Except that is a political hot potato. No what they really realized is that its better to assasinate them than put them in gitmo, because gitmo is a festering problem for years to come...the flak from an assasination comes and then just gets forgotten.
Though they mostly were before, HIV transmission through that route is still not that bad. Now, IV drug use, that is where it spreads like wildfire. In fact, there is some speculation that bad drug policy which drove people to IV drugs and then to share needles that actually caused the first wave of the AIDS epidemic.
That is a good long term solution. However, if one already has one of these phones and wants to respond in some way back to motorola, it seems to me that turnabout is fair play. If they are going to provide the service without an option to not use it...may as well use it right? Can't unbuy the phone now.
Professionals have resources, amateurs have time. The reason he has to wait 5hrs has nothing to do with his ability and everything to do with his resources. The reason he can't bear to wait 5hrs has everything to do with his personality and nothing to do with his status as an amateur.
Not sure I agree entirely here. Even the better printers will take a while to build his yoda, they do it more reliably, so that does translate into saved time but....I think what he really lacks is perspective.
Having what you designed today in hand today, or even tomorow, is a HUGE WIN. Take it back a few steps and what do you have? A design on "paper". Going from that description of a yoda to a yoda could take a long time in more traditional setups.
Sure maybe this means 1-3 iterations per day.... compared to multiple days or more for each prototype. That is really the correct comparison. He is comparing it against his fantasy rather than against the real technology that it is an improvement over.
Because without the 3d printer, he doesn't get his yoda at all, or it takes days to weeks for him to get.
I didn't manage to make that connection myself, but wow...yes.
OMG what possibilities. Hows this for a form of abuse.... if its sync data, then I can get it back...right? Think its capped or did they just think "at most its a few gigs per phone we have the space"?
Perhaps this would be a nice way to do backups...encrypted of course. Going to have to run my phone through a proxy and see what it picks up (I have an older Moto, droid 2). If it has been sending, then I may have to see if they are interested in storing the contents of my/dev/urandom too:)
Sigh.... they makes me more disappointed than mad, and reminds me of the phrase "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
They want easy sync, they want it so they can restore user data and save people's bacon whose phone gets destroyed or lost. Awesome, great intention. However, http? No SSL? Come on guys! At LEAST encrypt the data in flight!
In reality, they should encrypt it at rest too, and have the user at least submit some sort of password or something so its not just.... gobs of juicy data waiting to be sniffed or scooped. Realistically this means everyone who had one of these phones, with few exceptions, have their data, out of their control, just waiting to be abused.
> I think the problem with the rotgut is that the ethanol clears your system before the methanol is gone.
I don't think there is that much methanol in rotgut.
I did some looking into distilling a while back. Fermented liquid contains a number of chemicals, including entirely other alcohols, mostly in small enough quantities to not be worth talking about. However, when distilling, these tend to be concentrated. The main difference between "rot gut" and the good stuff is in how well controlled that process is in its ability to control how much of that other stuff is kept or discarded.
From wikipedia entry on Whisky:
The flavouring of whisky is partially determined by the presence of congeners and fusel oils. Fusel oils are higher alcohols than ethanol, are mildly toxic, and have a strong, disagreeable smell and taste. An excess of fusel oils in whisky is considered a defect.
Note only an excess is considered a defect.
Methanol however was, in the past, added to illegal alcohols to make them more potent; but the point is, it was added intentionally. Unlike lead and glycol contamination which was the result of using old radiators from homes or cars as the condenser for the still.
I believe Italy solved this problem once with its trains. People turned out to not be very happy with the results, and they hung the guy who did it. Ever since, nobody has been willing to try.
Yup. I mean, I don't see the downside to him living. First, Cost wise is insiginificant, we have so many people locked up all the time, its not like the cost of this one will matter. Its not like the victims will be somehow fixed by his death.
Wouldn't it be better that he live on as an example? Wouldn't it be better that he come to terms with what he did and show remorse? Or, if he wont do that, at least provide some insight into how a bright young man decides to take his path.
Killing him changes nothing. It hardens the resolve of those who would support him, it makes him a hero in their eyes. It makes terrible acts more attractive to people who don't care to live anyway. In the end, it deters none.
That would be my assessment as well. It also didn't escape me that there was a class action settlement sending checks to lots of people right at the same time as her failed run for congress either. Surely there was no planning or dealing to pull that off.
But then, hardly anybody takes checks anymore, and those that do often process them electronically on the spot, eliminating much of the "benefit" of checks for poor people (namely, "floating" checks a few days before you get paid when you don't have the balance to cover it.)
I remember when they started this....I thought it was a great thing to see checks clear instantly. Then i realized, banks still kept their "hold" on the money. So it was the worst of both words, the check writer has no float time, AND the person cashing it still has to wait that whole float time. Basically, the banks stole the float time for themselves.
Remind me never to vote for you for anything at all. Child proof lock? WTF why? He has no kids, he lives alone. Even if he did, they are his kids, it would be his perogative, not yours, not the states, to determine what is or is not safe enough for them to be around.
Fact is, he never left his damned house. He didn't touch the gun....and to top it all off, his state had no such requirement for locking up the gun.
This was not, in any way just. Especially since, the only life potentially in jeapordy is his own, which is his to take by right if he chooses. No denial of that right will ever be just in my eyes.
I have a long time internet aquantence who ran into some trouble a bit over a decade ago from a somewhat similar circumstance. He owned a shotgun which he kept leaned up against the wall of his appartment (not that uncommon, thats how most of my non-city dwelling family keep their guns)
He was quite drunk, and spouting off online. I don't have access to the long writeup he sent me on the matter, but he made some sarcastic comment with a suicidal double entendre and went off to "bed" (which I put in quotes because, as drunk as he was, he only made it to the floor, as the story goes)
The person, half a world away that he was talking to, looked up his local police and called them. Next thing he knew he was on his floor being arrested, and his gun taken away. The police report was, of course, written up such to indicate how he was found passed out within a few feet of the gun (of course, in a small apartment he is never more than a few feet from it)
So this is really not new except in whats being taken out of context and the frequency with which it is happening.
Really? Alright, fine. Some of it is people overreacting and taking things too far, but only a bit. People who dislike the president and seem a bit irrationally homophobic have every right to their views, and within reason for the context, should be able to express them (like on the bumpers of their privately owned cars)
As for the tweets, I would question some bits of context, but if he represents himself on twitter as an armed forces member, then he should be mindful of what he tweets. There is a reason you will find scarce mention of who I currently work for at any given time in my online posts. Sure, you can probably figure it out with some digging, but, I am careful not to say it; because I don't shit where I eat.
Overall, this is nothing special, a bit of them taking themselves too seriously, a bit of overreach, but nothing special.
> You all are trying to covering up censorship because you agree with it.
Actually I was making fun of it because I think its insanely stupid, but, insanely stupid in the wat that most large enough organizations are occasionally insanely stupid. Not really a special brand of insane or stupid, just, taken ever so slightly to the next level in the way militaries are want to be.
I mean really, its perfectly understandable in a way. The gaurdian releasing a doc doesn't make the doc unclassified. The policy is what it is, and likely the people who drafted it never considered the case where the classified document comes from a public source. So they enforce the regulation they have, blindly, and hamfistedly, because...its what they know.
The simple fact is, and there were people who brought this up during the Bush administration, which is why this is no surprize at all to me now, the law defines just about any explosive intended to harm people as a weapon of mass destruction. This is not new at all. Even while Bush was raving about WMDs in Iraq, the whole time, even a hand grenade was classified as a WMD.
The shocking thing, to my mind is that Bush never used this to his advantage. This dedinition could have easily been used to manufacture some news stories which would lose the details int he shuffle. "We found WMDs!"
What bothers me is that, this happened in MA, and MA specifically doesn't have the death penalty. The AG here should be bending over backwards to make sure he is charged HERE and fight federal attempts on general princible. Banning the death penalty here was done for good reason and he should be working to respect that as an agent of state law not using the federal loophole to allow him to, without any fight, end up in a court that would kill him.
In any case, this is no politically charged charge, its exactly the defined crime under federal law. Its just not clear to me why the federal government should get involved when this seems like one the state can handle.
As one of the militaried greatest detractors, I agree completely with your take on it. This is not some boneheaded attempted to put their head in the sand. No, this is just a hamfisted application of blind policy.
This is really more like the military version of "Office Space" than anything else.
Lt. Lumberg: "Um yah, didn't you get the memo about the classified documents? They can't be on machines that are not authorized or accessed by unauthorized people" Pvt Gibbons: "Yes I saw the memo, and I understand the policy, but this was public information I downloaded it from the Gaurdian" Lt Lumberg: "Ah yah, its just that we are not storing classified documents on unauthorized machines. I will send you another copy of that memo."
That is exactly what I was thinking. Since their secret program just blew up like semtex in a times square car bomb, they need to do some quick spin control. Look how we move tech forward people! Don't look at what we are doing now....look at new stuff we want to tell you about the past!
Don't pay any mind to the way we spread our own brand of terror like anthrax spores through the sears tower ventilation system. Just pay attention to the muslamic terror groups that we want you to be afraid of, thats the terror that we are trying to create here for our purposes.
Actually, the law came first, then the low-thc "hemp". There was no real distinction other than the basic variant types Sativa, Indica, and Ruderalis.
After it was banned, some french botanists bred a new variety of cannabis with very low THC content. They then pushed for laws internationally to define "hemp" as cannabis with an artificially low THC content, so low that it could only be achieved, without a breeding program, by the purchase of their seeds.
Of course, there was little to no hemp industry at that point, and the thc content so low that nobody cared and they easily got these regulations passed.... creating, for the first time, truely low THC hemp.
While its true there are natural variations in THC content, and some natural strains have less than others, prior to their breeding program (which I believe was in the late 70s or early 80s) I am not aware of any streain that was "equivalent to smoking a handful of straw." unless you had already taken off the flowers, and turned it into...well....straw.
Well, from state to state, on the theory that this newly encountered drug marijuana would be substituted by the hard narcotics addicts or by the alcohol drinkers for their previous drug that had been prohibited, state to state this fear of substitution carried, and that accounted for 26 of the 27 states -- that is, either the anti-Mexican sentiment in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas or fear of substitution in the Northeast. That accounted for 26 of the 27 states, and there was only one state left over. It was the most important state for us because it was the first state ever to enact a criminal law against the use of marijuana and it was the state of Utah.
The wikipedia article on the legal status of cannabis doesn't mention this as far as I can find, however, it does show several previous laws which included cannabis, not to directly ban it, but to try and classify it as a poison and put it in the hands of doctors and only available by prescription as a medicine.
> 1) Botanically, marijuana equals hemp. These are basically two > names for the same plant.
Yup. Adding to this, few people had even heard the term "marijuana" (which, if it arose new today, would be considered an ethic slur) when it was made illegal.
It wasn't until much later, 70s/80s when French botanists bred a low THC strain of cannabis and began pushing for a legal distinction between the two; enshrining into the law the use of a plant which could only be obtained from them (talk about shrewd business)
> 3) Jefferson farmed grew hemp on his Virginia farm > commercially.
Not only that, but look at his buddy George (thats Washington) and the instructions that he gave is slaves. Specifically they had been instructed to sew hemp seed and collect it for several crops, and then, once a large enough seed stock was available, to kill the males on the next crop.
I am aware of no claims of benefit to removing the males on in a crop intended strictly for rope or canvas use. GW grew the sticky icky for the head.
> 4) No great social stigma was attached to smoking pot in > the late 1700s and early 1800s â" pot use wasn't > considered a problem until the early 1900s.
There are some interesting connections between this and both Alcohol prohibition AND the mormon church. The first state to ban cannabis was actually Utah, an event which followed the return of many still polygamist mormons back to the area after having left to mexico years earlier. The story goes that some had picked up cannabis smoking in Mexico and this was an attempt to make them unwelcome. Texas then apparently picked up on this and decided to ban it on the supposition that they should prevent the problem from coming there.
Around this same time we saw Alcohol prohibition end, and the newly created "Federal Bureau of Narcotics" (precursor to the DEA) which had been created partially to fight illegal alcohol, had precious little left to do, and their main man Harry Anslinger went on his crusade to give his agency a purpose, and to deamonize the weed.
I highly recomend checking out the Senate testimony at the time, including the portion where a Doctor from the AMA is told to go home because he stood against making cannabis illegal, calling it an important medicine.
The top of mine broke, but its quite fixable. The way it was made the top "brush" (twisted stranded wire) is soldered to a thicker wire in an "A" shape. It had two holes in the top end of the shaft, one of them cracked out. At this point the belt is a good 20 years old, but, last time I rigged it up to work for a few minutes it gives some sparks.
H+ ions eh? Just so happens I was looking at a water torch video recently (sadly, nearly everyone working on such things seems to be a crackpot who is trying to fit an oxyhydrogen generator to his car) and wondering if there was any other silly excuse I could use to set up a rig to make some hydrogen.
Course when you really get down to it, if you are going to go through that much trouble to make a table top accelerator, it seems like it would be easier to skip the electrical energy to mechanical energy and mechanical energy to electrostatic potential steps. Seems like charging a capacitor and using some sort of cathode/annode setup..... and that is how the VDG ended up in the museum:)
Though, still pretty cool. It may be one of the cheaper and safer ways to get some of the high voltages, high voltage diodes and capacitors are not exactly the cheapest components to build up ladders of.
The faint throbbing that returned to my elbow once in a while for several years after I got the bright idea to put a plastic report cover on the wall next to the VDG and let it run, discharging a stream of small sparks at the plastic surface. It lit up a bright, thick spark, close to 4" to my finger, and traveled right down to the elbow.
But as strong as it can be, at least you only have to deal with as much energy as you store. Not quite dealing with line current.
off topic P.S. Being curious myself about how one might create an electron beam from the Van de Graaff, I consulted google and clicked on the first relevant looking link....
As a result of unconventional thinking about intelligent design, I coupled thermionic emission with a Van de Graff generator in a vacuum tube for electron beam high voltage alternative energy sources to produce electricity that was rejected by the scientific community.
The links from there are absolutely rich with incoherent babble... really good looking diagram photo. I like that all these crackpot inventions include a random magnet. You know its the real deal if it has magnets.
Price has gone up, a bit, and the look redesigned, but, still is what it is:
Amusing bit from wikipedia:
One of Van de Graaff's accelerators used two charged domes of sufficient size that each of the domes had laboratories inside - one to provide the source of the accelerated beam, and the other to analyze the actual experiment. The power for the equipment inside the domes came from generators that ran off the belt, and several sessions came to a rather gruesome end when a pigeon would try to fly between the two domes, causing them to discharge. (The accelerator was set up in an airplane hangar.)[5]
What is your point? If we wanted something back from the system, we should have made it a system that wasn't so terribly abusive and in need of complete dismantling.
I may pay more taxes than most, I also have people in my own household who live off that money. It would hit me hard as I suddenly get to fully take on supporting disabled family members.
So what? That income isn't worth the very lives of people around the world, and its certainly not worth supporting this sort of blanket surveillance. End it now, and lets move on.
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Except that is a political hot potato. No what they really realized is that its better to assasinate them than put them in gitmo, because gitmo is a festering problem for years to come...the flak from an assasination comes and then just gets forgotten.
Though they mostly were before, HIV transmission through that route is still not that bad. Now, IV drug use, that is where it spreads like wildfire. In fact, there is some speculation that bad drug policy which drove people to IV drugs and then to share needles that actually caused the first wave of the AIDS epidemic.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_pisani_sex_drugs_and_hiv_let_s_get_rational_1.html
That is a good long term solution. However, if one already has one of these phones and wants to respond in some way back to motorola, it seems to me that turnabout is fair play. If they are going to provide the service without an option to not use it...may as well use it right? Can't unbuy the phone now.
Not sure I agree entirely here. Even the better printers will take a while to build his yoda, they do it more reliably, so that does translate into saved time but....I think what he really lacks is perspective.
Having what you designed today in hand today, or even tomorow, is a HUGE WIN. Take it back a few steps and what do you have? A design on "paper". Going from that description of a yoda to a yoda could take a long time in more traditional setups.
Sure maybe this means 1-3 iterations per day.... compared to multiple days or more for each prototype. That is really the correct comparison. He is comparing it against his fantasy rather than against the real technology that it is an improvement over.
Because without the 3d printer, he doesn't get his yoda at all, or it takes days to weeks for him to get.
Yes.....YES!
I didn't manage to make that connection myself, but wow...yes.
OMG what possibilities. Hows this for a form of abuse.... if its sync data, then I can get it back...right? Think its capped or did they just think "at most its a few gigs per phone we have the space"?
Perhaps this would be a nice way to do backups...encrypted of course. Going to have to run my phone through a proxy and see what it picks up (I have an older Moto, droid 2). If it has been sending, then I may have to see if they are interested in storing the contents of my /dev/urandom too :)
Sigh.... they makes me more disappointed than mad, and reminds me of the phrase "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
They want easy sync, they want it so they can restore user data and save people's bacon whose phone gets destroyed or lost. Awesome, great intention. However, http? No SSL? Come on guys! At LEAST encrypt the data in flight!
In reality, they should encrypt it at rest too, and have the user at least submit some sort of password or something so its not just.... gobs of juicy data waiting to be sniffed or scooped. Realistically this means everyone who had one of these phones, with few exceptions, have their data, out of their control, just waiting to be abused.
> ...or black humor from the Italians, yes?
Sarcastic Italians? That is just inconceivable!
> I think the problem with the rotgut is that the ethanol clears your system before the methanol is gone.
I don't think there is that much methanol in rotgut.
I did some looking into distilling a while back. Fermented liquid contains a number of chemicals, including entirely other alcohols, mostly in small enough quantities to not be worth talking about. However, when distilling, these tend to be concentrated. The main difference between "rot gut" and the good stuff is in how well controlled that process is in its ability to control how much of that other stuff is kept or discarded.
From wikipedia entry on Whisky:
Note only an excess is considered a defect.
Methanol however was, in the past, added to illegal alcohols to make them more potent; but the point is, it was added intentionally. Unlike lead and glycol contamination which was the result of using old radiators from homes or cars as the condenser for the still.
I believe Italy solved this problem once with its trains. People turned out to not be very happy with the results, and they hung the guy who did it. Ever since, nobody has been willing to try.
Yup. I mean, I don't see the downside to him living. First, Cost wise is insiginificant, we have so many people locked up all the time, its not like the cost of this one will matter. Its not like the victims will be somehow fixed by his death.
Wouldn't it be better that he live on as an example? Wouldn't it be better that he come to terms with what he did and show remorse? Or, if he wont do that, at least provide some insight into how a bright young man decides to take his path.
Killing him changes nothing. It hardens the resolve of those who would support him, it makes him a hero in their eyes. It makes terrible acts more attractive to people who don't care to live anyway. In the end, it deters none.
That would be my assessment as well. It also didn't escape me that there was a class action settlement sending checks to lots of people right at the same time as her failed run for congress either. Surely there was no planning or dealing to pull that off.
I remember when they started this....I thought it was a great thing to see checks clear instantly. Then i realized, banks still kept their "hold" on the money. So it was the worst of both words, the check writer has no float time, AND the person cashing it still has to wait that whole float time. Basically, the banks stole the float time for themselves.
Remind me never to vote for you for anything at all. Child proof lock? WTF why? He has no kids, he lives alone. Even if he did, they are his kids, it would be his perogative, not yours, not the states, to determine what is or is not safe enough for them to be around.
Fact is, he never left his damned house. He didn't touch the gun....and to top it all off, his state had no such requirement for locking up the gun.
This was not, in any way just. Especially since, the only life potentially in jeapordy is his own, which is his to take by right if he chooses. No denial of that right will ever be just in my eyes.
I have a long time internet aquantence who ran into some trouble a bit over a decade ago from a somewhat similar circumstance. He owned a shotgun which he kept leaned up against the wall of his appartment (not that uncommon, thats how most of my non-city dwelling family keep their guns)
He was quite drunk, and spouting off online. I don't have access to the long writeup he sent me on the matter, but he made some sarcastic comment with a suicidal double entendre and went off to "bed" (which I put in quotes because, as drunk as he was, he only made it to the floor, as the story goes)
The person, half a world away that he was talking to, looked up his local police and called them. Next thing he knew he was on his floor being arrested, and his gun taken away. The police report was, of course, written up such to indicate how he was found passed out within a few feet of the gun (of course, in a small apartment he is never more than a few feet from it)
So this is really not new except in whats being taken out of context and the frequency with which it is happening.
ROTFL you think these are related?
> Please explain this then.
Really? Alright, fine. Some of it is people overreacting and taking things too far, but only a bit. People who dislike the president and seem a bit irrationally homophobic have every right to their views, and within reason for the context, should be able to express them (like on the bumpers of their privately owned cars)
As for the tweets, I would question some bits of context, but if he represents himself on twitter as an armed forces member, then he should be mindful of what he tweets. There is a reason you will find scarce mention of who I currently work for at any given time in my online posts. Sure, you can probably figure it out with some digging, but, I am careful not to say it; because I don't shit where I eat.
Overall, this is nothing special, a bit of them taking themselves too seriously, a bit of overreach, but nothing special.
> You all are trying to covering up censorship because you agree with it.
Actually I was making fun of it because I think its insanely stupid, but, insanely stupid in the wat that most large enough organizations are occasionally insanely stupid. Not really a special brand of insane or stupid, just, taken ever so slightly to the next level in the way militaries are want to be.
I mean really, its perfectly understandable in a way. The gaurdian releasing a doc doesn't make the doc unclassified. The policy is what it is, and likely the people who drafted it never considered the case where the classified document comes from a public source. So they enforce the regulation they have, blindly, and hamfistedly, because...its what they know.
The simple fact is, and there were people who brought this up during the Bush administration, which is why this is no surprize at all to me now, the law defines just about any explosive intended to harm people as a weapon of mass destruction. This is not new at all. Even while Bush was raving about WMDs in Iraq, the whole time, even a hand grenade was classified as a WMD.
The shocking thing, to my mind is that Bush never used this to his advantage. This dedinition could have easily been used to manufacture some news stories which would lose the details int he shuffle. "We found WMDs!"
What bothers me is that, this happened in MA, and MA specifically doesn't have the death penalty. The AG here should be bending over backwards to make sure he is charged HERE and fight federal attempts on general princible. Banning the death penalty here was done for good reason and he should be working to respect that as an agent of state law not using the federal loophole to allow him to, without any fight, end up in a court that would kill him.
In any case, this is no politically charged charge, its exactly the defined crime under federal law. Its just not clear to me why the federal government should get involved when this seems like one the state can handle.
As one of the militaried greatest detractors, I agree completely with your take on it. This is not some boneheaded attempted to put their head in the sand. No, this is just a hamfisted application of blind policy.
This is really more like the military version of "Office Space" than anything else.
Lt. Lumberg: "Um yah, didn't you get the memo about the classified documents? They can't be on machines that are not authorized or accessed by unauthorized people"
Pvt Gibbons: "Yes I saw the memo, and I understand the policy, but this was public information I downloaded it from the Gaurdian"
Lt Lumberg: "Ah yah, its just that we are not storing classified documents on unauthorized machines. I will send you another copy of that memo."
That is exactly what I was thinking. Since their secret program just blew up like semtex in a times square car bomb, they need to do some quick spin control. Look how we move tech forward people! Don't look at what we are doing now....look at new stuff we want to tell you about the past!
Don't pay any mind to the way we spread our own brand of terror like anthrax spores through the sears tower ventilation system. Just pay attention to the muslamic terror groups that we want you to be afraid of, thats the terror that we are trying to create here for our purposes.
Actually, the law came first, then the low-thc "hemp". There was no real distinction other than the basic variant types Sativa, Indica, and Ruderalis.
After it was banned, some french botanists bred a new variety of cannabis with very low THC content. They then pushed for laws internationally to define "hemp" as cannabis with an artificially low THC content, so low that it could only be achieved, without a breeding program, by the purchase of their seeds.
Of course, there was little to no hemp industry at that point, and the thc content so low that nobody cared and they easily got these regulations passed.... creating, for the first time, truely low THC hemp.
While its true there are natural variations in THC content, and some natural strains have less than others, prior to their breeding program (which I believe was in the late 70s or early 80s) I am not aware of any streain that was "equivalent to smoking a handful of straw." unless you had already taken off the flowers, and turned it into...well....straw.
There seem to be a few ways of looking at the question. I never read this article before, as my previous statement was based on a different article that I read many years back and can't properly cite. Here is one telling the same story though:
http://www.forces.org/Archive/articles/245-The+Early+State+Marijuana+Laws+History+Of+The+Non-Medical+Use+Of+Drugs.html
The wikipedia article on the legal status of cannabis doesn't mention this as far as I can find, however, it does show several previous laws which included cannabis, not to directly ban it, but to try and classify it as a poison and put it in the hands of doctors and only available by prescription as a medicine.
> 1) Botanically, marijuana equals hemp. These are basically two
> names for the same plant.
Yup. Adding to this, few people had even heard the term "marijuana" (which, if it arose new today, would be considered an ethic slur) when it was made illegal.
It wasn't until much later, 70s/80s when French botanists bred a low THC strain of cannabis and began pushing for a legal distinction between the two; enshrining into the law the use of a plant which could only be obtained from them (talk about shrewd business)
> 3) Jefferson farmed grew hemp on his Virginia farm
> commercially.
Not only that, but look at his buddy George (thats Washington) and the instructions that he gave is slaves. Specifically they had been instructed to sew hemp seed and collect it for several crops, and then, once a large enough seed stock was available, to kill the males on the next crop.
I am aware of no claims of benefit to removing the males on in a crop intended strictly for rope or canvas use. GW grew the sticky icky for the head.
> 4) No great social stigma was attached to smoking pot in
> the late 1700s and early 1800s â" pot use wasn't
> considered a problem until the early 1900s.
There are some interesting connections between this and both Alcohol prohibition AND the mormon church. The first state to ban cannabis was actually Utah, an event which followed the return of many still polygamist mormons back to the area after having left to mexico years earlier. The story goes that some had picked up cannabis smoking in Mexico and this was an attempt to make them unwelcome. Texas then apparently picked up on this and decided to ban it on the supposition that they should prevent the problem from coming there.
Around this same time we saw Alcohol prohibition end, and the newly created "Federal Bureau of Narcotics" (precursor to the DEA) which had been created partially to fight illegal alcohol, had precious little left to do, and their main man Harry Anslinger went on his crusade to give his agency a purpose, and to deamonize the weed.
I highly recomend checking out the Senate testimony at the time, including the portion where a Doctor from the AMA is told to go home because he stood against making cannabis illegal, calling it an important medicine.
The top of mine broke, but its quite fixable. The way it was made the top "brush" (twisted stranded wire) is soldered to a thicker wire in an "A" shape. It had two holes in the top end of the shaft, one of them cracked out. At this point the belt is a good 20 years old, but, last time I rigged it up to work for a few minutes it gives some sparks.
H+ ions eh? Just so happens I was looking at a water torch video recently (sadly, nearly everyone working on such things seems to be a crackpot who is trying to fit an oxyhydrogen generator to his car) and wondering if there was any other silly excuse I could use to set up a rig to make some hydrogen.
Course when you really get down to it, if you are going to go through that much trouble to make a table top accelerator, it seems like it would be easier to skip the electrical energy to mechanical energy and mechanical energy to electrostatic potential steps. Seems like charging a capacitor and using some sort of cathode/annode setup..... and that is how the VDG ended up in the museum :)
Though, still pretty cool. It may be one of the cheaper and safer ways to get some of the high voltages, high voltage diodes and capacitors are not exactly the cheapest components to build up ladders of.
The faint throbbing that returned to my elbow once in a while for several years after I got the bright idea to put a plastic report cover on the wall next to the VDG and let it run, discharging a stream of small sparks at the plastic surface. It lit up a bright, thick spark, close to 4" to my finger, and traveled right down to the elbow.
But as strong as it can be, at least you only have to deal with as much energy as you store. Not quite dealing with line current.
off topic P.S. Being curious myself about how one might create an electron beam from the Van de Graaff, I consulted google and clicked on the first relevant looking link....
http://www.intelligentdesigntheory.info/electron-beam-van-de-graff-generator.html
The links from there are absolutely rich with incoherent babble... really good looking diagram photo. I like that all these crackpot inventions include a random magnet. You know its the real deal if it has magnets.
Heh depending on your definitions my parents bought one for me when I was in 7th grade. Ordered it right out of a catalog. The company still sells them: http://www.scientificsonline.com/motor-driven-van-de-graff.html
Price has gone up, a bit, and the look redesigned, but, still is what it is:
Amusing bit from wikipedia:
The newer designs seem more...enclosed...
What is your point? If we wanted something back from the system, we should have made it a system that wasn't so terribly abusive and in need of complete dismantling.
I may pay more taxes than most, I also have people in my own household who live off that money. It would hit me hard as I suddenly get to fully take on supporting disabled family members.
So what? That income isn't worth the very lives of people around the world, and its certainly not worth supporting this sort of blanket surveillance. End it now, and lets move on.