>>1. Does it get local channels? 2. Does it work with Starband?
1. Yes. Assuming you are legal qualified, and are driving within your local spot beam, assuming that your particular locals are from a spot beam.
2. No. Starband is a bidirectional feed. However, it may be able to get DirectPC, which uses a phone line for the upbound side. You'd have to use a cell phone for upbound.
The quality when you expand is determined by the convertors you choose. Generally, outboard convertors are better quality than convertors on a card, though the Lynx 2 is excellent. You may actually gain quality by expanding the cards you've got. I wouldn't add cards to get to 24 tracks. If you expand two of your existing cards you'll have 24 tracks, 28 with the third card still in.
The expansion module is called the Lynx LS/ADAT. Then you get an outboard A/D convertor; some even come with preamps built in. The Digimax is one option, the Focusrite Platinum is another, or you could go with high end convertors like Mitek.
The cool thing about having outboard convertors is that you can upgrade them seperately, or swap them out for creative reasons. You can also run a single pair of lightpipe cables and put your convertors away from your computer.
Dual 7200 IDE drives should be plenty fast. You can probably get over 64 tracks before you start running into problems. And yes, DVD burners rock.
The last project I worked on was at 32 bit, with about 35 tracks per song. So just a single 5 minute song is about 2 gigabytes. And that needs to be streamed in real time to do mixing. Which comes out to about 400 Meg a minute, sustained.
Also, when you apply effects, you have to wait for a track to be read and processed. So hard drive speed can greatly affect how long you sit around waiting for things to happen.
My suggestion would be to go to www.prorec.com and search the discussion archives. This has been discussed there, over and over, for about 5 years. The software/interface question has been asked so many times the regulars get tired of answering it.
Here's my personal choices, though opinions vary:
Software: If you don't need MIDI (meaning you use mostly live instruments), my personal choice is Cool Edit Pro. It was recently bought by Adobe. The next version will be called Adobe Audition. Another great choice is Tracktion. It's very full featured and under $100. If you need MIDI, I'd probably go with Sonar, by Cakewalk.
Hardware: The analog side of most game cards frankly sucks for recording. My top choices for sound card manufacturers would be Lynx and RME. MOTU is also good, but they've had some serious compatibility issues with different hardware. But if you can get them running, they're great cards.
Microphones, preamps, etc: Don't forget this part. I researched and obsessed for months before I bought mics for my studio.
Why did you buy 3 lynx 2's? A single lynx 2 is expandable to 12 channels (20 channels if you go down to 48k) using a Lynx ADAT (or TDIF) module and external convertors. And you don't have to worry about all those PCI slots, getting the cards to co-exist, etc.
Obstacles to serious mobile recording:
1. Sound cards. This really isn't a problem. One option is go firewire; almost every prosumer sound card manufacturer has a firewire solution. Another option is PCMCIA, RME is a popular choice in that camp. You can use the same outboard interfaces with PCMCIA that you can on a desktop.
2. Hard drive speed. Most laptop hard drives are 4200 RPM, which really isn't fast enough for serious recording or mixing. I have a desktop/rackmount DAW, and I'm running dual 7200's on RAID 0. That's about where you want to be for hard drive speed.
3. Microphone preamps. Most small interfaces don't have very good mic preamps. So you'll need to either have a mixer with better preamps, or outboard preamps.
4. Microphones. Choosing the correct mic for an application requires having good mics, and possibly a fair quantity of them.
4. Engineering skills. Are your mics placed well placed and in phase with each other? Is your gain staging good? Unless you are extremely lucky, it takes years of learning and practice to be a good audio engineer. A good engineer can do a lot with cheap equipment, but you can have great equipment and still be a crappy engineer. Of course, this in true in a home studio as well, but I had to mention it because it's the real barrier to most bands that try to record themselves.
Other than that, a laptop works just as well for recording as any other computer. And all of these issues are solvable. But really, for the same amount of money, you can build a rackmount PC that's almost as portable, and has better performance and features.
The original length of copyright was 14 years. Returning copyrights to this length would:
a) Allow better enforcement of copyrights with less public resources.
b) Eliminate most of the copyright grey areas, such as Emulation, Abandonware, sharing of classic music, etc. Most content that is exchanged in these grey areas is over 14 years old.
Fair use would need to be guaranteed, and we would need a guarantee that the content would be accessible to the public after this period. But the current "Forever plus five years" copyright term has no benefit to anyone, with the possible exception of Disney.
Actually, you no longer need any key at all, since the second generation rippers have found a way to crack the key using a hash method. The older rippers (DeCss, etc.) used the Xing Player key to authenticate the movie key. Newer movies no longer contain this player key, but it no longer matters. CSS is completely cracked now.
Actually, you could cross reference the numbers somewhere else (CDDB, maybe?) and write an application that looks up the numbers before searching. Then try to keep the numbers in a fairly clueful circle of people.
A comment about the CDDB - This article seems to imply "These people had a clue, now they don't." Actually, they've been pushing a software patent on using a hash table of track length to search a database of songs. IMHO this is a trivial obvious method, and CDDB has been using it to push out any competitors. So as far as I'm concerned, they've NEVER been one of the Good Guys. I cringe whenever I rip a CD and click on the CDDB button. Just my personal feelings, though.
I've experienced this problem. I once had an application I needed to get running that involved two different database applications: Oracle and VSystem(a real time database). The problem was, at the time, VSystem would only run on RedHat Linux 5.x and Oracle would only run on RedHat Linux 6.x. Because we had to link the two programs with callbacks, the compat libraries were not an option.
What I ended up doing was putting them on two different machines and writing a glue program with Perl::DBI . There is now a VSystem for Linux 6, but we are still using the version I wrote with Perl, because there is no reason to switch.
Ethics are not based on your behavior when there are consequences. Ethics are what you do when you believe there AREN'T any consequences - when you believe there is gain involved. If you are ethical, you will do what you believe in, even when you think you're the only one watching.
However, there are ALWAYS consequences - whether it is loss of the technically conscious market share, bad karma, lost sleep, or simply people spitting in your face when you go to conferences. Even if they win in court (which they shouldn't), they will lose in the market, and someone (hopefully more ethical) will buy up their empty shell of a company.
We as humans are naturally born with freewill and free thought. If you "create" a poem, and you want to keep it to yourself, don't tell anyone about it. If you tell someone, then it goes from your mouth to their ears, and forms thoughts in their head. Those thoughts are theirs, not yours. When they tell someone else the poem, it is an exchange between that person and the person they are telling. You no longer have anything to do with it.
That's the problem with intellectual property. You are claiming ownership on someone elses THOUGHTS. That's what intellectual means.
Rules only exist by an agreement between the "ruler" and the "follower". Governments exist based on the assumption that we somehow gave up our freewill by mutual agreement, in exchange for "protection". In reality, if we do not wish for this protection, we should be able to make a mutual agreement to forego leadership.
So really, you don't own anyone else's thoughts, regardless of whether you gave them the idea to think them. And the natural state of the world is freewill, not leadership that you choose not to follow.
The D-VHS has actually been out for over 2 years. It was originally integrated with a digital satellite receiver, and simply dumped the MPEG-2 stream directly to tape. Look under dishnetwork.com for details.
The HM-DR10000EK version is essentially the same as the integrated satellite version, except it has an MPEG-2 encoder built in.
Both the old satellite version and the MPEG-2 version are limited to standard S-Video resolution, however. The difference with this new version is that is that it can handle HDTV (1080x1920) resolution. 2 Million pixels:-) 75 Gigabytes:-(
Real time compression of a 2 million pixel image takes some massive processor power. It probably isn't practical yet. But I bet we'll see it before HDTV is mainstream.
It's an open sourced, GNU licensed MPEG-4 Encoder. Why not just take the decoder released by these people, modify it so it works with the style of MPEG4 that flask outputs. Then tell their encoder software to piss up a rope.
Instant compression and decompression, add water. (Especially is the movie is Titanic.)
I like the 600A also. The only complaint I have with it is that the stupid-ass macrovision is very hyperactive, so the brightness isn't consistent. If you have a small, bright TV it's barely noticable. If you put it on a big screen projection TV, it's REALLY irritating.
This is a great DVD player, works well on MP3 CD-R's, plays VCD, etc. But I wouldn't recommend it for anyone with a big screen projection TV.
If I knew the cheat code to disable macrovision, this complaint would also be mute. But anyhow...
This is what makes me glad I switched from being forced into becoming a programmer to doing networking
That's funny, because I did exactly the opposite. I did networking for about 5 years, and then ended up in a programming job. I'm actually glad I switched to programming, except for the fact that I don't get as much exercise.
I like programming because if you find a bug, you are allowed (required) to fix it. Networking software seems to have weird bugs that you simply have to work around, or wait for the next patch/service pack. I also like the design phases of a project, though networking sometimes involves design as well.
software engineering gurus believe that if the proper techniques are used, the number of bugs can be cut drastically from the current norm
This is a topic we spend a lot of time discussing where I work. There are adamant opinions on both sides of this issue. The question is - What magical techinique are you going to use to eliminate bugs?
Most of the techniques that are commonly used help eliminate crashes, deadlocks, interface problems, etc. But they do NOT insure that a program does what it is supposed to, or that it is intuitive in the eyes of the user.
What good does it do for a program to be stable, if it adds together 2+2, and gets 5? And like the article in this thread pointed out, just because a program is stable doesn't mean the user understands how to use it.
My basic point is that nobody has found the "magic bullet" yet. Even if we use some magical tool to insure that a program will not crash or deadlock, the computational logic and usability are not guaranteed. Only a human being can check those types of things. So in the end, magical techniques are no substitute for just simply being a good programmer (or a well communicating team of programmers).
Actually, when the 760MP chipset comes out from AMD, you'll be able to use 2 different speed processors on the same board.
It's point-to-point multiprocessing, instead of symmetrical. You can, for example, buy a 760MP with a 1Ghz CPU now, and put on a 1.2Ghz as the second processor later. And each chip has it's own Northbridge and path to ram, as opposed to the shared GTL bus on an Intel.
They FINALLY demonstrated the prototypes, so the real boards should be out Real Soon Now.
The people who live in the neighborhood of a drug addict become victims, because the drug addict brings along a lower standard of living and brings other people around the neighborhood that you don't want there... people who don't respect the law or human life very much at all.
If this was true, it would be a good argument. However, it's not. I have personally known drug users from all walks of life and all ages. Attorneys, computer programmers, airport employees, accountants, construction workers, car dealers, etc. I even know of a few VERY wealthy pot smokers.
Where do you get the crazy idea that drug users have any less respect for human life than anyone else? That's not true either. I would agree that some of them have bitterness toward the law, mainly because there are laws that they disagree with. But they are no less likely to respect human life that you are.
Is there anything you do on a day-to-day basis that has "zero risk of making someone else a victim?" There are drug users who are more responsible about their decisions than many of the other decisions people make every day. That's where the responsibility argument comes in. And if they live their whole life, and they really DON'T hurt anyone else, what are we punishing them for?
You really don't seem to be for individual freedoms. You obviously tell yourself you are. But when an invasion of privacy is required just to see whether a "crime" has even been committed in the first place, personal freedom suffers by definition.
The drug cartels in Columbia are subsidized by the Columbian government. If you want to work in a coca field, you go down to job service and apply for the job. It's not the stealthy underground industry it is in the U.S.
If you have a problem with what people do in Columbia, you have the option of politely asking them to stop. We are not in charge of the world, nor do I think we should be.
But what happens when they take 'us' with them by committing crimes to finance their habits, and hurting the innocent 'us' along the way?
IF this happens, you arrest them for robbery. But you've unintentionally pointed out the main problem with drug laws. They fail to distinguish between irresponsible and responsible drug use. There are people for whom drugs "cause" many other problems, but there are also those people who use drugs for legitimate medical, social, or intellectual reasons. Many of these people never break any other laws. Many of them are actually more aware, more relaxed, happier, or free from pain because of their drug use. But they are imprisoned or persecuted along with the other drug users. Why? Paranoia. People are afraid of things, people, and cultures they don't understand. They think they if they eliminate the things they don't understand, then they can control their surroundings and everything will be perfect.
Sorry, doesn't work that way. There will always be things that cannot be understood and controlled. Not all of them are bad. Some of them are actually good. But we'll never know without an open mind.
What it seems like you implying here is that making more money is a "good life decision", where making less money is a "bad life decision". In general, I disagree. There are many people who choose careers which are less financially rewarding, but are more rewarding in other ways - public service, loyalty to a certain friend or employer, musical or artistic pursuits, or caring for a family. Many of these decisions are more important to their lives, and a better contribution to the planet, than a high paying job.
That said, I am a technical person who makes OK money. But my brother, who is an artist and a musician, and has at times been a full time father, is just as important to the planet as I am. So why should he not be as rewarded as I am?
Slashdot Mirror
>>1. Does it get local channels?
2. Does it work with Starband?
1. Yes. Assuming you are legal qualified, and are driving within your local spot beam, assuming that your particular locals are from a spot beam.
2. No. Starband is a bidirectional feed. However, it may be able to get DirectPC, which uses a phone line for the upbound side. You'd have to use a cell phone for upbound.
The quality when you expand is determined by the convertors you choose. Generally, outboard convertors are better quality than convertors on a card, though the Lynx 2 is excellent. You may actually gain quality by expanding the cards you've got. I wouldn't add cards to get to 24 tracks. If you expand two of your existing cards you'll have 24 tracks, 28 with the third card still in.
The expansion module is called the Lynx LS/ADAT. Then you get an outboard A/D convertor; some even come with preamps built in. The Digimax is one option, the Focusrite Platinum is another, or you could go with high end convertors like Mitek.
The cool thing about having outboard convertors is that you can upgrade them seperately, or swap them out for creative reasons. You can also run a single pair of lightpipe cables and put your convertors away from your computer.
Dual 7200 IDE drives should be plenty fast. You can probably get over 64 tracks before you start running into problems. And yes, DVD burners rock.
Yes, 80 min stereo, 16 bit, 44.1K is 700Mb.
The last project I worked on was at 32 bit, with about 35 tracks per song. So just a single 5 minute song is about 2 gigabytes. And that needs to be streamed in real time to do mixing. Which comes out to about 400 Meg a minute, sustained.
Also, when you apply effects, you have to wait for a track to be read and processed. So hard drive speed can greatly affect how long you sit around waiting for things to happen.
My suggestion would be to go to www.prorec.com and search the discussion archives. This has been discussed there, over and over, for about 5 years. The software/interface question has been asked so many times the regulars get tired of answering it.
Here's my personal choices, though opinions vary:
Software: If you don't need MIDI (meaning you use mostly live instruments), my personal choice is Cool Edit Pro. It was recently bought by Adobe. The next version will be called Adobe Audition. Another great choice is Tracktion. It's very full featured and under $100. If you need MIDI, I'd probably go with Sonar, by Cakewalk.
Hardware: The analog side of most game cards frankly sucks for recording. My top choices for sound card manufacturers would be Lynx and RME. MOTU is also good, but they've had some serious compatibility issues with different hardware. But if you can get them running, they're great cards.
Microphones, preamps, etc: Don't forget this part. I researched and obsessed for months before I bought mics for my studio.
Good luck,
Harley.
Why did you buy 3 lynx 2's? A single lynx 2 is expandable to 12 channels (20 channels if you go down to 48k) using a Lynx ADAT (or TDIF) module and external convertors. And you don't have to worry about all those PCI slots, getting the cards to co-exist, etc.
Obstacles to serious mobile recording:
1. Sound cards. This really isn't a problem. One option is go firewire; almost every prosumer sound card manufacturer has a firewire solution. Another option is PCMCIA, RME is a popular choice in that camp. You can use the same outboard interfaces with PCMCIA that you can on a desktop.
2. Hard drive speed. Most laptop hard drives are 4200 RPM, which really isn't fast enough for serious recording or mixing. I have a desktop/rackmount DAW, and I'm running dual 7200's on RAID 0. That's about where you want to be for hard drive speed.
3. Microphone preamps. Most small interfaces don't have very good mic preamps. So you'll need to either have a mixer with better preamps, or outboard preamps.
4. Microphones. Choosing the correct mic for an application requires having good mics, and possibly a fair quantity of them.
4. Engineering skills. Are your mics placed well placed and in phase with each other? Is your gain staging good? Unless you are extremely lucky, it takes years of learning and practice to be a good audio engineer. A good engineer can do a lot with cheap equipment, but you can have great equipment and still be a crappy engineer. Of course, this in true in a home studio as well, but I had to mention it because it's the real barrier to most bands that try to record themselves.
Other than that, a laptop works just as well for recording as any other computer. And all of these issues are solvable. But really, for the same amount of money, you can build a rackmount PC that's almost as portable, and has better performance and features.
I agree with this, in a way.
The original length of copyright was 14 years. Returning copyrights to this length would:
a) Allow better enforcement of copyrights with less public resources.
b) Eliminate most of the copyright grey areas, such as Emulation, Abandonware, sharing of classic music, etc. Most content that is exchanged in these grey areas is over 14 years old.
Fair use would need to be guaranteed, and we would need a guarantee that the content would be accessible to the public after this period. But the current "Forever plus five years" copyright term has no benefit to anyone, with the possible exception of Disney.
Actually, you no longer need any key at all, since the second generation rippers have found a way to crack the key using a hash method. The older rippers (DeCss, etc.) used the Xing Player key to authenticate the movie key. Newer movies no longer contain this player key, but it no longer matters. CSS is completely cracked now.
Actually, you could cross reference the numbers somewhere else (CDDB, maybe?) and write an application that looks up the numbers before searching. Then try to keep the numbers in a fairly clueful circle of people.
A comment about the CDDB - This article seems to imply "These people had a clue, now they don't." Actually, they've been pushing a software patent on using a hash table of track length to search a database of songs. IMHO this is a trivial obvious method, and CDDB has been using it to push out any competitors. So as far as I'm concerned, they've NEVER been one of the Good Guys. I cringe whenever I rip a CD and click on the CDDB button. Just my personal feelings, though.
Yes, it is. Under the 2.4 kernel.
I've experienced this problem. I once had an application I needed to get running that involved two different database applications: Oracle and VSystem(a real time database). The problem was, at the time, VSystem would only run on RedHat Linux 5.x and Oracle would only run on RedHat Linux 6.x. Because we had to link the two programs with callbacks, the compat libraries were not an option.
What I ended up doing was putting them on two different machines and writing a glue program with Perl::DBI . There is now a VSystem for Linux 6, but we are still using the version I wrote with Perl, because there is no reason to switch.
Yes, this sucks.
Ethics are not based on your behavior when there are consequences. Ethics are what you do when you believe there AREN'T any consequences - when you believe there is gain involved. If you are ethical, you will do what you believe in, even when you think you're the only one watching.
However, there are ALWAYS consequences - whether it is loss of the technically conscious market share, bad karma, lost sleep, or simply people spitting in your face when you go to conferences. Even if they win in court (which they shouldn't), they will lose in the market, and someone (hopefully more ethical) will buy up their empty shell of a company.
We as humans are naturally born with freewill and free thought. If you "create" a poem, and you want to keep it to yourself, don't tell anyone about it. If you tell someone, then it goes from your mouth to their ears, and forms thoughts in their head. Those thoughts are theirs, not yours. When they tell someone else the poem, it is an exchange between that person and the person they are telling. You no longer have anything to do with it.
That's the problem with intellectual property. You are claiming ownership on someone elses THOUGHTS. That's what intellectual means.
Rules only exist by an agreement between the "ruler" and the "follower". Governments exist based on the assumption that we somehow gave up our freewill by mutual agreement, in exchange for "protection". In reality, if we do not wish for this protection, we should be able to make a mutual agreement to forego leadership.
So really, you don't own anyone else's thoughts, regardless of whether you gave them the idea to think them. And the natural state of the world is freewill, not leadership that you choose not to follow.
But anyhow...
The D-VHS has actually been out for over 2 years. It was originally integrated with a digital satellite receiver, and simply dumped the MPEG-2 stream directly to tape. Look under dishnetwork.com for details.
:-) 75 Gigabytes :-(
The HM-DR10000EK version is essentially the same as the integrated satellite version, except it has an MPEG-2 encoder built in.
Both the old satellite version and the MPEG-2 version are limited to standard S-Video resolution, however. The difference with this new version is that is that it can handle HDTV (1080x1920) resolution. 2 Million pixels
Real time compression of a 2 million pixel image takes some massive processor power. It probably isn't practical yet. But I bet we'll see it before HDTV is mainstream.
One word - FLASK.
It's an open sourced, GNU licensed MPEG-4 Encoder. Why not just take the decoder released by these people, modify it so it works with the style of MPEG4 that flask outputs. Then tell their encoder software to piss up a rope.
Instant compression and decompression, add water. (Especially is the movie is Titanic.)
I like the 600A also. The only complaint I have with it is that the stupid-ass macrovision is very hyperactive, so the brightness isn't consistent. If you have a small, bright TV it's barely noticable. If you put it on a big screen projection TV, it's REALLY irritating.
This is a great DVD player, works well on MP3 CD-R's, plays VCD, etc. But I wouldn't recommend it for anyone with a big screen projection TV.
If I knew the cheat code to disable macrovision, this complaint would also be mute. But anyhow...
This is what makes me glad I switched from being forced into becoming a programmer to doing networking
That's funny, because I did exactly the opposite. I did networking for about 5 years, and then ended up in a programming job. I'm actually glad I switched to programming, except for the fact that I don't get as much exercise.
I like programming because if you find a bug, you are allowed (required) to fix it. Networking software seems to have weird bugs that you simply have to work around, or wait for the next patch/service pack. I also like the design phases of a project, though networking sometimes involves design as well.
software engineering gurus believe that if the proper techniques are used, the number of bugs can be cut drastically from the current norm
This is a topic we spend a lot of time discussing where I work. There are adamant opinions on both sides of this issue. The question is - What magical techinique are you going to use to eliminate bugs?
Most of the techniques that are commonly used help eliminate crashes, deadlocks, interface problems, etc. But they do NOT insure that a program does what it is supposed to, or that it is intuitive in the eyes of the user.
What good does it do for a program to be stable, if it adds together 2+2, and gets 5? And like the article in this thread pointed out, just because a program is stable doesn't mean the user understands how to use it.
My basic point is that nobody has found the "magic bullet" yet. Even if we use some magical tool to insure that a program will not crash or deadlock, the computational logic and usability are not guaranteed. Only a human being can check those types of things. So in the end, magical techniques are no substitute for just simply being a good programmer (or a well communicating team of programmers).
Because of the price/performance of this processor, I doubt that you'll see too many beowulf clusters of these, at least in the short term.
However, maybe somebody really IS that crazy.
do any of the new chips have nondeterministic functions?
Ever since the coppermine revision, the P3 has had a nondeterministic random number generator, based on a thermistor. The P4 probably has one as well.
Actually, when the 760MP chipset comes out from AMD, you'll be able to use 2 different speed processors on the same board.
It's point-to-point multiprocessing, instead of symmetrical. You can, for example, buy a 760MP with a 1Ghz CPU now, and put on a 1.2Ghz as the second processor later. And each chip has it's own Northbridge and path to ram, as opposed to the shared GTL bus on an Intel.
They FINALLY demonstrated the prototypes, so the real boards should be out Real Soon Now.
The people who live in the neighborhood of a drug addict become victims, because the drug addict brings along a lower standard of living and brings other people around the neighborhood that you don't want there... people who don't respect the law or human life very much at all.
If this was true, it would be a good argument. However, it's not. I have personally known drug users from all walks of life and all ages. Attorneys, computer programmers, airport employees, accountants, construction workers, car dealers, etc. I even know of a few VERY wealthy pot smokers.
Where do you get the crazy idea that drug users have any less respect for human life than anyone else? That's not true either. I would agree that some of them have bitterness toward the law, mainly because there are laws that they disagree with. But they are no less likely to respect human life that you are.
Is there anything you do on a day-to-day basis that has "zero risk of making someone else a victim?" There are drug users who are more responsible about their decisions than many of the other decisions people make every day. That's where the responsibility argument comes in. And if they live their whole life, and they really DON'T hurt anyone else, what are we punishing them for?
You really don't seem to be for individual freedoms. You obviously tell yourself you are. But when an invasion of privacy is required just to see whether a "crime" has even been committed in the first place, personal freedom suffers by definition.
The drug cartels in Columbia are subsidized by the Columbian government. If you want to work in a coca field, you go down to job service and apply for the job. It's not the stealthy underground industry it is in the U.S.
If you have a problem with what people do in Columbia, you have the option of politely asking them to stop. We are not in charge of the world, nor do I think we should be.
But what happens when they take 'us' with them by committing crimes to finance their habits, and hurting the innocent 'us' along the way?
IF this happens, you arrest them for robbery. But you've unintentionally pointed out the main problem with drug laws. They fail to distinguish between irresponsible and responsible drug use. There are people for whom drugs "cause" many other problems, but there are also those people who use drugs for legitimate medical, social, or intellectual reasons. Many of these people never break any other laws. Many of them are actually more aware, more relaxed, happier, or free from pain because of their drug use. But they are imprisoned or persecuted along with the other drug users. Why? Paranoia. People are afraid of things, people, and cultures they don't understand. They think they if they eliminate the things they don't understand, then they can control their surroundings and everything will be perfect.
Sorry, doesn't work that way. There will always be things that cannot be understood and controlled. Not all of them are bad. Some of them are actually good. But we'll never know without an open mind.
What it seems like you implying here is that making more money is a "good life decision", where making less money is a "bad life decision". In general, I disagree. There are many people who choose careers which are less financially rewarding, but are more rewarding in other ways - public service, loyalty to a certain friend or employer, musical or artistic pursuits, or caring for a family. Many of these decisions are more important to their lives, and a better contribution to the planet, than a high paying job.
That said, I am a technical person who makes OK money. But my brother, who is an artist and a musician, and has at times been a full time father, is just as important to the planet as I am. So why should he not be as rewarded as I am?
but what it boils down to is we're doing better than they are, and they are jealous
Don't tell yourself that too much, or you might actually believe it.