You're confusing doing something wrong with doing something illegal. Informants/snitches are most often used in the US's asinine war on drugs, because there's no victim to report the crime. Many people feel ruining peoples lives with felony charges for no crime other than using/selling (to consenting adults) some arbitrarily illegal chemical to get a high instead of using alcohol/tobacco to get it is an abhorrent violation of our rights over our own bodies. I for one applaud this website for helping people reduce their risk of personal destruction at the hands of an obscenely unjust government policy.
And please nobody start with "but drugs are bad for society" dribble; every harm of drugs to both bystanders and the users can be traced to their prohibition.
First we documented all of the tokens with just invokes yes; but from there we went on to writing our own windows and modifying the behavior of existing windows, working with every part of the FDO stream, not just the token invokes. If I remember correctly, the invoke menu command was only for invoking mF tokens anyway. That's all people could do before my time, where learning how to use all the other FDO commands was made possible by a internal documentation of the entire FDO language, a large manual covered in "CONFIDENTIAL" and "INTERNAL USE ONLY" stamps. Just invoking an mF token for a form would display the graphics and such, but if you really wanted to do something worthwhile, invoking that token was only the start of a stream. FDO has hundreds of commands besides invoke; we figured out how to do entire streams using all the commands, atoms, etc. Too bad I'm traveling with my laptop right now, I have hundreds of custom FDO scripts and documentations in my storage archives back at home. But anyway, FDO was an entire language, invoke was just one command, once one knew the entire language a whole new world of possibilities opened up that you could never accomplish with a simple invoke.
I'll share another OpsSec story. My account got terminated for no good reason, so I called up the support line (CAT i think) and asked to be transferred to OpsSec. I was told no such department exists. I asked to speak to a supervisor, since granted a low level support peon might not know about it. The supervisor also told me it didn't exist. I explained in great detail why I knew it existed, and was then told 'well, you're not speaking to them' and got hung up on. So I started digging around all the internal documents we had, and in a couple hours came up with a phone number for OpsSec. I called them up, and right after I said hello, they called me by my handle, told me my account was killed for hacking, and told me knock off the token scanning and stop harassing tech support. First time I ever talked to someone who worked for AOL that actually seemed like an intelligent person who knew what was going on, and how I found out the highest levels of the company were actually worried about what we could now do with FDO.
Well, the fact that this is news can mean only one thing; AOL has massively overhauled their security system and now has state of the art, well designed, and highly effective security. Because the AOL I remember had its security severely compromised by teenagers several times a day. Serious breaches too, read my other post in this thread. It happened so incredibly often, there's no way a breach would be national news. So logically, if its now rare enough to be newsworthy, they must have stopped the endless onslaught of easily exploited holes... ...because a journalist would never just write up a non-story to insult AOL or do some "omg haxors" fearmongering... never...
Well it sounds like I was in "the scene" a year or two after you. We took the token thing to a whole other level. Tokens are a small part of the scripting language AOL runs on, FDO. Thanks to some leaked internal documentation and lots of trial and error, a small group of us became quite good with FDO and could pretty much run amok among every resource on AOL. We wrote programs that automatically mapped the tens of thousands of objects; every mF token (forms), and my personal project, every eB token, which were the file libraries. Not only could a normal user invoke an eB token for a beta library, we could obtain staff only files too. The eB libraries didn't contain customer billing records, but they did contain internal operations documents, alpha release software, staff tools, and all sorts of other goodies. Mapping the tokens unleashed the real power of FDO; imagine having a list of every single window that made up the AOL software including ones you could not get to from a non-empowered account, and then being able to view the source code for that window and then having complete control of that code locally. While I wasn't involved personally, I believe one exploit that descended from that power was the ability to bypass the SecureID (a physical device with a code that changed every 60 seconds) of internal accounts by recoding the entry window to behave as if it was entered. And of course, countless ways to terminate or take over normal accounts and access billing systems (I never messed with anyone elses account or info, of course in part due to the legal risk, but mainly because I actually did have morals as a young teen, and I was in it for the challenge, knowledge, and yes the glory and fame that came with being among the first to harness the power of AOL's internal language, which made us the elitest of the elite among the AOL programmer/hacker kiddies). I won't go into much more detail, but good ole star tool (as it was called, adding a menu titled * that gave any account a direct interface to the internal FDO scripting) led to countless exploits for the small group of people able to take full advantage of it (i.e. it was significantly harder to interface with AOL through FDO than the Visual Basic programs everyone with half a brain flooded the scene with). Some of the more ambitious exploits made the news; I recall one time the leak of the next version of AOL months before it was even supposed to enter early beta got a mention in a major news outlet; while it wasn't me that leaked it, I was the one who found the eB library where it resided and passed along the token to those who did make it public. OpsSec (operations security, the highest level of AOL network security staff) knew us by name, and terminated my access more than a few times. It was really cool stuff, especially for a kid. I don't know if newer AOL software still allows clients to use tokens and other FDO code, or if AOL figured out how to secure privileged resources from those who could program in it, but back in the day security was so poor that our group of 10-13 year olds walked in and out of staff resources like they were our own personal playground.
That's assuming other storage mediums don't step up to replace todays magnetic storage. There's numerous other storage mediums on the horizon that don't use much metal or magnetic materials, that will far surpass traditional hard drives in data density. By the time the resources to make magnetic drives become prohibitively scarce, I just can't imagine it not being irrelevant because most new data is stored in some sort of crystal or organic material with such a high density that using up all the resources on the planet just to build enough storage devices will be just as far off as running out of magnetic material is today.
New technology will keep up.
It could simply be that she had a crush on the camera person. Pupils dialate for all manner of reason.
When filming a scene, there's all sorts of lights pointed at the set, and you can see there's a light pointed right at her face. Natural causes of pupil dilation simply don't dilate THAT much when there's a light of any noticeable intensity on the eye. To have eyes like that without a chemical influence, she'd have to be in dim light AND having a physiological response, or complete darkness, to get that wide.
That said, the chemical influence causing it isn't necessarily a hallucinogen (or a stimulant), it could be the same stuff the optometrist uses, to simulate the effect of drugs. The actors in drug movies don't really take drugs in front of the camera, most of the time anyway.
Individuals cannot place online orders with Sigma-Aldrich. Only companies can, and you have to fax them lots of forms to prove you're a business. For any chemical, not just controlled substances. You might still be able to place an order over the phone, but I've found its easier to just look for a smaller chemical company.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist an opportunity to be technically correct, the best kind of correct.
What people really need to realize is that research has suggested CP actually protects more children than it hurts. Some people are sexually attracted to children, it doesn't matter how harsh the laws are or how evil it's considered by however many people, they can't change it any more than anyone can choose whether they're attracted to men or women. However, they can control their natural urges and resist actually going out and molesting a kid. Some people can't resist, some can, and some (a substantial proportion) can be satisfied another way. CP can serve to satisfy the urges of many pedophiles enough to prevent them from having to satisfy it by doing something themselves. And the harsher the laws, the more kids are going to be molested. If a pedophile is going to get life for having as little as 10 pictures, well they might as well go out and get the real thing and probably would only be sentenced to a fraction of that term.
Of course, the attitude of the public is going to be, it doesn't matter how many children we can save, we can't be soft on these evil people and condone such immorality. Just like drugs.
Child porn sites are typically hidden from the general public, so you need to be a little more experienced with the net to find them. So the people who do find them are smart enough to use stolen ccs to pay for it, I'd bet 90% of the time.
0The small increase only affects patients who already have risk factors for heart trouble (hypertension, hyperlipidaemia, etc.) and take very high doses for very long periods of time. I don't know how many people you happen to know who take those medications, but most people taking them who aren't otherwise at risk for heart attacks are told to remain on them, and prefer doing so, since the alternative is being in pain (which is actually preferably to the OTC side effects).
Despite the media sensationalism, healthy adults don't suddenly have heart attacks from COX-2 inhibitors.
You're a pharmacist and think dextroamphetamine is always better then methylphenidate? I highly suggest you pull out the prescribing information on those two products and look at side effect profiles, abuse potentials, risk of dependence, etc. Most people don't need the increased strength (and the problems that come with it) of dextroamphetamine, so methylphenidate is a better alternative. You know what works even better than dextroamphetamine? Desoxyn (methamphetamine). But that is only prescribed when nothing else works, and for a reason similar to why dextroamphetamine is only prescribed when methylphenidate doesn't work; while it's "better" since it's much stronger, it has significantly more common and severe side effects along with a much higher abuse potential/risk of dependency.
Turns out this is the case in alot of these situations. Let's look at COX-2 inhibitors. They aren't any more effective at relieving pain than aspirin et al. (which bind COX-1 also), but alot of people can't tolerate the side effects of the OTC stuff. The side effects come from COX-1 activity, but the desired effect comes from COX-2 activity. So new drugs targeted exclusively to COX-2 with no COX-1 activity had all of the pain killing effects and none of the side effects.
That's what alot of new drugs are about, reducing side effects so more people are able to tolerate the drugs.
And YES, I am a fucking psychobiologist specializing in psychopharmacology.
So what incentive would a pharmaceutical company have to spend hundreds of millions designing, researching, and testing dozens of candidate drugs until they find the useful one; then some other company can just copy their formula, sell it for half right after its released, ensuring a massive loss of money to the company that did all the work. It costs money to make new drugs, ALOT of money, if companies can't make that money back they're simply not going to make the drugs. What other methods do you propose to pay for R&D? It would mean a significant tax increase if you think the government should pay for it.
Well, say the crack dealer is an undercover cop. To avoid entrapment, the buyer would have to be the first one to indicate he wanted to do an illegal transaction. The cop couldn't just walk around saying "You want crack?" and arresting everyone who says yes.
The Origin of Species is not the absolute complete flawless manual for evolution. There's been plenty of huge breakthrough in evolution that weren't even touched on in Darwin's book. The biggest one is tracking evolution through molecular genetics; the mechanism of what Darwin observed. Not to mention models for evolution like punctuated equilibrium (long periods of little evolution, short periods of rapid change in response to some major change in environment)... that was not part of Origin. Major breakthroughs recently have come in looking at evolutionary pathways for certain species or traits, way beyond the book.
I hope the funny mod captures the intent of the parent, but nonetheless I thought I would post this since peoples abhorrent ignorance of evolution never ceases to enrage me.
Second to last paragraph had (lessthansign)15% and it got treated as an open tag, oops:)
The rest was:
(instead of the less than 15% of addicts seeking treatment able to obtain it right now). Imagine if fear of legal and social issues didn't force your loved one to hide their drug use away from the world and you could have seen the addiction before it became too destructive to hide? Imagine if his drugs were of a known dosage and free from dangerous cuts and diseases so an OD wouldn't occur. The past few decades have shown trying to eradicate drugs from our streets simply isn't possible even after compromising our civil rights. Of course you wish your loved one couldn't have gotten drugs, but wouldn't your family member have a better chance at recovering from his drug addiction instead of having it end their life if those imagined things were true? Maintaining the delusion that drugs can be eradicated is preventing minimizing the harm drugs bring; people you love will always be able to obtain drugs, but it's prohibition that makes the drugs harmful enough to destroy their lives. Financial issues, purity/contamination issues, neccessity of involvement in the underworld, and trying to hide addiction until it's too late... it's THESE things that destroy someones life and create the spiral of worsening addiction, and they're not because of the drug, they're because of the black market created by prohibition. Without those issues your loved one's drug addiction would not be beyond help and their lives wouldn't be destroyed.
So if you've lost someone to drug addiction, you have to realize that prohibition has NO impact on ability to obtain drugs, and is in reality responsible for taking drug addiction from something harmful but treatable and non- life ruining, and, through the black market, making it into something that consumes and destroys a life. If drugs killed someone you loved, they would have had a FAR better chance of sitll being alive if people realized prohibition was far more responsible than the actual drug and instead realized since it will never work, you have to instead work to minimize the harm drugs cause.
If 20% of your kids are actively sleeping with the enemy, you've already lost the war. No technology in the world will help you when the enemy has wide spread grass root support in your own country. It'd probably be a good idea to start to negotiate a cease fire.
That one's good, but for an even more dramatic illustration of this concept, the latest government-conducted study reported 45.8% of Americans aged 12+ have tried an illegal drug in their lifetime. Not only does that show you're not wining the war, but how do you morally justify laws that make 45.8% of your citizens criminals? Further, 29.4% have used an illegal drug besides marijuana; that's still not a morally sound law. It's not like a traffic ticket... drug offenses all mean an arrest and problems getting jobs. The US incarcerates a percent of its population than every other industrialized nation in the world, even oppressive dictatorships, because of drug laws putting non-violent drug offenders behind bars.
Drug addiction destroys alot of lives. Nobody is denying that. But is justice turning a drug addict into a convicted felon who, by destroying his chance at a good job, good housing, and earning potential, is now more likely to be a drain on society and turn to a life of more drugs and crimes that actually hurt others?
Is drug use so morally reprehensible that it's worth waging a war on every other person in this country? Creating and financing extremely violent cartels and gangs? Driving addicts to property crimes to pay for the black market prices? Putting non-violent offenders in jail and denying them a future where they could contribute to society? Reducing jail terms for rapists and murderers because it's not possible to build prisons quickly enough to lock up people who harmed no one for drug offenses?
So you have a family member whose drug addiction destroyed his life and those who loved them. You think throwing him in jail would have been the best solution? Imagine if his addiction didn't destroy him financially. Imagine if the lifestyle a drug addict needs to obtain a constant supply of their drug didn't involve being a part of the criminal underworld. Imagine if the money used for jailing addicts was used to make effective treatment available for everyone (instead of the
We can't stop people from taking drugs, but we can profoundly reduce violent crime and offer a much better chance for drug addicts to lead productive, crime-free lives.
I believe that the cost of marijuana if legal would not significantly change. The same for cocaine as well. Compared to other vices, they are about the same as legal and quasi legal ones.
Cocaine the same cost as legal vices? Are you insane? Cocaine is extremely expensive. The cost of a cocaine habit is astronomical compared to a legal vice like alcohol or tobacco, I've never seen a smoker or an alcoholic consume $1500 of their vice in a 3-day binge.
With cocaine prices as high as they are because of the black market, they would unequivocally fall in a legal distro system. First of all, a legal drug system would have to seriously undercut the black market to eliminate it. So while the black market price won't drop below a typical price of $50/g because of what it takes to get it to the streets, a legit company could charge $25/g, which would still be a massive markup, and it would be of known purity, free from unsafe cuts, sanitary, and purchased in a store rather than cartels/gangs. So the price is already much lower... but then there's market forces- the vast majority of coke users aren't addicts and don't use it all too much, so the price point will clearly have an effect on how often they use it. If it's too expensive, some people won't buy it. And the other obvious influence: competition among companies. That would work the same as any other product, so I don't need to explain how it would drive down the price point.
If it were legal, it's price would level off to maybe $20 per pure gram for small quantities (5g) and down under $5/g for oz quantities. Since addicts, who buy the largest percent of the product, would be who ultimately determined the price point, there's no reason to believe a cocaine habit wouldn't cost about the same as an alcohol habit... $40/day for 2 big bottles of cheap booze, $40/day for 8g (reasonable average for a coke habit).
First of all, they wouldn't take a "huge" hit since the idea of the number of pot smokers increasing by some huge amount if it was legal has absolutely no basis in reality. The Netherlands has lower per capita pot usage with teenagers, and the same among adults, compared to the US. The bottom line is there's very few people who abstain from pot simply because it's illegal, and also a sizable group who smoke it BECAUSE it's illegal.
Normal marijuana would be easy to grow, but it takes alot more effort to grow marijuana with a much higher THC content, which the pharmaceutical industries would no doubt successfully market. Never mind the fact that most people aren't going to grow their own, and their friends won't be either since they won't be able to make any money with the enhanced strains as cheap as a pack of cigarettes.
Not to mention the industry would no doubt research drugs with higher affinities for the receptors THC binds to. It would be like opium... smoking it feels good, but it's nowhere near as euphoric as heroin. The pharm companies would quickly discover drugs that mimiced the anandamides so well it would be just like heroin vs. opium highs.
The pharmaceutical industry would absolutely profit from marijuana legalization, nevermind other drugs.
You can, however, use the internet to purchase alcohol and have it delivered to your door. Same goes for every other drug, legal or illegal, even hard drugs. And that's the point, to not venture out into the 'real' world.
Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW
on
Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So what if it degrades? I'd still love to have 50TB discs that last for 2-3 years instead of a few GB that lasts a few years. This is a new technology designed to give higher capacity, not longer shelf life.
If congress wanted to give the NSA power to do massive pattern analysis on US phone calls I would be all for it if they banned any information collected from being turned over to law enforcement or used for prosecutions
You're absolutely delusional if you think the government would ever create such a ban, let alone actually enforce it. Then the ban would be overturned with massive public support for going after "thugs peddling poisons to our children" (drug dealers) and child molestors, then the floodgates would be open for every other imaginable use. I can't believe anyone would consider a ban like that workable...
But all AIM messages sent/received actually are SMS messages, as well as non-IM messages such as login and signoff commands. So we're still left wondering why they would ban things like AIM, which from personal experience seems to generate a hell of a lot more SMS messages than just the plain old text messaging.
Well, from what I've seen and heard of how alot of legislators operate, sending a letter or e-mail isn't entirely useless. Alot of reps/senators have their staff read through a very good number of them. Sometimes a couple of the more well-written letters get passed along for the actual person to read. But their real usefulness is that that staff going through the letters can get an idea of what the people are saying... the general tone of all the messages about a particular issue, whether there's more support for or against a measure the legislator is focusing on, WHO opposes/supports the bills, etc. So while the impact of the letters might not be the deciding factor, it's influence is certainly non-zero for the most part.
Well, I see your inattention to detail isn't limited to spyware identification. Re-read my post, noting the language where it wasn't completely explicit: "more likely" and "generally". It should also be inferred from my post I followed the quiz's statement that in the first for, only one of the two contained spyware. Not both. And in the last 4, the only one not likely to be spyware was based on criteria I said applied "generally", not universally and immune from further verification. And I concluded with the idea that the test was useful for "*early identification* of problematic sites/software". You think I would be picking up on such subtle pieces of spyware yet somehow be the idiot described in your post? Sorry if I hurt your feelings, but I have no idea where you pulled out the crap you just posted, but you're obviously stretching to protect your pride again. Knock it off
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing doing something wrong with doing something illegal. Informants/snitches are most often used in the US's asinine war on drugs, because there's no victim to report the crime. Many people feel ruining peoples lives with felony charges for no crime other than using/selling (to consenting adults) some arbitrarily illegal chemical to get a high instead of using alcohol/tobacco to get it is an abhorrent violation of our rights over our own bodies. I for one applaud this website for helping people reduce their risk of personal destruction at the hands of an obscenely unjust government policy.
And please nobody start with "but drugs are bad for society" dribble; every harm of drugs to both bystanders and the users can be traced to their prohibition.
First we documented all of the tokens with just invokes yes; but from there we went on to writing our own windows and modifying the behavior of existing windows, working with every part of the FDO stream, not just the token invokes. If I remember correctly, the invoke menu command was only for invoking mF tokens anyway. That's all people could do before my time, where learning how to use all the other FDO commands was made possible by a internal documentation of the entire FDO language, a large manual covered in "CONFIDENTIAL" and "INTERNAL USE ONLY" stamps. Just invoking an mF token for a form would display the graphics and such, but if you really wanted to do something worthwhile, invoking that token was only the start of a stream. FDO has hundreds of commands besides invoke; we figured out how to do entire streams using all the commands, atoms, etc. Too bad I'm traveling with my laptop right now, I have hundreds of custom FDO scripts and documentations in my storage archives back at home. But anyway, FDO was an entire language, invoke was just one command, once one knew the entire language a whole new world of possibilities opened up that you could never accomplish with a simple invoke. I'll share another OpsSec story. My account got terminated for no good reason, so I called up the support line (CAT i think) and asked to be transferred to OpsSec. I was told no such department exists. I asked to speak to a supervisor, since granted a low level support peon might not know about it. The supervisor also told me it didn't exist. I explained in great detail why I knew it existed, and was then told 'well, you're not speaking to them' and got hung up on. So I started digging around all the internal documents we had, and in a couple hours came up with a phone number for OpsSec. I called them up, and right after I said hello, they called me by my handle, told me my account was killed for hacking, and told me knock off the token scanning and stop harassing tech support. First time I ever talked to someone who worked for AOL that actually seemed like an intelligent person who knew what was going on, and how I found out the highest levels of the company were actually worried about what we could now do with FDO.
Well, the fact that this is news can mean only one thing; AOL has massively overhauled their security system and now has state of the art, well designed, and highly effective security. Because the AOL I remember had its security severely compromised by teenagers several times a day. Serious breaches too, read my other post in this thread. It happened so incredibly often, there's no way a breach would be national news. So logically, if its now rare enough to be newsworthy, they must have stopped the endless onslaught of easily exploited holes...
...because a journalist would never just write up a non-story to insult AOL or do some "omg haxors" fearmongering... never...
Well it sounds like I was in "the scene" a year or two after you. We took the token thing to a whole other level. Tokens are a small part of the scripting language AOL runs on, FDO. Thanks to some leaked internal documentation and lots of trial and error, a small group of us became quite good with FDO and could pretty much run amok among every resource on AOL. We wrote programs that automatically mapped the tens of thousands of objects; every mF token (forms), and my personal project, every eB token, which were the file libraries. Not only could a normal user invoke an eB token for a beta library, we could obtain staff only files too. The eB libraries didn't contain customer billing records, but they did contain internal operations documents, alpha release software, staff tools, and all sorts of other goodies. Mapping the tokens unleashed the real power of FDO; imagine having a list of every single window that made up the AOL software including ones you could not get to from a non-empowered account, and then being able to view the source code for that window and then having complete control of that code locally. While I wasn't involved personally, I believe one exploit that descended from that power was the ability to bypass the SecureID (a physical device with a code that changed every 60 seconds) of internal accounts by recoding the entry window to behave as if it was entered. And of course, countless ways to terminate or take over normal accounts and access billing systems (I never messed with anyone elses account or info, of course in part due to the legal risk, but mainly because I actually did have morals as a young teen, and I was in it for the challenge, knowledge, and yes the glory and fame that came with being among the first to harness the power of AOL's internal language, which made us the elitest of the elite among the AOL programmer/hacker kiddies).
I won't go into much more detail, but good ole star tool (as it was called, adding a menu titled * that gave any account a direct interface to the internal FDO scripting) led to countless exploits for the small group of people able to take full advantage of it (i.e. it was significantly harder to interface with AOL through FDO than the Visual Basic programs everyone with half a brain flooded the scene with). Some of the more ambitious exploits made the news; I recall one time the leak of the next version of AOL months before it was even supposed to enter early beta got a mention in a major news outlet; while it wasn't me that leaked it, I was the one who found the eB library where it resided and passed along the token to those who did make it public. OpsSec (operations security, the highest level of AOL network security staff) knew us by name, and terminated my access more than a few times. It was really cool stuff, especially for a kid. I don't know if newer AOL software still allows clients to use tokens and other FDO code, or if AOL figured out how to secure privileged resources from those who could program in it, but back in the day security was so poor that our group of 10-13 year olds walked in and out of staff resources like they were our own personal playground.
That's assuming other storage mediums don't step up to replace todays magnetic storage. There's numerous other storage mediums on the horizon that don't use much metal or magnetic materials, that will far surpass traditional hard drives in data density. By the time the resources to make magnetic drives become prohibitively scarce, I just can't imagine it not being irrelevant because most new data is stored in some sort of crystal or organic material with such a high density that using up all the resources on the planet just to build enough storage devices will be just as far off as running out of magnetic material is today.
New technology will keep up.
It could simply be that she had a crush on the camera person. Pupils dialate for all manner of reason.
When filming a scene, there's all sorts of lights pointed at the set, and you can see there's a light pointed right at her face. Natural causes of pupil dilation simply don't dilate THAT much when there's a light of any noticeable intensity on the eye. To have eyes like that without a chemical influence, she'd have to be in dim light AND having a physiological response, or complete darkness, to get that wide.
That said, the chemical influence causing it isn't necessarily a hallucinogen (or a stimulant), it could be the same stuff the optometrist uses, to simulate the effect of drugs. The actors in drug movies don't really take drugs in front of the camera, most of the time anyway.
Individuals cannot place online orders with Sigma-Aldrich. Only companies can, and you have to fax them lots of forms to prove you're a business. For any chemical, not just controlled substances. You might still be able to place an order over the phone, but I've found its easier to just look for a smaller chemical company.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist an opportunity to be technically correct, the best kind of correct.
What people really need to realize is that research has suggested CP actually protects more children than it hurts. Some people are sexually attracted to children, it doesn't matter how harsh the laws are or how evil it's considered by however many people, they can't change it any more than anyone can choose whether they're attracted to men or women. However, they can control their natural urges and resist actually going out and molesting a kid. Some people can't resist, some can, and some (a substantial proportion) can be satisfied another way. CP can serve to satisfy the urges of many pedophiles enough to prevent them from having to satisfy it by doing something themselves. And the harsher the laws, the more kids are going to be molested. If a pedophile is going to get life for having as little as 10 pictures, well they might as well go out and get the real thing and probably would only be sentenced to a fraction of that term.
Of course, the attitude of the public is going to be, it doesn't matter how many children we can save, we can't be soft on these evil people and condone such immorality. Just like drugs.
Child porn sites are typically hidden from the general public, so you need to be a little more experienced with the net to find them. So the people who do find them are smart enough to use stolen ccs to pay for it, I'd bet 90% of the time.
0The small increase only affects patients who already have risk factors for heart trouble (hypertension, hyperlipidaemia, etc.) and take very high doses for very long periods of time. I don't know how many people you happen to know who take those medications, but most people taking them who aren't otherwise at risk for heart attacks are told to remain on them, and prefer doing so, since the alternative is being in pain (which is actually preferably to the OTC side effects).
Despite the media sensationalism, healthy adults don't suddenly have heart attacks from COX-2 inhibitors.
You're a pharmacist and think dextroamphetamine is always better then methylphenidate? I highly suggest you pull out the prescribing information on those two products and look at side effect profiles, abuse potentials, risk of dependence, etc. Most people don't need the increased strength (and the problems that come with it) of dextroamphetamine, so methylphenidate is a better alternative. You know what works even better than dextroamphetamine? Desoxyn (methamphetamine). But that is only prescribed when nothing else works, and for a reason similar to why dextroamphetamine is only prescribed when methylphenidate doesn't work; while it's "better" since it's much stronger, it has significantly more common and severe side effects along with a much higher abuse potential/risk of dependency.
Turns out this is the case in alot of these situations. Let's look at COX-2 inhibitors. They aren't any more effective at relieving pain than aspirin et al. (which bind COX-1 also), but alot of people can't tolerate the side effects of the OTC stuff. The side effects come from COX-1 activity, but the desired effect comes from COX-2 activity. So new drugs targeted exclusively to COX-2 with no COX-1 activity had all of the pain killing effects and none of the side effects.
That's what alot of new drugs are about, reducing side effects so more people are able to tolerate the drugs.
And YES, I am a fucking psychobiologist specializing in psychopharmacology.
So what incentive would a pharmaceutical company have to spend hundreds of millions designing, researching, and testing dozens of candidate drugs until they find the useful one; then some other company can just copy their formula, sell it for half right after its released, ensuring a massive loss of money to the company that did all the work. It costs money to make new drugs, ALOT of money, if companies can't make that money back they're simply not going to make the drugs. What other methods do you propose to pay for R&D? It would mean a significant tax increase if you think the government should pay for it.
Well, say the crack dealer is an undercover cop. To avoid entrapment, the buyer would have to be the first one to indicate he wanted to do an illegal transaction. The cop couldn't just walk around saying "You want crack?" and arresting everyone who says yes.
The Origin of Species is not the absolute complete flawless manual for evolution. There's been plenty of huge breakthrough in evolution that weren't even touched on in Darwin's book. The biggest one is tracking evolution through molecular genetics; the mechanism of what Darwin observed. Not to mention models for evolution like punctuated equilibrium (long periods of little evolution, short periods of rapid change in response to some major change in environment)... that was not part of Origin. Major breakthroughs recently have come in looking at evolutionary pathways for certain species or traits, way beyond the book.
I hope the funny mod captures the intent of the parent, but nonetheless I thought I would post this since peoples abhorrent ignorance of evolution never ceases to enrage me.
Second to last paragraph had (lessthansign)15% and it got treated as an open tag, oops :)
The rest was:
(instead of the less than 15% of addicts seeking treatment able to obtain it right now). Imagine if fear of legal and social issues didn't force your loved one to hide their drug use away from the world and you could have seen the addiction before it became too destructive to hide? Imagine if his drugs were of a known dosage and free from dangerous cuts and diseases so an OD wouldn't occur. The past few decades have shown trying to eradicate drugs from our streets simply isn't possible even after compromising our civil rights. Of course you wish your loved one couldn't have gotten drugs, but wouldn't your family member have a better chance at recovering from his drug addiction instead of having it end their life if those imagined things were true? Maintaining the delusion that drugs can be eradicated is preventing minimizing the harm drugs bring; people you love will always be able to obtain drugs, but it's prohibition that makes the drugs harmful enough to destroy their lives. Financial issues, purity/contamination issues, neccessity of involvement in the underworld, and trying to hide addiction until it's too late... it's THESE things that destroy someones life and create the spiral of worsening addiction, and they're not because of the drug, they're because of the black market created by prohibition. Without those issues your loved one's drug addiction would not be beyond help and their lives wouldn't be destroyed.
So if you've lost someone to drug addiction, you have to realize that prohibition has NO impact on ability to obtain drugs, and is in reality responsible for taking drug addiction from something harmful but treatable and non- life ruining, and, through the black market, making it into something that consumes and destroys a life. If drugs killed someone you loved, they would have had a FAR better chance of sitll being alive if people realized prohibition was far more responsible than the actual drug and instead realized since it will never work, you have to instead work to minimize the harm drugs cause.
If 20% of your kids are actively sleeping with the enemy, you've already lost the war. No technology in the world will help you when the enemy has wide spread grass root support in your own country. It'd probably be a good idea to start to negotiate a cease fire.
That one's good, but for an even more dramatic illustration of this concept, the latest government-conducted study reported 45.8% of Americans aged 12+ have tried an illegal drug in their lifetime. Not only does that show you're not wining the war, but how do you morally justify laws that make 45.8% of your citizens criminals? Further, 29.4% have used an illegal drug besides marijuana; that's still not a morally sound law. It's not like a traffic ticket... drug offenses all mean an arrest and problems getting jobs. The US incarcerates a percent of its population than every other industrialized nation in the world, even oppressive dictatorships, because of drug laws putting non-violent drug offenders behind bars.
Drug addiction destroys alot of lives. Nobody is denying that. But is justice turning a drug addict into a convicted felon who, by destroying his chance at a good job, good housing, and earning potential, is now more likely to be a drain on society and turn to a life of more drugs and crimes that actually hurt others?
Is drug use so morally reprehensible that it's worth waging a war on every other person in this country? Creating and financing extremely violent cartels and gangs? Driving addicts to property crimes to pay for the black market prices? Putting non-violent offenders in jail and denying them a future where they could contribute to society? Reducing jail terms for rapists and murderers because it's not possible to build prisons quickly enough to lock up people who harmed no one for drug offenses?
So you have a family member whose drug addiction destroyed his life and those who loved them. You think throwing him in jail would have been the best solution? Imagine if his addiction didn't destroy him financially. Imagine if the lifestyle a drug addict needs to obtain a constant supply of their drug didn't involve being a part of the criminal underworld. Imagine if the money used for jailing addicts was used to make effective treatment available for everyone (instead of the
We can't stop people from taking drugs, but we can profoundly reduce violent crime and offer a much better chance for drug addicts to lead productive, crime-free lives.
I believe that the cost of marijuana if legal would not significantly change. The same for cocaine as well. Compared to other vices, they are about the same as legal and quasi legal ones.
Cocaine the same cost as legal vices? Are you insane? Cocaine is extremely expensive. The cost of a cocaine habit is astronomical compared to a legal vice like alcohol or tobacco, I've never seen a smoker or an alcoholic consume $1500 of their vice in a 3-day binge.
With cocaine prices as high as they are because of the black market, they would unequivocally fall in a legal distro system. First of all, a legal drug system would have to seriously undercut the black market to eliminate it. So while the black market price won't drop below a typical price of $50/g because of what it takes to get it to the streets, a legit company could charge $25/g, which would still be a massive markup, and it would be of known purity, free from unsafe cuts, sanitary, and purchased in a store rather than cartels/gangs. So the price is already much lower... but then there's market forces- the vast majority of coke users aren't addicts and don't use it all too much, so the price point will clearly have an effect on how often they use it. If it's too expensive, some people won't buy it. And the other obvious influence: competition among companies. That would work the same as any other product, so I don't need to explain how it would drive down the price point.
If it were legal, it's price would level off to maybe $20 per pure gram for small quantities (5g) and down under $5/g for oz quantities. Since addicts, who buy the largest percent of the product, would be who ultimately determined the price point, there's no reason to believe a cocaine habit wouldn't cost about the same as an alcohol habit... $40/day for 2 big bottles of cheap booze, $40/day for 8g (reasonable average for a coke habit).
First of all, they wouldn't take a "huge" hit since the idea of the number of pot smokers increasing by some huge amount if it was legal has absolutely no basis in reality. The Netherlands has lower per capita pot usage with teenagers, and the same among adults, compared to the US. The bottom line is there's very few people who abstain from pot simply because it's illegal, and also a sizable group who smoke it BECAUSE it's illegal.
Normal marijuana would be easy to grow, but it takes alot more effort to grow marijuana with a much higher THC content, which the pharmaceutical industries would no doubt successfully market. Never mind the fact that most people aren't going to grow their own, and their friends won't be either since they won't be able to make any money with the enhanced strains as cheap as a pack of cigarettes.
Not to mention the industry would no doubt research drugs with higher affinities for the receptors THC binds to. It would be like opium... smoking it feels good, but it's nowhere near as euphoric as heroin. The pharm companies would quickly discover drugs that mimiced the anandamides so well it would be just like heroin vs. opium highs.
The pharmaceutical industry would absolutely profit from marijuana legalization, nevermind other drugs.
It's kind of like education kids about drugs by showing them where to buy all the ingredients to make meth...
That would be Walmart. No joke, they've got it all.
You can, however, use the internet to purchase alcohol and have it delivered to your door. Same goes for every other drug, legal or illegal, even hard drugs. And that's the point, to not venture out into the 'real' world.
So what if it degrades? I'd still love to have 50TB discs that last for 2-3 years instead of a few GB that lasts a few years. This is a new technology designed to give higher capacity, not longer shelf life.
If congress wanted to give the NSA power to do massive pattern analysis on US phone calls I would be all for it if they banned any information collected from being turned over to law enforcement or used for prosecutions
You're absolutely delusional if you think the government would ever create such a ban, let alone actually enforce it. Then the ban would be overturned with massive public support for going after "thugs peddling poisons to our children" (drug dealers) and child molestors, then the floodgates would be open for every other imaginable use. I can't believe anyone would consider a ban like that workable...
But all AIM messages sent/received actually are SMS messages, as well as non-IM messages such as login and signoff commands. So we're still left wondering why they would ban things like AIM, which from personal experience seems to generate a hell of a lot more SMS messages than just the plain old text messaging.
Well, from what I've seen and heard of how alot of legislators operate, sending a letter or e-mail isn't entirely useless. Alot of reps/senators have their staff read through a very good number of them. Sometimes a couple of the more well-written letters get passed along for the actual person to read. But their real usefulness is that that staff going through the letters can get an idea of what the people are saying... the general tone of all the messages about a particular issue, whether there's more support for or against a measure the legislator is focusing on, WHO opposes/supports the bills, etc. So while the impact of the letters might not be the deciding factor, it's influence is certainly non-zero for the most part.
Well, I see your inattention to detail isn't limited to spyware identification. Re-read my post, noting the language where it wasn't completely explicit: "more likely" and "generally". It should also be inferred from my post I followed the quiz's statement that in the first for, only one of the two contained spyware. Not both. And in the last 4, the only one not likely to be spyware was based on criteria I said applied "generally", not universally and immune from further verification. And I concluded with the idea that the test was useful for "*early identification* of problematic sites/software". You think I would be picking up on such subtle pieces of spyware yet somehow be the idiot described in your post? Sorry if I hurt your feelings, but I have no idea where you pulled out the crap you just posted, but you're obviously stretching to protect your pride again. Knock it off