Make a hand sanitizer with 90 % alcohol.
Offer it in various colors and fragrances, just like any good hand sanitizer.
But your line of products has the fragrance and taste of popular alcoholic beverages. Each fragrance of your product is labelled with a name similar to the alcoholic beverage it smells/tastes like.
Make it safe for human consumption.
Don't market it as a beverage. It's not. Really. It's a hand sanitizer. It's very slightly a gel in consistency and viscosity.
It can be sold anywhere. Grocery stores. Convenience stores. Schools vending machines. Church parking lots.
But licensed and heavily regulated alcoholic beverage stores might not be able to sell it since it is definitely not an alcoholic beverage.
Nothing for anyone to get upset about. It's just hand sanitizer.
My book site, mcgrewbooks.com, has been online for years now. It doesn’t really need SSL because there is no sensitive information shared, just HTML to read, pictures to look at, links to follow, and free e-books to download. To buy a physical book there’s a link to Lulu, which does have SSL.
That is, there’s no technical reason to need SSL.
Then a few years ago Google said sites without SSL would be downgraded in their search algorithm, and I worried a little, but my traffic numbers didn’t drop.
But looking at the site after Firefox’s last upgrade I noticed a broken padlock next to the URL. Most people don’t know anything about SSL, but a broken padlock sure looks ominous to them!
So I started looking into it. My host wants almost half of what I pay for hosting to add SSL, which would only serve to make my readers less uncomfortable. It’s not really expensive, about twenty five bucks a year.
Then I found LetsEncrypt.org, which offers free SSL certificates. I don’t know if my host (R4L) would allow it, and it would take some research to figure out how to use it.
What do you folks think?
Thinking of COVID-19. I am reminded of an episode with medical insurance company about a year ago. It's about one specific drug that I take for arthritis. (a drug that makes me somewhat immune compromised but not sarcasm compromised)
They stopped shipping it to me in 90 day supply. I had to start getting it in 28 day supply -- and from a "specialty" pharmacy. "specialty" usually means for a drug that is ultra fantastically expensive and/or needs special handling, refrigeration, cannot be beamed by transporter, or all of the above and more.
Instead of the usual 90 day bottle, it now comes in special packaging with all kinds of special scary warnings. WARNING - CYTOTOXIC COMPOUND! Don't touch it with your fingers, etc. (how do they think I've been swallowing it once a week for the last 13 years?) My wife definitely wanted to keep some of that packaging and photograph it. Use it for things she sent to friends, etc.
So I called them and asked why can't this be filled the way it has always been? But no real answer. They did send me to the specialty pharmacy. Those people had a lot of questions. The gist of it sounded like they think I have cancer. But I've been taking this drug for over 13 years, I tell them. Really? They are a bit astonished. Yes, for arthritis. My arthritis specialist and I know that is off label use, but it is sometimes used this way. And it is effective. (and anything to not take, or take less hydrocodone is good IMO)
It suddenly dawns on me. They think if I'm dying of cancer, I might not be around for 28 days, let alone 90 days. So why ship a 90 day supply of what was a very inexpensive generic drug. I assure them I've really been taking this drug more than 13 years and intend to keep taking it for a long time.
Then I notice it starts coming from the regular pharmacy again, in 90 day supply. No scary warnings or frightening packaging. My doctor never had mentioned handling or touching this drug in any special way different than any other pill that I take. And I'm the only one that handles or touches it.
If you haven't guessed, it's Methotrexate. And it is cheap.
Edit: thinking about it, this may be more about the pharmacy than the medical insurance. Insurance has an incentive to keep things cheap.
So if you need to get to the US from Europe, stop at a Trump resort first.
Trump’s travel ban sidesteps his own European resorts
The president announced new travel restrictions on Europeans as the coronavirus pandemic escalated, but a few key spots on the continent were spared.
President Donald Trump’s new European travel restrictions have a convenient side effect: They exempt nations where three Trump-owned golf resorts are located.
That's the Kwik Kourteous Konvenience you expect from Trump resorts.
These viruses are "foreign" viruses (listen to his speech). Thus good people coming from Trump resorts cannot possibly have been in contact with these "foreign" viruses.
Last year the TV show Innovation Nation highlighted an inventor who had produced a shirt that never stinks. The way it worked was that there were silver threads woven in with the cloth. Silver kills bacteria, they explained, and body odor us caused by bacteria.
I didn’t know that about silver, and they never explained why or how silver kills bacteria.
This made me wonder why all door and faucet handles, light switches, hand rails, and all sorts of other places that spread germs in hospitals aren’t silver plated?
Of course, this wouldn’t help with Covid-19, the flu, or common cold, since they’re viral, not bacteriological. Or would it? Is silver as deadly to viruses as it is to bacteria?
US President Donald Trump has suggested he might have "a natural ability" in medical research, as his government fended off criticism of an inadequate response to the coronavirus outbreak.
On a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, he told reporters: “I like this stuff. I really get it."
Mr Trump said he had had a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“People are really surprised I understand this stuff. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.
But he's totally fit for office of the president.
The holy grail of a perfect Hello World program may never be found.
I found the Java Enterprise Edition Hello World
With the right drugs I think I can do better.
C ************************************************
C Program to print Hello World to the console.
C
C Copyright (C) 1979 Hello Worlds Expeditions.
C For a better exploration of habitable Hello Worlds.
C A subsidiary of Tinfoil Cat Holdings.
C
C ************************************************
PROGRAM HelloWorld;ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
#include<stdio.h>
#define while if
#define struct unionDATA DIVISION.
CONST
Message = "Hello World";
Times = 10;VAR
I: Integer;BEGIN
FOR I := 1 TO Times DO {
10 System.out.println (Message);
20 GOSUB 10
}
END.
Edit: a few additional improvements.
Capitalism is a force for good, if restrained. Unrestrained capitalism is a force for evil. In the middle of the twentieth century unrestrained capitalism led to the German Nazis and the Italian fascists.
The fascists in Italy and the communists in the USSR claimed their governments to be socialist, despite the fact that under communism, government controls industry, while a fascist government is controlled by industry.
In a socialist government, like some European nations, capital works for society, which controls government and regulates industry so that it benefits society. In a capitalist country, like the USA (which keeps creeping farther away from socialism and closer and closer to Fascism), society works for capital, to the benefit of the rich and the detriment to everything and everyone else.
It pollutes the planet, but capitalism as practiced in America doesn’t care. It impoverishes people, but capitalists don’t care. It causes crime and violence, but capitalists don’t care. Capitalists only care about money.
Capitalism worships money. Many capitalists claim to be Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, but none of them really are; as the Christian Bible says, no one can serve two masters; he will love the one and hate the other; and the love of money is the root of all evil.
Many Christians think capitalism is good, and socialism is evil, because so many socialists are humanist, atheist, or even Satanists. But socialism is neither humanist (although it is good for humans), atheist, nor Satanic. It has nothing to do with any religion, or lack of one. It says society should control government and industry, not the other way around.
The capitalists have caused American minds to be really twisted. They have not only made socialism to sound like heresy (which it is, to one who worships money), but the word liberal, as well. But look what those words really mean: liberal and generous are synonyms, as are conservative and stingy. If you call yourself a conservative, you’re saying you’re stingy and will refuse to share.
Do you want a stingy America or a generous America?
A journal entry that simply restates a comment I just wrote.
Memory closely integrated with processors at the chip level makes sense. You would upgrade memory and processing power together.
Another thing I think will eventually happen, but that will be controversial.
Hardware assisted GC
Note that all modern languages in the last 2 freaking decades have garbage collection. Remember "lisp machines" from the 1980's? Like Symbollics? Their systems didn't execute Lisp especially fast, but what they did was provide hardware level assistance for GC which made GC amazingly fast.
I look at the amazing things JVM (Java Virtual Machine) has done with GC. If only the JVM's GC could benefit all other languages (Python, JavaScript, Go, Lisps, etc). Of course, those languages could use JVM as a runtime. And GraalVM _might_ make something like that happen where lots of different languages run in the same runtime and can transparently call each others functions and classes and have a common set of underlying data types. Red Hat's Shenandoah and Oracle's open source ZGC are amazing garbage collector technology. Terabytes of memory with 1 ms GC pause times. Now imagine if you had hardware assistance for GC. (btw, why is Red Hat investing so much into Java development? I thought they were a Linux company? Could Red Hat, which is a publicly tiraded company, have some economic reason Java is making them lots of money?)
Rationale: GC is an economic reality. Ignore the whining of he C programmers in the peanut gallery for a moment. They'll jump up and down and accuse other professionals of not knowing how to manage memory. Ignore it. Why do we use high level languages (like C) instead of assembly language? Answer: human productivity! Our code would be so much more efficient if we wrote EVERYTHING including this SN board directly in assembly language!!! So why don't we??? Because, as C programmers are simply unwilling to admit, the economic reality is that programmers are vastly more productive in higher and ever higher level languages. Sure there is an efficiency cost to this. But we're optimizing for dollars not for bytes and cpu cycles. Hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive.
Slight aside: ARM processors already have some hardware provision for executing JVM bytecodes (gasp! omg!).
I'm surprised that modern Intel or AMD designs haven't introduced some hardware assistance for GC.
Symbollics hardware, IIRC, had extra bits in each memory word (36 bit words I think) to "tag" the type of information in every word. Then a way to efficiently find all words that happened to be a "pointer". A way to tag all words that were "reachable" or "marked" from the root set, etc.
Maybe this can happen if memory and processing elements become highly integrated and interconnected. Hardware design will follow the money just as programming languages and technology stacks do.
Others will believe that system design will stand still to conform to a romantic idealism that was the major economic reality once upon a time.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Nobody's crystal ball is perfect. But I did expect in the early 90's that most new languages would start having GC, and that did begin to happen about 2000.
Senile Senior software developers look at the business case beyond how personally amusing all this fun technology is.