XTC is a good one. I thought it had significant long terms health effects on users, but apparently I was wrong
LSD and mushrooms are probably good as a category, distinct from the seriously addictive substances like crack, heroine, etc.
Alcohol is covered under the prohibition option.

Personally I am for legalizing all drugs.
The cost of the drug war is too high:
- police vs community
- guns and crime
- mass incarceration
- law enforcement loss of life
- corruption, cartels and gangs outside the us
- money to all the wrong people
- addicts as criminals rather than patients
- wasted resources that can be used elsewhere

I believe bitcoin is:
A Ponzi scheme / valueless
Valued at the cost of electricity it takes to generate new coins
Valuable due to continued currency for illegal activity
Valuable due to continued currency for legitimate business
A government conspiracy
An alien conspiracy
What is bitcoin?

I support a drug policy of:
No legal marijuana
Medicinal marijuana
Recreational marijuana
Legalization of all drugs
Bring back prohibition
Other

I think this goes under the "greed" category.

I suggested the poll question and I did include an alternative fact. I could not figure out a good way to fit Cowboy Neal in :(. Here is my original suggestion:

How do you former pentagon head, Luis Elizondo's claim of UFO's beyond a reasonable doubt?
a: truth
b: deliberate misinformation
c: gullibility, over interpretation of data
d: greed — hire us to find the UFO's
e: yoda told me not to tell you!

I am really interested in how people evaluate information in this day any age when "authoritative" voices are willing to lie and there is always conflicting information on any subject if you read the web. This person has had access to information that I don't have and be well trained authority. Normally I would tend to believe a person in this situation. However it goes against any evidence that I have seen and against my common sense. There are too many alternative ways to gather data by a society even merely equal to us, let alone advanced. However, in my mind, it is not beyond all possibility. I guess I will not believe it until a preponderance of experts have seen the evidence directly and declared it is something beyond current human capability and is not explained by natural phenomena.

Marketing Surveys?

Where I work, everyone code reviews each others code. I find this to be the best way to propagate best practices. Novices programmers not only get comments from more experienced programmers but they also review code written by experienced members of the team. Discussions are as important as the initial comments. Code review cuts down significantly on bad habits because it is easier to fix things you know will be caught then to go back and fix them later.

Also we have reviews on code design too. This is done before writing code to prevent rewriting everything that is already submitted.

This is still true, but not for long. Erasing objects is easy with photoshop content aware fill. Adding objects will be easy soon:
Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy

Look at the high variance images at the top of page 9 of the original article. I finding unsurprising at all the people can't tell if a sand dune was smoother or if erasures occurred on image of pine tree branches against pale blue sky.

One documentary on the development of new currency said portrait sizes were increased because of our ability to notices small variation in faces. I don't have the reference for this, but my personal observations match the claim.

My wife and I are both artists with masters of fine art in painting. For years, bad effects in movies will jump out at us. We will sometime refer to the "cgi cast of thousand" in egregiously offending movies. For some years now my ability to identify cgi inanimate objects has almost disappeared. In modern movies I almost never have a cgi object jump out at me. I notice that the cgi animation of people is similar improving, although glaring problems still appear. I am sure it has both to do with complexity of the physics problems and my own visual capability and nature focus of attention. I except it is few short years until I almost never notice any cgi modifications.

> pay-per-download site for *their* music

I guess I missed the word "their" and over interpreted. Since the problem she was addressing in the letter was royalty payments to artists in general and not herself, I was thinking of a generalized pay-per-download system. This would be a lot larger project requiring more complexity and vision in order to achieve its goals. This is what I think would be interest. I agree getting music directly from the artist is not a big thing.

This is a really interesting idea. I don't expect any single artist to do this as they investment of time and effort requires serious dedication. If artists wanted to be business people then they would not have become artist.

However if you could get maybe half of the top 20 artist to agree that it was in the best interest of the themselves and artists in general, they could pull there music form all the other services and form a new non-profit service (non-profit for the service no the artist). The top artists will drive people to the service. The service would use advertising and or fees and all the money would go to the artists / royalty owners.

Basically this is like a union with some very wealthy members such as the NFL's players union. The union would pay a health salary to president and others for the business aspect. The union could negotiate deals with other services if the membership thought it was in their best interest. It would have some of the drawbacks of such unions but in total it would be a lot better for the artists than current systems, if not so much for people who want to stream free music.

Thanks. That is great info. I am happy about my guess. I may be only an order of magnitude off on the # of nodes and I had 5-7 layers [input, 3-5, output] :)

When I was in college the 100 astrophysics class [rocks in space] taught estimation and actually asked how many trees in Chicago on the final. I thought this was probably one of the most valuable things you could teach liberal art students in a science class. One of my co-worker did very well on his hiring interview by doing a very good estimation of the number of veterinarians in NYC. He googled it when it he got home and was able to send a link that was about 10% from his answer. He was cherry picking, sure, but we were highly impressed. He is one of the most successful hires we ever made.