Yes. It is safe. We don't refrain from crossing the road on the basis that it's dangerous, after all, and the risk of being killed by a modern nuclear power plant is several orders of magnitude less than the risk of being killed by a road traffic accident.
Just because the laws on Marijuana are poorly thought out, ineffective, and unnecessary doesn't mean that all drug laws are.
Prohibition is necessary in the case of hard drugs. Its true that we need to attack it from all angles, but legalization and taxation of most of the illegal drugs would be a societal disaster the scale of which we have never seen.
Alcohol and tobacco are legalised and taxed. If neither of them are hard drugs, I don't know what is.
Before we prohibited heroin in this country (UK), there were only about 500 addicts in the whole country, and they could still live their lives with a reasonable amount of normality. Prohibition came, and now 50,000 risk death from adulterated doses of uncertain strength and are forced by prohibitionists to steal or sell themselves to pay black-market prices.
Well, treating people who make, sell or use unpopular recreational drugs completely differently to the way you treat people who make, sell or use popular recreational drugs like alcohol, caffeine or tobacco, and trying to put them in prison just because they are scarily unfamiliar and there aren't enough of them to defend themselves is actually pretty evil.
A useful mental exercise on the topic of drugs. Imagine if the coca leaf had been known to the native Americans in North America, becoming part of their traditions, and the tobacco leaf had only been found in the south of the continent...
Well, I take alcohol because a little bit makes me outgoing. But I don't think stopping me from wanting to be friendly is the answer. Indeed I don't think my drug-taking is a problem in the first place.
It's impossible to understand the drugs issue while you use the word 'drug' to refer only to substances which aren't sufficiently mainstream to remain legal. The notion that there's some sort of fundamental difference between popular drugs and drugs only taken by a small minority, to the point that the latter need group needs a special name, is the poison which is at the root of this worldwide system of state-sponsored discrimination against people just for being different. So part of the solution is to use words in a fair and accurate manner.
The difference is that a 500GB hard disk is unambiguously better than a 10GB hard disk. While smartphones are passable portable computers, but pretty rubbish if you want a mobile telephone. I wouldn't give up my mobile phone for a smartphone even if the smartphone was cheaper.
The cheaper games are and the lower their budgets, the more risks can be taken. If the leading talents of the industry can make more interesting games because of this, I will welcome this development.
The tactics in use by various governments to pursue the rape allegations against Assange are politically motivated.
The rape allegations are true and Assange should be held to account.
It's pretty difficult for two statements like that to be simultaneously true. For it to be right to hold Assange to account, the allegations don't just need to be true (something which is unknowable), they need to be provable beyond reasonable doubt. If various powerful governments want your head and are prepared to use underhanded tactics in order to get it, it's very difficult to maintain that doubt is unreasonable.
My theory would be segregation. The vast majority of chess-players are male, generally. But despite the lack of any obvious reason why men and women shouldn't compete on equal terms, any female chess players who come along get shoved into girl's and then women's tournaments, which means that they don't get to play so much against the vast majority of chess talent, and they're not encouraged to aspire to be better than the world's best players. And strong competition and high aspirations are two important factors in sporting success.
A small talent pool in which to find champions can go quite far in explaining the lack of successful chess-playing women. Having to find rivals in that same small talent pool seems enough to explain the rest. Maybe, instead of generating "women's world chess champions" of no real credibility, the female chess world should ditch its attitude of inferiority, and look to its best player for inspiration.
Financial institutions are still one of the last places where we expect people to put some effort into their appearance. Even geeks like myself who cringe when they have to put on a tie tend to expect the people dealing with our savings to look the part.
Well, if someone's wearing a tie, the part they look to me is the part of 'swindler' or 'con-man'. Someone who's genuinely honest and professional may end up wearing anything. Someone who's pretending to be honest and professional to mask a less attractive nature will always put plenty of effort into appearance.
Even switching to 512-bit keys is probably an overreaction. AES keys go up to 256-bit mostly to provide safety against these theoretical quantum attacks. Federal standards are only now trying to phase 80-bit equivalent algorithms out of new products, (even though they're still a long way away from being breakable), and while AES-128 isn't considered good enough to protect top secret information, only secret, AES-192 is considered fine for top secret info. Excluding AES-128 is generally seen as an insurance measure against quantum computers.
Several years ago, I was lamenting the almost complete lack of anything worth watching on television. But since I starting watching anime, I've never really been lacking something new and interesting to try. Since most shows run 12-26 episodes and then stop, you don't get problems with things being cancelled half-way through, and while there's a strong studio system, the studios are small, and make most of their money from fans rather than the general public, (plus sourcing many of their stories from one-man or two-man productions), there are plenty of new ideas and experimentation. Even just in terms of the use of moving pictures to convey mood and emotion within the context of a story, the industry has probably advanced beyond what is possible within the limits of live-action in the past decade and a half.
It doesn't make much sense to me to scrabble for scraps of new telefantasy purely within the output of Western TV, where finding anything is rare, and finding something which isn't just a remake or a re-imagining of a decades-old idea is almost impossible, when there are tens of new telefantasy shows being made every year in Japan, and acquisition is no longer a challenge.
and although digital library books (which also aren't supported by the Kindle AFAIK) do come with DRM, I consider the enforcement of a short term, free loan to be a reasonably valid use.
Indeed, since the primary problem with DRM, and the reason why most instances of it are or should be illegal, is that any arrangement involving DRM can only ever be a type of loan, but many companies fraudulently claim to be 'selling' encumbered works, without turning over the full control over the item 'sold' that must be conceded in any purchase.
I don't know if backscatter is optimal for the purpose, but I know it's more effective than taking no action.
Suppose it turns out that these X-rays (which have never been tested on humans for any length of time before) kill more people than terrorists ever could. Should you call it 'more effective' even then?
What's interesting is the question of whether this was inevitable, or whether he could have been a genuine backer of freedom if he didn't have to defend himself against most of the capitalist world.
The West's habit of trying to destroy any system of strong socialism, resulting in a "fight mode" becoming inevitable, makes it impossible to assess the true practicality of it.
If you're only concerned about accidental corruption, you should use a CRC, which will be much faster than a cryptographic hash. Spending a load of extra CPU time on acquiring good cryptographic properties is silly if you're not interested in any cryptographic properties.
Bullshit, it gives the creator the right (and more importantly the ability) to make money from his own work.
Even within your own claim, you almost admit to being wrong by highlighting 'ability'. It may in any given case confer the ability to make money. The frequency of this is a matter of debate, certainly it is not unknown for creators to make money from their creations without exerting the power of copyright. But the right to make money from your creations is always there irrespective of copyright. If copyright was abolished, this wouldn't mean any sort of civil or criminal sanctions being taken against people trying to sell instances of work they had created. It would merely change the environment in which they exercised this right. (Whether it would make this easier or more difficult is not easy to predict and will probably depend on the nature of the work.) In a world without copyright, creators would still be free to do engage in all of the moneymaking activities which they currently do with their works.
If you think that copyright is a right just because it's called 'copyright', then you've fallen victim to one of the most elementary forms of deception; doublespeak. Rights allow you to do things. Copyright does not change what the creator can do, it limits what everyone else can do. Copyright is a form of power, it does not give the creator rights, it just takes away rights from everyone else.
What's frustrating in the case of abandoned works is that this power gets exerted to take away everyone's rights by default, in the case of disinterest. If someone doesn't care about one of their powers any more, shouldn't we assume they have no interest in taking away people's rights with it?
By the time you've got to 300 houses, 667 is probably opposite 592 or 810 or something. I once lived on a road on which about 26 was opposite about 219, because the even side had large things on and the odd side only had houses.
Personally I *hate* all that mixed character crap and only use lower-case characters, so I don't have to hit Shift or otherwise contort my fingers.
And additionally, if you've trained yourself to be really good at remembering, say, lists of words, or have a good scheme for generating such lists in a repeatable fashion from some secret, and some application rejects your "flab nail sandwich under fixing splats time" password because it doesn't have a number in it, the chances of you writing down whatever awkward password you now have to remember and sticking it on your monitor are considerably increased.
Password systems should work with users to make it as easy as possible for them to create passwords which are hard to guess, but they find easy to recall. The only acceptable way to reject passwords as too weak is by running some entropy-assessment algorithm on them. That way the system can work just as well for string-of-words guy, and can-remember-things-like-e47%TeGGz1#~? man.
I mean leading a clean life is always best and that counts the legal ones. You are better off not to smoke tobacco, or marijuana or anything. However there's a big difference between those and things like meth and heroin.
Actually, tobacco is far more dangerous than heroin would be if it were legal. Before prohibition, addiction to heroin wasn't much more than a nuisance, while tobacco was merrily killing people just like it does today. The big dangers of heroin are all caused by prohibition - unreliable dosages causing accidental overdoses, insane black-market prices causing crime and needle-use (so as to get the desired effect with as small an amount as possible), and cutting with toxic substances doing all sorts of things. The worst side-effect of addiction, if it were accepted the way the drugs everyone uses are accepted, would be constipation.
Crystal meth is the only significant drug which clearly beats alcohol and tobacco for dangers inherent to the drug itself, rather than the dangers you'll incur due to the bigots who'll hate and fear you for making choices which aren't sufficiently normal.
They're not a single cohesive group. Some do stand up for their customers, and oppose things like the Digital Economy Act, some just want to sell them out. It's not surprising to find one owned by Rupert Murdoch being of the latter persuasion.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. It is safe. We don't refrain from crossing the road on the basis that it's dangerous, after all, and the risk of being killed by a modern nuclear power plant is several orders of magnitude less than the risk of being killed by a road traffic accident.
Just because the laws on Marijuana are poorly thought out, ineffective, and unnecessary doesn't mean that all drug laws are.
Prohibition is necessary in the case of hard drugs. Its true that we need to attack it from all angles, but legalization and taxation of most of the illegal drugs would be a societal disaster the scale of which we have never seen.
Alcohol and tobacco are legalised and taxed. If neither of them are hard drugs, I don't know what is.
Before we prohibited heroin in this country (UK), there were only about 500 addicts in the whole country, and they could still live their lives with a reasonable amount of normality. Prohibition came, and now 50,000 risk death from adulterated doses of uncertain strength and are forced by prohibitionists to steal or sell themselves to pay black-market prices.
I'd like the societal disaster back.
Well, treating people who make, sell or use unpopular recreational drugs completely differently to the way you treat people who make, sell or use popular recreational drugs like alcohol, caffeine or tobacco, and trying to put them in prison just because they are scarily unfamiliar and there aren't enough of them to defend themselves is actually pretty evil.
A useful mental exercise on the topic of drugs. Imagine if the coca leaf had been known to the native Americans in North America, becoming part of their traditions, and the tobacco leaf had only been found in the south of the continent...
Well, I take alcohol because a little bit makes me outgoing. But I don't think stopping me from wanting to be friendly is the answer. Indeed I don't think my drug-taking is a problem in the first place.
It's impossible to understand the drugs issue while you use the word 'drug' to refer only to substances which aren't sufficiently mainstream to remain legal. The notion that there's some sort of fundamental difference between popular drugs and drugs only taken by a small minority, to the point that the latter need group needs a special name, is the poison which is at the root of this worldwide system of state-sponsored discrimination against people just for being different. So part of the solution is to use words in a fair and accurate manner.
The difference is that a 500GB hard disk is unambiguously better than a 10GB hard disk. While smartphones are passable portable computers, but pretty rubbish if you want a mobile telephone. I wouldn't give up my mobile phone for a smartphone even if the smartphone was cheaper.
The cheaper games are and the lower their budgets, the more risks can be taken. If the leading talents of the industry can make more interesting games because of this, I will welcome this development.
It's pretty difficult for two statements like that to be simultaneously true. For it to be right to hold Assange to account, the allegations don't just need to be true (something which is unknowable), they need to be provable beyond reasonable doubt. If various powerful governments want your head and are prepared to use underhanded tactics in order to get it, it's very difficult to maintain that doubt is unreasonable.
My theory would be segregation. The vast majority of chess-players are male, generally. But despite the lack of any obvious reason why men and women shouldn't compete on equal terms, any female chess players who come along get shoved into girl's and then women's tournaments, which means that they don't get to play so much against the vast majority of chess talent, and they're not encouraged to aspire to be better than the world's best players. And strong competition and high aspirations are two important factors in sporting success.
A small talent pool in which to find champions can go quite far in explaining the lack of successful chess-playing women. Having to find rivals in that same small talent pool seems enough to explain the rest. Maybe, instead of generating "women's world chess champions" of no real credibility, the female chess world should ditch its attitude of inferiority, and look to its best player for inspiration.
Well, if someone's wearing a tie, the part they look to me is the part of 'swindler' or 'con-man'. Someone who's genuinely honest and professional may end up wearing anything. Someone who's pretending to be honest and professional to mask a less attractive nature will always put plenty of effort into appearance.
Even switching to 512-bit keys is probably an overreaction. AES keys go up to 256-bit mostly to provide safety against these theoretical quantum attacks. Federal standards are only now trying to phase 80-bit equivalent algorithms out of new products, (even though they're still a long way away from being breakable), and while AES-128 isn't considered good enough to protect top secret information, only secret, AES-192 is considered fine for top secret info. Excluding AES-128 is generally seen as an insurance measure against quantum computers.
Several years ago, I was lamenting the almost complete lack of anything worth watching on television. But since I starting watching anime, I've never really been lacking something new and interesting to try. Since most shows run 12-26 episodes and then stop, you don't get problems with things being cancelled half-way through, and while there's a strong studio system, the studios are small, and make most of their money from fans rather than the general public, (plus sourcing many of their stories from one-man or two-man productions), there are plenty of new ideas and experimentation. Even just in terms of the use of moving pictures to convey mood and emotion within the context of a story, the industry has probably advanced beyond what is possible within the limits of live-action in the past decade and a half.
It doesn't make much sense to me to scrabble for scraps of new telefantasy purely within the output of Western TV, where finding anything is rare, and finding something which isn't just a remake or a re-imagining of a decades-old idea is almost impossible, when there are tens of new telefantasy shows being made every year in Japan, and acquisition is no longer a challenge.
Indeed, since the primary problem with DRM, and the reason why most instances of it are or should be illegal, is that any arrangement involving DRM can only ever be a type of loan, but many companies fraudulently claim to be 'selling' encumbered works, without turning over the full control over the item 'sold' that must be conceded in any purchase.
Suppose it turns out that these X-rays (which have never been tested on humans for any length of time before) kill more people than terrorists ever could. Should you call it 'more effective' even then?
What's interesting is the question of whether this was inevitable, or whether he could have been a genuine backer of freedom if he didn't have to defend himself against most of the capitalist world.
The West's habit of trying to destroy any system of strong socialism, resulting in a "fight mode" becoming inevitable, makes it impossible to assess the true practicality of it.
If you're only concerned about accidental corruption, you should use a CRC, which will be much faster than a cryptographic hash. Spending a load of extra CPU time on acquiring good cryptographic properties is silly if you're not interested in any cryptographic properties.
Even within your own claim, you almost admit to being wrong by highlighting 'ability'. It may in any given case confer the ability to make money. The frequency of this is a matter of debate, certainly it is not unknown for creators to make money from their creations without exerting the power of copyright. But the right to make money from your creations is always there irrespective of copyright. If copyright was abolished, this wouldn't mean any sort of civil or criminal sanctions being taken against people trying to sell instances of work they had created. It would merely change the environment in which they exercised this right. (Whether it would make this easier or more difficult is not easy to predict and will probably depend on the nature of the work.) In a world without copyright, creators would still be free to do engage in all of the moneymaking activities which they currently do with their works.
If you think that copyright is a right just because it's called 'copyright', then you've fallen victim to one of the most elementary forms of deception; doublespeak. Rights allow you to do things. Copyright does not change what the creator can do, it limits what everyone else can do. Copyright is a form of power, it does not give the creator rights, it just takes away rights from everyone else.
What's frustrating in the case of abandoned works is that this power gets exerted to take away everyone's rights by default, in the case of disinterest. If someone doesn't care about one of their powers any more, shouldn't we assume they have no interest in taking away people's rights with it?
By the time you've got to 300 houses, 667 is probably opposite 592 or 810 or something. I once lived on a road on which about 26 was opposite about 219, because the even side had large things on and the odd side only had houses.
Personally I *hate* all that mixed character crap and only use lower-case characters, so I don't have to hit Shift or otherwise contort my fingers.
And additionally, if you've trained yourself to be really good at remembering, say, lists of words, or have a good scheme for generating such lists in a repeatable fashion from some secret, and some application rejects your "flab nail sandwich under fixing splats time" password because it doesn't have a number in it, the chances of you writing down whatever awkward password you now have to remember and sticking it on your monitor are considerably increased.
Password systems should work with users to make it as easy as possible for them to create passwords which are hard to guess, but they find easy to recall. The only acceptable way to reject passwords as too weak is by running some entropy-assessment algorithm on them. That way the system can work just as well for string-of-words guy, and can-remember-things-like-e47%TeGGz1#~? man.
Anyone who tells you to follow all those rules simultaneously is not a security expert.
Expertise means not being ignorant of hugely important aspects of a field, such as cost-benefit analysis, or how users behave.
I'd start straight away with those criminals the justice system never touches; those who do things like ordering invasions of other countries.
Actually, tobacco is far more dangerous than heroin would be if it were legal. Before prohibition, addiction to heroin wasn't much more than a nuisance, while tobacco was merrily killing people just like it does today. The big dangers of heroin are all caused by prohibition - unreliable dosages causing accidental overdoses, insane black-market prices causing crime and needle-use (so as to get the desired effect with as small an amount as possible), and cutting with toxic substances doing all sorts of things. The worst side-effect of addiction, if it were accepted the way the drugs everyone uses are accepted, would be constipation.
Crystal meth is the only significant drug which clearly beats alcohol and tobacco for dangers inherent to the drug itself, rather than the dangers you'll incur due to the bigots who'll hate and fear you for making choices which aren't sufficiently normal.
Free speech is supposed to give all citizens equal rights to speak, not to help those with money to shout down those without.
They're not a single cohesive group. Some do stand up for their customers, and oppose things like the Digital Economy Act, some just want to sell them out. It's not surprising to find one owned by Rupert Murdoch being of the latter persuasion.