspiracy shows that the author is either: ignorant and misinformed, dissembling for a perceived career boost, or simply irrational. My guess is he's a victim of the years of propaganda and lies dissembled by the Nancy Reagan and her spiritual children, but it's equally likely that he's pandering to socially-conservative reader base or editor.
I see a lot of criticism of our nations fascination with sports, particularly the American athletics model, which doesn't focus on teaching kids good health and physical fitness lessons that will benefit them in later life. Rather it seems to be aimed at teaching them primitive tribalism and in-group/out-group mentality.
That reminds me of another harmful aspect of American culture, which not only fosters tribalism and in-group/out-group thinking, but goes further and teaches kids not to think. I am of course talking about religion, which teaches children that faith (believing your belief despite the evidence) is good, and science and rational thought (questioning your beliefs when presented new evidence) is bad.
Jesus Christ! We live in a country where 45% of the population denies evolution and believes that the earth is less than 9000 years old! That's like believing New York is a foot away from San Francisco. Why do they believe this in the face of so much contrary evidence? Because the Bible tells them so. What about all the contradictions in the bible? Who knows, they are probably there to test our faith, just like fossil record.
America is a country where it is more likely to have a statue of the ten commandments put in a courhouse, or to have intelligent design taught in a high school, than it is likely to get "in god we trust" removed from our money. Every single politician has to pay lip service to believing in some kind of a higher power. We place a high moral value on faith
If you look at the messages floating out there in the American meme pool, you have the fundamentalist christian thought, which tells you you're going to hell unless you accept jesus christ as your personal savior, and then you have the much more mainstream mantra: It doesn't matter what you believe, but you must believe in something. Doing good science on the other hand requires you to question your beliefs. So let's stop deifying religion and faith, and make this the secular country the founding fathers intended!
Any policy needs to consider desired effects and undesired effects. In this case we have the contention or thought that allowing someone to play a video game depicting an action might increase the chance that that person will engage in that behavior in the real world. There isn't strong evidence that this is the case, so it's possible that outlawing virtual child pornography will have absolutely no positive effect.
On the other hand, forbidding virtual child pornography is a form of censorship. Child pornography, virtual or no, is pretty fucking creepy, especially depicting the rape of a twelve year old. It's probably hard to make the claim that this software is a form of artistic expression deserving of protection. But forbidding virtual child pornography will have chilling effects on artistic expression. When Nabokov wrote Lolita, he caught flak for it, but he was a respected author, and it has an obvious artistic merit, so it was accepted as art relatively quickly. When Crumb started doing his stuff, people thought he should be locked up. It was certainly more extreme than Nabakov's stuff, and it was in a medium - comics- which most people didn't consider an art form. But now Crumb is a pretty well respected artist. Some of his stuff is very clearly disturbing virtual child pornography. It involves parents having sex with their kids, a guru getting his dick sucked by a giant 18 year old baby with monster tits. It's really disturbing and creepy. It's also a powerful interesting look into some of the more disturbing aspects of human nature and deserves to be considered art.
Right now interactive entertainment has a hard time getting taken seriously as an art form. Just like comics are treated very differently from novels at the judicial level, so too are video games. But any medium can be used as a medium for artistic expression, and all forms of artistic expression or communication (free speech, remember that?) deserve protection
If I start a blog advocating reducing the age of sexual consent to 12, and actively work to that goal, maybe start a forum discussing the morality of sex with 12 year old boys, that's pretty creepy disturbing behavior. It might increase the chance that some middle aged middle manager starts raping little kids. But a strong democracy requires us to tolerate even that kind of speech. Remember everyone, Hitler and Stalin included, supported free speech as long you said what they liked to hear. Free speech means tolerating speech you don't like. If you are censoring speech because it's creepy and disturbing to your sensibilities, you no longer have free-speech.
Finally, it's dangerous to make policy based on obscure, touchy feely emotional reactions. It's not clear at all what effect legislating against virtual child porn will really have. For example, there may be merits to softening the taboos associated with depicting child rape. Free expression of such themes might make it easier for people with harmful appetites (i.e. the desire to have sex with kids) to seek help. It might make it easier for victims to seek help and report abuse. Censoring virtual child-porn will also censor graphic, disturbing depictions which have an anti-child-rape message.
Looking at the example of violent video games: I'm a total pacifist, vegetarian hippy type. When I find myself frustrated by life (don't we all), I find playing violent, horrible video games a terrific release from my stresses and frustrations. It's harmless way to exorcize my violent tendencies. Who's to say that video games can't be used in a similar fashion?
As a general rule, Censorship is evil, and should only be applied to situations where there is a direct, observable, harmful impact: shouting fire in a crowded room, real child pornography, etc.
Well, now we are getting into a discussion that is rather complex for this forum.
The policy trends in Holland are not relevant to this discussion as they are not determined by, nor are they an indication of the success or failure of a particular policy. Just as in America, policies are the result of a complex array of contributing factors including international pressure, drug tourism, and of course the health issues involved.
What is relevant is the fact that they have employed vastly different approaches to handing the drug problem than we have. It is useful to compare their results to ours. The fact is that allowing the legal purchase and sale of marijuana in Holland has not resulted in higher cannabis consumption than in countries where cannabis is forbidden.
I find it strange that you first try to argue against my claims that Hollands handling of cannabis was more successful than ours, and then go on to say that you can't compare what happened with cannabis to what would happen with meth. If the latter is true, why try and contradict the former? Nonethess, the latter is the stronger of your claims. It's unproven. You are assuming that the result with marijuana won't generalize to harder drugs, and I am assuming the trend will. So we must ask, is there evidence to support either assumption?
Evidence abounds that harm reduction strategies are more effictive at reducing drug use. Holland, Portugal and Switzerland's experiments show this. Although the decriminalization of the harder drugs has not been taken as far as Holland has done with cannabis, the fact is they have had more success at handling these drug problems than we have, by employing vastly different strategies. These strategies are in the direction of legalization and regulation, so those results support my thesis.
So there is quite a bit of evidence that one can treat a nations drug problems more effectively by treating them as a health problem than by treating them as a criminal problem. You claim the evidence is not bulletproof, and perhaps it is not. On the other hand, after 90+ years of drug prohibition, we have accumulated a hell of a lot of evidence that prohibition does not reduce drug availability, does not reduce drug addiction, nor does not reduce drug abuse. It does however create a strong criminal base, isolate addicts from treatment, marginalize people who have a serious health condition, cost a hell of a lot money, and puts a lot of people in jail for victimless crimes
In other words, there is simply no evidence to support continued prohibition. If you have any, I would love to hear it. Please note however that using careful time samples to show an increase or decrease in drug use is just bullshit playing with statistics, and I will see through that. It's important to consider long term trends. The 90 year trend is that the only thing that's come out of prohibition is a lot of needlessly ruined lives.
The trend that you are discussing regarding coffee shops is to address the problem of drug tourism.
The trend which is relevant to the discussion is that the rate of cannabis consumption is lower among the Dutch (where it can be bought freely) than it among their neighbors (where cannabis is forbidden). This shows that prohibition does not reduce consumption, nor does legalisation increase consumption. In fact, we have seen the same results in our own history with alcohol prohibition.
I don't know anyone who would contend that Meth or heroin are harmless. The relevant question here is "Does drug prohibition help?". In other words, does making a drug illegal reduce the number of drug addicts? Does it reduce the net consumption of the drug? Does it reduce the number of overdoses? Does it reduce the number of health issues caused by drug abuse? Does it reduce the crime caused by drug addiction?
The answer to all of these questions is NO , prohibition does not help. The evidence to support this claim is incredibly strong. Countries which treat drug problems as a public health issue, rather than a criminal issue, have an overwhelmingly higher success rate than countries which enforce prohibition. These countries include Holland, Switzerland, and recently Portugal. Indeed, we in America found that it much easier and more effective to deal with alcoholism as a health issue, than to prohibit alcohol.
Supporting an end to prohibition does not mean supporting increased drug use, or increased drug abuse. It means supporting sane, rational, evidence based policies which reduce the levels of drug abuse and addiction. By supporting prohibition, you aren't helping people like your friend . Think about it: Were the drugs that got your addict friend in trouble legal when he got addicted? Of course not. So prohibition didn't help them. Would they be better off if they had landed in jail? Evidence suggests the contrary. Would they have been better off if their drug consumption occured in the open, where trained professionals were available to counsel them on their problems and the effects of the drug? Well, there's no guarentee that your individual friend would have been saved, but under those systems the number of lost causes is much, much lower. He would have been able to get better help quicker under such a system, and would have been able to make better informed decisions.
Then of course, you need to add into the equation the damage that is done by prohibition: cost, countless jailed, corrupt police, unregulated drug distribution which leads to contamination and overdose, shared needles which lead to hiv and hepatitis spreading, poorly informed consumers, erosion of civil liberties, and a rampant and wealthy drug cartel. How can anyone justify a policy that causes so much harm, and doesn't help the people it is claming to help?
Everything I have claimed above is backed up by an enormous amount of data. I don't have a good synthesis of that data, but you can refer to stopthedrugwar.org and leap.cc, as well as drugnews.org, which will provide useful links. I can also organize some particlarly relevant UN documents on request.
If you want to reduce the number of people whose lives are ruined by drug addiction, treat them like a person with a sickness, don't treat them like a criminal: repeal prohibition
Your statement is senseless for the following reasons:
Your assertion that legalizing Meth is "not an option" is based on the assumption that legalisation and taxation of a drug will result in an increase of consumption of that drug. In fact, the experiences of countries which have decriminalized drug consumption, and replaced "drug war" methods with harm-reduction methods (i.e. legalization, treatment, and counceling), have experienced reductions in drug consumption, and most importantly in drug addiction. These countries include Switzerland, Holland, and Portugal. The data overwhelmingly indicates that a policy of regulation, taxation, education and treatment is far more effective at reducing drug abuse and addiction than prohibtion. See leap or stopthedrugwar.org for more information.
Most estimates show that the drug cartels biggest source of revenue is marijuanna (the estimate http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/04/04/drugs/> here is 62% ). This is understandable, as Marijuana is a popular drug, and relatively harmless (certainly less harmful than other legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol). There is no reason to believe consumption of other drugs will increase when marijuana is legalized. This implies that simply legalizing marijuana will cut the drug cartels revenue by 62%. Only a fool would believe this would have no effect on their influence
Any rigorous, honest evaluation of this issue indicates that the solution is extraordinarily simple. Just as ending prohibition was the solution to the mob violence of Al Capone's era, ending drug prohibition is the solution to ending the Drug Cartels.
Some might say that the right to copy others work is granted to you by the first amendment of the constitution. Thomas Jefferson would have said that it is an inalienable human right that is protected by the first amendment of the consitution.
Copyright law was created as a temporary limitation of your right to free speech, in order to encourage artistic work. It was considered a useful compromise in the interests of society: limit the right to free speech to encourage the labors of creativity.
Under copyright laws, creative works are protected for a period of time. At the expiry they revert back to the Public Doman, where they naturally belong.
In the last X years, copyright oligarchists have been subverting this agreement by extending the length of copyright to infinity (it's at 90 years now, but wait till some disney stuff is about to go in the PD and you'll see bills to extend again). Simultaneously they have engaged in a huge propaganda campaign to equate copyright law with property law. This is why they like to use the phrase "intelectual property". It is an orwellian attempt to take advantage of an emotional resonance with property rights: copying is stealing! But of course it is not.
That's my five minute summary. Please note that this is not paranoid fringe raving, but rather a simple summary of a complex issue and history. References for all of the above claims can be readily found. If you want more thorough and well informed discussion with references, you can start here.
If one actually RTFA, one finds the ambassador is specifically talking about scams in which a criminal element is involved. From the article:
In one version, the scammer poses as a government worker who has embezzled millions of dollars and is offering victims a percentage if they help retrieve the money by providing a relatively small amount of money for bribes or other charges.
Professor Olu Agbi said "greedy" Australians who tried to partake in these crimes - even though they are scams - should be arrested as well.
In this context I'd agree with him. They got what they deserved. But of course these are only a subset of all of the nigerian scams out there.
Thanks for that post. I've been scanning through the posts on this topic thinking "Why can't I have moderator points when I need them". I was formulating a similar post in my mind when I stumbled on yours. All of the anti-boost or anti-C++ posts can be tackled one-by-one, but who has the time, and what's the point? It's shocking what the modders have modded and how.
My 2cents worth on the subject is this: Whenever you need to implement some code, it's worth seeing if there's a good library available that already does the job. The first place to look is Boost, because it offers some extremely useful stuff, it's well tested and well implemented.
Templates and meta-programming is difficult, especially the debugging, but it results in extremely efficient code, and is a good way of extending the language. So isn't it nice that Boost guys have done all the difficult work for you? People complaining about having to learn another library are missing a significant point: Learning another library (or subset of a library) is no more difficult thant learning to use some custom made code, and your knowledge is more portable.
All that said, Boost's documentation could be significantly improved. In some cases its fantastic, in others it can only be rated as good if you are using volume as a metric.
I just read about the McCain's plagiarism issue. I dunno. I'm about as anti-republican as it comes, and I sure hope he doesn't win the election, but the plagiarism thing seems like blowing smoke.
Follow the link and read the so-called incidents of plagiarism. I would say it's completely obvious that his speechwriter used Wikipedia as a reference, but what's wrong with that? It's not like he/she grabbed the text verbatim. No single sentence is exactly the same, and most are rewritten substantially enough that I think it's hard to say whether or not this really is plagiarism...
Me I'm more concerned about the fact that he feels it's relevant to mention that:
one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion
I agree with you about the payed vacations, and insufficient punishment of the cops. But these are independent of the pay scale issue.
The OP's point is a good one, and I think history backs him up. The best way to reduce corruption in a police force is to make it prestigious, well-paying, and strictly enforce the rules. This reduces the incentives to be a bad cop.
The real problem with policing is the brotherhood mentality that the cops have. They seem to have a real "us vs them" attitude, so when an investigation comes up against a cop, it's tough to get cops to testify against other cops. I have an obvious solution to this: Re-enstate the draft. After high school, every man, woman, and child has to spend 1 year doing some kind of government service, be it military, civil service (like repairing damns and the like), or police work.
This will greatly reduce cronyism, since all the cops who didn't choose to be cops will be much more likely to narc out the dirty ones, and it breaks down the walls between normal america and its enforcers (military and police).
nine out of ten policemen think its important to keep drugs illegal, because otherwise they will have to buy their own.
I made up the number. But I had a friend named Guy who was busted in Michigan for possession, with intent to sell, 5 lbs of marijuanna. In court, when they asked him how he would like to plead, guy said "Guilty your honour, but to possesion of 6 lbs of Marijuanna. Those cops stole a pound of my grass!" After they sentenced him he started shouting "okay, but what about the cops who stole my grass?!?", for which he got an additional contempt of court charge slapped on.
Well, it doesn't fit your desires, but I'm buying one of these as soon as I have the cash. Top speed is 85 km/hr, range is 150 km and you can optionally purchase pedals to let you assist the engine and extend the range.
I like the minimalism. Due to their small size, you can also park them in cycle and motorcycle parking spaces, which can be pretty handy around here. They are completely silent. Their energy efficiency is the equivalent of 300-600 miles per gallon! It's not a total replacement for the car, but for 95% of my driving, this thing's perfect.
What I'd really like to see is vehicles being designed a bit more use-specific. A small, light-weight vehicle is all you need for most purposed (basically a more convenient, weatherproof bike). Hauling around a bunch of extra weight is just so inefficient. I boggle at people driving one person in a big ol tank of a car... so much energy just to accelerate the machinery, the load is insignificant.
But of course I can understand that not everyone wants to have 2 vehicles in their household.
I'm right with you there man. It's like calling pornographic movies "Adult Movies". "Mature Content" is an even worse oxymoron... A correct label would be "immature and violent" or "immature sex content". The most "mature content" video game I can think of, off the top of my head, would be Civilisation. Ah well...
I honestly don't know. Based on my job search history, I guess it's pretty unusual. Game companies seem fond of it. It's a good way of finding people who genuinely like programming, and do it for fun. It's also a good way to get an impression of a candidate's problem solving approach, and their coding style. My own experience is it works a lot better than trying to guess based on someones resume.
I'm glad to see the highly modded posts leaning towards the liberal arts school.
Me I opted for the tech school, and I regret it. Your college experience is partly about your career options, and partly about an important stage in your personal development, and I'm thoroughly of the opinion that the liberal arts school will serve you better in the latter regard. You'll be exposed to more diverse ways of thinking, you'll probably come out better adjusted, and your chances of getting some good experiences with wine, women, and song (figuratively speaking) will be much higher.
If it is me doing the hiring (and sometimes it is), all other things being equal I take the liberal arts guy. My experience with tech school graduates has left me soured on them (even being one myself). Their personal shortcomings (read 'huge ego problems') often outweigh any technical benefits they have to offer. Anyway, when I'm hiring I ask people to send me a portfolio, and that matters more than anything else they have to send.
As for the career stuff, you won't suffer having gone to a liberal arts school. If you do some creative work while you're in school, that'll count much more than the name of the school you attended. Sometimes the big-name tech school helps you get an interview, but I don't think it does much more than that.
I'm surprised this gets modded as insightful. Most of the issues you point out don't have anything to do with ebooks intrinsically, but are just a problem with current implementations/markets, and are therefore likely to change. It might be appropriate to say "I don't want an ebook yet", or "ebooks are currently still a foolish purchase", but the grandparent post was complaining about a-priori dismissal of ebooks as a concept. Point by point:
ebooks don't prevent you from reading paper books. They are an alternative and there are situations where they might be a superior alternative (that's a personal and implementation issue). I imagine there will always be a place for paper books, just as there is still a place (and currently growing!) for vinyl.
Prices will change. But if you like classics and older literature, as I do, ebooks are way cheaper than paper. Want to read a book by wodehouse? ebook cost: 0 (gutenberg.org). Orel Fuessli (local book distributor) 14CHF (about 12 bucks). On the other hand for desktop references I prefer paper for various reasons. As for new releases, expect the price ratio to change as economics of scale take hold and ebooks cease being a novelty and become mainstream.
Loaning: That's true until everyone has some kind of ebook reading capability, which I think is gradually coming. If it's within 1 year or 10 I can't say, but I'd lay good odds on it being less than 5. It might have to wait until flexible screens become available. It also, of course, means not allowing DRM to screw up our user experience. But that's up to us.
borrowing from a library: a valid point. This is one area where I suppose paper books will dominate.
Can't sell the book: Well, that would depend on how the DRM is implemented. This is a pretty complicated issue, and it's hard to predict how distribution mechanisms are going to change over the next 10-20 years. But again, it depends heavily on what you want to read, as so much great reading is freely available.
DRM: again, it all depends what you want to use it for, and where you get your books. Stick to standard formats which are unencumbred by DRM (and again, there's a huge selection of this), and this is a non issue.
So you see, all of the issues you listed depend heavily on what the intended use of the ebook reader is. I want one to read scientific papers (which are always unencumbered pdf's), and for doing some light reading on the train. I also want something for reading stuff I get from project gutenberg, since printing the books out is just wasteful and inconvenient.
I'd love an ebook reader becuase I hate unpacking and packing my books and papers on my daily commute. I also like to read in the bathtub, so I'm hoping someone makes a waterproof reader, at which point I'll be first in line to give them my money.
Had you said "For my purposes, it would be foolish to buy and eBook reader", I'd have nothing to argue with. But you declaim the entire concept of eBooks, and I find that rather foolish.
On the subject of the original news post, from what I can tell the kindle is designed with buying eBooks online from Amazon in mind, and has poor support for open and unencumbered media. So while it might have certain technical advantages (I hear the fonts are nicer) than the sony, I won't be buying one.
In this case we can make a pretty good guess what went down, by reading the article:
Circuit City told Sodomsky that the upgrade would be finished in about an hour. After installing the DVD burner, the technicians tested the drive's new software by searching the computer's hard drive for video files to play back. (Amusingly, the court refers to "codecs"--video compression and decompression software--as "code X.")
When searching the Windows XP computer for some sample video files, a technician named Stephen Richert allegedly spotted files that "appeared to be pornographic in nature" based on their names. Richert clicked on one that had listed a male name and an age of 13 or 14 and found a video he believed to contain child pornography.
Then the usual series of events happened: Richert called Wyomissing police, who promptly showed up, seized the computer, and, after Sodomsky returned to pick it up, seized its...
Now, I'm not arguing that the guy shouldn't be busted for child pornography. But I do think the guys privacy was violated by the techs: From the article, we know that the techs did a search for video files "to test the burner". Well, you don't need video files to test the burner, so based on my understanding of human nature within menial jobs, they guys were probably having a laugh about what kind of porn the guy had on his computer. Probably it's that systematic too. I would be surprised if the techs in question didn't have a pretty big stash of burnt porn, collected from various computer users.
Now, yeah, the guy should have been more careful with his data, especially concerning the nature of the data. But did he have a reasonable expectation of privacy when bringing his computer in for an hour, to have a dvd burner installed. That's actually a question of policy, and I think we should make it policy that YES we should have that right. If I'm going to give up the privacy of my data, I think that should be explicit, and that the techs should be bound to violate my privacy only to the minimum extent necessary (which doesn't include searching my hard drive for video files).
Discussing these issues has nothing to do with defending child-pornography (as the ACLU understands). We have to question these things to protect our more pedestrian privacy interests, which would otherwise be compromised by such systems.
For example, I have some artistic movies of me and my girlfriend on my hard drive. They're on a linux partition, and I do my own repairs, but if I were just some non tech-savvy joe, I wouldn't want the techs searching for video files so they and their colleagues can have a laugh over me shtupping my gf, or (god forbid) burning a copy for their own use. And based on the procedure described in the article, I'd bet my money that that's happening pretty often.
Sure the guy is probably a dope, but I doubt he had his files on the desktop or some easily discovered place. When the tech guys are sitting with the criminal prosecutors and or the police they have to come up with a description of their activities that doesn't make them sound criminal, so "searching for video files to test the burner" sounds more reasonable than "killing some boredom by seeing what kinda freaky shit the guy had on his PC".
What amazes me is that more people haven't commented on the poor guy's name. Sodomsky? The poor guy was doomed from the beginning.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but Delta can't compete with Air-Tran for chronically bad service. My experience with Air-Tran was so horrible I can't bring myself to tell the whole story. But, I will say that my crappy experience seemed to be the norm, as opposed to being an unlucky extreme. I had to stand in line waiting 3 hours to reschedule my connecting flight, since they had overbooked. The line never got shorter. As I watched, new people populated the line at about the same rate, or greater, than the poor customer service agents could handle. And that wasn't even the crappy part about my experience with them: dishonest service, destroyed and lost luggage (yes both), unfriendly and downright problematic (not to mention stupid) check-in staff. God I get angry just thinking about it. Delta's got their shit together by comparison.
I'm completely in agreement. Even if the reviews stink, I'm buying it.
I do have one suggestion for the dev team, but it's maybe too late... I think Duke should be an old geezer in this one... They could fill the game with lame old-geezer jokes, and start out with a cut scene of pulling Duke out of a retirement home... Some messenger comes in with a message for Duke to save the world. Duke reads it and says "This was supposed to reach me ten years ago!", to which the messenger replies with some stupid joke, like he got stuck in traffic, or the message was in his spam filter by mistake...
Had Duke arrived ten years ago, he would have had to clean out a small alien infestation. Now they've taken over nearly all of America. Duke didn't notice because he only ever watches porn, and only leaves the house to buy cigars, whisky, and whores. So now he's gotta invade an alien occupied NORAD and nuke all the infested cities. It's Duke Nukem Forever! Finally!!!
This is getting pretty off topic, but I wanted to reply to the "without a major war" comment. I hear this all the time, and it's pretty frustrating.
When I try to get people active in American politics, there are two common arguments given not to get involved. The first is that things are more or less ok, the people in charge must know what they are doing, there isn't really a problem, things are as good as they can be, or some variant thereof. The second argument is "Yeah, but things are so fucked up and broken there's nothing I can do anyway", or some variant thereof. "without a major war" falls into that second category, as does "things can't get better until they get a lot worse".
Rejoice! Be happy! You're wrong! It's not easy, and it's unlikely that you're going to get instant gratification, but your efforts do make a difference. Write your congressman, run for local office, get active in local politics, show up at or organize a demonstration about something you care about. Get educated and educate others. These things work, and history shows it. Public pressure is the reason we got out of Vietnam. People often lose sight of that, but the record shows it to be true. You can read government records of the time if you don't believe me, or you can read analysis done by scholars like Noam Chomsky. The same can be said about race issues. Things have really changed regarding racism in America, and it's thanks to a bunch of people working their asses off. We remember guys like Malcom X and MLK, but nothing would have happened without all of the nameless forgotten demonstrators, speakers, and letter writers. Look at Ghandi. Greed exists in every system, and it is up to the citizenry to do what they can to mitigate its negative effects. We are actually very lucky to live in a relatively open and responsive society. It's not the best, and needs improvement, but there exist peaceful and effective mechanisms for change. They just require OUR hard work.
In the modern world the government has obscenely effective means for the repression of violent revolt, so be careful what you wish for. Violent revolt should only be turned to as a last result anyway. In a violent revolution, it is often the most bloodthirsty and cruel that climb to the top, and I don't want that. I also enjoy the comforts and advances of civilization, and don't want to see my country sink into civil war, collapsing infrastructure, etc. We can reform and change. But the first thing we have to do is get rid of our apathy and our hopelessness, which provide convenient excuses to be lazy, sit on our ass and try not to think about it all.
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I find it disgusting that the author of the NYT piece lumped cannabils legalisation together with UFO and the Obama birth-certificate conspiracy.
Whether or not you feel that marijuana should be legalized, the subject is a legitimate subject for political discourse, and there's overwhelming evidence that:
I personally hold that the evidence overwhelmingly supports decriminalizing Cannabis, implementing a system something like in the Netherlands, but I can understand that less informed, more indoctrinated souls might not be convinced. However no sane, rational, honest person can look at the evidence and claim that this is not a subject which needs to be considered.
Lumping cannabis legalisation together with UFO conspiracies and the Obama birth conspiracy shows that the author is either: ignorant and misinformed, dissembling for a perceived career boost, or simply irrational. My guess is he's a victim of the years of propaganda and lies dissembled by the Nancy Reagan and her spiritual children, but it's equally likely that he's pandering to socially-conservative reader base or editor.
I see a lot of criticism of our nations fascination with sports, particularly the American athletics model, which doesn't focus on teaching kids good health and physical fitness lessons that will benefit them in later life. Rather it seems to be aimed at teaching them primitive tribalism and in-group/out-group mentality.
That reminds me of another harmful aspect of American culture, which not only fosters tribalism and in-group/out-group thinking, but goes further and teaches kids not to think. I am of course talking about religion, which teaches children that faith (believing your belief despite the evidence) is good, and science and rational thought (questioning your beliefs when presented new evidence) is bad.
Jesus Christ! We live in a country where 45% of the population denies evolution and believes that the earth is less than 9000 years old! That's like believing New York is a foot away from San Francisco. Why do they believe this in the face of so much contrary evidence? Because the Bible tells them so. What about all the contradictions in the bible? Who knows, they are probably there to test our faith, just like fossil record.
America is a country where it is more likely to have a statue of the ten commandments put in a courhouse, or to have intelligent design taught in a high school, than it is likely to get "in god we trust" removed from our money. Every single politician has to pay lip service to believing in some kind of a higher power. We place a high moral value on faith
If you look at the messages floating out there in the American meme pool, you have the fundamentalist christian thought, which tells you you're going to hell unless you accept jesus christ as your personal savior, and then you have the much more mainstream mantra: It doesn't matter what you believe, but you must believe in something. Doing good science on the other hand requires you to question your beliefs. So let's stop deifying religion and faith, and make this the secular country the founding fathers intended!
Poorly thought out argument.
Any policy needs to consider desired effects and undesired effects. In this case we have the contention or thought that allowing someone to play a video game depicting an action might increase the chance that that person will engage in that behavior in the real world. There isn't strong evidence that this is the case, so it's possible that outlawing virtual child pornography will have absolutely no positive effect.
On the other hand, forbidding virtual child pornography is a form of censorship. Child pornography, virtual or no, is pretty fucking creepy, especially depicting the rape of a twelve year old. It's probably hard to make the claim that this software is a form of artistic expression deserving of protection. But forbidding virtual child pornography will have chilling effects on artistic expression. When Nabokov wrote Lolita, he caught flak for it, but he was a respected author, and it has an obvious artistic merit, so it was accepted as art relatively quickly. When Crumb started doing his stuff, people thought he should be locked up. It was certainly more extreme than Nabakov's stuff, and it was in a medium - comics- which most people didn't consider an art form. But now Crumb is a pretty well respected artist. Some of his stuff is very clearly disturbing virtual child pornography. It involves parents having sex with their kids, a guru getting his dick sucked by a giant 18 year old baby with monster tits. It's really disturbing and creepy. It's also a powerful interesting look into some of the more disturbing aspects of human nature and deserves to be considered art.
Right now interactive entertainment has a hard time getting taken seriously as an art form. Just like comics are treated very differently from novels at the judicial level, so too are video games. But any medium can be used as a medium for artistic expression, and all forms of artistic expression or communication (free speech, remember that?) deserve protection
If I start a blog advocating reducing the age of sexual consent to 12, and actively work to that goal, maybe start a forum discussing the morality of sex with 12 year old boys, that's pretty creepy disturbing behavior. It might increase the chance that some middle aged middle manager starts raping little kids. But a strong democracy requires us to tolerate even that kind of speech. Remember everyone, Hitler and Stalin included, supported free speech as long you said what they liked to hear. Free speech means tolerating speech you don't like. If you are censoring speech because it's creepy and disturbing to your sensibilities, you no longer have free-speech.
Finally, it's dangerous to make policy based on obscure, touchy feely emotional reactions. It's not clear at all what effect legislating against virtual child porn will really have. For example, there may be merits to softening the taboos associated with depicting child rape. Free expression of such themes might make it easier for people with harmful appetites (i.e. the desire to have sex with kids) to seek help. It might make it easier for victims to seek help and report abuse. Censoring virtual child-porn will also censor graphic, disturbing depictions which have an anti-child-rape message.
Looking at the example of violent video games: I'm a total pacifist, vegetarian hippy type. When I find myself frustrated by life (don't we all), I find playing violent, horrible video games a terrific release from my stresses and frustrations. It's harmless way to exorcize my violent tendencies. Who's to say that video games can't be used in a similar fashion?
As a general rule, Censorship is evil, and should only be applied to situations where there is a direct, observable, harmful impact: shouting fire in a crowded room, real child pornography, etc.
Well, now we are getting into a discussion that is rather complex for this forum.
The policy trends in Holland are not relevant to this discussion as they are not determined by, nor are they an indication of the success or failure of a particular policy. Just as in America, policies are the result of a complex array of contributing factors including international pressure, drug tourism, and of course the health issues involved.
What is relevant is the fact that they have employed vastly different approaches to handing the drug problem than we have. It is useful to compare their results to ours. The fact is that allowing the legal purchase and sale of marijuana in Holland has not resulted in higher cannabis consumption than in countries where cannabis is forbidden.
I find it strange that you first try to argue against my claims that Hollands handling of cannabis was more successful than ours, and then go on to say that you can't compare what happened with cannabis to what would happen with meth. If the latter is true, why try and contradict the former? Nonethess, the latter is the stronger of your claims. It's unproven. You are assuming that the result with marijuana won't generalize to harder drugs, and I am assuming the trend will. So we must ask, is there evidence to support either assumption?
Evidence abounds that harm reduction strategies are more effictive at reducing drug use. Holland, Portugal and Switzerland's experiments show this. Although the decriminalization of the harder drugs has not been taken as far as Holland has done with cannabis, the fact is they have had more success at handling these drug problems than we have, by employing vastly different strategies. These strategies are in the direction of legalization and regulation, so those results support my thesis.
So there is quite a bit of evidence that one can treat a nations drug problems more effectively by treating them as a health problem than by treating them as a criminal problem. You claim the evidence is not bulletproof, and perhaps it is not. On the other hand, after 90+ years of drug prohibition, we have accumulated a hell of a lot of evidence that prohibition does not reduce drug availability, does not reduce drug addiction, nor does not reduce drug abuse. It does however create a strong criminal base, isolate addicts from treatment, marginalize people who have a serious health condition, cost a hell of a lot money, and puts a lot of people in jail for victimless crimes
In other words, there is simply no evidence to support continued prohibition. If you have any, I would love to hear it. Please note however that using careful time samples to show an increase or decrease in drug use is just bullshit playing with statistics, and I will see through that. It's important to consider long term trends. The 90 year trend is that the only thing that's come out of prohibition is a lot of needlessly ruined lives.
The trend that you are discussing regarding coffee shops is to address the problem of drug tourism.
The trend which is relevant to the discussion is that the rate of cannabis consumption is lower among the Dutch (where it can be bought freely) than it among their neighbors (where cannabis is forbidden). This shows that prohibition does not reduce consumption, nor does legalisation increase consumption. In fact, we have seen the same results in our own history with alcohol prohibition.
I don't know anyone who would contend that Meth or heroin are harmless. The relevant question here is "Does drug prohibition help?". In other words, does making a drug illegal reduce the number of drug addicts? Does it reduce the net consumption of the drug? Does it reduce the number of overdoses? Does it reduce the number of health issues caused by drug abuse? Does it reduce the crime caused by drug addiction?
The answer to all of these questions is NO , prohibition does not help. The evidence to support this claim is incredibly strong. Countries which treat drug problems as a public health issue, rather than a criminal issue, have an overwhelmingly higher success rate than countries which enforce prohibition. These countries include Holland, Switzerland, and recently Portugal. Indeed, we in America found that it much easier and more effective to deal with alcoholism as a health issue, than to prohibit alcohol.
Supporting an end to prohibition does not mean supporting increased drug use, or increased drug abuse. It means supporting sane, rational, evidence based policies which reduce the levels of drug abuse and addiction. By supporting prohibition, you aren't helping people like your friend . Think about it: Were the drugs that got your addict friend in trouble legal when he got addicted? Of course not. So prohibition didn't help them. Would they be better off if they had landed in jail? Evidence suggests the contrary. Would they have been better off if their drug consumption occured in the open, where trained professionals were available to counsel them on their problems and the effects of the drug? Well, there's no guarentee that your individual friend would have been saved, but under those systems the number of lost causes is much, much lower. He would have been able to get better help quicker under such a system, and would have been able to make better informed decisions.
Then of course, you need to add into the equation the damage that is done by prohibition: cost, countless jailed, corrupt police, unregulated drug distribution which leads to contamination and overdose, shared needles which lead to hiv and hepatitis spreading, poorly informed consumers, erosion of civil liberties, and a rampant and wealthy drug cartel. How can anyone justify a policy that causes so much harm, and doesn't help the people it is claming to help?
Everything I have claimed above is backed up by an enormous amount of data. I don't have a good synthesis of that data, but you can refer to stopthedrugwar.org and leap.cc, as well as drugnews.org, which will provide useful links. I can also organize some particlarly relevant UN documents on request.
If you want to reduce the number of people whose lives are ruined by drug addiction, treat them like a person with a sickness, don't treat them like a criminal: repeal prohibition
Your statement is senseless for the following reasons:
Any rigorous, honest evaluation of this issue indicates that the solution is extraordinarily simple. Just as ending prohibition was the solution to the mob violence of Al Capone's era, ending drug prohibition is the solution to ending the Drug Cartels.
Copyright law was created as a temporary limitation of your right to free speech, in order to encourage artistic work. It was considered a useful compromise in the interests of society: limit the right to free speech to encourage the labors of creativity.
Under copyright laws, creative works are protected for a period of time. At the expiry they revert back to the Public Doman, where they naturally belong.
In the last X years, copyright oligarchists have been subverting this agreement by extending the length of copyright to infinity (it's at 90 years now, but wait till some disney stuff is about to go in the PD and you'll see bills to extend again). Simultaneously they have engaged in a huge propaganda campaign to equate copyright law with property law. This is why they like to use the phrase "intelectual property". It is an orwellian attempt to take advantage of an emotional resonance with property rights: copying is stealing! But of course it is not.
That's my five minute summary. Please note that this is not paranoid fringe raving, but rather a simple summary of a complex issue and history. References for all of the above claims can be readily found. If you want more thorough and well informed discussion with references, you can start here.
No, but it would save him from head trauma in the event of a failure during take-off or landing, which is probably the reason behind it.
In one version, the scammer poses as a government worker who has embezzled millions of dollars and is offering victims a percentage if they help retrieve the money by providing a relatively small amount of money for bribes or other charges. Professor Olu Agbi said "greedy" Australians who tried to partake in these crimes - even though they are scams - should be arrested as well.
In this context I'd agree with him. They got what they deserved. But of course these are only a subset of all of the nigerian scams out there.
My 2cents worth on the subject is this: Whenever you need to implement some code, it's worth seeing if there's a good library available that already does the job. The first place to look is Boost, because it offers some extremely useful stuff, it's well tested and well implemented.
Templates and meta-programming is difficult, especially the debugging, but it results in extremely efficient code, and is a good way of extending the language. So isn't it nice that Boost guys have done all the difficult work for you? People complaining about having to learn another library are missing a significant point: Learning another library (or subset of a library) is no more difficult thant learning to use some custom made code, and your knowledge is more portable.
All that said, Boost's documentation could be significantly improved. In some cases its fantastic, in others it can only be rated as good if you are using volume as a metric.
Follow the link and read the so-called incidents of plagiarism. I would say it's completely obvious that his speechwriter used Wikipedia as a reference, but what's wrong with that? It's not like he/she grabbed the text verbatim. No single sentence is exactly the same, and most are rewritten substantially enough that I think it's hard to say whether or not this really is plagiarism...
Me I'm more concerned about the fact that he feels it's relevant to mention that:
one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion
The OP's point is a good one, and I think history backs him up. The best way to reduce corruption in a police force is to make it prestigious, well-paying, and strictly enforce the rules. This reduces the incentives to be a bad cop.
The real problem with policing is the brotherhood mentality that the cops have. They seem to have a real "us vs them" attitude, so when an investigation comes up against a cop, it's tough to get cops to testify against other cops. I have an obvious solution to this: Re-enstate the draft. After high school, every man, woman, and child has to spend 1 year doing some kind of government service, be it military, civil service (like repairing damns and the like), or police work.
This will greatly reduce cronyism, since all the cops who didn't choose to be cops will be much more likely to narc out the dirty ones, and it breaks down the walls between normal america and its enforcers (military and police).
I made up the number. But I had a friend named Guy who was busted in Michigan for possession, with intent to sell, 5 lbs of marijuanna. In court, when they asked him how he would like to plead, guy said "Guilty your honour, but to possesion of 6 lbs of Marijuanna. Those cops stole a pound of my grass!" After they sentenced him he started shouting "okay, but what about the cops who stole my grass?!?", for which he got an additional contempt of court charge slapped on.
I like the minimalism. Due to their small size, you can also park them in cycle and motorcycle parking spaces, which can be pretty handy around here. They are completely silent. Their energy efficiency is the equivalent of 300-600 miles per gallon! It's not a total replacement for the car, but for 95% of my driving, this thing's perfect.
What I'd really like to see is vehicles being designed a bit more use-specific. A small, light-weight vehicle is all you need for most purposed (basically a more convenient, weatherproof bike). Hauling around a bunch of extra weight is just so inefficient. I boggle at people driving one person in a big ol tank of a car... so much energy just to accelerate the machinery, the load is insignificant.
But of course I can understand that not everyone wants to have 2 vehicles in their household.
I'm right with you there man. It's like calling pornographic movies "Adult Movies". "Mature Content" is an even worse oxymoron... A correct label would be "immature and violent" or "immature sex content". The most "mature content" video game I can think of, off the top of my head, would be Civilisation. Ah well...
Me I opted for the tech school, and I regret it. Your college experience is partly about your career options, and partly about an important stage in your personal development, and I'm thoroughly of the opinion that the liberal arts school will serve you better in the latter regard. You'll be exposed to more diverse ways of thinking, you'll probably come out better adjusted, and your chances of getting some good experiences with wine, women, and song (figuratively speaking) will be much higher.
If it is me doing the hiring (and sometimes it is), all other things being equal I take the liberal arts guy. My experience with tech school graduates has left me soured on them (even being one myself). Their personal shortcomings (read 'huge ego problems') often outweigh any technical benefits they have to offer. Anyway, when I'm hiring I ask people to send me a portfolio, and that matters more than anything else they have to send.
As for the career stuff, you won't suffer having gone to a liberal arts school. If you do some creative work while you're in school, that'll count much more than the name of the school you attended. Sometimes the big-name tech school helps you get an interview, but I don't think it does much more than that.
316880? You aren't that old...
So you see, all of the issues you listed depend heavily on what the intended use of the ebook reader is. I want one to read scientific papers (which are always unencumbered pdf's), and for doing some light reading on the train. I also want something for reading stuff I get from project gutenberg, since printing the books out is just wasteful and inconvenient. I'd love an ebook reader becuase I hate unpacking and packing my books and papers on my daily commute. I also like to read in the bathtub, so I'm hoping someone makes a waterproof reader, at which point I'll be first in line to give them my money.
Had you said "For my purposes, it would be foolish to buy and eBook reader", I'd have nothing to argue with. But you declaim the entire concept of eBooks, and I find that rather foolish.
On the subject of the original news post, from what I can tell the kindle is designed with buying eBooks online from Amazon in mind, and has poor support for open and unencumbered media. So while it might have certain technical advantages (I hear the fonts are nicer) than the sony, I won't be buying one.
Now, I'm not arguing that the guy shouldn't be busted for child pornography. But I do think the guys privacy was violated by the techs: From the article, we know that the techs did a search for video files "to test the burner". Well, you don't need video files to test the burner, so based on my understanding of human nature within menial jobs, they guys were probably having a laugh about what kind of porn the guy had on his computer. Probably it's that systematic too. I would be surprised if the techs in question didn't have a pretty big stash of burnt porn, collected from various computer users.
Now, yeah, the guy should have been more careful with his data, especially concerning the nature of the data. But did he have a reasonable expectation of privacy when bringing his computer in for an hour, to have a dvd burner installed. That's actually a question of policy, and I think we should make it policy that YES we should have that right. If I'm going to give up the privacy of my data, I think that should be explicit, and that the techs should be bound to violate my privacy only to the minimum extent necessary (which doesn't include searching my hard drive for video files).
Discussing these issues has nothing to do with defending child-pornography (as the ACLU understands). We have to question these things to protect our more pedestrian privacy interests, which would otherwise be compromised by such systems. For example, I have some artistic movies of me and my girlfriend on my hard drive. They're on a linux partition, and I do my own repairs, but if I were just some non tech-savvy joe, I wouldn't want the techs searching for video files so they and their colleagues can have a laugh over me shtupping my gf, or (god forbid) burning a copy for their own use. And based on the procedure described in the article, I'd bet my money that that's happening pretty often.
Sure the guy is probably a dope, but I doubt he had his files on the desktop or some easily discovered place. When the tech guys are sitting with the criminal prosecutors and or the police they have to come up with a description of their activities that doesn't make them sound criminal, so "searching for video files to test the burner" sounds more reasonable than "killing some boredom by seeing what kinda freaky shit the guy had on his PC".
What amazes me is that more people haven't commented on the poor guy's name. Sodomsky? The poor guy was doomed from the beginning.
I do have one suggestion for the dev team, but it's maybe too late... I think Duke should be an old geezer in this one... They could fill the game with lame old-geezer jokes, and start out with a cut scene of pulling Duke out of a retirement home... Some messenger comes in with a message for Duke to save the world. Duke reads it and says "This was supposed to reach me ten years ago!", to which the messenger replies with some stupid joke, like he got stuck in traffic, or the message was in his spam filter by mistake...
Had Duke arrived ten years ago, he would have had to clean out a small alien infestation. Now they've taken over nearly all of America. Duke didn't notice because he only ever watches porn, and only leaves the house to buy cigars, whisky, and whores. So now he's gotta invade an alien occupied NORAD and nuke all the infested cities. It's Duke Nukem Forever! Finally!!!
Yeah, I heard about him (and that quote) in Civ IV!
When I try to get people active in American politics, there are two common arguments given not to get involved. The first is that things are more or less ok, the people in charge must know what they are doing, there isn't really a problem, things are as good as they can be, or some variant thereof. The second argument is "Yeah, but things are so fucked up and broken there's nothing I can do anyway", or some variant thereof. "without a major war" falls into that second category, as does "things can't get better until they get a lot worse".
Rejoice! Be happy! You're wrong! It's not easy, and it's unlikely that you're going to get instant gratification, but your efforts do make a difference. Write your congressman, run for local office, get active in local politics, show up at or organize a demonstration about something you care about. Get educated and educate others. These things work, and history shows it. Public pressure is the reason we got out of Vietnam. People often lose sight of that, but the record shows it to be true. You can read government records of the time if you don't believe me, or you can read analysis done by scholars like Noam Chomsky. The same can be said about race issues. Things have really changed regarding racism in America, and it's thanks to a bunch of people working their asses off. We remember guys like Malcom X and MLK, but nothing would have happened without all of the nameless forgotten demonstrators, speakers, and letter writers. Look at Ghandi. Greed exists in every system, and it is up to the citizenry to do what they can to mitigate its negative effects. We are actually very lucky to live in a relatively open and responsive society. It's not the best, and needs improvement, but there exist peaceful and effective mechanisms for change. They just require OUR hard work.
In the modern world the government has obscenely effective means for the repression of violent revolt, so be careful what you wish for. Violent revolt should only be turned to as a last result anyway. In a violent revolution, it is often the most bloodthirsty and cruel that climb to the top, and I don't want that. I also enjoy the comforts and advances of civilization, and don't want to see my country sink into civil war, collapsing infrastructure, etc. We can reform and change. But the first thing we have to do is get rid of our apathy and our hopelessness, which provide convenient excuses to be lazy, sit on our ass and try not to think about it all.