Apparently you are among those masses. What odies was trying to do is reinforce the first comment. Another AC commented back with a message of astonishment and odies was giving further detail for that confused poster. Likely odies assumed that his state of astonishment was due to thinking that Asian connections are slow as that Someone in the USA would experience a large amount of latency between their computer and one in an Asian country.

That's a pretty good analogy but I'm not sure I get it. Could you maybe make it a car analogy?... oh wait...

I'm just imagining a boy with a dog running out in front of you along the railroad tracks. Or even more absurd, a train flying out in front of you in the middle of the suburbs with no tracks in sight.

Why do I suddenly feel like watching back to the future?...

I think you're reading far too much into what I said. You're making everything black and white. All that I said is that if you are an average citizen with no lawmaking capabilities, you do have the ability to not support the cartels. I'm not saying it's the best way. I'm not saying it's the only way. But it is a way.

Also saying that a plant may have some medical use in the future as an argument as to why you should be able to recreationally use it is kind of flawed.

That honestly doesn't surprise me one bit. There were a few lectures that I could never stay awake in even if I had gotten plenty of rest.

Quick! Get the phonebook! Get me the address for John Smith!

Did you miss the entire conversation here? The reason is to stop supporting the evil crime syndicates that are harming many many people. I have far more of a problem with that than drugs. I don't care if you use drugs. You talk about it naturally growing. Go for it. I personally don't care if you do.

But to act like there's no reason to not use drugs just because you could pick an apple off a tree.That is a huge oversight of the situation. If crime groups were illegally trafficking apples and killing people over it, you can sure as hell bet I would advise not to purchase any of their apples too.

Cat o'nine tails? More like cat-5 cables! amirite?

What you really need to do is get it into sites that have a little more cred. Here's what you do, make a personal website that denotes some level of attention. My first thought is do some sort of hardware hack that makes it into Hack-a-day, Engadget, Wired, what have you. Get it slashdotted. Somehow use that to attract higher scale news that is looking for a feel good technology story to make people not fear the singularity. Then the image is on some news website. Other people write websites, google for pictures, use your picture. Suddenly your uncensored information is all over the web...

Of course everything I just said is completely impractical, especially if you're trying to spread more than one tiny source of information.

Another thing to note... If he gets into an accident and calls for help, couldn't he just give a fake name? Or even his old name. Hell, he could probably get help by pretending not to be able to speak.

Taking this even further, what if someone names their child something along those lines? Will the court deny it or make the parents change it? What's the limit to this? What name is just barely too crazy to have as deemed by the court? I wonder if it's the "the" that gives them trouble. No one seems to like to have "the" in their name anymore unless they're French.

I'm not taking a stance in the "legalize it" debate. But I would point out that you already have a way to use your freedom to not help the cartels. You could choose not to purchase drugs. I'm not saying that it's necessarily reasonable to ask people that do drugs to stop because of the behind the scenes horrors, but to say they DON'T have that ability is untrue.

This really makes me wonder why the scammers out there aren't signing up for tons of generic name sounding e-mails, hoping to get people's misplaced mail. Of course, for all I know, they already do.

As cool as that sounds, if we start colonizing the solar system, chances are people are going to branch out if it's possible. People are going to find ways to live on as many planets as possible. I know that the technological barriers are much greater than that of, say, the Oregon trail, but presumably by the time we have colonized an environment as hostile as the moon or mars, we will be at least a little more nonchalant about space travel at the least. People will expand to the area available to them. People with differing viewpoints and conflicting aspirations will push for colonies elsewhere. Then they will all multiply. By the time we fill up the livable parts of the solar system, I fear we would have enough people using enough energy to have some level of impact on Jupiter. I don't know what exactly, but we should bear that in mind before we go raping planets for their energy. After all, we've seen how well it worked out for Earth.

Now that you mention it, I've heard that it's cold as hell.

I'm sure it's somehow different, but at my college, we have a public wifi all over campus and as you walk around, your connection will get dropped and picked up by several different routers, but you continue to be connected. If you go to a totally dead area, yes it will drop and you'll have to reconnect, but not finding it for a short bit doesn't seem to be a problem. Of course this is a private university paying for large wireless routers that cover larger areas, concentrated in a much smaller area than Manhattan.