Re:There won't be widespread use until....
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Digital Doctoring
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But the big move is away from handwritten info in charts. At my pappy's hospital, they are seriously looking at switching to a chart system that is filled out via a series of check boxes that can later be filled in a la bubble sheet tests so that the chart can be scanned into a computer database. Apparently they work better since they can be filled out and read more quickly (most humans are visually oriented creatures, and besides, it's true. many doctors have abysmal handwriting.)
I don't see a palm as any more dangerous than the pagers that most people in hospitals wear. Given that those have been in common use in hospitals for longer than I've been alive, I'm sure whatever issues there are have been addressed.
Hmm. . . youre right. There does seem to be a lot of myth surrounding methadone.
Does the long time methadone takes to leave the system really make quitting harder? I've been told with pot people claim it isn't addictive (it is, it's just that the withdrawal symptoms aren't the kinds of things people tend to notice) because the slow rate at which it leaves a person's system greatly reduces the withdrawal symptoms. Do you know of any truth to that?
Also, what methods are better than methadone at helping people to get off opiates? It seems like if methadone weren't that good nobody would use it.
Will legalization increase the proportion of people to whom drugs are available? (yes)
Agreed, but what I advocate, and what most people advocate is decriminalization, which is a whole different pack o' cards. Under decriminalization, it is legal to posess drugs but drug trafficking remains illegal - so, hypothetically, drug dealers will still be just as hard to find. This is a long shot, but it might actually make drugs harder to find, as police will quite possibly quit trying to find users and put more effort into finding dealers. This could burn the candle at both ends for drug dealers, as not only would more dealers be taken off the streets from being arrested, but fewer dealers would be there to take their place as dealing would possibly become a less popular job.
Then again, if enough more people decide they want drugs when if they are decriminalized (I doubt it - in my experience, psychonauts and addicts are usually not the kinds of people who let laws stop them, so anyone who would use drugs already is.), dealing could become very popular. There's really no way of knowing which way the pendulum swings until we try it.
Is the decrease in drug related violent crimes worth the increase in citizens doing stupid things to themselves? (normative - you the viewers at home get to answer)
That's a very good question, but I would like to ask will people definitely start doing more stupid things? My guess would be that if, for example, pot were legalized in the US, the situation would be pretty bad here for a couple years and then it'd be a lot like Amsterdam - we'd all realize how stupid it is to fry your brain on pot and get so sick of the perma-dazed stoners walking around the streets that, much like in Amsterdam, people who do smoke weed (possibly a greater number of people) would do it in much more moderation than anyone here does nowadays, and the vast majority of people walking down the streets stopping to stare at every shiny object they see would, at least along the northern border, be Canadian kids crossing the border for a day of toking. At least I hope that's the way it would turn out.
Would the legalization of said drugs decrease their stigma and increase use? (yes)
I have a feeling it would decrease their abuse, though. If you take a look at many places where drugs are easier to get, more people use them but fewer people use them to the point where they cause problems. One example in my mind is European teenagers with alcohol vs. American teenagers with alcohol. The international students from Europe in my high school all thought we were pretty stupid about the way we drank.
What effects would increased positive drug meme's have on the american cultural locus? (normative)
If it means movies like Dude, where's my car? would become more popular, I think I might reconsider my position on drugs. =)
Is liquor a good example of potential effects of cocaine/crack, etc? (no idea)
Not at all. Cocaine and its derivatives are strong stimulants, alcohol is a depressant. A caffiene overdose is more similar (though still quite different.)
Does anyone really care or do they just view it as a sort of cultural selection akin to natural selection except it isn't about genes - more about class and social interactions. In other words - if someone wants to be a druggie and ruin their life on crack/cocaine we should just let them smear themselves out?
Given the worries I have about a lot of my friends, I've thought about that for a long time, and, it seems to me, when people do indeed want to smear themselves out, they generally won't let anything stand in their way. When people want help, they should certainly get anything we have to offer to help them. The group I can't decide for is the people who are screwing up their lives simply because they have no idea what they are getting into - kids who hough spraypaint, for example. I hate to admit it, but in addition to the part of me who is scared for them there's a part of me that really wants to say "If you're going to inhale LACQUER of all things, you probably weren't a very rational human being to begin with, so it's not like brain damage will hurt any vital organs."
You're probably talking primarily about weed use - and I don't see it as that bad - but what about other drugs? Although, even weed, E, and some of our legalized drugs are just easy ways out and can and will still ruin lives.
Yeah, if we ever change the drug policy I think we should definitely start slowly beginning with weed. I'm really not sure about other stuff - weed, in my opinion, is more benign than alcohol in most ways except that it makes people dumb, which to me is a horrible thing, but most stuff that's much harder is pretty dangerous - I wouldn't want LSD or mescaline to be easy for kids to get, and E is pretty dangerous, too (the data's not all in yet, but it looks like it has a greater potential for mermanent effects on a person's psyche than acid.) I really don't think it's possible to make a safe opinion about harder drugs and hallucinogens until we've tried weaker drugs like pot and seen what the effects of legalizing/decriminalizing those were.
See I'd like to make a decision one way or another, but I don't find the evidence thus far convincing either way.
Re:There's a very simple solution to that:
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I understand where you're coming from (I'm an advocate of decriminalization for most drugs), but I still think that the argument about the drugs still posing a danger to others because of how they change the way people act is an important one to understand. It's a bit of a trump card for advocates of the war on drugs, so we can't just pretend it doesn't matter, especially since the advocates are the ones making the laws.
I also don't believe that all drugs do is increase the chance of things happening when the tendencies are already there. I honestly think that once one gets into the range of meth, hallucinogens (including massive amounts of THC), and X (where the effects of a high for chronic users are very different from the effects for occasional users), there is little comparison between the effects of severe intoxication with many drugs and the effects of being extremely drunk.
That may not mean that these drugs have to stay illegal, but I think there should definitely at least be public intoxication laws pertaining to them. But what I think doesn't matter, because if you want to convince your local congressman of anything, you better not try to use the effects of pot to explain issues pertaining to powerful stimulants.
And then we can Beowulf cluster that little bastard child of a PDA and a memory card that goes in the Dreamcast controller, and then we can Beowulf cluster a bunch of TI-85's, and then we can do it with tivos and aibos, and a box of crackers, and we'll get computer chips implanted in our brains and Beowulf cluster those, and we'll beowulf cluster blah blah blah blah
This needs to stop.
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
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It's more commonplace with nurses. Doctors aren't too inclined to raid the drug cabinet since they are first in line when it comes to people who have to answer for missing drugs.
One popular scam is for the nurse to keep half of a dose for herself and mix the part that goes to the patient with saline solution to bring it up to volume, which is part of why morphine tends to be administered to patients via the IV machines where you push a button and get a little bit (provided you aren't pusing it too frequently.)
The biggest reason, though, which I find interesting, is that they do it that way instead of with shots because the patients tend to take less morphine when they have control over when they get it and how much they get, so there is less risk of addiction.
Re:Methadone and alcoholism
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Methadone treatment doesn't work that way, so it has to be handled pretty carefully to work. That's why any data on how methadone clinics work that is taken from an actual methadone clinic is useless - none of them have enough funding to correctly control the procedure of getting off junk.
I'm no expert, but here's my understanding: Basically, methadone is an opiate that doesn't get you high, so that you can take it on a regular schedule and it will take care of the physical craving while the addict can take care of all the psychological craving. Sort of a "divide-and-conquer" approach to getting off opiates. The other side to it is that sine the methadone dosages are controlled by doctors, the addict can get off the physical addiction in a manner that doesn't involve heroin fits, which can be fatal.
I had never heard of Naltrexone before. I had heard of drugs that make you sick when you drink, but it sounds like Naltrexone is a really great thing. I'm curious, though - it sounds like it would be less effective for type II alchoholism, which I always understood to be not at all related to the pleasure of drinking - do you know?
Re:It's more than just drugs
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It's hard to translate that ideal (which is a concept that I agree with in theory) into real life. 2 months ago I was attacked by a friend's roommate. He was stoned and on speed and decided that I was somehow involved in this conspiracy against me, and attacked me with a bottle and then a hickory stick. I have a scar on my right bicep that tells me that drugs don't always affect just the user of the drugs.
It's kind of like speed limits on roads. It's not that going faster always directly harms people, it's that when you're going fast it's easier to lose control and hurt someone.
Re:BTW, this _is_ relevant
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You want to know why they think they can put Carnivore through? So they can "finally begin to stem the tide of drugs into our country."
Which reminds me. . . I read in a report to congress from the early 1990s the official estimate from the pentagon about what it would take to put a dent in the inflow of drugs. The number that came back was pretty damn big and was itemized into personell, tanks, supplies, funding, etc, and I can't remember all those numbers, but what really dumbfounded me was that the estimate for the force necessary to merely put a dent in the flow across the US-Mexico border alone was equal to about 1/3 of our entire military force.
Re:Smarten the fuck up, all of you
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Sir, it is obvious from your aimless rant that you know much more about drug issues than us. For some reason, though, you are keeping aloof. Pray, share your wisdom with us that we may all become wiser and, as you put it, "wake the fuck up."
Lastly, support of the War on Drugs is tact support for the mob and cartels. Remember what prohibition does folks. This lesson should have been learned during the 1930's. It isn't a War on Drugs, it is a War on Personal Freemdom. Remember that at all times please.
It was learned before the 30s.
Back in the '20s, I believe, the US government was beginning to set up public treatment centers for opiate addiction. A few years later, politicians in all their political posturing decided that "wasting money" on helping people who often are volunteering to get help was a dumb idea and that we should just throw them in jail instead. Within a year, not only did the number of people being arrested for opiate posession increase (which I would assume was the intended affect of this precursor to the war on drugs) but also the number of people killed and hospitalized for overdose.
(Speaking of that, what is called overdose isn't necessarily an overdose. Mon pere, who is a doc in an inner city hospital, has observed that what gets written down as "overdose" on death certificates is just as often an unmistakable result of impurities in the drugs as it is a bonafide overdose.)
But anyway, this problem with drugs back in the '20s was investigated by a congressional committee, as has been done in the early 1930's, and they basically all come to the same conclusions: Imprisoning drug addicts is a harsher penalty at a much higher cost to the government that is also much less effective than treatment centers (which are admittedly not all that effective, either). The war on drugs is a major reason why the US is the country with the largest percentage of its population in prison. The war on drugs puts drug addicts in a situation where it is very hard to look for help or get their lives back on course. As a former homeless junkie friend of mine observes: You have to get off the junk before people are willing to help you, but you need to get help to get off the junk. (For years all the rescue missions and crisis shelters and such in my town would turn him away at the doors. The worst drug problem they would accept someone with is alchoholism. Incidentally, you also have to convert to christianity to get help, but that's another rant.)
Of course, in my mind, this is all trumped by a stumbling block that has much graver impilcations for how our society is structured than I think most people want to admit: We've known for decades now that punishment is an ineffective deterrent, that increasing sentences in the US rarely does anything to reduce crime rates (often the crime rates inexplicably increase as sentences get harsher - ex: states that have the death pentalty in the US have violent crime rates that easily dwarf the violent crime rates in states without it.), and that, given what we know about conditioning and learning and the structure and time frame of crime and punishment, there is no way in hell punishment could ever be an effective deterrent of crime.
I would love to see one state - just one state in this country - cut back their laws concerning heroin and directly pump the money they save on prison costs into methadone clinics. Not a single methadone clinic in this country has the funding for enough methadone to give a patient anything even resembling the reccomended treatment schedule, so we still don't really know how effective a well-run methadone clinic can be.
That's one thing I love about this country. Even after we find out something doesn't work, we've got our heads so far up our asses that I don't even think we are capable of thinking, "Hey, this isn't working. Maybe we should try something else." It's a sight to see - kind of like this hamster a friend of mine has that will repeatedly stick its head out of its hamster wheel while running at a high pace and get hit on the top of the head by a spoke hard enough to throw him onto his face. He's had this hamster for a year now and it's looking like it will be getting hit in the head with spokes for the reast of its life. In a sadistic way, we rather hope it doesn't. It's funny to see the antics of cretins much more idiotic than yourself.
Then again, I can't find America funny, since we're fucking up peoples lives with our antics.
Take a look at BeOS's splash screen. It has a series of icons that light up as the system reaches certain milestones on the way to getting the system booted.
Admittedly, it's not much, but think of what it could be - a fully customizable graphical splash screen with kernel messages. (affectionately known as a fcgsswkm)
I don't like nasty plaintext. I like fancy chiclet icons. I can make them give me just as much information as the normal linux bootinfo. Now that I think of it, I can probably make it give me more, since with a splash screen, the screen can be broken up into different areas that show the info for different kinds of stuff - I especially want one that displays each and every error and nothing else so I don't have to sort out what is an error and what isn't. On the bottom i'll have puzzle piece shaped icons pop up for any daemons that load, and above their icons will be icons for what services are started by those daemons. In a little window at the top left of the screen all the text will scroll past just like it normally does with my current bootprocess.
Eh, to me, Hacker is a term that has nothing to do with "good" and "bad."
Hacking is a feat of technical prowess, be it finding a way to root Bill Gates's PC or making a fish say pork. Cracking is breaking into something. Either way, the overlap each other for the most part.
Hey, it's easy to secure a homogenous Outlook shop against viruses like Love Bug. . . all you have to do is disable everything but plain-text emails, apply the patch that keeps people from sending attatchments, and kill the scripting in emails.
And when you've done all that you'll have so few problems w/ macro viruses that you'll have plenty of time to sit back and wonder why you spent all that $$$ on Exchange and putting Outlook on every computer when you could have provided the users just as many features and as much flexibility by getting PINE for free and having them use that.
My school has NT servers handling email, but will never even consider the Microsoft Exchange again. We also discourage the use of MS Outlook and MSIE, and those who do use them are not guaranteed tech support from the school for issues pertaining to their email client or web browser.
The campus network had turned into a playground for script kiddies when we were using MS internet server and client software. So far, the kids haven't shown quite so much skill at exploiting our current mailserver software or Netscape Communicator.
The Celeron isn't really an SMP-incapable chip. The microprocessor itself has full SMP support, with the only thing keeping users from using a Cel in a dual processor system is fancy packaging. That's why it was so easy to make a mobo like the aBit BP6.
With P4s, on the other hand, the processor core doesn't support it, so the closest you're going to get is a Beowulf cluster.
We could account for a lot of this through the use of checksums. They could easily be transferred through
"safe" means as well as electronic, too - it's not hard to telephone or fax one.
There are no allegations of official misconduct, all candidates were eligible to hold office, and even if some voters made a mistake on their ballots I don't believe that renders them "illegal".
There's more to part C than just legality of ballots. Look again (emphasis mine).
(c) Receipt of a number of illegal votes or rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
It doesn't take fuzzy math to show that 19k votes could easily change the results of an election that, last I heard, has only 800 votes' difference between the two candidates.
It's too bad there is no good way to handle this. IANAL, nor am I or have I ever been or do I know a resident of Florida, but I am pretty sure that in this situation Florida's law calls for, or at least allows, a revote. Being one who voted for Nader, I know that if there were a revote in my home state and the vote were as close as in Florida I would likely sell out and change my vote to Gore. I expect that would be the case with enough Floridans who voted for Nader to swing the vote towards Gore. A revote would give Gore an unfair chance.
I have to admit, I hesitated a moment and considered hiding my pent under my shirt before going in for fear I'd be given problems while signing in at the church to vote. In the end I didn't. I got some funny looks from some of the people running the polling place, but that's all that happened. I have a feeling they are quite aware of how much jail time they'd spend if they gave me problems.
That's enough separation of church and state for me. A building is just a building, and I don't care which building it is that I vote in as long as no baggage comes with that building.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could have a BSD that is ultrasecure, runs on anything you can put 110 volts (or whatever popular voltage your region supplies) through, and works as a great all-around desktop/server unix?
the desktop market will help us get that. Windows NT didn't get popular because it's the most robust server solution out there. It got popular because it integrates so well with the desktop software that is used by almost every consumer in the market.
Either way, Jesus wouldn't have liked a lot of the stuff Bush does. Relevant quotes and paraphrases I can think of are:
"Judge not lest you be judged."
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven."
Practise your faith alone. When you do it in private, it is devotion. When you do it in public, it is ostentation.
"Blessed are the meek."
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But the big move is away from handwritten info in charts. At my pappy's hospital, they are seriously looking at switching to a chart system that is filled out via a series of check boxes that can later be filled in a la bubble sheet tests so that the chart can be scanned into a computer database. Apparently they work better since they can be filled out and read more quickly (most humans are visually oriented creatures, and besides, it's true. many doctors have abysmal handwriting.)
I don't see a palm as any more dangerous than the pagers that most people in hospitals wear. Given that those have been in common use in hospitals for longer than I've been alive, I'm sure whatever issues there are have been addressed.
Hmm. . . youre right. There does seem to be a lot of myth surrounding methadone.
Does the long time methadone takes to leave the system really make quitting harder? I've been told with pot people claim it isn't addictive (it is, it's just that the withdrawal symptoms aren't the kinds of things people tend to notice) because the slow rate at which it leaves a person's system greatly reduces the withdrawal symptoms. Do you know of any truth to that?
Also, what methods are better than methadone at helping people to get off opiates? It seems like if methadone weren't that good nobody would use it.
So some questions are:
Will legalization increase the proportion of people to whom drugs are available? (yes)
Agreed, but what I advocate, and what most people advocate is decriminalization, which is a whole different pack o' cards. Under decriminalization, it is legal to posess drugs but drug trafficking remains illegal - so, hypothetically, drug dealers will still be just as hard to find. This is a long shot, but it might actually make drugs harder to find, as police will quite possibly quit trying to find users and put more effort into finding dealers. This could burn the candle at both ends for drug dealers, as not only would more dealers be taken off the streets from being arrested, but fewer dealers would be there to take their place as dealing would possibly become a less popular job.
Then again, if enough more people decide they want drugs when if they are decriminalized (I doubt it - in my experience, psychonauts and addicts are usually not the kinds of people who let laws stop them, so anyone who would use drugs already is.), dealing could become very popular. There's really no way of knowing which way the pendulum swings until we try it.
Is the decrease in drug related violent crimes worth the increase in citizens doing stupid things to themselves? (normative - you the viewers at home get to answer)
That's a very good question, but I would like to ask will people definitely start doing more stupid things? My guess would be that if, for example, pot were legalized in the US, the situation would be pretty bad here for a couple years and then it'd be a lot like Amsterdam - we'd all realize how stupid it is to fry your brain on pot and get so sick of the perma-dazed stoners walking around the streets that, much like in Amsterdam, people who do smoke weed (possibly a greater number of people) would do it in much more moderation than anyone here does nowadays, and the vast majority of people walking down the streets stopping to stare at every shiny object they see would, at least along the northern border, be Canadian kids crossing the border for a day of toking. At least I hope that's the way it would turn out.
Would the legalization of said drugs decrease their stigma and increase use? (yes)
I have a feeling it would decrease their abuse, though. If you take a look at many places where drugs are easier to get, more people use them but fewer people use them to the point where they cause problems. One example in my mind is European teenagers with alcohol vs. American teenagers with alcohol. The international students from Europe in my high school all thought we were pretty stupid about the way we drank.
What effects would increased positive drug meme's have on the american cultural locus? (normative)
If it means movies like Dude, where's my car? would become more popular, I think I might reconsider my position on drugs. =)
Is liquor a good example of potential effects of cocaine/crack, etc? (no idea)
Not at all. Cocaine and its derivatives are strong stimulants, alcohol is a depressant. A caffiene overdose is more similar (though still quite different.)
Does anyone really care or do they just view it as a sort of cultural selection akin to natural selection except it isn't about genes - more about class and social interactions. In other words - if someone wants to be a druggie and ruin their life on crack/cocaine we should just let them smear themselves out?
Given the worries I have about a lot of my friends, I've thought about that for a long time, and, it seems to me, when people do indeed want to smear themselves out, they generally won't let anything stand in their way. When people want help, they should certainly get anything we have to offer to help them. The group I can't decide for is the people who are screwing up their lives simply because they have no idea what they are getting into - kids who hough spraypaint, for example. I hate to admit it, but in addition to the part of me who is scared for them there's a part of me that really wants to say "If you're going to inhale LACQUER of all things, you probably weren't a very rational human being to begin with, so it's not like brain damage will hurt any vital organs."
You're probably talking primarily about weed use - and I don't see it as that bad - but what about other drugs? Although, even weed, E, and some of our legalized drugs are just easy ways out and can and will still ruin lives.
Yeah, if we ever change the drug policy I think we should definitely start slowly beginning with weed. I'm really not sure about other stuff - weed, in my opinion, is more benign than alcohol in most ways except that it makes people dumb, which to me is a horrible thing, but most stuff that's much harder is pretty dangerous - I wouldn't want LSD or mescaline to be easy for kids to get, and E is pretty dangerous, too (the data's not all in yet, but it looks like it has a greater potential for mermanent effects on a person's psyche than acid.) I really don't think it's possible to make a safe opinion about harder drugs and hallucinogens until we've tried weaker drugs like pot and seen what the effects of legalizing/decriminalizing those were.
See I'd like to make a decision one way or another, but I don't find the evidence thus far convincing either way.
I understand where you're coming from (I'm an advocate of decriminalization for most drugs), but I still think that the argument about the drugs still posing a danger to others because of how they change the way people act is an important one to understand. It's a bit of a trump card for advocates of the war on drugs, so we can't just pretend it doesn't matter, especially since the advocates are the ones making the laws.
I also don't believe that all drugs do is increase the chance of things happening when the tendencies are already there. I honestly think that once one gets into the range of meth, hallucinogens (including massive amounts of THC), and X (where the effects of a high for chronic users are very different from the effects for occasional users), there is little comparison between the effects of severe intoxication with many drugs and the effects of being extremely drunk.
That may not mean that these drugs have to stay illegal, but I think there should definitely at least be public intoxication laws pertaining to them. But what I think doesn't matter, because if you want to convince your local congressman of anything, you better not try to use the effects of pot to explain issues pertaining to powerful stimulants.
And then we can Beowulf cluster that little bastard child of a PDA and a memory card that goes in the Dreamcast controller, and then we can Beowulf cluster a bunch of TI-85's, and then we can do it with tivos and aibos, and a box of crackers, and we'll get computer chips implanted in our brains and Beowulf cluster those, and we'll beowulf cluster blah blah blah blah
This needs to stop.
It's more commonplace with nurses. Doctors aren't too inclined to raid the drug cabinet since they are first in line when it comes to people who have to answer for missing drugs.
One popular scam is for the nurse to keep half of a dose for herself and mix the part that goes to the patient with saline solution to bring it up to volume, which is part of why morphine tends to be administered to patients via the IV machines where you push a button and get a little bit (provided you aren't pusing it too frequently.)
The biggest reason, though, which I find interesting, is that they do it that way instead of with shots because the patients tend to take less morphine when they have control over when they get it and how much they get, so there is less risk of addiction.
Methadone treatment doesn't work that way, so it has to be handled pretty carefully to work. That's why any data on how methadone clinics work that is taken from an actual methadone clinic is useless - none of them have enough funding to correctly control the procedure of getting off junk.
I'm no expert, but here's my understanding: Basically, methadone is an opiate that doesn't get you high, so that you can take it on a regular schedule and it will take care of the physical craving while the addict can take care of all the psychological craving. Sort of a "divide-and-conquer" approach to getting off opiates. The other side to it is that sine the methadone dosages are controlled by doctors, the addict can get off the physical addiction in a manner that doesn't involve heroin fits, which can be fatal.
I had never heard of Naltrexone before. I had heard of drugs that make you sick when you drink, but it sounds like Naltrexone is a really great thing. I'm curious, though - it sounds like it would be less effective for type II alchoholism, which I always understood to be not at all related to the pleasure of drinking - do you know?
It's hard to translate that ideal (which is a concept that I agree with in theory) into real life. 2 months ago I was attacked by a friend's roommate. He was stoned and on speed and decided that I was somehow involved in this conspiracy against me, and attacked me with a bottle and then a hickory stick. I have a scar on my right bicep that tells me that drugs don't always affect just the user of the drugs.
It's kind of like speed limits on roads. It's not that going faster always directly harms people, it's that when you're going fast it's easier to lose control and hurt someone.
Which reminds me. . . I read in a report to congress from the early 1990s the official estimate from the pentagon about what it would take to put a dent in the inflow of drugs. The number that came back was pretty damn big and was itemized into personell, tanks, supplies, funding, etc, and I can't remember all those numbers, but what really dumbfounded me was that the estimate for the force necessary to merely put a dent in the flow across the US-Mexico border alone was equal to about 1/3 of our entire military force.
Sir, it is obvious from your aimless rant that you know much more about drug issues than us. For some reason, though, you are keeping aloof. Pray, share your wisdom with us that we may all become wiser and, as you put it, "wake the fuck up."
It was learned before the 30s.
Back in the '20s, I believe, the US government was beginning to set up public treatment centers for opiate addiction. A few years later, politicians in all their political posturing decided that "wasting money" on helping people who often are volunteering to get help was a dumb idea and that we should just throw them in jail instead. Within a year, not only did the number of people being arrested for opiate posession increase (which I would assume was the intended affect of this precursor to the war on drugs) but also the number of people killed and hospitalized for overdose.
(Speaking of that, what is called overdose isn't necessarily an overdose. Mon pere, who is a doc in an inner city hospital, has observed that what gets written down as "overdose" on death certificates is just as often an unmistakable result of impurities in the drugs as it is a bonafide overdose.)
But anyway, this problem with drugs back in the '20s was investigated by a congressional committee, as has been done in the early 1930's, and they basically all come to the same conclusions: Imprisoning drug addicts is a harsher penalty at a much higher cost to the government that is also much less effective than treatment centers (which are admittedly not all that effective, either). The war on drugs is a major reason why the US is the country with the largest percentage of its population in prison. The war on drugs puts drug addicts in a situation where it is very hard to look for help or get their lives back on course. As a former homeless junkie friend of mine observes: You have to get off the junk before people are willing to help you, but you need to get help to get off the junk. (For years all the rescue missions and crisis shelters and such in my town would turn him away at the doors. The worst drug problem they would accept someone with is alchoholism. Incidentally, you also have to convert to christianity to get help, but that's another rant.)
Of course, in my mind, this is all trumped by a stumbling block that has much graver impilcations for how our society is structured than I think most people want to admit: We've known for decades now that punishment is an ineffective deterrent, that increasing sentences in the US rarely does anything to reduce crime rates (often the crime rates inexplicably increase as sentences get harsher - ex: states that have the death pentalty in the US have violent crime rates that easily dwarf the violent crime rates in states without it.), and that, given what we know about conditioning and learning and the structure and time frame of crime and punishment, there is no way in hell punishment could ever be an effective deterrent of crime.
I would love to see one state - just one state in this country - cut back their laws concerning heroin and directly pump the money they save on prison costs into methadone clinics. Not a single methadone clinic in this country has the funding for enough methadone to give a patient anything even resembling the reccomended treatment schedule, so we still don't really know how effective a well-run methadone clinic can be.
That's one thing I love about this country. Even after we find out something doesn't work, we've got our heads so far up our asses that I don't even think we are capable of thinking, "Hey, this isn't working. Maybe we should try something else." It's a sight to see - kind of like this hamster a friend of mine has that will repeatedly stick its head out of its hamster wheel while running at a high pace and get hit on the top of the head by a spoke hard enough to throw him onto his face. He's had this hamster for a year now and it's looking like it will be getting hit in the head with spokes for the reast of its life. In a sadistic way, we rather hope it doesn't. It's funny to see the antics of cretins much more idiotic than yourself.
Then again, I can't find America funny, since we're fucking up peoples lives with our antics.
Take a look at BeOS's splash screen. It has a series of icons that light up as the system reaches certain milestones on the way to getting the system booted.
Admittedly, it's not much, but think of what it could be - a fully customizable graphical splash screen with kernel messages. (affectionately known as a fcgsswkm)
I don't like nasty plaintext. I like fancy chiclet icons. I can make them give me just as much information as the normal linux bootinfo. Now that I think of it, I can probably make it give me more, since with a splash screen, the screen can be broken up into different areas that show the info for different kinds of stuff - I especially want one that displays each and every error and nothing else so I don't have to sort out what is an error and what isn't. On the bottom i'll have puzzle piece shaped icons pop up for any daemons that load, and above their icons will be icons for what services are started by those daemons. In a little window at the top left of the screen all the text will scroll past just like it normally does with my current bootprocess.
Eh, to me, Hacker is a term that has nothing to do with "good" and "bad."
Hacking is a feat of technical prowess, be it finding a way to root Bill Gates's PC or making a fish say pork. Cracking is breaking into something. Either way, the overlap each other for the most part.
Hey, it's easy to secure a homogenous Outlook shop against viruses like Love Bug. . . all you have to do is disable everything but plain-text emails, apply the patch that keeps people from sending attatchments, and kill the scripting in emails.
And when you've done all that you'll have so few problems w/ macro viruses that you'll have plenty of time to sit back and wonder why you spent all that $$$ on Exchange and putting Outlook on every computer when you could have provided the users just as many features and as much flexibility by getting PINE for free and having them use that.
My school has NT servers handling email, but will never even consider the Microsoft Exchange again. We also discourage the use of MS Outlook and MSIE, and those who do use them are not guaranteed tech support from the school for issues pertaining to their email client or web browser.
The campus network had turned into a playground for script kiddies when we were using MS internet server and client software. So far, the kids haven't shown quite so much skill at exploiting our current mailserver software or Netscape Communicator.
The Celeron isn't really an SMP-incapable chip. The microprocessor itself has full SMP support, with the only thing keeping users from using a Cel in a dual processor system is fancy packaging. That's why it was so easy to make a mobo like the aBit BP6.
With P4s, on the other hand, the processor core doesn't support it, so the closest you're going to get is a Beowulf cluster.
Hey, at least nobody's tried to do an obfuscated bf contest yet.
We could account for a lot of this through the use of checksums. They could easily be transferred through "safe" means as well as electronic, too - it's not hard to telephone or fax one.
It doesn't take fuzzy math to show that 19k votes could easily change the results of an election that, last I heard, has only 800 votes' difference between the two candidates.
It's too bad there is no good way to handle this. IANAL, nor am I or have I ever been or do I know a resident of Florida, but I am pretty sure that in this situation Florida's law calls for, or at least allows, a revote. Being one who voted for Nader, I know that if there were a revote in my home state and the vote were as close as in Florida I would likely sell out and change my vote to Gore. I expect that would be the case with enough Floridans who voted for Nader to swing the vote towards Gore. A revote would give Gore an unfair chance.
I've never had a relationship with a boy as geeky as I am.
I have to admit, I hesitated a moment and considered hiding my pent under my shirt before going in for fear I'd be given problems while signing in at the church to vote. In the end I didn't. I got some funny looks from some of the people running the polling place, but that's all that happened. I have a feeling they are quite aware of how much jail time they'd spend if they gave me problems.
That's enough separation of church and state for me. A building is just a building, and I don't care which building it is that I vote in as long as no baggage comes with that building.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could have a BSD that is ultrasecure, runs on anything you can put 110 volts (or whatever popular voltage your region supplies) through, and works as a great all-around desktop/server unix?
the desktop market will help us get that. Windows NT didn't get popular because it's the most robust server solution out there. It got popular because it integrates so well with the desktop software that is used by almost every consumer in the market.
Either way, Jesus wouldn't have liked a lot of the stuff Bush does. Relevant quotes and paraphrases I can think of are:
"Judge not lest you be judged."
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven."
Practise your faith alone. When you do it in private, it is devotion. When you do it in public, it is ostentation.
"Blessed are the meek."