Quite relevant to this discussion, I think would be that after prohibition ended (1933) the vast majority of organized crime *did* indeed lose all their black-market booze money, though there were still *plenty* of existing illegal activities for them to continue to capitalize on (prostitution, existing blatantly racist drug laws, e.g. the Harrison Act from 1914), and some new ones which conveniently materialized,only 5 years later, for instance: the Marijuana Tax Act)

Obviously we can't legalize actual violent crimes or bribing/blackmailing lawmakers, that organized criminals profit from. Though legalizing and regulating simple possession and sale of a freaking dried plant or some powder, would likely free up law enforcement resources to deal with those kinds of things. Again, one could argue that that's not a certainty, but what is?

We'll never find out *for sure* if "legalizing everything" will *drastically* reduce violent crime, unless we do it (it couldn't be more of a disaster than prohibition if that experiment failed) though, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that it wouldn't reduce violent crime at all, it's really pretty simple to see that it would.

The important question is: would legalizing the drugs cause more harm than the increased violence that their prohibition causes (directly and indirectly)?

I suppose that's a complex question, but I've never seen *anyone* present hard evidence that it would. In fact the evidence is growing from countries like Switzerland, Holland and even the UK -- that drug legalization/decriminalization programs do indeed have a net positive benefit to a society currently undergoing drug prohibition, especially when coupled with a good public health program for treating addiction, even though, seemingly there are some people that don't seem to be able to stop their self-abusive behavior. But if they are getting their drugs from a clinic, for free even, they're probably not out knocking over a liquor store.

Some of the same people who say that there's no climate change because it snowed last week would say that "the science isn't in" on this one too, and while they may have a point (albeit possibly for the wrong reasons) -- sometimes you have to do something, even with "limited data", simply because it's the right thing to do, even with risk of failure, or risk of making things worse.

Since hey, if it doesn't reduce violent crime, or generates millions of new addicts (yeah, right), then launch the war on drugs "reloaded" or whatever.

With alcohol people realized after only a decade that it wasn't helping (or maybe more because a few too many senators and their buddies got caught drinking.)

After over 70 years of racist, poorly-conceived reactionary drug policy, it's time to do something to change it. I'd suggest that "legalizing everything" would be less harmful than what we have now, in almost every way -- but ideally there would probably be some kind of regulation, which is something that would require mature, reasonably smart people, with the authority to enact law to sit down and discuss the issues and listen to people who have actually already studied and thought about the issues -- I wonder how long it'll be before the US has that.

It’s really an entirely different situation.

You have physical access to the car. You don’t have physical access to a computer system. If you had physical access to the computer, you could do anything... disassemble it, reverse-engineer it, patch it, and make it do whatever you want.

You don’t. You have a network connection over which you can send bytes. Ones and zeros. The computer on the other end had damn sure better be designed in such a way that no sequence of ones and zeros can damage it or get it to reveal data that shouldn’t have been available to me. If I come into your building and smash the box with a sledgehammer, then no... there is no way your software could have foreseen that “input”. But ones and zeros coming in by the normal input path? Absolutely.

If you still require a car analogy, imagine the push-button door locks. Suppose that, by punching a particular sequence of numbers on the lock, I can reprogram the braking system to completely fail as soon as you get up to 60 MPH. Now did the designer fuck up? You bet your ass.

This should never happen, and the person who designed it is a bleeding moron:
http://mcckc.edu/searchResults.asp?cx=015941728899689753552%3Amvkfqavgtf4&ie=UTF-8&cof=FORID%3A11&q=%3E%3C%2Ftitle%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert%28document.cookie%29%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E%3C!&sa.x=0&sa.y=0#242
View the source to see where the code fucks up. Obviously it’s an issue of not escaping the input.

I'm not a software engineer, and I use a Windows machine approximately 80% of the time... And I don't like the way Windows hides stuff.

Install a piece of software under Windows, and there's really no telling where it goes. Sure, most of the code will live somewhere in the Program Files directory... But you'll wind up with some DLLs scattered all over the drive, and all sorts of registry entries. Un-install the software and it'll likely leave bits behind. Try to re-install again and you may find yourself with all sorts of odd errors.

I don't know how many times I've had to manually comb through the registry to clean out left-behind bits of antivirus software that didn't get cleanly removed.

There's generally no good way to make a backup of your settings before messing with something. Under Linux everything is basically a text file... So I can make a backup of that text file and revert to it if I have to. Under Windows... Well, I suppose I could probably make a backup of the registry... Unless the setting is actually stored in a file somewhere else - like in Local Settings or Application Data or something like that.

And if I screw something up in Linux it's generally a matter of making a change to a config file that is more-or-less human-readable. Under Windows it's a matter of finding the right checkbox in the right window - which isn't necessarily going to be available if you've borked your machine badly enough that you've had to slave the drive.

it isn't supposed to benefit the consumer. It's supposed to benefit their bottom line. Which in the long run, benefits the people who want a better, more diverse range of games to play.

It's the same thinking as paywalls on news websites - we aren't making enough money now, even though we have x customers. If we add a paywall, we'll only have 0.y *x customers, but at least we'll have enough money to stay in business and provide them content. The users who pay may even get a better experience this way if they make more money doing it.

Why would customers be happy about it? Well if I'm paying for a game, and getting the same experience as someone who pirated it, and they represent 19/20 players, and then they start to add DRM which gimps the game to keep those 19/20 people out (and still doesn't work) I'm not exactly feeling like their strategy is pro customer. Now though, they're saying things like 'free DLC when you preorder' well really that means you're paying $60 for the DLC and the the game is free because you could have pirated it and just had to buy the DLC, but at least I feel like I'm not stealing their stuff, and I'm getting something out of paying money. UBIsofts system is bad because it punishes you for having bought their product. The EA system of DLC is good because it rewards you for paying for the game, but if you won't pay for the game or DLC elements of it, you're not getting the same experience as someone who does. The Sony thing is half and half, they're just advertising it badly, not that I can think of a better way. Buy our product, get free multiplayer, don't buy our product, pay for multiplayer! But then I suppose they have the problems as EA and their DLC - you can still get the rest of the game for free, or a lot less used/pirated.

Computer programming is of little value without the ability to communicate.

I have to hire college graduates to change diapers at the school I run -- to ensure that when they do speak to the children, they do so with correct grammar.

But you see I am not sure that is helping. I am very fond of the idea of playing with stuff. Crayons, paste, paper, scissors, blocks, and Popsicle sticks.
Way too many people can not fix the simplest things around the house or build anything.
I think that a child that learns to use the physical world at an early age will be better able to use all the tools available.

I see to many kids and teens that think they know how to use technology but in reality they only know how to be technology users not creators.

Google News and Twitter are great sources for breaking news, and I use it for that, but it's inherently sensationalist. The topics that are the most talked about get put on the Google News page, not the best or most relevant. You're just as likely to see an article about Tiger Woods as you are about Iran's enrichment program, but any of the in-depth, after-the-fact commentary or articles about issues that for whatever reason didn't catch the public eye are left out.

Since when? Or do you make a distinction between "government" as an abstract entity ("they") and the actual person? ("Der Fuehrer", er, pardon, the "Commander-in-Chief").

For now, they are just recruiting "volunteers" to watch for "suspicious behaviour" and report "unreliable elements".

Just the most obvious problems (as mentioned in other posts)

• how long until "not volunteering" is deemed "suspicious behaviour"?
• how long until people wronly accuse others for financial gain or just for fun?
• how long until you'll have to prove your "reliability" by filling your snitching quota?

Another thing to keep in mind: The so-called "War on Terror" can be used to outlaw anything and anyone.

Soon after a high-profile Cyber-Attack all knowledge of critical infrastructure(tm) will become classified. Too bad for those lacking the official clearance for things they already know. The state will have to place such persons in "protective custody" camps to keep the terrorists from expoliting their knowledge. Unfortunately, even a short time spent in a such a camp will disqualify you from ever getting back to your former life: While they could'nt prove any previous contacts to "unreliable elements", now they know where you have met them. Finally, once the "unrecovereable elements" are confined to the camps it wont be long until some politician wants the money wasted on their upkeep be spent on his constituency instead. That is where the "showers" come in ..

Note that the 0th law isn't really a law, it's an application of the first law. The logic is that the collapse of human society will cause harm to large numbers of humans, therefore protecting the abstract 'humanity' protects individual humans. By this stage, robots were sufficiently advanced that first-law decisions were complex. Almost any action can be interpreted as harming a human and so the robot has to weigh the harm done against the harm prevented. If the difference in potentials is very small, then the brain is damaged. If the difference is large (in the positive direction), then it is fine.

In Robots and Empire, one robot performs an action that will kill millions, but potentially save all of the others. This causes a significant conflict. In the later books, Daneel is shown to have applied the zeroth law successfully, but presumably with far greater differences in harm-caused and harm-prevented potentials.

Another possible outcome was described in 'That though art mindful of him...' where the problem was in defining a human. Two robots were allowed to build their own model of what defines a human. They concluded that things like empathy and compassion were more important than physical attributes and that they were the most human creatures that they had encountered.

Sure, but that's the pop culture definition of "evolve".
In the context of biology its basically an abbrevation for "improves from generation to generation because of reproduction, variation and unintended selection".
If you create harder to swat mosquitos by only swatting the ones in your room that you actually CAN swat its evolution in the biological sense, since the mosquitos are adapting to the swatter (as opposed to you intending to breed better mosquitos).
If a car manufacturer takes the bestselling cars from last year and varies them a bit he is doing this to make them sell better. That's not evolution in the biological sense, at best you could call it "car breeding". ;)

I disagree. Correlate the dates of troughs against the dates of crests and see that each crest happens the day after a trough. Sure, correlation by itself does not imply causation, but it does raise a red flag that causations are worth investigating.

During his last two decades, Ludwig van Beethoven lost his hearing. He was completely deaf when he composed
his ninth symphony (famous for e.g. "Ode to Joy"). That doesn't mean that a hearing impairment enhances songwriter skills.

Imagine the works of those artists if they weren't bound to cover the area they're working on.
They might've raised the bar of perceived perfection to even higher levels.

I'm sure some anasthetics could cause complications for at least one in a million. Even if its not the anasthetic itself, maybe someone has some serious sleep complicatins? There is never a solution to any medical problem that will work for everyone, so having multiple methods is always a plus.

Others include

• Firebird
• Ingres

And there are many more, relational and non-relational, out there.