I blame the documented policy for being stupid and risky. It's inferior. It's like a car engine made of brittle iron versus de-sulfated iron: one of these is definitely better than the other. It's not a matter of "well one's a V8 and one's an I4, so you should understand that one of these has more power"; one of these will crack the block relatively easily, and would be acceptable if it were made of de-sulfated iron instead so it wasn't a brittle piece of shit.

What part of "we don't support this -at- -all-, but there will be no updates in current production stable release that break it" is hard to understand?

RedHat's tech preview include any sort of fail-over mechanism. That means you have to chose between the risk of running without high-availability and the risk of RedHat breaking your shit. When you do dev testing, and you find it breaks, you now have to deal with the risk of protracting your update cycle longer than would have been necessary if they had taken the liberty to ensure that updates will specifically not break what once worked. That means you're forced to take on greater risk no matter what you do.

RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant beta testing field.

"Cruel and unusual punishment" is an appeal to emotion.

It's a fact both that children have less life experience and that highly addictive and dangerous substances are difficult to learn from and adapt to. Heroine will addict you in 3-4 uses (not 1 like people say), and after fairly short-term use will put you in a situation where withdrawal can be fatal--not to mention your brain is screaming for it. I know folks who have been through it and gotten out of it as young as 12-14; their anecdotes are always the same: it's only their emotional support network of family and friends that pulled them out, otherwise they'd have never gotten off no matter how bad they'd wanted to.

The same can be said of student loans--18 year olds don't know anything about finances, and hell even most seasoned adults who have trudged all 30 years of a mortgage don't get it. How anyone thinks deferred loans are a good idea is beyond me. Maybe it's because people put too much value on education--more value than the sum total of their life, not to mention a stunted career unless you're in some form of education-driven skilled labor (i.e. medicine, law, higher level engineering/mechanics i.e. rockets and planes). Experience-driven skilled labor (automechanics, IT, management) benefits more from entering the career field early, taking college slowly, taking a broad-base education, and taking minimal and short-term debt.

It's not fallacious to assume that children and young adults are less experienced and more vulnerable. It is in fact a powerful strategy to market wares to the naive and build psychological attachment so that they become a profitable adult market--it's called 'grooming'. Drug dealers would do best to market their wares to young teens and turn them into addicts just like cigarette companies used to. This isn't an appeal to emotion so much as an acknowledgement of a fact.

Likewise, I specified that we're applying certain rules to things we determine to represent a wide social threat. Highly addictive substances are important; substances we're uncomfortable with but that represent low risk are not as important. Executing drug dealers for selling marijuana to kids is an appeal to emotion--especially with arguments about gateway drugs and their future forays into cocaine and prostitution to support their habits. Citing a problem that represents a societal threat to the adult population and tracing it back to the impact of indoctrinating young, mouldable minds is simple strategy.

As for cruel and unusual punishment, we live in a world where a highly immature and uncivilized segment of society has used a huge appeal to emotion to convince people that folks don't really fear pain or death. Execution is not a deterrent to murder, and the infliction of pain (called "torture" even if we're talking about something as banal as caning, which is little more than a short, painful beating) is thought to be a horror. For our trouble, what we do is shove people into prison for eternity instead of executing them; and, when we do execute them, we do so by injecting them with anesthetics so they feel no pain as they die peacefully.

How cruel it would be to take a poor man who steals a loaf of bread, beat him two dozen times, and send him home to his family. He might be sore when he returns to work the next day to barely earn money for food and rent. What we should do, what we do instead now, is send him to jail for 45 days, 60 days, 90 days. When he comes back he will be behind in rent, and his family will be starving, possibly evicted already and on the street; he likely will no longer have a job; but at least we're not so cruel as to drive screams of pain out of him by vicious application of the cane! No, we're much better sentencing him to a life on the streets where his best options are petty theft--or, perhaps, to become a drug dealer and have a chance at affording a home again one day. This is the superior, civil method of dealing with criminals--not that barbaric display of cruelty our ancestors used.

Watch what fallacies you call. You might want to look a little harder to see if perhaps you're standing on that very island.

Really? Because AMC and Regal are both charging $12-$18 per ticket, plus outrageous prices for popcorn and soda. Matinee child tickets are even almost 170% of the quoted standard price you gave, never mind adult ticket prices for evening fare being over 250%.

Now all I need is some ninja training, and I can become a real life Batman!

why do you think Steve Jobs faked his death?!!

To become "The Man of Gorilla-Glass"??

Hey now, at least I didn't go for "Polyvinyl-Chloride Man".

Besides, even a super-Jobs is no match for Powdered Toast Man!

Strat

Really? You're going there?

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". ...as expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England. It is commonly known as "Blackstone's Formulation".

Benjamin Franklin stated it as, "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer".

John Adams also expanded upon the rationale behind Blackstone's Formulation when he stated:

"It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished.... when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever."

Tyrannies have excellent conviction rates.

Strat

If you're always nice, friendly, sterile, and PC, people won't take you seriously. The landscape is non-threatening, and we all learn to smile and nod and pretend to play along and then go do our own stupid shit just the same.

When someone comes up and rams you in the ass for your shit, you learn different. Not faster--different. Life is about learning to manipulate people. People will beat the -shit- out of you if you go fingering their screaming, crying 13 year old daughter in the park--in order to not get the shit beat out of you, don't do that. If people just went, "Maybe you shouldn't do that," just a friendly suggestion, how much of this do you think would go on? Hint: We arrest folks for doing this sometimes.

The situation needs to become uncomfortable sometimes. Unpleasant conversations are easy to deal with. Constant ranting and screaming can create stress and interference; but it's not very effective. When you -really- fuck up, maybe you -need- your ass kicked; it's not appropriate all the time, but a few choice words and some raising of voice -will- get the point across PDQ.

Why would you limit the use of a language?

How many people would you describe as ebullient? How many folks would you describe as cock-sucking assholes that need to extract themselves from civilized society and go hurl themselves and their immature fucking bullshit off a god damn cliff?

Not everybody has a dev environment for everything.

Not everything works because it's been tested. Every time we release something out of software in-house dev, it goes through a month of dev testing. Then... it breaks 15 minutes after it's released, and takes 3 hours to un-break.

Ubuntu inherits Debian policy. Anything--supported or not--is not updated in any way that breaks things. You might not be able to get security patches for stuff in Universe or Multiverse in a timely manner without rolling and submitting it yourself; but they won't go releasing a package that no longer does X when X worked before. The idea is that, if your configuration works, it will continue to work *exactly* the way you have it without modification no matter which version of the package you have across the entire lifecycle of a stable release--if it doesn't, that's a bug and they need to undo that breakage. Extending is fine, breaking is *not* acceptable.

RedHat on the other hand released RHEL 6.4 and removed crmsh, the configuration system for Pacemaker, to be replaced with PCS. This wasn't documented in the release notes, either. Suddenly things that configure high-availability fail-over on RHEL 6 don't work. Running the same tools/scripts/whatnot breaks. This is still RHEL 6 stable, and under Debian policy that's not supposed to happen. RedHat doesn't have such a policy, so it happens.

That means you're persistently at risk of reaching a situation where your patching priority demands increased resources: I can continue to patch Ubuntu while my dev team comfortably works on readying our stuff for the next LTS or the next 9 month release, usually; but one day RHEL has patches and I either don't upgrade as my company's security policy dictates OR we find resources (meaning, sometimes, hire more people) to step up the porting process.

With RHEL, the risk is that we may need more manpower (labor cost--salaries) to support the same security policy; and that we may still not be able to keep in step as quickly as with a Debian-style update policy (i.e. there may be greater lag time as we rewrite scripts and configurations and do more dev testing before releasing patches). On top of that, we're faced with the risk of more frequent large roll-outs--things that worked in dev might not work in production, and now we're rolling out a patch that breaks production along with a bunch of patches to production to un-break it, and hoping that it all works in production.

Yes, I blame RHEL for this.

I was thinking more "Why DNA instead of fluorescent dye?"

Breaks one day because snapshots are a "Technology preview" and destroys all your disk images when RedHat releases a new update to RHEL7 production stable feed.

They are. Corruption is a portion, and it doesn't have to be a majority--just one damaged organ with 10% of its tissue rotting away will kill the whole organism.

My stance on drugs is constantly evolving. Currently it stands:

If it's viciously addictive, it should be regulated; the more physically and socially toxic (you CAN'T go to work without shooting heroine if you're DYING FROM WITHDRAWAL) and the more addictive, the higher the penalties should be. For dealing the penalties should be a hell of a lot higher--you sell methamphetamine to minors, we bring back crucifixion. For possession and use, lower penalties--for addiction cases, I want to get people off the drugs. Possession and use are difficult because leaving them open creates problems, but attempting to address them puts people who made mistakes and now are seeking help in the line of fire--and those who repent deserve help, not punishment; they are no longer a danger to society (i.e. by exemplifying and encouraging the consumption of dangerous substances) and deserve to not be treated as one.

If it's not addictive, or just not very--if the risk is very low--then the danger to society is very low and the damage done by prohibition is extremely high. We have two options: Accept the potential risk (maybe we find out some day marijuana is like... really, worse than Heroine) and leave open the possibility to discover great benefits in the future; or reject the risks and take away any potential benefits. I can tell you straight out marijuana is anxiolytic--sure I've never used it, but THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE USE IT FOR so you know... I'm about 100% certain that's the primary positive benefit. By banning it, we're saying the risk to society outweighs the harm done by prohibition enforcement plus the loss of an anxiolytic option--is that really true? If not, then it shouldn't be banned.

Disclosure: I'm basically always on Piracetam, Aniracetam, L-Theanine, Alpha-GPC, Noopept, and SAM-e, all currently legal. I also have Oxiracetam and Pramiracetam for occasional use (also legal); and I do often take standardized antioxidants marketed as "green tea extract" standardized to 98% polyphenols, with 50% of the total mass being EGCg.

The doctors had me on Methylphenedate and Risperdal, which had vicious side effects and were terrible and relatively toxic; they suggested a mixture of mainly dexamphetamine (Adderall--78.2% dex), which is also too toxic to my tastes (but people who snort cocaine insist that dex isn't bad for you and tell me it's the best substance ever invented...). I'm on zero prescription drugs.

I've actually gotten better results out of the drugs I've picked out for myself, and can safely adjust them at will--the drug interactions are good, and doses of 80 times the standard dosage are minimally risky, and the side effects are things like headache (because of choline depletion--hence Alpha-GPC, fixes that), insomnia (I have that anyway, and Melatonin 1mg time release fixes that), and an upset stomach (eating at McDonalds does that too, and it doesn't happen to me). This works better for me, and if we just brazenly banned all kinds of shit without evaluating if it's dangerous then I wouldn't have that option.

Now, Dexamphetamine is another potential treatment route; but it's dangerous--I actually believe that, you can dispute it but let's keep context clear--and I have no problem with it being scheduled. I can get it with prescription. Cocaine I can't get, even if the doctors determine that cocaine may be an effective option to treat some condition I have--I understand that too, but if that ever happens I don't think I'd be able to argue that banning cocaine is a bad thing. I'd argue that the lack of research into medical use and access to prescription under a doctor's professional judgment is ... inconvenient, and that if there's such a body of knowledge suggesting it should be scheduled for prescription then that needs to be fixed. But I mean, hell, dangerous substances, I don't want that stuff floating around out there. Look at how that works with cigarettes.

You can be an uberlibertarian if you want and go raving that we should make meth legal regardless, that's fine, but I disagree. You can go talking about how MDMA is illegal and it shouldn't be because it's not dangerous enough to warrant scheduling as a controlled substance--I like that argument, I might disagree on the details but I *support* that argument and if that can be shown scientifically that there isn't a real basis for us believing MDMA is that dangerous then we *should* unban it. That's my opinion.

I'm far too logical for humans, I think. Most people who understand the above argument turn white and get sick.

Some e-mail address in .ru or .cn or something e-mailed me child porn once. The girl in the picture was older than I was at the time. Looking back on this, I lol.