Pretty sure glue-sniffing
The result of drug laws.
opium dens were places for broken souls
As are pubs. Oh wait.... maybe it's only a small minority that seek solace in continual inebriation. Like the lazy kid up the back of the class - he needs a little peer group pressure correctly applied and some coaching, don't hold the whole damn class back.
And your history "knowledge" sucks.
With designer drugs, scientists can't agree on what exactly a 'drug analogue' means,
Where do you get this shit? Or do you just make it up? We know exactly what an analog is, and how to design them to give fairly predictable effects. Replace the benzene ring with Sulphur etc.
The rest of your argument sucks balls too - the government has no problems legislating against nature. Existing laws already hamper "medicinal" drug research, even with the recently enlightened changes to cannabis legislation in some States of the US, it's still extremely difficult to get funding or approval for research into non-recreational use of the "traditionally" illegal drugs (i.e. morphine, cannabis, cocaine). You might want to look up "reversal of onus" too, being sent to jail while you endeavour to prove beyond reasonable doubt you are not guilty as charged is just as bad as actually being proven guilty.
Obviously enforcement of every bespoke chemical being synthesized to order is impractical even by the standards of the drug wars; but are substances such as the one described in the article actually 'legal'?
In Australia where the story is based, maybe (Designer Drugs Legislation), but would it be enforced? No. Sythetic Cannabis analogs are illegal here under the same legislation, but before seizing them they have to be run through Lidcombe labs where there is a long waiting list, in the meantime the distributors are making a lot of money - and have legal heavyweights that can and have stalled the process.
One of the things the sensationalised story overlooked is that the same compound could be manufactured to order almost anywhere in the world - China just happens to give the story more zing.
It should also be noted that these and other "designer" drugs are not very enjoyable. The reality is that all the "good" drugs (relatively harmless, few unpleasant side effects) are either illegal or heavily taxed and subject to production and distribution monopolies.
In New South Wales they have laws in place that can make possession of a length of garden hose and a milk bottle illegal. The laws against drugs have a purpose and it's not to stop people taking them. Good luck banning them - I studied organic chemistry and pharmacology, everything on your spice rack, even your lawn itself has non-amine precursors. But that'd involve a bit of work and an outlay. Give me a truck, a woodchipper, a chainsaw, and malicicious intent and I can actually get paid big money to legally collect large amounts of (very) rich *amine* precursors for Alpha Methyl PhenEthyl Amines (MMDA and speed/Ice etc) - as could any number of people who likewise have no motivation to get rich from recreational drugs - or compete with very competitive existing marketers, and the host of "officials" who live off them. By rich I mean 5 - 8% and in semi trailer loads. Continuously.
The drug industry, the other industry that calls their clients "users".
[sarcasm]
Obviously we need more legislation, not just against these insidious drugs, but also against bad weather and sharp corners on furniture. Zeus forbid we stop for a moment and consider why people throughout history take drugs. Cue King Cnut. Personally I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on a more productive excercise than pissing up a rope.
[/sarcasm the lowest form of wit... except for the witling fools (f* wits) it's aimed at]
Oh, and kudos and more funds to Caldicot, the man in the middle of this stupidity.
Install only from the source. If you install from a third-party source or don't check the md5sum what did you expect?
Tag story as stupid
Hey, I just found a bottle of whisky by the side of the road.... Party! (what could go wrong?)
All it takes is digesting all the data from Wikileaks and Snowden and applying it to the rest of the issues. It's no psychic anything. Its called deduction. You are right that my logic wouldn't stand in court... Obviously. You probably believe the White House knew nothing about 9/11 before 9/11 happened,
I differentiate between "believe", "suspect", and "know".
I suspect a lot of things. I "know" their is no entity called the "White House" - it's a building occupied by a bunch of partially informed people with different agendas. So, no, I don't "believe" the "White House" "knew" about 9/11 in advance. I do "believe" that when people talk of "them" and "they" in the context you use them - that they subscribe to unified conspiracy theories, an over-simplification of reality. I don't believe in nationalist conspiracies that run countries or wars - company interests do, and they don't believe in nationalism except as a tools to manipulate people's opinions. As for conspiracies - I side with Adam Smith on their origins and frequency.
I suspect Bush and Co. "should" have seen something like it coming. I suspect some FBI personnel had evidence it was going to happen, whether they "knew" is a different matter. E.g. I "suspect" you have "the large corporations that are in bed with govt" backwards, and that you don't comprehend the Snowden and Wikileaks releases - all that data is gathered by devices made by private companies and processed by private companies, after being pitched to those agencies by those same companies (there's gold in that thar data). The order in which the data access occurs is critical to the understanding. i.e if you "think" that the problem is that the government leaks data to companies you've got it arse-backwards.
And I definitely don't believe in psychics. Though I do believe many people "saw a lot of things coming", just like they "often know who it is calling there phone before they see Caller ID". The problem is despite "knowing" they never test their "knowledge i.e. they only recall the times they were right, not the majority of times they were wrong. Because they only ever look for "evidence" to support their "gut instincts". Who were Snowden's employers again?
tl;dr;dc
Meaning?
Too Lazy;Don't Read;Dumb C?
no proof needed. It's too obvious.
It's "obvious" in much the same way that other false things have been "obvious" over the years on Slashdot.
You're confusing psychic "knowledge" with psychotic conflating an emotional investment in their own "gut instincts" "confirmed" by a cherry-picked version of reality and calling it "obvious". A common mistake I blame on education and logical deduction.
My intiution is that psychic ability is, um, bullshit....
That's all I've got, for the life of me I can't figure out how to attach it to a computer without someone noticing.
<telephone rings>
"Hi, this is Microsoft Tech Support. We've noticed you have a problem with your computer. We are sending someone over to fix it."
That'd be it!
And there I was naively "thinking" the NSA would be exercising some sort of change control to control exposure of secret intelligence gathering technology by carefully evaluating the exposure risk to intelligence gains and doing slick shit like, um, intercepting hardware shipments and swapping in doctored keyboards or mice. And maybe even adding a doctored PSU with modified DC filtering to match the USB keyboard (those PS2 units don't have much of a power supply) they'd doctored to send DC signals along the AC mains - which'd be good for a few kilometres of signaling.
Sometimes my mind comes up with the most unlikely crap when I don't take my meds.
We were discussing this last night on boingboing, and I shared an equal skepticism. The basic conclusions were:
I'm still skeptical, mainly because a simple frequency scanner would allow one to detect the presence of transmissions by the device, and because concealing an antenna, even in the form of a USB cable, would be difficult. If the cable is cut-off, then it would be massively obvious with a simple look underneath, and it would be difficult to manufacture a functioning USB cable that contained a radio and antenna. There was talk of manufacturer collaboration, especially against organizations that develop security (tampering with new-manufacture to replace components on the motherboards essentially) but that seems like it would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve without employees of the manufacturers questioning why they're going through so much effort to do this. We'll just have to see what comes of it. I'm genuinely curious if we'll ever see any actual evidence or not.
Not in the catalogue, but extremely do-able, develop a small device that'll run off a USB power supply and will create a secret channel using DC over the AC supply, embed device in mouse or keyboard... That's all I've got, for the life of me I can't figure out how to attach it to a computer without someone noticing.
Of course I'm joking - if it was likely it would have been in some game, or a movie.
This shit has been going on long before Snowden and his self centered ego trip of thinking he has done "good"?
Feeling a little cock challenged? Cheer up, there's a new shirt in the mail for you.
There has never been an occurrence of a variety of human stupidity that Mark Twain has not commented on. One particular quote comes to mind with regard to the anonymous poster above:
"The trouble ain't that there are too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.”
Stay inside, fool.
Maybe if we could get them to wear antenna hats!
Just give 'em all free "We hate Snowden/Assange" shirts. In nice bright colours.
That way when they're lined up against the wall they'll be easier to shoot. That'd automatically raise the standards.
Fair enough and I agree with your point about network tv and the advertising cash cows. However I will point out that the latest generation Smart TVs do have interfaces for the new cash cow streaming media services and they have them big time.
.
I get your point too. However I just see newspaper, television, music "publishers" and film "production" companies as robber barons of distribution. Streaming services IMO are just late prospectors on a picked out gold field, all of them dying because the internet changes the game. When it comes to hardware, and "smart" TV is just hardware - the manufacturers are at the mercy of consumers. For the most part their revenue stream comes from those that weren't born knowing the internet (I remember the first television broadcasts, but I'm showing my age). My grandkids don't know what MTV is, watch most of their videos on YouTuber, and get their movies from bittorrent - almost all those movies are made for subscription TV. They get their news from blogs and forums and have never bought a newspaper, they buy their music from Google Play - much of it direct from the musicians, and they haven't watched television since they were in primary school. The grandkids are all gamers but mostly they play "app games'' - something else they buy direct from the developers by-passing the distribution monopolies. Only one of my kids owns a television, though they've all got home-built multimedia boxes with TV cards, likewise the grandkids - none of whom have ever owned televisions that I know of. Gunna be hard for those business models to make money from them, and I see the same things happening in Asia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Africa.
So we agree on some things, just not the future of "smart tv". And no, I don't own a "television" (a couple of old analogue TV sets, but there's no signal for them even if I wanted to watch them, though I've got TV cards - which I don't watch, just the recordings (I'm in Australia where television is shit, so I mostly watch HBO, from PirateBay.)
I've got friends who own a chain of electronic shops - they don't sell many TV sets these days... probably because the top end of the consumer market import Yamakasi Catleap big screens that beat the shit out of anything "smart" TV can offer, in price, picture quality and screen real estate. Might be different elsewhere though. The "low-end" of the market, earning less than $100K pa, still buy televisions, and watch daytime TV and "reality" shows - but changes in technology (self-driving delivery vehicles and robots) mean their spending will be increasingly restricted... so I strongly suspect that'll be the final nail in the coffin for content delivery monopolies. "Smart" TV is pretty dumb without content monopolies, and streaming is a content delivery monopoly built on a content delivery/distribution monopoly.
I think you are missing the point. The TV is in the process of morphing into a fully internet capable device.
I base my opinion on the revenue figures not Murdock's stockholder speeches and CES "optimism over experience" PR. The only relatively healthy sector is subscription.
It would be interesting to see if sales of smart tvs are on the upswing, but like I said everybody seems to be buying them
In your enthuasiasm for the hardware your're missing the point. The Television industry is dying because, with the exception of subscription TV, it's revenue stream is advertising. That's now a revenue trickle with no chance in hell of reverting to it's former cash cow status.
You conflate a viewing device (TV viewer) with a content delivery industry (Television). The television you refer to is just a screen with only arbitrary differences from a plethora of other "screen" devices.
In some parts of the world Television is still broadcast and viewed in a non-digital format, elsewhere "TV manufacturers" are losing market share to "Computing device" manufacturers. That's as likely to change as a Neilsen report is to become relevant to ABC mobile device iview statistics (passive advertising funded entertainment/content consumption is no longer a couch dominated activity).
In short, it could be argued that "television" is morphing - just as it could be argued that drive-in-theatre morphed into streaming video. It's all "screens" right?
even if you take the study at face value, and skew the cause/effect in the alarmist direction, what is it actually saying? that if you overuse cannabis, you are likely to become psychotic a few years earlier than you would have otherwise. Really? geez.
News at 9, if you drink whisky every waking hour you'll develop mental "problems" - oh wait, you have mental problems if you drink whisky every waking hour.
A lot of people smoke. A lot of people smoke a lot. (and it didn't start in the 60s, just became mainstream, I'm a grandfather and my grandfather "goofed off" in the Merchant Navy "as a lad". Cannabis in Scotland predates the Romans.)
So it's a subject I'd like to see researchers take seriously - but the the current regime of "funding is only available for research into the dangers" and the piss poor science doesn't do that. In the UK where that crap researcher did that "polling" you've got a few major factors that stop me from taking the "paper" seriously. Absolutely no effort is made to seperate the effects of contaminants - deliberate or otherwise from the effects of cannabis. I've seen some alarming studies of the contaminants in street weed in the UK - radioactive lead and polunium in the Nigerian imports and hydro fed with fertilizers made from metal refining by-products, even silica being added to Dutch imports, and the majority of local grow-op bud is heavily contaminated by cut flower preservatives used to try and increase profit by making the buds weigh more (Budswell, glycrerine, etc). Then you've got environmental pollution resulting from poor ventilation in overlit grow-rooms - as well as nasty levels of nitrates from overfertilization (nitrides when smoked).
I've also seen some interesting results from a study in Australia where classes of students were interviewed by men and women - even when the surveys are properly structured (which they often aren't) people lie. In the UK, the US, and Australia hospitals and GPs gather data that is deliberately misused to support particular anti-pot agendas*1. If you wind up in an Emergency room or a psych ward your answers to drug use questions will be misinterpreted to further those agendas. No surprise that we suddenly have an enormous number of people "wanting help to quit cannabis" when the police are no longer allowed to issue a simple fine (no criminal offence) for cases of small possession and cultivation. The Drug Council suddenly find proof for further funding citing an "increase in arrests" followed by courts in (for example) Australia offering mitigation or suspended sentences if the person being charged "seeks treatment".
*1 actual case - a car leaves the road and ploughs through a house injuring a guy sleeping. He goes to hospital and is asked if he ever smoked cannabis. Not "were you under the influence of cannabis at the time of incident".....(sigh)
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart
