It's odd then, that all those European countries who have replaced the ruthless insurance company sharks with beige bureaucrats have also managed to reduce their per-capita expenditure on health "care" to half or less than half of ours here in the U.S., and on top of saving vast seas of cash they also get measurably superior outcomes (lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy).
Seroiusly. Stop focusing on airy theoretical analysis and look at the real-world bottom line. We Americans are getting royally screwed by the medicine industry. Every year they screw us deeper and harder. Are you in favor of leaving the dismal status quo as-is, or can you consider the vastly cheaper and more effective systems that every other "first-world" country in the world employ?
Try going to FreeRepublic, setting up a new account, and then voicing an opinion or two - not lies, or rants, or insults, or flamebait, just an opinion, and you can phrase it as diplomatically as you like - that lies on the political spectrum anywhere to the left of Rush Limbaugh. They'll revoke your account within the day.
Truly contemptible. Bunch of losers. And that also explains why that damn site is so boring.
...taking care of people who didn't plan. Initially SS was just the answer to that problem...
Oh, they planned all right. In the twenties, there was no government pension in U.S.A. so no one relied on such a thing. Millions of hard-working Americans, our great and great-great grandparents, thinking ahead of retirement, invested a good fraction of their modest incomes in bank savings accounts and sound securities and worst of all the booming late twenties Stock Market.
Then ten-twentyfour-twentynine, along came this bad thing and it made all their money go away, not just the daring speculative margin bids but also even those straight 2% savings accounts at the solid downtown National Bank. Gone, gone, all gone, irretrievably gone. Exactly as though one had hoarded dollar bills against old age in a sack under the mattress, went out one day for groceries, came home to find the house burned to ashes. All gone.
By 1931 unemployment topped twenty-five percent. You've never seen anything like it in your lifetime; millions of hard-working Americans who had been employed all their lives, having been fired due to no fault of their own but only Wall Street's bubble's collapse, millions of these Americans suffered chronic physical hunger, and that was adults of working age! Imagine what it was like for a retiree, particularly if he'd seen a life's savings evaporate as a side-effect of Wall Street's speculative failure...
That's how Social Security came about. Please restrain yourself from blaming the victims whom Wall Street robbed.
No man, if you enjoyed the privilege of being an American and better yet a adherent to the ideas of of Ayn Rand you'd realize that the dollar value of a thing is its one and only value. Consider the eschatological consequence of that. As Mr. Van Gogh didn't sell any of his paintings during his life (well, two) it follows logically that as an artist, specifically a painter, he was a plain and simple failure.
Yet some Japanese fellow paid a hundred million dollars - a glorious hundred million glorious dollars! - for a single canvas of his a mere few decades after his death. This means that without a doubt he must have been a singularly potent success as a painter. Just not within his lifetime! He became a success after he died. Now it's only common sense that nonexistence is synonymous with impotence. QED, we have irrefutably proven the existence of the afterlife!
Actually, you were educated stupid and evil by evil educators. Academia is a religious cult empowerment of self word. Not even a god can deny that I have squared the circle of a static Earth and cubed the Earth sphere by rotating it once to a dynamic Time or Life Cube. Only a false god or academically brainwashed indoctrinated mindless moron would deny that the Earth lacks the top and bottom, the front and back, and 2-sides physical dimensions of a Cube that spirals a 4-season quad helix around the Sun - creating a swirling of 4 simultaneous years as in a separately created year for each of 4 seasons. You do not have the "guts" to seek Time Cube "Truth".
It's not the gun's fault nor the bullet's fault, nor most of all it ain't and just can't be, no no never, the fault of the guys who own the stock in the companies which sell the guns. It's their own fault, those whining losers that stop bullets, and I can prove it.
Logically. (You like logic dontcha?) First of all, why do they die anyway? Nine times out of ten they bleed to death. It's lack of blood that does 'em in. Now, is it or is it not, the so-called "victim's" own heart whichs pump, ejects, squirts all his entire supply of blood out on the pavement? Irresponsible litigious bastards, the blame is plain. After dying of their own free will, they have got the nerve to want to send my client to jail!
If you cannot influence your government through political channels then its time to sell your computer and buy a plane ticket.
To where do you suggest?
I live in a police state. That's clear and undeniable - we sub-police subjects suffer the highest rate by far of incarceration of all the developed nations. Talk about lack of influence - just recently the presidency of my little banana republic was seized outright by a family junta. The fell deed was done right here in my state, by the brother of the usurper overthrowing the election he lost! To where would you suggest I emigrate?
Sure hope they speak Merican there cause alla us can only speak that one language, ya know? Huh.
Well SCREW YOU! We are not slaves to be worked to death...
Why heck no! Don't be absurd, sir! You're not slaves! As all students of economics know, slaves receive no recompense whatsoever beyond the minimum barely required to sustain organic life. You programmers, on the other hand, get paid so well you can almost afford to live in San Francisco! In fact, if you're really lucky in your choice of employers, in return for all that exorbitant, nerves-destroying overtime, you get richly rewarded in (drum roll) stock options!
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha WD "f*ck computers" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I must say I'd consider paying $30 a year if they include a filter so I don't have to read anything by or about that preposterous ass David Horowitz.
Long time ago he used to be a attention-craving left-wing idiot, intoxicated with the glamour of the loud mouth/empty head branch of the Black Panther Party, and now in his money-hungry old age he's become a right-winger, but the "idiot" part still shines through.
Although, come to think of it, maybe he just went "underground" like the CPUSA members did when it looks like the whip was about to come down, and what superficially appears as pro-right-wing diatribes actually constitute a sneaky left-wing attempt to discredit the right by portraying them as halfwits incapable of making a logically coherent argument.
The second amendment has been null and void since 1933 at the latest. Or maybe you can go down to the hardware store and pick up a Thompson submachine gun and a crate of dynamite and a box of blasting caps with no interference where you live?
Once I wrote a plot program for an HP71B, a handheld computer, in that machine's dialect of BASIC, which would print out lines and arcs (land survey drafting) on their weirdass inkjet printer - took about an hour per 8-1/2" x 11" page...
Unlike these cheat-o-matic languages in popular use these degraded days, which basically run way too God damn fast for you ever to win, BASIC is a sporting language, plays fair, gives you the competitor at least a chance to keep up or even surge ahead and break the ribbon, with nothing more than a pencil and paper and your own slow brain as a processor.
If you trust the cops, or the courts, or the legislatures, anywhere in this loathsome country even any at all, then shame on you for a fool, you obviously don't read the newspaper carefully enough.
1.) Methadone gets you high as a motherf***in' kite. Wow, boy oh boy, is it ever strong to last long. By "last long" I mean where a strung-out junkie might start feeling itchy only eighteen hours after his last shot of smack, he'll still be OK thirty-six hours after the last cup of "my favorite flavor cherry red." If you, with no tolerance, steal and drink up some junkie's take-home (don't do that, it's cruel), be prepared not only to cop a Hell of a buzz today but also to wake up all buzzy and loaded tomorrow morning, after the greatest sleep, illuminated by Technicolor dreams, that you ever had in your life. That's how it works, it's that simple; the clinic simply substitutes a regular daily dose for those street drugs the patient has been acquiring and taking at such risk to his person. Don't ever discount the profound effect of being free of having to cruise the dismal and dangerous drug underground just in order not to get mortally sick.
2.) Methadone is also real mother to kick. After all, it is a strong-as-Hell opiate, maybe the strongest there is. When the clinic finally tapers you off, it takes months.
3.) Methadone treatment works absolutely great to get people who are physically addicted to street opiates free of their addictions. This is a hard fact, I've seen it with my own eyes - I'm talking about guys, apperently total burn-outs, who, if you'd known them at the depth of their addictions, you'd have bet any amount of money that they'd end up dead or locked up forever real soon. These same guys, after a few years (yep, I said years) in the hands of a methadone clinic, have been turned back into regular, sober, respectable, intelligent, even happy people. It's the damndest thing you ever saw, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are incredulous - you'd have to see it to believe it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
consequences specific to specific drugs
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"Traffic"
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· Score: 2
"legalize drugs"? Which drugs? May I hypothetically prognosticate?
Legalize penicillin (yes, penicillin is a controlled substance, just try walking into a pharmacy and asking for a bottle of it with no prescription) and relative to a control group, you'll soon see a small increase in penicillin-resistant pathogens. That, at least, is the rationale put forth by the U.S.A.'s profit-oriented medical profession, why ordinary folks like you and I should not be able to buy antibiotics over-the-counter without first writing a big old check to an M.D. somewhere first in return for his scribbled sig on a scrip pad. I suspect that that for-profit aspect might have something to do with it too, but maybe I am just a cynic, feel free to disregard me.
Legalize marijuana, and, socially speaking, well, nothing happens. No one dies of marijuana overdoses, no one at all, not now and not "then," never. It could be argued that marijuana use would go up, but that assumption presumes that our idiotic War on Drugs actually does something today to inhibit marijuana use. This presumption seems to be contradicted by facts such as the one about marijuana being California's number-one cash crop. Evidently, legal or not, millions of people smoke marijuana anyway. The only public effect, then, would be that the jails would have more room for armed robbers, rapists, and that ugly ilk, and those taxes spent on enforcement of marijuana laws could be either spent on something more socially productive or rebated to the taxpayers, and the tens of billions of dollars which go into the illegal marijuana market would stop disappearing underground. Oh yeah, and when you'd go the the bookstore and buy new books they'd be printed on cheap, high-quality, acid-free paper that lasts just about forever.
Legalize heroin and other opiates, and among other effects you'll see a diminution in the number of overdose deaths. I've got a specific mechanism in mind. #1: junkies can only afford one or two doses at a time. #2: our junkie especially values that intense rush he gets when he shoots up, that rush is something he doesn't want to miss. #3: the concentration of street dope varies wildly from day to day. #4: overdoses suck; they don't feel extra-good, on the contrary, they feel real bad, plus of course OD'ing squanders a whole bunch of perfectly good dope. But in order not to miss out on that rush (junkies are not noted for caution), the junkie shoots up all he's got anyway. Unfortunately, sometimes the dealer is trying to do his customer a favor by supplying especially good, that is, high-purity dope. Alas, the poor junkie. All his old friends miss him.
But imagine that one could buy opiates in shrink wrap right over the counter at your local pharmacy and/or liquor store. (It isn't that fantastic, after all - keep in mind that a hundred years ago, right here in the U.S.A, you could buy all the morphine you wanted, with no legal restrictions.) Well, in that case, our junkie would probably not overdose, because, having bought a commercial product with a known concentration, he wouldn't want to take too much, and he'd know exactly what quantity he's taking. By the way, counting overdose fatalities, I exclude suicides. If opiates were readily available, they'd probably the means of choice for deliberate self-extinction. As Schopenhauer put it, "...there is nothing in
the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person." This might be a specific advantage of legalization, for victims of painful, terminal diseases. The obvious down side of opiate legalization, of course, would be that while you would see fewer overdose deaths, you would also most likely see a whole lot more people who become physically addicted to these opiates for one reason or another, If for any reason their supply were cut off for seventy-two hours, they would be reduced to agonized withdrawal victims. Maybe not good, huh? At least something to worry about.
Legalize cocaine. Imagine an ultra-libertarian world where even cocaine were available without restriction (again, this was the situation one century ago, when among other luminaries Freud and Conan Doyle dabbled in it). Now, first of all, too much cocaine kills, that's a simple medical fact. And second, for some people at least, cocaine is the perfect and complete binge drug. Particularly when you strip off that pesky HCl with a little NaHCO3 + H2O, heat the resulting solid precipitate to vaporization in a pipe, and inhale the gaseous product... Take these two facts together, you can see the danger here. More and more leads to more and more and more. So I am told. Individuals differ, of course. For example, someone I knew well a long time ago had that very same problem with mere common alcohol. One drink, one single little drink, and absolutely surely from that moment he'd stop eating and start drinking non-stop, for days and weeks until he had to be ambulanced to an emergency room in epileptiform delirium tremens. Anyway. My guess is, you make essentially limitless quantities of coke available o.t.c. and one result would be that every big city's Sanitation Department would have to take on a new, disgusting duty: patrolling the alleys every morning before dawn, carting off the corpses of the freshly OD'd dead. Gee, I don't like cocaine.
Well, all this is highly hypothetical, and who knows? maybe even incorrect in point of fact, but there's four of them. Only four of the countlessly many currently proscribed drugs, each wildly different from the others. That's the point I'm trying to make here: "drugs" are all different. Talking about globally legalizing "drugs" is like talking about legalizing, I don't know, green things. Cabbages, iguanas, bottles of absinthe, hand grenades, treat 'em all identically, they're all green. I could maybe accept this attitude from an ideologically pure radical Libertarian or anarchist. At least he is consistent: possession of any thing should be legal. Conversely there's the equally consistent but dystopian 1984/police-state model where everything is illegal. It's not over the issue of self-contradiction that we reject the Khmer Rouge theory of government! Anybody else, however, who jabbers about drug laws without explicitly distinguishing between the various drugs in question, I have to accuse him of shallow, or sloppy, or downright dishonest thinking.
So which drugs, exactly, did you want to legalize?
Don't forget, computers often need to look forward in time. For example, if I compute your new house mortgage today (something that I suspect people use computers for, every now and again), I'm going to be looking at dates all the way up through 2031. So if there's any financial software down at your bank or mortgage company that uses 32-bit time_t's, it's at least possible that it may start displaying symptoms as soon as seven years from now.
At some point in this new millennium, I'm going to die. So confident am I of this fact that I'm not even going to bother to buy a handgun as a backup. What a relief!
Yes, but far more important than mere nutrition or sanitation, our modern computers will enable our capitalist ruling class to finally achieve their centuries-old dream of enslaving and monitoring everyone on the globe!
OK, so the Panopticon prison is really an old idea, dating from the end of the eighteenth century. For that matter, Lucian, in ancient Rome, invented, but could not implement, the manned Lunar expedition... But Bentham's panopticon originally was applied against the inmates of a single penetentiary, not the population of the whole planet; and with the limited technology of his time even that was practically impossible to implement. No longer! The millenium is in sight!
One might argue (if one were unafraid to be labeled as a Kommie subversive) that such a scheme is deeply immoral. Arguments such as that, however, have never restrained any ruling class ever. Besides, we know that the one and only moral imperative that counts in this world today is that one which demands, "greater, and greater, and ever greater returns for stockholders".
A while back I replaced the 850 MB 8.5 mm drive in my Libretto with a 3.2 GB 9.5 mm drive. You have to take the case apart and remove a couple of little clear plastic spacers, then the 9.5 mm drive fits in just fine. Nowadays you can get 20 GB drives in this size. 850 MB was kind of cramped. But I have enough room on the 3.2 GB drive for both the Win95 that came with the box and a Linux installation as well.
I learned how to add a 9.5 mm drive through this excellent, illustrated page by Dr. Xin Feng. The link on the adorable Libretto page doesn't work, Dr. Feng moved his stuff.
Since you have a Libretto, another must-see page on his site is this one, which describes how to make an external battery pack for your laptop using real cheap lead-acid camcorder batteries which will run your Libretto in full-power mode for about four hours. With only $50 worth of batteries, I can use my Libretto all day long in the field.
I suppose this is kinda dumb and irrelevant, but if you ever get your laptop out and use it in a public place, have you noticed how so many of the ladies strolling by just love the Libretto? Weird, but repeatedly women have stopped and told me they think it's so cute! Maybe that's why that web page is titled adorable Libretto. Something worth thinking about, for you single guys; if I were still single I'd think I might take it down to the park, find a well-shaded park bench, and hack away...
So some sinister nameless hax0r who maybe, maybe not, managed to download a few source code files despite Microsoft's "world-class" internal network security is a threat to our national welfare - but each and every one of the tens of thousands of Microsoft employees with unfettered day-to-day access to that same source code, well, all of them can be trusted implicitly?
Gee, thinking like that goes a long way toward explaining how Aldritch Ames got away with all he did to subvert the CIA (Completely Incompetent A**holes) so successfully for as long as he did.
Yours WD "untrustworthy" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
Your scenario is hardly even plausible. The only IP laws that protect the inventions themselves are patents, and these expire after 20 years.
Yeah, sure, and copyrights used to expire after seventeen years, too. But now that big business interests have stolen the Presidency (look at GWB's cabinet!), and they, not voters any more, control this nuthouse of a country, any reasonable person can foresee that new legislature will spring up, increasing the period for patents to thirty, forty, fifty years...forever.
Just like the duration of copyrights, which, for the benefit of the loathsome Disney Corporation and its ilk, apparently is going to be extended out to eternity.
That armored case looks ideal for land surveying. But how bright is the screen? I use a PC when surveying in the field and I have to duck into a shady spot to see the screen at all. If there are no buildings around I have to put a towel over my head to cut off the sunlight. We also use a laptop-based program to guide a boat for hydrographic surveying; obviously the pilot can't keep his head under cover. Our solution thus far has been to get monochrome screens, but those are just about unobtainable any more. Does anyone reading this know of someone who makes a color laptop screen which is both rugged and bright enough to read under direct sunlight?
Number two by what criterion? Second largest number of lines of source code? Number two revenue generator for its distributors? Number two in terms of user popularity, benchmark performance, shaded polygons per second in Half Life, one over the crash rate, votes in the congeniality category, what? Maybe the author means, used or at least installed on more computers than all others, except one? How are dual-boot systems counted, then? Should a server that's been on continuously for the last year get the same count as a laptop that's run once every two weeks? Heck, if you count by the reboots, you just know Win9x is the world champion forever and ever. Etc., etc., etc.
Hey, what happened to Win95, Win 98, and WinME? It's maybe a good sign really that Reuters refuses to dignify these products by so much as including them in the general category of "operating systems." Though if I worked at MS, particularly in the department which has the Augean job of maintaining and extending that farrago of "legacy code," I might be a bit miffed at this slight. But whatever you choose to call them, last I heard, the Win9x branch has always sold a lot more copies than all the NTs put together. Particularly to home users; just try to get a PC with Win2K on it from most consumer outlets.
...behind Micorsoft Corp.'s (MFST) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems...
I suppose NT 4.0 competes with Windows 2000. For example, I actually bought a copy of Win2K with my motherboard, but I'm still using NT 4.0 because thus far I have had no need to change. Mod me down, pelt me with hostile email, I don't give a damn. I think NT 4, once you get it set up at first and so long as you don't mess with it (e.g. download the latest hi-performance video driver beta) is a really adequate desktop OS, could be better, lots better, but it does the job for me.
This, by the way, is the true nightmare of software vendors. God forbid they should ever release a product that's really, really good. For if they do that, and they nearly wholly satisfy their happy customers, why will anyone ever upgrade later on?
But at any rate I just know that the guy who wrote this piece for Reuters wasn't talking about NT 4.0 competing with Win2K; he was talking about (NT + W2K) competing with Linux. I think I know what he meant by context. Too bad that isn't what the writer said, though.
Slashdot Mirror
It's odd then, that all those European countries who have replaced the ruthless insurance company sharks with beige bureaucrats have also managed to reduce their per-capita expenditure on health "care" to half or less than half of ours here in the U.S., and on top of saving vast seas of cash they also get measurably superior outcomes (lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy).
Seroiusly. Stop focusing on airy theoretical analysis and look at the real-world bottom line. We Americans are getting royally screwed by the medicine industry. Every year they screw us deeper and harder. Are you in favor of leaving the dismal status quo as-is, or can you consider the vastly cheaper and more effective systems that every other "first-world" country in the world employ?
I believe the au courant technical term for this is "cloud computing".
Try going to FreeRepublic, setting up a new account, and then voicing an opinion or two - not lies, or rants, or insults, or flamebait, just an opinion, and you can phrase it as diplomatically as you like - that lies on the political spectrum anywhere to the left of Rush Limbaugh. They'll revoke your account within the day.
Truly contemptible. Bunch of losers. And that also explains why that damn site is so boring.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You're talking about Social Security:
Oh, they planned all right. In the twenties, there was no government pension in U.S.A. so no one relied on such a thing. Millions of hard-working Americans, our great and great-great grandparents, thinking ahead of retirement, invested a good fraction of their modest incomes in bank savings accounts and sound securities and worst of all the booming late twenties Stock Market.
Then ten-twentyfour-twentynine, along came this bad thing and it made all their money go away, not just the daring speculative margin bids but also even those straight 2% savings accounts at the solid downtown National Bank. Gone, gone, all gone, irretrievably gone. Exactly as though one had hoarded dollar bills against old age in a sack under the mattress, went out one day for groceries, came home to find the house burned to ashes. All gone.
By 1931 unemployment topped twenty-five percent. You've never seen anything like it in your lifetime; millions of hard-working Americans who had been employed all their lives, having been fired due to no fault of their own but only Wall Street's bubble's collapse, millions of these Americans suffered chronic physical hunger, and that was adults of working age! Imagine what it was like for a retiree, particularly if he'd seen a life's savings evaporate as a side-effect of Wall Street's speculative failure...
That's how Social Security came about. Please restrain yourself from blaming the victims whom Wall Street robbed.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Was Vincent van Gogh a serious artist?
No man, if you enjoyed the privilege of being an American and better yet a adherent to the ideas of of Ayn Rand you'd realize that the dollar value of a thing is its one and only value. Consider the eschatological consequence of that. As Mr. Van Gogh didn't sell any of his paintings during his life (well, two) it follows logically that as an artist, specifically a painter, he was a plain and simple failure.
Yet some Japanese fellow paid a hundred million dollars - a glorious hundred million glorious dollars! - for a single canvas of his a mere few decades after his death. This means that without a doubt he must have been a singularly potent success as a painter. Just not within his lifetime! He became a success after he died. Now it's only common sense that nonexistence is synonymous with impotence. QED, we have irrefutably proven the existence of the afterlife!
Hallelujah, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Actually, you were educated stupid and evil by evil educators. Academia is a religious cult empowerment of self word. Not even a god can deny that I have squared the circle of a static Earth and cubed the Earth sphere by rotating it once to a dynamic Time or Life Cube. Only a false god or academically brainwashed indoctrinated mindless moron would deny that the Earth lacks the top and bottom, the front and back, and 2-sides physical dimensions of a Cube that spirals a 4-season quad helix around the Sun - creating a swirling of 4 simultaneous years as in a separately created year for each of 4 seasons. You do not have the "guts" to seek Time Cube "Truth".
beautiful!
your fan WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's not the gun's fault nor the bullet's fault, nor most of all it ain't and just can't be, no no never, the fault of the guys who own the stock in the companies which sell the guns. It's their own fault, those whining losers that stop bullets, and I can prove it.
Logically. (You like logic dontcha?) First of all, why do they die anyway? Nine times out of ten they bleed to death. It's lack of blood that does 'em in. Now, is it or is it not, the so-called "victim's" own heart whichs pump, ejects, squirts all his entire supply of blood out on the pavement? Irresponsible litigious bastards, the blame is plain. After dying of their own free will, they have got the nerve to want to send my client to jail!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If you cannot influence your government through political channels then its time to sell your computer and buy a plane ticket.
To where do you suggest?
I live in a police state. That's clear and undeniable - we sub-police subjects suffer the highest rate by far of incarceration of all the developed nations. Talk about lack of influence - just recently the presidency of my little banana republic was seized outright by a family junta. The fell deed was done right here in my state, by the brother of the usurper overthrowing the election he lost! To where would you suggest I emigrate?
Sure hope they speak Merican there cause alla us can only speak that one language, ya know? Huh.
Yers WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Well SCREW YOU! We are not slaves to be worked to death...
Why heck no! Don't be absurd, sir! You're not slaves! As all students of economics know, slaves receive no recompense whatsoever beyond the minimum barely required to sustain organic life. You programmers, on the other hand, get paid so well you can almost afford to live in San Francisco! In fact, if you're really lucky in your choice of employers, in return for all that exorbitant, nerves-destroying overtime, you get richly rewarded in (drum roll) stock options!
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha WD "f*ck computers" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I must say I'd consider paying $30 a year if they include a filter so I don't have to read anything by or about that preposterous ass David Horowitz.
Long time ago he used to be a attention-craving left-wing idiot, intoxicated with the glamour of the loud mouth/empty head branch of the Black Panther Party, and now in his money-hungry old age he's become a right-winger, but the "idiot" part still shines through.
Although, come to think of it, maybe he just went "underground" like the CPUSA members did when it looks like the whip was about to come down, and what superficially appears as pro-right-wing diatribes actually constitute a sneaky left-wing attempt to discredit the right by portraying them as halfwits incapable of making a logically coherent argument.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yep, you're wrong. Because the U.S.A. isn't "great."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The second amendment has been null and void since 1933 at the latest. Or maybe you can go down to the hardware store and pick up a Thompson submachine gun and a crate of dynamite and a box of blasting caps with no interference where you live?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Once I wrote a plot program for an HP71B, a handheld computer, in that machine's dialect of BASIC, which would print out lines and arcs (land survey drafting) on their weirdass inkjet printer - took about an hour per 8-1/2" x 11" page...
Unlike these cheat-o-matic languages in popular use these degraded days, which basically run way too God damn fast for you ever to win, BASIC is a sporting language, plays fair, gives you the competitor at least a chance to keep up or even surge ahead and break the ribbon, with nothing more than a pencil and paper and your own slow brain as a processor.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Why not? As a U.S. citizen, that is, as a rights-free subject under a police state, I can imagine being arrested, convicted, and subjected to a decade in jail for a rape and murder that someone else committed. Also, I can imagine being assassinated on my own doorstep by a police department death squad, each of whom later being found "not guilty" of even so much as a misdemeanor.
If you trust the cops, or the courts, or the legislatures, anywhere in this loathsome country even any at all, then shame on you for a fool, you obviously don't read the newspaper carefully enough.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
1.) Methadone gets you high as a motherf***in' kite. Wow, boy oh boy, is it ever strong to last long. By "last long" I mean where a strung-out junkie might start feeling itchy only eighteen hours after his last shot of smack, he'll still be OK thirty-six hours after the last cup of "my favorite flavor cherry red." If you, with no tolerance, steal and drink up some junkie's take-home (don't do that, it's cruel), be prepared not only to cop a Hell of a buzz today but also to wake up all buzzy and loaded tomorrow morning, after the greatest sleep, illuminated by Technicolor dreams, that you ever had in your life. That's how it works, it's that simple; the clinic simply substitutes a regular daily dose for those street drugs the patient has been acquiring and taking at such risk to his person. Don't ever discount the profound effect of being free of having to cruise the dismal and dangerous drug underground just in order not to get mortally sick.
2.) Methadone is also real mother to kick. After all, it is a strong-as-Hell opiate, maybe the strongest there is. When the clinic finally tapers you off, it takes months.
3.) Methadone treatment works absolutely great to get people who are physically addicted to street opiates free of their addictions. This is a hard fact, I've seen it with my own eyes - I'm talking about guys, apperently total burn-outs, who, if you'd known them at the depth of their addictions, you'd have bet any amount of money that they'd end up dead or locked up forever real soon. These same guys, after a few years (yep, I said years) in the hands of a methadone clinic, have been turned back into regular, sober, respectable, intelligent, even happy people. It's the damndest thing you ever saw, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are incredulous - you'd have to see it to believe it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
"legalize drugs"? Which drugs? May I hypothetically prognosticate?
Legalize penicillin (yes, penicillin is a controlled substance, just try walking into a pharmacy and asking for a bottle of it with no prescription) and relative to a control group, you'll soon see a small increase in penicillin-resistant pathogens. That, at least, is the rationale put forth by the U.S.A.'s profit-oriented medical profession, why ordinary folks like you and I should not be able to buy antibiotics over-the-counter without first writing a big old check to an M.D. somewhere first in return for his scribbled sig on a scrip pad. I suspect that that for-profit aspect might have something to do with it too, but maybe I am just a cynic, feel free to disregard me.
Legalize marijuana, and, socially speaking, well, nothing happens. No one dies of marijuana overdoses, no one at all, not now and not "then," never. It could be argued that marijuana use would go up, but that assumption presumes that our idiotic War on Drugs actually does something today to inhibit marijuana use. This presumption seems to be contradicted by facts such as the one about marijuana being California's number-one cash crop. Evidently, legal or not, millions of people smoke marijuana anyway. The only public effect, then, would be that the jails would have more room for armed robbers, rapists, and that ugly ilk, and those taxes spent on enforcement of marijuana laws could be either spent on something more socially productive or rebated to the taxpayers, and the tens of billions of dollars which go into the illegal marijuana market would stop disappearing underground. Oh yeah, and when you'd go the the bookstore and buy new books they'd be printed on cheap, high-quality, acid-free paper that lasts just about forever.
Legalize heroin and other opiates, and among other effects you'll see a diminution in the number of overdose deaths. I've got a specific mechanism in mind. #1: junkies can only afford one or two doses at a time. #2: our junkie especially values that intense rush he gets when he shoots up, that rush is something he doesn't want to miss. #3: the concentration of street dope varies wildly from day to day. #4: overdoses suck; they don't feel extra-good, on the contrary, they feel real bad, plus of course OD'ing squanders a whole bunch of perfectly good dope. But in order not to miss out on that rush (junkies are not noted for caution), the junkie shoots up all he's got anyway. Unfortunately, sometimes the dealer is trying to do his customer a favor by supplying especially good, that is, high-purity dope. Alas, the poor junkie. All his old friends miss him.
But imagine that one could buy opiates in shrink wrap right over the counter at your local pharmacy and/or liquor store. (It isn't that fantastic, after all - keep in mind that a hundred years ago, right here in the U.S.A, you could buy all the morphine you wanted, with no legal restrictions.) Well, in that case, our junkie would probably not overdose, because, having bought a commercial product with a known concentration, he wouldn't want to take too much, and he'd know exactly what quantity he's taking. By the way, counting overdose fatalities, I exclude suicides. If opiates were readily available, they'd probably the means of choice for deliberate self-extinction. As Schopenhauer put it, "...there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person." This might be a specific advantage of legalization, for victims of painful, terminal diseases. The obvious down side of opiate legalization, of course, would be that while you would see fewer overdose deaths, you would also most likely see a whole lot more people who become physically addicted to these opiates for one reason or another, If for any reason their supply were cut off for seventy-two hours, they would be reduced to agonized withdrawal victims. Maybe not good, huh? At least something to worry about.
Legalize cocaine. Imagine an ultra-libertarian world where even cocaine were available without restriction (again, this was the situation one century ago, when among other luminaries Freud and Conan Doyle dabbled in it). Now, first of all, too much cocaine kills, that's a simple medical fact. And second, for some people at least, cocaine is the perfect and complete binge drug. Particularly when you strip off that pesky HCl with a little NaHCO3 + H2O, heat the resulting solid precipitate to vaporization in a pipe, and inhale the gaseous product... Take these two facts together, you can see the danger here. More and more leads to more and more and more. So I am told. Individuals differ, of course. For example, someone I knew well a long time ago had that very same problem with mere common alcohol. One drink, one single little drink, and absolutely surely from that moment he'd stop eating and start drinking non-stop, for days and weeks until he had to be ambulanced to an emergency room in epileptiform delirium tremens. Anyway. My guess is, you make essentially limitless quantities of coke available o.t.c. and one result would be that every big city's Sanitation Department would have to take on a new, disgusting duty: patrolling the alleys every morning before dawn, carting off the corpses of the freshly OD'd dead. Gee, I don't like cocaine.
Well, all this is highly hypothetical, and who knows? maybe even incorrect in point of fact, but there's four of them. Only four of the countlessly many currently proscribed drugs, each wildly different from the others. That's the point I'm trying to make here: "drugs" are all different. Talking about globally legalizing "drugs" is like talking about legalizing, I don't know, green things. Cabbages, iguanas, bottles of absinthe, hand grenades, treat 'em all identically, they're all green. I could maybe accept this attitude from an ideologically pure radical Libertarian or anarchist. At least he is consistent: possession of any thing should be legal. Conversely there's the equally consistent but dystopian 1984/police-state model where everything is illegal. It's not over the issue of self-contradiction that we reject the Khmer Rouge theory of government! Anybody else, however, who jabbers about drug laws without explicitly distinguishing between the various drugs in question, I have to accuse him of shallow, or sloppy, or downright dishonest thinking.
So which drugs, exactly, did you want to legalize?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Don't forget, computers often need to look forward in time. For example, if I compute your new house mortgage today (something that I suspect people use computers for, every now and again), I'm going to be looking at dates all the way up through 2031. So if there's any financial software down at your bank or mortgage company that uses 32-bit time_t's, it's at least possible that it may start displaying symptoms as soon as seven years from now.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
At some point in this new millennium, I'm going to die. So confident am I of this fact that I'm not even going to bother to buy a handgun as a backup. What a relief!
But... "to sleep, perchance to dream"?
Nahhh!
Happy happy, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yes, but far more important than mere nutrition or sanitation, our modern computers will enable our capitalist ruling class to finally achieve their centuries-old dream of enslaving and monitoring everyone on the globe!
OK, so the Panopticon prison is really an old idea, dating from the end of the eighteenth century. For that matter, Lucian, in ancient Rome, invented, but could not implement, the manned Lunar expedition... But Bentham's panopticon originally was applied against the inmates of a single penetentiary, not the population of the whole planet; and with the limited technology of his time even that was practically impossible to implement. No longer! The millenium is in sight!
One might argue (if one were unafraid to be labeled as a Kommie subversive) that such a scheme is deeply immoral. Arguments such as that, however, have never restrained any ruling class ever. Besides, we know that the one and only moral imperative that counts in this world today is that one which demands, "greater, and greater, and ever greater returns for stockholders".
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
A while back I replaced the 850 MB 8.5 mm drive in my Libretto with a 3.2 GB 9.5 mm drive. You have to take the case apart and remove a couple of little clear plastic spacers, then the 9.5 mm drive fits in just fine. Nowadays you can get 20 GB drives in this size. 850 MB was kind of cramped. But I have enough room on the 3.2 GB drive for both the Win95 that came with the box and a Linux installation as well.
I learned how to add a 9.5 mm drive through this excellent, illustrated page by Dr. Xin Feng. The link on the adorable Libretto page doesn't work, Dr. Feng moved his stuff.
Since you have a Libretto, another must-see page on his site is this one, which describes how to make an external battery pack for your laptop using real cheap lead-acid camcorder batteries which will run your Libretto in full-power mode for about four hours. With only $50 worth of batteries, I can use my Libretto all day long in the field.
I suppose this is kinda dumb and irrelevant, but if you ever get your laptop out and use it in a public place, have you noticed how so many of the ladies strolling by just love the Libretto? Weird, but repeatedly women have stopped and told me they think it's so cute! Maybe that's why that web page is titled adorable Libretto. Something worth thinking about, for you single guys; if I were still single I'd think I might take it down to the park, find a well-shaded park bench, and hack away...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
So some sinister nameless hax0r who maybe, maybe not, managed to download a few source code files despite Microsoft's "world-class" internal network security is a threat to our national welfare - but each and every one of the tens of thousands of Microsoft employees with unfettered day-to-day access to that same source code, well, all of them can be trusted implicitly?
Gee, thinking like that goes a long way toward explaining how Aldritch Ames got away with all he did to subvert the CIA (Completely Incompetent A**holes) so successfully for as long as he did.
Yours WD "untrustworthy" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
Your scenario is hardly even plausible. The only IP laws that protect the inventions themselves are patents, and these expire after 20 years.
Yeah, sure, and copyrights used to expire after seventeen years, too. But now that big business interests have stolen the Presidency (look at GWB's cabinet!), and they, not voters any more, control this nuthouse of a country, any reasonable person can foresee that new legislature will spring up, increasing the period for patents to thirty, forty, fifty years...forever.
Just like the duration of copyrights, which, for the benefit of the loathsome Disney Corporation and its ilk, apparently is going to be extended out to eternity.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
That armored case looks ideal for land surveying. But how bright is the screen? I use a PC when surveying in the field and I have to duck into a shady spot to see the screen at all. If there are no buildings around I have to put a towel over my head to cut off the sunlight. We also use a laptop-based program to guide a boat for hydrographic surveying; obviously the pilot can't keep his head under cover. Our solution thus far has been to get monochrome screens, but those are just about unobtainable any more. Does anyone reading this know of someone who makes a color laptop screen which is both rugged and bright enough to read under direct sunlight?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Number two by what criterion? Second largest number of lines of source code? Number two revenue generator for its distributors? Number two in terms of user popularity, benchmark performance, shaded polygons per second in Half Life, one over the crash rate, votes in the congeniality category, what? Maybe the author means, used or at least installed on more computers than all others, except one? How are dual-boot systems counted, then? Should a server that's been on continuously for the last year get the same count as a laptop that's run once every two weeks? Heck, if you count by the reboots, you just know Win9x is the world champion forever and ever. Etc., etc., etc.
Hey, what happened to Win95, Win 98, and WinME? It's maybe a good sign really that Reuters refuses to dignify these products by so much as including them in the general category of "operating systems." Though if I worked at MS, particularly in the department which has the Augean job of maintaining and extending that farrago of "legacy code," I might be a bit miffed at this slight. But whatever you choose to call them, last I heard, the Win9x branch has always sold a lot more copies than all the NTs put together. Particularly to home users; just try to get a PC with Win2K on it from most consumer outlets.
I suppose NT 4.0 competes with Windows 2000. For example, I actually bought a copy of Win2K with my motherboard, but I'm still using NT 4.0 because thus far I have had no need to change. Mod me down, pelt me with hostile email, I don't give a damn. I think NT 4, once you get it set up at first and so long as you don't mess with it (e.g. download the latest hi-performance video driver beta) is a really adequate desktop OS, could be better, lots better, but it does the job for me.
This, by the way, is the true nightmare of software vendors. God forbid they should ever release a product that's really, really good. For if they do that, and they nearly wholly satisfy their happy customers, why will anyone ever upgrade later on?
But at any rate I just know that the guy who wrote this piece for Reuters wasn't talking about NT 4.0 competing with Win2K; he was talking about (NT + W2K) competing with Linux. I think I know what he meant by context. Too bad that isn't what the writer said, though.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What will Linux NOT run on these days?
...Al Gore, George W. Bush, OR Ralph Nader...
Wrong-O! Linux was ported to the Gorebot by IBM; their version can run hundreds and even thousands of instances of Linux simultaneously.
Or to quote it itself:
FOOLISH HUMANS! DO YOU NOT RECOGNIZE THE SUPERIOR PROCESSING CAPABILITIES OF MY ADVANCED NEURAL NETWORK?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net