Citation....desired. I really don't mean to be a dick, I am really curious to read more about this. I actually have a few tranny friends and find this pretty interesting. One of the people in their circle of friends actually found out, at somewhere around 40 years old, that desipite being outwardly born male, she actually had ovaries!
I always find this interesting because I tend to be a bit gender blind. I never really had this strong notion of basic mental differences and ability differences between men and women. As it turns out women I get along with well, including my own wife, tend to identify themselves as tomboys, but, I never really notice or think of them that way.
so it starts coming down to.... what causes these differences? The brain changes all the time based on what we do. You can find differences in brain connectivity just based on people's activities and lifestyles. So.... is it hormonal? (maybe not if the transgender thing translates to these connections), is it social? (women and men socialize in different groups that tend to do different things, and so, grow different types of connections?)
another interesting question is when and how this happens. If a transexual is more like their claimed sex than their outwardly visible one.... is that innate? or does that come from years of practice at trying to be the opposite sex?
One observation I have made is that.... well... I don't like young trannies, they annoy me. What annoys me, and this goes for both MTF and FTM is that (and I am generalizing) they tend to take on a characture of the gender they want to emulate. Some younger, less experienced FTMs tend towards being loud, overtly macho. Likewise MTFs tend towards well... acting like they learned to be a woman from watching Zsa Zsa Gabore (get off my lawn). You kinda get the idea they are overacting, faking it a bit. Its a vibe I don't get at all from older trannies who are more experienced.
This makes me think.... maybe its in fact acting out our expected social roles that changes the brain in these ways? Or maybe its a feedback loop, a bit of the chicken, a bit of the egg.
Here is a well-formulated partisan post which is completely contrary to conventional wisdom, and is contrary to facts supported by references and evidence. It is trivially refuted by easily-found references. I expect it was "modded up" based on clarity and construction. It certainly *seems* like an informativie position by an expert in the field.
References are nice, they are helpful in doing further research but, they are not proof of anything. I can give you a link to the communist manifesto and claim that it shows the clear superiority of capitalism. I can link to an ONDCP article about how evil drugs are and claim that proves something (even though their own charter requires them to espouse a specific position without regard to truth, the GAO even refused to evaluate their statements for factual correctness on that basis)
So is it a shill? Maybe but, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and it appears the refuting evidence doesn't, to my admittedly quick casual skim, doesn't appear to refute him, in fact, it says pretty clearly that a lot of the "spending" was based on tax deductions.
It MIGHT refute him if it broke out what those deductions were and if they were specifically for anything relating to fuel extraction/sale and not normal business expenses.....but I don't see that in there (it is the main question I am left with trying to reconcile the post vs the "evidence")
Also: "contrary to conventional wisdom" is itself, a sort of appeal to common sense; which is strongly in logical fallacy territory. Conventional wisdom holds all sort of odd things true. My personal favorite one to say is that "Common sense is what tells you to douse a grease fire with water"
One example, which I would cite except it was one of those "I heard a discussion on NPR" things, is that common sense says that oil prices drive gas prices. Makes sense, gas is made from oil, if the price of the input goes up, the price of the output often has to. Thing is, common sense is not really right here. Gas prices are set by a global market with global demand. Rising demand and competition for the output of refineries is what is driving price. In fact, seemingly paradoxically (its not really a paradox) gas prices are being driven up by competition over cheap gas.
That is right....refineries generally run off natural gas, so gasoline production costs are actually lower overhead than they would be with higher natural gas prices.... meaning more competition for the more competitively priced gasoline; and higher prices at the pump; mostly decoupled from oil prices.
Of course, nobody wants to hear that because it presents a situation that doesn't give anyone specific to blame, and doesn't provide any real solution that provides lower pump prices, without abandoning any notion of global markets and going entirely protectionist....or hiding the real cost by subsidizing consumer purchases.
Of course, consumer purchases are currently taxed for the roads, so subsidizing them would, in some real ways, be little more than a transfer of capital from one congressional fund,the discretionary, budget to another congressional fund, for road maintenance.
This is of course nothing new, or even particularly egregious in terms of congressional funding...we are talking about the people who created the SS trust fund and a separate tax so that it was safe from congressional budgeting.... then turned around and borrowed the whole fund so now its in danger from congressional budgeting; but I see no reason to encourage them to play more funny money games.
You know what your criticizm of zombies makes me compare Zombies to.....dreams. It has been suggested that dreams provide a sort of "holodeck" where your mind can evaluate threats and train responses to them. There is seldom reason behind things, just situations. Whatever is scary can be brought up, and simulations can be run to find potential responses.
It doesn't matter why zombies showed up, or how they live. It doesn't matter why this guy is mugging you or why you showed up to work with no clothes on. You are here to evaluate responses and outcomes to the situation; not to question how you got here.
Zombies are perfect for that. No shortage of them to try things on, no need to feel bad about killing them, in fact, they are just mindless and a threat that needs to be dealt with. Exactly what you would expect in a dreamscape.
Easily, most explosives don't require air, even black powder comes with its own oxidizer, and others don't even require that. In High school we were shown the decomposition reaction for nitroglycerin (or as the teacher used to point out: if you follow normal naming conventions it is glycerol trinitrate). No oxidation needed, one big unstable molecule that is liquid at normal temps/pressures breaks down into 6 smaller molecules which are in gaseous.... resulting pressure change is just immense.
Or.... even easier.... just rupture/open the capsule its in and let the pressure difference and volatility do the rest. The result will be pretty explosive.
Unkempt hair and bushy beard? Yup thats me. You know, I DID pick out terrible passwords when I was younger and early on in my career. However, being a sysadmin I had to learn to be better. First I thought I improved on my own....then I got called into the security guys office and he pointed at a jumble of letters on the board and said "Recognize anything there?".... my password was clearly embeded in the jumble. Damnit!
Soon after I learned to use mnemonics and never looked back.... not till I found out about passphrases ala xkcd's "Correct Horse Battery Staple", and password vaults. Now I don't choose my passwords, I generate them...and I only have to remember one really good one.
I like the other responses explanation but try this one too.... the sun is a moving target. If your delta-V is fixed (so you have a fixed final speed relative to your starting position but, can choose the direction) ie, you have a gun, a gun which can bring an object to earth escape velocity. Score.
Now you are shooting a moving target, so you have to lead it. The faster its moving, and further away it is, the more you need to lead it. The required lead angle is directly proportional to both relative speed and distance, which approaches 90 degrees. Thing is, you get to a limit of the speed/distance function where you just can't hit it no matter what angle you use, it always misses.
Turns out, earth escape velocity, directly backwards still misses.
OTOH once you have them out there a little ways, just detonate them in space. The resulting toxic gas cloud will be undetectably sparse pretty quick. I mean seriously.... I bet if you took every chemical weapon ever produced by man, brought them out to a high orbit and detonated them, it should be perfectly safe.
And by perfectly safe I mean.... no less safe than loading massive amounts of those chemicals onto a huge rocket and trying to blast it off in the first place. That part could be a huge disaster.
Works for me, but, I also played way too much Kerbal Space Program. I think XKCD described it best: http://xkcd.com/1291/ at least in the alt text: "Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind."
While I appreciate throwing specialized hardware at the problem, it sounds like a rather expensive solution to the problem. Still going to have the same constraints, going to need to be powered up to receive the burn instructions.
Its actually an interesting problem set, what happens if the drive electrically dies? Seems like you want key data on a separate device where you can then wipe sections of either drive to destroy the data (that way a failed drive can be "erased"), but then you also need to guard against failures in more devices.....
Almost makes you wonder where the break even point is with mechanical drive shredding.
All you need to do is overwrite the sectors with the encryption headers, then nobody is accessing the data. Course if you can't garauntee its never in anyones hands without you being around, then you probably don't have a mobile device and need something always on, so it can be always ready to trash itself..... but....
no matter how small a boom you make, you are going to be accused of some sort of recklessness, terrorism and whatever else. If you have a security system that wipes out data on some manner of alarm, that at least can't be said to be a booby trap.
So if that isn't convincing, at least do it with style.... thats right.... Thermite and magnesium. In fact, if you want to make sure its slag, you repackage the hard drive platters in a magnesium case* and give them a show. At least it will give you a good story or two to tell inside.
>or a problem finding a way to make it commercially viable either.
That is just it isn't it? Sure we know how to degrade them. Thing is, what do you get from degrading them? Bacterial cells that can degrade more? At what point is that a usable product? It may be safe to dump, but that implies somebody is paying for disposal, it implies they are being collected and separated from other trash so somebody can pay to have it disposed of.
> For one thing, it turns out that lots of people do "recycle" those "disposable" plastic bags. When > Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags, bin liner purchases increased by 400%.
Bingo! I mean I will admit, i throw away the occasional perfectly good bag but, we use them for all sorts of thing. we even have had a bin just for putting plastic bags in so they could be reused later. Who doesn't reuse them?
Need to carry something that has to be protected from rain? Plastic bag. Need a small trash bag to carry with you while cleaning up? Need a quick "glove" to pick up something nasty? Plastic bags. plastic bag. Or a trash bag...for the car.
Actually i think the majority of people against drugs are not hypocrites. See , to me, being a hypocrite would imply that you actually spent any time whatsoever to consider and evaluate the position and made some conscious decision.
It is really only hypocrisy when you factor in that everything they know is wrong. Most people have every reason to believe that prohibition lowers addiction rates, for example. Its not true, but if it were, few people could really argue that isn't a good thing, in and of itself. Of course it is; barring any unintended effect right?
but still... even if it doesn't do that, it helps keep addicts away from normal people, and since addicts are dangerous and unscrupulous, thats good right? It is flawed and untrue on several levels. However, I understand why people who haven't spent much time on the subject believe that its true.
A lot of people just have never considered these things, have never seen the clear parallels between Prohibition and the drug war. Not so many know about medical alcohol, the horrors of poisoned hooch, or the trouble with drunk kids.
They don't see what the addicts see. The whole subculture is hidden from them. Not all of it is bad, but it has some terrible elements. It provides a fertile ground for some of the worst psychopaths. Every small time addict slinging product is like fresh carrion for these maggots. I am just a pot head, been smoking for almost 20 years now. In that time, I have seen some choice things. (less now of course its practically legal here, been a civil fine for possession for a bit now...and I am getting older, less social flux, better judge of character)
- I met a loudmouth prick junkie who liked to play tough guy, who later mugged a friend of mine for his pot at knife point.... on two separate occasions. - Several dealers (at least 4) of mine have been robbed, a couple at gun point - One was setup to be robbed; smashed his car window and grabbed his bag while he was talking to "new customer" - There was the brutal murder of a dealer only 2 hops removed from my circle of friends.
Its not just a matter of high drug prices pushing desperate people to crime, that is definitely a real problem shown in several places, but.... it also provides a fertile ground for psychopaths who thrive on having a population that can't call the police for protection. Just look at the numbers for drug users and dealers...millions of people. A highly fertile ground for a psychopath to extort and steal with impunity.
Hell if he is real scum, he can become a CI and get paid to find new targets. Another friend of mine had a CI in his apartment, pretending to be his friend, got raided later. The warrant claimed he had large amounts of coke and weapons. The guy could have gotten killed in the raid by jumpy cops with claims like that.... he was lucky they caught him on his way home. All that was in the house was pot and money.
I don't know about some other people, but, I think a world where psychopaths who want to rob people have to worry about their victims calling the police, and where high value targets are not afraid to use video cameras to protect themselves is a far preferable world to one where they are allowed to operate with impunity on a population of people with, what could rightly be called in many extreme cases, a medical issue.
> so what's the point of talking about how it would be if drugs are legal when there is little chance in hell of that > happening any time soon?
Well couple of reasons.
1. If we don't talk about it, then the only people talking about it are the prohibitionists; and its NEVER going to happen. 2. I don't actually think its possible to say how long a change could take. I firmly believe that just weeks or months before something like this happens, the general perception could still be that it will never happen. 3. Pot will likely be legal in a few years. This is huge for all drugs.
Now I want to elaborate on point 3.
There are more pot users than the next 3 major street drugs COMBINED. There just are not that many junkies and coke heads, and tweekers and the police need pot busts in between the other ones to justify their programs and keep the money flowing. The majority of drug enforcement has been pot, is pot, and will continue to be pot until its legalized. Once that happens, its going to be a rough couple of years for dealers of anything else but, they are going to have trouble justifying it.
Only by talking about it, and what a failure the drug war is across the board can we get support for changing it. I have hope that marijuana will be a gateway drug.... the gateway out of the drug war.
> Going to point out again that heroin isn't that cheap cheap and > America's stance on making money because of the war on drugs will never allow it to be legal.
Its not that cheap BECAUSE of our drug policy. It would be that cheap if not for it.
Call it the real world if you like.... I call it the cause of the problem. Seriously, the best thing a prohibitionist can do is die... because if enough of them did, we could change that policy and fix the actual problem.
Blaming the victims and saying they should die....is every bit as unrealistic of a solution, and possibly more so. Addicts have existed longer than drug laws. A LOT longer. They will continue to exist longer than drug laws, a LOT longer.
Let me put it this way.... I can forsee a future day when there are still humans but not drug laws. I can't reverse those and still think I am considering a possible future.
That is because alcohol isn't a drug. Its a foreign substance that you take into your body primarily for the feeling produced by its interactions with your body chemistry. See? Totally different from a drug which is a foreign substance that other people take into their body primarily because they are evil nasty druggies who want to get high and mug you.
Incidentally, I can't stop laughing about the fact that Walgreens became a houshold name...from the money they made prescribing medical alcohol back when these arguments were the same ones used against it.
Except that there is no evidence that junkies do this when their drugs are available at reasonable prices. In fact, there is ample evidence (thousands upon thousands of prescription "junkies", the swiss heroin study, portugal) to the opposite.
So the reality is....the best thing a prohibitionist can do, is die.
That's not a bad idea at all, actually, I wonder if we still have a couple stashed away somewhere? I may need to check that out for him. Of course, they are a bit unwieldly to lug around, I believe he does a lot of this at the courthouse.
I just this past week had the opportunity to read some legal filings in the case between a friend of mine and his former wife over custody. Since he can't afford a lawyer, he fills out forms the court gives him and does it.... BY HAND.
while absolutely correct, and not just we put up with it.... if the license check is what the compiler does, then it is what it does. To leave those out is to be measuring something other than the real behaviour of the compiler in real situations.
Hell if this is the case, can you really call the testing complete if he didn't simulate network conditions like, the licensing server being unreachable, or having really high latency?
Which, of course, is why I pointed out if you wanted to say they should get a day off, like a floating holiday or something...fine but.... I wouldn't even try to compare thanksgiving or xmass to other days. Such a huge portion of the population is doing family things for the day that they really are some of the worst days to have off otherwise.
Actually, I have had years where my family celebrated the day over a weekend to accomidate some family members and was left with nothing to do on those days....I usually end up just playing video games. Which is fine but, I would rather take a normal work day off.
Entitled? Sure, but you don't address whether they want to. Thanksgiving is generally celebrated with family centered feasting. How much of a celebration is it if you have no family to be with? How much celebration is it to sit alone in your apartment while the kids are off with your former spouse? How much do you care if your family is back in India or down in Mexico and you have nobody to feast with?
You know, I love these holidays. But some people dislike them, get depressed by them, whatever. If you want to argue anyone who works that day should get a floater to take another day off, sure, sounds great. If you want to say any hourly workers should automatically get time and a half or more? Sure. Fine.
However, if there is work to do and you have people who would rather work; I KNOW some percentage (maybe not 23% of it) actually does prefer to work those days; its no boon to them to tell them they are not allowed.
> Well, he's a comic creator, not a doctor, philosopher or politician. He's somewhere up there with > Janitor or Central Park Mime in my book. Why he expects me to take what he says seriously is > quite curious.
Even more curious is why I would take seriously the opinion of someone who so easily dismisses the opinions of others based on their job title.
How about this....he is a man who has watched his father deteriorate and come to the brink of death while his own estate is pissed away for no reason but to keep him in this state longer. Sounds like a fucking expert in the topic at hand to me.
> I get the guys in pain, that his dad is in pain but if his mind is "98%" gone as he says then > his dad is suffering less than he is.
And likely he is. His dad likely isn't suffering at all anymore, his dad is already gone. The man he knew and loved and who raised him....doesn't even exist. All that is left is lump of living tissue being kept alive for the purpose of maintaining the legal fiction of a living man.
The real problem here is the utter insufficiency in determining when a person is really alive or dead. Just because we can keep a hunk of meat alive doesn't mean we can keep a person alive. The person can be gone long before the meat starts to rot.
However, you also have to ask....what percentage WANT to work on the holiday?
Some people came from other countries and don't celebrate the same holidays. Others have no family to spend time with or would rather not spend time with theirs. While you could say they should still get the day off too, some days like thanksgiving leave one precious little to do.
I have talked to a number of people who choose to work holidays and like working them.
> From what I've been reading over the years, both law and cases, intent is a "gimme" by mere possession of > whatever amount is designated.
Sure but don't forget, prosecutors love two things: Getting convictions, and avoiding trials. They love themselves some plea deals. I think this has a lot to do with why they so overestimate the amounts. Sure you can maybe fight it in court, but you would need to actually fight and likely need the help of a lawyer.... to reduce the amount at best.
When a plead deal will get you a few years of probation, most people will take that and give the prosecutor his easy win for the numbers rather than fight it and potentially face years in prison.... years in prison for...not saying uncle because the bully found you with flowers.
regardless of grow style? Bullshit. Yeild depends on a lot of factors and yeild per plant depends a lot on the type of grow. Some growers prefer to use more, smaller plants with much shorter veg cycles, that way the entire cycle time is reduced. Lower yeild, in less time.
Also light can be a limiting factor. It takes some experience and work to get above 1 gram per watt. If all you have is a single 600 watt light, which is common, and you can produce a Kilo, I know several people that would lick your boots to know how.
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Citation....desired. I really don't mean to be a dick, I am really curious to read more about this. I actually have a few tranny friends and find this pretty interesting. One of the people in their circle of friends actually found out, at somewhere around 40 years old, that desipite being outwardly born male, she actually had ovaries!
I always find this interesting because I tend to be a bit gender blind. I never really had this strong notion of basic mental differences and ability differences between men and women. As it turns out women I get along with well, including my own wife, tend to identify themselves as tomboys, but, I never really notice or think of them that way.
so it starts coming down to.... what causes these differences? The brain changes all the time based on what we do. You can find differences in brain connectivity just based on people's activities and lifestyles. So.... is it hormonal? (maybe not if the transgender thing translates to these connections), is it social? (women and men socialize in different groups that tend to do different things, and so, grow different types of connections?)
another interesting question is when and how this happens. If a transexual is more like their claimed sex than their outwardly visible one.... is that innate? or does that come from years of practice at trying to be the opposite sex?
One observation I have made is that.... well... I don't like young trannies, they annoy me. What annoys me, and this goes for both MTF and FTM is that (and I am generalizing) they tend to take on a characture of the gender they want to emulate. Some younger, less experienced FTMs tend towards being loud, overtly macho. Likewise MTFs tend towards well... acting like they learned to be a woman from watching Zsa Zsa Gabore (get off my lawn). You kinda get the idea they are overacting, faking it a bit. Its a vibe I don't get at all from older trannies who are more experienced.
This makes me think.... maybe its in fact acting out our expected social roles that changes the brain in these ways? Or maybe its a feedback loop, a bit of the chicken, a bit of the egg.
References are nice, they are helpful in doing further research but, they are not proof of anything. I can give you a link to the communist manifesto and claim that it shows the clear superiority of capitalism. I can link to an ONDCP article about how evil drugs are and claim that proves something (even though their own charter requires them to espouse a specific position without regard to truth, the GAO even refused to evaluate their statements for factual correctness on that basis)
So is it a shill? Maybe but, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and it appears the refuting evidence doesn't, to my admittedly quick casual skim, doesn't appear to refute him, in fact, it says pretty clearly that a lot of the "spending" was based on tax deductions.
It MIGHT refute him if it broke out what those deductions were and if they were specifically for anything relating to fuel extraction/sale and not normal business expenses.....but I don't see that in there (it is the main question I am left with trying to reconcile the post vs the "evidence")
Also: "contrary to conventional wisdom" is itself, a sort of appeal to common sense; which is strongly in logical fallacy territory. Conventional wisdom holds all sort of odd things true. My personal favorite one to say is that "Common sense is what tells you to douse a grease fire with water"
One example, which I would cite except it was one of those "I heard a discussion on NPR" things, is that common sense says that oil prices drive gas prices. Makes sense, gas is made from oil, if the price of the input goes up, the price of the output often has to. Thing is, common sense is not really right here. Gas prices are set by a global market with global demand. Rising demand and competition for the output of refineries is what is driving price. In fact, seemingly paradoxically (its not really a paradox) gas prices are being driven up by competition over cheap gas.
That is right....refineries generally run off natural gas, so gasoline production costs are actually lower overhead than they would be with higher natural gas prices.... meaning more competition for the more competitively priced gasoline; and higher prices at the pump; mostly decoupled from oil prices.
Of course, nobody wants to hear that because it presents a situation that doesn't give anyone specific to blame, and doesn't provide any real solution that provides lower pump prices, without abandoning any notion of global markets and going entirely protectionist....or hiding the real cost by subsidizing consumer purchases.
Of course, consumer purchases are currently taxed for the roads, so subsidizing them would, in some real ways, be little more than a transfer of capital from one congressional fund,the discretionary, budget to another congressional fund, for road maintenance.
This is of course nothing new, or even particularly egregious in terms of congressional funding...we are talking about the people who created the SS trust fund and a separate tax so that it was safe from congressional budgeting.... then turned around and borrowed the whole fund so now its in danger from congressional budgeting; but I see no reason to encourage them to play more funny money games.
You know what your criticizm of zombies makes me compare Zombies to.....dreams. It has been suggested that dreams provide a sort of "holodeck" where your mind can evaluate threats and train responses to them. There is seldom reason behind things, just situations. Whatever is scary can be brought up, and simulations can be run to find potential responses.
It doesn't matter why zombies showed up, or how they live. It doesn't matter why this guy is mugging you or why you showed up to work with no clothes on. You are here to evaluate responses and outcomes to the situation; not to question how you got here.
Zombies are perfect for that. No shortage of them to try things on, no need to feel bad about killing them, in fact, they are just mindless and a threat that needs to be dealt with. Exactly what you would expect in a dreamscape.
Easily, most explosives don't require air, even black powder comes with its own oxidizer, and others don't even require that. In High school we were shown the decomposition reaction for nitroglycerin (or as the teacher used to point out: if you follow normal naming conventions it is glycerol trinitrate). No oxidation needed, one big unstable molecule that is liquid at normal temps/pressures breaks down into 6 smaller molecules which are in gaseous.... resulting pressure change is just immense.
Or.... even easier.... just rupture/open the capsule its in and let the pressure difference and volatility do the rest. The result will be pretty explosive.
Unkempt hair and bushy beard? Yup thats me. You know, I DID pick out terrible passwords when I was younger and early on in my career. However, being a sysadmin I had to learn to be better. First I thought I improved on my own....then I got called into the security guys office and he pointed at a jumble of letters on the board and said "Recognize anything there?".... my password was clearly embeded in the jumble. Damnit!
Soon after I learned to use mnemonics and never looked back.... not till I found out about passphrases ala xkcd's "Correct Horse Battery Staple", and password vaults. Now I don't choose my passwords, I generate them...and I only have to remember one really good one.
I like the other responses explanation but try this one too.... the sun is a moving target. If your delta-V is fixed (so you have a fixed final speed relative to your starting position but, can choose the direction) ie, you have a gun, a gun which can bring an object to earth escape velocity. Score.
Now you are shooting a moving target, so you have to lead it. The faster its moving, and further away it is, the more you need to lead it. The required lead angle is directly proportional to both relative speed and distance, which approaches 90 degrees. Thing is, you get to a limit of the speed/distance function where you just can't hit it no matter what angle you use, it always misses.
Turns out, earth escape velocity, directly backwards still misses.
OTOH once you have them out there a little ways, just detonate them in space. The resulting toxic gas cloud will be undetectably sparse pretty quick. I mean seriously.... I bet if you took every chemical weapon ever produced by man, brought them out to a high orbit and detonated them, it should be perfectly safe.
And by perfectly safe I mean.... no less safe than loading massive amounts of those chemicals onto a huge rocket and trying to blast it off in the first place. That part could be a huge disaster.
Works for me, but, I also played way too much Kerbal Space Program. I think XKCD described it best: http://xkcd.com/1291/ at least in the alt text:
"Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind."
While I appreciate throwing specialized hardware at the problem, it sounds like a rather expensive solution to the problem. Still going to have the same constraints, going to need to be powered up to receive the burn instructions.
Its actually an interesting problem set, what happens if the drive electrically dies? Seems like you want key data on a separate device where you can then wipe sections of either drive to destroy the data (that way a failed drive can be "erased"), but then you also need to guard against failures in more devices.....
Almost makes you wonder where the break even point is with mechanical drive shredding.
Need is quite a funny word here.
All you need to do is overwrite the sectors with the encryption headers, then nobody is accessing the data. Course if you can't garauntee its never in anyones hands without you being around, then you probably don't have a mobile device and need something always on, so it can be always ready to trash itself..... but....
no matter how small a boom you make, you are going to be accused of some sort of recklessness, terrorism and whatever else. If you have a security system that wipes out data on some manner of alarm, that at least can't be said to be a booby trap.
So if that isn't convincing, at least do it with style.... thats right.... Thermite and magnesium. In fact, if you want to make sure its slag, you repackage the hard drive platters in a magnesium case* and give them a show. At least it will give you a good story or two to tell inside.
* This might void the warranty
>or a problem finding a way to make it commercially viable either.
That is just it isn't it? Sure we know how to degrade them. Thing is, what do you get from degrading them? Bacterial cells that can degrade more? At what point is that a usable product? It may be safe to dump, but that implies somebody is paying for disposal, it implies they are being collected and separated from other trash so somebody can pay to have it disposed of.
> For one thing, it turns out that lots of people do "recycle" those "disposable" plastic bags. When
> Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags, bin liner purchases increased by 400%.
Bingo! I mean I will admit, i throw away the occasional perfectly good bag but, we use them for all sorts of thing. we even have had a bin just for putting plastic bags in so they could be reused later. Who doesn't reuse them?
Need to carry something that has to be protected from rain? Plastic bag. Need a small trash bag to carry with you while cleaning up? Need a quick "glove" to pick up something nasty? Plastic bags. plastic bag. Or a trash bag...for the car.
Actually i think the majority of people against drugs are not hypocrites. See , to me, being a hypocrite would imply that you actually spent any time whatsoever to consider and evaluate the position and made some conscious decision.
It is really only hypocrisy when you factor in that everything they know is wrong. Most people have every reason to believe that prohibition lowers addiction rates, for example. Its not true, but if it were, few people could really argue that isn't a good thing, in and of itself. Of course it is; barring any unintended effect right?
but still... even if it doesn't do that, it helps keep addicts away from normal people, and since addicts are dangerous and unscrupulous, thats good right? It is flawed and untrue on several levels. However, I understand why people who haven't spent much time on the subject believe that its true.
A lot of people just have never considered these things, have never seen the clear parallels between Prohibition and the drug war. Not so many know about medical alcohol, the horrors of poisoned hooch, or the trouble with drunk kids.
They don't see what the addicts see. The whole subculture is hidden from them. Not all of it is bad, but it has some terrible elements. It provides a fertile ground for some of the worst psychopaths. Every small time addict slinging product is like fresh carrion for these maggots. I am just a pot head, been smoking for almost 20 years now. In that time, I have seen some choice things. (less now of course its practically legal here, been a civil fine for possession for a bit now...and I am getting older, less social flux, better judge of character)
- I met a loudmouth prick junkie who liked to play tough guy, who later mugged a friend of mine for his pot at knife point.... on two separate occasions.
- Several dealers (at least 4) of mine have been robbed, a couple at gun point
- One was setup to be robbed; smashed his car window and grabbed his bag while he was talking to "new customer"
- There was the brutal murder of a dealer only 2 hops removed from my circle of friends.
Its not just a matter of high drug prices pushing desperate people to crime, that is definitely a real problem shown in several places, but.... it also provides a fertile ground for psychopaths who thrive on having a population that can't call the police for protection. Just look at the numbers for drug users and dealers...millions of people. A highly fertile ground for a psychopath to extort and steal with impunity.
Hell if he is real scum, he can become a CI and get paid to find new targets. Another friend of mine had a CI in his apartment, pretending to be his friend, got raided later. The warrant claimed he had large amounts of coke and weapons. The guy could have gotten killed in the raid by jumpy cops with claims like that.... he was lucky they caught him on his way home. All that was in the house was pot and money.
I don't know about some other people, but, I think a world where psychopaths who want to rob people have to worry about their victims calling the police, and where high value targets are not afraid to use video cameras to protect themselves is a far preferable world to one where they are allowed to operate with impunity on a population of people with, what could rightly be called in many extreme cases, a medical issue.
> so what's the point of talking about how it would be if drugs are legal when there is little chance in hell of that
> happening any time soon?
Well couple of reasons.
1. If we don't talk about it, then the only people talking about it are the prohibitionists; and its NEVER going to happen.
2. I don't actually think its possible to say how long a change could take. I firmly believe that just weeks or months before something like this happens, the general perception could still be that it will never happen.
3. Pot will likely be legal in a few years. This is huge for all drugs.
Now I want to elaborate on point 3.
There are more pot users than the next 3 major street drugs COMBINED. There just are not that many junkies and coke heads, and tweekers and the police need pot busts in between the other ones to justify their programs and keep the money flowing. The majority of drug enforcement has been pot, is pot, and will continue to be pot until its legalized. Once that happens, its going to be a rough couple of years for dealers of anything else but, they are going to have trouble justifying it.
Only by talking about it, and what a failure the drug war is across the board can we get support for changing it. I have hope that marijuana will be a gateway drug.... the gateway out of the drug war.
> Going to point out again that heroin isn't that cheap cheap and
> America's stance on making money because of the war on drugs will never allow it to be legal.
Its not that cheap BECAUSE of our drug policy. It would be that cheap if not for it.
Call it the real world if you like.... I call it the cause of the problem. Seriously, the best thing a prohibitionist can do is die... because if enough of them did, we could change that policy and fix the actual problem.
Blaming the victims and saying they should die....is every bit as unrealistic of a solution, and possibly more so. Addicts have existed longer than drug laws. A LOT longer. They will continue to exist longer than drug laws, a LOT longer.
Let me put it this way.... I can forsee a future day when there are still humans but not drug laws. I can't reverse those and still think I am considering a possible future.
That is because alcohol isn't a drug. Its a foreign substance that you take into your body primarily for the feeling produced by its interactions with your body chemistry. See? Totally different from a drug which is a foreign substance that other people take into their body primarily because they are evil nasty druggies who want to get high and mug you.
Incidentally, I can't stop laughing about the fact that Walgreens became a houshold name...from the money they made prescribing medical alcohol back when these arguments were the same ones used against it.
Except that there is no evidence that junkies do this when their drugs are available at reasonable prices. In fact, there is ample evidence (thousands upon thousands of prescription "junkies", the swiss heroin study, portugal) to the opposite.
So the reality is....the best thing a prohibitionist can do, is die.
That's not a bad idea at all, actually, I wonder if we still have a couple stashed away somewhere? I may need to check that out for him. Of course, they are a bit unwieldly to lug around, I believe he does a lot of this at the courthouse.
I just this past week had the opportunity to read some legal filings in the case between a friend of mine and his former wife over custody. Since he can't afford a lawyer, he fills out forms the court gives him and does it.... BY HAND.
Give me some arial any day of the week.
while absolutely correct, and not just we put up with it.... if the license check is what the compiler does, then it is what it does. To leave those out is to be measuring something other than the real behaviour of the compiler in real situations.
Hell if this is the case, can you really call the testing complete if he didn't simulate network conditions like, the licensing server being unreachable, or having really high latency?
Which, of course, is why I pointed out if you wanted to say they should get a day off, like a floating holiday or something...fine but.... I wouldn't even try to compare thanksgiving or xmass to other days. Such a huge portion of the population is doing family things for the day that they really are some of the worst days to have off otherwise.
Actually, I have had years where my family celebrated the day over a weekend to accomidate some family members and was left with nothing to do on those days....I usually end up just playing video games. Which is fine but, I would rather take a normal work day off.
Entitled? Sure, but you don't address whether they want to. Thanksgiving is generally celebrated with family centered feasting. How much of a celebration is it if you have no family to be with? How much celebration is it to sit alone in your apartment while the kids are off with your former spouse? How much do you care if your family is back in India or down in Mexico and you have nobody to feast with?
You know, I love these holidays. But some people dislike them, get depressed by them, whatever. If you want to argue anyone who works that day should get a floater to take another day off, sure, sounds great. If you want to say any hourly workers should automatically get time and a half or more? Sure. Fine.
However, if there is work to do and you have people who would rather work; I KNOW some percentage (maybe not 23% of it) actually does prefer to work those days; its no boon to them to tell them they are not allowed.
> Well, he's a comic creator, not a doctor, philosopher or politician. He's somewhere up there with
> Janitor or Central Park Mime in my book. Why he expects me to take what he says seriously is
> quite curious.
Even more curious is why I would take seriously the opinion of someone who so easily dismisses the opinions of others based on their job title.
How about this....he is a man who has watched his father deteriorate and come to the brink of death while his own estate is pissed away for no reason but to keep him in this state longer. Sounds like a fucking expert in the topic at hand to me.
> I get the guys in pain, that his dad is in pain but if his mind is "98%" gone as he says then
> his dad is suffering less than he is.
And likely he is. His dad likely isn't suffering at all anymore, his dad is already gone. The man he knew and loved and who raised him....doesn't even exist. All that is left is lump of living tissue being kept alive for the purpose of maintaining the legal fiction of a living man.
The real problem here is the utter insufficiency in determining when a person is really alive or dead. Just because we can keep a hunk of meat alive doesn't mean we can keep a person alive. The person can be gone long before the meat starts to rot.
However, you also have to ask....what percentage WANT to work on the holiday?
Some people came from other countries and don't celebrate the same holidays. Others have no family to spend time with or would rather not spend time with theirs. While you could say they should still get the day off too, some days like thanksgiving leave one precious little to do.
I have talked to a number of people who choose to work holidays and like working them.
> From what I've been reading over the years, both law and cases, intent is a "gimme" by mere possession of
> whatever amount is designated.
Sure but don't forget, prosecutors love two things: Getting convictions, and avoiding trials. They love themselves some plea deals. I think this has a lot to do with why they so overestimate the amounts. Sure you can maybe fight it in court, but you would need to actually fight and likely need the help of a lawyer.... to reduce the amount at best.
When a plead deal will get you a few years of probation, most people will take that and give the prosecutor his easy win for the numbers rather than fight it and potentially face years in prison.... years in prison for...not saying uncle because the bully found you with flowers.
regardless of grow style? Bullshit. Yeild depends on a lot of factors and yeild per plant depends a lot on the type of grow. Some growers prefer to use more, smaller plants with much shorter veg cycles, that way the entire cycle time is reduced. Lower yeild, in less time.
Also light can be a limiting factor. It takes some experience and work to get above 1 gram per watt. If all you have is a single 600 watt light, which is common, and you can produce a Kilo, I know several people that would lick your boots to know how.