Well, most other illegal drugs really are illegal. Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline (except in peyote under appropriate religious supervision), MDMA... all much less harmful that the legal methamphetamine, for example.
Well $200B >= $670 for every man woman and child in the US at the time, so I'd expect a lot more than we got.
Your comment about the wire records systems is good, better than you probably know, in fact worth several books of mind-breakingly dull commentary.
Although it was in fact in a digital format, well several incompatible formats, actually, and didn't tell you much about the quality of wire, or even the length to better than +/-10%.
For the CO lines you had to run 1 Amdahl mainframe for every few hundred thousand lines - IBM wasn't IBM compatible enough for the 35+ year old software, and the Wang terminal emulator with really peculiar settings was a problem, and the passwords changing according to the lunar calendar was a bit odd, not to mention the need to know the two-letter wire center code for the old CO names that they used back when phone numbers were 4 digits...
None of that software got upgraded, either - just paved over for the nth time, and things sometimes would break under the paving. A thousand people have to know the ins and outs of every archaeological system layer to make it work in the US, and the telcos didn't even try to clean it up, but they did lay off most of the people who could run the whole spaghetti monster "by hand", so to speak,- better to leave a few lines broken than to fix it. After all, consumer data lines are just "best effort" which is regulatorese for "what ever you guys feel like doing".
Anyway, whatever they did with the money, it should have bought a lot more. They're quasi-governmental monopolies over a hundred years old. They know they can get away with just about anything -- no matter how much they steal, the politicians are never going to mess with them, .
Exactly - but he didn't go in as a mole, but to feed his family. Then, two years later he finds out that they're screwing him. He files suit. They fire him, and throw a tantrum, and smear him with lies in the press. They know that the information he saw is fatal to their case, so they're claiming that it was a trade secret that he wouldn't have been able to get in discovery. They will lose, but it'll be a decade before he sees anything but legal bills and in the meantime they'll continue to trash him so he can't work. They probably figure the deterrence effect (terrorism) is worth whatever it ends up costing them.
His preexisting patent rights should trump any separate and later contractual claims if MS appears to not have been acting in good faith. MS has no right to conceal evidence of its crimes or torts under any legal theory, AFAIK,IANAL.
... it is mind-bogglingly incredible and infuriating that they claim (to believe) that that he deceived them by his claim that his former employer was out of business. Couldn't they have called on business ID information, tax ID information, payroll records?
By MS standards, the company was never in business. The guy never even paid himself. I doubt that the company kept the meetings, minutes, fees, etc. up after he joined MS, so it was effectively out of business. The company had certainly ceased all operations, had no sales, no employees (the owner had quit doing work for the company). The details really don't matter much in all likelihood since he directly or indirectly owns the patent that MS infringed. He acted in good faith, MS didn't, he found out, now MS is throwing a tantrum that he found out. They should be trying to settle, but it's not really their style.
Perhaps in theory he should have just quit, filed suit and asked for discovery of the documents while looking for investors to pay the legal bills. But unless he disclosed MS information outside the company that he as a plaintiff wouldn't have been entitled to see in discovery, MS is toast.
You should read TFA - the information he "stole" was only that MS had defrauded him by using a patent he tried to get them to license before he started working there. He disclosed his prior interests and continuing property in writing before they hired him. He worked for MS for the salary, not illicit access. He would have had a right to the information in question through discovery anyway even if he hadn't worked at MS. MS should be scared - they're going to lose. But MS is a bully, they do this over and over when small companies come to them with patents. So they bluster, and they sue and sometimes they lose, as with Stacker, Eolas, and others, but they crush enough other honest folk that it seems like a good gamble to them - right has nothing to do with it.
Microsoft is basically suing this guy for finding out that they defrauded him. MS is going to lose this suit, and the countersuit could well cost them hundreds of millions.
You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowered to make smart decisions. It all turns into a giant charlie foxtrot, and that's even assuming you don't have some bad eggs intentionally swindling the operation.
With the telcos that CF is both the start and the finish. In between, to get anything done they will set up a department that can do everything, full of smart new hires with the authorization to whatever it takes to make things work. Then the larger system decides that this is a threat and the smart people are literally told to stop building and fixing things, six-sigma consultants are sent in, and the smart new people are fired to make room for the people in declining areas of business who have more seniority. It's all part of the cycles of, well not nature - but hierarch-ecology perhaps.
Our $200,000,000,000 mostly went to pointless meetings, extra layers of management, overpaying vendors who give kickbacks, lobbyists, new office buildings in already overbuilt cities, and, of course, buying nice things for telco executives' families.
Meanwhile there is still hardly any broadband in rural areas. The core network is still vast and empty, while the telcos still are trying to extort rents on the obsolete wires the taxpayers paid for decades ago.
What if we... got rid of districts and per-state representation entirely, at least in the House, and seated the top 435 vote-getters in a national election where voters would have to show that they knew the policies of the people for whom they were voting,
required the representatives to pass a test showing that they actually understood the import of the contents of each bill before voting,
enforceably prohibited legislative vote-trading,
required the whole body of statutes to be self-consistent,
required the whole body of law to be small enough to be knowable,
gave all voters standing to sue to strike down any vague or unconstitutional provisions,
federally funded legal representation in court so people to be able to actually enforce all their presently-theoretical rights,
rebuilt the judicial system to get decisions in days or weeks rather than years,
made judicial errors of all types practically and economically reviewable,
made lawyers ineligible for election to office or appointment to the bench (judge school separate from law school, as in civil law countries),
abolished sovereign immunity,
issued and enforced writs of mandamus on the basis of officials' obligation to uphold all laws at any citizen's request,
construed the Declaration of Independence, the preamble of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights together as the supreme substantive law; any law, interpretation, or application of government power which did not actually effect their stated goals would be stricken down, even if otherwise constitutional,
abolished corporate privileges and personhood,
made corporate charters subject to challenge and enforcement,
gave minors and persons under guardianship a standard way of proving their ability was equal to others afforded greater rights, and correcting that injustice,
made objective tests or demonstrations of learning substitute in all cases for legal requirements of schooling and degrees for issuing professional licenses,
reinstituted independent grand juries, private prosecution,
reinforced the right of juries to decide the law,
and required jurors to be knowledgeable and capable of critical thought?
"Many of the bonuses are contractually owed. If a person meets their contract they should be paid."
But companies, particularly phone companies, are essentially little communist kleptocracies managed by apparatchiks led by politburos who write themselves whatever contracts they like. Whatever regulations they like, for that matter. They also decide what the board resolutions will be and vote all the stock that wasn't voted by real shareholders (or more likely fellow-kleptocrat fund-managers).
CEO's and other executives are no better than congressmen, but they do get paid a lot more - even if you just count the tax dollars.
If shareholder votes determined company management or even board membership, you'd have a point. As it is,any shares not voted by stockholders are voted by the company management, and shares held through mutual funds and pensions are voted not by the beneficiaries/owners but by the fund managers. (That's in regular corporations - Google is worse - the founders' stock shares each have 10x the votes of the common shares.) Really stock is just an excuse for legal gambling, bank fees, and free money for top executives. Capitalization of productive industry in exchange for profitable public ownership is not at all the real purpose of stock - that's just what they tell the suckers.
The phone companies do not spend much on providing consumer- grade ($100/mo.) data service. In fact, they turn a profit on essentially every line. If they show you numbers that say otherwise, look for the accounting tricks, such as inflated equipment "costs" paid to essentially captive suppliers.
Phone companies are not in the business of providing service, though, even when there's a profit to be made. Phone company executives are the most short-sighted bureaucrats ever to feed at the government trough, the pointiest haired of the pointy-haired bosses. They have no interest in upgrading infrastructure, upgrading old technology like twisted pair lines, or even software-configuring existing lines in a way that would improve service unless they can charge more for it. It's a dog-in-the-manger attitude - any degree of increased benefit for customers must generate proportionally more revenue regardless of how little it costs the company to provide the service. If they wanted to compete, they wouldn't be in the ILEC business.
The farmer-in-east-nowhere argument is a red herring. Nearly everyone lives close enough to other people to make providing high-speed lines profitable, and the tiny percentage that are unprofitable are not that expensive. The real reason it doesn't happen is that the phone companies still think that they should get eternal rent on old phone lines that the taxpayers paid for decades ago, and are willing to do whatever it takes to hide their crimes and evade any real oversight.
Citation? FTL entanglement signaling has not been demonstrated even in theory, as far as I know, and I have been paying attention. The correlation between entangled bits cannot be detected without comparing them.
While it might seem like you should be able to tell whether a particle is still in a superposition or has collapsed, no one has made it work to carry information.
The OP seems satisfied with his life and finding that more stuff isn't the way forward anymore for him. For some reason you seem to find that threatening. Your post seems like pompous defensive bullshit to me. Smoke some pot or go hiking or meditate, but quit with the hating.
Cocaine is still legal, same schedule as the amphetamines they give to schoolkids. Opium is still legal - basically that's what paregoric is. The synthetic opioids like fentanyl are hundreds of times more powerful than opium, and they're legal too.
Alcohol as a legitimate industry was severely decimated by prohibition in 1937, and wasn't in much condition to field lobbyists.
Umm.. what? Prohibition was repealed in 1933. The market was huge - it never went away, just underground, and after repeal it came back into the light bigger than ever. By 1937 the beverage industry was certainly fielding lobbyists, and didn't want competition. The other industries mentioned had a bigger hand in cannabis prohibition, certainly, but it seems very likely that the brewers and distillers were in on it too, even if not as overtly.
See my post above. Industrial hemp was not the only type of cannabis in use.
Cannabis preparations with THC and CBD were in the USP from 1870 to 1941. Further, there was no need to have a prescription to get any drug in the U.S. until 1914 (Harrison act). All drugs, including heroin, cocaine and cannabis were available over the counter.
"What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp." - George Washington in a letter to his plantation manager
Indian hemp, or Cannabis indica did not have more or better fiber, but some indica strains had been bred over a long period for THC. The European C. Sativas of Washington's period had been bred exclusively for fiber.
Washington also had the female plants separated from the males, which is helpful mostly for getting drug-grade flowers.
So yes, there is an excellent chance that Washington used cannabis as a drug.
It was not listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP, official dispensable/prescribable pharmaceuticals list) until 1870, and it was not dropped until 1941.
The use of marijuana as a drug goes back far longer than that. Here's a recent discovery:
"An ancient Caucasian people, probably the Indo-European-speaking Yuezhi whose fair-haired mummies keep turning up in Xinjiang province, seem to have buried one of their shamans with a whopping 789 grams of high-potency pot 2,700 years ago.... The ancient Greek historian Herodotus relates how the Scythians, Iranian-speaking nomads who roamed the steppes to the west of the Yuezhi in the first millennium B.C., liked to throw marijuana onto bonfires to induce trancelike states. It's possible the buried shaman followed similar practices."
A few years ago I got an Tek 453A, the first all solid-state model of o'scope which had apparently been used in a coal or oil-fired power plant for over 30 years. After cleaning off all the soot inside and out, it was a beauty, with sinuous gold traces on the PCB, little sockets for the transistors (they didn't quite trust them at that point), hand-painted precision resistors... a work of art. See http://www.diyguitarist.com/TestEquipment/Tektronix453.htm [not my site] for pictures of the insides.
I used it for teaching electronics to a small group of 8-12 year-olds - when I opened the case an aroma of ozone and machine oil wafted out, and I'm sure that they'll remember that experience if they get a whiff of that electrical scent even when they're 90.
Unfortunately, when using the scope on the deck on a misty day with the kids, it started making zapping sounds and died. I still haven't gotten around to figuring out whether it was the caps or something else in the HV supply, but it's still the finest thing I own.
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Well, most other illegal drugs really are illegal. Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline (except in peyote under appropriate religious supervision), MDMA ... all much less harmful that the legal methamphetamine, for example.
Well $200B >= $670 for every man woman and child in the US at the time, so I'd expect a lot more than we got.
Your comment about the wire records systems is good, better than you probably know, in fact worth several books of mind-breakingly dull commentary.
Although it was in fact in a digital format, well several incompatible formats, actually, and didn't tell you much about the quality of wire, or even the length to better than +/-10%.
For the CO lines you had to run 1 Amdahl mainframe for every few hundred thousand lines - IBM wasn't IBM compatible enough for the 35+ year old software, and the Wang terminal emulator with really peculiar settings was a problem, and the passwords changing according to the lunar calendar was a bit odd, not to mention the need to know the two-letter wire center code for the old CO names that they used back when phone numbers were 4 digits...
None of that software got upgraded, either - just paved over for the nth time, and things sometimes would break under the paving. A thousand people have to know the ins and outs of every archaeological system layer to make it work in the US, and the telcos didn't even try to clean it up, but they did lay off most of the people who could run the whole spaghetti monster "by hand", so to speak,- better to leave a few lines broken than to fix it. After all, consumer data lines are just "best effort" which is regulatorese for "what ever you guys feel like doing".
Anyway, whatever they did with the money, it should have bought a lot more. They're quasi-governmental monopolies over a hundred years old. They know they can get away with just about anything -- no matter how much they steal, the politicians are never going to mess with them, .
"KILL THEM ALL - LET GOD SORT THEM OUT" was a fairly popular bumper sticker back when I was in Texas 20+ years ago.
God help us all if Texas ever gets nukes.
... I might be tempted to kill the person I thought did it. That does not mean I actually would. In fact, I certainly would not.
I certainly would say I would not whether or not I were... but of course I wouldn't. :-]
Exactly - but he didn't go in as a mole, but to feed his family. Then, two years later he finds out that they're screwing him. He files suit. They fire him, and throw a tantrum, and smear him with lies in the press. They know that the information he saw is fatal to their case, so they're claiming that it was a trade secret that he wouldn't have been able to get in discovery. They will lose, but it'll be a decade before he sees anything but legal bills and in the meantime they'll continue to trash him so he can't work. They probably figure the deterrence effect (terrorism) is worth whatever it ends up costing them.
His preexisting patent rights should trump any separate and later contractual claims if MS appears to not have been acting in good faith. MS has no right to conceal evidence of its crimes or torts under any legal theory, AFAIK,IANAL.
... it is mind-bogglingly incredible and infuriating that they claim (to believe) that that he deceived them by his claim that his former employer was out of business. Couldn't they have called on business ID information, tax ID information, payroll records?
By MS standards, the company was never in business. The guy never even paid himself. I doubt that the company kept the meetings, minutes, fees, etc. up after he joined MS, so it was effectively out of business. The company had certainly ceased all operations, had no sales, no employees (the owner had quit doing work for the company). The details really don't matter much in all likelihood since he directly or indirectly owns the patent that MS infringed. He acted in good faith, MS didn't, he found out, now MS is throwing a tantrum that he found out. They should be trying to settle, but it's not really their style.
Perhaps in theory he should have just quit, filed suit and asked for discovery of the documents while looking for investors to pay the legal bills. But unless he disclosed MS information outside the company that he as a plaintiff wouldn't have been entitled to see in discovery, MS is toast.
You should read TFA - the information he "stole" was only that MS had defrauded him by using a patent he tried to get them to license before he started working there. He disclosed his prior interests and continuing property in writing before they hired him. He worked for MS for the salary, not illicit access. He would have had a right to the information in question through discovery anyway even if he hadn't worked at MS. MS should be scared - they're going to lose. But MS is a bully, they do this over and over when small companies come to them with patents. So they bluster, and they sue and sometimes they lose, as with Stacker, Eolas, and others, but they crush enough other honest folk that it seems like a good gamble to them - right has nothing to do with it.
Microsoft is basically suing this guy for finding out that they defrauded him. MS is going to lose this suit, and the countersuit could well cost them hundreds of millions.
You run out of smart people and aren't able to be part of the hiring process. You also turn into a faceless entity, so the employees have very little stake in the success of the operation anymore and have zero loyalty. Everything has cost overruns and delays because nobody is around and empowered to make smart decisions. It all turns into a giant charlie foxtrot, and that's even assuming you don't have some bad eggs intentionally swindling the operation.
With the telcos that CF is both the start and the finish. In between, to get anything done they will set up a department that can do everything, full of smart new hires with the authorization to whatever it takes to make things work. Then the larger system decides that this is a threat and the smart people are literally told to stop building and fixing things, six-sigma consultants are sent in, and the smart new people are fired to make room for the people in declining areas of business who have more seniority. It's all part of the cycles of, well not nature - but hierarch-ecology perhaps.
Our $200,000,000,000 mostly went to pointless meetings, extra layers of management, overpaying vendors who give kickbacks, lobbyists, new office buildings in already overbuilt cities, and, of course, buying nice things for telco executives' families.
Meanwhile there is still hardly any broadband in rural areas. The core network is still vast and empty, while the telcos still are trying to extort rents on the obsolete wires the taxpayers paid for decades ago.
What if we ...
got rid of districts and per-state representation entirely, at least in the House, and seated the top 435 vote-getters in a national election where voters would have to show that they knew the policies of the people for whom they were voting,
required the representatives to pass a test showing that they actually understood the import of the contents of each bill before voting,
enforceably prohibited legislative vote-trading,
required the whole body of statutes to be self-consistent,
required the whole body of law to be small enough to be knowable,
gave all voters standing to sue to strike down any vague or unconstitutional provisions,
federally funded legal representation in court so people to be able to actually enforce all their presently-theoretical rights,
rebuilt the judicial system to get decisions in days or weeks rather than years,
made judicial errors of all types practically and economically reviewable,
made lawyers ineligible for election to office or appointment to the bench (judge school separate from law school, as in civil law countries),
abolished sovereign immunity,
issued and enforced writs of mandamus on the basis of officials' obligation to uphold all laws at any citizen's request,
construed the Declaration of Independence, the preamble of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights together as the supreme substantive law; any law, interpretation, or application of government power which did not actually effect their stated goals would be stricken down, even if otherwise constitutional,
abolished corporate privileges and personhood,
made corporate charters subject to challenge and enforcement,
gave minors and persons under guardianship a standard way of proving their ability was equal to others afforded greater rights, and correcting that injustice,
made objective tests or demonstrations of learning substitute in all cases for legal requirements of schooling and degrees for issuing professional licenses,
reinstituted independent grand juries, private prosecution,
reinforced the right of juries to decide the law,
and required jurors to be knowledgeable and capable of critical thought?
"Many of the bonuses are contractually owed. If a person meets their contract they should be paid."
But companies, particularly phone companies, are essentially little communist kleptocracies managed by apparatchiks led by politburos who write themselves whatever contracts they like. Whatever regulations they like, for that matter. They also decide what the board resolutions will be and vote all the stock that wasn't voted by real shareholders (or more likely fellow-kleptocrat fund-managers).
CEO's and other executives are no better than congressmen, but they do get paid a lot more - even if you just count the tax dollars.
If shareholder votes determined company management or even board membership, you'd have a point. As it is,any shares not voted by stockholders are voted by the company management, and shares held through mutual funds and pensions are voted not by the beneficiaries/owners but by the fund managers. (That's in regular corporations - Google is worse - the founders' stock shares each have 10x the votes of the common shares.) Really stock is just an excuse for legal gambling, bank fees, and free money for top executives. Capitalization of productive industry in exchange for profitable public ownership is not at all the real purpose of stock - that's just what they tell the suckers.
The phone companies do not spend much on providing consumer- grade ($100/mo.) data service. In fact, they turn a profit on essentially every line. If they show you numbers that say otherwise, look for the accounting tricks, such as inflated equipment "costs" paid to essentially captive suppliers.
Phone companies are not in the business of providing service, though, even when there's a profit to be made. Phone company executives are the most short-sighted bureaucrats ever to feed at the government trough, the pointiest haired of the pointy-haired bosses. They have no interest in upgrading infrastructure, upgrading old technology like twisted pair lines, or even software-configuring existing lines in a way that would improve service unless they can charge more for it. It's a dog-in-the-manger attitude - any degree of increased benefit for customers must generate proportionally more revenue regardless of how little it costs the company to provide the service. If they wanted to compete, they wouldn't be in the ILEC business.
The farmer-in-east-nowhere argument is a red herring. Nearly everyone lives close enough to other people to make providing high-speed lines profitable, and the tiny percentage that are unprofitable are not that expensive. The real reason it doesn't happen is that the phone companies still think that they should get eternal rent on old phone lines that the taxpayers paid for decades ago, and are willing to do whatever it takes to hide their crimes and evade any real oversight.
Citation? FTL entanglement signaling has not been demonstrated even in theory, as far as I know, and I have been paying attention. The correlation between entangled bits cannot be detected without comparing them.
While it might seem like you should be able to tell whether a particle is still in a superposition or has collapsed, no one has made it work to carry information.
Clearly this calls for a new open-source project to be called DAQuiri.
Oh, and lest we forget, Clinton also killed half a million Iraqi preschoolers with sanctions on water-treatment chemicals and equipment.
I think that figure must be for dried stalks.
The OP seems satisfied with his life and finding that more stuff isn't the way forward anymore for him. For some reason you seem to find that threatening. Your post seems like pompous defensive bullshit to me. Smoke some pot or go hiking or meditate, but quit with the hating.
Cocaine is still legal, same schedule as the amphetamines they give to schoolkids. Opium is still legal - basically that's what paregoric is. The synthetic opioids like fentanyl are hundreds of times more powerful than opium, and they're legal too.
Alcohol as a legitimate industry was severely decimated by prohibition in 1937, and wasn't in much condition to field lobbyists.
Umm.. what? Prohibition was repealed in 1933. The market was huge - it never went away, just underground, and after repeal it came back into the light bigger than ever. By 1937 the beverage industry was certainly fielding lobbyists, and didn't want competition. The other industries mentioned had a bigger hand in cannabis prohibition, certainly, but it seems very likely that the brewers and distillers were in on it too, even if not as overtly.
You are quite misinformed about history.
See my post above. Industrial hemp was not the only type of cannabis in use.
Cannabis preparations with THC and CBD were in the USP from 1870 to 1941. Further, there was no need to have a prescription to get any drug in the U.S. until 1914 (Harrison act). All drugs, including heroin, cocaine and cannabis were available over the counter.
"What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp." - George Washington in a letter to his plantation manager
Indian hemp, or Cannabis indica did not have more or better fiber, but some indica strains had been bred over a long period for THC. The European C. Sativas of Washington's period had been bred exclusively for fiber.
Washington also had the female plants separated from the males, which is helpful mostly for getting drug-grade flowers.
So yes, there is an excellent chance that Washington used cannabis as a drug.
It was not listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP, official dispensable/prescribable pharmaceuticals list) until 1870, and it was not dropped until 1941.
The use of marijuana as a drug goes back far longer than that. Here's a recent discovery:
"An ancient Caucasian people, probably the Indo-European-speaking Yuezhi whose fair-haired mummies keep turning up in Xinjiang province, seem to have buried one of their shamans with a whopping 789 grams of high-potency pot 2,700 years ago. ...
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus relates how the Scythians, Iranian-speaking nomads who roamed the steppes to the west of the Yuezhi in the first millennium B.C., liked to throw marijuana onto bonfires to induce trancelike states. It's possible the buried shaman followed similar practices."
A few years ago I got an Tek 453A, the first all solid-state model of o'scope which had apparently been used in a coal or oil-fired power plant for over 30 years. After cleaning off all the soot inside and out, it was a beauty, with sinuous gold traces on the PCB, little sockets for the transistors (they didn't quite trust them at that point), hand-painted precision resistors... a work of art. See http://www.diyguitarist.com/TestEquipment/Tektronix453.htm [not my site] for pictures of the insides.
I used it for teaching electronics to a small group of 8-12 year-olds - when I opened the case an aroma of ozone and machine oil wafted out, and I'm sure that they'll remember that experience if they get a whiff of that electrical scent even when they're 90.
Unfortunately, when using the scope on the deck on a misty day with the kids, it started making zapping sounds and died. I still haven't gotten around to figuring out whether it was the caps or something else in the HV supply, but it's still the finest thing I own.