Prohibition increases the harm of a substance. C-I/II drugs are frequently harmful no doubt, but spending billions killing and arresting millions of people, while shredding the Bill of Rights because there's no other way to aggressively enforce vice crimes, creating a gigantic unemployable underclass, and creating and funding violent gangs and cartels, who drive up the price so high it leads to massive property crime by addicts, massively increases the harm drug abuse causes to society-- nevermind the user themselves, who are less able to get help and more likely to die. This causes harm that pales in comparison to the drugs themselves and the damage they'd cause if that money was spent instead on education and treatment.
And it's happening again. The consensus now is that it's better to let people in pain suffer in agony until they kill themselves than let a small percent of people get high on pharmaceuticals instead of street drugs. People just don't understand that you can't criminalize your way out of a drug problem. Making 100 people suffer so 1 doesn't get high is not only barbaric, it's ineffective, as the 1 will just do something else, usually even more dangerous with more collateral damage. Yet that's what everyone is cheering right now, Republican and Democrats alike.
What I've found with H265 is everyone seriously drops the bitrate, to 25-33% of the same content in H264. 265 is good, but not that good, so what I've seen nearly universally is that when there's an option, the 264 version looks better.
The funniest thing is the Trumptards haven't come up with a single thing she may or may not be guilty of that are worse than what Trump openly says and does every time he runs his cockholster.
It's just like with the pardon, that Bill Clinton made a bad pardon means Trump is entitled to and should be applauded for pardoning someone even worse for even worse reasons.
The position that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" should apply to civilians but not law enforcement professionals is absurd, as is the notion that holding police to the same standards as everyone else will lead to anarchy. Lack of accountability is one of the reasons our justice system is so terrible. What's worse, you're responding to a question about social media posts, not even an exigent circumstance, so any mistake is blatant negligence, since there's plenty of time to ask if they can do it. And you want to excuse that? Sorry, you're biased in favor of police authoritarianism, not against it, when you propose that extreme of insulation from accountability.
Because if you call the police for help they might shoot you. Haven't you been watching the news? Not even white woman are exempt from summary execution upon summoning the police for aid these days.
Ironically it's people like you who will enable straight men in the ladies room. Unlike most transwomen, it's very hard to identify transmen. They look like a normal, buff, hairy dude. Google someone like Buck Angel, that's who you want in your daughters bathroom? Then all any cis man has to do is say they're trans, they don't even have to put on a dress. What are you going to do, have an ID or genital check at every bathroom door? Have 911 calls every time a transman enters the bathroom he's now mandated to? I've not seen a single one of you bigots even attempt to get around this.
FWIW, I think it's all silly and sex discrimination is no more acceptable in bathrooms than it is anywhere else. Separate but equal is inherently unequal applies like race. We have way too many hangups to make it work today, but if men and women are equal like blacks and whites are equal, and you can't have a white and black bathroom... One day we'll achieve true equality.
Sure they do. Why just a few weeks ago on the subway a friendly off duty NYPD detective pulled out his gun on a homeless guy who had been berating him for breaking up subway dancers, then instead of shooting the guy, held the gun by the barrel and repeatedly bashed him in the head with it. While I didn't appreciate that the barrel was 2' away and pointed directly at me, I'm sure the other guy definitely appreciated this new form of non-lethal gun use by the police.
Ever since the far left extreme progressives declared that words were "literal violence" and they were therefore entitled to defend themselves from that violence by starting violent mobs to stop some right-wing nutters from speaking. They're really alienating loads of people who are very liberal but don't agree with throwing free speech and due process out the window; I can already see Darth Cheeto to be reelected in 2020 for that reason. That's why you've got those jackasses saying things like how they would just love for the left to keep hammering identity politics.
I'll second the call for VB6. It's hands down the best tool for creating desktop apps. Very easy to use, but also so powerful you can do whatever you need too, dropping down to inline ASM if you want. My pet project in fact is bringing in all the new shell features from XP and Vista+, especially the new Common Controls features, so you can have all the same GUI goodies and shell APIs/COM interfaces as a modern tool; you can't tell from looking at my apps that they're written in a decades old IDE.
VB.NET is something entirely different, and not at all a suitable replacement. If VB6 was ever updated with 64bit support (which would be trivial for MS because they did update the language itself for VBA) and a few other features, it would be huge.
It's not the screen resolution that's most important, it's the screen size. The vast majority of people cannot afford a home theater with an IMAX-sized screen. Sitting close to a smaller screen just isn't as good. For a lot of movies, the big screen adds quite a bit to the experience; often enough to justify the downsides of the theater. And besides I don't get the complaint about snacks and drinks; it's not like you're getting searched on your way in, just smuggle it.
The correlation is simple: Use of one psychoactive drug means you're more likely to use other psychoactive drugs. Caffeine is a drug. A legal drug, but a drug nonetheless.
So the compatibility list showing all the extensions that are no longer possible because of lack of functionality in WebExtensions is all in my head? Cool. And the UI hasn't been continually dumbed down and options removed, to be similar to Chrome? Damn I need to check into a psych ward because the browser I've been using for years is apparently in a different reality from the one I can see.
Yup, Firefox has been gradually becoming a Chrome clone for a long time now. Dumbing things down, removing options, and now in their final move, making it impossible to have extensions more powerful than Chrome. For some reason Mozilla is absolutely convinced they can increase market share by shitting on their power users and becoming Chrome. It's not going to work. Alienating your entire loyal userbase by breaking everything that makes them choose your product over the alternative, then hoping more people switch from that alternative (despite pissing off the very people who recommend/install browsers for non-technical people) is the most batshit crazy business model I've ever seen. But they're 100% dedicated to it, not giving a flying fuck that opposition is near universal. They've even gone so far as having obvious employee shills lie about not working for them and preaching the benefits with language straight from their marketing department. They think they know better than their loyal users, and are going to be crying when ditching powerful extensions finally pushes them to rounding error share.
That's cleaning up the mess after the damage is done. Vaccinations should be mandatory with no non-medical exemptions. Refusing to vaccinate should be treated no different than the nutters who medically abuse children in other ways like refusing to take a very sick child to a doctor. It's abuse and impermissible; your religious beliefs don't let you get away with child abuse, and that's what non-vaccination is.
I don't understand why everyone is so focused on consumer home internet connection speeds. What evidence is there that the hack originated from a machine using Comcast, Verizon, whatever, and not say, a university network? I had a connection far faster than any home internet even as an undergrad in a dorm. Or a machine at the ISP itself? Or are we talking about the DNCs connection to the outside world? Was it on consumer-grade internet; not hosted in a datacenter with a fat pipe? I don't think it was the Russians either but connection speed is hardly proof.
The president can't even get past calling unflattering facts fake news, good luck getting him to comprehend the difference between bias and fake... like teaching astrophysics to a chimp.
Gizmodo has fully embraced SJW goodthink. It's what their readers want judging by the comments, which are full of the factually wrong, illogical, and anti-freedom positions you find with SJWs that are alienating those of us who are extremely liberal, but also care about civil rights, due process, facts, and logic/reason. Well thought out factually correct rebuttals are mocked and dismissed.
Ars Technica is going that road too. The articles are thankfully still good, by you can expect to be moderated into oblivion for even the mildest criticism of SJW groupthink. I gave up on that site when someone asked why libertarians don't break more to the Democrats if they value freedom so much. After providing a long list of anti-civil rights and anti-due process positions held by Democrats, all of which were factually true, I was promptly modded down to -30, continuing the trend where no matter how mild the criticism, if it was of the left, hello negative score. It's not like I'm even a conservative, and the same opinions get highly modded here at/. when I post them.
It's really sad, at least the comment section here is still reasonably good.
It wasn't that; VW screwed with the government, THAT is why they are being punished so harshly. Had they just cheated, bankrupted, lied to, and ripped off their customers by the millions, nobody would be going to jail and the worst outcome would be a tiny fine.
It's not entirely a scam; the problem is they lump in countries with excellent controls, like Canada, with countries like India. Counterfeit products with different amounts of the active ingredient, another active ingredient that may do something entirely different, or no active ingredient at all are very common when ordering prescription drugs from companies based there. It's not fearmongering over a super-rare occurrence, it's a very common occurrence.
While the libertarian in me supports peoples ability to purchase whatever drug they want without the governments permission, there's certainly a case to be made for some protections for people dependent on a medication they can't afford being economically forced to turn to regions that frequently sell drugs that are dangerous because of fraudulent mislabeling of their contents. What absolutely is inexcusable right now though, is importing from Canada and Europe; not allowing that is completely without merit.
Well obviously things are different in the modern age, but I can share a story on this principle from the world of an ancient AOL game, CyberStrike. Your score was controlled server side, so modifying that in the client didn't do anything. But as a young teen, eventually I discovered that a variable that effected your score (multiplier) was indeed trusted from the client. Years and years into the game, the highest legitimate score was IIRC 800,000 something that took hours of play a day for like 5 years, but adjusting this multiplier allowed you to get arbitrarily high in seconds-- and you have to be careful, because around 2.4m it actually overflowed and the server said you had points in the negative millions, and you couldn't come back positive ever.
Fun times, but it was certainly an oversight that this piece of score data unlike all others was trusted; your # of kills, shield level, upgrades, etc were server managed. I still remember that memory address two decades later... x45baf0:74b. If anyone here played it, you might recognize my username:)
The charge against Backpage was led by new Democrat/SJW hero Kamala Harris. Both sides are united in their crusade to clamp down on rights here, under the fake accusations of sex trafficking. (Fake in that they are going after all prostitution because of 0.0001% of it being anything resembling actual sex trafficking.. the left thinks all prostitutes are victims because women have no agency, and the right just wants to suppress sexual freedom)
Because if only a few more had gotten through, what then? Pai would change his mind? Trump? Congress? None of them give a rats ass what people want, or the already overwhelming opposition would matter.
Fines can work; they just need to not be that slap on the wrist. Fine by Days of Profit. Average out their last couple years of net profit, then fine them like 90 DP. Or 180 DP. That will definitely get the shareholders and boards attention. You could even up it; for the most serious, egregious abuses, fine by Days of Revenue. Expanding the prison population with more non-violent criminals isn't the answer, especially when you have a group that will respond to financial pressures. You could fine the board members personally too; following the same theme and link it to Days of Compensation, averaging out the value of total compensation (not just salary), and fine them a few weeks of that-- but for this you should really have a showing that they personally were responsible for it (which includes knowing about it, having the power to stop it, and not doing so).
Should really do that with individual civil/criminal fines too; beats the situation right now where some people get a $1000 fine, can't feed their kids, wind up in jail, lose their jobs; meanwhile someone else laughs while they keep paying the fine over and over to keep right on doing what they're doing.
Some places in Europe are following this philosophy IIRC.
Slashdot Mirror
Prohibition increases the harm of a substance. C-I/II drugs are frequently harmful no doubt, but spending billions killing and arresting millions of people, while shredding the Bill of Rights because there's no other way to aggressively enforce vice crimes, creating a gigantic unemployable underclass, and creating and funding violent gangs and cartels, who drive up the price so high it leads to massive property crime by addicts, massively increases the harm drug abuse causes to society-- nevermind the user themselves, who are less able to get help and more likely to die. This causes harm that pales in comparison to the drugs themselves and the damage they'd cause if that money was spent instead on education and treatment.
And it's happening again. The consensus now is that it's better to let people in pain suffer in agony until they kill themselves than let a small percent of people get high on pharmaceuticals instead of street drugs. People just don't understand that you can't criminalize your way out of a drug problem. Making 100 people suffer so 1 doesn't get high is not only barbaric, it's ineffective, as the 1 will just do something else, usually even more dangerous with more collateral damage. Yet that's what everyone is cheering right now, Republican and Democrats alike.
What I've found with H265 is everyone seriously drops the bitrate, to 25-33% of the same content in H264. 265 is good, but not that good, so what I've seen nearly universally is that when there's an option, the 264 version looks better.
The funniest thing is the Trumptards haven't come up with a single thing she may or may not be guilty of that are worse than what Trump openly says and does every time he runs his cockholster.
It's just like with the pardon, that Bill Clinton made a bad pardon means Trump is entitled to and should be applauded for pardoning someone even worse for even worse reasons.
The position that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" should apply to civilians but not law enforcement professionals is absurd, as is the notion that holding police to the same standards as everyone else will lead to anarchy. Lack of accountability is one of the reasons our justice system is so terrible. What's worse, you're responding to a question about social media posts, not even an exigent circumstance, so any mistake is blatant negligence, since there's plenty of time to ask if they can do it. And you want to excuse that? Sorry, you're biased in favor of police authoritarianism, not against it, when you propose that extreme of insulation from accountability.
Because if you call the police for help they might shoot you. Haven't you been watching the news? Not even white woman are exempt from summary execution upon summoning the police for aid these days.
Ironically it's people like you who will enable straight men in the ladies room. Unlike most transwomen, it's very hard to identify transmen. They look like a normal, buff, hairy dude. Google someone like Buck Angel, that's who you want in your daughters bathroom? Then all any cis man has to do is say they're trans, they don't even have to put on a dress. What are you going to do, have an ID or genital check at every bathroom door? Have 911 calls every time a transman enters the bathroom he's now mandated to? I've not seen a single one of you bigots even attempt to get around this.
FWIW, I think it's all silly and sex discrimination is no more acceptable in bathrooms than it is anywhere else. Separate but equal is inherently unequal applies like race. We have way too many hangups to make it work today, but if men and women are equal like blacks and whites are equal, and you can't have a white and black bathroom... One day we'll achieve true equality.
Police don't consider Tasers to be weapons at all; they're compliance tools.
Sure they do. Why just a few weeks ago on the subway a friendly off duty NYPD detective pulled out his gun on a homeless guy who had been berating him for breaking up subway dancers, then instead of shooting the guy, held the gun by the barrel and repeatedly bashed him in the head with it. While I didn't appreciate that the barrel was 2' away and pointed directly at me, I'm sure the other guy definitely appreciated this new form of non-lethal gun use by the police.
Ever since the far left extreme progressives declared that words were "literal violence" and they were therefore entitled to defend themselves from that violence by starting violent mobs to stop some right-wing nutters from speaking. They're really alienating loads of people who are very liberal but don't agree with throwing free speech and due process out the window; I can already see Darth Cheeto to be reelected in 2020 for that reason. That's why you've got those jackasses saying things like how they would just love for the left to keep hammering identity politics.
I'll second the call for VB6. It's hands down the best tool for creating desktop apps. Very easy to use, but also so powerful you can do whatever you need too, dropping down to inline ASM if you want. My pet project in fact is bringing in all the new shell features from XP and Vista+, especially the new Common Controls features, so you can have all the same GUI goodies and shell APIs/COM interfaces as a modern tool; you can't tell from looking at my apps that they're written in a decades old IDE.
VB.NET is something entirely different, and not at all a suitable replacement. If VB6 was ever updated with 64bit support (which would be trivial for MS because they did update the language itself for VBA) and a few other features, it would be huge.
It's not the screen resolution that's most important, it's the screen size. The vast majority of people cannot afford a home theater with an IMAX-sized screen. Sitting close to a smaller screen just isn't as good. For a lot of movies, the big screen adds quite a bit to the experience; often enough to justify the downsides of the theater. And besides I don't get the complaint about snacks and drinks; it's not like you're getting searched on your way in, just smuggle it.
The correlation is simple: Use of one psychoactive drug means you're more likely to use other psychoactive drugs. Caffeine is a drug. A legal drug, but a drug nonetheless.
So the compatibility list showing all the extensions that are no longer possible because of lack of functionality in WebExtensions is all in my head? Cool. And the UI hasn't been continually dumbed down and options removed, to be similar to Chrome? Damn I need to check into a psych ward because the browser I've been using for years is apparently in a different reality from the one I can see.
Yup, Firefox has been gradually becoming a Chrome clone for a long time now. Dumbing things down, removing options, and now in their final move, making it impossible to have extensions more powerful than Chrome. For some reason Mozilla is absolutely convinced they can increase market share by shitting on their power users and becoming Chrome. It's not going to work. Alienating your entire loyal userbase by breaking everything that makes them choose your product over the alternative, then hoping more people switch from that alternative (despite pissing off the very people who recommend/install browsers for non-technical people) is the most batshit crazy business model I've ever seen. But they're 100% dedicated to it, not giving a flying fuck that opposition is near universal. They've even gone so far as having obvious employee shills lie about not working for them and preaching the benefits with language straight from their marketing department. They think they know better than their loyal users, and are going to be crying when ditching powerful extensions finally pushes them to rounding error share.
That's cleaning up the mess after the damage is done. Vaccinations should be mandatory with no non-medical exemptions. Refusing to vaccinate should be treated no different than the nutters who medically abuse children in other ways like refusing to take a very sick child to a doctor. It's abuse and impermissible; your religious beliefs don't let you get away with child abuse, and that's what non-vaccination is.
I don't understand why everyone is so focused on consumer home internet connection speeds. What evidence is there that the hack originated from a machine using Comcast, Verizon, whatever, and not say, a university network? I had a connection far faster than any home internet even as an undergrad in a dorm. Or a machine at the ISP itself? Or are we talking about the DNCs connection to the outside world? Was it on consumer-grade internet; not hosted in a datacenter with a fat pipe? I don't think it was the Russians either but connection speed is hardly proof.
The president can't even get past calling unflattering facts fake news, good luck getting him to comprehend the difference between bias and fake... like teaching astrophysics to a chimp.
Gizmodo has fully embraced SJW goodthink. It's what their readers want judging by the comments, which are full of the factually wrong, illogical, and anti-freedom positions you find with SJWs that are alienating those of us who are extremely liberal, but also care about civil rights, due process, facts, and logic/reason. Well thought out factually correct rebuttals are mocked and dismissed. /. when I post them.
Ars Technica is going that road too. The articles are thankfully still good, by you can expect to be moderated into oblivion for even the mildest criticism of SJW groupthink. I gave up on that site when someone asked why libertarians don't break more to the Democrats if they value freedom so much. After providing a long list of anti-civil rights and anti-due process positions held by Democrats, all of which were factually true, I was promptly modded down to -30, continuing the trend where no matter how mild the criticism, if it was of the left, hello negative score. It's not like I'm even a conservative, and the same opinions get highly modded here at
It's really sad, at least the comment section here is still reasonably good.
It wasn't that; VW screwed with the government, THAT is why they are being punished so harshly. Had they just cheated, bankrupted, lied to, and ripped off their customers by the millions, nobody would be going to jail and the worst outcome would be a tiny fine.
It's not entirely a scam; the problem is they lump in countries with excellent controls, like Canada, with countries like India. Counterfeit products with different amounts of the active ingredient, another active ingredient that may do something entirely different, or no active ingredient at all are very common when ordering prescription drugs from companies based there. It's not fearmongering over a super-rare occurrence, it's a very common occurrence.
While the libertarian in me supports peoples ability to purchase whatever drug they want without the governments permission, there's certainly a case to be made for some protections for people dependent on a medication they can't afford being economically forced to turn to regions that frequently sell drugs that are dangerous because of fraudulent mislabeling of their contents. What absolutely is inexcusable right now though, is importing from Canada and Europe; not allowing that is completely without merit.
Well obviously things are different in the modern age, but I can share a story on this principle from the world of an ancient AOL game, CyberStrike. Your score was controlled server side, so modifying that in the client didn't do anything. But as a young teen, eventually I discovered that a variable that effected your score (multiplier) was indeed trusted from the client. Years and years into the game, the highest legitimate score was IIRC 800,000 something that took hours of play a day for like 5 years, but adjusting this multiplier allowed you to get arbitrarily high in seconds-- and you have to be careful, because around 2.4m it actually overflowed and the server said you had points in the negative millions, and you couldn't come back positive ever. :)
Fun times, but it was certainly an oversight that this piece of score data unlike all others was trusted; your # of kills, shield level, upgrades, etc were server managed. I still remember that memory address two decades later... x45baf0:74b. If anyone here played it, you might recognize my username
The charge against Backpage was led by new Democrat/SJW hero Kamala Harris. Both sides are united in their crusade to clamp down on rights here, under the fake accusations of sex trafficking. (Fake in that they are going after all prostitution because of 0.0001% of it being anything resembling actual sex trafficking.. the left thinks all prostitutes are victims because women have no agency, and the right just wants to suppress sexual freedom)
Because if only a few more had gotten through, what then? Pai would change his mind? Trump? Congress? None of them give a rats ass what people want, or the already overwhelming opposition would matter.
Fines can work; they just need to not be that slap on the wrist. Fine by Days of Profit. Average out their last couple years of net profit, then fine them like 90 DP. Or 180 DP. That will definitely get the shareholders and boards attention. You could even up it; for the most serious, egregious abuses, fine by Days of Revenue. Expanding the prison population with more non-violent criminals isn't the answer, especially when you have a group that will respond to financial pressures. You could fine the board members personally too; following the same theme and link it to Days of Compensation, averaging out the value of total compensation (not just salary), and fine them a few weeks of that-- but for this you should really have a showing that they personally were responsible for it (which includes knowing about it, having the power to stop it, and not doing so).
Should really do that with individual civil/criminal fines too; beats the situation right now where some people get a $1000 fine, can't feed their kids, wind up in jail, lose their jobs; meanwhile someone else laughs while they keep paying the fine over and over to keep right on doing what they're doing.
Some places in Europe are following this philosophy IIRC.