The reason we're talking about NAT as a solution is that there aren't enough IPv4 addresses to handle everybody in Asia getting a broadband internet connection. A typical NAT system lets you put up to ~2**8-2**16 users per real IPv4 address (how many depends on how many open connections a given end user typically maintains to the outside world.) That means that one real Class A address could support 2**32-2**40 users if you managed it all with NAT, so China's taken care of. (There are about 100 spare Class A addresses.)
That doesn't mean they're all in the same 10.* network (they're not - one major point of NAT is that you don't need to expose your internal addresses to the outside world), or that you're funnelling all of China through one NAT box, or that you're even funnelling 2**16 users through one NAT box (depends on how much horsepower it's got.) The "collapse under load" question is really about how many users you can put behind one NAT box, because it's difficult to use a given real-side IP address on more than one NAT box without either major ugliness (like double-NAT) or really serious cleverness. If you can handle 256 users (with however many open ports they've each got) you've won. If you can only handle 16 users, then APNIC needs to haggle a few more Class As to cover everybody in China and India, but it's still managable, and by the time any appreciable fraction of those countries can afford broadband at home, handling lots of users on NAT will have moved from being a PC's job to being a small appliance's job, just as home NAT is today.
The big difference between doing this with IPv6 vs. RFC1918 on the private side is that you really *could* use a unique address space with IPv6 instead of duplication, which does have some advantages, and can let you use tunnelling instead of NAT.
It's easy to set up IPv6 tunnels over IPv4, but those don't change the problem - they're not much different than setting up RFC1918 10.x.x.x IPv4 tunnels over IPv4 (pick your favorite flavor of IPSEC, PPTP, L2TP, NAT, etc.) It may be a tastier, more interesting version of NAT, but it's still basically NAT until you can run native.
The big difference between the 6-over-4 tunnelling world and RFC1918-tunnelled is that you _can_ interconnect different IPv6 islands into one big archipelago, if you're willing to run security methods that aren't bothered by this. And some ISPs are supporting this for IPv6 users to meet each other, as well as running it native. So if you're trying to talk to another IPv6 destination that's in the same archipelago, you can do it natively without NAT in the way, but if you're trying to talk to Native IPv4 users who don't also run compatible 6-over-4 tunnels, you're still using NAT or some kind of IPv4 in addition to your IPv6.
(I know, I should be replying to one of the serious articles, not the funny one, but it really is the right connection....)
Ths difference between business and dial and broadband home users is really critical here. Business users don't need a lot of IP address space - they're almost always behind firewalls, so a/29 group with 8 IP addresses can handle an office with thousands of people, using 1 address with NAT or proxy firewalls to initiate connections to the outside, and maybe another one or two for server DMZs. The only time most non-ISP businesses need more than that (per location) is if they're trying to do dual-homed access to multiple ISPs, which tends to need a/24 or sometimes a/20.
Dial users usually need real addresses, but they typically aren't full-time - industry ratios used to be about 10 users per modem, so you also get a lot of address concentration. That may be a bit different now that more people are using the web rather than email as their big application, but it can still handle a lot of users per address.
The big problem will be broadband home computers, because they need real IP addresses fulltime. For most users, 1 address is enough, whether it's static or dynamic, and some of these users can be bullied into using ISP NAT instead of real internet connectivity. (That's particularly likely in China, because of the Great Firewall of China censorship proxy stuff, and just switching to an IPv6-nat-IPv4 isn't enough to fix that.) There's more likely to be a lot of IP demand from Japan and Korea because of this - they've got enough money that a large fraction of households can afford computers or game consoles, and enough of the population is in concentrated urban centers where broadband is cost-effective.
Then there's the whole network-capable cellphone business. The early stuff didn't have problems with IP addresses, because most of it was proprietary walled-garden WAP stuff, so you were going to need to use a gateway to connect to the real world anyway. Some of the newer standards are supposed to provide real IP capabilities, and I suppose that if enough people actually buy them for the phone companies to make back some of the billions of dollars they've wasted on 3G upgrades and spectrum auctions, maybe it'll be a problem, but as a disgruntled stockholder of a wireless company, I don't see that happening soon:-(. In practice, I suspect that'll mostly be a NAT or IPv6 world, and it'll be the Japanese wireless folks who push us to using real IPv6.
Sorry. You've always got 1 address for the all-0s, 1 for the all-1s broadcast, and usually 1 for the router. So if you think you're seeing 4 IP addresses, that's probably either a/30 with 1 for the users and 3 fnords, or a/29 with 5 for the users, not just 4, and 3 fnords.
Of course, now that I've said that, I think my DSL line actually _is_ giving me 4 static IP addresses out of a bigger block that's managed by some router, but it's been long enough since I looked that I'm not too sure.
You can borrow IP addresses, but you can't borrow - the RIAA will hand you your ass.
Multiple Coding Formats, not Generations
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Phish Moves To FLAC
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· Score: 1
The issue isn't multiple generations of copies, the way it was with analog tapes. The issue is that different listeners will be converting it to N different formats, and everybody can start with the lossless original, rather than starting with some lossy compressed format, decompressing, and recompressing with a different lossy format. For example:
Some people are playing it on their PCs or iPods and can use high-bandwidth formats, so they want near-original quality.
Some people are playing on their pocket MP3 players, so they want 128kbps or even 64kbps, and they want to use the best encoder they can to make it. Other people will use whatever encoder they happen to find lying around free.
Some people want OGGs. Better to make them from the original, not from an MP3.
Some people have Brand X Portable Music Players which have Brand X Really Tight Coding, but they need originals to encode from; converting a 128kbps-coded-badly MP3 or even 128-kbps-coded-well into 64kbps BrandX isn't going to be anywhere near as good as compressing raw bits, because the lossy coders have different models of what kind of audio damage is supposedly "imperceptable".
If people are redistributing compressed formats, there'll be multiples of them floating around, and it'll be hard to know which 128kbps format was from which encoder, and different people will distribute multiple formats, and you'll end up with almost as much data being passed around and lots more indexing. Might as well just use the lossless formats.
There's occasional speculation about this sort of thing. For crypto applications themselves, FLOPS don't matter - integer processing and bitmap-bashing do, and it's possible that they've built themselves some efficient DES-crackers or other crypto engines. I doubt that most of those would be Cray-like vector processors - it's more of a job for dataflow architectures and lots of parallelism.
But the big floating-point applications that NSA has are likely to be signal-processors like Echelon which are trolling for voice signals and such, which is a good match for large numbers of scalar processors. How tightly they're integrated depends on the conveniences of signal collection, which is beyond my ability to speculate credibly:-)
The Second Fastest Supercomputer, which isn't on the list, is SETI@HOME, with ~27TFLOPS, and most of the machines it's running on are Windows. Most of the machines don't say what OS they're running, but most of them are running some kind of hacked-up operating system to coordinate communications and tasks. The problem with Windows in this environment isn't whether it sucks, but that it's not open to hacking and customization to anywhere near the extent that most Unix OS relatives are (except apparently SCO, which has trouble running networks on/dev/lawsuit.)
Also, Windows wants to run on something that looks at least *vaguely* like a PC. Some of these supercomputers look like PCs with odd network peripherals underneath them, some look like clusters of multi-processor shared-memory PCs (sometimes with too many processors for Windows) with a communications layer between clusters. Some of these work ok for Windows (SETI, for instance), while others are too different.
Also, the communications patterns between nodes and between common applications programs are highly critical here. The tighter the coupling, and the finer-grained the parallelism, the harder it is to fit into whatever framework the operating system provides. Loosely-coupled systems can work just fine on Microsoft; very-tightly-coupled systems need more hacking. And a large part of the Windows plaform is really focused on desktop graphics applications, which simply aren't relevant for supercomputers. (There are people doing clusters with game consoles, such as the Sony Playstation, but that's because they want to use the fast parallel CPU in the graphics engine, not the boring CPU.)
The World's Fastest Computer is trying to figure out this planet,
The World's Second-Fastest Computer is a volunteer effort to figure out if anybody's on other planets, cure cancer, and do other good things on this planet, and
The Next Fastest Four Computers are trying to figure out how to blow up this planet.
When you're having a conversation with somebody by email, it's nice to have it respond instantly. And except for the first message in each direction, that'll happen here, and you usually have such conversations with people you know. And of course, for email from inside your company, you wouldn't use greylisting.
For most other email business applications, the first contact isn't all that time-critical - you might not even be in the same timezone or working at the same time - and most of the exceptions are knowable in advance, e.g. email to abuse@ and support@ where you'd obviously turn off greylisting.
There are exceptions - you're on the road using dialup, or you're having a conference call and somebody needs to send some document you're working on. They may be annoying enough that you wouldn't use it, but for most companies, many of the companies you'd be in that situation with are Usual Suspects that you'd whitelist anyway. And besides, your email staff can do it in all the free time they have because your spam got reduced by a few percent:-) Yeah, ok, this also means there'd be increased forgery of email purporting to be from corporate sites, but really, who'd send out email claiming to be from support@microsoft.com - nobody'd believe that:-)
Aside from being aesthetically pleasing, the plaintext posting was important to keep the text from getting slashmunged. In my other posting, I'd put in an unquoted joke about
<- 451 Slashdotted, try again later
and it was interpreted as a broken piece of HTML and deleted:-)
Open Relays are a problem for greylisting, because most of them are correct SMTP implementations (so they know how to retry) that are administered badly (so they're left with relaying on by default.) Obviously that's an interesting combination with Open-Relay Blacklists.
But Virus/Trojan Relays are a lower risk, because they're less likely to implement a full-scale correct SMTP, especially because spammers know that large numbers of their addresses will be bogus. Much more likely that they simply try relaying once, though if they do report success/failure back to the spammer's master machine, perhaps the spammer can try again.
Virus proxies could be more of a risk, if they're giving their users full capabilities to pass packets across - does anybody know how much of this kind of malware is relay vs. proxy?
It's an earlier adaptation. coolgeek pointed to Thom Hartmann's books, which make the analogy of ADHD as being a useful trait for hunter-gatherers, as opposed to farmers for whom it's not so useful. And then in between there were factory workers, which is a lot of what the "everybody sit in rows and do the same things at the same time" style of schools are really good for. Offices, TVs, and Cars are a couple of social revolutions after that:-) (But hey, some video games work well for ADHD kids.)
A friend of mine had something like that
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
He got along better with his mother, but school was still boring and sucked, and he was brighter than the teachers. Ritalin was the upcoming new thing then (before it had really taken over), and they made him take it. He could concentrate a bit better, but he didn't like people drugging him to change his personality. After about a week he'd figured out most of the effects it was having, so he decided that he was going to be himself and act like himself, not like a conforming drugged-out little zombie. So he did. "They" didn't like it that the drugs had stopped controlling him, but since he wasn't going to cooperate, they stopped drugging him.
I've had several friends who were manic-depressive or hypo-manic, and it sounds like problems people they knew had. One of them, and people they knew, found that self-medicating with marijuana or alcohol helped, but doctors were able to get them drugs that worked better with less side-effects. Even if yours is ADHD, if you're often doing stuff like that, yeah, stay on the meds, and if you're getting bored with it, see if you and your doctors can retune every once in a while.
I also had a cousin who was manic-depressive, who killed himself after going drinking one night. His wife wasn't manic-depressive, but she was using a lot of cocaine in those years, which is pretty good way to fake it if you're not:-) I didn't know him well; he was about 15 years older and lived on the other side of the country.
Owning Your Medication and Your Head
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's your head. When you were a kid, your parents felt responsible for you, and doctors and teachers felt smarter than you, and some of them wanted to help you or whatever, but unless you were a really rare kid or had really good parents, they were in control of the medical aspect and you mostly weren't. You're not a kid now, and you're as smart as your doctors, and though they know more about medicine, and can give you some outside perspective, they're not inside your head, and they don't have to live there, and you are and you do.
So if you want to try meds to help you get along better in life, work with the doctor on them, but remember that you're in charge, and if that's not how your doctor wants to work, get another doctor. If Ritalin isn't doing it for you, and something else might, you and your doctor can experiment. (And of course that's for most other kinds of medicine besides ADHD as well.) Maybe Wellbutrin works for you (some people absolutely hate it!), maybe Dexedrine or other traditional amphetamines do (my niece's doctor had her on Dex in high school), maybe caffeine and/or exercise breaks work better. (Remember how schools dealt with energetic kids before Ritalin? Recess twice a day plus gym class, and sometimes actually paying individual attention to the kids...)
The big caveat with a lot of these drugs is that they are messing with your head, and everybody's reaction is somewhat different. If you find yourself getting wacked out or strung out, it's time to get attention quickly, because taking mind-altering drugs that aren't a good match for you can really mess you up, and the reason you're taking them is to help you cope better, not worse. Lots of people I know do anti-depressants, and some do manic-depressive drugs, and sometimes they find that after a while life just sucks, or that it doesn't suck badly but it just isn't any fun either, or that everything's fine and normal most of the time with occasional interruptions of suicidal depression or psychotic anger, which is not something you want to leave alone...
... well, anyway, one somewhat movtivated gang of authors. The hardest part is probably finding somebody with Cisco hacking experience. At least the last couple of worms weren't that malicious - they got their 15 minutes of fame, but didn't wipe the disk drives of the machines they'd infected.
Yup. the obvious method for them to stop spam is to remove the spice, reconstitute it into the original pigs, and let it fly away, and that'll work just about as well as anything else that they'll propose.
There are a couple of standards for representing non-Roman character sets in email. If you don't read any languages that use them, you can set your spam filters to delete them. Ideally you can do that on your ISP's machine before they're delivered to you, but either way it blocks them.
As far as American-oriented products go, most of the spammers are perfectly happy to sell their porn or blue-pills-purporting-to-be-Viagra to anybody in the world as long as they get a working credit card number. The credit card and mortgage loan offers may not do you any good, but they're not really any good for us. And the Nigerians will be perfectly happy to use UK bank accounts to deliver the ill-gotten gains of their dear departed father General Abacha.
I fail to follow your assertion that, since regulation by people who do know what they're doing isn't working, regulation by people who don't know what they're doing can't be worse.... Governments have pretty consistently demonstrated their lack of understanding of what an "ISP" is, and the Home Office have certainly demonstrated their lack of respect for freedom of speech, anonymity, etc.
Any time governments regulate speech, it's risking censorship. Any time governments regulate technology they don't understand, they're even more likely to cause collateral damage than when they're regulating things they _do_ understand, and they've done a spectacularly bad job of that over the years. While your "at what cost" partially implies that that could be a problem, you're really not going far enough.
I agree that "would it be enforceable?" is an important question, or really a bunch of important questions, and I suspect that, to the extent that the regulations could potentially do something useful, the answer is "no". To the extent that regulations cause collateral damage, the answer is unfortunately "yes", though they would probably be enforced selectively, worsening the damage.
But "would the law work?" really is one of the critical questions - if it doesn't work, which it won't, you've still got the collateral damage, and you've still got the spam.
My own preference is to relax any restrictions on computer cracking when it's being used to stop spam. That's not harmless - Joe Job impersonations can be used to cover up crackers' activity - but it's at least emotionally satisfying:-)
Smoking vs. Eating vs. other delivery mechanisms
on
Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 1
Disclaimer: The statute of limitations is your friend. All these events happened a long, long time ago.:-)
Different ingestion methods affect different people differently. I've found that smoking marijuana hits me at the right pace, and gives me some control over the effects. Eating brownies, on the other hand, doesn't do anything. At all. For an hour or so. At which point I need to sit down while I still remember which way down is and what sitting is for. I missed the middle of a couple of Grateful Dead shows before deciding that wasn't for me. Also, smoking is much less nasty if you're smoking small quantities of high-THC buds as opposed to large quantities of low-THC leaves, and if you use something to cool the smoke instead of those little tiny pipes.
Even longer ago, an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends decided to experiment on the effects of delivery mechanisms with another drug. Reasoning that with opium, cocaine, and cannabis, the effects of the drug are much different between ingesting the raw plant form or the chemically refined powder or smoking the refined powder, they wondered about the effects of smoking caffeine. So they crunched up some No-Doz and smoked it. Do not do this.... My friend said that all the bad things that caffeine normally does to you happened very quickly - headaches, jitters, nausea, speediness - and that it was a highly unpleasant experience.
The level of integration in Outlook still has you click on a box to accept/tentative/decline a meeting announcement. That works just as well whether it's in your message as URLs or at the top in the munged-header section.
Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
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Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The best legal uses for hemp included smoking the flowers - that requires fixing the laws to match the US Constitution, rather than doing anything technical with the hemp:-) After all, the original copies of the Constitution seem to have stuck around long after anybody in government bothered to read the words on them. Other useful things to do are making hemp cloth, paper, rope, edible seeds, etc. However, I've found that hemp papers sometimes curl a bit too much in laser printers to work very well (or at least, they're not very useful for printing double-sided, because they don't flatten out as well for printing the back side.)
However, using hemp rolling papers won't affect the THC content of your smoke, because it's got pretty close to none in it. The paper is made from those stems you didn't need, and it's made from hemp plants that were bred for big fibrous stems, not big tasty buds or leaves. As the label for one brand of hemp-based clothing says "Sorry, but you can't smoke your shirt."
It's possible that using hemp rolling papers will make the contents burn faster or slower or hotter or less hot than dead-tree papers, but you really ought to be smoking from a bong or some other device that'll cool the smoke and reduce lung irritation. However, selling devices that improve public health by reducing the harm caused by illegal substances is illegal in many states, so you're not allowed to print out this message on hemp-based paper with soy-based ink to roll joints in.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't mean they're all in the same 10.* network (they're not - one major point of NAT is that you don't need to expose your internal addresses to the outside world), or that you're funnelling all of China through one NAT box, or that you're even funnelling 2**16 users through one NAT box (depends on how much horsepower it's got.) The "collapse under load" question is really about how many users you can put behind one NAT box, because it's difficult to use a given real-side IP address on more than one NAT box without either major ugliness (like double-NAT) or really serious cleverness. If you can handle 256 users (with however many open ports they've each got) you've won. If you can only handle 16 users, then APNIC needs to haggle a few more Class As to cover everybody in China and India, but it's still managable, and by the time any appreciable fraction of those countries can afford broadband at home, handling lots of users on NAT will have moved from being a PC's job to being a small appliance's job, just as home NAT is today.
The big difference between doing this with IPv6 vs. RFC1918 on the private side is that you really *could* use a unique address space with IPv6 instead of duplication, which does have some advantages, and can let you use tunnelling instead of NAT.
The big difference between the 6-over-4 tunnelling world and RFC1918-tunnelled is that you _can_ interconnect different IPv6 islands into one big archipelago, if you're willing to run security methods that aren't bothered by this. And some ISPs are supporting this for IPv6 users to meet each other, as well as running it native. So if you're trying to talk to another IPv6 destination that's in the same archipelago, you can do it natively without NAT in the way, but if you're trying to talk to Native IPv4 users who don't also run compatible 6-over-4 tunnels, you're still using NAT or some kind of IPv4 in addition to your IPv6.
Ths difference between business and dial and broadband home users is really critical here. Business users don't need a lot of IP address space - they're almost always behind firewalls, so a /29 group with 8 IP addresses can handle an office with thousands of people, using 1 address with NAT or proxy firewalls to initiate connections to the outside, and maybe another one or two for server DMZs. The only time most non-ISP businesses need more than that (per location) is if they're trying to do dual-homed access to multiple ISPs, which tends to need a /24 or sometimes a /20.
Dial users usually need real addresses, but they typically aren't full-time - industry ratios used to be about 10 users per modem, so you also get a lot of address concentration. That may be a bit different now that more people are using the web rather than email as their big application, but it can still handle a lot of users per address.
The big problem will be broadband home computers, because they need real IP addresses fulltime. For most users, 1 address is enough, whether it's static or dynamic, and some of these users can be bullied into using ISP NAT instead of real internet connectivity. (That's particularly likely in China, because of the Great Firewall of China censorship proxy stuff, and just switching to an IPv6-nat-IPv4 isn't enough to fix that.) There's more likely to be a lot of IP demand from Japan and Korea because of this - they've got enough money that a large fraction of households can afford computers or game consoles, and enough of the population is in concentrated urban centers where broadband is cost-effective.
Then there's the whole network-capable cellphone business. The early stuff didn't have problems with IP addresses, because most of it was proprietary walled-garden WAP stuff, so you were going to need to use a gateway to connect to the real world anyway. Some of the newer standards are supposed to provide real IP capabilities, and I suppose that if enough people actually buy them for the phone companies to make back some of the billions of dollars they've wasted on 3G upgrades and spectrum auctions, maybe it'll be a problem, but as a disgruntled stockholder of a wireless company, I don't see that happening soon :-(. In practice, I suspect that'll mostly be a NAT or IPv6 world, and it'll be the Japanese wireless folks who push us to using real IPv6.
Of course, now that I've said that, I think my DSL line actually _is_ giving me 4 static IP addresses out of a bigger block that's managed by some router, but it's been long enough since I looked that I'm not too sure.
You can borrow IP addresses, but you can't borrow - the RIAA will hand you your ass.
- Some people are playing it on their PCs or iPods and can use high-bandwidth formats, so they want near-original quality.
- Some people are playing on their pocket MP3 players, so they want 128kbps or even 64kbps, and they want to use the best encoder they can to make it. Other people will use whatever encoder they happen to find lying around free.
- Some people want OGGs. Better to make them from the original, not from an MP3.
- Some people have Brand X Portable Music Players which have Brand X Really Tight Coding, but they need originals to encode from; converting a 128kbps-coded-badly MP3 or even 128-kbps-coded-well into 64kbps BrandX isn't going to be anywhere near as good as compressing raw bits, because the lossy coders have different models of what kind of audio damage is supposedly "imperceptable".
If people are redistributing compressed formats, there'll be multiples of them floating around, and it'll be hard to know which 128kbps format was from which encoder, and different people will distribute multiple formats, and you'll end up with almost as much data being passed around and lots more indexing. Might as well just use the lossless formats.But the big floating-point applications that NSA has are likely to be signal-processors like Echelon which are trolling for voice signals and such, which is a good match for large numbers of scalar processors. How tightly they're integrated depends on the conveniences of signal collection, which is beyond my ability to speculate credibly :-)
Also, Windows wants to run on something that looks at least *vaguely* like a PC. Some of these supercomputers look like PCs with odd network peripherals underneath them, some look like clusters of multi-processor shared-memory PCs (sometimes with too many processors for Windows) with a communications layer between clusters. Some of these work ok for Windows (SETI, for instance), while others are too different.
Also, the communications patterns between nodes and between common applications programs are highly critical here. The tighter the coupling, and the finer-grained the parallelism, the harder it is to fit into whatever framework the operating system provides. Loosely-coupled systems can work just fine on Microsoft; very-tightly-coupled systems need more hacking. And a large part of the Windows plaform is really focused on desktop graphics applications, which simply aren't relevant for supercomputers. (There are people doing clusters with game consoles, such as the Sony Playstation, but that's because they want to use the fast parallel CPU in the graphics engine, not the boring CPU.)
He'd be happy to make money customizing it for people...
For most other email business applications, the first contact isn't all that time-critical - you might not even be in the same timezone or working at the same time - and most of the exceptions are knowable in advance, e.g. email to abuse@ and support@ where you'd obviously turn off greylisting.
There are exceptions - you're on the road using dialup, or you're having a conference call and somebody needs to send some document you're working on. They may be annoying enough that you wouldn't use it, but for most companies, many of the companies you'd be in that situation with are Usual Suspects that you'd whitelist anyway. And besides, your email staff can do it in all the free time they have because your spam got reduced by a few percent :-) Yeah, ok, this also means there'd be increased forgery of email purporting to be from corporate sites, but really, who'd send out email claiming to be from support@microsoft.com - nobody'd believe that :-)
In my other posting, I'd put in an unquoted joke about and it was interpreted as a broken piece of HTML and deleted
(Sorry, but it was _such_ an obvious parallel...)
But Virus/Trojan Relays are a lower risk, because they're less likely to implement a full-scale correct SMTP, especially because spammers know that large numbers of their addresses will be bogus. Much more likely that they simply try relaying once, though if they do report success/failure back to the spammer's master machine, perhaps the spammer can try again.
Virus proxies could be more of a risk, if they're giving their users full capabilities to pass packets across - does anybody know how much of this kind of malware is relay vs. proxy?
It's an earlier adaptation. :-) (But hey, some video games work well for ADHD kids.)
coolgeek pointed to Thom Hartmann's books, which make the analogy of ADHD as being a useful trait for hunter-gatherers, as opposed to farmers for whom it's not so useful. And then in between there were factory workers, which is a lot of what the "everybody sit in rows and do the same things at the same time" style of schools are really good for. Offices, TVs, and Cars are a couple of social revolutions after that
He got along better with his mother, but school was still boring and sucked, and he was brighter than the teachers. Ritalin was the upcoming new thing then (before it had really taken over), and they made him take it. He could concentrate a bit better, but he didn't like people drugging him to change his personality. After about a week he'd figured out most of the effects it was having, so he decided that he was going to be himself and act like himself, not like a conforming drugged-out little zombie. So he did. "They" didn't like it that the drugs had stopped controlling him, but since he wasn't going to cooperate, they stopped drugging him.
I also had a cousin who was manic-depressive, who killed himself after going drinking one night. His wife wasn't manic-depressive, but she was using a lot of cocaine in those years, which is pretty good way to fake it if you're not :-) I didn't know him well; he was about 15 years older and lived on the other side of the country.
So if you want to try meds to help you get along better in life, work with the doctor on them, but remember that you're in charge, and if that's not how your doctor wants to work, get another doctor. If Ritalin isn't doing it for you, and something else might, you and your doctor can experiment. (And of course that's for most other kinds of medicine besides ADHD as well.) Maybe Wellbutrin works for you (some people absolutely hate it!), maybe Dexedrine or other traditional amphetamines do (my niece's doctor had her on Dex in high school), maybe caffeine and/or exercise breaks work better. (Remember how schools dealt with energetic kids before Ritalin? Recess twice a day plus gym class, and sometimes actually paying individual attention to the kids...)
The big caveat with a lot of these drugs is that they are messing with your head, and everybody's reaction is somewhat different. If you find yourself getting wacked out or strung out, it's time to get attention quickly, because taking mind-altering drugs that aren't a good match for you can really mess you up, and the reason you're taking them is to help you cope better, not worse. Lots of people I know do anti-depressants, and some do manic-depressive drugs, and sometimes they find that after a while life just sucks, or that it doesn't suck badly but it just isn't any fun either, or that everything's fine and normal most of the time with occasional interruptions of suicidal depression or psychotic anger, which is not something you want to leave alone...
... well, anyway, one somewhat movtivated gang of authors. The hardest part is probably finding somebody with Cisco hacking experience. At least the last couple of worms weren't that malicious - they got their 15 minutes of fame, but didn't wipe the disk drives of the machines they'd infected.
Yup. the obvious method for them to stop spam is to remove the spice, reconstitute it into the original pigs, and let it fly away, and that'll work just about as well as anything else that they'll propose.
As far as American-oriented products go, most of the spammers are perfectly happy to sell their porn or blue-pills-purporting-to-be-Viagra to anybody in the world as long as they get a working credit card number. The credit card and mortgage loan offers may not do you any good, but they're not really any good for us. And the Nigerians will be perfectly happy to use UK bank accounts to deliver the ill-gotten gains of their dear departed father General Abacha.
Any time governments regulate speech, it's risking censorship. Any time governments regulate technology they don't understand, they're even more likely to cause collateral damage than when they're regulating things they _do_ understand, and they've done a spectacularly bad job of that over the years. While your "at what cost" partially implies that that could be a problem, you're really not going far enough.
I agree that "would it be enforceable?" is an important question, or really a bunch of important questions, and I suspect that, to the extent that the regulations could potentially do something useful, the answer is "no". To the extent that regulations cause collateral damage, the answer is unfortunately "yes", though they would probably be enforced selectively, worsening the damage.
But "would the law work?" really is one of the critical questions - if it doesn't work, which it won't, you've still got the collateral damage, and you've still got the spam.
My own preference is to relax any restrictions on computer cracking when it's being used to stop spam. That's not harmless - Joe Job impersonations can be used to cover up crackers' activity - but it's at least emotionally satisfying :-)
Different ingestion methods affect different people differently. I've found that smoking marijuana hits me at the right pace, and gives me some control over the effects. Eating brownies, on the other hand, doesn't do anything. At all. For an hour or so. At which point I need to sit down while I still remember which way down is and what sitting is for. I missed the middle of a couple of Grateful Dead shows before deciding that wasn't for me. Also, smoking is much less nasty if you're smoking small quantities of high-THC buds as opposed to large quantities of low-THC leaves, and if you use something to cool the smoke instead of those little tiny pipes.
Even longer ago, an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends decided to experiment on the effects of delivery mechanisms with another drug. Reasoning that with opium, cocaine, and cannabis, the effects of the drug are much different between ingesting the raw plant form or the chemically refined powder or smoking the refined powder, they wondered about the effects of smoking caffeine. So they crunched up some No-Doz and smoked it. Do not do this.... My friend said that all the bad things that caffeine normally does to you happened very quickly - headaches, jitters, nausea, speediness - and that it was a highly unpleasant experience.
The level of integration in Outlook still has you click on a box to accept/tentative/decline a meeting announcement. That works just as well whether it's in your message as URLs or at the top in the munged-header section.
However, using hemp rolling papers won't affect the THC content of your smoke, because it's got pretty close to none in it. The paper is made from those stems you didn't need, and it's made from hemp plants that were bred for big fibrous stems, not big tasty buds or leaves. As the label for one brand of hemp-based clothing says "Sorry, but you can't smoke your shirt."
It's possible that using hemp rolling papers will make the contents burn faster or slower or hotter or less hot than dead-tree papers, but you really ought to be smoking from a bong or some other device that'll cool the smoke and reduce lung irritation. However, selling devices that improve public health by reducing the harm caused by illegal substances is illegal in many states, so you're not allowed to print out this message on hemp-based paper with soy-based ink to roll joints in.