Maybe you don't know, but SSL is useless vs local sniffing because of things like ARP Poisonning ect.
That's why SSL certificates are signed. As long as the certificate issuers are doing their jobs and only giving out signed certificates for www.myURLNameHere.com to the actual owner of www.myURLNameHere.com, and people actually don't complete transactions when a warning of a self-signed certificate comes up, you're fine. The cert issuers are pretty good (I haven't heard of any real problems). Some people do ignore cert warnings, but that's the risk they take. I know to take cert warnings seriously when entering in secure information, so the risks to me are minimal.
Sure the certificates will not match or give a self-issued warning. But how many people surfing at StarBucks care about those broken lockpad symbols?
Well, the browers should bring up a message that says the certificate isn't valid. That might be a red-flag to a lot of people, especially when visiting their bank. Some people might ignore the popup message like they ignore every message.
But in general I agree that online banking could be a problem at your local Starbucks. I've felt for a long time that banks need to enable something better than the stupid username/password authentication. Make it a physical device issued by the bank to each customer that verifies the identity of the bank, and verifies the identity of the customer. Require users have the thing plugged into the USB device whenever they do online banking.
However, the real problem is that someone will set up a laptop to sniff an open wireless network and then grep the output for credit-card numbers and MMO passwords.
While this is somewhat of a concern, the risk is greatly reduced by the fact that the vast majority of shopping sites use SSL to encrypt transactions where credit card numbers are being sent. That would make any sniffing attempts useless.
Hell, even Yahoo has a secure login for email these days.
I'm soon moving to an apartment that offers free Wi-Fi internet connectivity. Though it's an encrypted connection, I don't necessarily want anyone in the apartment complex to be able to look at the contents of every un-secured website I go to. Can someone recommend a VPN provider that:
1. Will provide a static IP address so I can run services like SMTP and HTTP 2. Will easily work with some version of firmware on my wireless router, a WRT-54G. This way I can provide seemless access to the rest of the machines on my network without running VPN software on them.
Unless you're bill gates, your "home theater" isn't even close to that 3-story high screen. However loving your family is, they're simply not the same as an enthusiastic sold-out crowd.
I think he's talking about the entire experience, not just one aspect of it. Some people are more annoyed at obnoxious people talking on cell phones, kicking seats than others are and care less about watching something on a giant screen.
The narrowing of the gap the GP is talking about is quite good picture quality, have surround sound if you want it, widescreen versions, and obviously the special features which aren't even available at the theatre. With VHS, none of those are possible. With HD-DVD coming around the corner and HD-TV already available that gap is getting even smaller.
It was the highest grossing movie this weekend, right? First place? What were they hoping for? Zeroth place? I mean really
They were hoping that the movie would make back the 30 million it took to produce it on opening weekend. Instead they only make a measly 13.8 million. For comparisons sake, Clerks II, a movie of limited appeal that had almost no advertising budget made 10 million on its opening weekend (and only cost about 5 million to produce).
The problem here isn't that the movie only made 13.8 million, the problem is that it cost 30 million to produce it. The producers should have realized this movie would likely have a niche market, and spent a lot less money to make it.
One way is simply from updates that haven't been fully tested. I remember a couple years ago when I ran Fedora there were many new kernel version updates on the same version of Fedora. Also patches to one part of Fedora can break other parts. Lack of security updates after a couple years when support ends can also spell problems. I'd sugest moving to RHEL if you've got a few dollars to spend, or CentOS if you're cash strapped.
It all depends on what you're running the server in production for. If it's just your home server serving up mail and files, no big deal if it breaks.
But a vaccination is something that would be given to everyone in order to prevent them from getting HIV in the first place. This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.
That's probbably true in developed countries like the US where HIV infection rates are somewhere around 0.60% of the population. But in a country like Swaziland where 38% of the population has HIV, or South Africa where 21% of the population has HIV it'd be a very different story.
Actually if you had thought a little bit you might have realized that I was responding to the idea that we shouldn't eliminate hardship because it "makes people grow up". Sorry if that level of subtlety is lost on you. If every time I get into a little trouble the answer is always to just call for assistance (mom, dad, friends, police) then when will I know how to actually solve my own problems for myself or learn to recognize when I'm getting in over my head?
Maybe when mom, dad, friends, police tell you to solve your own damn problem? What is it with people that think that parents that give a kid a cell phone will just automatically come to the rescue for every minor problem? If they do, the problem isn't the technology, it's the parents. If you live in a perfectly sterile bubble you will have no chance of death by simple virus or bacteria. But the moment you step outside of that bubble you are many times more likely to suffer serious ailments within 24 hours than if you never lived in that bubble
Cell phones don't keep people in bubbles, it's the parents who rescue a kid out of any situation that do that. You don't need a cell-phone for parents to do that.
Rather than checking around and discovering that no such malware exists in the wild, they assume that computer users are able to judge for themselves the cause of computer difficulties.
Well, ultimately what matters to the consumer is what the consumer perceives. If 10% of Mac users think they have spyware, then there's 10% diss-satisfied customers. It doesn't matter if none of them actually do. It'd be like CR doing a survey of car owners and finding out if they're satisfied with how the brakes operate in Chevys. If 10% say they thought the brakes were too grabby, it doesn't matter if Chevy says that they designed the brakes to be grabby for safety reasons. This would be like studying the mechanisms of natural selection by way of a survey. Hey, whaddyaknow, turns out there's no such thing as evolution
You miss-interpret the question that CR is trying to answer. They aren't studying the prevalence of spyware on Macs vs PCs, they're studying how well consumers like/dislike different products.
Just how big of yield do you need to make it a worth while terrorist weapon?
Well, a lot larger than the blast you'd get if your mass of plutonium were just a conventional explosive. I don't know the yield of such a crappy "nuclear" weapon, but I doubt it'd be very much. You'd be much smarter to just use conventional explosives than a Pu-238 bomb.
Dying from the noxious fumes in a small bathroom before you can make enough explosives to blow up the plane isn't really meeting the goals of most suicide bombers. I suggest you read the actual articles before posting from now on.
Who would have believed that before it happened? Who wouldn't have said that someone had been "watching a few too many Hollywood movies"?
Planes have been hijacked before 9/11, so it's not really that unbelieveable that someone couldn't accomplish the same thing. Learning how to fly isn't really that difficult, and obviously people do it all the time. The most un-intuitive thing about 9/11 was simply that a plane flown into a building could collapse it. That's something only an expert could have predicted. The difference here is that we're getting the information from an expert in the explosive in question. It's pretty obvious from reading the article that making this explosive onboard a plane is difficult no matter how much training you have. If you discount what experts in the field have to say, what isn't "to far fetched"?
These are the things that make us better parents, better children, better storytellers, and better people. Hardship is what makes you grow up. Having a phone to bail you out of every situation, parent or child, inhibits your progress to adulthood.
I wasn't aware of this new function of cell-phones that bail you out of every situation. Is that function buried somewhere in the menus? Cell phones provide some very limited functionality, and could arguably give kids a little more freedom. Why can't that make you grow up too?
If your logic is that we shouldn't use technology to avoid problems in life, then we never should have developed the polio vaccine, anti-biotics, or anything else to prevents hardship.
They are radioactive and could be used to make at least a dirty bomb if not an outright fission device.
It would probbably make a very good dirty bomb, but Pu-238 is a lousy choice for a fission bomb. The reason is that it has a high rate of spontaneous fission (and emits neutrons in the process). This would cause the plutonium to undergow premature detonation before the mass of Pu was compressed. The result would be a much smaller explosion.
I would say "I don't know, but probably", would this put me down as an evolution denier?
I don't know. I'd say it just means you don't know much about the evidence for human evolution. It's quite overwhelming. I think it is certainly the most plausable answer but I'm not going to say that it is FACT because it isn't
Well, it's not a fact in the same sense that gravitational theory isn't a fact, or heliocentric theory isn't a fact. Geocentric theory actually does work out mathematically with all the cycles and epi-cycles. It just requires un-observed forces, whereas Newton's universal gravitation and helio-centric theory explain everything except extremely massive objects like the sun. You can take your skepticism pretty far and come up with the theory we're all living in the Matrix too.
Well, it really had nothing to do the actual civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, but it was really something else..." That's called 'moving the goalposts'. You know, the American colonists didn't really win the war for independence -- it was more a factor of waning British influence around that time...
Actually I never said that, so I'm not sure why you're arguing this point. The point is that different situations demand different tactics.
I'm not sure how to address your unrelenting faith in non-violent protest always being a strategy that can replace violence. I think we simply disagree to the lengths that some people will take to stop non-violent protest. It's kind of funny that you bring up one incidence of non-violent protest in Poland. The last I checked the Nazi's were quite effective at killing the vast majority of Jews in Poland. Sure, a few people were saved, but ultimately that strategy failed. The only thing that actually stopped the Nazis was allied troops marching into Germany. I guess the only lasting thing that Mayor accomplished was boosting your faith in non-violent protest even when it's obvious it didn't work.
It is also true that conflict is a fact of existence. People will get mad at each other, and respond in a number of ways, from ignoring each other, acting passive-aggressive, sitting down and talking, arguing, yelling, fighting, perhaps murder and gang/tribal fueds, but warfare as an absolute necessity? You're telling me that Ghandi's non-violent resistance didn't successfully overthrow the British Empire in India?
I don't know much about the British leaving India, but I kind of doubt it's all because of Ghandi and not mostly because the larger scale decline of the British empire after WWII. It really bothers me when people bring up Ghandi and assume that non-violent protest is applicable to all situations. How do you think that kind of strategy would have worked against the Nazi's? From what I've heard there were small protests and organizing against the Nazi party. Those people were quickly killed. To pick another example, do you think non-violent protests could have ended slavery in the US? The South was willing to fight a war and divide the country to continue slavery. I don't think they'd let some sit-ins or boycotts change them.
Non-violent protest is certainly sometimes a valid option for change, and sometimes the only option for change. But violence is also sometimes a valid option, and sometimes the only option.
But what if you paid for Redhat 9, standardized upon it, put a huge developer investment into it, and a year later they tell you it's gone and they want more money
If someone did that I guess they made a really dumb decision putting all that money into a product that never had any support guarantees in it. You should have ponied up the few extra bucks and standardized on RHEL 2.1, or even the previous "Redhat Advanced Server". (since RHEL was basically 9 with minor changes)
Actually RHEL 2.1 was based on Redhat 7.2. RHEL 3 was based on Redhat 9. One of the "minor changes" was the level of support that was offered. Redhat should have said 9 was the last release and we will support our paid customers who made an investment in it for longer than 1 year and do good by them
Like I said, there was never any support contract for RH9, and by that time if you wanted guaranteed support you should have picked a RHEL product. I'm still running a RH9 box. It works great with the updates from Fedora Legacy, and I certainly don't blame RH for getting out of that game.
If we legalize "hard drugs" why wouldn't we extend this to all drugs. That is to say all prescription drugs such as anti-depression, heart meds, erectile enhancers, and the like?
Those drugs are already legal, but regulated. You seem to imply legalization of illegal drugs means there won't be any kind of regulation on them at all and you'll be able to buy cocaine at your local gas station. Very few people are arguing for that. Where do we draw the line.
You don't draw one line, you draw 1000 different lines on a case by case basis. The problem you're having is lumping all illegal drugs into one big pile. This is idiotic, but it's been the attitude that people have taken for many years. Marijuanna is very different from heroin, but yet they're both lumped into the category of "illegal drugs". Seeing a rock of crack next to the hard candy would make it seem like trying an atomic fireball or sour gummy. (There's no reason to think they wouldn't be presented like this if all are legal).
Huh? I think you must be trolling here. Are legal drugs like alcohol sitting next to hard candy, and freely available to children? If drugs were legalized then they'd certainly have some very hard restrictions on them, much more so than alcohol. The fact that they were illegal made me wonder why and that's when I did some research and talked to my parents.
Well, if the only thing preventing you from doing potentially dangerous things is the legality of illegality of it, you've got a lot to learn. Drinking drain cleaner is also perfectly legal, but I wouldn't recommend you try it. Rock climbing without a rope is also legal, but I wouldn't do it unless you're an expert climber and enjoy risking your life.
it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
Actually DC can also be transmitted long distances as well. It's high voltage that allows long distance power distribution, not something special about AC. The reason why we use AC for power distribution and not DC is that AC can be easily stepped up or stepped down to different voltages using simple technology. It's only recently become possible to do the same thing with DC using semi-conductors. DC is actually being used for some long-distance power distribution now because it doesn't have to be synchronized with the other side (as well as other reasons). This gives some kind of advantage in preventing failures between parts of the power grid.
No, it's not rigorously defined. But this is a conceptual discussion, not a scientific one. When the genre of highbrow video games hasn't been developed yet it's hard to perfectly define what it means. He doesn't perfectly define what he's talking about, but he points in the direction he's speaking of. I see no problem with that. In the absense of such a definition, this essay is simply content-free, alluding to some vague idea in your head that may or may not resemble some vague idea in the author's head, which may or may not actually correspond to reality in any particular sense
I think you're looking for the end-product, and it hasn't been reached yet. This is the first I've ever heard anyone talk about the lack of elite video games, and I think it's a very interesting idea. As far as I'm concerned this is the beginning of a discussion, not the end.
It seems that it is less that the little guy here won, so much as the DA simply thought he wouldn't win.
Well, you're correct, but with a qualification. In this case it's not lack of evidence that made the DA think he couldn't win. Obviously there's a frickin video tape that's undeniable evidence of what went on. The reason the DA didn't think he could win is that any jury would be hard pressed to believe that this guy has done anything wrong. If you ask me, that's a big win against this law in cases like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you don't know, but SSL is useless vs local sniffing because of things like ARP Poisonning ect.
That's why SSL certificates are signed. As long as the certificate issuers are doing their jobs and only giving out signed certificates for www.myURLNameHere.com to the actual owner of www.myURLNameHere.com, and people actually don't complete transactions when a warning of a self-signed certificate comes up, you're fine. The cert issuers are pretty good (I haven't heard of any real problems). Some people do ignore cert warnings, but that's the risk they take. I know to take cert warnings seriously when entering in secure information, so the risks to me are minimal.
Sure the certificates will not match or give a self-issued warning. But how many people surfing at StarBucks care about those broken lockpad symbols?
Well, the browers should bring up a message that says the certificate isn't valid. That might be a red-flag to a lot of people, especially when visiting their bank. Some people might ignore the popup message like they ignore every message.
But in general I agree that online banking could be a problem at your local Starbucks. I've felt for a long time that banks need to enable something better than the stupid username/password authentication. Make it a physical device issued by the bank to each customer that verifies the identity of the bank, and verifies the identity of the customer. Require users have the thing plugged into the USB device whenever they do online banking.
However, the real problem is that someone will set up a laptop to sniff an open wireless network and then grep the output for credit-card numbers and MMO passwords.
While this is somewhat of a concern, the risk is greatly reduced by the fact that the vast majority of shopping sites use SSL to encrypt transactions where credit card numbers are being sent. That would make any sniffing attempts useless.
Hell, even Yahoo has a secure login for email these days.
I'm soon moving to an apartment that offers free Wi-Fi internet connectivity. Though it's an encrypted connection, I don't necessarily want anyone in the apartment complex to be able to look at the contents of every un-secured website I go to. Can someone recommend a VPN provider that:
1. Will provide a static IP address so I can run services like SMTP and HTTP
2. Will easily work with some version of firmware on my wireless router, a WRT-54G. This way I can provide
seemless access to the rest of the machines on my network without running VPN software on them.
Unless you're bill gates, your "home theater" isn't even close to that 3-story high screen. However loving your family is, they're simply not the same as an enthusiastic sold-out crowd.
I think he's talking about the entire experience, not just one aspect of it. Some people are more annoyed at obnoxious people talking on cell phones, kicking seats than others are and care less about watching something on a giant screen.
The narrowing of the gap the GP is talking about is quite good picture quality, have surround sound if you want it, widescreen versions, and obviously the special features which aren't even available at the theatre. With VHS, none of those are possible. With HD-DVD coming around the corner and HD-TV already available that gap is getting even smaller.
It was the highest grossing movie this weekend, right? First place? What were they hoping for? Zeroth place? I mean really
They were hoping that the movie would make back the 30 million it took to produce it on opening weekend. Instead they only make a measly 13.8 million. For comparisons sake, Clerks II, a movie of limited appeal that had almost no advertising budget made 10 million on its opening weekend (and only cost about 5 million to produce).
The problem here isn't that the movie only made 13.8 million, the problem is that it cost 30 million to produce it. The producers should have realized this movie would likely have a niche market, and spent a lot less money to make it.
Why would a Fedora server break?
One way is simply from updates that haven't been fully tested. I remember a couple years ago when I ran Fedora there were many new kernel version updates on the same version of Fedora. Also patches to one part of Fedora can break other parts. Lack of security updates after a couple years when support ends can also spell problems. I'd sugest moving to RHEL if you've got a few dollars to spend, or CentOS if you're cash strapped.
It all depends on what you're running the server in production for. If it's just your home server serving up mail and files, no big deal if it breaks.
But a vaccination is something that would be given to everyone in order to prevent them from getting HIV in the first place. This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.
That's probbably true in developed countries like the US where HIV infection rates are somewhere around 0.60% of the population. But in a country like Swaziland where 38% of the population has HIV, or South Africa where 21% of the population has HIV it'd be a very different story.
Actually if you had thought a little bit you might have realized that I was responding to the idea that we shouldn't eliminate hardship because it "makes people grow up". Sorry if that level of subtlety is lost on you.
If every time I get into a little trouble the answer is always to just call for assistance (mom, dad, friends, police) then when will I know how to actually solve my own problems for myself or learn to recognize when I'm getting in over my head?
Maybe when mom, dad, friends, police tell you to solve your own damn problem? What is it with people that think that parents that give a kid a cell phone will just automatically come to the rescue for every minor problem? If they do, the problem isn't the technology, it's the parents.
If you live in a perfectly sterile bubble you will have no chance of death by simple virus or bacteria. But the moment you step outside of that bubble you are many times more likely to suffer serious ailments within 24 hours than if you never lived in that bubble
Cell phones don't keep people in bubbles, it's the parents who rescue a kid out of any situation that do that. You don't need a cell-phone for parents to do that.
Yes, but if spyware isn't the real problem, then anti-spyware software isn't going to help.
True, but irrelevant. Consumer Reports exists only to answer one question. Should I buy product A, product B, or product C?
Rather than checking around and discovering that no such malware exists in the wild, they assume that computer users are able to judge for themselves the cause of computer difficulties.
Well, ultimately what matters to the consumer is what the consumer perceives. If 10% of Mac users think they have spyware, then there's 10% diss-satisfied customers. It doesn't matter if none of them actually do. It'd be like CR doing a survey of car owners and finding out if they're satisfied with how the brakes operate in Chevys. If 10% say they thought the brakes were too grabby, it doesn't matter if Chevy says that they designed the brakes to be grabby for safety reasons.
This would be like studying the mechanisms of natural selection by way of a survey. Hey, whaddyaknow, turns out there's no such thing as evolution
You miss-interpret the question that CR is trying to answer. They aren't studying the prevalence of spyware on Macs vs PCs, they're studying how well consumers like/dislike different products.
Just how big of yield do you need to make it a worth while terrorist weapon?
Well, a lot larger than the blast you'd get if your mass of plutonium were just a conventional explosive. I don't know the yield of such a crappy "nuclear" weapon, but I doubt it'd be very much. You'd be much smarter to just use conventional explosives than a Pu-238 bomb.
And, to a suicide bomber, this is a downside how?
Dying from the noxious fumes in a small bathroom before you can make enough explosives to blow up the plane isn't really meeting the goals of most suicide bombers. I suggest you read the actual articles before posting from now on.
Who would have believed that before it happened? Who wouldn't have said that someone had been "watching a few too many Hollywood movies"?
Planes have been hijacked before 9/11, so it's not really that unbelieveable that someone couldn't accomplish the same thing. Learning how to fly isn't really that difficult, and obviously people do it all the time. The most un-intuitive thing about 9/11 was simply that a plane flown into a building could collapse it. That's something only an expert could have predicted. The difference here is that we're getting the information from an expert in the explosive in question. It's pretty obvious from reading the article that making this explosive onboard a plane is difficult no matter how much training you have. If you discount what experts in the field have to say, what isn't "to far fetched"?
These are the things that make us better parents, better children, better storytellers, and better people. Hardship is what makes you grow up. Having a phone to bail you out of every situation, parent or child, inhibits your progress to adulthood.
I wasn't aware of this new function of cell-phones that bail you out of every situation. Is that function buried somewhere in the menus? Cell phones provide some very limited functionality, and could arguably give kids a little more freedom. Why can't that make you grow up too?
If your logic is that we shouldn't use technology to avoid problems in life, then we never should have developed the polio vaccine, anti-biotics, or anything else to prevents hardship.
They are radioactive and could be used to make at least a dirty bomb if not an outright fission device.
It would probbably make a very good dirty bomb, but Pu-238 is a lousy choice for a fission bomb. The reason is that it has a high rate of spontaneous fission (and emits neutrons in the process). This would cause the plutonium to undergow premature detonation before the mass of Pu was compressed. The result would be a much smaller explosion.
What kind of strange rabbits have these topologists seen? The rabbits I've seen have a hole from end to end through them called the digestive tract.
I would say "I don't know, but probably", would this put me down as an evolution denier?
I don't know. I'd say it just means you don't know much about the evidence for human evolution. It's quite overwhelming.
I think it is certainly the most plausable answer but I'm not going to say that it is FACT because it isn't
Well, it's not a fact in the same sense that gravitational theory isn't a fact, or heliocentric theory isn't a fact. Geocentric theory actually does work out mathematically with all the cycles and epi-cycles. It just requires un-observed forces, whereas Newton's universal gravitation and helio-centric theory explain everything except extremely massive objects like the sun. You can take your skepticism pretty far and come up with the theory we're all living in the Matrix too.
Well, it really had nothing to do the actual civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, but it was really something else..." That's called 'moving the goalposts'. You know, the American colonists didn't really win the war for independence -- it was more a factor of waning British influence around that time...
Actually I never said that, so I'm not sure why you're arguing this point. The point is that different situations demand different tactics.
I'm not sure how to address your unrelenting faith in non-violent protest always being a strategy that can replace violence. I think we simply disagree to the lengths that some people will take to stop non-violent protest. It's kind of funny that you bring up one incidence of non-violent protest in Poland. The last I checked the Nazi's were quite effective at killing the vast majority of Jews in Poland. Sure, a few people were saved, but ultimately that strategy failed. The only thing that actually stopped the Nazis was allied troops marching into Germany. I guess the only lasting thing that Mayor accomplished was boosting your faith in non-violent protest even when it's obvious it didn't work.
It is also true that conflict is a fact of existence. People will get mad at each other, and respond in a number of ways, from ignoring each other, acting passive-aggressive, sitting down and talking, arguing, yelling, fighting, perhaps murder and gang/tribal fueds, but warfare as an absolute necessity? You're telling me that Ghandi's non-violent resistance didn't successfully overthrow the British Empire in India?
I don't know much about the British leaving India, but I kind of doubt it's all because of Ghandi and not mostly because the larger scale decline of the British empire after WWII. It really bothers me when people bring up Ghandi and assume that non-violent protest is applicable to all situations. How do you think that kind of strategy would have worked against the Nazi's? From what I've heard there were small protests and organizing against the Nazi party. Those people were quickly killed. To pick another example, do you think non-violent protests could have ended slavery in the US? The South was willing to fight a war and divide the country to continue slavery. I don't think they'd let some sit-ins or boycotts change them.
Non-violent protest is certainly sometimes a valid option for change, and sometimes the only option for change. But violence is also sometimes a valid option, and sometimes the only option.
But what if you paid for Redhat 9, standardized upon it, put a huge developer investment into it, and a year later they tell you it's gone and they want more money
If someone did that I guess they made a really dumb decision putting all that money into a product that never had any support guarantees in it. You should have ponied up the few extra bucks and standardized on RHEL 2.1, or even the previous "Redhat Advanced Server".
(since RHEL was basically 9 with minor changes)
Actually RHEL 2.1 was based on Redhat 7.2. RHEL 3 was based on Redhat 9. One of the "minor changes" was the level of support that was offered.
Redhat should have said 9 was the last release and we will support our paid customers who made an investment in it for longer than 1 year and do good by them
Like I said, there was never any support contract for RH9, and by that time if you wanted guaranteed support you should have picked a RHEL product. I'm still running a RH9 box. It works great with the updates from Fedora Legacy, and I certainly don't blame RH for getting out of that game.
If we legalize "hard drugs" why wouldn't we extend this to all drugs. That is to say all prescription drugs such as anti-depression, heart meds, erectile enhancers, and the like?
Those drugs are already legal, but regulated. You seem to imply legalization of illegal drugs means there won't be any kind of regulation on them at all and you'll be able to buy cocaine at your local gas station. Very few people are arguing for that.
Where do we draw the line.
You don't draw one line, you draw 1000 different lines on a case by case basis. The problem you're having is lumping all illegal drugs into one big pile. This is idiotic, but it's been the attitude that people have taken for many years. Marijuanna is very different from heroin, but yet they're both lumped into the category of "illegal drugs".
Seeing a rock of crack next to the hard candy would make it seem like trying an atomic fireball or sour gummy. (There's no reason to think they wouldn't be presented like this if all are legal).
Huh? I think you must be trolling here. Are legal drugs like alcohol sitting next to hard candy, and freely available to children? If drugs were legalized then they'd certainly have some very hard restrictions on them, much more so than alcohol.
The fact that they were illegal made me wonder why and that's when I did some research and talked to my parents.
Well, if the only thing preventing you from doing potentially dangerous things is the legality of illegality of it, you've got a lot to learn. Drinking drain cleaner is also perfectly legal, but I wouldn't recommend you try it. Rock climbing without a rope is also legal, but I wouldn't do it unless you're an expert climber and enjoy risking your life.
it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
Actually DC can also be transmitted long distances as well. It's high voltage that allows long distance power distribution, not something special about AC. The reason why we use AC for power distribution and not DC is that AC can be easily stepped up or stepped down to different voltages using simple technology. It's only recently become possible to do the same thing with DC using semi-conductors. DC is actually being used for some long-distance power distribution now because it doesn't have to be synchronized with the other side (as well as other reasons). This gives some kind of advantage in preventing failures between parts of the power grid.
The problem is that "highbrow" is not defined.
No, it's not rigorously defined. But this is a conceptual discussion, not a scientific one. When the genre of highbrow video games hasn't been developed yet it's hard to perfectly define what it means. He doesn't perfectly define what he's talking about, but he points in the direction he's speaking of. I see no problem with that.
In the absense of such a definition, this essay is simply content-free, alluding to some vague idea in your head that may or may not resemble some vague idea in the author's head, which may or may not actually correspond to reality in any particular sense
I think you're looking for the end-product, and it hasn't been reached yet. This is the first I've ever heard anyone talk about the lack of elite video games, and I think it's a very interesting idea. As far as I'm concerned this is the beginning of a discussion, not the end.
It seems that it is less that the little guy here won, so much as the DA simply thought he wouldn't win.
Well, you're correct, but with a qualification. In this case it's not lack of evidence that made the DA think he couldn't win. Obviously there's a frickin video tape that's undeniable evidence of what went on. The reason the DA didn't think he could win is that any jury would be hard pressed to believe that this guy has done anything wrong. If you ask me, that's a big win against this law in cases like this.