JillSwift

I don't get it. What Nutt did was a bad career move. It's politics, going against the grain of what your boss is up to is a surefire way to get fired. But I keep seeing hints that there's some moral issue with what Nutt did. Words like "bad" and "wrong" being tossed about. If there is a moral issue, can someone make it clear what it is?

I know you are dead wrong on this. I worked with teens and young adults for 12 years, all of whom had a drug problem of some intensity. I know exactly what the costs of drug use are. Strange that you think there is a single person here asking you to change your mind on drugs. What folks are saying, including myself, is that current methods fail to work, and are extraordinarily expensive for the tiny return value. Rethink drug use? No. Rethink methods for drug control? Yes.

No, you didn't. You made the assertion that he was, but didn't offer reason. Odd, it failed to work for robbery, murder, most business torts...

Yes, you've said all this already. The question is why?

People are constantly scanning other's faces. They "lock on" to you when eye contact is made. That's likely why it appears to you that they "know" when you're looking at them.

Why? I can see the firing for political reasons - as politics is not a science and is instead a wild frenzy of emotional reactions and careful presentations of choices to the public (aka, "spinning"). But to call it "wrong" seems utterly baseless to me.

There is probably no benefit to society from recreational drug use. No matter the drug. And it matters not one whit. Whether drugs are legal or not isn't about stopping drug use. We know that the drugs are going to get used, the question is how we are going to control use. Making the drugs illegal isn't working out very well. Drugs are still readily available, carrying only a risk of arrest for possession, and with no regulation for safety and quality, and a high price as the dealers and manufacturers need extremely broad margins to cover losses to law enforcement. So we end up paying not only for the welfare of the addicts, but also for the addicts' drive to crime (robbery mostly) to pay for their addiction, the cost of housing users and addicts in prison, the costs of law enforcement specific to drug control, and ambulance/hospitalization/funerary for those who get unsafe additives in their drugs or get drugs that are unusually potent. Legal but regulated use would eliminate or significantly reduce the costs by allowing the reduction or elimination of law enforcement specific to drugs and housing users and addicts in prisons. Regulation would make drugs more safe and of predicable quality, reducing the costs of caring for the medical aspects of drug use. The costs to manufacturers would be lowered, and margins could be narrowed, making the drugs easier for users to afford (and feed their addictions) possibly lowering the drive to crime. Removing the potential for arrest on admitting your addiction will also allow more addicts to get help controlling their addictions. If you can't eliminate it, control it.

Been using Karmic since the Betas. I'm happy to say I dodged all the major bugs. This release works very well for me. However, Karmic uses a lot of "new and not quite finished" software, like the new GDM, GRUB2, etc. I don't reccomend an upgrade to anyone unwilling to tolerate a sudden lack of configure-ability (Especially if you prefer a GUI, as some configuration options are still there but require mucking about in the files or using gconftool-2). Generally, if 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope is working for you, stick with. Unless you really want or need a more recent kernel and libraries. 10.04 Lucid Lynx will likely be the better choice for upgrade time, as GDM and GRUB2 will be more mature, and pulseaudio will finally have been de-kinked (or so they promise. We'll see ).

It's unwise to think that any part of this universe should "make sense". The human psyche is a cobbled together mess of various evolutionarily formed mechanisms. There is little hope that the end result will appear to be "logical" by any stretch. It just has to work "well enough". I'm an advocate of establishing a phenomenon before explaining it. What makes you think humans crave violence? I know we are able to be, and are violent, but is there really evidence that humans - speaking as a whole here - actually crave it?

I think the folks currently participating on this board could discuss faith without becoming hostile - or even deeply annoyed. However, the discussion will not be limited to current participants. There are plenty of forums all over the web where such discussions are encouraged or are the whole point of the forum's existence. I don't honestly see how bringing such a subforum to SFN would bring enough value to offset the problems, or be more valuable that the forums already hosting such discussions. The mods here do one thing particularly well over any other science forum I've experienced - herd discussion back to evidence. It gives SFN a particularly nice atmosphere for the discussion of science and discovery. By the nature of requiring evidence, any "fungible" idea or ideology can't easily be discussed here. I'd rather that not be alloyed nor diluted just to host discussions that can already be held in a multitude of other forums.

A new way to explain explanation. A TED talk, by David Deutsch. (In the Pseudoscience and Speculations forum because it explains why some ideas are rejected as pseudoscience immediately.) folTvNDL08A

Syntax: If the EULAs and licences of proprietary software gives you reason to pause, may I suggest looking into Free/Open Source Software. Operating systems like those based on Linux or FreeBSD don't come with a corporation hungry for information on their customers. For first time users of Linux, I suggest Ubuntu. It's arguably the easiest to use of all the flavors of Linux, and comes with an on-line repository of free and open source programs to cover just about any computing need you have. I'm unsure how to maintain any level of freedom from intrusion in interaction with most companies away from my computer, but on my computer this is pretty much tops.

They should never have let cleverbot read 4chan.

Nothing makes me wonder more than the irony of posting about privacy concerns on the Internet, where you leave a little trail of your doings, via your IP address, everywhere you go.

Eeee!This is fun! Thanks for helping me grock this.

Not "Tux Racer". Ha ha! That's pure Linux! Besides, Win7's prettiness takes up just as much resource time as my Compiz-Fusion window manager. The question isn't really performance or stability, but freedom to get at the source and make the system your own.

Probably disagreement on what the "best" bits are.

Water is the big killer of this idea. If you make the soil properly permeable for growing, then you will end up - within a few irrigations - with a bunch of mud and drowned young crops in the valleys, and not much growing soil left on the peaks (and what's left is too dry anyway). A few more irrigations later and you're back to a flat field. If you tier the mounds to avoid this, well, you end up with the exact same amount of usable space as a flat field. _____EDIT_____ I'm thinking of some radical undulation here, tough. It occurs to me late (as usual) that something like hilling doesn't have this problem.

Ah. Well, in that context everything has cost. Like this post. Who should I bill?

In which context? That's true for businesses/enterprise computing. Not so much for personal computing.

I think you're taking the common name for the theory far too literally. The term "big bang" is in fact a disparaging name given to the "initial universal expansion theory" by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle thought the universe existed in a steady state, and had no "beginning" or "end".

I agree with your interpretation. I also agree with Einstein on the particular point that being an "individual" is something of an illusion. We do have an individual point of view, but we are no more separate from the universe than any other construct within it.</wax type="philisophical">

MacOS X is amazingly similar to Linux based OSs - in fact the kernel and parts of the extents (Darwin) are open source. Even having to pay for it makes it similar to some enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat. Third-party software support of the platform is testament to Apple's marketing skills. Mention creativity in digital media and "Macintosh" is the first platform to come to mind for just about anyone. Apple's Logic and Reason (I love those names!) software really drives that home in a very tangible way. The only problem I see with Apple is that they are better at the whole dirty-tricks vendor lock-in game than Microsoft would dare to aspire to. Their constant re-structuring of their data transfer protocols, dedication to DRM, and slow response to third-party device support is infamous.

Thanks CharonY. If you care to continue I assure you it will be appreciated. ==