There is a difference between the various substances and how they're perceived. All misinformation included, there are certain "absolutes". Seeking the thrill is something you'll do with stuff like psychedelics and stimulants. MJ, MDMA, LSD, various othre three-to-six-letter chemicals. Sure, some say they're harmful, some say they might be dangerous, but "I know what I'm doing".

Crack and Heroin or insane shit like Krok is a different matter. You don't reach for that for a thrill. When you're going down that road, you know that you don't come back. And you really don't plan to.

Sorry, I have my principles. I don't eat what I fuck.

While I generally agree, there's little a financial fine would do to a business. If it's low, it's not a matter for legal but one for cost accounting and risk management. If it's high, the company is sent into bankruptcy and the assholes running it simply continue.

Because two wrongs don't make a right.

Sorry, but the day I copy the harebrained crap a Rep dreamed up, I hand in my socialist card.

1000 bucks silly high? Ask the average CEO and he'll wholeheartedly disagree.

And he doesn't even pick anything!

Yeah, dammit, we can't exploit the niggers anymore...

Umm... then I guess it's those illegal workers that create jobs like crazy?

Consider trying QNX, the message-passing real time OS, for this. This is a message passing problem, and Linux doesn't do message passing well. QNX has a scheduler optimized for message passing. You should be able to handle the UDP front end and fan-out without any problems. You can give the front-end process a higher priority than the other processes, which should let you get all the UDP packets into the fan-out program without losing any. That's what real-time OSs are for.

Trying to do anything high-performance with CPython's threads is hopeless. Watch this presentation on performance issues with Python's Global Interpreter Lock, Python has an internal scheduler, and it behaves very badly under load.

So each Python process should be single-thread. Have as many as you need, set up to get work via MsgReceive and reply by MsgReply. Don't set them up as "resource managers".

Python under QNX is being used by the robotics community, where real-time matters for some things, but not others.

QNX - great technology, marketing operation from hell.

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are several causes. One is that POD allows publishers to make an reliable though modest profit from their mid-list authors, which ironically makes them more risk averse. But publishers still provide production and editing services on a MS that'd cost you maybe ten thousand dollars if you were contracting those services out. They also get your book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, which is a bridge too far for most indy authors, even the successful ones.

A lot of the bad feeling that publishers get from indy authors comes from two sources. First, a long history with rejection. Second the lack of respect indy authors get relative to traditionally published authors. We can see it in this discussion elsewhere, where one poster puts "authors" in quotes when referring to indy authors. And it's easy to see why because most indy authors just aren't good enough to get traditionally published. *Some* indy authors put out a product that's every bit as good as the mid-list authors from the big publishing houses, but most just dump their terrible manuscripts on Amazon with a clip-art cover and no copy editing, much less developmental editing.

The statistic that most indy authors make their investment back plus 40% didn't impress me, because (a) that counts the author's labor as free and (b) most indy authors don't invest much cash in their projects. The percentage of indy authors that clear, say, five thousand dollars in profit are very small.

It's not that indy publishing doesn't have its points, and my traditionally published friends are certainly thinking about dipping their toe in the water. But it's not as cheap as it looks if you want a comparable product, and you give up certain things. I was in Manhattan recently and went to the 5th Avenue branch of the NYPL. My traditionally published friends' books were either on the shelves our out circulating. The NYPL had *none* of my indy author friends' books, even though at least one of them has made the New York Times best seller list.

Well, if history tells us one thing for certain, then that if someone WANTS to get H, he WILL get H. Simply that.

On the other hand, why do you think addiction rates would go up. Would you go "gee, H used to be so expensive, now it's cheap, let's shoot my brain into orbit!"? Would you?

Why do you think anyone else would?

A friend of mine is a social worker. So I get far more insight into the whole shit than I really would like to. And there is one thing all H addicts have in common: They reached the bottom of the barrel. H is usually "end of the line", along with crack (which, fortunately, so far has not reached our areas in quantity). By far not everyone gets "that low". I know quite a few people who do MJ or MDMA occasionally, and they do manage to hold down jobs (one of them being the Vice-CISO of a rather important company, another one a very successful lawyer, for some curious reason specialized in cases concerning drugs...).

In a nutshell, by far not everyone who tried drugs will end up shooting H up his veins. Not even people who do other drugs regularly do. H is something you reach for when you already hit rock bottom. These people FULLY KNOW what they get into, even before they start. They KNOW they will be fully addicted and they know that this stuff will kill them. They are at the point of no longer giving a shit.

And no law on the planet could change that either way. It's like trying to stop suicide terrorists with laws. Why the fuck does anyone think someone who pretty much gave up on himself cares about a law?

Yes, but it's one of the few instances where you actually can't argue that you need to cut freedoms in the name of safety, because BOTH freedom AND safety are on the same side of the equation this time.

It's really hard to tell whether you're actually serious or just trolling. Well, allow me to point to the ultimate kind of punishment for drug related issues: Killing people. And believe it or not, there are countries where people are killed for having drugs. Here a brief list.

People fucking get KILLED there for touching drugs. Not "wearing pink" or doing some menial work, or something else silly. The big one. You're not carrying a bucket to pick up crap, you kick it.

And STILL people do drugs.

Maybe, just maybe, you MIGHT realize when you look at that, that it's not the drugs themselves that are a problem. Hell, people shooting H up their veins are already looking at a death sentence. A long and agonizing one. And they FUCKING KNOW IT. And they STILL do that shit.

And you really want to tell anyone that drugs are the problem? Drugs are the fake escape from the actual problem. Solve the underlying problem and you solve the "drug problem" implicitly.

Erh... one flaw in that plan. If MJ ain't illegal, what legal grounds is there to seize it?

Dude, whatever it is you're doing, do less of it.

Or at least pass some.

That's one of the things I never really understood: Why does "medical use" matter? There's a lot of stuff we consume or do that is dangerous, purely for recreational purposes. Some of it even with addictive properties. Oddly, what matters seems to be whether it's tasty. If it's tasty, it doesn't matter whether it's addictive or has any "good" effect besides giving you a buzz or high. If it's not, it's probably somewhere in Schedule I.