SOE's problem was that they didn't notify the players about any sort of scanning. The WoW EULA includes notification, in all caps and in easy-to-read language, that they will perform these scans when you play the game. Since SOE's woes, gold selling (i.e., selling in-game gold for real cash) has become a pox upon MMOGs, and players are much more acutely aware of the misdeeds of other people in the game because of it, to the point where most players are happy to let Blizzard run these scans if it means that cheaters will be caught and banned.
The first small bit of code is read from each running process, hashed, and compared to a list of hashes downloaded to the client. AFAIK, only code segments are scanned, not data segments and not the stack, which means that PGP privacy and other such niceties are not violated.
By definition, spyware sends back personal information concerning the user. Warden does no such thing, even going by the analysis of Hoglund (the author of a rootkit.com article, and a developer of cheat software for WoW). Hoglund uses FUD to scare the reader into believing that WoW is snooping around their e-mail addresses and IM friends list, but in actuality, the first thing Warden does when it scans a string is to hash it, thus removing all personally-identifiable information. It compares the hashes to a list of hashes sent from Blizzard's servers, and sends a notification to Blizzard if a hash matches one on the list. That's the only information it sends back.
Yes, it does scan window titles, and yes, coincidentally, those window titles may contain URLs or e-mail addresses. But Warden only works with hashes of those strings and doesn't phone them home. The paranoid can easily close other windows while running WoW (or, for that matter, uninstall), but the majority of the game-playing public wants anti-cheat measures in place.
Note that this anti-Warden crusade is perpetrated by people who will benefit financially if Blizzard is humiliated into discontinuing the use of Warden. The folks over at WoW!Sharp, the most well-known cheating/botting program for WoW, were selling subscriptions to their software, right up to the point where Warden caught them using their cheat software and led to them being banned. They realized that if they continued selling subscriptions to their software, they could be sued, so they released it as open-source, essentially to shove the problem of liability off onto their users.
If Warden were discontinued, they would, quite literally, be back in business.
I can't believe nobody mentioned System Shock 2. Not for the "Holy Bajeezus" startle-the-crap-outta-you kind of scare, but for the unnerving, menacing, heebie-jeebies kind of scare that you get when a blood-covered guy with a parasite going out of his chest and onto his head runs at you with a steel pipe, saying, "I'm sooorrrrrrrryyyyy...." Or when a protocol droid steps gingerly toward you, saying, "That's the Tri-Optimum way," and you know you've got to beat feet before it explodes in your face. The game robs you of human* contact, constantly holding the possibility of finding someone else still alive on the ship just out of reach.
(*Yeah, I know "human" contact is something of a stretch, since it's just a game, but I couldn't help thinking throughout the game that there's safety in numbers.)
I'm sort of regurgitating some points brought up by Kenneth Miller that I saw on C-SPAN's coverage of a debate on evolution versus ID education at AEI. But he mentioned, among other things, one way in which the scientific method has been used to test evolution.
Most apes have 48 chromosomes. Humans have 46 chromosomes. Wholesale removal of a pair of chromosomes by mutation would almost certainly result in a nonviable organism. However, there is another possibility - that a mutation caused two chromosomes to fuse together into one (remember that the 46 human chromosomes are actually in 23 pairs). But this possibility presents the prediction that the characteristics of two chromosomes would be found sandwiched together in the human genome as one chromosome.
Since we now have the data from the Human Genome Project available, this prediction - stemming from the hypothesis that humans and modern apes have a common ancestor - can be tested. The ends of chromosomes consist of "telomeres", which are specialized and easily recognizable segments of DNA. By sequencing each chromosome, these telomeres can be detected. If two chromosomes were fused together end-to-end, there should be telomere sequences in the middle of a human chromosome.
Lo and behold, such a prediction was shown to be true - chromosome 2 contains the expected telomere sequences roughly in its center.
Now, this doesn't prove that humans and modern apes had a common ancestor. It does, however, lend additional evidence to that hypothesis. But that's how the scientific method works. You come up with a hypothesis, generate testable predictions based on that hypothesis, and then conduct experiments to test those predictions. The hypothesis is proven false when the testable predictions prove false. The more of these tests that the hypothesis survives, the more important it becomes as a theory worthy of acceptance into mainstream science - not as fact, but as our best current understanding of how something works.
On the other hand, ID produces no testable predictions of its own. Its survival is based on the false dichotomy between evolution and ID perpetuated by ID advocates - the claim that if evolution is tested to be false, then ID (nee creationism) must be true. This violates both basic logic and the scientific method - evolution and ID are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and in order for ID to be accepted as a scientific theory, it must produce testable predictions which, if proven false, would prove ID to be false as well. ID advocates raise no such testable predictions - all of their claims are actually tests of evolution, not of ID. Until ID can produce such predictions and can survive tests of those predictions, it cannot be regarded as a truly scientific theory.
Note that this isn't a matter of a lacking in the state of the art. Other scientific theories such as string theory can't currently be tested given today's technology, but they do produce predictions that, given sufficient advances in the state of the art, could be tested. ID doesn't even go that far.
People who act like one day of school is the difference between a career and a job make me laugh.
Making your kids go to school on-time every day is part of instilling in them a positive work ethic. Of course, when you consider that the parents probably took a sick day to head to Blizzcon with their kids, it all kinda makes sense.
My scientific non-acceptance of the Kyoto protocol stems not from a disbelief in the existence of climate change, but rather from a belief in the existence of China and India.
I didn't have to rely on Wikipedia, but I was considering that you might actually have been honest in a desire to find out who they are. But since you're only interested in the popularity contest, here's what Google has to say:
Glenn Reynolds: Results 1 - 20 of about 2,570,000 for "glenn reynolds". Cory Doctorow: Results 1 - 20 of about 1,740,000 for "cory doctorow". Joshua Micah Marshall: Results 1 - 20 of about 593,000 for "joshua micah marshall".
How many results do you get when you put your name in?
I hope more of our Congresspeople start up weblogs. It'll give the voters a better chance to really see what each individual person is all about during their term, so that we can decide whether to keep them or chuck them when their term is up. It'll also remove media spin altogether. Yeah, I know, the political spin will be there, but it'll be spin straight from the horse's mouth, without the NY Times or Fox News or whoever fudging what our representatives say to make for a better-selling story.
Hopefully, it'll also give us a better look at the inside strategies of Congress. For example, Rick Boucher could give us better info on the state of the DMCRA and consumer rights in the IP age in general, as things happen. It can also let Congresspeople gather grassroots support for nationally-relevant policies, to help move along bills that get stuck in the "we can only do so much in a term" pipeline but that are also desired by the public.
In Hastert's case, it'll probably end up being a lot of party line nonsense - after all, he was chosen to lead House Republicans. His criticisms of the oil companies are interesting, though, and I wonder how the party in general will react.
To be honest, it's not like they're asking a lot here. WoW wouldn't be a market leader if your comparison to 1980s Apple were close.
Don't cheat, don't grief or harass other players, don't use foul language, and choose a name that fits within the naming rules. (And if you're on a RP server, stay in character in in-character chat channels.) But if you don't like these rules, you're right: "Don't play" is always an option. There are lots of other games out there.
My god, I thought QA sucked on the web in general but TWO FUCKING COPIES of the same story within 5 screenfulls of text?
You'll get to read it a third time once the dupe gets posted.
Re:where's the article?
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Click on the images. They're a form of navigation, not ads. You'll note that they say "monday", "tuesday", "wednesday", etc. The series is only half complete.
Damn! And I was waiting for them to put Saturdays up for sale. I don't have nearly enough of them.
Ah, so he descends the throne to post among the proletariat.;)
I will say, though.... Back in the day, I was a senior guide in EverQuest. One of the things that senior guides did was enforce the naming policy. Mostly this consisted of changing obvious troll names containing misspelled profanity or an off-color reference. But it also included rules such as "no title prefixes" (this was long before EQ added AA and tradeskill titles, way back in 1999) and "no non-fantasy names". And yes, there were times that I changed character names despite the pleadings of their owners and their friends. Made me feel like a turd doing it, too. These characters had gotten well into the 30s or 40s (50 was the limit at the time) with no problem, and in a way, their being able to get to that point without having a GM or SG talk to them was almost tacit acceptance of their name - and by that point it had in some fashion become their identity.
However, I am lawful neutral at heart, and when a name fairly obviously violated a rule, I had no qualms about changing it - in many cases where the violation was obvious (even if it wasn't vulgar), the person would laugh and say, "You finally got me.;)" In the case of "CmdrTaco", yeah, it's pretty much spelled out right there, and even though your online identity in general revolves around using that name, once you get into the game, that identity has to fit through the "Carry-On Baggage Size Checker of Justice". The GMs should try to help you maintain that identity while conforming to the rules (suggesting "Taco" as an alternative, for example, assuming you're not on a RP server), but they can't treat you any differently than anyone else whose name they've changed.
Of course, you probably already know all this, but I think it's important to drive home the point that the society of World of Warcraft or any other MMOG isn't the same as society IRL. There are different rules in this society that go right down to the essence of one's identity. But they're there at the outset, and the decision is ultimately up to the player as to whether they want to participate in a society where the rules might not grant them the freedom to choose or make use of a particular online identity.
On a side note, I don't know why you would want to name a character "CmdrTaco" anyway. Seems like an invitation for constant spam tells to me;)
This has also been a rule in EverQuest for a very, very long time.
In response to Taco's claim that "Cmdr" is not one of the PvP ranks, I would just mention that "Commander" is, in fact, such a rank - it's the third highest rank, and the server I play on only has five of them at the moment.
It's analogous to environmentalists opposing nuclear power simply because "it's evil and must be stopped at all costs", even though it would help the environment rather than hurt it.
However, it's unclear to me whether DoC can actually halt ICANN introducing.xxx, or whether ICANN is merely being courteous. Whenever I read commentary on the topic, they usually say that DoC blocked.xxx, but when I read news reports, they always talk in more nebulous terms that suggest that DoC is acting in an advisory capacity. Which is it?
Seems like this wouldn't apply to The Onion as a satirical piece.
Read on:
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated by the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
And those regulations were specified by Richard Nixon (later amended by Gerald Ford):
Ex. Ord. No. 11649. Regulations Governing Seals of President and Vice President of United States
Ex. Ord. No. 11649, Feb. 16, 1972, 37 F.R. 3625, as amended by Ex. Ord. No. 11916, May 28, 1976, 41 F.R. 22031, provided: By virtue to the authority vested in me by section 713 (b) of title 18, United States Code, I hereby prescribe the following regulations governing the use of the Seals of the President and the Vice President of the United States: Section 1. Except as otherwise provided by law, the knowing manufacture, reproduction, sale, or purchase for resale of the Seals or Coats of Arms of the President or the Vice President of the United States, or any likeness or substantial part thereof, shall be permitted only for the following uses: (a) Use by the President or Vice President of the United States; (b) Use in encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, journals, pamphlets, periodicals, or magazines incident to a description or history of seals, coats of arms, heraldry, or the Presidency or Vice Presidency; (c) Use in libraries, museums, or educational facilities incident to descriptions or exhibits relating to seals, coats of arms, heraldry, or the Presidency or Vice Presidency; (d) Use as an architectural embellishment in libraries, museums, or archives established to house the papers or effects of former Presidents or Vice Presidents; (e) Use on a monument to a former President or Vice President; (f) Use by way of photographic or electronic visual reproduction in pictures, moving pictures, or telecasts of bona fide news content; (g) Such other uses for exceptional historical, educational, or newsworthy purposes as may be authorized in writing by the Counsel to the President. Sec. 2. The manufacture, reproduction, sale, or purchase for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, of the Seals of the President or Vice President, or any likeness or substantial part thereof, except as provided in this Order or as otherwise provided by law, is prohibited. Richard Nixon.
Meth and crack, at least, create a public safety hazard because users often exhibit dangerous behavior in public. With meth, there's a double whammy, because production is also hazardous. That's the main reason why the penalties for production and distribution of those sorts of drugs are so stiff.
I don't really think there's a huge public safety hazard concerning weed (no more than alcohol, anyway, and generally only connected with driving), but there may be an economic productivity incentive to keep people off weed. That may be due as much to the stoner stereotype as to anything else, though. If weed is going to remain illegal, then personally, I think a fine and confiscation of contraband is appropriate punishment for possession of weed, up until you get to significant quantities (even street dealers of weed probably don't need to be thrown in prison as long as the fines are stiff enough that they can't make good money off of it).
Slashdot Mirror
SOE's problem was that they didn't notify the players about any sort of scanning. The WoW EULA includes notification, in all caps and in easy-to-read language, that they will perform these scans when you play the game. Since SOE's woes, gold selling (i.e., selling in-game gold for real cash) has become a pox upon MMOGs, and players are much more acutely aware of the misdeeds of other people in the game because of it, to the point where most players are happy to let Blizzard run these scans if it means that cheaters will be caught and banned.
The first small bit of code is read from each running process, hashed, and compared to a list of hashes downloaded to the client. AFAIK, only code segments are scanned, not data segments and not the stack, which means that PGP privacy and other such niceties are not violated.
By definition, spyware sends back personal information concerning the user. Warden does no such thing, even going by the analysis of Hoglund (the author of a rootkit.com article, and a developer of cheat software for WoW). Hoglund uses FUD to scare the reader into believing that WoW is snooping around their e-mail addresses and IM friends list, but in actuality, the first thing Warden does when it scans a string is to hash it, thus removing all personally-identifiable information. It compares the hashes to a list of hashes sent from Blizzard's servers, and sends a notification to Blizzard if a hash matches one on the list. That's the only information it sends back.
Yes, it does scan window titles, and yes, coincidentally, those window titles may contain URLs or e-mail addresses. But Warden only works with hashes of those strings and doesn't phone them home. The paranoid can easily close other windows while running WoW (or, for that matter, uninstall), but the majority of the game-playing public wants anti-cheat measures in place.
Note that this anti-Warden crusade is perpetrated by people who will benefit financially if Blizzard is humiliated into discontinuing the use of Warden. The folks over at WoW!Sharp, the most well-known cheating/botting program for WoW, were selling subscriptions to their software, right up to the point where Warden caught them using their cheat software and led to them being banned. They realized that if they continued selling subscriptions to their software, they could be sued, so they released it as open-source, essentially to shove the problem of liability off onto their users.
If Warden were discontinued, they would, quite literally, be back in business.
I can't believe nobody mentioned System Shock 2. Not for the "Holy Bajeezus" startle-the-crap-outta-you kind of scare, but for the unnerving, menacing, heebie-jeebies kind of scare that you get when a blood-covered guy with a parasite going out of his chest and onto his head runs at you with a steel pipe, saying, "I'm sooorrrrrrrryyyyy...." Or when a protocol droid steps gingerly toward you, saying, "That's the Tri-Optimum way," and you know you've got to beat feet before it explodes in your face. The game robs you of human* contact, constantly holding the possibility of finding someone else still alive on the ship just out of reach.
(*Yeah, I know "human" contact is something of a stretch, since it's just a game, but I couldn't help thinking throughout the game that there's safety in numbers.)
I'm really confused now. When did Edgar Bronfman become CEO of SBC?
And Troi was way hotter in her Season 7 uniform than she ever was in her Season 1 skirt or her Season 2-6 form-fitting whatever those were.
I'm sort of regurgitating some points brought up by Kenneth Miller that I saw on C-SPAN's coverage of a debate on evolution versus ID education at AEI. But he mentioned, among other things, one way in which the scientific method has been used to test evolution.
Most apes have 48 chromosomes. Humans have 46 chromosomes. Wholesale removal of a pair of chromosomes by mutation would almost certainly result in a nonviable organism. However, there is another possibility - that a mutation caused two chromosomes to fuse together into one (remember that the 46 human chromosomes are actually in 23 pairs). But this possibility presents the prediction that the characteristics of two chromosomes would be found sandwiched together in the human genome as one chromosome.
Since we now have the data from the Human Genome Project available, this prediction - stemming from the hypothesis that humans and modern apes have a common ancestor - can be tested. The ends of chromosomes consist of "telomeres", which are specialized and easily recognizable segments of DNA. By sequencing each chromosome, these telomeres can be detected. If two chromosomes were fused together end-to-end, there should be telomere sequences in the middle of a human chromosome.
Lo and behold, such a prediction was shown to be true - chromosome 2 contains the expected telomere sequences roughly in its center.
Now, this doesn't prove that humans and modern apes had a common ancestor. It does, however, lend additional evidence to that hypothesis. But that's how the scientific method works. You come up with a hypothesis, generate testable predictions based on that hypothesis, and then conduct experiments to test those predictions. The hypothesis is proven false when the testable predictions prove false. The more of these tests that the hypothesis survives, the more important it becomes as a theory worthy of acceptance into mainstream science - not as fact, but as our best current understanding of how something works.
On the other hand, ID produces no testable predictions of its own. Its survival is based on the false dichotomy between evolution and ID perpetuated by ID advocates - the claim that if evolution is tested to be false, then ID (nee creationism) must be true. This violates both basic logic and the scientific method - evolution and ID are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and in order for ID to be accepted as a scientific theory, it must produce testable predictions which, if proven false, would prove ID to be false as well. ID advocates raise no such testable predictions - all of their claims are actually tests of evolution, not of ID. Until ID can produce such predictions and can survive tests of those predictions, it cannot be regarded as a truly scientific theory.
Note that this isn't a matter of a lacking in the state of the art. Other scientific theories such as string theory can't currently be tested given today's technology, but they do produce predictions that, given sufficient advances in the state of the art, could be tested. ID doesn't even go that far.
Yeah, that episode of Stargate: SG-1 was pretty good, wasn't it?
I dunno, I generally regard cleavage as being eye-catching.
People who act like one day of school is the difference between a career and a job make me laugh.
Making your kids go to school on-time every day is part of instilling in them a positive work ethic. Of course, when you consider that the parents probably took a sick day to head to Blizzcon with their kids, it all kinda makes sense.
My scientific non-acceptance of the Kyoto protocol stems not from a disbelief in the existence of climate change, but rather from a belief in the existence of China and India.
I didn't have to rely on Wikipedia, but I was considering that you might actually have been honest in a desire to find out who they are. But since you're only interested in the popularity contest, here's what Google has to say:
Glenn Reynolds: Results 1 - 20 of about 2,570,000 for "glenn reynolds".
Cory Doctorow: Results 1 - 20 of about 1,740,000 for "cory doctorow".
Joshua Micah Marshall: Results 1 - 20 of about 593,000 for "joshua micah marshall".
How many results do you get when you put your name in?
I hope more of our Congresspeople start up weblogs. It'll give the voters a better chance to really see what each individual person is all about during their term, so that we can decide whether to keep them or chuck them when their term is up. It'll also remove media spin altogether. Yeah, I know, the political spin will be there, but it'll be spin straight from the horse's mouth, without the NY Times or Fox News or whoever fudging what our representatives say to make for a better-selling story.
Hopefully, it'll also give us a better look at the inside strategies of Congress. For example, Rick Boucher could give us better info on the state of the DMCRA and consumer rights in the IP age in general, as things happen. It can also let Congresspeople gather grassroots support for nationally-relevant policies, to help move along bills that get stuck in the "we can only do so much in a term" pipeline but that are also desired by the public.
In Hastert's case, it'll probably end up being a lot of party line nonsense - after all, he was chosen to lead House Republicans. His criticisms of the oil companies are interesting, though, and I wonder how the party in general will react.
I have a feeling I'm feeding a troll here, but
l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Reynolds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Micah_Marshal
To be honest, it's not like they're asking a lot here. WoW wouldn't be a market leader if your comparison to 1980s Apple were close.
Don't cheat, don't grief or harass other players, don't use foul language, and choose a name that fits within the naming rules. (And if you're on a RP server, stay in character in in-character chat channels.) But if you don't like these rules, you're right: "Don't play" is always an option. There are lots of other games out there.
My god, I thought QA sucked on the web in general but TWO FUCKING COPIES of the same story within 5 screenfulls of text?
You'll get to read it a third time once the dupe gets posted.
Click on the images. They're a form of navigation, not ads. You'll note that they say "monday", "tuesday", "wednesday", etc. The series is only half complete.
Damn! And I was waiting for them to put Saturdays up for sale. I don't have nearly enough of them.
Ah, so he descends the throne to post among the proletariat. ;)
;)" In the case of "CmdrTaco", yeah, it's pretty much spelled out right there, and even though your online identity in general revolves around using that name, once you get into the game, that identity has to fit through the "Carry-On Baggage Size Checker of Justice". The GMs should try to help you maintain that identity while conforming to the rules (suggesting "Taco" as an alternative, for example, assuming you're not on a RP server), but they can't treat you any differently than anyone else whose name they've changed.
;)
I will say, though.... Back in the day, I was a senior guide in EverQuest. One of the things that senior guides did was enforce the naming policy. Mostly this consisted of changing obvious troll names containing misspelled profanity or an off-color reference. But it also included rules such as "no title prefixes" (this was long before EQ added AA and tradeskill titles, way back in 1999) and "no non-fantasy names". And yes, there were times that I changed character names despite the pleadings of their owners and their friends. Made me feel like a turd doing it, too. These characters had gotten well into the 30s or 40s (50 was the limit at the time) with no problem, and in a way, their being able to get to that point without having a GM or SG talk to them was almost tacit acceptance of their name - and by that point it had in some fashion become their identity.
However, I am lawful neutral at heart, and when a name fairly obviously violated a rule, I had no qualms about changing it - in many cases where the violation was obvious (even if it wasn't vulgar), the person would laugh and say, "You finally got me.
Of course, you probably already know all this, but I think it's important to drive home the point that the society of World of Warcraft or any other MMOG isn't the same as society IRL. There are different rules in this society that go right down to the essence of one's identity. But they're there at the outset, and the decision is ultimately up to the player as to whether they want to participate in a society where the rules might not grant them the freedom to choose or make use of a particular online identity.
On a side note, I don't know why you would want to name a character "CmdrTaco" anyway. Seems like an invitation for constant spam tells to me
This has also been a rule in EverQuest for a very, very long time.
In response to Taco's claim that "Cmdr" is not one of the PvP ranks, I would just mention that "Commander" is, in fact, such a rank - it's the third highest rank, and the server I play on only has five of them at the moment.
In other words, whine more, noob.
It's analogous to environmentalists opposing nuclear power simply because "it's evil and must be stopped at all costs", even though it would help the environment rather than hurt it.
.xxx, or whether ICANN is merely being courteous. Whenever I read commentary on the topic, they usually say that DoC blocked .xxx, but when I read news reports, they always talk in more nebulous terms that suggest that DoC is acting in an advisory capacity. Which is it?
However, it's unclear to me whether DoC can actually halt ICANN introducing
Here, I'll use some bold print for you since you evidently have vision problems:
knowingly manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either
separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold,
So, for-pay encyclopedias can't include it in an article?
s c_sec_18_00000713----000-notes.html
That use is expressly provided for via executive order.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/u
So I guess the phrase "a government of the people, by the people and for the people" means nothing to you?
Lincoln didn't even say that until four score and seven years after the Revolutionary War.
Seems like this wouldn't apply to The Onion as a satirical piece.
s c_sec_18_00000713----000-notes.html
Read on:
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated by
the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly
manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either
separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness
of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any substantial part
thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official
use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this
title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
And those regulations were specified by Richard Nixon (later amended by Gerald Ford):
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/u
Ex. Ord. No. 11649. Regulations Governing Seals of President and Vice President of United States
Ex. Ord. No. 11649, Feb. 16, 1972, 37 F.R. 3625, as amended by Ex. Ord. No. 11916, May 28, 1976, 41 F.R. 22031, provided:
By virtue to the authority vested in me by section 713 (b) of title 18, United States Code, I hereby prescribe the following regulations governing the use of the Seals of the President and the Vice President of the United States:
Section 1. Except as otherwise provided by law, the knowing manufacture, reproduction, sale, or purchase for resale of the Seals or Coats of Arms of the President or the Vice President of the United States, or any likeness or substantial part thereof, shall be permitted only for the following uses:
(a) Use by the President or Vice President of the United States;
(b) Use in encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, journals, pamphlets, periodicals, or magazines incident to a description or history of seals, coats of arms, heraldry, or the Presidency or Vice Presidency;
(c) Use in libraries, museums, or educational facilities incident to descriptions or exhibits relating to seals, coats of arms, heraldry, or the Presidency or Vice Presidency;
(d) Use as an architectural embellishment in libraries, museums, or archives established to house the papers or effects of former Presidents or Vice Presidents;
(e) Use on a monument to a former President or Vice President;
(f) Use by way of photographic or electronic visual reproduction in pictures, moving pictures, or telecasts of bona fide news content;
(g) Such other uses for exceptional historical, educational, or newsworthy purposes as may be authorized in writing by the Counsel to the President.
Sec. 2. The manufacture, reproduction, sale, or purchase for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, of the Seals of the President or Vice President, or any likeness or substantial part thereof, except as provided in this Order or as otherwise provided by law, is prohibited.
Richard Nixon.
Meth and crack, at least, create a public safety hazard because users often exhibit dangerous behavior in public. With meth, there's a double whammy, because production is also hazardous. That's the main reason why the penalties for production and distribution of those sorts of drugs are so stiff.
I don't really think there's a huge public safety hazard concerning weed (no more than alcohol, anyway, and generally only connected with driving), but there may be an economic productivity incentive to keep people off weed. That may be due as much to the stoner stereotype as to anything else, though. If weed is going to remain illegal, then personally, I think a fine and confiscation of contraband is appropriate punishment for possession of weed, up until you get to significant quantities (even street dealers of weed probably don't need to be thrown in prison as long as the fines are stiff enough that they can't make good money off of it).