Just keep in mind that Cannabis isn't without lasting side effects. Over time, people get burnt, ain't quite as sharp as they used to be, some flip their lid in ways that aren't precisely comedic.
Yeah, gee, I wonder why? Maybe it's because one has a tendency to induce heart attacks, and the other group is treacherously addictive.
But, consider that cocaine is a "new world" drug, specific to the South American continent, as an indigenous herbal extract, mostly until the 19th century, when highly purified extacts became a popular part of western society.
Meanwhile use of opiates dates back to ancient times, given that Opium is dead simple to produce. But again, it was really in the 19th century when good equipment, and precise measuing tools permitted chemists and drugists to purify highly addictive perparations of the wider variety of drugs. Prior to that, the poppy's medicinal qualities were known and used, but expertise and well-crafted instruments which could readily facilitate powerful extracts weren't as widespread. Otherwise, people were limited to whatever was grown locally, and would be required to cultivate and harvest their own supply, instead of relying on trade.
Oh, I'd really like to know where they got that number from first.
If it includes the salaries of the officers involved, by allocating the man-hours consumed by each response, then that number needs to be lowered.
I'll accept the fact that vehicles consume gallons per mile in gas, and that private residences have to repair busted down doors and damaged sheetrock, and maybe if some other expendables were used, if say some shots were fired and it cost 50 cents in bullets, but the officers would have been on the clock anyway (overtime or no), and the taxes are already budgeted for salaries.
Did the counties get sued by the swatted? If that's the source of the number, maybe he owes a large percentage of that, but then again, maybe the lawsuit has a point and how swat teams respond to prank calls should be changed?
Every time first responders of any kind are deployed there is an inherent risk to their lives.
First responders have to drive fast to get to their destination quickly. SWAT teams are heavily armed and accidents do happen. Innocent bystanders could get shot, pets could get shot, other officers could get shot in a confusion. They might get called out on a prank call but end up finding a sovereign citizen freeman-on-the-land at home who hates the government and is willing to get into a firefight anyway.
All these things are potential liabilities on the department, not to mention the danger of having your entire SWAT force deployed to a prank call while there's a real incident on the far other side of town and not enough time to get there.
So yeah, we can argue about the cost as long as we want, but at the end of the day the primary cost on the minds of the police departments are these dangers, and the actual price tag quoted by them must take these into account.
That's exactly why they should be more circumspect when busting down citizens' doors. It's just irresponsible to allow this kid to cause this much damage.
$10k for a major incident sounds in the right ball park including what a couple of SWAT fire teams plus say another 8-12 ordinary coppers to form a cordon.
Plus there might have call out off duty cops on overtime to cover and then there is the paperwork and reports which will have to be written up and analysed.
Plus there is the cost of damage to property, disruption to traffic and so on.
My banking app does not need access to my phone's camera "for security" purposes.
My banking app will more than likely be snapping photos of me at the time of the transaction, encrypting them, and then transmitting the images back to themselves as opaque binary blobs (claiming that they are part of the normal transaction data, even though they add 3MB to the bandwidth, because security), and retaining them for audit, in case there's a security breach, and securing their unfortunate scenario for their own purposes with ordinary photographic information, and never actually generating "quantum" random seed information (their database fell into the wrong hands, but they have upwards of 20,000 distinct, recognizable faces as a starting point for a possible ID during the subsequent postmortem and investigation). All while receiving kickbacks from the NSA for for sharing geotagged facial recognition images for their world domination scheme.
In this situation, cameras become a dual-use technology. Maybe they're used for a QRNG or maybe something else?
How would I honestly ever know whether my bank was lying to me about what it's really using my camera for?
The obvious solution for this would be for Android to expose "derive random numbers from image frame" as a permission. But this is unnecessary, because they can just seed /dev/random from this source at boot (or if the device is unseeded).
That said, mobile devices really aren't lacking in entropy sources. With all the radios and sensors in a modern smartphone, why do they need additional methods to generate random numbers?
For information security purposes, a cryptographically secure PRNG is typically at least as secure as the encryption algorithms that it protects.
