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Ocean11

SnowJapan Member
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Posts posted by Ocean11

  1. 6 will still work OK.

     

    It killed my old version of MusicMatch Jukebox. I had to do some headscratching there to figure out why my trusty music software simply wouldn't start. Thank you Microsoft! Thank you Yahoo!

     

    (And all I use IE for is looking at Goemon's silly animated GIFs because I have 'em turned off in Firefox...)

  2.  Quote:
    Originally posted by Mudguts:
    Deafeningly loud mufflers on scooters/bikes. I just want to pick up the nearest heavy object and hurl it at those tossers when they ride past.
    When I lived in Osaka, I realized that several such tossers actually lived in my neighbourhood, and from my apartment window I could see them parking their bikes. I went to the police box to inform the policeman that I had identified a public nuisance and asked him to take some action. He lamented that his country was different from mine in what the police can do.

    So I bought some bolt cutters and cut everything on their bikes that could be cut (quite a lot of things it turned out).
  3. > I'm guilty of this myself. I suffer regularly from chronic sinusitis . It's almost impossible to run a business and concentrate on the tasks at hand when it feels like someone is standing on your face!

     

    My friend gets that. She says acupuncture clears it up really quickly.

  4. Side effects of Ritalin from Wiki:

     

     Quote:
    Side effects

     

    Commonly reported side effects are[12][13] difficulty sleeping (which can lead in turn to other problems); loss of appetite (thus its use as an appetite suppressant); depression; irritability; nervousness; stomach aches; headaches; dry mouth; blurry vision; nausea; large pupils; dizziness; drowsiness; and motor tics or tremors. Up to 5% of children experience disturbing hallucinations often involving worms, snakes, or insects (New Scientist, 31 March 2006).

     

    Less common side effects include hypersensitivity, anorexia, palpitations, blood pressure and pulse changes, cardiac arrhythmia, anemia, scalp hair loss, and toxic psychosis.[citation needed]

     

    There have also been reports of abnormal liver function, cerebral arteritis, leukopenia, and death.[citation needed] There have been at least 19 cases of sudden death in children taking methylphenidate, leading to calls by the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee to the FDA to require the most serious type of health warning on the label, but this advice was rejected (New Scientist 18 Feb. 2006).

     

    Medline[14] lists a number of side-effects of unquantified frequency.

    It sounds as though they need to find some drugs to cure those side effects.
  5. Mantas, the short answer would be, leave it up to The Market, just as we do with margerine. Obviously there would be problems - margerine is not that good a product to start with, the government has to set standards which tend to be a bit scattershot, and sometimes people put too much on their bread. But what works well enough for margerine would also work for drugs. Probably.

     

    There are drugs in Japan and a drug culture. Some of the reasons why drugs don't appear rife here like some other countries may include control of the trade by the yakuza, lack of entrepreneurialism from other producers/dealers, and government control and self-censorship in the media concerning the issue. But there's plenty of evidence of drugs around. Celebrities like Nagabuchi and Tashiro occasionally get busted, people on drugs occasionally freak out and kill people and get in the news, and there are head shops here and there. If you scratched the surface a bit, you'd find that the Japanese nation is quite normal in this respect.

  6. > Who knows what could be achieved.

     

    Nothing. Because you'd be waging war on human nature.

     

    I have a kid and it doesn't change my view one jot.

     

    The 'adding to the list of addictives' is not a rational argument, because it assumes that the substance is at fault rather than the person. And it begs for any currently permitted addictive substance to be banned along with the others.

     

    The whole mindset that says that any form of artificial stimulation is a sin is currently driving drug policy, and it's indefensible.

  7. I found these articles on pot and the drug business interesting;

    Marijuana, the Anti-Drug

    The Adverse Effects of Marijuana

     

    Big Pharma and the Pill

     

    There's also a fascinating chapter in The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan about the necessarily covert efforts of pot producers to develop hybrids with reliable and desirable characteristics. If this didn't have to be covert, varieties that tend less to mess you up might become the norm.

     

    Thunderpants, that's a ghastly irony about the sleeping drug. People need to think about the implications of that long and hard.

  8. It's not irrelevant at all. There's supposed to be a reason for drugs being illegal. One of the reasons given is that it's for our own protection. But that protection isn't there. So should they be illegal on that ground? I think not.

     

    If drugs were not illegal, people could then freely demand the same quality control and health information they expect for say, margerine or cough mixture. Your acquaintance might then have been better informed about the risks he was running.

  9. I wonder what it's like living in a small town where the economy is based on savage butchery of that sort. I bet they have some proper psychos there. It's generally acknowledged that the business of slaughtering animals needs to be regulated carefully, not just for the sake of the animals but also for what it can do to people.

     

    I didn't see any signs of regulation in that video.

  10. My missus really gets into it so when it's on I can't avoid seeing most of it. I'd rather watch curling if I had to choose. The only good bit is when they fluff a jump and do that funny 'boing' thing, or when they fall on their bums. It's a bit like watching F1 for the crashes, or rugby for the big men punching each other - not nearly enough of the fun bits.

  11. They sounded like really weird, robotic creatures with software designed by an America-centric international consortium. One of them seemed to be taking perverse pleasure in stressing the word 'skiing' as if that's all that's available.

     

    Tokyo's a strange place. Bumping into media like that really makes me glad I don't live there. The boonies seem like a refuge where all the good things are.

     

    But let's not carp on so. The SJ snowball really seems to be rolling now. It must be gratifying.

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