Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Yes, there seems to be a basic reasonableness test going on here. It would be good if there were clearer law about it, but in the absence of that, I guess a judge has to decide if Slater walks and quacks like a journalist. If he does, it's an extremely low bar, rendering the s68 of the Evidence Act almost pointless. It might as well read "You're allowed to defame people on the internet, period".
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
There is an interesting discussion about this going on over at the Kiwi Journalist blog..
Can you link it?
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Also, it's probably easier to keep track of if simply tied back to the quantity purchased in the first place. No one is going to weigh their joint before and after adding the cannabis, and their scales wouldn't be accurate enough to get a reading unless they had one of those pharmaceutical ones, and that's even if they can remember the last 1000 joints they made. But they can probably fairly easily account for the 10 ounces of dope involved, and divide by the number of days, to get a very accurate per-day usage.
ETA: Which is not to say that knowing the frequency is irrelevant, of course it's not.
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Hard News: Heads Up, in reply to Russell Brown,
I guess the variability in the strength per gram means that the accuracy is diluted. But it does seem like a pretty basic measure to use.
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some of her subjects consumed cannabis at the level of a heavy tobacco smoker: 20-25 joints a day.
By joint, did she mean "tobacco mixed with cannabis"? Because 25 pure cannabis rolls per day is a pretty huge quantity.
ETA: Also, quite an expensive quantity. $3000/month maybe? You'd need a 6 figure income to support that habit.
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Hard News: Cannabis: The Experiment is Real, in reply to Simon Wood,
I think he was more likely referring to the two subsequent comments which pretty much slagged off a conference that might do some good to the debate.
I certainly wouldn't be a fan of your actual suggestion, either. The idea of predicating the purchase of something with a whole bunch of other completely unrelated actions doesn't sound sensible to me. The works you are describing would be simply punishing to anyone who didn't want to do them, and they would buy on the black market as they do now. I can understand the things you're prescribing as alternative kinds of punishment for minor crimes, but be honest about the fact that they ARE punishments. I don't think viewing the access to dope as a crime/punishment cycle is an improvement. It's actually what we have right now. You're talking about people getting pre-punished. Not a good idea IMHO.
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How did this conversation end up sounding like a couple of stoned geeks?
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I think I'd have to read the Android source to find out if the Location.GetSpeed() method uses the Doppler info.
Heh, yes, a naughty app for using on airlines when you're supposed to turn all that stuff off. I haven't tried any mid air tracking. There's apps for it already, so it's clearly possible.
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Cracker: Stoned in Charge, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
But in practice not many chipsets / interface layers pass through the raw data to do that, so you’re stuck with whatever the manufacturer deigns to implement.
Yup, on Android all of the above mentioned interfaces are available, although a particular phone might not present them (although why it would bother to have the hardware at all in that case, I don't know). There are a few more as well. Magnetic compass readings, humidity and pressure sensors, the list goes on. All adds up to the chance of a better reading, with the right software. I just trolled through some of the developer doco, and most people seem to do it off absolute location smoothed over previous readings, which is what I recall the developers of the software I use saying they did for the most part. It's hard to argue with "you've gone this distance in this time, hence this is your speed".
Software specifically designed for boy racers used the accelerometer more, because boy racers want to know their true horsepower, their 0-100km/h and their standing quarter mile (fuck that anywhere but a race track in my last muscle car which got to 100km/h in 5.5s - I shudder to think what it would have got to by the end of a quarter mile), and they really need to know the g forces for some of that. Also cornering g-forces really only come from the accelerometer. One app I have makes a little movie of it all overlaid on the view out the window. Strikes me as the absolutely perfect thing to use if you really want to get busted to the maximum limit the police can manage, as they watch your collection of geocoded clips shortly before crushing your car.
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Cracker: Stoned in Charge, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Intriguing, didn't know that was available. Software can use any algorithm, taking into account multiple sources - cell tower, satellites, and accelerometer, and possibly the map knowledge of your probable altitude (in case you've only got 3 satellites locked in), all together and smoothed. Doppler shift is probably quite accurate for working out velocity, although as with the accelerometer, I'd think that waving around isn't going to help matters, if the polling interval is slow.
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