I get my view of how the lower class is treated by the cops, from watching the TV show "Cops".

Understandable, then why you hold your views of the poor.

Generally the poor are poor because they make bad choices.

Some people, true, but not generally. If you're raised by poor parents, you're up against a very big wall. It's hard for them to buy school supplies, and if you're raised by a single parent it's harder for them to help you because they're probably working two jobs. Having a single parent is the result of a poor choice, but it wasn't your poor choice.

And a poor kid can forget ever attending college.

People who have bills to pay and have to go to work in the morning don't have time to be out causing trouble.

Most of the US's poor work, and are not criminals. But the cops still treat them as criminals; hell, society itself does.

Those folks working at McDonald's, WalMart, the corner convenience store are all on food stamps. That friendly face you see at the checkout counter is the face of poverty, not the idiots you see while watching "Cops" (that show is government propaganda, BTW).

So we are a classless society, in that you're not stuck in one socioeconomic class no matter how hard you work.

Rags to riches is extremely rare and takes a hell of a lot more than hard work. My late uncle was one of the exceptions. Creativity and hand-eye coordination runs in the family, and a stroke of bad luck was the best thing that happened to Dan.

He was injured in WWII in the navy, and became friends with a fellow patient in the hospital who had lost a leg in the war. The army gave him a prosthetic, and Dan saw it and said "I can make a better leg than that" when his friend showed him the new leg, and he did. They went into the prosthetics business, and all it took to sell one was for Dan's partner to talk to a recent amputee, who would invariably say "What could YOU possibly know about it?" All he had to do was pull up his pants leg and it was an instant sale, because you would never know that he was missing a limb.

But there were so many lucky breaks, including genetics, that his rags to riches story (both sets of my grandparents were poor all their lives) would not have happened had a single thing, especially meeting his future partner, who was a born salesman; that's something that doesn't run in the family. We couldn't sell a ten cent hamburger to a starving man.

The fact is, if you're born poor you're almost certain to die poor, and if you're born rich you're almost certain to die rich. If you're born middle class there's no telling; you could die rich, middle class, or poor.

If this society is as classless as you say, then why did no one spend a single day in jail over the banking crimes that brought down the economy? Why did no one from Sony go to prison over XCP? Why was OJ Simpson "not guilty"? Do you think a poor black man would have been treated the same? Hell, a poor white man would have gone to prison under those circumstances.

I don't know, I hadn't heard of them. Thanks for the heads-up, I'll give it a try!

LOL, those Venus hos are HOT! As in, hot enough to melt metal.

if someone is insistent on harassing others, interrupting traffic, etc, they should be dealt with accordingly.

Well, of course, even if they're stone cold sober. But that simply doesn't happen with pot. Like I said, unlike alcohol and a lot of other drugs, pot doesn't make people obnoxious.

I have known people who feel that life doesn't start until they are stoned, and they are not content to stay home or out of the way. They also believe that society owes it to them to welcome them when they are under the influence and that they are the life of the party at that point.

I've known one or two like that. They're idiots. The ones I've known like that all started smoking in adolescence.

I have unfortunately encountered unreasonable people from both sides.

Unreasonable people come in all shapes, sizes, colors, religious beliefs, politics, and nationalities. In politics the name is "wingnuts".

I'm holding on to my cheap Kyocera until it breaks or styles change. All of the new phones are WAY too big for a straight American man; unlike women, gays, and Europeans I don't carry a purse. It has to fit in my front pants pocket with my wallet or it's useless to me.

My all-time favorite phone was the old Motorola Razr. It was a "feature phone" but you could get on the internet with it, text, play games on it, it had a camera, etc. It had features Android (at least Jellybean) lacks. One thing I loved about it was you could set it to automatically answer in speakerphone mode. Great for traveling, with my Android it sits in my pocket ringing and buzzing and I have to call back after I stop. And it was really small, its best feature IMO.

Two things I like about the Kyocera is that it's shock resistant and waterproof. I've lost phones dropping them in water, and lost one when I was caught in a thunderstorm. My daughter used to use iPhones, I don't think any of them lasted a year before the screen broke.

How many languages have "functional programming features" without including the most important feature of functional programming: true determinism with immutable variables, hence easier testing and less debugging?

Certainly not Access, I hated that damned program. dBase, FoxPro, NOMAD were all easy to maintain, Access was a pain in the ass. It's one of the reasons I love being retired.

It depends on the circumstance, of course. Sanctioned drinking isn't abuse, although when those situations arose at work I generally took the afternoon off (I was in a pretty good union and had good bosses who would let me use vacation time any time I wanted).

FoxPro 8, back in the late '90s.

They are great for things like whipping up a quick program because you need some numbers and a quick report for this afternoon, but they fail when you have to use the resulting application on a day-to-day basis.

That wasn't my experience at all, except for Access. I wrote very large applications in dBase and FoxPro that I used for years.

One application I wrote for a Chicago hospital in Clipper (Clipper produced executables from xBase code) had been in use for six months when they had a problem; large amounts of data had gone missing.

I looked at both code and data and couldn't figure it out, but saw from a hidden entry date field that there was no data for a two month period. They gasped when I told them than and they immediately saw the cause of the problem -- that was when an intern was supposed to be entering data but obviously didn't and thought he or she could get away with it.

They used that application for a couple of years after that with nothing but praise for the app.

LG? I had an LG phone about a decade ago. Buggiest piece of shit I ever saw. I see they must still be shoddy, but after that piece of shit phone I'll not buy any more of LG's shoddily engineered and built junk.

I want to see an easily administered field test (preferably with an unbiased number attached to it) that can be used to say when someone has had too much.

I certainly agree with that. No one should be driving while impaired, and I'd like something better than sobriety field tests.

If that person is in public wandering around they get to spend the evening in detox with the drunks who committed the same offense, and pay a small fine (say $50 or so) to discourage them from doing it again and cover the cost of keeping them in detox overnight.

Why should wandering around in public, whether drunk, stoned, or sober, be against the law? If they're jaywalking, ticket them. If they're harassing people, arrest them.

Marijuana is completely different than alcohol in almost every way. Beerheads will keep drinking until they pass out. This doesn't happen with pot, although if you eat it you could get higher than you want.

Pot doesn't make people rowdy or obnoxious like alcohol does. Someone who's had too much pot will just sit there smiling peacefully. That's one reason crime rates have dropped so much in Colorado since legalization.

And unlike alcohol, pot doesn't ruin lives unless the user starts before adulthood. All the potheads I've known were gainfully employed or retired, unless they started young or were on some other drug, such as alcohol.

Perhaps most importantly if they want to stay home (or at a friends house, or in the pot equivalent of a bar - with a sober ride home, or any other place other than in public) they can get as fucking stoned as they want, I don't give a shit.

That's actually what pot smokers do. When you're stoned you don't want to go anywhere, you want to watch that funny TV show or listen to music.

For some reason this opinion pisses off both the pro-pot and the anti-pot crowds.

I can see why it pisses off prohibitionists, but don't see why it would anger the anti-prohibition camp. It's a reasonable opinion.

Take a look at evolution. Sexual reproduction has so many hurdles to jump through before a beneficial mutation could find a toehold. In asexual reproduction individuals can rapidly and radically adjust to the changing environment and pass on the beneficial mutations to the next generations.

The late writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov would have disagreed with you vehemently. Asimov held a PhD in biochemistry and did cancer research at Boston University.

The above linked short sci-fi story was originally titled "Playboy and the Slime God".

Worse is better is basically the KISS principle for software.

Huh? It seems the opposite of the KISS principle. Making my old code no longer work is hardly keeping it simple. Most modern, ugly web design is as confusing and complicated and bloated as they can make it.

I always followed the KISS principle, it's the easiest way to write bug-free code. Hard to write a buggy version of "hello, world".

This guy is an idiot.

I certainly don't disagree there.