It is a shame that so many of these drugs are illegal and have been demonized, because they do have benefits for people at smaller doses as discussed. Some of the greatest work and innovation in the world has been created by people under the influence of one substance or another (from Picasso and his wormwood/absinthe to Steve Jobs and LSD).
In my own experience, I have used small doses of either amphetamines (both prescription and not), cocaine or various other narcotics (usually just dropped into a coffee) to take me through some big, demanding and complex projects. I know that this is not the 'correct' thing to say, but with self-control and knowledge about dosage, I can't think of a single downside to them being used in such a manner.
I can imagine that daily small doses would add up to a dependency which has its own ill effects.
Obligatory Bill Hicks quote:
“See I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn 'em. 'cause you know the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years.... rrrrrrrrreal fkin high on drugs.”
Don't understand this to be showing off or upvote as karma baiting, but I really need to say this:
I've written some marvelous code and completed gargantuan projects on my lonesome, battling thousands of lines of assembly and debugging hardware circuits and stuff.... and never used.
It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative. You can be creative and withstand by just willing it - it's just not the easiest way out. When you take drugs you're either lying to yourself and pretending there is no harm in fucking up your brain - losing sense of priorities, time, yourself, and the world around you - or afraid of how it would feel without them.
Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience. Staying up for 65 hours straight? Been there, done that with nothing more than coffee and cold showers. Write some brilliant hacks that do something genius in little lines of code? Check. Debug memory leaks and crashes across over 100k lines of C code going to and from different dynamically-linked libraries? Check. Writing your own OS Kernel? Check.
I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
I don't really care about upvotes, I just voice my opinion based on my own experience.
The other replies to your post have already covered what I would have said, I would just add that having a fixed belief that if something is illegal, that it must be bad for you, is ignorant at best.
Almost all of the illegal drugs are also prescribed in some form of the other. There is the massive painkiller industry built on opiates, ADHD and amphetamine salts, Air Force pilots in the USA are given 'go pills' as were SS troops during WW2. There is a terrible double-standard in our society when it comes to drugs, where for some reason we are expected to believe that these use cases are somehow fine, or are somehow safer, than an individuals own experimentation with using the same substances for their own performance gains.
The human body was designed thousands of years ago, and evolved its capabilities based on having enough energy to gather enough food to survive that day. With no additional substances to give us an extra push, we simply weren't designed to be able to concentrate on complex tasks for 16-18 hours in day.
If you are able to with just coffee and cold showers, then good for you - there are some of us who, like the Air Force pilots, seek a bit more of a push. I don't distinguish between coffee, vitamin supplements or any other drugs, they all have a purpose and we all should be free to use or not use each as we choose.
> It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative.
Your brain as well as your entire organism needs external stimulus to function. Food, coffee, oxygen, water. Many of these things affect your brain in obvious and noticable ways: coffee, oxygen. So what's the fundamental difference between substances that are legal and those that governments decided would be too luxury for the people to have freely available?
> I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
I pity those who are not questioning the established propagandistic axioms. If you lived in the 15th century you'd never question the theory that the world is flat.
"Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience."
No, you're not. You haven't been everyone, you haven't done everything, not everyone has done everything, and even if they had you wouldn't have been able to observe them closely.
You are ridiculous to think that, if you truly think that from your limited experience you can do anything without the aid of anything, and to think that your life experience is applicable to anyone else, is naive at best.
> I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.
How would you know? As somebody who has never used drugs you are unqualified to argue from experience about how they affect creativity and performance.
I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish
People who feel you need drugs are in the extreme minority if they exist at all. As far as I can tell, people tend to regard the use of (some) drugs as simply an enriching experience, as they would with seeing a great film, listening to certain music, or visiting a certain place.
As a non-user, you would be genuinely surprised at what strategic use of certain psychedelic drugs can do, even -- especially -- if your brain works great just the way it is.
Reliance on drugs is unfortunate, and in the case of psychedelics, it's ineffective as well. But don't think that e.g. LSD couldn't show you something new.
here is a case where we actually need DRM. the girl should have been able to secure the content and allow access to only those people she wished to grant it to - there is both nothing legally or morally wrong with that.
there is a tech angle to this story - and its about how we need solutions to stop unauthorized propagation of private content. DRM systems as already built into Windows and other systems would work perfect - it just needs to be standardized and rolled out across mobile and web platforms (most of it is based on open protocols)
It's a shame because we have the technology, it is just currently being applied in the wrong places
No, it's a bad idea. It wouldn't work. Neither on a technical level (DRM on images is trivially circumvented), nor on a social level (idiots will always be idiots - no matter how many safeguards you build in, they always find a way around them).
And that's without even getting into the slippery slope aspects of DRM technology.
no, it would work. it doesn't have to be DRM per se, just automated public key encryption and signing using something unique such as the phones IMEI number.
it is very possible to implement encryption and signing without having the user go through key generation etc. make it all transparent and give them a lock to click on if they want to make the message and attachments secure. PGP already has a similar product, and hushmail is pretty easy to use.
we are talking about propagation here. its built so that the person who receives the image is then unable to forward it to somebody else. or at least they can, but that person won't be able to unencrypt.
its pretty standard, and working with e-commerce for a while now.
its pretty standard, and working with e-commerce for a while now.
In what area of "e-commerce" is that standard and working? I don't know of any but I know at least one where DRM was tried and failed miserably (music distribution).
Moreover I can only repeat that DRM is technically infeasible for images because the images need to be displayed on the clients screen. When your eyes can see it then the lens of your digicam can also see it. Get it?
all 3 founders leave at the same time, only two years after being acquired? there is more to this than simply leaving to do other things. founders of sites like last.fm don't just let their babies go so easily, acquisition or not (think myspace, facebook, bebo, etc.)
I would say that it is connected to the RIAA drama and CBS sending them user info. If they resigned because of that, then full props to them (they just owe TC one big apology).
If the data sharing with the RIAA did happen and they didn't resign - then shame on them.
I don't think all 3 leaving at the same time means anything. One would assume that they're probably great friends, and feel that their combined effort in a new project (when the time comes) is better than 1 or 2 going separate ways.
if we could measure influence, Mashable wouldn't even come close.
It seems 55% of Mashable traffic is coming in from search engines. If you look at their homepage, they are obviously heavily optimized for keywords like 'youtube', 'myspace' etc. (I got my stat from compete pro, cant link)
As a tech/valley person, I keep up with TC a few times a day but Mashable doesn't interest me at all. I am sure I am not alone.
It is pretty impressive to me that they are on the front page for huge keywords like that and explains why Mashable can have such high traffic numbers with so much less influence than Techcrunch. Most of the people searching for youtube and myspace and showing up in these statistics do not care about Mashable and will never visit again.
I wonder how much less it costs to advertise on Mashable because the traffic is so much less valuable than Techcrunch's traffic.
It is always tempting to point to a big company and to try and argue how stupid they are and how they waste money etc. but as most of the comments here have already pointed out, there are fatal flaws in their argument.
I will add one more to the list. The difference in click-through rate for the top result from the second result is 3.5x. ie. Top result gets 43%, second place gets 12% CTR. Ranking first means a lot.
Also the spikes in trends for the caveman keyword being linked to Geiko is very speculative at best.
Thanks for your comment. Really enjoy the dialog.
The caveman spike is correlation, not speculation. It does correlate very closely, the news stories for the time period even other platforms like YouTube, trend very highly for Caveman around the same months... but you're right - I don't know for sure.
Where did you get your CTR stats? Those are intriguing. Our experience is very different. Thanks again!
no. since it is gzipped, there is no progressive download of the page and it is all downloaded at once and then executed. so startTime and endTime are measuring processor execution rather than download speed.
it is a flawed method. a better method would be to make an xmlhttprequest to an object of known size and compare the time to known times for known connection speeds. this method also has the advantage that you don't interrupt the page being loaded and don't interrupt the user experience since it is run in parallel.
WAY over-rated story. The network is built using a script kiddy tool called Gh0st RAT, which relies solely on social engineering to propagate. There are no new exploits here, or nothing as sophisticated as confiker especially since Gh0st RAT is a simple client/server model that is very easy to block (infact, most firewalls should already be blocking it).
The security company that wrote that report probably charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for information that any competent network admin could have found online or would already know if they kept up to date with the 'latest' (ie. 10 year old) threats.
It just happens that one of these networks hits a high-valued target, and then propagates. Note that most of the victims are incredibly unsophisticated and from poorer countries or organizations without a clue.
The lesson here should be about training computer users and having competent administration and support of IT infrastructure, rather than a scare campaign about Chinese government hacking. ('oh the host server is a Chinese IP, it must be the government! (300M net users in China.. durgh)).
The article is about how it negotiates NAT using forged UDP packets. What is more interesting is how it actually gets past firewalls.
It exploits common default rules in firewalls. ie. to allow web surfing, a firewall will allow port 80, but most of the time it will allow both outbound and inbound 80, rather than just outbound. Skype will listen on a bunch of common ports (80, 25, 110, 443, etc.) and blast out connection requests, and then wait to see which port it actually receives a response on. It will also fall back on using UPnP to find a way through - a protocol that is often overlooked by network admins.
If you netstat while running skype, you will see it listening on a bunch of ports. It often prevents a local web server from starting up. The way it does this is a lot more interesting than the actual NAT punching - skype and kazaa will almost always find a way in and out of a network and they are a pain to block. Joost is also using the same tech stack.
"ie. to allow web surfing, a firewall will allow port 80, but most of the time it will allow both outbound and inbound 80"? outbound http traffic uses ephemeral ports, not 80.
Outbound firewall rules almost never limit the source port, 99.99% of them only limit the destination port. If party A can accept packets on port 80 then almost any client out there can connect to the service on that port. The point being made is that a lot of default firewall rules allow traffic to any port 80 destination and accept traffic from any source to the local port 80.
execution speed is more important than lines of code in this case