Heroin is indeed a nasty drug. However, when it's managed, people can actually lead normal, even productive lives and still be addicts. It was legal in the UK up to the 1950s as diamorphine and we didn't see anything like the kind of problems we have with it now.

That said, I'm in favour of decriminalising it, not legalising it. It might sound like a non-distinction, but there's a difference between allowing anyone to go out and buy heroin from a pharmacy and prosecuting some poor fool who made some bad life choices.

As for Trance, he continues to push his childish agenda in the face of reality. That Tolstoy quote is cute and sounds great, until you realise that it is completely and utterly wrong.

"Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society." Leo Tolstoy

>> ^Kofi:

She was clearly referring to the quasi-Rousseauian undertones of Obama's pre-election promises when compared to his autocratic yet Hegelian dialectic of historical materialism as demonstrated by his attempt to governmentalise the auto-industry.
This woman is clearly a first generation Frankfurt school type critical theorist as she quoted the now infamous Adorno and Hawkheimer work "Just study it out". Far from a derogatory phrase she is merely asking the American people to abandon their nationalistic self-destruction and embrace internationalism as entolled by Tolstoy and Lenin.
Kudos comrade.


...and shit.

She was clearly referring to the quasi-Rousseauian undertones of Obama's pre-election promises when compared to his autocratic yet Hegelian dialectic of historical materialism as demonstrated by his attempt to governmentalise the auto-industry.

This woman is clearly a first generation Frankfurt school type critical theorist as she quoted the now infamous Adorno and Hawkheimer work "Just study it out". Far from a derogatory phrase she is merely asking the American people to abandon their nationalistic self-destruction and embrace internationalism as entolled by Tolstoy and Lenin.

Kudos comrade.

That was great! If everyone in the US thought like that it would be no.1 in everything. God knows it has the rescources to be and then some.

Tolstoy said 'Anyone who says things are worse now than they were before is a fool.'

But it has to be said that right wing mercenaries knocking over democracies and looting their countries used to be done in the dark, not in broad daylight. And when the much vaunted new LIBERAL president is sending killer robots to blow up funerals without feeling he has to explain himself it's difficult to say nothing has changed..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/25/jimmy-carter-drone-strikes

>> ^criticalthud:

uggg. everything was not GREAT in the past. utter bullshit. we are just repeating the same mistake today.
this generation is a direct product of the past generations.

Actually I don't think the issue of representation is critical here. I think it's very easy to point out where Ariane went wrong:

"What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity."

That's our intuition, but it's wrong. That's why this thought experiment is interesting. The likelihood is perhaps 1 in 10^10000000, but it is very much not "about 1 in infinity".


>> ^Sotto_Voce:

>> ^Ariane:
Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.

You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

>> ^Ariane:

Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.


You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

Also, it's important to check out the Youtube comments and the video uploader's description. If you did that, you'd know his non-dying performances outweigh his dying performances. Someone did all that work and now you don't need to: http://www.compleatseanbean.com/deathbycow.html

HE DIES IN:
Airborne - bye bye Toombs
Caravaggio - Rannuccio gets his throat slashed
Clarissa - Lovelace is skewered by Sean Pertwee
Don't Say a Word - Patrick Koster is buried alive
Equilibrium - Death by Poetry - Partridge is blasted away by Christian Bale while reading Yeats
Essex Boys - Jason Locke meets a nasty end in a Range Rover
Far North - Loki is frozen. Naked. In the snow. A chilling end if there ever was one.
The Field - the infamous Death by Cow - Tadgh falls over a cliff, pursued by a herd of stampeding cows
GoldenEye - Alec Trevelyan falls a long way down and is crushed by a satellite dish thing
Henry VIII - Robert Aske meets a gruesome end
The Island - Death by Clone. Merrick is shot in the throat by a nasty grabber thingy with a sharp
hook and a cable that gets wrapped around his neck, and while he's struggling with Lincoln
Six-Echo, the catwalk they're on collapses, and Merrick ends up dangling by the neck. Currently
the most creative dispatch of Sean's career. Definitely well hung.
The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) - Death
by Orc. Boromir. Arrows. Need I say more?
Lorna Doone - Carver Doone drowns
Outlaw - Dead Dead Dead. Was there ever any question? Dead.
Patriot Games - Sean Miller is beaten up, boathooked and finally blown up by Harrison Ford
Scarlett - Lord Fenton is dispatched
Tell Me That You Love Me - Gabriel Lewis is stabbed by Laura. Or he stabs himself. We're not
quite sure about this one, actually.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - Death by summoning a god's avatar. Martin Septim (the son of the Emperor, aka The Lost Heir) meets his X-Box end when he attempts to save the world.
The Hitcher - Surely you jest. You need to ask? (There were two different versions filmed. He dies
in both of them.)
War Requiem - The German Soldier dies, but returns in the afterlife


HE LIVES IN:
(Leo Tolstoy's) Anna Karenina
A Woman's Guide to Adultery
The Big Empty
The Bill
Black Beauty
Bravo Two Zero
Exploits at West Poley
Extremely Dangerous
Faceless
The Fifteen Streets
Flightplan
Fool's Gold
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
In the Border Country
Inspector Morse: Absolute Conviction
Jacob
Lady Chatterley
The Loser
My Kingdom for a Horse
National Treasure (But only because of a rewrite. In an early version
of the the script Ian Howe got eaten by alligators in the subways of
New York. Really. Honest. I wouldn't lie to you. I wouldn't.)
North Country
Percy Jackson (Zeus is more or less an immortal so death seems a bit
redundant, really...)
The Practice
Pride
Prince
Punters
Ronin
Samson & Delilah
Sharpe (14 films)
Sharpe's Challenge
Shopping
Silent Hill
Small Zones
Stormy Monday
Tom & Thomas
Troubles
The Canterbury Tales - The Nun's Priest's Tale
The Dark
The True Bride
The Vicar of Dibley
Troy
Wedded
When Saturday Comes
Windprints
Winter Flight

Major Theatrical Performances:
Macbeth ... Yes. He dies. And gets his head impaled on a spike.
Romeo & Juliet... What do you think?
Fair Maid of the West ... Spencer doesn't die!

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

I don't doubt there is opportunism, but we might not have gained our own independence had the French not intervened in the American revolution. That said, the first American boot to hit the ground in Libya and I'll take to the streets with you to protest.

Glad to hear that you are reading Tolstoy.

Here's another timely quote for ya:

"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave."

-LT



In reply to this comment by blankfist:
RE: our libyan conversation. I'm going to be that guy that leaves a quote on the internet. Yep. Gonna do it right here, too.

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful." – Leo Tolstoy

RE: our libyan conversation. I'm going to be that guy that leaves a quote on the internet. Yep. Gonna do it right here, too.

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful." – Leo Tolstoy

The bad man put his Dickens in my Tolstoy.

Ok, first of all let me say I'm actually not a big fan of off topic comments and I really should've left my comment on radx's profile, not here... my apologies. But I will defend myself here...

@rgroom1 | You start off by calling me a cunt, and then say you didn't know who "the bitch" was either... I really didn't read anything further than that, but I assume it was all just as classy. So, well played I guess.

@radx | Neat, we get to do the number thing. (1) You're right, you didn't "brag" about the fact that you are ignorant. You were just pointing out how wrong they were to say "everyone" knows her, when in fact there are people out there who are unfamiliar with her work. This is a good point, people should stop saying "everyone" unless they've done a poll and it truly applies to everyone in the known world. (B) You're right again, most people have no idea and simply don't care what the source material is for the movies they watch. Unless of course it's a comic book movie. Anyone who does know more than what makes it through the Hollywood filter should just shut up, if it wasn't in the trailer it must not have been important. (III) After re-reading your comment, you are again correct. Your post doesn't have anything to do with Anne Rice. Really, you're just saying, "Man guys, if you don't know who Anne Rice is and go look it up on Wiki you'll get some surprising information from the author of said article. And that is totally a comment worth posting.

@NinjaInHeat | I'm fairly well read, and I know who Rice, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky all are, I think you got confused somewhere.

@gorillaman | You can't compare this foolishness to the epicness that is Jon Peters Buys a Volvo

I stand corrected guys. I'll try to keep my opinions on individuals and their comments out of the video's comments section from now on. Move along...

mizila:

It's a very sad statement to say the vast majority of the population never heard of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, though if true, and if you're one of those unfortunate souls, why are you surprised by the fact you've never heard of her before? books clearly aren't your strong suit.