While laws against vulgar language are just laws against free speech, laws against profanity go farther, violating the First Amendment's prohibition on establishment of religion.
"Profanity" doesn't mean "rude language" - it means taking something sacred and using it for secular purposes. You can only define that legally if you've defined whose religion's language and concepts get to be sacred, and the US government and its subsidiaries aren't allowed to do that, even if it's only specifying the religion at the level of "Vaguely Western Monotheist" as opposed to some specific organization. Personally I consider profanity to be much more offensive than the words that politicians don't let you say on TV, especially when it's non-believers using it to be offensive, but you're allowed to use profanity on TV.
Also, other religions may or may not care if you swear or curse using their gods' names - Roman polytheism probably approved of invoking the gods any time you were serious about what you were saying. Buddhism probably considers the equivalent not to be Right Mindfulness, but that's not the same as being sinful. And other cultures prefer different kinds of terms to insult people - diseases are popular, but Senator Ford isn't making it illegal to call him a scurvy dog.
It does mean that anybody telling kids to Pledge Allegiance Under God could be arrested, though, as could the people issuing cheap-metal coins that say "In God We Trust" instead of real coins saying "99% Pure Silver"... So it's not a total loss.
According to people like Terence McKenna, it's fairly standard for people who take ayahuasca or DMT to see dome-shaped things and talk with gnome-like beings, which sounds a lot like true hallucinations to me. (On the other hand, I'm not sure that it exactly sounds like _recreation_...)
As the anti-drunk-driving people say, coffee won't make you any less drunk, it'll just make you a wide-awake drunk. Mixing enough caffeine with your booze makes it easier to get far more drunk that you would if you weren't having the caffeine, or at least to not notice when you should have stopped, potentially leading to experiences like yours (though in your case the caffeine may have added to the hallucinations.) Red Bull and vodka seems to be a popular variant on that, but even rum and coke can do it. (Brain Wash and mixed drinks appear to be a bad combination as well, even if it's the red kind as opposed to the evil blue-dye version:-)
My favorite variant on that is Irish Coffee - since it's hot, I get hit with alcohol vapors right away, but it probably makes it something that I drink slowly and don't have too many of, so I haven't hit the bad-feedback-loop with it.
For some reason people attribute evil-don't-do-that-again-ness more to tequila than to other liquors; I don't know if it's something actually about the tequila, or that it's often mixed in smooth-tasting fruity drinks that are easy to overconsume, or if it's that many people first encounter tequila at parties in early adulthood, when they don't have much experience with drinking and haven't learned not to overindulge yet, as opposed to something like beer that fills you up if you're drinking a lot.
Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends decided that, since many other drugs have differing effects between the natural plant form, ingested refined powder, and smoked refined powder, it might be interesting to try smoking caffeine. So they crunched up some caffeine pills and smoked them.
Results: You do not want to do this. Do not try it at home, do not try it at work, do not try it with other trained professionals... He said that all the bad effects of regular caffeine abuse show up very quickly - shaking, jitters, nausea, headaches. It was interesting to have done it, but it was Not Fun. On the other hand, he was young enough at the time and had sufficient practice with other substances that are Not Good Ideas either that he didn't get a heart attack, and if there were any hallucinations added to the paranoia, they didn't lead to any additional dangerous behaviour, but YMMV.
I'm not on a 9/80 plan, but I've been with my company long enough that when they started requiring us to use or lose our vacation every year rather than carrying it over, I started taking Fridays off most of the summer. I had mixed success with it; just because I'm not planning to work on a given day, that doesn't mean that my customer doesn't want to schedule a meeting or call me on the phone, or that people stopped sending me emails that needed attention, or there might be training from the head office folks or whatever, so Fridays were often only half-off, or I'd sleep late and do email around noon. But still, that meant that I really did get my Saturday off:-)
Remember that Exchange systems are mainly used for internal corporate mail, not just for mail to the Internet, so most of the users are under the control of the same system. Outlook clients typically get mail in one of two ways - reading it off a server, or downloading to the user's client and storing it there. If it's stored on the server, Recall can succeed; otherwise it's a bit of a race, but can often succeed, though they often fail or the recipient might read it before the recall gets there. My organization mostly uses them for correcting mail that was accidentally sent without an attachment or for meeting notices that had some detail wrong.
Back in the 1980s and early 90s, when I was working as a tool for the military-industrial complex, I ran a VAX lab that processed classified information. I forget which DoD standard we followed (it was equivalent to Army 380-380), but I got to write our declassification processes and my successor at the job had the fun of implementing them. The basic choices were
Officially NSA-certified overwrite software (Didn't exist for our platform.)
NSA-certified Big Fscking Magnet (Not near *my* equipment, thank you.)
Dissolving the coating in acid (No thanks.)
Physical Destruction - Yeah!
Our building had a machine shop in the basement, and my successor got to take apart the RM05 removable drives (which were about the size of a Tupperware cake carrier and had a dozen 14" platters), and have the machinists sandblast them for her. The canonical Sysadmin Wall Decoration in those days was to have a disk platter with some tracks scratched off it from a head crash; she had one that was clean down to the bare metal.
These aren't the kind of video glasses that display the image right in front of each eye - these are shutter glasses that alternately black out the left and right sides, synchronized with your monitor that's alternately showing right and left images.
So if you're walking around instead of looking at your monitor, unless the real world is blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, it'll just look a little dimmer. And if the real world *is* blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, you've found Owsley's Secret Lost Acid Stash... let me help you with that:-)
(My first question when reading the headline about new 3D glasses was to wonder what resolution they are, since I'm not happy reading text at less than 800x600, and most gamer glasses have been 640x200 or less, , but of course they don't work for that either, so no gargoyle mode for me yet.)
(I'll ignore the question of whether the parent poster is ta troll, or is Darryl in disguise, or whatever.)
A couple of bloggish sites I know of, including BoingBoing, have a way of indicating moderator displeasure with comments or commentors without censoring them entirely. It's to remove all the vowels from the offending posts. You can still pretty much read them, if you're a native English speaker at least, but it's also fairly obvious that they've been spanked.
How much data does Groklaw really have? Sure, some of it's likely to be in bloated formats (PDFs of scanned raster images as opposed to text, etc.), but is it more than a few GB? If not a DVD, will it fit on a Blue-Ray? Put it out on Bittorrent, sell copies if you want, and put some Google ads on the main page to balance some of the costs. Also, make sure Archive.org has a copy of the originals.
The Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism is the school that the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama belong to, as opposed to the Nyingma or Red Hat sect which is the school that the Karmapa Lama belongs to.
And if anybody wants you to install a piece of distributed computing software that needs you to install Tibetan fonts and nine gigabytes of RAM on your computer, do be careful...
So these reactors power about 20,000 homes. That means that to power LA and the greater NYC area you'd need about 1000 of them. Good luck with that. People get annoyed enough if you want to put cellphone towers in their back yards.
And think of what NYC looks like during a garbage strike, and imagine what it'd be like if the garbage is now radioactive waste:-)
And yeah, sure, putting one in Alberta tar-sands country is fine, because the only people living up there are the oil workers.
The US has many universities that are private and many that are government-run. But in either case, the university needs money to operate, and even if they're getting some of it from the government as well as from students, they always need more money than they're getting. Socializing education doesn't change that (or if you think it does, ask your professors if they'd like a larger budget and higher salaries...)
Personally, I think that any government-funded research results ought to belong to the public - and by that, I mean they should be Free, not that the government should own patents on them. Privately run universities in the US often get lots of government funding for research, through the National Science Foundation and other sources, though they also get funded by tuition and alumni gifts and paid by corporations to do research, but even there, I think that part of the deal that the universities offer to corporations should be that the results are public.
Yeah, I know you said/humor here, but I'm currently facing that situation:-) I've been at my company long enough to officially be "retired" when they lay me off this month, though I'd expected to need to work at least another decade before I could actually retire. My defined-benefit pension got replaced with a cash-balance "equivalent" some years ago, which looked a lot better when I could make 10% interest than now when I'll be lucky to get 2% on it and my 401K. At least I get my medical covered, which is a good thing if the next job I find doesn't provide that.
Meanwhile, I'll get to practice welding at Techshop, and try to pick up on the programming that I've ignored the last few years (I've been messing with routers instead), and go cover my home PC with a pile of virtual machines. Pretty soon I should be able to start actually writing some FOSS instead of just using it - it's been too long...
Paying contributors would ruin Wikipedia, because it would give people an incentive to post uninteresting content simply to get their cut. If you look at Google search results, you'll see a surprising number of pages that don't offer anything original or useful, but are put in there to attract traffic to advertising pages.
The same kind of thing would happen to Wikipedia. You'd get trash pages, and you'd get lots of gratuitous changes to popular pages. And you'd either overload the volunteer editors, or you'd be paying editors to reject useful submissions. Bad bad bad.
If you want to collect taxes based on the mileage everybody drives, you can either use several hundred dollars worth of gear to retrofit every car and spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars building a Big Brother monitoring infrastructure that doesn't succeed in tracking out-of-state cars, or you can collect the odometer reading every year when the taxpayer is paying their car registration. Sounds like an obvious choice to me.
If you want to collect money in ways that are more progressive than the gas tax, which disproportionately affects poor people who can't afford to buy Priuses, you can raise the state income tax instead. (The gas tax also disproportionately affects SUV owners, but they knew that when they bought their toys.) It'd be a lot cheaper to implement, and raise more money, and it's more honest.
If the problem is that the state has a complex hokey rule-bound system for allocating taxes between different levels of governments and between different cost centers within the state government, I suppose you could try to fix it by adding a new complex privacy-invading bureaucratic system using untested technology and requiring retrofit of all the cars in the state. On the other hand, you could try to fix the system instead of making it worse, or you could just raise the bloody income tax yet again and claim you're saving the state money by avoiding the Location Tax.
I don't know about Oregon, but when I lived in New Jersey they tried to change the gas-pumping law, so I got to see what the politics around it were.
Safety - if you let amateurs pump gas instead of trained professionals, you'd have gas stations exploding right and left, the way they do in the rest of the country, like every week! The only reason you don't see that on national TV is that it's so routine, it only makes it to local news, right?
Grandma. Your Grandma - Making consumers pump gas would mean that your grandma is going to have to get out of the car into the snow on her walker to pump her gas, because most gas stations won't have Full Service, and the ones that do will charge far more than for self serve and your grandma won't be able to afford it. Yes, the newspapers really do get letters like that any time they propose changing the law. New Jersey's full-serve gas is almost always cheaper than self-serve across the border in PA or NY; I suspect Oregon's isnt'. (Here in California, gas stations have to pump gas for handicapped people for no extra charge, but our gas taxes are about 50 cents higher than most of the country's, so grandma's still getting ripped off.)
Small non-chain gas stations - AFAICT, this is the real issue - small gas stations that mainly make money by fixing cars but also pump gas are able to compete with the bigger chain-owned stations if everybody has to have full-serve gas, but with self-serve, a big-chain station can have one cashier serving a dozen pumps, and the little guys can't compete, especially if they don't have room to expand, which typically they don't.
A few years back in was in NJ on business, and pulled into a gas station to refill my car. The guy said his guy who pumped gas was on lunch break and wouldn't be back for 10 minutes, so I went and pumped my gas, having forgotten that that was highly illegal, and he yelled at me when I went to pay. Fortunately, I didn't blow up the gas station or force anybody's grandma out into the cold and snow while I was there:-)
A decade or so ago, thebunker.net bought a UK nuclear bunker to set up a data center. It had good connectivity to power grids, generators, and cheap cooling because it was underground. It also sounded cool, and they were able to sell to lots of London banks concerned about natural disasters and civil disturbances. They were able to get it relatively cheaply, and the savings in cooling costs were really valuable financially during years when other data centers were having trouble making money; I think they've acquired a second bunker by now.
Obviously an alien object autopsy like that calls for Gillian Anderson to do the dissection. The question is where they'd get a large enough scalpel to dissect a supermassive black hole?
You're actually one step off - anonymity encourages lack of accountability, which is fine, but lack of accountability encourages bad behaviour as well as encouraging good behaviour.
I used to run one of the early remailers. I eventually had to close it down, because some troll posted flamebait to some flame-sensitive newsgroups, and the resulting level of complaints led my ISP to ask me to shut it down. If the complaints had been because somebody had posted a socially valuable message, such as revealing government secrets or complaining about some serious social problems, my ISP would have helped me fight it, but this was just basic trolling.
Also, genuine lack of accountability is difficult; there are technologies like Chaum's Dining Cryptographer networks that can do it, but they're not widely implemented. Remailers and Anonymizers and the like depend on people explicitly not keeping user information, so that you don't have to trust them about the past, only the future, but even then you have to assume that some of them will be compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
While laws against vulgar language are just laws against free speech, laws against profanity go farther, violating the First Amendment's prohibition on establishment of religion.
"Profanity" doesn't mean "rude language" - it means taking something sacred and using it for secular purposes. You can only define that legally if you've defined whose religion's language and concepts get to be sacred, and the US government and its subsidiaries aren't allowed to do that, even if it's only specifying the religion at the level of "Vaguely Western Monotheist" as opposed to some specific organization. Personally I consider profanity to be much more offensive than the words that politicians don't let you say on TV, especially when it's non-believers using it to be offensive, but you're allowed to use profanity on TV.
Also, other religions may or may not care if you swear or curse using their gods' names - Roman polytheism probably approved of invoking the gods any time you were serious about what you were saying. Buddhism probably considers the equivalent not to be Right Mindfulness, but that's not the same as being sinful. And other cultures prefer different kinds of terms to insult people - diseases are popular, but Senator Ford isn't making it illegal to call him a scurvy dog.
It does mean that anybody telling kids to Pledge Allegiance Under God could be arrested, though, as could the people issuing cheap-metal coins that say "In God We Trust" instead of real coins saying "99% Pure Silver"... So it's not a total loss.
While it *may* be flamebait or trolling, and is also funny, it also deserves a +1 Insightful or two.
According to people like Terence McKenna, it's fairly standard for people who take ayahuasca or DMT to see dome-shaped things and talk with gnome-like beings, which sounds a lot like true hallucinations to me. (On the other hand, I'm not sure that it exactly sounds like _recreation_...)
As the anti-drunk-driving people say, coffee won't make you any less drunk, it'll just make you a wide-awake drunk. Mixing enough caffeine with your booze makes it easier to get far more drunk that you would if you weren't having the caffeine, or at least to not notice when you should have stopped, potentially leading to experiences like yours (though in your case the caffeine may have added to the hallucinations.) Red Bull and vodka seems to be a popular variant on that, but even rum and coke can do it. (Brain Wash and mixed drinks appear to be a bad combination as well, even if it's the red kind as opposed to the evil blue-dye version :-)
My favorite variant on that is Irish Coffee - since it's hot, I get hit with alcohol vapors right away, but it probably makes it something that I drink slowly and don't have too many of, so I haven't hit the bad-feedback-loop with it.
For some reason people attribute evil-don't-do-that-again-ness more to tequila than to other liquors; I don't know if it's something actually about the tequila, or that it's often mixed in smooth-tasting fruity drinks that are easy to overconsume, or if it's that many people first encounter tequila at parties in early adulthood, when they don't have much experience with drinking and haven't learned not to overindulge yet, as opposed to something like beer that fills you up if you're drinking a lot.
Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends decided that, since many other drugs have differing effects between the natural plant form, ingested refined powder, and smoked refined powder, it might be interesting to try smoking caffeine. So they crunched up some caffeine pills and smoked them.
Results: You do not want to do this. Do not try it at home, do not try it at work, do not try it with other trained professionals... He said that all the bad effects of regular caffeine abuse show up very quickly - shaking, jitters, nausea, headaches. It was interesting to have done it, but it was Not Fun. On the other hand, he was young enough at the time and had sufficient practice with other substances that are Not Good Ideas either that he didn't get a heart attack, and if there were any hallucinations added to the paranoia, they didn't lead to any additional dangerous behaviour, but YMMV.
I'm not on a 9/80 plan, but I've been with my company long enough that when they started requiring us to use or lose our vacation every year rather than carrying it over, I started taking Fridays off most of the summer. I had mixed success with it; just because I'm not planning to work on a given day, that doesn't mean that my customer doesn't want to schedule a meeting or call me on the phone, or that people stopped sending me emails that needed attention, or there might be training from the head office folks or whatever, so Fridays were often only half-off, or I'd sleep late and do email around noon. But still, that meant that I really did get my Saturday off :-)
Warning: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Warning: Power attracts the corruptable.
Remember that Exchange systems are mainly used for internal corporate mail, not just for mail to the Internet, so most of the users are under the control of the same system. Outlook clients typically get mail in one of two ways - reading it off a server, or downloading to the user's client and storing it there. If it's stored on the server, Recall can succeed; otherwise it's a bit of a race, but can often succeed, though they often fail or the recipient might read it before the recall gets there. My organization mostly uses them for correcting mail that was accidentally sent without an attachment or for meeting notices that had some detail wrong.
Otherwise not a problem.
The one that used coconuts was a European-owned airplane.
But yes, Tim the Enchanter didn't even _consider_ what happened if you used a North American swallow carrying either coconuts or algae.
It's military - so "lose the dogs of war"...
Back in the 1980s and early 90s, when I was working as a tool for the military-industrial complex, I ran a VAX lab that processed classified information. I forget which DoD standard we followed (it was equivalent to Army 380-380), but I got to write our declassification processes and my successor at the job had the fun of implementing them. The basic choices were
Our building had a machine shop in the basement, and my successor got to take apart the RM05 removable drives (which were about the size of a Tupperware cake carrier and had a dozen 14" platters), and have the machinists sandblast them for her. The canonical Sysadmin Wall Decoration in those days was to have a disk platter with some tracks scratched off it from a head crash; she had one that was clean down to the bare metal.
These aren't the kind of video glasses that display the image right in front of each eye - these are shutter glasses that alternately black out the left and right sides, synchronized with your monitor that's alternately showing right and left images.
So if you're walking around instead of looking at your monitor, unless the real world is blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, it'll just look a little dimmer. And if the real world *is* blinking on and off in sync with your glasses, you've found Owsley's Secret Lost Acid Stash... let me help you with that :-)
(My first question when reading the headline about new 3D glasses was to wonder what resolution they are, since I'm not happy reading text at less than 800x600, and most gamer glasses have been 640x200 or less, , but of course they don't work for that either, so no gargoyle mode for me yet.)
(I'll ignore the question of whether the parent poster is ta troll, or is Darryl in disguise, or whatever.)
A couple of bloggish sites I know of, including BoingBoing, have a way of indicating moderator displeasure with comments or commentors without censoring them entirely. It's to remove all the vowels from the offending posts. You can still pretty much read them, if you're a native English speaker at least, but it's also fairly obvious that they've been spanked.
How much data does Groklaw really have? Sure, some of it's likely to be in bloated formats (PDFs of scanned raster images as opposed to text, etc.), but is it more than a few GB? If not a DVD, will it fit on a Blue-Ray? Put it out on Bittorrent, sell copies if you want, and put some Google ads on the main page to balance some of the costs.
Also, make sure Archive.org has a copy of the originals.
The Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism is the school that the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama belong to, as opposed to the Nyingma or Red Hat sect which is the school that the Karmapa Lama belongs to.
And if anybody wants you to install a piece of distributed computing software that needs you to install Tibetan fonts and nine gigabytes of RAM on your computer, do be careful...
So these reactors power about 20,000 homes. That means that to power LA and the greater NYC area you'd need about 1000 of them. Good luck with that. People get annoyed enough if you want to put cellphone towers in their back yards.
And think of what NYC looks like during a garbage strike, and imagine what it'd be like if the garbage is now radioactive waste :-)
And yeah, sure, putting one in Alberta tar-sands country is fine, because the only people living up there are the oil workers.
The US has many universities that are private and many that are government-run. But in either case, the university needs money to operate, and even if they're getting some of it from the government as well as from students, they always need more money than they're getting. Socializing education doesn't change that (or if you think it does, ask your professors if they'd like a larger budget and higher salaries...)
Personally, I think that any government-funded research results ought to belong to the public - and by that, I mean they should be Free, not that the government should own patents on them. Privately run universities in the US often get lots of government funding for research, through the National Science Foundation and other sources, though they also get funded by tuition and alumni gifts and paid by corporations to do research, but even there, I think that part of the deal that the universities offer to corporations should be that the results are public.
Yeah, I know you said /humor here, but I'm currently facing that situation :-) I've been at my company long enough to officially be "retired" when they lay me off this month, though I'd expected to need to work at least another decade before I could actually retire. My defined-benefit pension got replaced with a cash-balance "equivalent" some years ago, which looked a lot better when I could make 10% interest than now when I'll be lucky to get 2% on it and my 401K. At least I get my medical covered, which is a good thing if the next job I find doesn't provide that.
Meanwhile, I'll get to practice welding at Techshop, and try to pick up on the programming that I've ignored the last few years (I've been messing with routers instead), and go cover my home PC with a pile of virtual machines. Pretty soon I should be able to start actually writing some FOSS instead of just using it - it's been too long...
Paying contributors would ruin Wikipedia, because it would give people an incentive to post uninteresting content simply to get their cut. If you look at Google search results, you'll see a surprising number of pages that don't offer anything original or useful, but are put in there to attract traffic to advertising pages.
The same kind of thing would happen to Wikipedia. You'd get trash pages, and you'd get lots of gratuitous changes to popular pages. And you'd either overload the volunteer editors, or you'd be paying editors to reject useful submissions. Bad bad bad.
If you want to collect taxes based on the mileage everybody drives, you can either use several hundred dollars worth of gear to retrofit every car and spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars building a Big Brother monitoring infrastructure that doesn't succeed in tracking out-of-state cars, or you can collect the odometer reading every year when the taxpayer is paying their car registration. Sounds like an obvious choice to me.
If you want to collect money in ways that are more progressive than the gas tax, which disproportionately affects poor people who can't afford to buy Priuses, you can raise the state income tax instead. (The gas tax also disproportionately affects SUV owners, but they knew that when they bought their toys.) It'd be a lot cheaper to implement, and raise more money, and it's more honest.
If the problem is that the state has a complex hokey rule-bound system for allocating taxes between different levels of governments and between different cost centers within the state government, I suppose you could try to fix it by adding a new complex privacy-invading bureaucratic system using untested technology and requiring retrofit of all the cars in the state. On the other hand, you could try to fix the system instead of making it worse, or you could just raise the bloody income tax yet again and claim you're saving the state money by avoiding the Location Tax.
I don't know about Oregon, but when I lived in New Jersey they tried to change the gas-pumping law, so I got to see what the politics around it were.
A few years back in was in NJ on business, and pulled into a gas station to refill my car. The guy said his guy who pumped gas was on lunch break and wouldn't be back for 10 minutes, so I went and pumped my gas, having forgotten that that was highly illegal, and he yelled at me when I went to pay. Fortunately, I didn't blow up the gas station or force anybody's grandma out into the cold and snow while I was there :-)
A decade or so ago, thebunker.net bought a UK nuclear bunker to set up a data center. It had good connectivity to power grids, generators, and cheap cooling because it was underground. It also sounded cool, and they were able to sell to lots of London banks concerned about natural disasters and civil disturbances. They were able to get it relatively cheaply, and the savings in cooling costs were really valuable financially during years when other data centers were having trouble making money; I think they've acquired a second bunker by now.
Obviously an alien object autopsy like that calls for Gillian Anderson to do the dissection. The question is where they'd get a large enough scalpel to dissect a supermassive black hole?
You're actually one step off - anonymity encourages lack of accountability, which is fine, but lack of accountability encourages bad behaviour as well as encouraging good behaviour.
I used to run one of the early remailers. I eventually had to close it down, because some troll posted flamebait to some flame-sensitive newsgroups, and the resulting level of complaints led my ISP to ask me to shut it down. If the complaints had been because somebody had posted a socially valuable message, such as revealing government secrets or complaining about some serious social problems, my ISP would have helped me fight it, but this was just basic trolling.
Also, genuine lack of accountability is difficult; there are technologies like Chaum's Dining Cryptographer networks that can do it, but they're not widely implemented. Remailers and Anonymizers and the like depend on people explicitly not keeping user information, so that you don't have to trust them about the past, only the future, but even then you have to assume that some of them will be compromised.