The War on Drugs is Completely Idiotic
[written 2-28-03]
On 2-25-03, some 55 web sites that sold “drug paraphernalia” like water pipes and bongs were shut down by the DEA.
I went to check out a couple of the sites that had been shut down, among them AHeadCase.com and SmokeLab.com. The sites have been replaced by this absolutely ridiculous government page. It reads:
By application of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, the website you are attempting to visit has been restrained by the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania pursuant to Title 21, United States Code, Section 853(e)(1)(A).
Dude, I was so stoned, it felt like my head was this big!
I noticed that these pages loaded peculiarly slowly so I took a look at the source of the pages… It’s such an obscene waste of HTML that it’s not even funny! They took the 40 word sentence, 230 characters in all and governmentalized the HTML. Take a guess how many characters are in the actual HTML? Think about it for a second… you need some header info, some font info… image referrer… maybe another 10 lines of code right? WRONG. They puffed this single sentence into 15,312 characters… That’s 15 kilobytes of information… 66 times the actual document size! How did they manage to vomit such a quantity of red tape on the internet?!?! They should be arrested for such an obscene display of code!
In case those pages aren’t up anymore, I’ve archived one here. The document is actually so fucked up, they couldn’t fit it in one .html file. There’s an index.html and a header.htm. And the big kicker is, they dicked around with 15 K of worthless HTML and then used the lowest quality background image of the American flag they possibly could. The image is only 10K! It feels like they are burning the flag!
Here I am, foaming at the mouth about this, and I haven’t even gotten to the part about our own federal government shutting down legitimate, profitable businesses!