ballzac

Does it make a difference whether you have BBCode enabled (the 'switch' icon in the top left of the tools panel) or not?

Time and again, when a young person dies like this, we see the same reactionary response from their parents. It's attitudes like hers that set up this whole system that is indirectly responsible for the deaths of many drug users. Why not do something more productive, like calling for the legalisation of relatively harmless drugs like MDMA? Or at least spread a message about the importance of drug testing kits? Besides, unless I missed something, there is no mention of what her son actually died from. While the specific circumstances of this case do not change whether or not bitcoin should be regulated, it seems odd that this important detail has been left out of an emotional appeal to get a law implemented. Was he sold a substance that was not what he paid for? Did he get what he paid for but took too much? Was he driving drunk and happened to have other drugs in his system? Like I said, it wouldn't change an objective analysis of whether bitcoin should be regulated, but considering that her appeal is far from objective, it would make sense to provide details of what occurred, and to explain how she believes bitcoin is responsible.

I haven't actually done any tapestries yet, but because I have plans to do some, I've been preparing patters for it. What I do is look at the dimensions of the aida cloth, canvas, mesh, or whatever, and divide the dimensions of the cloth by the thread count to get the total number of 'pixels' along each dimension. Then I take the image I wan't to use and resample it to the resolution of the mesh. Then I work out how many colours I want to work with, and reduce the colour depth of the image to match roughly the number of colours I want to work with. I use paint shop pro for these tasks, and after reducing the colour depth to, say, 16 colour, there is a palette that shows all the colours that have been used in the resampling. Some may not occur in your image, but it provides a guide for colour matching with threads. It's also worth considering the different resampling algorithms. Nearest neighbour colour mapping will produce large areas of each colour, and is probably best for tapestry. More sophisticated interpolation methods produce a grainy effect that may require a tedious number of single stitches of each colour. Good luck, and be sure to let us know how you go and show us your results.

Welcome to the forums phytolator Very weird and cool. Do you have any ideas as to what might have caused it? Because this plant is propagated vegetatively, it seems unlikely that it would be a genetic thing, so I'm guessing it must be something caused by the growing conditions.

Except that, at some stage, any secret technological program becomes public knowledge when the technology is actually used. I meant significant in terms of the cooperation of top-level physicists required. And yes, I would think they would classify this research as less significant in terms of military value than weapons of mass desstruction, which is why I feel it's unlikely that they could pull it off.

I'm highly skeptical. It would be the first time (that I'm aware of anyway) that any organisation has secretly made such significant advancements in any technology. This would be more significant than the Manhattan project, and that was instigated by Albert Einstein and required the cooperation of several other leading physicists.

Awesome idea Ceres. I've been planning on learning cross-stitch or something similar. It looks fairly easy but produces incredible results. I think your suggestion would make a great project for me to learn it, but I might do the border in crochet rather than tatted lace as I think it would suit better.

Thanks I mostly learnt from youtube tutorials. I've been knitting on and off since I was about 5, so anything to do with threads or yarn I tend to pick up pretty easily.

So, I wanted to incorporate a motif like this into a larger design, so I designed a border for a doily. I realised that the motif would be lost in the rest of the design if it was done in white, so I started making a psilocybin molecule with each type of atom represented by a different colour. However, I'm looking at this design and thinking that molecule (not finished) will not be very clear inside the border, and don't want to put in the work to fill the space between the border and the motif with lace if I'm not going to like the end result. I think I'll have to do something a bit more creative if I want to make a larger design with a molecular theme, but it might take some time to execute, so I want to make sure I have a solid design before I start working on it. Not sure what I will do with this doily border, but I might just fill it in with a lace pattern.

A straw man is where someone misrepresents the opponent's position. You didn't demonstrate how weedRampage misrepresented a position, but instead appeared to defend the position that weedRampage was attacking, implying that it wasn't a straw-man at all Chernobyl was pretty much the worst-case scenario, and events like this are pretty rare. Even using the most grossly overestimated death-tolls for an event like this, the number of people who have died as a result of nuclear accidents since its inception pales in comparison to the number of people who have died in motor vehicle accidents in the same time frame. It's also worth noting that focussing solely on half-life can be misleading, because the longer a material's half-life, and the more widely dispersed, the lower its activity. If you have a material with a half-life of 1000s of years and it is widely dispersed, it's activity will be so low that it will be basically harmless. On the other hand, if you have a material that has a half-life of a year being highly concentrated in a local water supply, its activity will be high enough to cause radiation poisoning, but its lack of dispersion will mean fewer people will be affected, and its short half-life will mean that the cross generational problems will not occur.

I also think I should note that I do not completely disagree with having to pay excise on alcohol, considering a lot of people who make their own liquor are likely to over-indulge and become a burden on the public healthcare system. I think it would be reasonable to legalize distilling for personal use, and to apply a small excise in the form of an annual license (it would be too hard to police one based on quantity). Applying harsh penalties to those who distill without the licence would encourage people to pay the fee, but without the ridiculously stringent licencing standards that currently force people to do it illegally. Having said that, I don't think there are enough people distilling to make it worth their while changing any laws, so unlike cannabis prohibition, I would expect our distilling laws to remain the same for a long time.

I think this would be mostly true, but it's just another stupid law that could be used at the discretion of the police if they don't like you. Imagine a cop using "reasonable suspicion" to search your house because he thinks he smells cannabis. He doesn't find any, but does find a small still and several bottles of 'moonshine'. I think it's unlikely he'd be turning a blind eye.

Unless something has changed, these laws cover possession of a still only, and it is illegal to distill any quantity of ethanol without a license.

It's all done using acrylic paint. He's never been too comfortable with the properties of oil paint.

Yeah, he just uses a very fine brush. They vary in size. The Buddha is pretty large. At a guess I'd say it's about a meter wide. This latest one is roughly 35x45cm.

Acrylic Well, some of the ones on the first page use more conventional methods, but the first Buddha uses some lines and lots of dots, and the other one in the first post, as well as the second buddha, as well as this most recent painting are done with a combination of lines and dots. The close ups in post #12 show how the larger features are made of lines and dots, much like a printed image.

Finally finished

As I said, there is a difference between an anarchist and a citizen of an anarchist society. The traits that would make a person a good citizen of an anarchist society is not the same thing as what makes a good anarchist, whatever that is. There are plenty of countries that do not have democracy. If you would prefer to live in one of those, there's not a lot stopping you, apart from the fact that they're mostly terrible places with atrocious human rights records. There have been many societies around the world with very varied social structures, but the only ones that have come close to anarchy are very small tribal cultures. Even then, there is hierarchical structure to those cultures. In every single example of larger societies, there has either been dictatorship or democracy. Large societies simply cannot exist in a state of anarchy. There are no exceptions to this rule throughout history and across cultures. Actually, we have the threat of incarceration for the reason that many people can't learn to be controlled. In spite of this threat, there are many people who behave in damaging ways to their fellow man. Fortunately, people who transgress in serious ways are usually caught and locked up to protect the rest of society. In a state of anarchy, the only way to deal with such people is to form vigilante justice groups. Of course, such groups intrinsically need some sort of hierarchical structure in order to operate. And there's nothing to stop such groups imposing their will on the rest of the populous...unless of course you have other vigilante groups that fight them. See where this is going? You end up with 'tribal' warfare and ultimately dictatorship. This is the default state of humanity It's not simply a matter of educating people. Rape, war, murder, oppression, etc. have always existed. There may be some component of human nature that is relevant to education and upbringing, but there are very fundamental aspects of human nature, such as greed, fear and anger, that are evolved, biological characteristics, which would make anarchy an impossible state for a human society to exist in. Perhaps we should start a new thread for this?

At the risk of further derailing... I agree with you that anarchy is often misunderstood. The form of anarchy that grew out of a particular sub-culture of the punk movement is probably more closely related to libertinism than to true anarchy. However, the traits that you identify as "some of the best attributes of what makes an anarchist" are actually the examples of what would make good attributes of typical members of a society built on anarchy. There is a subtle difference. It doesn't matter how many 'good anarchists' there are, if we have a society unbounded by governmental control, then almost every member would need to cooperate in this system. We essentially started with anarcho-primitivism, and as societies grew larger, we ended up with dictatorships, which is simply a result of the undeniable fact that there exist in the world people who are selfish and power-hungry. Eventually, we evolved to a point where we have democratically elected governments, and despite the significant shortcomings of this system, it is preferable to the dictatorships that arise out of anarchy. Anarchy is a Utopian dream that would work perfectly in a society comprised of exactly one person, but the larger and larger a society gets, the less and less viable it becomes. Anarchist theory should not be misrepresented, but I don't think it's constructive to idealise or romanticise it either.

bullit, I think maybe you are still missing what you have done wrong here. It is not that you raised the issue. Things like this need to be raised if there are any concerns, as it enables other members to take extra precautions if they think it's warranted. All you really needed to do was add qualifiers to the title and your post. Things like "seems to", "possibly", "might", "could have", etc. When you speak in absolutes, you need to provide some supporting evidence. It's that simple.

First you need to work out how much power you will be drawing. Then you need to look at your inverter's efficiency curve for that power usage. For example, if you are going to be drawing 100W, and your inverter efficiency is 95% at 100W (not unreasonable for a 350W inverter), you will be drawing about 105W from your battery. Then you need to know your battery capacity. Let's say it's 100Ah for simplicity. If you multiply it by the voltage (12V?) you get a value of Watt-hours (1200) then divide it by the power you will be drawing (105) and you'll get about 11.4 hours out of it. There are peculiarities of battery behaviour not taken into account here, so you want to give yourself a wide error margin and give yourself a conservative estimate of maybe 7 or 8 hours. So t = C*V*E/P where t is the time you get, C is the capacity, V is the voltage of the battery, P is the power you are going to be drawing, and E = E(P) is the inverter efficiency when you are drawing P watts, expressed as a fraction (i.e. 95% = 0.95).

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I was strongly against removal of the neg button originally, but I believe it has been a lot more harmonious around here since it went. The neg button caused a lot of fights, and often they were due to misunderstandings. The reason being that if you just click the button as a substitute for providing constructive feedback on why you don't like the post, it doesn't enable the poster to evaluate their post based on your feedback, and instead they just feel attacked. I was guilty of contributing to these problems. There was on time I clicked the neg button and didn't leave a reply. The person whose post it was thought it was someone else who negged them, and thought the reason for negging was different to what the actual reason was. So an argument started between the poster and someone who had nothing to do with the neg. I still don't like the idea of super sanitising things around here or in any other discussion forum, but the fact is that having no neg button doesn't actually restrict peoples ability to disagree with a post, it just means they have to put in the effort to construct an argument rather than click a button. There is a little loophole, where someone will post "you're wrong" after a 200 word coherent argument, without addressing any of the actual points made in the post. If this post gets 'liked' 15 times, it essentially becomes the neg button. I have seen this taken to another level on youtube videos that don't have ratings enabled, where someone has posted "I am the dislike button", and that post has been upvoted dozens of times. Although I advise against it, this is a fairly successful way to circumvent the lack of a neg button. As a mod, having no neg button makes my job a lot easier because of the more harmonious atmosphere, so I'm quite happy if it stays gone.