Well he could have been experiencing severe suicidal depression due to his asshole friends not recognizing his psychiatric burn-out, and turned to marijuana as a coping mechanism. I've done similar, but without involving any drugs;sleep for 18 hours a day isolates me from the world better than psychotropics.

Yeah, I know. Marijuana in vogue, alcohol falling out of favor.

Their argument is that you take like 1/20 the amount of alcohol needed to kill you (20 beers = death) versus 1/1000 the amount of THC needed to kill you (1000 joints = death), therefor alcohol is worse for you than marijuana. That's a very unscientific approach.

It's part of the propaganda movement to ban alcohol for anyone under the age of 25.

The temperature also dropped.

Honestly, the whole "Climate Change" thing was to explain that "it's not really global warming"; now they want to stop climate change by cooling the earth. ... So. Global Warming.

This kind of tampering would be a disaster.

Mental instability, irrationality, and other issues would cause global nuclear destruction. Hostility is a problem. On the other hand, aggression is the driver that prevents the world from stagnating; remove aggression entirely and nobody would even mate, causing a collapse of the human species.

You mean Gap Sickness?

I'm sure you could make a movie adaptation that wasn't horse shit unrelated to the book; however, a TV series is more suited. We really need long-run drama TV series where each episode carries an hour and a half of content to capture the story in a lot of really good books.

Ants and bees are aggressive as all fuck. Honeybees are notable for being docile, and only certain subspecies at that; honeybees, the most successful organism second only to ants, are among the most violent and aggressive motherfuckers in existence, with the Megapsis species able to quickly kill a human if annoyed, and some of the smaller African apsis species prone to violent and fatal attacks in which they chase you forever and sting you until you die. The more docile species have been propagated by human effort.

Or, you know, Ben Carson.

No, it's stupidity coming from a fool who has no idea what he's talking about. He's a cosmologist and a quantum physicist, not a social scientist.

Oh man, you should see the bullshit it takes to hook up a YMF262 and YAC512 to an Arduino. It's not just programming the YMF, or even emulating the YAC512 interface (on both ends) so you can pass the audio stream through the ARM core and possibly out to a second Atmel or a DSP for processing or further synthesis (e.g. a SID or YM2612); to hook up any of these chips, you need multiple crystals, piles of capacitors, resistors, and then you need a strategy for matching clock on the interface pins.

I expect a hilarious amount of effort just to plan out how everything gets plugged together and gets its data across; and then a minimal amount of effort to create a SID/2A03/VC6 emulator on a separate hardware chip. I'd use a DSP for effects processing and SID/2A03/VC6 if I could; some of these things run at 1.2GHz with 64K of RAM. I doubt I'd have the IO to get that much data in/out of the main processor.

Imagine if Microsoft gave Unity $10 per full Unity Pro license on all XBoxes. If fewer than 1 in 150 users actually used the dev kit, Unity would come out ahead in revenue versus their $1500 permanent license.

It already did something positive: It saved them from a useless degree.

He needs to be more blunt. Let me assume the Jefferson position for a second. Ahem...

There will come a time when our leniency toward strong encryption will prevent law enforcement from doing its job. Some sort of violent attack will occur, a murder or a bank robbery or even a terrorist attack; and the public will demand answers. The public will want to know why we weren't able to break the veil of secrecy around our enemies's communications, why we couldn't keep up with them, why we couldn't protect those we were sworn to serve when we, all of us, from the lowest law enforcement officer to the highest government official, took our office.

There comes a time when a nation must decide where it places our value. We all want those basic rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, of security from search and property seizure, of privacy. At times, those rights interfere with our safety, and we must decide: Do we prefer the risk of terrorist attack, or the risk of being arrested for our political views and our opinions? Do we want the chance, however slight, to overhear a plot to blow up a school or a shopping mall; or do we want our private conversations to be private, to be our own business, without fear of law enforcement or government finding something to worry about in our own personal lives?

We decided long ago that our officers, our legislators, our executives are here to defend us, not to pry into our lives or raise us like children. We decided long ago that our rights include privacy and personal security from government intrusion. When, in time, these decisions cause us pain and loss, we can look back and say we accepted that when we wrote the rules; we can look across at oppressive regimes and say we are glad we are not them; we can assure ourselves that the decision was correct, personally, for every one of us save a few lost, an unfortunate consequence of doing the right thing for all of us.

A strong society recognizes that the Child of Omelas cannot be saved; but it also does all it can to comfort the child. We cannot protect everyone, and we won't do any better by removing their protections and stripping their rights; we can only work to find better solutions despite the difficulty basic human rights pose to our security.

This is true. A lot of landlords were, at some point a few years ago, sitting on vacant buildings that didn't need tons of work. Strip interior walls and redo the floor plan, and you go from a 6-bedroom unit to an 18-bedroom unit. Filling 18 units at more than 1/3 as much is going to bring a profit; I put in my calculations at $1.33/sqft instead of $0.96/sqft to ensure housing viability.