some studies have shown it does more damage to your lungs than smoking a pack of cigarrettes.
Horseshit. What these studies have shown is that they have isolated some of the same chemicals in marijuana smoke as in tobacco smoke. Until I'm going to believe that marijuana smoking is anywhere near as harmful as smoking corporate tobacco:
They will have to explain away the effects of radioactive heavy metals and nitrosamines in commercial cigarettes, the former produced from cheap phosphate fertilizer and readily uptaken by the tobacco plant, and the latter produced by open-air curing of the tobacco.
They will have to explain why tobacco chewers get cancer.
They will have to explain how PACs in the concentrations and duration present in smoke (both tobacco and marijuana) supposedly cause carcinogenic mutations.
They will have to explain away the antioxidant and anti-tumor properties of cannabinoids.
They will have to explain why they cannot unearth a single case of lung cancer or emphysema in a marijuana-ONLY smoker that has no other risk factors. Where are the bodies?
Speaking of emphysema, THC is an expectorant which means it aids the lungs in clearing smoke particles from the small airways. Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, which means it does a good job of keeping smoke particles inside the small airways (and raises blood pressure). Asthmatics have successfully used sufficiently potent cannabis to ward off asthma attacks when no other option was available.
If you still think tobacco and marijuana smoke are the same, why in the heck does tobacco smoke stick to everything and turn it yellow?
Some people will point to a smoker's cough as evidence that marijuana smoke is harmful. You should note that the mild bronchitis that a frequent pot smoker gets is not accompanied by coughing up blood and ceases when he quits smoking. This is a risk so small as to be vanishing, when compared to the well documented long-term and permanent risks of tobacco smoking.
Also, nicotine in tobacco smoke raises the heart rate and blood pressure while at the same time the carbon monoxide starves it for oxygen. Marijuana smoke, while containing CO as well raises heart rate but decreases blood pressure. Even if the same amount of marijuana as tobacco was smoked, and the same amount of CO taken in over the same period of time, the vasodilating effects of THC may mitigate heart damage that would otherwise be caused by the CO. It is a good area for further research (with appropriate controls).
If you think smoking is risky, don't smoke it. Make brownies, or use a vaporizer. But the jury is most definitely still out on this one.
Selection doesn't necessarily increase the potency, because not everyone wants a maximally potent product. If they did, they would smoke hashish (scraped resin glands) or hash oil (THC extract). Many smokers simply enjoy smoking, and would not like to get incredibly blasted out of their minds every time they sit down for some. Breeding usually concentrates on controlling the ratio of cannabinoids in the plant in order to bring out whatever psychoactive and medical effects are preferred, and of course for other properties like growing well indoors, not stinking enough to alert neighbors, etc.
There was also some testing done on 60's and 70's samples in the 1980's, but by then the bulk of THC in the samples had spoiled into useless CBN, rendering the results useless.
Since the beginning of reliable testing in 1980, marijuana potency has remained fairly constant. Were marijuana an "order of magnitude" more potent today than in 1980, it would be 30% THC on average. Where can I get some?
I don't suppose that hashish, a highly potent mixture of the resin glands of the plant, having been used for thousands of years would convince you that the potency alarmism is a red herring even if it were true (which it isn't)?
Have you ever heard of an alcohol vaporizer? Minimal hangover, fast onset of effects, and reduced health risk compared to excessive drinking. All the properties of this proposed "synthahol". Unfortunately, this is how we celebrate innovation in our society. So I wouldn't hold out hope for whatever this guy creates staying legal for too long...
In science, proof means "supported by evidence to such an extent that to withhold provisional assent would be perverse". Both stronger and weaker than mathematical proof; stronger in that no axioms are required, weaker because new evidence may be discovered.
Actually, science does require certain axioms. One is that the universe is deterministic (i.e., that it is possible to predict anything at all), and that our observations reflect reality.
The second axiom is very difficult to preserve when to make an observation sometimes requires changing the reality we are trying to observe, such as in particle physics. How do you observe this particle without bouncing another particle off it, which then changes its state in some way? Schroedinger and Heisenberg make for some real fun designing solid experiements.
Certain religious folks would disagree with the first axiom too. It is, in fact, why it is impossible to produce a scientific test for God that would satisfy them. According to them, if God realizes you are "testing God", then he twiddles reality in some way to throw you off the track, so your result is meaningless. Fortunately, the rest of reality does not seem to operate this way.
The primary reason they invented the registry was to allow software vendors to hide data about their program.
If the purpose of the registry was to "hide" data and not simply provide a common repository and API for storing it, can you explain why Microsoft supplied a registry editor to the end user ever since the registry was introduced in Windows 3.1?
If you think their products are bad now, just imagine how bad they would be without competition. And imagine how entrenched their lock-in schemes would be.
It's 2006, and Free Software(tm) still has done essentially nothing to change the average person's life.
Nothing, besides being responsible for the explosion of this thing we call the Internet and the World Wide Web. And for forcing Microsoft and other established industry behemoths like Cisco and Sun to produce a better product or to die.
No one who isn't a dyed-in-the-wool technophile has even heard of it,
Plenty of people who aren't die-hard technophiles haven't heard of Nikola Tesla or Detroit Diesel. It doesn't change the fact that things would be a lot more expensive and inconvenient, and not necessarily in an immediately quantifiable way, if they didn't exist. The solution is not to join those who would continue to marginalize Free Software into obscurity, it is to educate people who have no clue about the systems that do the real heavy lifting to make their day to day lives easier.
Through this education, they can see the value of the invisible hand of Linux, of GNU, of Apache, of Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and countless other successfully engineered operating system and middleware products that lie there, just below the surface of the pretty application they are using, doing what they are designed to do and in doing so enabling people to lead more fulfilling lives.
Won't I'm not sure they grasp is that in the Internet world most people don't do their own copying and that it only takes one dedicated geek to crack the shit and spread it to the world.
I'm sure they know this. And I am sure they realize that this scenario is easier for them. Making enough of an example out of that one dedicated geek so that no other dedicated geek will bother when the next version arrives, is easier than trying to make examples out of enough of the entire computer-using population so that the rest of the computer-using population will hopefully knock off the file sharing. (As they are currently doing with little success.)
You know, that could be because regulators have their heads up their collective asses about the true scope of the threat. Ithashappenedbefore. I bet half of the chemicals on this list are more poisonous than they are given credit for, and the other half are far more useful than poisonous. Unfortunately, they all get painted with the same brush when anti-competitive industry interests and lobbyists get in bed with the regulators.
Yes. Now why don't you tell us exactly how you're using a voltmeter to measure current, especially on a load that has capacitive and inductive components.
I think that is an utterly ridiculous idea for anyone who is not a developer. The "testing" distribution is there for a reason, use it!
This release started as a copy of sarge, and is currently in a state called testing. That means that things should not break as badly as in unstable or experimental distributions, because packages are allowed to enter this distribution only after a certain period of time has passed, and when they don't have any release-critical bugs filed against them.
The downside with testing is that you need to subscribe to debian-security-announce to keep abreast of security problems and see if you need to pull from unstable or backport a fix. Security releases for testing are not done in a managed fashion, i.e., they trickle down when the package passes all the usual criteria to enter testing.
Neither testing nor unstable is suitable for a non-development machine.
I believe there are cases where patent licences should be greanted for only a little time - like cures for cancer, AIDS, or the avian flu.
Why? Doing that would only ensure that nobody would invest in those areas or devote resources to research. A better plan would be to have a rich philanthropist write a blank check for the costs of developing the cure, if in fact it is ever developed (most pharma companies are more focused on managing symptoms than ever curing anything, because a continuous revenue stream is more attractive to investors).
If someone promises to underwrite the costs of development, the need for the patent system with all its evils is utterly neutered in that case - as long as finding a cure is in fact even a realistic goal.
You can't just load a program and start doing low level IO to ports.
Actually you can, man iopl(3)
You can't just bypass the MMU and paging system and write directly to physical memory.
man mlock(2), and take a look at/dev/mem
You can't just write directly to video memory.
The X server is a user process, yet it does this (on behalf of video drivers as well as DGA applications). Ditto for svgalib (1.x).
I think what you meant is that an unprivileged user process should not be able to do this. But it is easy to fool a user into giving the program excessive privileges (on modern desktop Unix, that would be through the use of sudo).
As a first step in this direction, I recommend placing the execution stack in ROM. Following that, we can move towards a ROM heap, and maybe ROM-based disk drives.
I'll start at the most basic one: bus speed. I mean seriously, dude -- the biggest overall improvement you could care to mention is that a P3 or P4 talks to everything a LOT faster than a P2 could.
Sure, but consumer PCI devices still run at 33MHz. The only thing you're getting here is main memory bandwidth.
Have you got any idea at all what that means? Nah, didn't think so. Look up what a cache hit is, it might interest you. Then try to wrap your wee little brain around the fact that a cache hit is less expensive on modern systems.
That's not a fact at all. That depends entirely on the latency of the cache, and it has nothing to do with the bus speed, since if the cache is hit, on any P6 or later CPU there is no associated bus traffic.
It might help you come to grips with the fact that the "megahertz myth" is just that. A myth.
Not when you are comparing processors with the same execution core. P2 and P4 may be incomparable, but P2 and Intel's new P3-core mobile chips can very well be compared in terms of MHZ. You can write a benchmark program that never once accesses main memory after loaded, to control for bus bandwidth.
I hope you looked up cache hit like I suggested -- 'cause now I'm going to mention that the newer processors have (get this!) BIGGER CACHE!
Not necessarily. Many CPUs still have a L2 cache smaller than the 1MB in my PPro system. And many newer CPUs still don't even have a 128KB L1 cache like my classic Athlon.
I mean like... Wow, dude... Not only is the processor faster.... Not only is the processor able to get data from memory faster but -- check this shit out, the processor can also AVOID CACHE HITS BY KEEPING MORE DATA AND CODE IN CACHE. Holy fucking shit! No way! No way!
Are you on something? How can you be so overconfident and yet so completely wrong at the same time? A larger cache, given the same set-associativity, will INCREASE the number of cache hits.
Those new processors are doing, WOW, more per cycle than the old ones! I mean, wtf? An op that used to cost 16 clock cycles can now be done in two or three?
Pipelining has given us this, but there is a tradeoff because a long stalled pipeline is just as effective as no pipeline at all. And hazards cause a pipeline to be flushed, negating any advantage. The P4 was a design with an incredibly long pipeline, and Intel seems to have largely given up on that strategy in favor of the P3 philosophy, a shorter pipeline with more execution units.
Fuck, man, look at all those transistors on the chip! They're smaller and change state faster!
They can, and this is in fact one benefit of newer hardware. You can take your new CPU, downclock it to match the performance of your old CPU, then the power consumption becomes negligible.
Oh, and yeah -- that doesn't even mention how they deepened the pipeline
A tradeoff
improved predictive branching
A tradeoff - trading power consumption for potential work-ahead
improved the feasability of OOOE
You'd best quantify this, since P2 was an extremely strong performing out-of-order processor. One of the first and still one of the best.
A modern system will outperform an older system with one-fifteenth the clockspeed by FAR MORE than fifteen times. Seriously.
Nah. You're full of shit. Run some benchmarks. Unless the "application" has a compact (wrt cache) and minimal memory usage, doesn't spend the majority of its time waiting for user input, and never hits the disk or uses external peripherals, the difference isn't as great as you'd like to believe it is.
whereas the celeron had a power factor of about.6...ie, not power-factor corrected.
That's nothing to do with the CPU or the PSU age, and everything to do with how cheaply designed the PSU was. There are tons of brand new PSUs on the market with absolutely crap power factors.
Yes, that's great, it's a historical account of people telling the ignorant masses that they'll be tortured for all eternity if they let the facts affect their conclusions. I don't understand how being recorded in a book brings their claims any closer to truth?
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Two decades of research has shown that marijuana intoxication has a negligible negative effect on driving performance, and may even promote safe driving.Though it is an extremely good idea, as you said, to not allow this knowledge to impart false confidence, and to NEVER drive after consuming both alcohol and marijuana (there is a multiplier effect involved).
- They will have to explain away the effects of radioactive heavy metals and nitrosamines in commercial cigarettes, the former produced from cheap phosphate fertilizer and readily uptaken by the tobacco plant, and the latter produced by open-air curing of the tobacco.
- They will have to explain why tobacco chewers get cancer.
- They will have to explain how PACs in the concentrations and duration present in smoke (both tobacco and marijuana) supposedly cause carcinogenic mutations.
- They will have to explain away the antioxidant and anti-tumor properties of cannabinoids.
- They will have to explain away the apoptosis-suppressing (and thus cancer-friendly) effects of nicotine.
- They will have to explain why they cannot unearth a single case of lung cancer or emphysema in a marijuana-ONLY smoker that has no other risk factors. Where are the bodies?
- Speaking of emphysema, THC is an expectorant which means it aids the lungs in clearing smoke particles from the small airways. Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, which means it does a good job of keeping smoke particles inside the small airways (and raises blood pressure). Asthmatics have successfully used sufficiently potent cannabis to ward off asthma attacks when no other option was available.
- If you still think tobacco and marijuana smoke are the same, why in the heck does tobacco smoke stick to everything and turn it yellow?
Some people will point to a smoker's cough as evidence that marijuana smoke is harmful. You should note that the mild bronchitis that a frequent pot smoker gets is not accompanied by coughing up blood and ceases when he quits smoking. This is a risk so small as to be vanishing, when compared to the well documented long-term and permanent risks of tobacco smoking.Also, nicotine in tobacco smoke raises the heart rate and blood pressure while at the same time the carbon monoxide starves it for oxygen. Marijuana smoke, while containing CO as well raises heart rate but decreases blood pressure. Even if the same amount of marijuana as tobacco was smoked, and the same amount of CO taken in over the same period of time, the vasodilating effects of THC may mitigate heart damage that would otherwise be caused by the CO. It is a good area for further research (with appropriate controls).
If you think smoking is risky, don't smoke it. Make brownies, or use a vaporizer. But the jury is most definitely still out on this one.
Selection doesn't necessarily increase the potency, because not everyone wants a maximally potent product. If they did, they would smoke hashish (scraped resin glands) or hash oil (THC extract). Many smokers simply enjoy smoking, and would not like to get incredibly blasted out of their minds every time they sit down for some. Breeding usually concentrates on controlling the ratio of cannabinoids in the plant in order to bring out whatever psychoactive and medical effects are preferred, and of course for other properties like growing well indoors, not stinking enough to alert neighbors, etc.
Since the beginning of reliable testing in 1980, marijuana potency has remained fairly constant. Were marijuana an "order of magnitude" more potent today than in 1980, it would be 30% THC on average. Where can I get some?
I don't suppose that hashish, a highly potent mixture of the resin glands of the plant, having been used for thousands of years would convince you that the potency alarmism is a red herring even if it were true (which it isn't)?
Have you ever heard of an alcohol vaporizer? Minimal hangover, fast onset of effects, and reduced health risk compared to excessive drinking. All the properties of this proposed "synthahol". Unfortunately, this is how we celebrate innovation in our society. So I wouldn't hold out hope for whatever this guy creates staying legal for too long...
The second axiom is very difficult to preserve when to make an observation sometimes requires changing the reality we are trying to observe, such as in particle physics. How do you observe this particle without bouncing another particle off it, which then changes its state in some way? Schroedinger and Heisenberg make for some real fun designing solid experiements.
Certain religious folks would disagree with the first axiom too. It is, in fact, why it is impossible to produce a scientific test for God that would satisfy them. According to them, if God realizes you are "testing God", then he twiddles reality in some way to throw you off the track, so your result is meaningless. Fortunately, the rest of reality does not seem to operate this way.
That's what happens when you're out of your element
If you think their products are bad now, just imagine how bad they would be without competition. And imagine how entrenched their lock-in schemes would be.
Hooray for overloaded open source project names!
Through this education, they can see the value of the invisible hand of Linux, of GNU, of Apache, of Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and countless other successfully engineered operating system and middleware products that lie there, just below the surface of the pretty application they are using, doing what they are designed to do and in doing so enabling people to lead more fulfilling lives.
You know, that could be because regulators have their heads up their collective asses about the true scope of the threat. It has happened before. I bet half of the chemicals on this list are more poisonous than they are given credit for, and the other half are far more useful than poisonous. Unfortunately, they all get painted with the same brush when anti-competitive industry interests and lobbyists get in bed with the regulators.
Neither testing nor unstable is suitable for a non-development machine.
Try F0 0F C7 C8.
If someone promises to underwrite the costs of development, the need for the patent system with all its evils is utterly neutered in that case - as long as finding a cure is in fact even a realistic goal.
I think what you meant is that an unprivileged user process should not be able to do this. But it is easy to fool a user into giving the program excessive privileges (on modern desktop Unix, that would be through the use of sudo).
As a first step in this direction, I recommend placing the execution stack in ROM. Following that, we can move towards a ROM heap, and maybe ROM-based disk drives.
I thought he meant "crown" instead of "thrown" ;)
Quite funny that the only reference that your struggle unearthed, while admittedly a Christian, is actually an ID critic
Yes, that's great, it's a historical account of people telling the ignorant masses that they'll be tortured for all eternity if they let the facts affect their conclusions. I don't understand how being recorded in a book brings their claims any closer to truth?