You're right... It is merely decriminalized, meaning if you're caught with it they send you to rehab, not jail. I'm pretty sure I've made a point of saying legalization and decriminalization together in the course of this thread because different drugs are in different classes in each country... But that doesn't really matter: Where the two countries are similar is that all of their drug laws deal with it as what it is, a medical issue, rather than a matter for the courts and police.

I strongly suggest you look at the real numbers... Portugal and the Netherlands have the least-restrictive drug laws on earth and both are seeing consumption rates fall--for all drugs, not just "soft" ones, (whatever that means.)

For us to ever "solve" the drug problem on this planet, we first have to wrap our brains around the idea that you can't use violence to stop people from consuming something they are addicted to--it simply does not work. Remember, there was a time when alcohol prohibitionists said the same thing about beer and liquor: That people were incapable of making good judgments about what to drink, and in what quantities.

Yet, if you look at alcoholism and alcohol consumption in this country, ending prohibition had a similar effect to the decriminalization and legalization of drugs in the Netherlands and Portugal have had: Less consumption, and less addiction across the board, and less experimentation by youths, which is likely the main contributing factor to less overall addiction from their laws.

Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't encourage anybody to go out and take a bunch of heroin in any context... But my desire to stop people from taking it (by force) is tempered by the fact that its impossible. Shit, look at Thailand... they EXECUTE people for drugs crimes... and yet its the heroin capital of the universe.

Replying because I can't mod in this thread, but this is the most insightful thing said here so far: It isn't a "kitchen sink" if your co-workers need the feature to do their jobs. They don't exist for the purpose of kow-towing to your divine fiats: You're there to serve THEM, not the other way around.

"Doing one thing well" sounds great on paper until you realize what that really means in this context...

Either you'll have multiple address books/sets of contacts (you'll need one for each different application, one for email, one for calendaring, one for collaboration,) or you integrate that function between them all. Both are horrendous pains in the ass, unless the servers are written to work together in the first place. ...But if they are, you're suddenly "locked in" to using only products that are all compatible with each other. Of course, if any part of that integration breaks (likely, if the applications involved weren't written to work together in the first place, and you had to "improvise" a solution to make that happen) all the apps lose their contacts function at once. So we're back to multiple sets of contacts, and "one-tiny-failure" breaking all these functions.

And you'd have to have an account on each of these separate servers, permissions on all of them... Somebody would have to know how all five platforms work (instead of having just one Exchange admin,) and have monitoring capabilities configured correctly. That's another thing: Does XYZ Calendar App support your monitoring tool? Your backup platform? If not, better be prepared for some pissed off co-workers when it crashes overnight and you don't know that's happened until you arrive at the office the next day. Or better be prepared to find another job if your backup solution's support for it is limited, and you restore a "backup" that brings back the functionality while losing all the data.

I mean, if you really think that is "simple" then more power to you... I mean, it is your career, after all... But your co-workers and bosses will laugh you out of your job if you seriously propose this "model" which would turn the entire business' concept of productivity on its ear, since they almost certainly currently use Exchange and Outlook for productivity apps, and every single user would have to re-learn everything they currently know to make your "simple" solution work. My guess? You'd be fired before lunch the first day this "solution" went live, as angry people from the parts of your company that generate profit as opposed to just spending money on personal technology wish lists line up outside your boss' office to decry your insane, not-compatible-with-how-we-do-business decisions.

Not to mention the lynching you'd get for breaking everybody's Android/iToys integration to their work productivity apps, since those functions on both platforms rely on ActiveSync, which isn't available anywhere but Microsoft platforms.

First of all, you've proposed using five servers to provide the same services as one server in an effort to "Keep It Simple ..." Do you recognize how ridiculously not-simple such a plan is? You've gone from one server to 4-5 (depending on what features you're using.) How is that "simple?" ...and I have to train my users to utilize a different everything (calendar, email, tasks, contact management, and collaboration) too?

Where do I sign up!

Additionally, Exchange Server now comes with redundancy and fail-over capabilities which means that unplanned downtime from "failure" is now down to the efficacy of the individual engineer, and his employer's willingness to spend money to reduce downtime. How much downtime is "acceptable" is directly proportional to how much value your organization derives from a particular service. How much you actually have is directly proportional to how much you spend to prevent it (up to a certain point.)

Well, let's be clear... I believe the "lost" data was the result of a choice to change retention policies and start wiping tapes... Which was probably illegal, but without the tapes, or an outlook OST file somebody finds in a closet from one of Cheneys' lickspittles' laptops, there's no way to prove a crime. Which sucks, because... I mean, come on... We all know there was a crime here.

True, but Exchange isn't an "email" application--it is a group productivity application that includes email, group calendaring and scheduling, tasks, and collaboration.

I understand there are MS haters who will bash Exchange relentlessly, with any label on it, but let's try to be even a tiny bit accurate. Exchange isn't an "email" service and hasn't been exclusively that for nearly 15 years: Time to come up with some new criticisms, the old ones don't apply.

An interesting take, straight out of "Hugs not Drugs!" But also utter bullshit.

Legalization leads to less abuse by youths, and less abuse overall, lower rates of addiction, and less overall harm.

If you're really trying to "protect" people from dangerous drugs and their ill effects on society, you should be working to legalize or decriminalize just about everything, since the Netherlands experiment shows pretty conclusively that young people have less access to drugs in a legalized marketplace (because black marketeers don't check ID) there's less experimentation among youth, less addiction among youth, and less addiction overall in society. Overall, fewer people take drugs in the Netherlands now that they're de facto legal.

This is fraud: A police officer accepted a paycheck for work and services he did not perform. That's fraud, and the officer should be relieved of duty and terminated from employment. Cops aren't above the law, or accountability, and it sounds like whoever fraudulently filled out the forms using the baseline measurements engaged in fraud.

Perhaps this will also lead to revelations about the myths of "drugged" driving as well. Reality: Just because you can test somebody's urine and find XYZ doesn't necessarily follow that they're under the influence of XYZ. Technically a blood test can reveal alcohol consumption up to 14 days later, but no serious person above the age of 5 really believes that means that you're drunk for 14 days...

You might consider exploring a campus agreement--some variants allow the sale of software at a super-steep discount (in recent years including OS) to students for use on their machines, so this might get you to a place where the machines could be manageable Pro or higher editions without major expense... Compliance would still be hard, but really we're at a point where you shouldn't be having "client" systems connect directly to the internal network, and should instead carefully manage their traffic and communicate content to students from the school on semi-private networks that don't have access to the live network. It isn't very difficult to conceive of configuring a VPN service onto that network in such a fashion as the clients couldn't communicate with the other clients, and only have access to the terminal servers you provide application services from...

If students want access they need to login... Android, iPhone, and iPad all support VPN connections so it seems like a trivial inconvenience to protect all involved.

It would also give you access to some very cheap pricing for the software you're probably already over-paying for.

For god's sake, don't forget sun-spots! The sun-spots will work with the predators and John Travolta to create landing pads for gay Martians...*

* Apologies to whomever's sig I just ripped off.

No, I'm not, but I am making fun of a group of people who like to use both to their political advantage, even as they themselves continue to support other types of slavery.

The talking point is that democrats are racists who supported slavery. Which was true in the 1860s. But also ironic because current republicans almost universally support intellectual property slavery even as they accuse democrats of racism.

Hilarious!

Please cite an example of how banning it's use has reduced the harm to users or to the non-using public-at-large?

I submit it hasn't. I submit that the ban has created more harm than the drug ever could have hoped to. In a legal marketplace addicts wouldn't need to steal to support their habit, wouldn't need to worry about impure batches suddenly killing them off, and wouldn't have to worry about being murdered when meeting their black-market dealers. Then there are the prisons, packed to the rafters with "offenders," most of whom are there for participating in some part of the drugs trade... Ever wonder why more people are addicts coming out of prison than were when they went in? Because everybody in jail is a fucking drug dealer or addict! We're putting dealers and addicts in close proximity to each other in an environment of extreme violence and fear, and then scratching our heads in confusion when those people keep on using, and even manage to recruit non-using inmates into the ranks of the addicted.

I'm not saying everybody should run out and take methamphetamines, but people will use the drug whether it is legal or not... Human-beings have been altering their consciousness with substances since we lived in caves. Laws that try to stop it have always utterly failed to do so, and have only produced more violent crime, higher-taxes, and a police state. When you consider that all of those sacrifices by "the rest of us" haven't achieved any measurable positive result, and indeed have only resulted in the negative ones I've outlined, the WoD seems even more stupid. Slightly fewer people use cocaine and heroin than did in the 1970s... but a shitload more smoke pot, and at a younger age.

Compare this with countries that have a decriminalized (or outright legalized) drug-policy and what you see is dramatically lower rates of youth drug-abuse, dramatically lower rates of youth experimentation, and dramatically lower levels of addiction in all age groups.

So, yeah, "Drugs are bad... mmm'kay..." but drug laws are even worse.

Good question! Maybe this was what Newt was referring to on the campaign trail when he proposed to put 9-10 year olds to work scrubbing bathrooms in public schools as a budget-savings measure, and "workforce development" plan.