All of it. Slight variations in font, screen depth, screen size, plugins, etc.

@MattЭллен Use an md5 algorithm to encode the reverse polarity of the death ray, then patch the new code into the robot's auxiliary graphics processor using a nanite vector. Piece of cake.

maybe I'm the only person to stick with the default set of fonts and have a huge monitor

Huh I wonder why Firefox thinks I have a different color bit depth than IE

@Kitḫ golly! You're my hero! Can you do it in time to stop the robot?

@MattЭллен Hmm. Possibly.

The real problem is that it is nearly impossible to reverse the polarity of a death ray until you've already been struck with it.

@Kitḫ oh no! but a strike from a death ray is enough to kill me

Let me consult my Tesla tome.

@MattЭллен Now you understand the gravity of the problem.

I knew I would have some really uncommon fonts, but it says my browser plugin combination is actually even more identifying. Wow.

Well, I am not terribly concerned about being incognito.

@Kitḫ Same.

So they can tell I am the same person hacking the FBI and CIA mainframes. They still don't know who I am.

@Kitḫ Hehe.

shrugs I am also not concerned about that.

@Cerberus Well, and they would actually only guess that the same computer was doing that.

Until one day you make a terrorist joke on the phone to a friend, and you are thrown into military prison by mistake, without trial.

And apparently, I could just change my browser and it would confuse them.

Yeah.

@Cerberus Not gonna happen, my friend.

it seems its my plugins that did me in

Or change the user agent: there are extensions that can do that with a click.

A terrorist joke on the phone with a friend is not enough information to get me thrown in jail.

@Kitḫ Perhaps not yet.

@Cerberus Don't be silly.

There would have to be a lot more evidence than that to have the military come through my windows and make me disappear.

@Kitḫ Mistakes are made. There is a Dutch businessman who has been on the Interpol wanted list for years due to some bureaucratic mistake, and no-one has been able to get him off the list. He can't travel abroad due to it.

@Kitḫ oh gosh! not the 3 body problem? That's nearly intractable.

@Kitḫ The biggest problem is mistakes and their consequences.

@Cerberus is it because he's an international arms trafficker?

@Cerberus Is he indefinitely detained without right to a lawyer or trial?

@MattЭллен Nope, he is innocent. It has been in the papers several times.

@Kitḫ No; but, if the laws change, that may happen in the future in similar cases.

@Cerberus I am still not worried about it. It takes a lot of resources to do those sorts of things. There is nothing about me or my life that makes it worth putting $650,000 into the defense budget for my capture.

Uh there is no reward on this guy. I don't think we have rewards in Europe.

1 in 6 billion. I will take that gamble.

He is just on the wrong list.

By accident.

I'm not talking about a reward.

Then what is this 650k about?

I am! what's the price on your heads, @Cerberus?

It is a number I pulled out of thin air to illustrate that detaining citizens is resource intensive.

@MattЭллен I managed to "convince" certain people that it should be removed.

@Kitḫ Yes, it is; so?

What do you think this businessman has cost Dutch and European governments?

Loads.

Uh huh.

forpunce 'n' ha'penny

And he is not alone.

The police make mistakes too, all the time. That is fine: but there should always be a civilian court to test the evidence.

and yet you still don't have a virus scanner, cerb

Well, you already know all this.

If you have a budget of $19 billion dollars, and each person you detain costs an average of $1 billion dollars, how many people will you detain?

Regardless of the ethics of detaining them.

@MattЭллен Hmm wait what?

@JasperLoy Overhead. Salaries for the spec ops team, equipment and training, hush money, detainment facility, etc.

@Kitḫ You don't "choose": the system makes you arrest certain people.

@JasperLoy See, this is why people just don't get it.

Underlings present evidence.

@Cerberus The "system"? System = people making decisions.

@Cerberus if your computer is compromised, and you don't know (because why would you - you've no way of detecting intrusion) and then people make it look like you've done something, like, I don't know, looked at kiddie porn, you'll be on the lists

But they are not checked by an independent institution, so they will make countless mistakes.

@MattЭллен Yes, exactly.

If you can only afford to detain 19 people, you won't waste your time even researching a stupid joke phone call between two US citizens who are under the age of 18.

And so there should be a judge to whom I can prove my innocence.

@Cerberus Well, naturally, but I'm not arguing that.

@Kitḫ You can afford to detain many more. Secret prisons can be quite cheap.

@Cerberus just a sack and a rope!

@Kitḫ But that is what this law entails, isn't it?

@Cerberus My point is, it is not worth the time or resources to chase after every little lead.

@Cerberus Potentially, but I think it won't stand. And again, not what I am discussing here.

Exactly.

@Kitḫ I do not disagree; but still a considerable number can be arrested without trial, at least theoretically, and there are bound to be mistakes.

@Cerberus Fair enough, but I am still not worried about it.

@Kitḫ You're probably right that it will be struck. But then what are you discussing?

I am a white professional woman who lives in a poor rural state. My profile is about as not-a-terrorist as it gets.

@Kitḫ Understandable: in the short term, the chance that it will negatively affect you is probably negligible.

@Cerberus You are acting like I should be paranoid about the government whisking me off in the night. I'm not. I have better chances of winning the lottery.

@Kitḫ But what if you happen to visit New York while a bomb goes off, and you're at the wrong place?

@Cerberus I still have better chances of winning the lottery.

I mean, they might arrest you if you happened to have talked to the bomber on the train earlier that day.

@Kitḫ For now, yes.

They might. They might hold me indefinitely too. But I doubt it. It is not a good investment of resources.

@Cerberus Forever.

It is prohibitively expensive to arrest and detain indefinitely thousands of citizens.

@JasperLoy Well, that's clearly still illegal.

Also, what would be the point?

But people with Duchenne also had better chances of winning the lottery, and still we do not consider them an unavoidable loss: we try to help and protect even small minorities. That should include dark-skinned people from the Near East who have been wrongly arrested.

@Kitḫ How many people do you have in prisons at the moment?

Incarceration or imprisonment?

@Kitḫ Does it matter? The army can just build new, cheap prisons somewhere abroad and lock people up.

@Cerberus "Cheap" prisons cost how much? $50? Plus, where will you put them?

@Cerberus And I meant do you want the incarceration rate or the imprisonment rate.

@Kitḫ In places like Guantanamo, or anywhere around the world in secret locations. The CIA has been doing that for a while, and it is quite cheap, like the ones in Eastern Europe.

@Kitḫ What is the difference?

@Cerberus But how cheap?

@Kitḫ You just rent a basement in a suburb: that cheap. Build a few cells in it, hire a few mercenary guards.

@Cerberus Incarceration includes all sorts of punishments, including probation and parole, I think; imprisonment includes only persons sentenced to more than 1 year in prison.

Oh, right.

Well, let's say the total.

@Cerberus How are you going to hold more than 19 detainees there?

@Cerberus You know we have the highest rate in the world right?

> According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) 2,292,133 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2009 — about 1% of adults in the U.S. resident population.

7.2 million in prison, on probation, or on parole.

@Kitḫ You hire other basements.

@Cerberus So really not that cheap, if you are renting 10 million basements in the US. Also, not that secret.

Uh, what?

Keeping 10 million basements with a couple of mercs each quiet is going to be really difficult.

I am not saying the army could support 2 million prisoners abroad in secret prisons; but their budget is huge, so they should easily be able to detain thousands.

@Kitḫ Where do you get this number?

@Cerberus Thousands, so let's see. What percentage of the US population is that?

A small percentage.

But it could be one of your friends.

@Cerberus Out of thin air. What I am getting at is that resources impose a significant limitation on this law.

@Cerberus Not likely.

And if they ever start using non-secret camps in poor countries, their capacity could very well be much larger.

@Robusto Yeah, I know. Stupid war on drugs.

Currently over 1% of the population is incarcerated.

And a quarter of the people incarcerated are in the US.

@Kitḫ Well, if the army has only 10k untried life-long prisoners, is that a good thing?

@Cerberus So there is the real issue. The military should not be used as law enforcement.

@Kitḫ Huh, a quarter only??

This is one of the reasons I may vote for Gary Johnson. He's for the immediate cessation of the "war on drugs."

@Kitḫ Of course. What did you think was the issue?

@Jasper: I take your point about the traffic Q. :)

@Cerberus Only? That's something like five times any other country.

@Robusto Yeah I agree. Our former EU commissioner is in favour of legalizing all drugs, including hard drugs. I think I agree.

@Cerberus Um, well, you think I should be worried that the military is going to detain me indefinitely.

@Kitḫ Ohh I thought you meant "a quarter of the American prisoners are in the US, but the rest are detained abroad". But you meant "a quarter of all people in the world".

@Cerberus — Johnson's point is that the WoD is identical to Prohibition, which didn't prevent substance usage but did spawn vast, ruthless, well-armed and well-organized criminal groups.

@Kitḫ I mean in the long term. Great bad things often start small.

garyjohnson2012.com/issues/drug-policy-reform

@Robusto Exactly, and it costs the government and the police a great deal of money and resources.

> Since only criminal gangs and cartels are willing to take the risks associated with large-scale black market distribution, the War on Drugs has made a lot of dangerous people and organizations very rich and very powerful.

> The same happened with Alcohol Prohibition (1920-1933). Prohibition had only a minimal effect on the desire of Americans to drink (in some cases, it clearly made drinking more attractive), but pushing alcohol underground had other effects: overdose deaths, gang violence, and other prohibition-related harms increased dramatically during the Prohibition years.

Exactly.

That is why we have legalized soft drugs.

Not because we think they are good.

Don't forget the devastating health effects of the additive they put in vanilla extract.

Huh?

> Governor Johnson believes it is insane to arrest roughly 800,000 people a year for choosing to use a natural substance that is, by any reasonable objective standard, less harmful than alcohol, a drug that is advertised at every major sporting event.

and the apples in apple pie

@Robusto Exactly.

During Prohibition, they added something to vanilla extract that made it poisonous if you consumed it uncooked in large quantities.

Then there is tobacco...

And fat foods...

@Kitḫ Huh? Why? An accident?

@Cerberus To prevent people from drinking it for the alcohol it contained.

I am confused and upset by this revelation

Oh!

I didn't know it contained alcohol.

> By managing marijuana like alcohol and tobacco – regulating, taxing and enforcing its lawful use – America will be better off. The billions saved on marijuana interdiction, along with the billions captured as legal revenue, can be redirected against the individuals committing real crimes against society. Harder drugs should not be legalized, but their use should be dealt with as a health issue – not a criminal justice issue.

But of course, only serious addicts would drink vanilla extract to get drunk.

I think hard drugs should also be legalized.

I don't.

I am not cofused by it anymore

But I agree with decriminalizing them.

@Cerberus — It follows as the night the day.

@Kitḫ Well, okay, so what's the difference?

@Robusto Yeah. Everyone here can and does use cocaine anyway.

I have never used it myself.

so... not everyone

@Cerberus — So you have a different definition for "everyone"?

Jinx.

@JasperLoy Sniffed.

Legalizing means regulation, enforcement, taxation. Decriminalizing means making it less of a serious crime. In my head, that's the distinction anyway.

@Robusto Of course. I am not en tois pollois.

@JasperLoy — And my response was a jape.

@Kitḫ I don't know. How serious is less serious?

@Cerberus Fines, sentencing to treatment programs, etc. Certainly not hard time in prison.

Make it a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

@Kitḫ That sounds better, but I think we already have that.

Only trade is still a real crime; personal use is not.

Doesn't the Netherlands have a unique heroin support program as well?

I think I remember reading about that.

Unique, probably not; but junkies can get methadon for free, a substitute.

It prevents them from stealing, and from buying impure stuff that kills them.

Gives the same sensation, I believe.

Nah, we have methadone clinics too. I was thinking that the program was unique in providing support for users so that they could hold down jobs and manage their lives without constantly drug-seeking.

Hmm I don't know, probably.

Would be a good idea.

This was supposed to reduce crime and help users stabilize their lives so that treatment was more successful.

Yes, I would be in favour of that.

Oh I have to go, dearies.

Going to take a shower, then see a play.

Maybe I'll be here between shower and play.

Bye!

cya! have a good shower :)

Eh, does it?

@MattЭллен Thanks!

I will think of you all.

:D

@Kitḫ — Methadone is more addictive than heroin.

@Robusto Does the difference even matter, heroin being extremely addictive already?

Well, it's just hypocritical to allow the government to get you addicted on their substance, when addiction was the issue in the first place.

@Cerberus Also, heroin is not as addictive as tobacco.

or oxygen

@MattЭллен I've already kicked my oxygen habit.

man I can't get enough O2

@Robusto It's differently addictive than heroin.

Still addicted to oxytocin, though. That's the real danger. I can't seem to live without women. <sigh>

:D

I know what you mean

At least the other drugs aren't passive-aggressive.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

@Kitḫ is the difference that heroin replaces your natural pain killers?

where as nicotine only makes you think you need it

He wanted it deleted.

oh

@MattЭллен Yes-ish.

Both heroin and nicotine are physically addicting.

Meaning that your body alters its chemistry.