I will merely point out that according to the FDA rules for a schedule 1 narcotic, something has to meed all of the following requirements:
(A) The drug or other substance has high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
Does Pot have a medical use: Yup, check out marinol (the THC pill). Bang, struck from schedule 1 right there. It has a currently accepted medical use in treatment for HIV and cancer patients. Not to mention that it could be prescribed off label for a multitude of things (low doses for anxiety, insomnia, etc.) I have in the past smoked and it is a neuro-seditive. Side effects? Yeah, smoke too much, you get paranoid, short term memory lapses, etc. Same with alchohol though, in addition, you can die from alchohol poisoning (and yes it would be possible to OD on THC, but I don't think anyone could stay concious long enough to smoke that much, you'd have to have a high dose IV drip of it or something).
The simple fact of the matter here though is the FDA keeps it illegal not for medical reasons, but political ones. No one wants to be the one who gets smeared for "caving to the drug cartels", despite the fact that the best way to take them out is to take away thier products and sevices. In addition, the DuPont family paid a lot of money back in the day to keep people using wood pulp for paper so they could keep selling thier chemicals. For a good read, check out "Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do" by Peter McWilliams. Available for online reading.
Perhaps in PA, I know in Missouri when you're a judge, you get appointed, then have to be voted back in (It's a simple retain judge X yes or no?) but you still face the election cycles. The MO Bar association claims this has decreased judicial corruption (maybe it has, I don't know), but they are still subject to the whims of the voters. I knew a few people in St. Louis who voted to not retain any judge, ever, citing the War on Fun our Federal government declared seeping down into the state and local level. Just an FYI.
That's the way it should be, unfortunately, it won't happen like that. If the judge did that, his political rivals could throw out that he let 6 sexual predetors walk because he doesn't care about the children. Yes, he could bring up the specifics of the case, but it would do him no good, they got the first whack at him, and he'd have to play catch up. Yes, the judge should throw it out becuase the whole case is nonesense, but he won't, it would be career suicide. Instead, I hope he gives the defense team free reign, and overrules every objection the prosecutor throws out, maybe even citing prior case law to throw out the evidence. One can hope....
Check out DirectTV though, they might run it 24. If not, get a tivo I've discovered Noggin tends to repeat. You're not completely screwed (unless your kids watch Gubba Gubba Island at 3:00 am).
Completely know what you mean. My best friend is a Dish installer, and we would have switched but thier Noggin programming runs 0600 to 1800, then cuts over to TheN (it's like nick at night for teenagers, mostly Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire and what not), so that was a deal breaker for us. Alas, maybe in a few more years, there will be a decent HSI and an IPTV service in my area. (Along the Mississippi river, as far west in IL as you can go without going into Missouri)
I second your opinion. Thankfully I have comcast (did I just say thankfully I have comcast), but as a father of 6 (5 of whom are 4 and below), with a three year old that has mild to moderate Autism, Noggin is a godsend. When our Noggin was out for 3 days (because comcast had to change our digital reciever), I went to nickjr.com and piped the output through s-video to my TV. Some problems with that approach however, if you go that route, yes, you will have access to some of the programming you get on noggin, however, I couldn't get fullscreen to work, so the player only used up about half of my screen real-estate. Another issue is that you pick one show and it will run through all of the episodes they decide to have up that day (it changes), then it will stop. Sometimes it would last 45 minutes, sometimes only 15. The biggest issue, however, was that my children absolutely adore that moose, and he's not up there. I truly feel for your situation, and wish I could give you a viable alternative. If it weren't for Noggin, we would have stripped cable programming down to the 20 channel linup long ago and gotten all our programming from the internet.
An interesting interpretation, however, the government pays for various services with college tax credits (Americorps, the GI Bill, hell, even ROTC will kick in money for college if you sign up for 4 years after graduation). I recall nothing in the constitution that says the government can't hire someone for compensation (looks like you do community service and they give you a break on college).
Umm, yes, I am for healthcare, but if you noticed in my previous post, I said the states should handle that one. And yes, I do think education should be affordable, and again, I don't think the Feds should be doing that, just that I wouldn't go absolutely ape shit about it should they do it. They already do much more that isn't in the constitution (consentual crimes). I merely pointed out that both sides could have what they want, if they would stop trying to enforce the "christian" morals (that are way off base anyway, but that's another subject entirely, and I really don't want to go there).
Funny, I'm a social liberal, fiscally I run middle-ground (as long as there isn't deficit spending, I don't care what the government's budget is). As a social liberal, I'm more than happy to hear someone else's argument, nod in disagreement, and say "well, good thing we don't have to agree". I don't try to push my morals on anyone, so long as they give me the same leeway. I really don't see how that's evil. I think there would be a bunch of money left over for big planes and ships to keep enemy armies from invading my home, and ample money left over for healthcare, etc (although I would prefer the states to handle that), if they would stop blowing so much money on cracking down on consentual crimes, as well as ensure that education (you need a degree to do anything anymore) is affordable. If that makes me left-wing, so be it. But calling me evil, that's pretty well off the mark. Evil does require the desire for harm to come to another, so I'd be interested in how my views are "evil".
You should be set my man. As far as distros go, Arch is a small download (it's kinda like Gentoo or Sourcemage without the compiling), myself, I like compiling (it has a soothing, zen-like quality about it), and prefer Sourcemage. There's quite a bit of work to either of those. You could also go with an Ubuntu variant, or Slackware, for full feature complete distros ready to rock out of the box (Although I don't think Slack has any vm stuff installed, haven't looked too deeply though). Installing the retail box inside a VM shouldn't be an issue, although you might have to call MS to explain that you needed to re-install Windows and need to re-activate your key. Best of luck to you in your journey.
completely off topic to the article, but I thought I'd throw you a bone, as I really find your comments and journals interesting. If it was an OEM copy the license is tied to the hardware purchased. If it is a retail copy, I believe you can transfer the license. I'm not a MS employee, however, I do work with my boss (who handles our licensing with MS), and if we understand it correctly, retail licenses can move to another computer. Of course, who pays retail for windows, so if it is, in fact, OEM XP, and your older box is not an XP OEM, then, yeah, you're probably out of luck.
-- Disclaimer, as mentioned, I am not an MS employee, re-seller, or in any way affiliated with the company, nor is this legal advice, just one guy who sometimes deals with licensing issues for my employer.
p.s. if your video card is supported, you could always do what I do, which is run XP in a VM (virtualbox is my current flavor), and I only do that because everything at work is windows except for 3 computers (mine and 2 macs).
I had to double check this, and it's probably going to get modded down, but nonetheless:
According to the 08 Illinois Rules of the Road: Yellow Light -- The Yellow light warns when a light is changing from Green to Red. When the red light appears, you may not enter the intersection.
This seems to be the way to go IMHO. You can't ticket someone for running the red light unless they entered the intersection when after the light turns red. I know in Missouri, however, it is the opposite, if any part of your car is in the intersection after the light is red, you can be fined. (This was something I had to remind myself of when I moved to St. Louis, and something I had to remind my wife of when we moved into IL). Just one reason I prefer IL to MO.
Well, assuming that the safeguards are in place, sure. However as it stands right now, the executive branch already has a wiretap on every phone (as reported by the whistleblower who worked in AT&Ts NOC), so that point is moot. The point I was trying to is this: Everyone, even you, have something that you do not want anyone else to know about you. It might be something petty, it might be something grand, what it is doesn't matter, what matters is that there are things which are private, and that privacy is being eroded. I drew my example from a college buddy of mine who's girlfriend (now wife) had a crazy ex who happened to be an IL state police officer, and did just those things, and nothing significant ever happened to him. Does this mean that every "they" out there would do the same, no, I would agree that most could care less about your phone calls to your family, but that they could listen in on them, that is the scary part. Our government is going (maybe already gone to) from "innocent until proven guilty" to "anyone that seems funny is a terrorist without rights and is guilty by association", with the executive branch being the ones who get to decide what funny is. Am I being over the top, perhaps, perhaps not, but this country was founded on the principles that the government should fear the people, not the other way around.
The point is not whether some random "they" person cares. Who's to say that one of those "they" people is your Significant Other's creepy ex who decides to make your life hell/embarass you both or have some other agenda to make your life difficult. It's easy enough if that Significant Other happens to be a police officer right now. They have immense power, they can run your plates, find out where you live, follow you around. But wait, you say, they should surely get in trouble for that, yes, they should, do they always, no. Besides, you have nothing to hide. Face it, we all have some things we would like to keep private, and they can always make you a bad guy.
For an interesting look on why major banks did, in fact want to keep the sub-prime mortgage market running, check out this article from Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2182709/pagenum/all/ it is really quite interesting. To sum it up, the individual states were working to stop the predatory lenders from selling the loans they made out to investors, but the national banks were making so much money they asked the federal government to exempt them from the state laws, which discouraged the states from passing laws to prevent the mess from occurring in the first place. It all boils down to "follow the money".
But (as a AC posted in response to a sibling of your comment), the police can't just ask a private citizen (or even a P.I.) to illegally wiretap a phone just because they couldn't get a warrant. The person who placed said wiretap could(should) still face charges, and by all decent standards the "evidence" should be tossed as well (IANAL, YMMV)
And therein lies the problem. Everyone wants to see their morals codified into law. Happened with the prohibition. Once saw an old news reel of a old woman saying something to the tune of "I don't want to drink alcohol because I think it's wrong, so I don't think anyone else should either". That kind of stuff chaffs me raw. Personally, I would love to see my religious morals codified into law, but they're a lot simpler "Do what thou wilt, but harm no one". Seems pretty simple to me. Nanny state crap like this is wasting time, wasting money, but you're right, they want to get re-elected, and no one seems to want to think about the important issues.
In retrospect, I really should have just modded you insightful.
Seriously not trolling here or anything like that, but when has 3) not been overruled by society anyway. Prohibition on alcohol, prostitution (in 49 states in the union), marijuana, internet gambling, sex toys in Alabama (I think Alabama), the list goes on for quite some time about things that really aren't that critical, (really think about it, is it such a bad thing is someone bangs a hooker with a dildo in Alabama while placing bets in an online poker game), those are moral arguments, not inherently related to crime, aside from the fact that you need to go through a criminal element to get to it. All in all, what you said is dead on right. Unfortunately, there are several people in these United States that wish to have their morality codified into law, they've done it before, they'll do it again. I personally think the reason tobacco is still legal is it's just too much of a cash crop for the government (they tax the crap out of smokes). I apologize for my rant. I'll go sit in the corner now.
Well,
Sitting idle (with only tasks in the system tray running A-V, pidgin, and a slew of new bells and whistles I never saw on XP) my 4 gig laptop (of which Vista says it can only use 3 because I'm running 32-bit) uses 40% of my RAM. So who knows;) Can't wait until I have the time to get my wireless working under Linux.
Favorite Pinky and the Brain exchange ever: "Um, I think so Brain, but me and Pippi Longstockings, what would the kids look like?"
(I know I know offtopic, but what the hell, I had to say it)
Slashdot Mirror
I will merely point out that according to the FDA rules for a schedule 1 narcotic, something has to meed all of the following requirements:
(A) The drug or other substance has high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
Does Pot have a medical use: Yup, check out marinol (the THC pill). Bang, struck from schedule 1 right there. It has a currently accepted medical use in treatment for HIV and cancer patients. Not to mention that it could be prescribed off label for a multitude of things (low doses for anxiety, insomnia, etc.) I have in the past smoked and it is a neuro-seditive. Side effects? Yeah, smoke too much, you get paranoid, short term memory lapses, etc. Same with alchohol though, in addition, you can die from alchohol poisoning (and yes it would be possible to OD on THC, but I don't think anyone could stay concious long enough to smoke that much, you'd have to have a high dose IV drip of it or something).
The simple fact of the matter here though is the FDA keeps it illegal not for medical reasons, but political ones. No one wants to be the one who gets smeared for "caving to the drug cartels", despite the fact that the best way to take them out is to take away thier products and sevices. In addition, the DuPont family paid a lot of money back in the day to keep people using wood pulp for paper so they could keep selling thier chemicals. For a good read, check out "Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do" by Peter McWilliams. Available for online reading.
At least 8, I agree poorly worded summary.
Perhaps in PA, I know in Missouri when you're a judge, you get appointed, then have to be voted back in (It's a simple retain judge X yes or no?) but you still face the election cycles. The MO Bar association claims this has decreased judicial corruption (maybe it has, I don't know), but they are still subject to the whims of the voters. I knew a few people in St. Louis who voted to not retain any judge, ever, citing the War on Fun our Federal government declared seeping down into the state and local level. Just an FYI.
That's the way it should be, unfortunately, it won't happen like that. If the judge did that, his political rivals could throw out that he let 6 sexual predetors walk because he doesn't care about the children. Yes, he could bring up the specifics of the case, but it would do him no good, they got the first whack at him, and he'd have to play catch up. Yes, the judge should throw it out becuase the whole case is nonesense, but he won't, it would be career suicide. Instead, I hope he gives the defense team free reign, and overrules every objection the prosecutor throws out, maybe even citing prior case law to throw out the evidence. One can hope....
Check out DirectTV though, they might run it 24. If not, get a tivo I've discovered Noggin tends to repeat. You're not completely screwed (unless your kids watch Gubba Gubba Island at 3:00 am).
Completely know what you mean. My best friend is a Dish installer, and we would have switched but thier Noggin programming runs 0600 to 1800, then cuts over to TheN (it's like nick at night for teenagers, mostly Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire and what not), so that was a deal breaker for us. Alas, maybe in a few more years, there will be a decent HSI and an IPTV service in my area. (Along the Mississippi river, as far west in IL as you can go without going into Missouri)
I second your opinion. Thankfully I have comcast (did I just say thankfully I have comcast), but as a father of 6 (5 of whom are 4 and below), with a three year old that has mild to moderate Autism, Noggin is a godsend. When our Noggin was out for 3 days (because comcast had to change our digital reciever), I went to nickjr.com and piped the output through s-video to my TV. Some problems with that approach however, if you go that route, yes, you will have access to some of the programming you get on noggin, however, I couldn't get fullscreen to work, so the player only used up about half of my screen real-estate. Another issue is that you pick one show and it will run through all of the episodes they decide to have up that day (it changes), then it will stop. Sometimes it would last 45 minutes, sometimes only 15. The biggest issue, however, was that my children absolutely adore that moose, and he's not up there. I truly feel for your situation, and wish I could give you a viable alternative. If it weren't for Noggin, we would have stripped cable programming down to the 20 channel linup long ago and gotten all our programming from the internet.
McGrew,
Once again, you owe me a new keyboard (wish I had mod points)
An interesting interpretation, however, the government pays for various services with college tax credits (Americorps, the GI Bill, hell, even ROTC will kick in money for college if you sign up for 4 years after graduation). I recall nothing in the constitution that says the government can't hire someone for compensation (looks like you do community service and they give you a break on college).
Please, please tell me you made that up, because if you did, it's hilarious, and if you didn't, it's scary.
Umm, yes, I am for healthcare, but if you noticed in my previous post, I said the states should handle that one. And yes, I do think education should be affordable, and again, I don't think the Feds should be doing that, just that I wouldn't go absolutely ape shit about it should they do it. They already do much more that isn't in the constitution (consentual crimes). I merely pointed out that both sides could have what they want, if they would stop trying to enforce the "christian" morals (that are way off base anyway, but that's another subject entirely, and I really don't want to go there).
Funny, I'm a social liberal, fiscally I run middle-ground (as long as there isn't deficit spending, I don't care what the government's budget is). As a social liberal, I'm more than happy to hear someone else's argument, nod in disagreement, and say "well, good thing we don't have to agree". I don't try to push my morals on anyone, so long as they give me the same leeway. I really don't see how that's evil. I think there would be a bunch of money left over for big planes and ships to keep enemy armies from invading my home, and ample money left over for healthcare, etc (although I would prefer the states to handle that), if they would stop blowing so much money on cracking down on consentual crimes, as well as ensure that education (you need a degree to do anything anymore) is affordable. If that makes me left-wing, so be it. But calling me evil, that's pretty well off the mark. Evil does require the desire for harm to come to another, so I'd be interested in how my views are "evil".
You should be set my man. As far as distros go, Arch is a small download (it's kinda like Gentoo or Sourcemage without the compiling), myself, I like compiling (it has a soothing, zen-like quality about it), and prefer Sourcemage. There's quite a bit of work to either of those. You could also go with an Ubuntu variant, or Slackware, for full feature complete distros ready to rock out of the box (Although I don't think Slack has any vm stuff installed, haven't looked too deeply though). Installing the retail box inside a VM shouldn't be an issue, although you might have to call MS to explain that you needed to re-install Windows and need to re-activate your key. Best of luck to you in your journey.
completely off topic to the article, but I thought I'd throw you a bone, as I really find your comments and journals interesting. If it was an OEM copy the license is tied to the hardware purchased. If it is a retail copy, I believe you can transfer the license. I'm not a MS employee, however, I do work with my boss (who handles our licensing with MS), and if we understand it correctly, retail licenses can move to another computer. Of course, who pays retail for windows, so if it is, in fact, OEM XP, and your older box is not an XP OEM, then, yeah, you're probably out of luck. -- Disclaimer, as mentioned, I am not an MS employee, re-seller, or in any way affiliated with the company, nor is this legal advice, just one guy who sometimes deals with licensing issues for my employer. p.s. if your video card is supported, you could always do what I do, which is run XP in a VM (virtualbox is my current flavor), and I only do that because everything at work is windows except for 3 computers (mine and 2 macs).
I had to double check this, and it's probably going to get modded down, but nonetheless:
According to the 08 Illinois Rules of the Road: Yellow Light -- The Yellow light warns when a light is changing from Green to Red. When the red light appears, you may not enter the intersection.
This seems to be the way to go IMHO. You can't ticket someone for running the red light unless they entered the intersection when after the light turns red. I know in Missouri, however, it is the opposite, if any part of your car is in the intersection after the light is red, you can be fined. (This was something I had to remind myself of when I moved to St. Louis, and something I had to remind my wife of when we moved into IL). Just one reason I prefer IL to MO.
Well, assuming that the safeguards are in place, sure. However as it stands right now, the executive branch already has a wiretap on every phone (as reported by the whistleblower who worked in AT&Ts NOC), so that point is moot. The point I was trying to is this: Everyone, even you, have something that you do not want anyone else to know about you. It might be something petty, it might be something grand, what it is doesn't matter, what matters is that there are things which are private, and that privacy is being eroded. I drew my example from a college buddy of mine who's girlfriend (now wife) had a crazy ex who happened to be an IL state police officer, and did just those things, and nothing significant ever happened to him. Does this mean that every "they" out there would do the same, no, I would agree that most could care less about your phone calls to your family, but that they could listen in on them, that is the scary part. Our government is going (maybe already gone to) from "innocent until proven guilty" to "anyone that seems funny is a terrorist without rights and is guilty by association", with the executive branch being the ones who get to decide what funny is. Am I being over the top, perhaps, perhaps not, but this country was founded on the principles that the government should fear the people, not the other way around.
The point is not whether some random "they" person cares. Who's to say that one of those "they" people is your Significant Other's creepy ex who decides to make your life hell/embarass you both or have some other agenda to make your life difficult. It's easy enough if that Significant Other happens to be a police officer right now. They have immense power, they can run your plates, find out where you live, follow you around. But wait, you say, they should surely get in trouble for that, yes, they should, do they always, no. Besides, you have nothing to hide. Face it, we all have some things we would like to keep private, and they can always make you a bad guy.
I wonder if that includes the admin shares on Windows hosts
For an interesting look on why major banks did, in fact want to keep the sub-prime mortgage market running, check out this article from Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2182709/pagenum/all/ it is really quite interesting. To sum it up, the individual states were working to stop the predatory lenders from selling the loans they made out to investors, but the national banks were making so much money they asked the federal government to exempt them from the state laws, which discouraged the states from passing laws to prevent the mess from occurring in the first place. It all boils down to "follow the money".
But (as a AC posted in response to a sibling of your comment), the police can't just ask a private citizen (or even a P.I.) to illegally wiretap a phone just because they couldn't get a warrant. The person who placed said wiretap could(should) still face charges, and by all decent standards the "evidence" should be tossed as well (IANAL, YMMV)
And therein lies the problem. Everyone wants to see their morals codified into law. Happened with the prohibition. Once saw an old news reel of a old woman saying something to the tune of "I don't want to drink alcohol because I think it's wrong, so I don't think anyone else should either". That kind of stuff chaffs me raw. Personally, I would love to see my religious morals codified into law, but they're a lot simpler "Do what thou wilt, but harm no one". Seems pretty simple to me. Nanny state crap like this is wasting time, wasting money, but you're right, they want to get re-elected, and no one seems to want to think about the important issues. In retrospect, I really should have just modded you insightful.
All I can say is "that is interesting, isn't it".
(yeah, it's offtopic, I know, but still that reference to Contact was too good to pass up)
Seriously not trolling here or anything like that, but when has 3) not been overruled by society anyway. Prohibition on alcohol, prostitution (in 49 states in the union), marijuana, internet gambling, sex toys in Alabama (I think Alabama), the list goes on for quite some time about things that really aren't that critical, (really think about it, is it such a bad thing is someone bangs a hooker with a dildo in Alabama while placing bets in an online poker game), those are moral arguments, not inherently related to crime, aside from the fact that you need to go through a criminal element to get to it. All in all, what you said is dead on right. Unfortunately, there are several people in these United States that wish to have their morality codified into law, they've done it before, they'll do it again. I personally think the reason tobacco is still legal is it's just too much of a cash crop for the government (they tax the crap out of smokes). I apologize for my rant. I'll go sit in the corner now.
Well, Sitting idle (with only tasks in the system tray running A-V, pidgin, and a slew of new bells and whistles I never saw on XP) my 4 gig laptop (of which Vista says it can only use 3 because I'm running 32-bit) uses 40% of my RAM. So who knows ;) Can't wait until I have the time to get my wireless working under Linux.
Favorite Pinky and the Brain exchange ever: "Um, I think so Brain, but me and Pippi Longstockings, what would the kids look like?" (I know I know offtopic, but what the hell, I had to say it)