You might be correct, but only because prescriptions weren't required for them at the time. I should point you to this article. I has some interesting pictures of ads for heroin, mostly for children. I'm not sure if I should be typing "Heroin (R)" since it was a registered Bayer trademark, but they've let it lapse, plus the term has become a generic, so I don't think I need to.

Hmm. My girlfriend and I once came across an idling Volkswagen Beetle parked in a fire lane without the parking brake on. The owner was nowhere to be seen and the car, being a manual, did not have a park gear, but was instead in neutral. The owner clearly did not understand that being in neutral does not lock the transmission and that some torque may (that really should be "will") be applied to the wheels. We watched the car drive itself about a meter or so gradually picking up speed, looked around at the parking lot with various children and elderly people who might not be able to move out of the way of even a slow moving driverless car, then I stood in front of the car and stopped it from moving forward while my girlfriend got into the car and applied the parking brake. The woman who owned the car came out of the store in short order and thought we were stealing her car or something, but we just told her that her car was driving itself away and went on our way.

Anyway. If the parking brake in that car didn't work, I would have had no problem getting into it and driving it out of the fire lane and parking it in a parking spot, then turning off the ignition, then possibly popping the trunk and using the jack or something to block the wheels. If the owner had called the police and a reasonable police officer had come along, they would have fined the owner and thanked me (an unreasonable police officer would, of course, have arrested me for grand theft auto and I would have had to wait for a hopefully reasonable court). Basically, by leaving their car illegally and dangerously parked, I would say the owner gave me implied permission to save them from potential negligent manslaughter charges.

So, the car analogy is not as cut and dried as you presented it. At this point, you might say that the situation I described doesn't map very well to the copyright situation. Of course, your original car analogy doesn't really map properly to it anyway.

Oh yes, absolutely. But those 363 pages weren't even a bill until they were introduced. Until that Tuesday, anyone who complained that there was pending legislation like that waiting in the wings would have been lambasted as a paranoid conspiracy nut. Especially if they made the obviously ludicrous claim that it would go from bill to law in three days.

I was talking about having the text of the bill right away. I was wondering if it was even available at all for public review before it was voted into law.

Yes, that was my point. The USAPATRIOT act was railroaded through before anyone even had a chance to object. Even if the text was available to the public the moment the bill was introduced, it would have been too late for anyone to object to it.

We don't know that. Most people probably wouldn't want to be revived into such a cold world anyway... Of course, the world we currently live in is probably that cold as it is right now. Replace "frozen people" with desperate living refugees on ships and we have pretty much the same situation.

Anyone know if anyone has ever tried memory experiments with animals that can survive freezing and thawing? I'm not sure exactly how you would do it though. Is it possible to train a frog to do tricks or run mazes or something? If you could, then you could demonstrate that, in principle, memory can survive the freezing process. Of course, it still might be the case that the memory of amphibians and the like isn't stored in the same way as the memory of humans and other mammals.

They have demonstrated chilled (but not frozen) suspended animation over a period of hours in mice and pigs. Their hearts were stopped completely and they were effectively dead the entire time before being warmed back up. Presumably if memory were stored in ways that requires a continuous refresh, those pigs and mice would have lost their memories. I can't find any details of whether any memory tests were done on those animals however. Pigs and mice are, at least, quite trainable.

Still, even the pigs and mice in the suspended animation experiments weren't as totally dead as someone completely frozen. There still might have been some undetectable slow process going on keeping their memories going (or, once again, maybe they actually didn't keep their memories).

The actual cells can't be dead, but most organs can certainly be harvested from a corpse that's clinically dead.

Well, in the case of the USAPATRIOT act, it was introduced on Tuesday, passed the House on Wednesday, then passed the Senate on Thursday, then signed by the President on Friday. It is 363 pages long. Numerous congressmen have admitted to not having read it before voting for it (and let's face it, they probably never read through the whole thing after passing it either). As for the rest of us... frankly I'm not sure how quickly the congressional record was actually available back in 2001. Anyone know? Would it have been immediately available to the public as soon as it was introduced? Put online somewhere maybe? Or would it be done at the end of the day? Perhaps the end of the week after it had already been signed into law? This is something I really want to know. In any case, even if it were available to the public instantly and a it was read through by an amazing speed reading legal scholar, their letter of objection to their congressman probably wouldn't have gotten there in time.

See, this is the thing I don't quite get. If the courts do overturn it, what happens? This isn't some civil case, this is the very deliberate, premeditated taking of a human life. If the courts overturn the laws allowing it on the grounds that the law was never legal in the first place, does anyone get prosecuted for murder? If not, then why not?

An example. Someone comes after you with a knife screaming that they're going to gut you like a pig. You run away from them until you see a piece of rebar lying on the ground and you pick it up, wait for them to come into range, then whack them in the skull killing them. You assumed that the law allowed that as justifiable self defense. Oops. It turns out that, while running away, you crossed state lines and now you're in a state where self-defense is more narrowly defined and you were only legally allowed to kill in defense if it was impossible for you to run away. Since you stopped running, you're now going to jail for murder.

That's the way it works for most of us. Commit a crime that you thought was legal and go to jail.

It's only legal under the stated supreme law of the land if the term "due process of law" is rendered utterly meaningless.

Well, the US War of Independence wasn't really a revolution was it? It was, as you stated, a war of independence.

Based on some of the people who have received it, I've always assumed that it's mostly used in an attempt to try to shame people into being better.

That's a fairly responsible way to operate. Still, it can't really beat having home heating as one of the primary uses for the device. Only during colder months of course, and a modern well-insulated home reduces the necessity of heating.

I understand that it's de facto legal, it's still not de jurem legal.

When they discovered it during excavation, was it full of pinkish psychoreactive slime flowing towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Did the excavators get put on trial for violating their judicial restraining order?