It really doesn't matter what the reason is. There really isn't much worthwhile content on Netflix these days. There was never enough content but it used to be substantially better with their starz content.
I'm sorry for everyone thinking of the children and using them as an excuse to push an unconstitutional political agenda but mass school shootings aren't even a statistically significant cause of death. Somewhere in the ballpark of death by lightning strike. Your child's chances of being struck by lightning are much greater than getting killed in a mass shooting.
A car is a capable of far more damage than a gun, they kill a hell of a lot more people than guns, and outlawing cars wouldn't be a direct violation of the Constitution in the way these gun control laws are.
Stop trampling on people's rights and cut this gun control crap out. If anything we should be relaxing gun laws. Require schools to have a number of "safety officers" based on student population. Let them determine their own method of selecting teachers to occupy these roles there are generally no shortage of former military among gym teachers and administrators. These teachers should have special training and concealed weapons permits, concealed weapons, and a bump in pay. Maybe lock a few rifles up securely somewhere on the off chance something more is needed. Then give them radios and wire an alarm button to every teachers desk. Press the button and the safety officers all get an alert over the radio indicating the class.
Doesn't put guns into unqualified hands. Doesn't put a useless TSA style security checkpoint at the door. Doesn't involve openly armed authority figures roaming the halls desensitizing children to a police state. But does drastically reduce the damage a rogue child can do before being put down.
Additionally, weapon (including gun) safety and usage courses should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum with a certification given at the end. Hopefully this will reduce hysteria, accidental shootings, and maybe lead to a boost in private gun ownership thereby making our nation safer and reducing crime. Statistics all show that gun owners who have gotten this sort of training are safer and more responsible by far than the general population (and not just with guns).
"Actually, ingesting is more efficient than smoking."
Another myth spread around forums. Try it. 1/4oz of marijuana provides dozens of doses smoked. 1/4 of pot butter provides about 4-6 doses for a typical 6ft tall 200lb adult male. The dose will kick in about 30-45minutes later like any ingested substance, provides a reduced effect, but lasts longer and in the process your digestive system will destroy most of the ingested active components. Additionally, the substance is not passed directly to the brain but instead is more uniformly spread through the tissues of the body (which absorb some of the material). Most of it ends up at the brain eventually but this is why the effect is both diminished relative to smoking and longer in duration. The dose you actually get starts small and increases to a peak and then begins diminishing again. Only at the peak would you feel the same level of intoxication you feel from smoking, most of the rest of the experience you'd feel some sort of gentle inadequate effect so the majority of the time the substance is being delivered the substance is wasted.
Inhalation (be it vapor or smoke) passes large quantities directly into the blood stream in a very efficient way due to the large surface area of the lungs and the fact they are purpose evolved to pass gas and vapor directly into the bloodstream. The uptake is more efficient and more active material gets to the brain more quickly. Of course the more rapid delivery means the effects don't last as long.
You did say smoking rather than vaporizing so it would be fair to compare the amount destroyed by combustion to that destroyed in the digestive system but the slower delivery does not change. You need to ingest a larger quantity to get an appropriate dosage and while the duration is increased it isn't increased enough to offset the larger quantity you need to consume because the time period in which you brain is getting too little at the beginning, and the time period in which it is getting too little at the end is also effectively if not technically lost efficiency.
Bottom line. To maintain a "high" comparable to that a smoker utilizing a 1/4 a day would maintain you'd need a good oz of material to ingest and you'd be taking the next dose before the first wears off. I am of course ignoring the difficulties in dosing ingested material which are subject to large fluctuations (do you have an empty stomach?) and the fact that you don't know the impact of a dose for 30-45mins after you'd taken it. It is very hard to take too much when you have near instant feedback from smoking or vaporizing but very easy to take too much ingesting.
No they aren't. First tablets are likely to only include THC ignoring the other active substances in whole Cannabis that provide most of it's benefits. And there is nothing efficient about extracting and purifying THC from the whole plant vs smoking or vaporizing it. Last but most importantly, ingesting a tablet is going to result in your digestive system destroying about 60% of the active content of the tablet.
This is already done on the black market. The process uses super critical fluid extraction utilizing confined butane as the solvent which gives the cleanest extraction found thus far. Multiple passes gives the best yield (the butane can be recycled if you have the equipment). Then providing agitation while applying a gentle low heat to convert intermediate THC's into delta-9 THC which provides a high enough purity to crystalize the material resulting in a golden powder typically called "budder" that is better than 99% pure delta-9 THC. There are no shortage of chemistry geeks who smoke pot. Taking this to a lab isn't going to magically give a substantially higher yield in fact additional purification steps would likely be added thus reducing yield. The resulting THC both has fewer of the source cannabinoids and provides fewer doses than the original plant material smoked/vaporized.
The lungs have a great deal of surface area and are directly hardwired into the bloodstream. This is no surprise their as purpose is pass as much oxygen gas into the bloodstream as rapidly and efficiently as possible. Nothing short of injection can get more of a substance into the bloodstream more rapidly and with higher efficiency than inhalation. Snorting can get a substance to the brain more quickly but your sinuses have a smaller surface area than the lungs so the lungs still get a higher volume of a substance into the bloodstream more quickly than snorting and unlike the lungs the sinuses are designed to resist foreign substances so with each dose the efficiency of absorption goes down. There is a reason crack addicts smoke cocaine rather than snorting it they get more bang from less cocaine.
It's questionable if marijuana demotivates. But as someone else pointed out the a pack of cigerettes an ounce of tobacco and in IL for example have a total of about $4/OZ combined state and federal taxes. California was proposing about $75/oz of tax on Cannabis. The result of such a high tax would be a price that stays near the black market price of $400/oz.
A heavy smoker will smoke a 1/4oz of marijuana a day. A comparable user who ate it would consume about an ounce to get the same result. So it might be reasonable to compare them although those taxes are already very heavy.
But the taxes being brandied for potential marijuana legalization are much higher. For instance California proposed something like $100 per plant tax on growers and then another $50 per ounce at the time of retail sale. A plant will yield a couple oz so that is something like $75 of tax on a volume comparable to a pack of cigarettes. The only possible justification for such high tax proposals is the current black market supported price of about $400 an ounce. There probably would be sales tax on top of that.
"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument.[1] Ad hominem reasoning is normally described as an informal fallacy,[2][3][4] more precisely an irrelevance.[5]"
His argument is either valid or invalid but it's validity isn't related to his personal credibility. Attacks upon his character or credibility are irrelevant. "it's part of how we judge reliability of sources" He is a human, it is safe to conclude he isn't a reliable source. The same would be true if he were a solidly credentialed professor with 60 years of consistent publication. If one were asserting his was correct because of a positive history it would be another logical fallacy known as a plea to authority. If his data is bogus it won't be replicated. If his logic is faulty it should be dismissible with examination of nothing but his argument and premise.
At no point does it become valid logic to dismiss a sound argument on the basis of labeling someone a crackpot or dubious. It might be a valid personal screening criteria for whether or not you care to take the time to examine his argument that would hardly give you grounds for asserting to others that he is wrong which is what the submitter has done.
Attacking the credibility of the guy making the argument and not the argument itself is an Ad Hominem attack in every case. It is a logical fallacy. It doesn't matter how you spin it or want to disagree. A valid argument is a valid argument no matter who makes it.
From wikipedia:
"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument.[1] Ad hominem reasoning is normally described as an informal fallacy,[2][3][4] more precisely an irrelevance.[5]"
I didn't invent or discover the fallacy. It is fundamental logic. The validity of his argument is completely unrelated to his personal validity and entire based on the validity of his premises and whether or not they support his conclusion.
His past history might justify not investing your time in reading his argument and premise but it doesn't support the assertion his argument is invalid without having examined the premises.
"Not at all, the guy has a history of making dubious claims. It's perfectly reasonable to assign him a low a priori probablity of being correct."
No, not it is not. That's why it's a well known and established logical fallacy.
"Sure, you could look at the evidence but life is too short to follow up every crank."
Sure but that is a reason to not personally choose to spend your time that way determining if he is wrong, not a valid basis for asserting that he is wrong.
"It's not worth wasting the time reading if it can't even get published in a respectable journal."
Maybe but views that are popular have a much easier time of getting into 'respectable' journals while views that are unpopular have a much harder time. In no small part because the reviewers tend to apply aforementioned logical fallacy in their evaluations. Those reviewing articles for journals have a tendency to approve research supporting things they agree with because they are subject to the same human failings as the rest of us. Trusting their judgement makes you more likely to agree with the things they agree with as well. Popular views among intelligent and educated individuals have a higher probability of being correct but that doesn't make views that are unpopular in said circles incorrect.
Having a history of dubious claims and not being published in a respectable journal might be a reasonable screen for determining if it's worth your time to investigate but it doesn't make his current claim false or justify the unsubstantiated assertion "No, Life Has Not Been Found In a Meteorite." All it means is that you (for whatever reasons) haven't taken the time to find out.
"You rely on "anecdotal" evidence for most of your life. Anecdotal information is the most basic way that human beings learn."
I'd agree with this. At the end of the day we don't have any information EXCEPT for anecdotal evidence and correlation. You throw a ball up, there is a strong correlation to the ball falling back down. All experiments are looking for correlation. Correlations don't prove a thing, they only suggest it, the more correlations you have the more strongly it is suggested until at some point a line is crossed and you work with that is most likely.
Anecdotal evidence is also the only kind. After all, at the end of the day all you really know is that in your experience everybody has said the ball will fall and from what you've seen that is the case. Reproducable? So two guys had a similar anecdotal experience of seeing a correlation between the ball being thrown in the air and falling.
All that aside two correlations suggesting something is still better than one and while you can put some higher assurance in your own anecdotal experiences that doesn't mean you should take those of someone else on faith. The bar should be higher for information you accept from someone else.
"Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence."
Pure Ad Hominem attack. No content here. Invalid content is invalid innately regardless of source, similarly valid content is valid regardless of source. It doesn't matter if the guy stands by the subway station carrying a sign that says magical leprechauns whisper in his ear it has no impact on the validity of his statements. Unless of course you are considering the validity of his testimony as evidence but if you consider the testimony of anyone as evidence you have other problems in your critical analysis.
"While the diatoms appear to be real, they are certainly from Earth. The meteorite itself, on the other hand, does not appear to be real. Many of the basic scientific steps and claims made in the paper are very shaky."
That may or may not be true. One would actually have to read the article to determine if there is substance provided for these assertions and who is going to do that?
True. Unfortunately most measures to legalize also involve heavy taxation as a selling point that will probably continue to artificially inflate the price of cannabis. Other methods of ingestion tend to either isolate just THC (which is NOT the only active or desirable substance in cannabis) and/or are less efficient to produce. Ingesting for instance is far less efficient than smoking.
Given the massive quantities one can produce on the back 40 of even one farm cannabis should be sold by the pound right next to flour.
"Not really a shining endorsement of pot smoking as a past time"
Doesn't really indicate anything negative about it either. Pot is chemically induced euphoria. Some people add artificial in there but your emotions are nothing more than a chemical state so there is nothing artificial about it. If your life isn't a joyful wonderland pot is a fairly effective and low cost way to make it one for a little while. Being poor sucks and being dumb sucks, why wouldn't you want cheap happiness. If you aren't dumb but merely lazy and making bad choices it seems that would tend be depressing as well so ditto on cheap happiness. If you are highly intelligent and can't help but realize just how fucked we are in this life then again bring on the happiness.
If you are rich, lazy, and dumb on the hand you don't have much to be unhappy about. You get handed degrees from the best schools, society is set up to ensure that the wealthy enjoy the most comfort and have the best of everything, and the opposite sex will throw themselves at you all day long.
Nope but I've known plenty of lazy moron layabouts who did nothing but smoke pot. The pot doesn't make them lazy moron layabouts though it's just something to do.
Perhaps being poor and uneducated correlates to being unhappy and self medicating with drugs and has nothing to do with the drug the poor are self medicating with?
In my experience LSD makes you THINK you are having great epiphanies but if you actually record yourself or write them down they aren't very wondrous and usually not even coherent in the morning. Thinking you had revelations can still be beneficial though. It can help you overcome emotional problems and help you open your mind to possibilities you wouldn't have been willing to give a chance sober and afterward you feel like you've opened your mind and those conclusions you reached were deep and valid. The conclusions are almost always positive because of the extreme mind blowing euphoria that LSD brings on.
Doing this a lot means having lots of ideas you normally would have never reconsidered crushed and leads to maintaining a more open viewpoint to just about everything. And keeping an open mind without losing prospective is always a good thing.
There are studies that show increased levels of known carcinogens compared with say tobacco smoke. Most of these are known to be byproducts of burning so they really have nothing to do with cannabis. However studies DO NOT support an actual increased incidence of cancer among marijuana smokers despite the presence of those known carcinogens.
I'll provide as many links as you've bothered to.
Finding carcinogens in the smoke is NOT a substitute for actually finding increased incidence of cancer. Since that increased incidence has been looked for (believe me there are plenty of entities including the DEA that have funded studies trying to find it) but not found it implies there is something else contained within the smoke which is minimizing or even neutralizing the cancer causing effects of these substances.
It's better journalism to give both. "The strands are about 2 nanometers wide or about the width of a strand of DNA." Either just means really small to most people but for those who aren't most people you've provided the important piece of information.
Exchange is currently a piece of shit too. There just isn't a non piece of shit alternative. If you just needed email and a directory there are much better less bloated and more efficient solutions but alas you don't just just need a directory and a mail server.
You are forgetting the shared calendar/tasks and their tight email integration. The idea that giving people a calendar or a directory based addresses gave them an exchange/outlook alternative is the reason most of the alternatives aren't viable.
"The proof would be in the job postings on sites like"
That isn't proof of anything. You need 3 or 4 windows admins for every Linux admin required to administer the same number of systems. There is also far more turn-over in windows spots. Many organizations call the guys who work on those windows desktops and laptops admins as well. That and because some types of organizations require lots and lots of local offices and those organizations often are forced to deploy a windows server at each of those locations, not because they need that many servers or windows has expanded into another server space but because the protocols involved weren't properly designed and perform poorly over the wan and good wan accelerators are both tough to find and the ones that are worth a damn are expensive.
There are millions of small companies asking for little.net apps and the like but you aren't likely to find that in many enterprises. In the enterprise you are going to have something served up through a web interface or java based or java served up through a web interface and the backend certainly isn't going to be windows. If you are using windows on your database servers, web servers, archival systems, or virtualization boxes it is you who is smoking the crack pipe my friend.
The one notable exception that is picking up quite a bit of steam is Sharepoint. Hopefully we'll see that go away but in the meantime it's a VM and the actual server underneath it isn't windows and box the data is stored on, also isn't windows.
Slashdot Mirror
It really doesn't matter what the reason is. There really isn't much worthwhile content on Netflix these days. There was never enough content but it used to be substantially better with their starz content.
I'm sorry for everyone thinking of the children and using them as an excuse to push an unconstitutional political agenda but mass school shootings aren't even a statistically significant cause of death. Somewhere in the ballpark of death by lightning strike. Your child's chances of being struck by lightning are much greater than getting killed in a mass shooting.
A car is a capable of far more damage than a gun, they kill a hell of a lot more people than guns, and outlawing cars wouldn't be a direct violation of the Constitution in the way these gun control laws are.
Stop trampling on people's rights and cut this gun control crap out. If anything we should be relaxing gun laws. Require schools to have a number of "safety officers" based on student population. Let them determine their own method of selecting teachers to occupy these roles there are generally no shortage of former military among gym teachers and administrators. These teachers should have special training and concealed weapons permits, concealed weapons, and a bump in pay. Maybe lock a few rifles up securely somewhere on the off chance something more is needed. Then give them radios and wire an alarm button to every teachers desk. Press the button and the safety officers all get an alert over the radio indicating the class.
Doesn't put guns into unqualified hands. Doesn't put a useless TSA style security checkpoint at the door. Doesn't involve openly armed authority figures roaming the halls desensitizing children to a police state. But does drastically reduce the damage a rogue child can do before being put down.
Additionally, weapon (including gun) safety and usage courses should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum with a certification given at the end. Hopefully this will reduce hysteria, accidental shootings, and maybe lead to a boost in private gun ownership thereby making our nation safer and reducing crime. Statistics all show that gun owners who have gotten this sort of training are safer and more responsible by far than the general population (and not just with guns).
"Actually, ingesting is more efficient than smoking."
Another myth spread around forums. Try it. 1/4oz of marijuana provides dozens of doses smoked. 1/4 of pot butter provides about 4-6 doses for a typical 6ft tall 200lb adult male. The dose will kick in about 30-45minutes later like any ingested substance, provides a reduced effect, but lasts longer and in the process your digestive system will destroy most of the ingested active components. Additionally, the substance is not passed directly to the brain but instead is more uniformly spread through the tissues of the body (which absorb some of the material). Most of it ends up at the brain eventually but this is why the effect is both diminished relative to smoking and longer in duration. The dose you actually get starts small and increases to a peak and then begins diminishing again. Only at the peak would you feel the same level of intoxication you feel from smoking, most of the rest of the experience you'd feel some sort of gentle inadequate effect so the majority of the time the substance is being delivered the substance is wasted.
Inhalation (be it vapor or smoke) passes large quantities directly into the blood stream in a very efficient way due to the large surface area of the lungs and the fact they are purpose evolved to pass gas and vapor directly into the bloodstream. The uptake is more efficient and more active material gets to the brain more quickly. Of course the more rapid delivery means the effects don't last as long.
You did say smoking rather than vaporizing so it would be fair to compare the amount destroyed by combustion to that destroyed in the digestive system but the slower delivery does not change. You need to ingest a larger quantity to get an appropriate dosage and while the duration is increased it isn't increased enough to offset the larger quantity you need to consume because the time period in which you brain is getting too little at the beginning, and the time period in which it is getting too little at the end is also effectively if not technically lost efficiency.
Bottom line. To maintain a "high" comparable to that a smoker utilizing a 1/4 a day would maintain you'd need a good oz of material to ingest and you'd be taking the next dose before the first wears off. I am of course ignoring the difficulties in dosing ingested material which are subject to large fluctuations (do you have an empty stomach?) and the fact that you don't know the impact of a dose for 30-45mins after you'd taken it. It is very hard to take too much when you have near instant feedback from smoking or vaporizing but very easy to take too much ingesting.
No they aren't. First tablets are likely to only include THC ignoring the other active substances in whole Cannabis that provide most of it's benefits. And there is nothing efficient about extracting and purifying THC from the whole plant vs smoking or vaporizing it. Last but most importantly, ingesting a tablet is going to result in your digestive system destroying about 60% of the active content of the tablet.
This is already done on the black market. The process uses super critical fluid extraction utilizing confined butane as the solvent which gives the cleanest extraction found thus far. Multiple passes gives the best yield (the butane can be recycled if you have the equipment). Then providing agitation while applying a gentle low heat to convert intermediate THC's into delta-9 THC which provides a high enough purity to crystalize the material resulting in a golden powder typically called "budder" that is better than 99% pure delta-9 THC. There are no shortage of chemistry geeks who smoke pot. Taking this to a lab isn't going to magically give a substantially higher yield in fact additional purification steps would likely be added thus reducing yield. The resulting THC both has fewer of the source cannabinoids and provides fewer doses than the original plant material smoked/vaporized.
The lungs have a great deal of surface area and are directly hardwired into the bloodstream. This is no surprise their as purpose is pass as much oxygen gas into the bloodstream as rapidly and efficiently as possible. Nothing short of injection can get more of a substance into the bloodstream more rapidly and with higher efficiency than inhalation. Snorting can get a substance to the brain more quickly but your sinuses have a smaller surface area than the lungs so the lungs still get a higher volume of a substance into the bloodstream more quickly than snorting and unlike the lungs the sinuses are designed to resist foreign substances so with each dose the efficiency of absorption goes down. There is a reason crack addicts smoke cocaine rather than snorting it they get more bang from less cocaine.
It's questionable if marijuana demotivates. But as someone else pointed out the a pack of cigerettes an ounce of tobacco and in IL for example have a total of about $4/OZ combined state and federal taxes. California was proposing about $75/oz of tax on Cannabis. The result of such a high tax would be a price that stays near the black market price of $400/oz.
A heavy smoker will smoke a 1/4oz of marijuana a day. A comparable user who ate it would consume about an ounce to get the same result. So it might be reasonable to compare them although those taxes are already very heavy.
But the taxes being brandied for potential marijuana legalization are much higher. For instance California proposed something like $100 per plant tax on growers and then another $50 per ounce at the time of retail sale. A plant will yield a couple oz so that is something like $75 of tax on a volume comparable to a pack of cigarettes. The only possible justification for such high tax proposals is the current black market supported price of about $400 an ounce. There probably would be sales tax on top of that.
Incorrect.
"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument.[1] Ad hominem reasoning is normally described as an informal fallacy,[2][3][4] more precisely an irrelevance.[5]"
His argument is either valid or invalid but it's validity isn't related to his personal credibility. Attacks upon his character or credibility are irrelevant. "it's part of how we judge reliability of sources" He is a human, it is safe to conclude he isn't a reliable source. The same would be true if he were a solidly credentialed professor with 60 years of consistent publication. If one were asserting his was correct because of a positive history it would be another logical fallacy known as a plea to authority. If his data is bogus it won't be replicated. If his logic is faulty it should be dismissible with examination of nothing but his argument and premise.
At no point does it become valid logic to dismiss a sound argument on the basis of labeling someone a crackpot or dubious. It might be a valid personal screening criteria for whether or not you care to take the time to examine his argument that would hardly give you grounds for asserting to others that he is wrong which is what the submitter has done.
Attacking the credibility of the guy making the argument and not the argument itself is an Ad Hominem attack in every case. It is a logical fallacy. It doesn't matter how you spin it or want to disagree. A valid argument is a valid argument no matter who makes it.
From wikipedia:
"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument.[1] Ad hominem reasoning is normally described as an informal fallacy,[2][3][4] more precisely an irrelevance.[5]"
I didn't invent or discover the fallacy. It is fundamental logic. The validity of his argument is completely unrelated to his personal validity and entire based on the validity of his premises and whether or not they support his conclusion.
His past history might justify not investing your time in reading his argument and premise but it doesn't support the assertion his argument is invalid without having examined the premises.
"Not at all, the guy has a history of making dubious claims. It's perfectly reasonable to assign him a low a priori probablity of being correct."
No, not it is not. That's why it's a well known and established logical fallacy.
"Sure, you could look at the evidence but life is too short to follow up every crank."
Sure but that is a reason to not personally choose to spend your time that way determining if he is wrong, not a valid basis for asserting that he is wrong.
"It's not worth wasting the time reading if it can't even get published in a respectable journal."
Maybe but views that are popular have a much easier time of getting into 'respectable' journals while views that are unpopular have a much harder time. In no small part because the reviewers tend to apply aforementioned logical fallacy in their evaluations. Those reviewing articles for journals have a tendency to approve research supporting things they agree with because they are subject to the same human failings as the rest of us. Trusting their judgement makes you more likely to agree with the things they agree with as well. Popular views among intelligent and educated individuals have a higher probability of being correct but that doesn't make views that are unpopular in said circles incorrect.
Having a history of dubious claims and not being published in a respectable journal might be a reasonable screen for determining if it's worth your time to investigate but it doesn't make his current claim false or justify the unsubstantiated assertion "No, Life Has Not Been Found In a Meteorite." All it means is that you (for whatever reasons) haven't taken the time to find out.
"You rely on "anecdotal" evidence for most of your life. Anecdotal information is the most basic way that human beings learn."
I'd agree with this. At the end of the day we don't have any information EXCEPT for anecdotal evidence and correlation. You throw a ball up, there is a strong correlation to the ball falling back down. All experiments are looking for correlation. Correlations don't prove a thing, they only suggest it, the more correlations you have the more strongly it is suggested until at some point a line is crossed and you work with that is most likely.
Anecdotal evidence is also the only kind. After all, at the end of the day all you really know is that in your experience everybody has said the ball will fall and from what you've seen that is the case. Reproducable? So two guys had a similar anecdotal experience of seeing a correlation between the ball being thrown in the air and falling.
All that aside two correlations suggesting something is still better than one and while you can put some higher assurance in your own anecdotal experiences that doesn't mean you should take those of someone else on faith. The bar should be higher for information you accept from someone else.
"Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence."
Pure Ad Hominem attack. No content here. Invalid content is invalid innately regardless of source, similarly valid content is valid regardless of source. It doesn't matter if the guy stands by the subway station carrying a sign that says magical leprechauns whisper in his ear it has no impact on the validity of his statements. Unless of course you are considering the validity of his testimony as evidence but if you consider the testimony of anyone as evidence you have other problems in your critical analysis.
"While the diatoms appear to be real, they are certainly from Earth. The meteorite itself, on the other hand, does not appear to be real. Many of the basic scientific steps and claims made in the paper are very shaky."
That may or may not be true. One would actually have to read the article to determine if there is substance provided for these assertions and who is going to do that?
True. Unfortunately most measures to legalize also involve heavy taxation as a selling point that will probably continue to artificially inflate the price of cannabis. Other methods of ingestion tend to either isolate just THC (which is NOT the only active or desirable substance in cannabis) and/or are less efficient to produce. Ingesting for instance is far less efficient than smoking.
Given the massive quantities one can produce on the back 40 of even one farm cannabis should be sold by the pound right next to flour.
Except that there are no shortage of very productive individuals who drink and smoke pot and aren't poor.
"Not really a shining endorsement of pot smoking as a past time"
Doesn't really indicate anything negative about it either. Pot is chemically induced euphoria. Some people add artificial in there but your emotions are nothing more than a chemical state so there is nothing artificial about it. If your life isn't a joyful wonderland pot is a fairly effective and low cost way to make it one for a little while. Being poor sucks and being dumb sucks, why wouldn't you want cheap happiness. If you aren't dumb but merely lazy and making bad choices it seems that would tend be depressing as well so ditto on cheap happiness. If you are highly intelligent and can't help but realize just how fucked we are in this life then again bring on the happiness.
If you are rich, lazy, and dumb on the hand you don't have much to be unhappy about. You get handed degrees from the best schools, society is set up to ensure that the wealthy enjoy the most comfort and have the best of everything, and the opposite sex will throw themselves at you all day long.
Nope but I've known plenty of lazy moron layabouts who did nothing but smoke pot. The pot doesn't make them lazy moron layabouts though it's just something to do.
Perhaps being poor and uneducated correlates to being unhappy and self medicating with drugs and has nothing to do with the drug the poor are self medicating with?
When you get your hair cut, go to work, and stop wearing tie-dye but don't stop smoking do you still magically stop being a hippy?
In my experience people of high intelligence, especially in STEM fields smoke a lot more pot than the general population pretty much across the board.
In my experience LSD makes you THINK you are having great epiphanies but if you actually record yourself or write them down they aren't very wondrous and usually not even coherent in the morning. Thinking you had revelations can still be beneficial though. It can help you overcome emotional problems and help you open your mind to possibilities you wouldn't have been willing to give a chance sober and afterward you feel like you've opened your mind and those conclusions you reached were deep and valid. The conclusions are almost always positive because of the extreme mind blowing euphoria that LSD brings on.
Doing this a lot means having lots of ideas you normally would have never reconsidered crushed and leads to maintaining a more open viewpoint to just about everything. And keeping an open mind without losing prospective is always a good thing.
There are studies that show increased levels of known carcinogens compared with say tobacco smoke. Most of these are known to be byproducts of burning so they really have nothing to do with cannabis. However studies DO NOT support an actual increased incidence of cancer among marijuana smokers despite the presence of those known carcinogens.
I'll provide as many links as you've bothered to.
Finding carcinogens in the smoke is NOT a substitute for actually finding increased incidence of cancer. Since that increased incidence has been looked for (believe me there are plenty of entities including the DEA that have funded studies trying to find it) but not found it implies there is something else contained within the smoke which is minimizing or even neutralizing the cancer causing effects of these substances.
It's better journalism to give both. "The strands are about 2 nanometers wide or about the width of a strand of DNA." Either just means really small to most people but for those who aren't most people you've provided the important piece of information.
Carbon is biodegradable and you can grow new Carbon. How do you think we recycle cotton (which is carbon)?
Exchange is currently a piece of shit too. There just isn't a non piece of shit alternative. If you just needed email and a directory there are much better less bloated and more efficient solutions but alas you don't just just need a directory and a mail server.
You are forgetting the shared calendar/tasks and their tight email integration. The idea that giving people a calendar or a directory based addresses gave them an exchange/outlook alternative is the reason most of the alternatives aren't viable.
"The proof would be in the job postings on sites like"
That isn't proof of anything. You need 3 or 4 windows admins for every Linux admin required to administer the same number of systems. There is also far more turn-over in windows spots. Many organizations call the guys who work on those windows desktops and laptops admins as well. That and because some types of organizations require lots and lots of local offices and those organizations often are forced to deploy a windows server at each of those locations, not because they need that many servers or windows has expanded into another server space but because the protocols involved weren't properly designed and perform poorly over the wan and good wan accelerators are both tough to find and the ones that are worth a damn are expensive.
There are millions of small companies asking for little .net apps and the like but you aren't likely to find that in many enterprises. In the enterprise you are going to have something served up through a web interface or java based or java served up through a web interface and the backend certainly isn't going to be windows. If you are using windows on your database servers, web servers, archival systems, or virtualization boxes it is you who is smoking the crack pipe my friend.
The one notable exception that is picking up quite a bit of steam is Sharepoint. Hopefully we'll see that go away but in the meantime it's a VM and the actual server underneath it isn't windows and box the data is stored on, also isn't windows.