Simon Phoenix, after reprogramming Dr. Cocteau's house lights;

"Nah, I changed that."

"Illuminate"

"De-luminate"

"Ah, Isn't that much better?"

(I swear, the US is looking and feeling more and more like the fictional "Greater SanAngeles" from the movie with every day that passes.)

Strat

Posted to undo mod

Yes. As I sad, there would be a lot of start-up cost. The process of processing plant fiber is largely identical; but removing it from hemp is a lot more intensive than plucking cotton puffs and milling out the seeds with a mechanical comb. Once you've harvested it, you can effectively drop that shit right into what we have now with minimal manufacturing adjustments.

The fact that this isn't just sew-and-go is important: the industry has been beaten down, and bringing it back represents a lot of market risk. People will ask, "If it's so great and cheap, why isn't anyone selling it?" That's your answer: they have to put down capital and take big risks to find out if the market will care. You have a superior product? Well we have cuter advertising so lol. Everybody likes Ambercrombie and Fitch and why should Ambercrombie and Fitch put up for a better product that might change the look-and-feel of their insanely popular brand? That's a risk you can fuck off with. Who you gonna sell hemp to?

Cotton lobby. Did you miss that part? They assassinated the hemp industry. They taught us this in HIGH SCHOOL where they insisted that smoking pot one time would give us permanent brain damage and kill our babies. They taught us hemp was great but that evil lobbyists got it banned. Mind you they didn't give us a product comparison, but they did tell us how it got banned in the first place.

If this country built a strong cannabis industry, right now, what would the benefits be?

Cannabis in the Industrial Hemp strain does not produce enough THC to get you high. The THC-production-ready strains represent an emerging market thanks to recent changes in the legislative climate.

All cannabis will grow in less-ideal conditions. It is easily grown and harvested on land unfit for the growth of more sensitive crops. See discussions about switchgrass for this concept; the benefits here are the same. Better land utilization means increases in economic wealth, as land is a wealth-bearing asset which holds less value when unused (You own land, but produce nothing? You can SELL it, but you're not gaining wealth by PRODUCING on it).

Industrial Hemp provides strong fibers which you can blend with clothes in 30% hemp 70% cotton to make cotton-like fabric of extremely light weight--sort of like silk--with high durability. Higher hemp content would be perfect for labor-clothes (i.e. denim), as it's ridiculously hard to cut and tear. Hemp is also very smooth and so very comfortable. Spun hemp fiber, being that hemp has better tensile strength, doesn't break down as easily under the stresses of wash and wear, and so produces less lint, so the clothing lasts longer.

Longer lasting, higher-quality clothing made from lower-cost materials means poor people can purchase clothing at a discount price and less often. They are then able to more effectively manage their money, improving their economic situation. The middle class and the rich similarly benefit, ending up with more money to spend elsewhere and stimulate other economic sectors. This represents an increase in wealth via a decrease in the destructive turn-over of goods (i.e. things don't wear out as fast, so are not destroyed as often; and the lower resource intensiveness of production reduces the amount of wealth sunk into creating the good, thus greatly increasing the wealth of society by replacing a high-cost good with a low-cost good of equal or greater value).

Hemp seed is highly nutritious and can be used for feed or food. Hemp seed oil can be processed into biodiesel fuel. Again, this allows for the use of unsuitable land toward a valuable economic end, thus increasing the wealth of society.

Hemp damages the cotton industry. The cotton industry, being large and powerful in the time of slave-negros, thus lobbied congress as is American tradition to produce protectionist laws. Hemp was, for a time, heavily regulated; moving onto hemp production would today require some relatively large start-up costs, despite that the process of spinning plant fibers into thread and yarn is largely the same. It would also incur a frightening amount of risk due to the risk of accidentally growing recreational cannabis (the plant is the same, the seeds look the same, and pollen on bees and in the wind from nearby grow operations could taint your crop and produce high-THC seeds). Government regulation of recreational cannabis would require regular DEA inspections, meaning expensive permits to cover the cost of these inspections, as well as the risk of determining that cross-pollination has created a hybrid and your entire crop can give folks a weak buzz--so you must now raze and burn it at your own expense, a huge loss of wealth.

We would have been better off if we didn't ban the stuff. Jefferson was, in a way, right. Maybe a little overzealous--it's a great crop with wonderful uses and a huge amount of economic benefit, but it's not the absolute top-priority of anything--but he was right.

It was a joke. You'd have to be familiar with David Thorne's work to get it.

LOLLLLLLLLLLLLL we'd #1 child pedophile cases and #1.0001 marijuana use, #2 hard drug users, #3 gay people committing tax fraud by filing jointly in states that don't have gay marriage. The state is ridiculously focused on moral crisis and prefers nice, safe risks--drug users, not drug cartels. Arrest the victim, but the guy who's trafficking Meth is ... armed ... leave him alone. Even if he DOES rape school children. ELEMENTARY school children. Dude those people will come cut your fucking head off, send the SWAT team to arrest the guy smoking pot instead.

I don't like how we implicitly bow to terrorists. Drug cartels want to play hardball? Okay, we'll play hardball. You motherfuckers crossed the border and decapitated a bunch of people who had Facebook accounts talking about how your drug cartel is evil? We're sending a god damn -army- to come get you, we will find you, and we -will- kill you. Hostages? We'll arrange for the funerals.

We need to get our priorities straight. Marijuana isn't just small-time; it's ridiculously harmless compared to the rest of the shit out there. It's low-hanging fruit: easy, low-risk stuff people just don't worry about because it's not going to fuck you up like cocaine or crystal meth or heroine, and that they can grow in their basement, so everybody has it. I don't smoke and even I know where I can get it--there's drug dealers across the street from me, I keep threatening them with a fucking pipewrench for trying to come hide their stash under my porch. There's 3 drug dealers in my parents' upper-middle-class, low-crime, white neighborhood in a 5 block radius from them! Half the people on my block probably grow their own. Most of these people are normal.

What else is out there? Coke and crack and meth and opiates and shit like bath salts. Forget the users, hang the dealers--and where are the dealers getting it? Who's importing this shit? Oh, those are armed cartels that will wage vicious, deadly war with the agents we send to get them? Boo-fucking-hoo, suit up and get your weapons ready! Cut OFF the flow of dangerous, deadly, viciously-addictive substances--worry about that instead of going after nigh-on-harmless low-hanging fruit and trying to shield our agents from harm while letting these assholes run around killing innocents. You signed up for this job, -you- go put yourself in harm's way trying to stop this shit, it's what you're paid for!

Nobody wants to do the hard jobs: Cut the source, admit that X is bad but Y isn't -that- bad, take the heat, take the flack, possibly get murdered. Cowards. Protecting their careers and their polyester suits and frothy lattes. I guess I can't talk; I fear nothing, when I put myself in harm's way it's not bravery so much as too-stupid-to-live. But god dammit some people need to be beat with a pipe wrench.

Entire exchange can be found on 27bslash6.com.

I would have directed the lawyer to the response given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

"The legality of such action is unknown, since Brazilian laws prohibit this kind of wiretapping."

This caught my eye too. Poster needs to make up his mind. If Brazilian laws prohibit this then the legality is not "unknown" it's illegal. I have no idea what the relevant Brazilian law says, and I am guessing the submitter doesnt either.

No, the poster is correct. Obviously, the Brazilian government holds to the same school of thought as the US government. It's not unlawful/un-Constitutional if we do it because of the current scary and propaganda-hyped boogeyman-du-jour.

Civil rights are taking a beating everywhere these days along with those advocating for them, it seems. All the recent US government "scandals" are actually just symptoms of the government attacking and violating civil rights in general. Every one of the so-called "scandals" are actually the government violating/ignoring/abusing/attacking/denying the civil rights of all the people, not just a particular group.

We need *real* civil rights leaders. Not the current jokes that bill themselves as such. It's time for another civil rights movement (NOT some "Arab Spring" violent revolution based on hate). Everywhere.

Strat

I grant that my examples were more for comedic effect than scientific accuracy. It's like an old Robin Williams stand-up line, that after a total nuclear war, all that will be left alive with all the radiation will be the cockroaches and Keith Richards.

The point still stands that even for humans (barring Keith Richards), the amount of power required for such a weapon to generate any where near a fatal dose within the space of one or two minutes or less at distances of 20 meters or more (say, from a curbside vehicle into the interior of the proximate building) from the X-ray emitter, given the inverse-square rule concerning effective power at a given distance from a radiation source, would be quite impressive to say the least. Five minutes with a calculator should have convinced them to move on.

This whole thing sounds like one of those wacky FBI "sting" operations where the FBI comes up with some lame plan and method, then finds a moron or three to play it off on until the morons incriminate themselves sufficiently for charges to be brought.

I can't imagine any actual terrorists that wouldn't do at least a little checking to make certain their Dr. Evil-esque "weapon" will even have any serious life-threatening effect, other than what one would get from a year or two of regular business air travel, before they started plotting an attack.

Strat

My x-ray gun is purely for hunting.

The department of game and wildlife might like to have a few words with you, about that device that is not a lawful hunting weapon :)

Wow, DNR regulates hunting of mosquittos & houseflies?!?

Talk about mission-creep! Ha!

GP never stated what he intended to hunt with his X-ray gun. Due to energy storage/weight/size considerations, anything man-portable might...assuming a brilliant design...be able to kill a very tiny insect-size creature at very close range at best. Ever looked at the amount of hardware and power required to irradiate food pouches for non-refrigerated storage/transport, just to kill bacteria?

Now, of course, if he went all Dr. Evil with a giant X-ray laser on the moon...

Strat

How about the technical release notes for RHEL 6.4

They at least warn that Corosync won't start Pacemaker in a future release--that's normal; we have the pacemaker init.d script running it, not the Corosync plug-in. Removing it during release would be a mistake, though.

They don't mention that they've removed crmsh and added PCS. They do give this warning:

Status, but not configuration. Nothing about configuration input, which was previosuly handled by crmsh but now is handled by pcs. pcs isn't even installed by default; you have to figure out that you need it, then install it. crmsh is removed by default when you upgrade.

How wonderful that they've been so clear.

The product wasn't fully supported. That's fine. Supplied as-is.

I want the product supplied as-is.

What I don't want is a product supplied as-whatever-the-fuck-happens. It's not functionally complete? It's not supported? Not guaranteed to work? Okay, we can manage that risk. It works for us, and then you rip half of it out and throw something completely different in, during a "stable" system release? Not okay.

I get that something might be "not complete or production ready" and I might come back like "Hey this breaks when we touch it this way" and get "... okay. We'll do something about that, eventually. We have other priorities right now." What I don't get is putting stuff out there as part of a "stable" distribution, marking that it's not supported, and then yanking the rug out from under people who use it. If it's "not supported" then you're at risk of it caving underneath you; you shouldn't be at risk of your asshole distributor coming back and causing the fucking cave-in on purpose.

Our company policy is non-existent and SOP is insane. We'll leave it at that. I've suggested jumping off RHEL repeatedly because it's such a shit heap, but I get arguments about how "the industry knows RedHat is a good product" when it's really not.

The fact is this "technology preview" is a critical feature for a huge business case--fail-over servers. You have to supply 99.999% SLA, so you have 3 servers, and when one fails it transfers its IP address to another one and there's barely a flicker. Yes, they broke that; and when they wrote the release documents, they didn't mention that they removed an entire configuration system.

On Ubuntu you have the guarantee that they won't fucking break release. They won't break release. They. Won't. Break. Release. Oh, shit, bzr isn't a thing anymore? Well, the current releases of Ubuntu that have bzr won't lose that until they've gone out of support cycle! LTS is supported 5 years? Everything in LTS is going to be there, working as-is, for 5 years! Guaranteed 100% absolutely! It won't be there in next release, so start migrating your shit off now; but it won't vanish overnight!