It has been about a decade since I worked at a university, but, I still remember hearing about the great debates. I wasn't part of them, but heard about them second hand from one of the people who was. At the time they were trying to push through email virus scanning and....

"But this is a university, its perfectly legitimate that someone researching viruses may want to get email with viruses, we can't do anything that would impede legitimate research!"

I am at about the same but, for some reason I don't think they seem any more idiotic than we were at their age. Pretty sure that by my standards today I was a moron at their age.

Which is why the old saying goes, "age and treachery will always beat youth and exhuberance".

No jail is supposed to be about holding a person who who is still innocent of any crime while awaiting trial. It is mostly just where people wait when they can't afford or are denied the ability to be released before trial. Often times, this is done as a pressure tactic where a person is denied the ability to be released on technicalities and given harsh time in jail in order to convince them to sign a confession.

Otherwise it is very similar to prison usually, including bland tasteless food, all designed to mill confessions out of people.

and the more people are willing to kow-tow to them.

We had a presentation once at a previous job on the new corperate single sign on system. I thought it was really strage that they were, in fact, storing passwords using an encryption rather than a hash, a fact which they made fairly clear was not simply a slip up in terminology.

After the presentation I grabbed the presentor for a side conversation and asked why they didn't use a hash when that would be far more standard, and he sighed and said that it was because some people couldn't get over the idea of not being able to recover the password if a high level exec asked them to.

It isn't that simple though because that only tells you part of cause and effect. If I gave you a capsule that you could swallow that somehow was 100% nutritionally complete and you would require nothing else to live, you would still get hungry and want to eat. Would you be able to "starve" yourself just because you knew you were not "really" starving, you were just perceiving yourself as starving because every signal our ancestors evolved to associate with the need to eat was telling you otherwise?

Its long been said that Calories in - Calories out = weight gain. Its so simple and so correct in its simplicity but, it entirely misses that real picture, that we are not spreadsheets.

The bigger issue is that appetite is based on feedback loops, and if you don't satiate appetite, willpower isn't ever going to be enough to help most people.

This is, of course, where diet really comes in because....different foods have different effects on appetite, and its not always in proportion to their calorie content. If all foods with the same calorie content provided the same level of satiation, then drinking a soda would leave you as full as eating a hamburger. However, it doesn't. In fact, sugar suppresses satiation so, if you drink a soda you will likely want more hamburgers than if you didn't....meaning each calorie in soda is really more than 1 calorie since it will induce you to ingest more calories of something else than you would have normally.

Without knowing how different foods effect fullness, calories in and calories out is almost worthless since it doesn't tell you how to control it.

If the water pipe bursts a useful thing to say is "the shut off valve is over there", not "I think the problem is water is coming in" that is actully , correct but useless.

Ahhh but how many places that enact these licenses have stipulations that the fees be used to enact outreach and educational programs? Its one thing to use those as a reason but, often licensing fees are little more than a state revenue source and a reason to make the occasional arrest when they can't find anything else.

Personally, I have no problem with stripping or prostitution, I think its ridiculous to tell a person what they can do with their body or their money. If licensing were actually instituted in such a way as to benefit the people being licensed, and to ensure their safety so much as their profession does bring some dangers from exposure to the public, then I am not so much against it.....

However, if all it is is another sin tax or to look like the government is doing something when it isn't....then its pretty ridiculous. Seems licensing the establishments should mostly be enough. Require establishments to live up to health code, safety, and training standards, not the dancers. Its not like mandatory training is a new concept.

You seriously don't understand the problem then. Yes you are right about all those things however, there is a major difference here. None of those is offering up a service to the world that allows people to connect to me and make requests.

It is an entirely different type of attack surface, with far lower requirements to exploit and allows for fast exploitation of many targets as soon as an exploit becomes available, and requires no compromise of intermediate systems to pull off, and no need to wait for an unpatched victim to fall into the trap.... they can collect targets ahead of time and exploit them all at once.

This looks great in concept but, having everyone run it on their own machines and host their own store means encouraging lots of people to be vulnerable to every security issue that comes along. Oops one remote exploit and anyone's anonymity can be compromised.

Now, I am not fool, I realize that many of the bigger players will take more steps will protect themselves with dedicated servers rented under false identities etc....but the vast majority are being encouraged to leave themselves exposed to every vulnerablity that comes along because they don't have the sophistication to play the game that they are being encouraged to play.

This is one of the reasons I really liked the concept of freenet....sure everyone is hosting but, there is author anonimty beyond simply "you can't find my IP", there is actual separation between hosted data and how it is published.

Of course, I haven't tried it in years but, the problem always more seemed to be speed than anything since it is funadamentally a storage and retrieval mechanism and not a transport layer.

If there was any way to verify it, I would bet dollars to donuts that those ads were mostly police, and con artists looking to scam people out of some cash just like Silk Road 1.0 apparently got scammed. I would be shocked if a single actual hit was ever delivered on via Silk Road 2.0

>How is Silk Road infringing on your ability to do anything? 90% of the activity on Silk Road are private
> transactions between consenting adults for things that should have never been illegal in the first place

I am shocked at the baseless allegation that 10% of silk road activity was anything but more of the same.

> The feds make it pretty tough. But alcohol prohibition did not start with the repeal of the 18th amendment, it
> started with states backing away from it until the momentum caused the 21st amendment to pass.

This is very true but also, it started with Doctors backing away and stepping up on the other side with "medical alcohol" as it was far better for their patients health to get legal alcohol from trustworthy sources than to leave them to the whims of the black market and law enfocement.

Except a lot of the revenue it generates is kind of bullshit and short term. Legalized cannabis just will not be expensive without some sort of serious artificial barriers to its production and distribution, kind of like what we have under prohibition.

This hundreds of dollars an ounce BS just is not going to hold up. All of the small time growers using lights in apartments who need those super high prices to stay in business are going to get put out of business by pure economics within a few short years.

In my mother's day, an ounce went for about $10. I expect we wont see those prices again for quality stuff but, $50-100/ounce I would believe....and a good bit of that will be the excessive taxes.

Not really contradictions though. This is what you should expect when the majority of such a large country is broken up into two big tent parties. None of these things is actually contrary to the core princibles that drive people to choose one party or the other. These do tend to be hot button issues that many individuals care deeply about and might choose candidates based solely on.... and one party may cater to or not....but really none of them is so big in and of itself to be a contradiction for a person to support when the parties are such huge tent.

Its kind of like we have cable at the house which includes some sports channels, does that mean you would be shocked that nobody in the house watches sports? It was all one big package, we chose the package not the channels.

Lets not forget there are also states, like my own, that often have "non-binding" questions, where the question goes to the ballot but its really people are voting to "instruct the legislature to enact legislation..." meaning, the people spoke, but its still up to the legislature to write and pass a law, which they are really not actually required to do and there is no garauntee they will.

That said I think unreasonably complicated is what it is not. If you remember that it is supposed to be a federation of states and not an imperial government, it makes a lot of sense.

This. Not just this but this sort of moralizing and racism really goes well with jobs programs.

Lets not forget, when prohibition ended, it left a number of federal employees with budgets to burn and fuck all to do. They were not stupid, that is no recipe for job security. Harry Anslinger, one of the most vocal proponants of the marijuana laws of the day, was head of the FBN, the very people who were left with fuck all to do after prohibition ended.

Who better to justify law enforcement jobs than people who are seen as "immoral" or inferior and in need of being kept in their place? The thing about it is.... its a story so crazy you almost can't make shit like this up.

Good ole Harry spent years writting letters to police chiefs, asking them to keep their eye on "jazz musicians"....seriously.... claiming one day, they were going to have an operation to round them all up. One great quote of his that sums it all up:

Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death â" the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.

This is from a man who testified before congress and was taken seriously.