Is it biology and psychopharmacology that are the limits on our drug development or is it some kind of bullshit puritanism that's opposed to success/wins/gains without the concomitant misery and suffering?

The drugs we have for feeling good, being productive, or increasing our sociability are just OK at best and kind of shitty at worst. The "productive" drugs (amphetamines, anti-narcoleptics, cocaine) tend to be somewhat-to-a-lot addictive and can produce psychosis and/or overdose death at the shitty end of the spectrum. The feel-good drugs (tranquilizers, barbiturates, opiates) also tend to be addictive, potentially deadly or induce depression. Sociability drugs are a mess, too -- alcohol, MDMA, cocaine all have serious drawbacks.

Of all the common drugs, only marijuana seems to escape most of the problems, although it has a habit-forming potential which will keep you stuck in mom's basement being a slug and watching Netflix or playing Xbox.

Why aren't we developing improved drugs that solve these problems -- reduce the risk of dependence, prevent overdose, basically provide as much of the desired effect with as little drawbacks as possible so that we don't have to have a ridiculous control regime, prisons, health problems, etc and people can take them as desired for their benefits without any significant downsides?

Provide a limited marginal utility of amount -- ie, the first N units provide most of the effect, taking more is just a waste because the effect tops out. I think Butalbital sort of does this by including low doses of naloxone, so that if its injected the naloxone inhibits the opioid effect. Couple this with a limited useful frequency -- the longer it has been since you last used the drug, the greater the effect, and the more often you take it decreases the effect.

Why aren't we creating better, safer drugs?

I wrote why I don't (as in "present tense") use an AMD GPU. The new and improved driver isn't out in the wild yet, and certainly not integrated into distros.

Even a quick search violates your privacy rights. The question is what exactly is "reasonable suspicion". It can't just be a hunch, they have to have some tangible evidence for that.

The basic idea there is that the dog can't tell anything other than whether you have drugs or not, and 4A is not deemed to be applicable to your criminal activity (i.e. you don't have the right to privacy to evidence of the crime). The reason why your right to privacy is violated in a regular warrantless search is because of all the other things that cops get to see that aren't related to a crime. But if they have a magic device that can only detect evidence and not anything else, then that doesn't affect anything other than evidence and hence is not an infringement. Cops claim that drug-sniffing dogs are such devices.

They can still use a dog, because that doesn't count as a search (for 4A purposes). But now it's only true if they have one at hand already, and do it as part of the traffic stop without extending your detention (because such an extension would be illegal).

There is a lawyer who's doing some nice comics that explain all those intricacies - he has a strip covering dogs.

However, dogs are still BS, for the simple reason that a signal from the dog is considered to be probable cause, which is ridiculous because they can be conditioned quite easily to do so at the handler's signal (and often do it without the signal just to please the handler).

I'm too lazy to add anchor tags, but here are some references for you.

The UCDavis study is the best description of this -- when actually tested in scenarios designed to expose false positive results, that's EXACTLY what happened -- the dogs alerted in every place they shouldn't have and where the handler was given cues that the dogs would alert, the dogs were MORE likely to alert.

This is a huge problem with using dogs. It's not that dogs aren't good at sniff detection, its that dogs are so inclined to please their handlers that even when the handlers aren't purposefully lying they are still signaling their dogs that they should find something. So how do you separate out the dog actually sniffing out drugs versus the experienced profiling of the handler who expects their target to have drugs, gets a false alert from the dog and then discovers drugs from a hand search?

I don't think we CAN know if it was a legitimate signal from the dog or just the officer's experience that $Socialtype or $MinorityMember is very likely to have drugs.

It gets much, much worse if you take away the assumption that the cops/handler are 100% honest all the time. Do you really think that there isn't even some deliberate dishonesty with dogs? The worst outcome for the cops has been "well, the dog knows you had something in here but since I didn't find anything I'll let you go". The best outcome for the cops is that they get away with an illegal search that results in an arrest and conviction based on a dog's behavior that is beyond question, because, you know, dogs are so good at sniffing and its "a well established tool in our legal system and for good reason."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/w...

http://www.cato.org/blog/cleve...

I would back date the origin to something closer to the late 19th century as urbanization and cities grew. You had increasing agricultural efficiency allowing more people to live away from the land and more and larger business organizations that required "white collar" jobs to manage the organization -- clerks, accountants, record-keepers, etc.

You might make an argument that could possibly stretch this kind of middle-class into the 18th century but the further back you go the fewer large business organizations you have requiring the kind of white collar employee base to make them run.

I'm kind of using the generic term of automation versus specific technologies that physically automate mechanical tasks, such as robots. The PC is the biggest automater -- I heard a fascinating podcast on the development of the spreadsheet application. They interviewed retired accountants describing the work involved in creating paper spreadsheets for very basic cost modeling, the kind of thing that would be a 1 hour throwaway task in Excel now. IIRC, they even interviewed an accountant who was an early PC spreadsheet adopter that managed to make huge money charging for the time to do it the old fashioned way when he was really doing it on a computer, billing a dozen hours of work for an hour of actual labor with a PC.

That was short lived, but a great example of how PCs in many ways decimated a field as a single accountant could now do the work of many. I think they said that long-term it didn't hurt that much because as the ease of which you could create sophisticated models in PC applications became understood, the same number of accountants were now doing vastly more complex accounting jobs.

Ironically, I think the increasing sophistication of business modeling has had a side effect of making businesses much more efficient and allowed them to cut costs, including a lot of jobs.

But who's making money off those smartphone games at $1 a pop? All we hear about is how nobody makes money on them.

I've heard more than a few serious economists (ie, real academics who aren't mass-media brand names) sound kind of nervous about automation's role in shrinking the number of jobs. Few of them seem ready to entirely disown the notion that automating one set of tasks frees up labor for new economic expansions where the tasks can't be easily automated.

Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.

The new high wage white collar jobs being produced often require the kind of extensive training and experience extremely difficult for mid-career professionals to obtain, which is compounded by the rate of jobs being automated.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.

Upper management at most companies view IT as a set of tasks or items you can check off as "done", requiring no further investment or maintenance. I blame them for the sorry state of affairs that allows these "security" companies to advertise and sell "in a box" products that are supposed to "take care of your security."

If upper management would realize that things like security and infrastructure are things that need constant maintenance, enhancement, and upgrades, we wouldn't be in this pickle. Nor would we be stuck with applications that are running on three-major-revision-old vendor products, subject to a whole raft of security issues that could be addressed by upgrading them.

If the politicians in Congress and Parliament qualify as "legal persons", I guess chimps are over-qualified. :P

Minneapolis had a theater like that, the Uptown. New schedule came out every month, and a good chunk of the month was different movies on different days, sometimes even different movies at different showings. Occasionally there would be a theme (eg, Tommy and Quadrophenia in one evening) and once in a blue moon a movie would span a weekend if it was new/popular. The movies were all manner of genres, from foreign to documentary to arthouse (Jim Jarmusch, etc) to revival showings. Quite often the films shown were unobtainable on VHS. Rocky Horror at midnight on the weekends.

And it was a great theater, interior-wise -- very art deco and with a balcony you could still use (my favorite spot, the railing was a great footrest). The audio was just OK but the projection was good.

The theater is still there, but its kind of the first run theater for an arthouse chain and shows usually one movie for a week or so, usually a bigger release film.

You know, some people in US actually have that kind of a deal on the grid...

There aren't even any 3G towers that I know of.

Seriously? A good chunk of the existing phone base can't even do 4G - prepaid is still largely 3G-only phones, which are still sold new today. It would be very rare to have 4G-only coverage areas in a town.

However, if you never go anywhere and have really good 4G coverage, setting your phone to 4G-only may well be a good workaround to reduce your chance of an intercept.

The article states that the earlier figure was incorrect; the Baltimore police actually used it 4,300 times, not 25,000 times.

It's still a big enough number that they must have full-time staff dedicated to these illegal searches. No wonder B'more has so many problems with dropped calls.