I have a problem when people who are under the influence go out and interfere with non-intoxicated society.

That is not and never has been one of pot's effects. You're describing alcohol, not pot. Why not outlaw beer? Sorry, dude, but your stand is illogical, irrational, and ignorant.

Coincidentally, I saw this JE this morning right after seeing a report on CBS's morning news program that said that marijuana is by far the least dangerous of all recreational drugs. They found the most dangerous was alcohol, followed by heroin, followed by cocaine. I did a quick search, it doesn't look like they've posted it to their web site.

I've found an incredible amount of misinformation about marijuana. This article says "Those who might remember pot from the 70s - the marijuana grown and sold in Colorado today is up to 10 times stronger."

The difference isn't strength of the pot, it's how its potency is measured and how pot is and was sold. They take the pot, grind up the entire bag and test it.

Today, pot is grown indoors so it has no seeds, and only the buds are sold. In the seventies, they put the whole plant; stems, seeds, leaves and all. Leaves are far less potent than buds, stems have very little THC and seeds have none at all, and the seeds are heavy. I saw pot in the '70s that the seeds were more than half the weight of the bag. So grinding up the whole bag would indicate that it's 10 times stronger, when stoners always threw the stems and seeds away and usually saved the bud for the weekend.

The best pot I ever smoked was in Thailand in 1973-4.

Now, even if pot wasn't the safest of all recreational drugs, even if it were the deadliest, how does your neighbor getting stoned affect you or society at large?

There's a chapter in a book that was required reading in a college history class in the late '70s that shows how incredibly moronic prohibition is. Alcohol and Al Capone

Look at Mexico and Columbia. Prohibition is purely stupidly evil.

I didn't have mod points for years when I was commenting a lot. As far as wasting them, that horizontal scroll bar makes everything but journals unreadable. Fucking beta wasn't even as bad. Wasting /. mod points is like wasting mud.

I've seen no evidence that they have, and I doubt they will. They started it because of slashdot's infamous beta and the goal was a better slashdot than slashdot. There seem to be fewer morons over there, although one or two stupid comments crop up occasionally.

Since I rarely post at slashdot any more, instead going to soylent where they're not run by corporate morons who are STUPID enough to add horizontal scrolls it seems I always have mod points.

I used a few in one of your journals, but it was one of the right wing trolls I moderated.

Slashdot has nearly run me completely off of this site.

My workaround for the idiotic preview thing is simply to link a less retarded site. My workaround for the incredibly stupid and unprofessional sideways scroll is dropping slashdot, except for reading journals. "Classic" slashdot is now almost as moronic as Beta.

I think you're right, Dice is trying to kill slashdot.

Just as I'm not going to go to the effort of working around Windows' bugs when Linux exists, I'm not taking the time and effort to work around slashdot's fuck ups when I can simply paste the text in soylent and just leave a link here.

I've thought about simply not posting items with smart quotes here at all. Dice needs to get its shit together. Every change they make makes the damned thing less usable. The last change they made seemed to do nothiing but force a horizontal scroll in my browser.

It's almost like they're trying to run users off the site. They're coming close with me.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought.

My oldest daughter is autistic and I'm pretty sure I know why. Autism spectrum disorder has a huge genetic component and is linked to families with high intelligence, which makes sense since they recently discovered that an autistic brain has too many neuronal connections.

Leila had birth complications, but despite our worries she was advanced in almost everything. She delighted in freaking people out by waving and saying "hi!" to them at six months. She discovered at a very early age that she could roll anywhere she wanted to go, so had no need to learn how to crawl. She walked at a normal age, and it only took a single day to potty-train her at fifteen months.

Then she got her MRI when she was two. An hour or two after we got home she started crying, then screaming and running a fever; we had no thermometer so don't know how high. We called the doctor, who said it wasn't that unusual and not to worry.

By the next morning she stopped talking, stopped using the potty, stopped playing, and withdrew into her own little world. Note this was early 1988 before vaccine fears came about and before autism was well known. Despite our poverty we took her to specialists, every one of whom misdiagnosed her. One doctor said mentally retarded, one checked her hearing and said she was deaf and we should all learn sign language (Leila has better ears than anyone I know).

It's my belief that a very small number of children who have the genetic component can't handle getting all three vaccines at once, or perhaps is allergic to some component. The doctor said fever is common, but perhaps a dangerously high fever happnes, too. That's what I think caused Leila's problems.

At any rate, thanks to the incompetence of some highly educated quacks, Leila, who turns 30 this year, will never hold a job or drive a car. She spends most of her time reading the news on the internet; she has the worst interpersonal skills of anyone I ever met.

You can be sure that we got separate vaccinations for Patty, rather than the MMR superbomb.

Get the measles vaccine, NOT the MMR. Get the shots separately, and if your kid gets a fever afterwards, take him or her to the hospital. We're a lot less ignorant than we were when Leila was 2 or 3.

Thanks, I just may. I wonder who the other person was?

B&N has one too, I may just go for both and look for more.