There's no such thing as more primitive in a genetic sense which makes it ridiculous in both cases. Anything alive today is the result of all the evolution that has taken place since the first bits of life and is therefore equally evolved.

"If that bloated pretentious undergraduate essay style waffle was an attempt at justifying drugs it failed."

Way to play kill the messenger. Unfortunately, attacking the source of an argument rather than it's content is a logical fallacy. Your argument is like a table and your premise are it's legs. My argument showed that each of the legs of yours were faulty or didn't support your table. In order to make a VALID argument, you'd have to successfully refute my argument. A fallacy is fine for falsely persuading people to agree with your invalid argument but serves no purpose if your objective is to reach a valid conclusion.

"Get back to me when someone picks a fight in the street or stabs someone for money or increases someone else's chance of lung cancer after they've had a few glasses of water or played a game of CoD."

Here you've artfully managed to combine at least three logical fallacies. You are using a plea to emotion to try to stir emotional sentiment with mention of violent crime and causing physical harm to others. You've built a strawman to beat down because you've mentioned easily demonstrable cases of negative things associated with some of the specific examples of addiction cited earlier (thus creating a resemblence to the topic of debate) but establishing those cases nor my providing counter examples adds or subtracts support for your assertion that "activit[ies], not a chemical you're ingesting whose sole purpose is to alter your brain chemistry - [they are] entirely different things." with regard to addiction. Also, you are asserting that nobody picks fights in the street, stabs someone for money, or increases someone's chance of [developing] lung cancer after drinking water or playing a game of CoD. This is called begging the question because the phrasing of your query assumes that you are correct.

Your strawman, while bearing plenty of resemblance to the topic is easy to demonstrate because you've provided no premise to support it. So I can trivially build it back up and demonstrate that doing so lends no support to my own argument nor does it detract from yours thus proving it was nothing but a strawman and does support either of our conclusions. Humans will die of dehydration in 72hrs or less without drinking water, therefore all of them have drank water at some point. Therefore every human that has picked a fight in the street, stabbed someone for money, or increased someone's chance of developing lung cancer did so after drinking water. If we assume that your strawman was intended to imply that water and video games aren't sources of people inflicting harm on others and disregard the qualifiers of specific types of harm, we have your red herring. Wars have been fought over water and the harm inflicted in them easily dwarfs any claimed drug related crime statistics. Mass school shootings, murders, and theft related to video games and possession of game items and funds are all examples of people inflicting harm on others after playing games and the murders and theft over in-game property.

People inflict harm both intentionally and through disregard in order to support their addictions. The level of harm is related to their perception of the harm being caused, the strength of their addiction, their desperation for a fix, and the difficulty of acquiring a fix. Name any example of someone causing harm to support/engage in addiction behavior and one or more of those factors can explain it without need to introduce any requirement that the addiction be to a chemical you are ingesting for the sole purpose of altering brain chemistry.

It's unlikely you'd need to steal if recreational drugs were legalized without ridiculous taxes attached to them. We don't tax people for dieting, excess exercise, depression associated with working, etc and all those things cause health expenses.

Cocaine and Marijuana would as cheap or cheaper than sugar by weight if legalized globally, sold in an unregulated market, and taxed comparably to other goods without special taxes/duties attached to them.

It's a shame. Cocaine in high concentration doesn't have much real benefit but at levels such as found in coca leaves it could be one of the most useful tools imaginable for brain training. Just use it for one thing at a time. Afraid of heights? Spend significant amounts of free time in high places, chew coca leaves while there and only reward yourself with chewing them while in those high places. Do it for awhile. Stop for a bit, then revisit at periodic intervals to reinforce. Watch your fear melt away as your brain forms neural chains associating being at heights with positive reward pathways and the reinforcing will solidify them and make them permanent. Eventually, you will not only not be afraid but actually enjoy being at heights and it will trigger a feeling of satisfaction of it's own without the leaves! Also chew during sex and other tightly bound positive experiences so you don't form a negative association with coca leaves. Anything else in your life that you don't enjoy but wish you did? Perhaps studying. Once you've associated studying positively with the coca you could form extremely positive interconnective associations by studying at heights, sometimes chewing coca, sometimes not. Every time you are at a height, chew coca, or study it will light up the neural chains associated with all three and reinforce all of them and their associations.

The "sole purpose" thing is nothing more than a red herring. It makes no difference what a things purpose it. It only matters what it does. Playing video games and engaging in any activity you find rewarding, fun, satisfying, or gain a sense of accomplishment from alters your brain chemistry in pretty much the same way as addictive recreational drugs. There's really not much difference between a substance that triggers your brains reward pathways and an activity which does so.

Do a little powder cocaine with your eyes wide open about what is happening. Cocaine doesn't really provide any euphoria, just a feeling similar to a cup of coffee, but it does provide a model for distilled addiction. The addictive properties are strong, so blatant you'd have to be particularly obtuse to not recognize them, and fortunately mostly subside as quickly as they come on. There's a constant feeling of needing/wanting something, no different than the feeling you get when you need a cup of coffee in the morning, something sweet, a snack, a drink, something to do, or even an unspecified impulse where you aren't sure what the answer is. The answer if you've recently used cocaine is pretty much always cocaine and the only euphoria is the same feeling of satisfaction that comes with finding the answer in any of those other situations. Just like anything else that provides that feeling of satisfaction the more you find that answer the more you solidify the neural pathways associated with it.

Now having observed that, realizing what is happening and recognizing the sensation and behavior for a couple rounds, drop the powder (this is easier if you know what is happening and can recognize your brain trying to justify getting more). Cocaine will gradually be the answer less and less in your mind first being replaced by the most deeply entrenched things. These are your strongest addictions in more or less the order they appear, generally it starts with sleep, water, food, love, sex. Your brain justifies (quite easily as you are addicted to these for good reason) saying you haven't had these things in a long time. But note the need/want feeling is nearly identical to your urge for cocaine and the satisfaction of stuffing your face and/or finding that cozy bed is also nearly identical to the feeling of satisfaction when you found the more cocaine that was the answer. As the pieces of your life come back on the radar you will recognize that every one of them is the same.

Everything in life is nothing more than your brain triggering want feelings for things it has associated with reward pathways and triggering highly addictive neurotransmitters to trigger a feeling of satisfaction in response. Overdo it (where it is anything that makes you feel satisfied) at too great a frequency and your brain will become less sensitive to the stimuli in the same way you develop tolerance for a drug or your body adapts to attempts at diet manipulation or you become desensitized to violence with frequent exposure. But every so often you feel like you want something, your brain cycles through the potential paths to reward, the more highly rewarding and/or frequently rewarding the more you'll feel like you want it.

It gets confusing about there, because if you've logically concluded you don't want the thing when your brain requests it, you reinforce negative connections to the idea and your brain will request it less often and the urge will fade over time (but the more rewarding the thing is when/if you do finally have it and the more likely your brain is to "refresh" those neglected but existing reward links). If you decide against it but wish you didn't have to, your brain will do what I call a "shouldn't but I wanna" association and you'll find yourself making justifications for rewarding yourself with the thing, the easiest go to justifications being "it's been a long time", "look how good I've been, I can reward myself with this something something moderation", and "the bad thing is because of circumstance x, if I do y that changes the circumstance I'll get the good without the bad". Note, whether or not the justifications happen to be logically sound and accurate or faulty logic is irrelevant to this mechanism.

If the thing is highly rewarding in a consistent manner, you will not only find more justifications popping in your head, there will be physical responses to push you to seek the thing. For example, caffeine addiction causes you to feel more sluggish and tired in the morning which compliments the stimulating effect and the enhanced brain functions resulting from caffeine; nicotine addiction causes a feeling of edginess and lack of focus which compliments the increased focus and relaxation effects of nicotine; cocaine addiction causes a feeling of dissatisfaction and fatigue, narcotic pain killer addiction causes feelings of pain, addiction to a physical activity will make you feel down, lazy, and discontent with stillness; addiction to social interaction such as love will cause you feel empty, alone, and to "miss them."

So, with that said. EVERYTHING is addictive. Your brain changes permanently in response to anything that triggers a strong positive or negative response repeatedly over time for the same reason it changes to make more and more permanent memories of information you are exposed to repeatedly and changes more rapidly the more strongly those memories are associated with other things in your brain.

Also, whether it is it's sole purpose or not, everything you put in your body is a chemical and pretty much everything alters your brain chemistry. Water actually has one of the most dramatic chemical impacts on your brain of anything you ingest. It has the magical property of physically facilitating more rapid transport of all neurochemicals in the brain! That is some seriously addictive stuff, you crave it even more strongly than food/sleep/sex! How much do you want to bet imaging the brain of people who consistently drink 8, 8oz glasses of day for a prolonged duration would show zillions of permanent changes to their brain. We should open a clinic to treat adequate hydration addicts immediately!

It matters to those of us who use bitcoin regularly. Also, the plural of bitcoin should be bitcoin not bitcoins. Whole units have no significance when handling bitcoin since there are no physical bits and you rarely hold or exchange even whole units.

How can you get to a bank account in 15mins? I can convert instantly but two business days are required to get it to my bank.

Hack for what purpose? You have to consider the value of the target and the value of your thermostat is virtually none. I mean, if you hacked ALL of them you might have enough compute power to add up to a single GPU mining bitcoin and that'd pull a hacker a cool $20-$30 a month (halved each week as difficulty increases).

51 gph is a relatively small fountain pump. I didn't look at the picture but someone said 2x8 tubes. You could easily use a couple tiny 30 gph fountain pumps to exceed that flow rate. The draw would be under 15w (if I remember right from the last time I built a fountain).

The battery to run that for any length of time is going to be bigger than what it seems like they are suggesting here but for perspective your laptop is drawing at least 4x that and will run for a couple hours. So this could go like 8hrs on a battery the size of a laptop.

Srsly, you can 3D scan with a kinect already. Or there is another application that uses a folded paper with dots, a webcam, and a laser pointer.

They didn't tell the guy to his face. They told the hiring manager, the hiring manager refused, so they canned the hiring manager who clearly was going to be a problem going forward.

I'm not sure why people are acting surprised. Undercutting the local market is the entire reason US tech companies import people from India just like it's the entire reason they export functions to India. You didn't actually believe there is any sort of shortage of talented labor? Only in the sense that local labor wants more money than companies like Oracle would care to be paying therefore they want a cheaper pool of labor.

"The guy is considered so good, they want to move him to the other side of the world. That generally means he's at least as good as, if not better than, the top performers of his US counterparts."

That's exactly why companies move a guy from the US to Asia. It is rarely why they move a guy from India to the US. The US imports staff from India so they can pay them less than US counterparts.

Yeah, now find a company that doesn't pay them less. Companies just have to list the position somewhere, interview a few obviously unqualified people, and then when they "fail to hire" someone in the US they hire the H1-B at the reduced rate.

That's just silly. We have black holes for that sort of thing.

If they have the same religious values they won't be buying contraception. In any case it is for the employees and not the employer to determine their personal values.

I'd contend that the idea is good but the implementation is bad. That's probably because it was designed by a government agency for government use that parallels the screwed up government models for controls and access to information.

For a system that is single purpose and just sits there except at update time I use SELinux every time. Because everything that raises the security bar is a good thing. For a system with lots of activity I take a pass, SELinux just adds too much troubleshooting and configuration overhead. If you invest that time and effort across the board it is almost certainly costing you more than additional risk of not running SELinux.

At least as things stand now. If Linux were attacked with the frequency and in the same ways the windows platform is attacked SELinux might quickly become a painful fact of life. But I'd expect if that were the case someone would come along and develop something a bit more sane to work with.