LD50 as I remember from my work in the nuclear industry is the amount of a substance that causes death in 50% of a population. Whether that's by cancer or not doesn't matter.
A simple google query starts off with four articles, two of which say the cancer risk from cannabis is high, and two that don't.
It's pretty dishonest, and likely wishful thinking on the part of cannabis users, to claim that there is "no risk of cancer." Remember, "low" and "lower" than tobacco does not mean "zero" or "negligible."
Until there are some good data on the issue, it's pretty irresponsible to go about saying that there is no risk of cancer from cannabis use.
There is a risk of cancer from many things, heck even living causes death eventually. I've taken more than my fair share of unhealthy food and I like to drink alcohol. But I don't go around pretending there is no cancer risk.
I've done open standpipe working over two nuclear reactors. I put (by hand) video cameras into the reactor cores. There was a cancer risk there too. It was incredibly low, though, tens of thousands of times lower than regularly smoking cigarettes.
I don't smoke cigarettes, or any kind of tobacco, but I have in the past (less than 10 in total) and passively-smoked by going to pubs, clubs, restaurants and gigs.
Most people who take cannabis smoke it mixed in with tobacco. There is a direct cancer risk there from the tobacco and the cannabis. There is also the serious issue of nicotine addiction. Yes, kids, nicotine is more addictive than heroin.
Many a young person starts off smoking a few joints at the weekend with friends and becomes addicted to nicotine. That's a big win for the tobacco industry.
BBC Radio 4 often has programmes and news reports about these issues, and the last I heard, the British medical establishment concluded that cannabis wasn't that bad compared to alcohol and tobacco, but it is very carcinogenic. There was also mention of the flawed study that claimed that "skunk" was responsible for psychosis and they were keen to point out that it was a flawed study.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it(pun intended), Fox News of the USA.
Cannabis/Marijuana is carcinogenic, and about four times as carcinogenic as tobacco.
They say that if tobacco were "discovered" today it would be outlawed straight away.
Alcohol has serious long-term health effects too, but in the short term it also leads to intoxication and injury and death by accidents. Not just road accidents either. That would be banned as well.
Really, the banning of all drugs is absurd. In an ideal world, adults would be responsible for their own actions and deemed wise enough to decide for themselves what and what not to ingest into their own bodies, and for their actions while under the influence of those substances. However, we live in a conservative, irrational, authoritarian world. And besides, have you seen the shockingly childish and ignorant behaviour of many adults?
I have little sympathy for Gary McKinnon. That doesn't make the actions of the courts right ot just, mind you.
He's "into computers" and intelligent enough to exploit vulnerabilities in others' systems to gain unauthorised access. He should therefore have been paying attention to the US (and UK's) "war on terror" and the absurd, heavy-handed measures that they've brought in in the name of security.
What on earth did he think he was doing? Why did he think that he wouldn't get caught and made an example of?
He's got Asbergers, not dementia. He's not retarded. What an idiot.
This is good news. All those Fedora folks can be beta testers. In five years or so I'll consider going from ext3 to ext4. It's only about a year since I went to ext3. I figured it must be OK by now since there haven't been any scare stories. I used to use Reiser before ext3 was stable.
xfs is really over-rated. I used to work on an "Enterprise" storage appliance that used xfs. It was scary. Don't go there. Also, avoid anything from IBM.
Actually, it might be more like the UK's original space rocket programme. Just as they get something built that looks like it might work, some bureaucrat will try to terminate the project. There will be begging and pleading to let it fly just once, which it will, and do so perfectly much to the admiration of the world.
Then it will be canceled properly and everyone will have a nice cuppa tea, a slice of cake and a sit-down.
Chemical to orbit, where we can assemble a huge nuclear space ship.
I'll say this again: we should be thinking big for interplanetary missions. If we had an Ares V or Saturn V class chemical booster, we could be building a LEO assembly facility and space ships of 1000 metric tonnes and greater with nuclear engines. Note to hippies: the nuclear fuel doesn't become dangerous until it has gone critical at least once, i.e. the first time the nuclear engine is started. The ship could have a smallish chemical engine to boost it into a higher orbit before starting the nuclear engine.
We shouldn't be contemplating going to Mars in a pointy VW bus. We should be thinking , "cruise liner." Going to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn would be an iteration or two away rather than two centuries, which it will be at this rate.
What I can't understand is how these long-hours heroes can claim honestly that their mind is still functioning at full capacity after all that time.
Some people claim long hours when actually they are chatterboxes - standing around at the water cooler talking nonsense or spouting verbal diarrhea on the phone or on meetings and having to come in on Saturday to finish their work.
I am contracted to do 7.5 hour days, 5 days a week. I have worked genuine very insane hours in the past (14 hours for 8 weeks) and it nearly killed me. It was a real struggle after about 9 hours to keep my brain focused on the task.
I've also worked at an industrial site where they limited the number of hours you could work in a certain period, because the manager's best friend had been a hero once and worked something stupid like 23 hours non-stop and got himself killed driving home when he fell asleep.
Having to work long hours is a failure in the system. If it's not you, it's management's failure to plan or having unrealistic expectations from the staff. It's down right inhumane and uncivilised.
It produces ill, bitter and twisted people, poor quality work, and poor company performance.
Better yet, get your friends all to set up email accounts for drivel and get one of those markov-chain text generator thingies and send hundreds of emails a day between the accounts. For a bonus, attach random binary data (old jpegs etc.) to some of them.
Buy shares in storage and network companies. Retire.:-)
Ah, I see. This is American Frontierism at its most gratuitous. The cowboy hero mentality from the 19th century.
Here in Europe we take a different attitude. Seriously, You Americans who don't like American business culture should consider coming to Europe. We even speak a form of English here in the UK:-)
I just couldn't handle that kind of stress. There is no job on earth that could be worth all of my free time as well as my 37.5-40 hours a week of work time. None. Holidays/vacations? 25 days a year plus bank holidays. Paid, arranged in advance i.e. properly planned to fit in with the project and my life. Need to see a doctor? No problem, take it as sick, flexi-time or holiday. (Usually do the flexi-time).
So they pay's not astronomical, but if they want to fire me they've got to have a good reason and give me at least a month of notice. Likewise, I have to give them at least a month.
See, interesting as my Software Engineer's job is, I like to do my own on my own time which is not prohibited by my employment contract. I also like to play the guitar and cook.
So I work sensible hours, and they get my full and undivided attention, and the pay's not too bad and neither are the benefits. There's absolutely no skiving off to read slashdot during work hours etc.
As for hanging rope, a blame culture is counterproductive. In enlightened industries where preventing problems rather than gung-ho fixing them and chopping off heads after the event is preferred, it's a lot more pleasant to work and more productive.
Never mind, it's a cultural difference and each has its advantages and disadvantages.
I prefer mine here and that's where I'll be staying. You can have yours too. Each to their own etc.
I know people who love to work those 80 work weeks in exchange for the freedom to do updates on the live server whenever they wanted without going through 20 different hoops and having manager approval..... and they get happiness out of the situation.
They like to be stressed, over-worked, exploited, have no personal time and also appreciate being handed enough rope with which to hang themselves?
Heh. How about managers, developers and testers at a so-called Enterprise Archive and Storage company who didn't know about root squash on NFS and twice came in on a Monday morning to find out that a shell script, run as root from a client on the network, had wiped out all 250GB of data on the NAS used for everyones' home dirs.
Data was backed up on tape (despite being an optical disk company) and took many hours to restore.
Talk about eating your own dog food.
There was a Dickensian working environment if ever I saw one. Politely and discretely try to point out to the boss how to save $2000? "I've had enough of your ideas."
People in the same room were discouraged from communicating with each other lest they be wasting their time. The manager put a Windows guy in charge of the Linux NAS (hence the root squash thing). Had we been allowed to talk or collaborate at some point, we might have set it up right.
They went bust a couple of months ago. Luckily I escaped 18 months ago.
I live in Scotland; a country that was victim to the political machinations of its more powerful neighbor over 300 years ago - and to this day we're still bitching about it
I was born and brought up in Scotland. My family is Scottish through and through going back generations, and my father made sure that I "knew" how stupid the English were... Having said that he is a Unionist (Tory).
When I was a small child I was fiercely patriotic. I was going to grow up and marry a pure-bred Scottish woman and have a Scottish family, all brought up in Scotland.
By the age of about 15 I realised the absurdity of national boundaries, and was prepared to make a life for myself anywhere in the world.
I went as far as south-east England and married an English woman.
It's obvious to most semi-intelligent people that modern national boundaries are anachronisms, and exist for political reasons. All human beings are one and the same fundamentally.
All of these petty conflicts are to be pitied, even the trivial Scotland vs. England rivalry. Scotland only joined with England to form the United Kingdom because it was bankrupt because the Scottish colony of Jamaica went wrong etc.
A federal UK might be a good idea nowadays, but it will never happen. England would need to be split up into 5 or 6 regions. The English would never have it.
Now, a federal, democratic United States of Europe would be even better. Whether Scotland was still in the UK or independent within Europe then wouldn't really matter... but the English just wouldn't have it. They are England, after all, "The best country in the world. Take that, Johnny foreigner!" It's why we still have pints, feet and inches, pounds and ounces, and banknotes with Her Maj's face on...
Oh, is that reality calling? *harp noises* Time to wake up.
The way to prevent knife crime is to NOT have mercy on perpetrators. IOW, Death Penalty.
Of course, in countries with the Death Penalty, murders are virtually non-existent, and of those that are, the perpetrators are always prosecuted with 100% accuracy so no innocent people are ever put to death: it has never happened once.
And keeping people on Death Row is far cheaper and better for society than keeping them in any other kind of prison.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is slashdot.
Can I have some of what you are smoking, sir?
No, it's only available on prescription, and I don't smoke it.
LD50 as I remember from my work in the nuclear industry is the amount of a substance that causes death in 50% of a population. Whether that's by cancer or not doesn't matter.
A simple google query starts off with four articles, two of which say the cancer risk from cannabis is high, and two that don't.
It's pretty dishonest, and likely wishful thinking on the part of cannabis users, to claim that there is "no risk of cancer." Remember, "low" and "lower" than tobacco does not mean "zero" or "negligible."
Until there are some good data on the issue, it's pretty irresponsible to go about saying that there is no risk of cancer from cannabis use.
There is a risk of cancer from many things, heck even living causes death eventually. I've taken more than my fair share of unhealthy food and I like to drink alcohol. But I don't go around pretending there is no cancer risk.
I've done open standpipe working over two nuclear reactors. I put (by hand) video cameras into the reactor cores. There was a cancer risk there too. It was incredibly low, though, tens of thousands of times lower than regularly smoking cigarettes.
I don't smoke cigarettes, or any kind of tobacco, but I have in the past (less than 10 in total) and passively-smoked by going to pubs, clubs, restaurants and gigs.
Most people who take cannabis smoke it mixed in with tobacco. There is a direct cancer risk there from the tobacco and the cannabis. There is also the serious issue of nicotine addiction. Yes, kids, nicotine is more addictive than heroin.
Many a young person starts off smoking a few joints at the weekend with friends and becomes addicted to nicotine. That's a big win for the tobacco industry.
BBC Radio 4 often has programmes and news reports about these issues, and the last I heard, the British medical establishment concluded that cannabis wasn't that bad compared to alcohol and tobacco, but it is very carcinogenic. There was also mention of the flawed study that claimed that "skunk" was responsible for psychosis and they were keen to point out that it was a flawed study.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it(pun intended), Fox News of the USA.
You can eat (chew) tobacco too. It gives you mouth cancer, amongst others.
Cannabis/Marijuana is carcinogenic, and about four times as carcinogenic as tobacco.
They say that if tobacco were "discovered" today it would be outlawed straight away.
Alcohol has serious long-term health effects too, but in the short term it also leads to intoxication and injury and death by accidents. Not just road accidents either. That would be banned as well.
Really, the banning of all drugs is absurd. In an ideal world, adults would be responsible for their own actions and deemed wise enough to decide for themselves what and what not to ingest into their own bodies, and for their actions while under the influence of those substances. However, we live in a conservative, irrational, authoritarian world. And besides, have you seen the shockingly childish and ignorant behaviour of many adults?
I have little sympathy for Gary McKinnon. That doesn't make the actions of the courts right ot just, mind you.
He's "into computers" and intelligent enough to exploit vulnerabilities in others' systems to gain unauthorised access. He should therefore have been paying attention to the US (and UK's) "war on terror" and the absurd, heavy-handed measures that they've brought in in the name of security.
What on earth did he think he was doing? Why did he think that he wouldn't get caught and made an example of?
He's got Asbergers, not dementia. He's not retarded. What an idiot.
...zzzZZZ
Wake me up when he switches to GNUstep.
You Microsoft shills are always looking for the next conspiracy. Go to Sheffield.
This is good news. All those Fedora folks can be beta testers. In five years or so I'll consider going from ext3 to ext4. It's only about a year since I went to ext3. I figured it must be OK by now since there haven't been any scare stories. I used to use Reiser before ext3 was stable.
xfs is really over-rated. I used to work on an "Enterprise" storage appliance that used xfs. It was scary. Don't go there. Also, avoid anything from IBM.
you yanks are convinced that 30mpg is some sort of decent figure for fuel economy
Them pesky Yanks have smaller gallons than us. One of their cars would go further on a British (Imperial) gallon.
A car that does 30mpg in the USA would do 36mpg here in Blighty. Our gallons are 1.2 times the size of an American gallon.
So your 50mpg Diesel taken to America would only get about 42mpg in the USA.
"There's more!" Jimmy Cricket.
The best song ever on the interweb.
we'll never let it.
+5, insightful.
Actually, it might be more like the UK's original space rocket programme. Just as they get something built that looks like it might work, some bureaucrat will try to terminate the project. There will be begging and pleading to let it fly just once, which it will, and do so perfectly much to the admiration of the world.
Then it will be canceled properly and everyone will have a nice cuppa tea, a slice of cake and a sit-down.
Still, mustn't grumble.
Even if the exhaust flow is not undergoing fission, there must be a heck of an x-ray and gamma shine off of it.
Chemical to orbit, where we can assemble a huge nuclear space ship.
I'll say this again: we should be thinking big for interplanetary missions. If we had an Ares V or Saturn V class chemical booster, we could be building a LEO assembly facility and space ships of 1000 metric tonnes and greater with nuclear engines. Note to hippies: the nuclear fuel doesn't become dangerous until it has gone critical at least once, i.e. the first time the nuclear engine is started. The ship could have a smallish chemical engine to boost it into a higher orbit before starting the nuclear engine.
We shouldn't be contemplating going to Mars in a pointy VW bus. We should be thinking , "cruise liner." Going to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn would be an iteration or two away rather than two centuries, which it will be at this rate.
Do you still have to cook and clean and drive to and from work, go shopping etc? Do you get more that 4 hours sleep in each 24 hour period?
What I can't understand is how these long-hours heroes can claim honestly that their mind is still functioning at full capacity after all that time.
Some people claim long hours when actually they are chatterboxes - standing around at the water cooler talking nonsense or spouting verbal diarrhea on the phone or on meetings and having to come in on Saturday to finish their work.
I am contracted to do 7.5 hour days, 5 days a week. I have worked genuine very insane hours in the past (14 hours for 8 weeks) and it nearly killed me. It was a real struggle after about 9 hours to keep my brain focused on the task.
I've also worked at an industrial site where they limited the number of hours you could work in a certain period, because the manager's best friend had been a hero once and worked something stupid like 23 hours non-stop and got himself killed driving home when he fell asleep.
Having to work long hours is a failure in the system. If it's not you, it's management's failure to plan or having unrealistic expectations from the staff. It's down right inhumane and uncivilised.
It produces ill, bitter and twisted people, poor quality work, and poor company performance.
Better yet, get your friends all to set up email accounts for drivel and get one of those markov-chain text generator thingies and send hundreds of emails a day between the accounts. For a bonus, attach random binary data (old jpegs etc.) to some of them.
Buy shares in storage and network companies. Retire. :-)
Ah, I see. This is American Frontierism at its most gratuitous. The cowboy hero mentality from the 19th century.
Here in Europe we take a different attitude. Seriously, You Americans who don't like American business culture should consider coming to Europe. We even speak a form of English here in the UK :-)
I just couldn't handle that kind of stress. There is no job on earth that could be worth all of my free time as well as my 37.5-40 hours a week of work time. None. Holidays/vacations? 25 days a year plus bank holidays. Paid, arranged in advance i.e. properly planned to fit in with the project and my life. Need to see a doctor? No problem, take it as sick, flexi-time or holiday. (Usually do the flexi-time).
So they pay's not astronomical, but if they want to fire me they've got to have a good reason and give me at least a month of notice. Likewise, I have to give them at least a month.
See, interesting as my Software Engineer's job is, I like to do my own on my own time which is not prohibited by my employment contract. I also like to play the guitar and cook.
So I work sensible hours, and they get my full and undivided attention, and the pay's not too bad and neither are the benefits. There's absolutely no skiving off to read slashdot during work hours etc.
As for hanging rope, a blame culture is counterproductive. In enlightened industries where preventing problems rather than gung-ho fixing them and chopping off heads after the event is preferred, it's a lot more pleasant to work and more productive.
Never mind, it's a cultural difference and each has its advantages and disadvantages.
I prefer mine here and that's where I'll be staying. You can have yours too. Each to their own etc.
I know people who love to work those 80 work weeks in exchange for the freedom to do updates on the live server whenever they wanted without going through 20 different hoops and having manager approval..... and they get happiness out of the situation.
They like to be stressed, over-worked, exploited, have no personal time and also appreciate being handed enough rope with which to hang themselves?
Heh. How about managers, developers and testers at a so-called Enterprise Archive and Storage company who didn't know about root squash on NFS and twice came in on a Monday morning to find out that a shell script, run as root from a client on the network, had wiped out all 250GB of data on the NAS used for everyones' home dirs.
Data was backed up on tape (despite being an optical disk company) and took many hours to restore.
Talk about eating your own dog food.
There was a Dickensian working environment if ever I saw one. Politely and discretely try to point out to the boss how to save $2000? "I've had enough of your ideas."
People in the same room were discouraged from communicating with each other lest they be wasting their time. The manager put a Windows guy in charge of the Linux NAS (hence the root squash thing). Had we been allowed to talk or collaborate at some point, we might have set it up right.
They went bust a couple of months ago. Luckily I escaped 18 months ago.
I live in Scotland; a country that was victim to the political machinations of its more powerful neighbor over 300 years ago - and to this day we're still bitching about it
I was born and brought up in Scotland. My family is Scottish through and through going back generations, and my father made sure that I "knew" how stupid the English were... Having said that he is a Unionist (Tory).
When I was a small child I was fiercely patriotic. I was going to grow up and marry a pure-bred Scottish woman and have a Scottish family, all brought up in Scotland.
By the age of about 15 I realised the absurdity of national boundaries, and was prepared to make a life for myself anywhere in the world.
I went as far as south-east England and married an English woman.
It's obvious to most semi-intelligent people that modern national boundaries are anachronisms, and exist for political reasons. All human beings are one and the same fundamentally.
All of these petty conflicts are to be pitied, even the trivial Scotland vs. England rivalry. Scotland only joined with England to form the United Kingdom because it was bankrupt because the Scottish colony of Jamaica went wrong etc.
A federal UK might be a good idea nowadays, but it will never happen. England would need to be split up into 5 or 6 regions. The English would never have it.
Now, a federal, democratic United States of Europe would be even better. Whether Scotland was still in the UK or independent within Europe then wouldn't really matter... but the English just wouldn't have it. They are England, after all, "The best country in the world. Take that, Johnny foreigner!" It's why we still have pints, feet and inches, pounds and ounces, and banknotes with Her Maj's face on...
Oh, is that reality calling? *harp noises* Time to wake up.
Close, but no banana.
A light particle (photon) is an infinite rocket. Think about it.
The way to prevent knife crime is to NOT have mercy on perpetrators. IOW, Death Penalty.
Of course, in countries with the Death Penalty, murders are virtually non-existent, and of those that are, the perpetrators are always prosecuted with 100% accuracy so no innocent people are ever put to death: it has never happened once.
And keeping people on Death Row is far cheaper and better for society than keeping them in any other kind of prison.
Incidentally, it's actually just as quick to type MS as it is M$, but only one of them is immature name-calling.
The other one is a painful, debilitating, incurable, chronic fatal disease.