Gareth Williams (26 September 1978 – c. 16 August 2010) was a Welsh mathematician and employee of GCHQ seconded to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) who was found dead in suspicious circumstances at a Security Service safe house flat in Pimlico, London, on 23 August 2010. His decomposing naked remains were found in a red North Face bag, padlocked from the outside, in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom.
Philip Taylor Kramer (July 12, 1952 – February 12, 1995) was a bass guitar player for the rock group Iron Butterfly during the 1970s. After this he obtained a night school degree in aerospace engineering, he worked on the MX missile guidance system for a contractor of the US Department of Defense and later in the computer industry on fractal compression, facial recognition systems, and advanced communications. His disappearance on February 12, 1995 caused a mystery lasting for years.
Oded Schramm died in 2008 on solo climb in Washington State. Really should have won a Fields medal for his work on SLE (Schramm-Loewner evolution), as his collaborator Wendelin Werner received.
That's not how laws work. There needs to be a justification for something to be illegal, not for it to be legal.
In absence of any compelling argument to the contrary, things are legal by default. There has never been a terribly convincing argument for imposing punishment for marijuana.
Well, if it is Marijuana now, then what's next in line? I'm afraid to see the day when some people will start demanding the legalization of other harmful drugs, pulling "the science says" card out and rationalizing the possible usefulness of certain drugs that really should be out of everyone's hands...
Well, if it is Marijuana now, then what's next in line?
This slippery slope argument is decades old and isn't borne out by experiences with decriminalization or legalization in other countries. I'm not and never have been a user, but I see a lot more harm in criminalization than in legalization.
pulling "the science says" card out
Science is a trump card because science trumps. Seriously, people wouldn't constantly perform science if it didn't work.
Portugal did NOT legalize drugs. They changed personal use and possession of less than a 10 days personal supply so that these were no longer criminal offenses. They become administrative offenses.
Producing, distributing, and selling remain criminal offenses.
In too much of an indignant hurry in my reply. Yes, it was decriminalization not legalization. But the point stands that reducing impediments to drug use isn't going to cause civilization to crumble.
Anybody who brings up the issue of the damage done to society by drug use has to then take into account the damage done by drug prohibition. It's clear (to many) that the latter is far more harmful.
Most drugs aren't harmful anyways. Heroin is whispered as if it's terrible, when some leaders of the world were lifelong morphine addicts, with no damage in their performance. LSD is also referred to as a "hard" drug, yet has essentially zero deaths associated with it.
But that shouldn't be the argument. Bleach is very harmful, but I'm not stopped if I decide to go drink some. The constant reduction in personal liberty by deciding what chemicals people may possess.
I can only hope someday this is viewed as backwards and horrible as governing what kind of sex consenting entities engage in. (In fact, this is still a problem, as sex with consenting adults of other species is still illegal in many jurisdictions. In fact, to my shock it seems this is going in the opposite direction, as The Netherlands recently criminalized such sex. I wonder how such laws handle cases where an animal rapes a human.)
> I wonder how such laws handle cases where an animal rapes a human.
At one time, the animal might have been given a trial in a court, just like a human. Google "animals on trial" and you'll find some interesting articles about specific cases and the practice in general, mostly from a "let's make fun of our idiotic ancestors" perspective, but there is one from Slate in there that takes a more nuanced look at why they did it.
There is an early 20th century book about animal trials and punishment called "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" by Edmund P. Evans. It is available [1] at Project Gutenberg.
I really never enjoy this slippery slope argument, when arguably the most harmful drugs [1, 2] are already very much legal (sometimes the drug is controlled, but at least studies can be done, and those who can benefit have access).
Heroin and opiates in general simply are not very harmful, referring to the actual medication. Apart from acute respiratory depression (OD'ing), there isn't much except constipation. Overdosing is dangerous for many drugs - more people end up in the hospital from misuse of Tylenol and ibuprofen than from, say, Oxycontin.
So it's very unfair to allow only certain people access to basic medications, especially when the medicine itself isn't particularly dangerous. The study you linked has a rather expanded definition of "harm".
This has been an active area of political dispute for at least as long as I’ve been able to understand language and comprehend the news, around 20 years.
The same thing that was gained with re-legalizing alcohol, a more civil and well functioning society that values and preserves individual liberty.
Drug prohibition and the war on drugs has had an enormously deleterious effect on our society and our criminal justice system. It has resulted in one of the highest incarceration rates of any "free" country in history, for non-violent crimes where typically the "victim" in the crime is the person being jailed themselves. It has resulted in a massive change in the criminal justice system due to so many drug cases being prosecuted, and drugs being such a prominent target of police activity. The result is massive expenditures on police, DAs, and the courts and yet a constriction in the resources being used to solve and prosecute the most serious crimes (murder, rape, etc.) or to ensure justice is carried out according to the finest principles of a free and just society.
Moreover, drug prohibition results in massive amounts of money getting funneled to hardened criminals and gangs, because when the business of procuring and transporting drugs is illegal those are the people most willing and able to undertake such activity and most desirous of "easy" money outside of the conventional labor market. That vast wealth propping up criminal enterprises then serves to corrupt the criminal justice system directly, especially the police, through direct payoffs. Just as it did when alcohol was illegal.
Even when direction corruption isn't a factor, the militarization of the police has led to a massive degradation of freedom and personal safety as well as a growing divide between the law abiding public and the police.
Meanwhile, a massive section of the population, recreational drug users, becomes outlaws. They are forced into a more tentative or even adversarial relationship with the police and the justice system in general. They are more vulnerable to other crimes and less likely to cooperate with investigations. These are not just "fringe" elements of society such as destitute meth addicts on the streets, these are people who are otherwise fine, upstanding citizens. Folks such as Carl Sagan, Bryan Cranston, Morgan Freeman, and Bill Gates. These aren't people whose lives were ruined, these are people who chose to exercise their own individual liberty to explore recreational drugs, just as people choose to use alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc.
Overall, the war on drugs has been incredibly corrosive for liberty, the proper functioning of the criminal justice system, social cohesion, rule of law, and safety from violence. I can think of few things developments within the last century which have been more disastrous to the stability and health of America and the developed world as a whole, I think that says a lot.
I think it'll exercise your brain when learning new programming languages that solve problems in different ways, building up your logical and critical thinking skills. But I think learning a new spoken language will exercise the brain more broadly since it's more complex.
Not sure if this is what they're using but there is VoxelJS[1] - it has a very healthy plugin ecosystem so you can get a functioning game up and running quite quickly.
VoxelJS is really cool, but not quite really suited to building something like Voxatron. You could however probably use straight ThreeJS, or go lib-less and roll your own WebGL system.
These games are all compiled from native languages to asm.js.
