No actually your moralizing is irrelevant, because the reality is the same no matter how you feel about it. Its been shown in the studies I have run into on the subject that piracy rates drop off with income level. Those with money pay for it.

This lines up perfectly with my own experience, the people who pirate the most tend to make the least amount of money and have the most amount of free time to consume huge amounts of media.

I don't see how your feelings on the topic, which seems to be your only point, makes a difference here. Your argument doesn't even make sense. Content easily can cost many times the initial investment, especially an initial investment for a pc or console setup, and many people's finances fluxuate over time.

In any case, I don't see how that is relevant, point is, the loss of money is money that they were never likely going to get the vast majority of, so why is your moral outrage the only effect that matters or is worth talking about? IS it worth more than any potential side benefits?

Actually I had a bad experience with caffiene withdrawl years ago, high school actually. I had managed quite a habbit of hitting the vending machine for iced tea. Two in the morning before class, two at lunch, then of course there was either wrestling practice or the ride home. After doing this a while, I forgot my wallet at home in a rush one day.....ouch.

Ever since, I watched for the morning headaches, if I get them, I immediately detox off caffiene for two weeks, never had such a bad reaction since.

Though, the last time I got caffiene headaches was a few years back, when I was in a cubicle practically next to a break room stocked with decent coffee. Now I work in an office that is a bit of a walk, and well.... I can't drink the stuff they make....I may be an addict but, I have standards. I just can't drink that swill.

They have decent tea though....

While true, I have trouble imagining anyone who can afford games does this. There are so many cheap games out there it seems like a silly bother and... a lot to go through to screw the publisher out of a few bucks.

That said, since the majority of people who do this likely are attemtping to cheat because they couldn't afford many games anyway, the loss of money is likely actually very small since the alternative would be, they don't play the game or download it some other way.

However, they likely tell all their friends about any game so, in a way its free advertising. Hell LL Bean has a return policy that almost screams "come take advantage of us" but, they claim very few people do, and that it works out for them in the long run with loyal customers.

In fact, I bet the people who suffer the most from this sort of trick are the people who make shitty games, because not only will they not get paid by the people who use this trick, they might also lose out on other sales as people warn their friend's away from wasting their money.

lol funny as it is, I heard a great commentary a while back by a woman who went to college and spent years studying feminist theory and all this, who went and interviewed a woman who was a ceo of some decently sized company and came to the realization that it wasn't the academics where were making strides for the acceptance of women in the workforce, it was the ones actually working who were doing it.

I had a forehead smacking moment last year when I mentioned this jokingly last year while camping at a friend's event. I said "They were basically selling dowsing rods for explosives" and one of my friend's pipes in, with all seriousness: "Oh that is fine, dowsing works!".....sigh.....

That is absolutely preposterous. However, if you model the stone blocks as frictionless point masses.....

A while back I tried to turn the tables on a scammer who royally pissed me off.

I posted an ad looking for a roomate and I got interest from someone claiming to be relocating from spain with moving costs paid by her company. Sounded good to me....after a quick exchange I took down my ad and a day later got the bad news "I will be sending a money order, can you cash it and forward on the difference too...."

I immediately recognized the scam and put my ad back up, but I was mad.

So I said "Sure sounds good".... the money order came, I said "never got it, when is it coming?"....got another one.... then I decided to have fun with it.... I sent a url for some pictures on my webserver and asked questions that would requiore looking at them to answer...about the room of course.... soon as I had an IP, I looked it up and told "her"

"I have seen better fakes, you wont fool me" I told "her" and that I knew she was somewhere outside Lagos Nigeria. Suddenly she admitted to being a he, and had a new tune.... he was trying to recruit me. Too easy.

Pretty quickly it shaped up what he wanted...someone with a US addrss to remail packages. I would get a package of papers to send out, all I had to do was put them in envelopes, slap postage on, and that would be $500 for me, each time.

So I figured....no way I am helping this scammer who tried to scam me, but, lets see if I can scam him out of $500 by getting him to pay up front. He mentioned counterfit bills, so I was like yes, cool, I will take counterfit bills, then I can report you directly to the Secret Service oooh fun.....

in the end we could never work out a deal that sounded good to him and I was willing to burn him on so, it never happened. Oh well.....

AND its worth noting.....should anything ever go to court....

NOTHING you said can be used to help you. While anything you say can be considered a confession and used against you, anything you say that is not used against you is hearsay.

So you have nothing to gain by speaking if it ever does go to court.

Except, the system is setup to prevent the government from printing money directly for their own use.

Lets not forget how it works, the semi-independent federal reserve prints the money and then offers it out as no recourse loans to their industry cronies (or whoever is a most convininet front...like their wives: http://www.rollingstone.com/po... )

Then, those people, now with money in hand that they only have to pay back if they make a profit, they loan it to everyone else, with interest.

Does that work with full disk luks encryption? Because not encrypting the disk is not an option for me.
Besides, after I put the luks password in, its not like I am going to get right to work when my coffee cup needs filling still.

Needless efficiency really, wouldn't actually save much time.

That, I must say, is one of the arguments that turns me off to it. I really could not possibly care less how long it takes any system other than my laptop to boot. My laptop does run a distro with systemd, and I do like that it boots fast....I would not hesistate for a second to give that speed up if I needed to for something I do once a day usually and twice a day at most.

The majority of systems I deal with are servers. They mostly have plenty of CPU and memory available and typically run very few services..... they boot plenty fast without systemd.

Really the most annoying thing about it for me isn't going to be learning it, its going to be training other people to deal with it and supporting them when they find the software they are installing isn't setup for it properly and they need to troubleshoot and fix it.

If there was some real benefit, I am all for it but....boot speed? Talk about not worth it if that is the "benefit"

Except not everyone reading this knows that and the very fact that there is difficulty in detection calls some question on the "1 case in 14 years" claim; since we should expect false negatives due to the pharmacology of one of the drugs in question.

It is quite understandable to day that many tests for GHB would be false positives or false negatives so its not worth doing, but, that means the case is inconclusive, and saying "1 case in 14 years" means all inconclusive cases are bing lumped with all the true negatives which, is misleading at best.

I would, be shocked if the numbers were high given how rare this sort of crime really is compared to more mundane versions of the same; however, I have trouble believing it is quite this cut and dry simple.

> Why nail-polish? Why not just use the strips?

Easy, it reduces the steps required between returning to your drink or realizing you have forgotten to watch it, and doing the test. It removes....barriers. If you have to go into your pocket or purse to remove test strips, you are less likely to want to do it as often as you should....it could also be seen as insulting to whoever you are with that you don't trust them.

> doesn't anyone see a problem with sticking your fingers in your drink?

Not to me, but I understand that there are people grossed out by such things however, your body evolved to process far worst than whatever your fingers are likely to harbor, even after a night out drinking and touching doorknobs.

well wouldn't you expect GHB to be hard to detect since it occurs naturally anyway in the body and the body is excellent at eliminating it? I have taken it myself, it onsets in 10 minutes if the dose is large enough, and is pretty much back to baseline within an hour, its doubtful anyone in real disress makes it there fast enough to be reliably tested.

That said, I have little doubt you are mostly correct that its very few. Having personally gotten myself to debilitated states on both GHB and Alcohol, I would be hard pressed to really differentiate the effects (aside from GHBs lack of a hangover but, if you are doing both anyway....) from such a state.

I suspect the majority of such cases are really people who got drunker than they realized, and may have trouble believing that they drank that much.

Which brings up a very legitimate question: Do these nail polishes give a false sense of security when out drinking? Or, on the other hand, will simply having a "string on ones finger" itself help to remind the wearer to be more careful by inducing her to take conscious steps towards recognizing danger?

I suspect the former but.... I can't really say that the second is implausible either. Regardless, I am doubtful that their main effect of detecting these substances will, in and of itself, be of much use.

> Or are there enough people out there who have been exposed within three days and are as of yet symptom free?

Well that number seems to be increasing every day. So that is a positive um right?

Actually I think the way you do it is with a double blind in a population that is already likely to be exposed, or likely to be exposed soon.... then watch for whether the people vaccinated with the real deal vs the placbo get infected at higher rates.

Since you don't even know if it works, its not like you are actually withholding treatement on those with the placebo, and its a population you expect to have some cases anyway. So if it works, it could protect some of the population and allow for others.... if it doesn't work, any new risks they are exposed to are only from the drug itself, as long as you can weigh that against the risk and outcomes of ebola infection.....

Essentially I think the only viable population is medical professionals themselves who work with Ebola patients, and family of patients who just recently brought their family member to the clinic. That is mostly because any cases that are found have to be isolates asap and so there is no possibility for any real control group outside the clinics/centers.