lsd is a drug

caffeine is a drug

therefore, they are the same legal entity

no, this is just intellectual dishonesty, sophistry, or you're just stupid

marijuana should be legal, but there's drugs out there where the effects are so horrible, they should stay illegal. simply because the effects of those drugs being illegal, while bad, are less than the effects drugs being legal: screwed up lives

methamphetamine. what this shit does to you? permanently? this shit should be legal?

then we get into a discussion about how safe environments and how carefully monitored dosing prevents tragedies

what the fuck?

when did society get in the business of enabling drug use?

if someone has fallen through the cracks and is addicted to drugs, society should treat this person, not put them in jail. but this should be reactive, not proactively enable "safe" use of highly addictive substances that really fuck up your life. addiction is a REAL PROBLEM, not a vague idea that a little application of will power can get over.

of course, some treatment is ineffective. with more resources, they might be effective

well yeah, with inffinite resources, even the most helpless basically suicidal self-destructive addict can be saved

but we don't live in a world of infinite resources

there's a difference between recreational casual use, and a person that is basically trying to kill themselves in slow motion

highly addictive substances have probably destroyed more lives in the history of homo sapiens than all wars combined, by orders of magnitude. making it all legal really just enables a lot of us walking around with the seeds of self-destruction to go full blown self-destructive. there has to be a barrier in society against the use of really vile substances

you have to understand what chronic drug use really is: suicide. society is not interested in enabling suicidal tendencies. therefore, there will always be illegal substances. come to grips with this, naive idealists

don't engage in sophistry and reductive nonsense when you talk about drugs. it is one of the most if not most complicated issues ever to face mankind. there are no easy answers, and there is really just a lot of pain, no matter what the legal approach

all i can say about drug use with certainty is this: as soon as someone says the answer is simple, and that simple answer is complete legalization or complete prohibition, you are dealing with a fucking moron who doesn't understand drugs

petapixel's registrar appear to also be GoDaddy. Of course that may not be their host...in fact probably is not. Her takedown notice still makes her sound like a lunatic though.

(I'm going to make my reply here as it's about midway on the page and I haven't seen anyone make this very obvious point.)

You can teach just about anyone to write usable Python, PHP, or Ruby. Fast. You can teach people with high school diplomas how to code in these languages especially if you have a framework in place.

Java not so much.

If you want to get started fast and have access to potential talent, go with the more accessible skill set. If you want to do it *just* right (and have, imo, a needlessly complicated code base) you can go with Java, C++, or PERL.

Evidence? I'm talking personal anecdote. I was a volunteer poll worker in the 2008 elections in DuPage County.

Churches in the town alternated weeks on being open at night and providing homeless a place to sleep and an evening meal.

They used the opportunity for other activities, like AA/NA meetings, worship service, etc. One of those was a "register to vote" activity, where they helped people register to vote and get proper ID.

During the actual voting on election day the homeless that wanted to vote went to the churches who used their vans and mini-buses to give them a ride to the proper polling place. Free coffee and donuts to all who showed up with an "I voted" sticker later -- homeless or not -- at the churches.

Most, not all, who did this were Democrats.

Our cars come with all these different paint jobs:

• Pink with orange dots
• Pink with orange rainbows (warning: rainbow contains only one color, but still recognized as "probably gay" by 52% of people polled)
• Pink with orange Jesus fishes
• Pink with orange swastikas
• Orange with pink swastikas (warning: car does not actually start)
• Pink with reddish-orange swastikas
• Pink with yellow swastikas
• Pink with orange Coca Cola ad

How many more paint schemes do car manufacturers need to offer? Your complaints about our cars' appearances ring hollow. Quit your bitching!

(And why do people keep bringing up the fact that in 1997 we purchased a radical new law that no person is allowed to repaint their car, and that no person is allowed to manufacture or sell paint? WTF does that have to do with anything?)

There may be a god. I haven't seen any good evidence for it, but I haven't seen any evidence against it either.

As an agnostic, that's one part I don't particularly agree with. At least, I don't agree within the confines of what most people consider to be "God". You see, the general issue is that God is given specific characteristics, including being the ultimate originator and creator, omnipotent, loving, benevolent, etc. But, clearly there's something very unloving about giving someone cancer--terminal or not, painful or not, to the young or to the old. It could be argued God doesn't "give" people cancer, but he created everything, so he set the conditions that he knew would cause cancer to occur. It could be argued God is testing people or implementing some sort of tough love, but the story of Job makes it quite clear that even the most pious may suffer under God's seeming indifference to their suffering, all under the banner of "I'm God, so don't question me". The only thing left is to specify that God is not omnipotent, be it under some sense of free will--which really doesn't apply to something like congenital, terminal cancer in a newborn, unless you think God is punishing a newborn for something they did in the womb--or simply that God can't--be it through a selective choice or simple fact--interact with the world of today. Well, that might be a God to worship, I guess, but it's a little bit hard to not feel a little bit sick about the situation then, as if humans were to create some sort of artificial life and to consider all the moral questions and pitfalls that would almost certainly follow--consider the short life of the clone Dolly the sheep.

In the end, it's hard to take a lot of visions of what God is, if he/she exists, seriously if you really think about it. But, it leaves room for other sorts of gods to exist and they can't be so easily dismissed. Having said all that, I do really wonder about the fixation on "god", "religion", "morals", etc and really which or if all of the above are the real point of the consideration being set forth and just how much it may simply be a need to feel correct about a issue, no matter how trivial, irrelevant, or uninvested a person is. :/

And personally, I don't consider the question *interesting* either.

Well, yes and no. The whole reason I'm agnostic is precisely because any sort of supernatural being or even possible natural beings could manipulate humanity, given the specific desire, possible to the point that humanity would be entirely oblivious to those manipulations--ie, there could be the irony that humanity is being manipulated by a god of a certain type and by pure coincidence humanity could invent a whole religion around the idea of worshiping a god of the same type. And to me, that's interesting if for nothing else because it starts to set a boundary of consideration of where you simply march into some form of sophistry. That is worthwhile, I think, so I think the debate is interesting. Yet, the final conclusion, I'll admit, isn't as interesting.

I'm not a Republican. I didn't vote R in 2004. I don't watch Fox. I just don't ever remember seeing a R bus in people to where they can vote, only ever Ds.

I didn't mean to imply it was a "dirty trick", just a simple statement of fact. Assume I was giving a compliment to Ds for caring enough to assist people in exercising their Constitutional Rights.

Only half joking, my freshman math professor actually did this. He was finishing up his doctorate at the time he taught the class I was in. Couple years later he was in a CS class with me. He'd decided the pure math jobs out there were crap, but math programming there was a market for.