I knew someone in Los Angeles who had disposed of some tired storebought tomatoes by tossing them into the front yard for the birds to eat. The seeds volunteered all over the place and after a few years of benign neglect, their yard was one big self-renewing tomato patch -- producing perfectly edible tomatoes, all of the same variety. Apparently whatever they'd bought at the grocery were not hybrids.

They don't. They lead to more spying, which is what GP said but was omitted in your quote. And sooner or later they'll be armed, let's not kid our selves.

I see your point. And much though I admire Verne and his visionary imagination... I was under the impression that he was extrapolating from contemporary science and engineering.

Now, perhaps I'm just hopelessly out of touch, but I'm not aware of any current work, not even any out-of-box blue sky imagineering (eew), toward actual teleportation.

Would love to be wrong though!

I don't follow you, both have the ad absurdum label for much the same reason. Both can be applied correctly or not. I fail to see how it is "funny". But we're severely off topic here, so never mind; it's probably some really specific humor deficiency on my part.

Heh, tell that to the 39% of survey respondents who apparently believe teleportation will be "solved" by 2064.

Not all that funny, reductio ad absurdum disproves the hypothesis you started with. The fallacy of the hypothesis proves its logical negation.

Possibly so, at first. However, these days the strains used for industrial use (rope, clothes, paper) are almost a different species from the ones for, um, recreational use. In fact, some of the mom and pop growers specifically do so because they find the stuff from the coffeeshops too potent.

Yes, it is actively enforced. Everything over 5 plants constitutes a rather serious offense, and people do get caught.

That is correct. Like I said, an utterly silly state of affairs. So the output of these coffeeshops is legal (provided they respect the weight limits, don't sell to underage visitors, etc) while their inputs aren't.

The way it is now (but this is being debated constantly) we are basically not enjoying the major potential benefit of decriminalisation, which is taking the wind out of the sails of organized crime.

The Netherlands here. Not quite. We have this utterly silly situation where the selling of mj is sort of legal, up to a certain weight and only in designated establishments (the famous coffeeshops). However the growing and distributing is quite illegal.

The mom and pop growers are entirely insignificant compared to organized criminals. The latter produce way more than local demand, so much of that is exported.

The real reason is probably a lot simpler: Cost.

Before you break ground on a single-family home in Pleasanton CA, you must cough up in excess of $125,000 (yes, 125 grand) in fees and permits.

I expect said fees and permits are even more expensive in San Francisco proper.

[For comparison, in Los Angeles County a home building permit is $38,000. Here in Montana it's from $50 to $2000 depending where you are.]

I'd say that his revision would have the direct effect of creating a more-effective police state, where the government need never fear The People.

The whole POINT of the 2nd Amendment was that government SHOULD fear The People.

How does the second part of that sentence not make you reconsider your assertion in the first?

I think you are right that might possibly be a very small fraction who actually do prefer the "vagabond" lifestyle, despite the obvious and many hardships. But to make a blanket statement that *all* homeless are in that situation as a matter of choice seems wildly inaccurate to me.

As to your analog about criminals, isn't it also quite likely that recidivism is largely due to the many bariers to any chance of building up a normal life post-incarceration, which is to say after formally having done their time?

"And just for fun, he says 'Get a job'"

That's just the way it is, some things will never change.

except for the ... 3rd

Come to think of it, I recall that there was a case last year in Nevada over exactly that, I wonder how that went?

Just like a malicious client can suck data out of a vulnerable server, the same can work in reverse, though clients tend not to keep an SSL connection open any longer than they need to (unless, it's IMAPS or FTPS or chat or some other application with persistent connections).

If you suck the private key out of a bank webserver's RAM, then perform a MITM attack on the bank users using the bank's own certificate, not only can you get their bank credentials (by them filling in the form and sending it to you), depending on the browser you may or may not be able to suck up other accounts from them (eg user logs into a credit card company site to see their bill, then logs into your fake bank to see if they can pay it).