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So, just like diamonds, that's artificial scarcity at full work here.

According to Wikipedia, a woman has something around 300.000 egg cells when she turns fertile. Let us assume 50.000 cells as the average for all women between 16 and 40. So how many human females do we have in that age range?

According to the US census [1], there were ~4.5 billion (short scale) humans on this planet between 16 and 64. To subtract the oldest 24 years, let us be pessimistic and assume an equal distribution; so we need to subtract one half (16 to 64 = 48 years; 16 to 40 = 24 years). We also subtract one half of that, as we only want women.
Therefore, we have roughly 1.125 billion human females of fertile and (in many countries) legal age.

So, (1.125 x 10^9) * (5 x 10^4) = 5.625 x 10^14 egg cells. 10^12 is a trillion (short scale); so we have somewhere around 562.5 trillion human egg cells on this planet earth.

According to [2] a single human egg cells weighs between 0.00177-0.0042 mg. Average of 0.001mg. That means the total mass of all human egg cells is: ~0.5 trillion milligrams. Since milli = 1/1000, that makes 0.5 billion grams. Since 1kg = 1000g, we have 0.5 million kg of human egg cells. That means a bit over half a megaton of human egg cells at this moment.

According to Google, that's 17 636 981 ounces of human egg cells.

Plus, if even 1 out of every 50.000 cloning attempts works (assuming you're only producing female clones), it's self-replenishing. :p

[1] - http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/1353_age_distribution_by_country.html
[1] - http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Weight_of_a_human_egg_cell

I if you read the article, they feel pornography encourages the culture that allows women to make less money than men.

Which is ironic, being that women in porn earn far more then men.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_porn_star_salary

By an eerie coincidence, you can lose 8% of your body weight by decapitating yourself

If your body can't manage an 8% reduction in weight without dying, it doesn't deserve to exist in the first place! Your body didn't earn that 8%, it belongs to the Universe which made that matter in the first place! Plants are the only real producers, and every other animal is a moocher sucking on the teat of Big Photosynthesis!

Percentage-wise, we're shaving off about 8%:

Broadly speaking, for 2013 the across-the-board cuts will mean about an 8.4 percent cut in most affected non-defense discretionary programs, a 7.5 percent cut in affected defense programs, an 8.0 percent cut in affected mandatory programs other than Medicare, and a 2.0 percent cut in Medicare provider payments.

By an eerie coincidence, you can lose 8% of your body weight by decapitating yourself:

An adult human cadaver head cut off around vertebra C3, with no hair, weighs on average somewhere between 4.5 and 5 kg, typically constituting around 8% of the body mass.

Millions of people have made it across the ocean on ships similar to the Titanic (though smaller); only a few thousand had perished.

You might want to check your numbers: "It is suspected that of 11 million slaves transported, this represented a third of the slaves from the start. so approximately 22 million slaves died on the slaves ships in the Indies and Americas alone."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_did_Barack_Obama_win_the_Nobel_Peace_Prize

According to Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland, "He got the prize because he has been able to change the international climate... Some people say, and I understand it, isn't it premature? Too early? Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond - all of us."

Jagland highlighted that the Committee was especially influenced by a speech Obama gave to reach out to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009, as well as the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals.

Some believe that Barack Obama has not done anything to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Here are some opinions from Answers.com contributors who believe that Obama should not have won the Prize:

There has been no intervention on a huge scale by Obama. He has not curtailed any aggressive actions by any foreign state, or even his own. In fact he has increased military actions against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He has not been long on the international circuit and has no international reputation as a peacemaker.

In the past, winners have spent many years of dedicated service to achieve the honour, or have used high office for the furtherance of peace. President Obama has done neither of these.

Obama himself has stated that he does not feel he deserved the award, and that it must be spiritually shared by all the other nominees, but also not "as a recognition of my own accomplishments but rather an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," and "as a call to action --- a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century." He plans to donate the full US$1.4 million monetary award to charity.

Jagland shrugged off the question of whether "the committee feared being labeled naive for accepting a young politician's promises at face value", stating that "no one could deny that 'the international climate' had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason... 'We want to embrace the message that he stands for.'"

The Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang has later reported that Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, who represented the right-wing populist Progress Party on the committee, led the way in objecting to the choice of Obama because she questioned his ability to keep his promises. It also said the representative of the Conservative Party, Kaci Kullmann Five, and Aagot Valle, the representative of the Socialist Left, had objections. The choice for Obama was however strongly supported by committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland and Sissel Roenbeck, both representatives of the Labour Party.

In his will, Alfred Nobel left little to guide those who award the prize. Besides directing that it be awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament (though Nobel was a Swede), Nobel said only that it should be given to the person who "...shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." By October 2009, when the prize was awarded to him after less than nine months in office, few would argue that President Obama had qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize -- or any other -- even under such nebulous terms. Indeed, the announcement was something of a surprise in most circles, including the president's own. Obama himself is quoted as saying, "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments." It should

The ATLAS system's funding is a step in the right direction but as the article mentions the southern pole would remain a blind spot. Still, having one to two day's notice for an affected area would go a long way. We seem to have most of the >150m asteroids located through current efforts but that still leaves thousands or millions of undetected objects capable of wiping out a city and causing further catastrophe for nuclear facilities. The cost vs. benefit seems evident, better late than never.

Further catastrophe for nuclear facilities?

Come on, playing the nuclear card when the chances of a nuclear plant being hit by a meteor is vanishingly small seems to be a bit over the top, don't you think?. Maybe throw in your local school, so we can "think of the children" while you are at it...

Also, meteors are far less likely to approach us from the poles. Like most things, their orbits tend to generally align with the plane of the major planets. Slightly tilted with regard to our orbit, but polar approach seem very unlikely.

Right off the top, you can write off 3/4 of meteors as they will statistically land in the ocean. (And no they won't cause a tsunami).
Then you can write off another large percentage that will hit farm land or forests.
Finally you get down to about 1% of the earths surface that is occupied by people.

Then lets measure the damage? 1908 = nill. 2013, several million to replace broken glass, and patch up cuts and scrapes. (Lesson: Don't watch meteors thru windows).

Seriously, this is statistically a huge waste of money.

We sometimes forget that both of the non-scientific methods lead to great and often institutional stupidity. Reason without data is seen all the time when charlatans and the like argue that "women are the same as men because anything else is social heresy". And as for faith without data, well, get thee to Missouri.

UK Govt did this with Dr David Nutt.

Govt: Dr Nutt, go do research into how dangerous drugs are and report back. We need more strings to the War on Drugs bow.
Dr Nutt: Drugs aren't as bad as you people make out. These stats clearly show some interesting things, E.g. You are more likely to die riding a horse than from an E overdose, and there have been no deaths directly attributed to overdose on cannabis in the entire documented history of mankind.
Govt: Oh! Oh, wow... This is embarassing. You're fired.

(Obviously satirical, but cite and cite. Not original sources, but I'm sure you educated types can follow the paper trail.)

Irony is a verbal or situational context involving outcomes that are either unexpected, unanticipated, or actually the opposite of what they should be. A statement may be intended to mean the opposite what it normally means, or an event can occur that is unexpected. Sometimes it can be so unexpected that it's funny. For example: a man steps around a mud puddle to avoid getting his shoes wet, but steps on a broken sprinkler line which sprays him head to toe. Another example would be a thief who steals a car, only to be caught because the car belongs to the police commissioner. The 3 different types of irony are: verbal - similar to sarcasm, but not necessarily insulting. For example, an overachiever who passed a test says, "I bombed the test." situational - when a surprising and unexpected event occurs. For example, a professional swimmer almost drowns. dramatic - when the character of a story doesn't know something but the reader/viewer does, and acts in a way that is obviously ill-advised. For example, in a horror movie, a person wanders into an abandoned house. We can predict that ghosts will start playing tricks on that person, but he/she seems unaware of the ghosts.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_irony

But is the same temperature as a jacuzzi. TOTC.

How soon can I browse the salary history of CEO's, Congressmen, the chairmen of the FED, ...

As far as CEO salaries are concerned, the shareholder proxy statement will tell you their total compensation. Many times just Googling it will tell you: CEO Apple: Time Cook

But the sucky part for us is that, while CEOs can get away with hundreds of a percent in compensation increases because of market forces, we peons are stuck with what is deemed "reasonable" by the HR and hiring manager. Example, back in the 90s, my contract was ending and the body shop I dealt with (doesn't matter who - they all do it) wanted to know what I wanted for a rate. I looked online and saw that a rate of $55/hr for a W2 with my experience and skills - I was at $47/hr as a W2 with the previous contract. The recruiter said, "Gee! That's a big increase!" even though THEY would be billing out at market rates.

Companies have a problem paying market rates for their employees when they go up but have no problem cutting when things get bad. We peons only take the downside risk and get none of the upside - unlike that CEOs and Congressmen - they can go and become highly paid lobbyists if they lose their election.

Careful on the temperature of that inferno.

Everyone who follows one of the abrahamic religions does that.

From your own link:

Though there are no verses in the New Testament that advocate the killing of non-believers.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; (Matthew 5:43-44 KJV)

Everyone who follows one of the abrahamic religions does that.

Your own link disproves your point. I am a christian-turned-agnostic myself, I hardly want to defend any organized religion because I think all of them are nutjobs to varying degrees, but if you actually read the bible, Jesus pretty clearly tells you that he has come to fulfill the prophecies and to forget what has been written before and follow his teachings instead. To any practicing christian who "follows the book", the old testament is irrelevant, and the new testament preaches the complete opposite (which is what the website that you linked actually tells you if you read it until the end)

Do you submit to an authoritative text which commands you to kill anyone who disagrees with it or laughs at it?

Everyone who follows one of the abrahamic religions does that.

I like (650) 543-4800. That is of course Facebook's customer service number.

I had to look up "brine" to find out what that is. What did I find? "In different contexts, brine may refer to salt solutions ranging from about 3.5% (a typical concentration of seawater, or the lower end of solutions used for brining foods) up to about 26% (a typical saturated solution, depending on temperature)." So which one freezes at 0 degrees Fahrenheit? An arbitrary chosen one.
Also, temperature of human body. Scientifically, the differences between normal body temperatures for different people are significantly large, up to 2 degrees Celsius. So it's an arbitrary chosen one as well.

Moving on to your "60 seconds" question, you can expand that to 60 minutes. The answer is the same and readily available if you look it up on this wonderful thing called "The Internet". http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_are_there_60_minutes_in_an_hour
  Base-10 is strictly linked to the number of fingers you have at your both hands. Dude, you're asking ridiculous questions.

Good guy or bad, own a gun and you start to feel power enough to turn into a thug.

The math doesn't support that statement. There are an estimated 43 - 55 million gun owning households in the US(*). If owning a gun made you a thug with, say, 10% likelihood, there'd be over 4 million thugs. Assuming the definition of thug involves some propensity for violent crime, we would see a much higher violent crime rate.

* http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_gun_owners_are_there_in_the_United_States_of_America

Let's see... the last time such a law was truly applicable was The Stamp Act

Sounds like it's time to read the actual legal requirements (or lack of) for printing legal docs and avoid re-living the American revolution. My understanding is you need one official copy that is say notarized and if there's any discrepancies with copies of that copy, the original is referenced to resolve. I'm not aware of anything that requires you to make carbon copies of a document anywhere I've worked.

Also there's printers just about as old as your ideas that have been able to use carbon copies, just cause they pre-date inkjets don't let that stop you from picking one up to upgrade.

On the other hand if you're trolling, kudos :)

I've never heard of or seen learner plates before. I'm genuinely curious where you live that they have those, since it's an interesting idea, though a bit excessive, I think.

As for risk, how does owning a gun put anyone at "significant risk" compared to any of the other risks you regularly tolerate? A gun is only a source of risk if there is ill intent or negligence involved. But if you're concerned with ill intent, the chemicals in our garages and kitchens are more readily available, cheaper, more dangerous, and easier to procure, not to mention that our cars can do a lot of damage too if we want. If you're worried about negligence, why not have smokers register? There are almost 45x more deaths caused by secondhand smoke (49,000/year in the US, not to mention that 17% of fire-related deaths in residences in the US are caused by smoking) than accidental/unknown intent gun deaths in the US each year (about 1100 in 2011). If risk is your concern, there are FAR greater risks we regularly face that do not require that we give up our right to privacy, so I'm not sure why you think guns in the hands of properly registered owners put you at significant risk.

And if you believe that the intended use of the items impacts how private they should be allowed to be (i.e. cars and chemicals are fine, since they're intended for good uses, while guns are bad, since they're inherently destructive), that argument falls apart in light of the fact that I'm explicitly given the right to own them, as well as given the right to privacy, which would override any "want to know" that you have. But if you're still not swayed, what about cigarettes? They're only intended for smoking, which is an inherently destructive action that is directly responsible for about 20% of US deaths every year (roughly 443,000) according to the CDC link I provided earlier. That stands in stark contrast to the roughly 31,000 intentional deaths caused by guns in the US in 2011. Again, why not have smokers register?

Besides which, even in your example with the learner's permit and the learner plates (which I think is an excessive and unnecessary practice), I would assume those plates go away once the training period has ended. At least in all the places I've lived, before a gun owner can be licensed to carry they must go through a training period, so even based on your analogy there should be no need for gun owners to continue to sacrifice their privacy after they're properly licensed. And if the gun owner merely keeps the gun at home, rather than concealed carrying, that doesn't give you a right to know about it, any more than you have a right to know about the car that the parents next door bought and keep in the garage for their kid who doesn't yet have his permit.

Your "want to know" does not give you any sort of right to know what I have or what I do in my own home. I don't own any guns, but your comment strikes me as a lot of FUD. I prefer sticking to facts.

You are completely & totally wrong.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_put_on_the_sex_offenders_registry_for_public_urination

Happens all the time actually.

Absolutely yes, in the US. In the past public urination was charged as indecent exposure. There was little thought to how that was worded until the sex offender registry became so broad that it included all who were convicted of this crime. Thousands of people register for public urination, mooning, streaking and many other acts that don't fit the image we have of a sex offender.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_put_on_the_sex_offenders_registry_for_public_urination

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_put_on_the_sex_offenders_registry_for_public_urination#ixzz20ShoPVh1

According to Wiki Answers one percent are heard. According to Wikipedia 5% of certiorari cases are heard. Note that granting certiorari would allow the **AA's to lobby the courts as "friends of the court" and that the **AA's can afford much better lawyers than you can.

I did this when I was 15'...

Damn! How tall are you now?

That's not his height. He meant to say he was 15 minutes old then.

Perhaps this *will* diminish Ada's contributions: http://www.answers.com/topic/ada-lovelace#Controversy_over_extent_of_contributions Choice quote: "Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so." The depressing lack of female role models in CS is a real problem, but revisionist history is not a valid solution.

All right, here's your goddamn citation.

I was genuinely expecting there to be more guns than people in the US. But it looks like 1:1.

This is taken from answers.com and is the best definition of non-secular I was able to find (there were several other good answers elsewhere, but they took longer to say the same thing. The word "secular" generally refers to non-religious things. Period. The word "non-secular" generally refers to religious things. Period.
If you disagree with this definition, how would you define "non-secular", in particular in this context?

According to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_are_modern_space_probes modern probes can travel roughly 39000 miles per hour, or 341640000 (39000*24*365) miles per year. 1 light year = 5.87849981 × 10^2 miles, so it would take about 17206 years (5.87849981 × 10^12 / 341640000) for a probe to get there, and another 25 years for it to send a light signal pattern back to us for us to process. Assuming once at the solar system the probe would be able to determine atmospheric compositions of some of the planets in the solar system, and possibly drop some rovers on a planet and send back some additional data. Might as well send a probe out and write down somewhere that we sent it out. Hopefully in 17k years we remember to look for an answer.

Yes. There. Are.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_legal_immigrants_does_the_us_take_in_per_year

People with mod points. Please stop modding people up informative when you can paraphrase their argument as "nuh uh" just because you agree with their politics.

Pentagram or Pentacle?

There is a difference, in both orientation and meaning

I threw the apple into its beam and (I didn't catch it, hit the floor) when retrieved it was warm. Was going to do it again but some passenger stopped me.

No, you didn't. If you threw the apple up, it can't have been in the beam for more than fractions of a second - round that to half a second. Assuming apples are 80% water, you need at least 3.4J per gram of apple to heat it one degree celcius/kelvin. To feel the difference, I guess you need at least five degrees difference - or 17J per gram of apple. Assuming you have a hundred and fifty grams of apple, you'll need 2550J. Remember, half a second hang time in front of the beam. Minimum power? Just above 5kW. And then the beam is not concentrated like a LASER... It is no way your story adds up. In the estimate above I probably have a too long hangtime, and assume a concentrated beam...

If so, may I ask Eastern-EU folks to please refrain from hacking my servers during the holiday season?

At least 10 countries have just been given the green light for hacking.

You realize that there are over 400 million arabs?

Lumping them all together the way you do is patently absurd. Let's take this statement:

I know it is a very small percentage of Arabs who show up drooling hate from their beards but until the majority stands up to those ruining their communities and reputations they will continue to engender distrust and hostility from others.

Let's apply the same standard to another ethnicity:

I know it is a very small percentage of white Southeners who show up drooling hateful racism, but until the majority stands up to those ruining their communities and reputations they will continue to engender distrust and hostility from others.

This kind of stereotyping is never helpful.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_spell_flys

Mitt was a dreadful choice for a conservative presidential candidate.

A dreadful choice for the Republican Party indeed as Ritt Momney is an actual conservative. Those folks who call themselves "conservative" are anything but. They are radical reactionaries bordering on fascism who want nothing more than a return to the GIlded Age with Jim Crow, monopolistic industries, Wells Fargo as union (and head) busters, women without the vote, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and on and on and on.

If these folks want to lie to themselves and call themselves "conservative," fine. But when they lie to me, I'm going to call them on it.

What, IMHO, will eventually happen is that the non-batshit crazy Republicans will join the Democratic Party and the Left will end up in the Green Party or something similar. This will leave the reactionaries without a base and they will be exposed to all and sundry as the racist, misogynistic, greedy scumbags they are. Maybe then we can actually start to make this country great again.

Basically, its Wisconsin, but with a couple more feet of lake effect snow, and the eyesore / mindsore of Detroit.

Detroit proper has a population of just 700,000 people. Most people who say they are "from Detroit" don't actually live in the city itself. The Metro Detroit area is much larger (population 4 million) and actually is a nice place to live. Oakland County just to the north of Detroit has a AAA credit rating and is among the 10 wealthiest counties in the US. There is a huge amount of engineering talent in the state and the businesses that need it. (Hint, the auto industry uses a LOT of technology)

I believe Wisconsin has something like 10 lakes for every 1 lake in Michigan.

Wisconsin has about 15,000 while Michigan has over 11,000. The numbers are very similar. Please cease making up nonsense when two seconds on Google will prove you are making stuff up.

... Your now at 202kW, or 271HP. That's probably around 10% of the cruising HP of an actual jetliner...

Looks like you're off by 2-3 orders of magnitude:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_horsepower_of_one_engine_in_a_Boeing_747
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080124191508AAxnhMi

And NASA's numbers for cruise speed:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-468/ch10-2.htm

So 60K-160K HP, depending on who's counting what.

That article compares workers to workers, not the countries' populations as a whole. How is the higher productivity of each American worker offset by the huge number of Americans who are, for example, either unemployed (7.8%), on welfare or some other entitlement program (21.8% for federal programs alone), or engage in non-wealth-producing labor such as working for the government (4%)? (Obviously some of those categories overlap so you can't just add them together.)

We may have among the most productive workers, but how much is that being offset by the deadweight we're supporting with it?

Yeash. You have a bizarrely Chinese-centric version of history.

The war in Korea was a US "proxy war" against China? What nonsense. It was a war started by the (Communist) North Koreans. It's a lot easier to make the argument that the Korean war was a Chinese proxy war against the United States than vice-versa. (Or are you aiming to make the US the bad guy?) The USSR was also a big backer of the North Koreans (so why don't you call the Korea war a proxy war against the USSR?) Afterall, the North Koreans were using some of the most recent Russian military equipment and Russians were actually flying aircraft against US pilots. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_provided_military_support_for_North_Korea_during_the_Korean_War

The Vietnam war was about stopping the spread of communism into South Vietnam (see the Domino Theory). It's nonsense to say Vietnam was about fighting a war with China.

Einstein did invent the atomic bomb, didn't he...?

No. next question

The key words here are "personal God". No, he didn't believe in a God that worried himself over the daily comings and goings of the human race, or one that listened to prayers; however, he did believe in some sort of metaphysical creator, and resented it when atheists misrepresented or misunderstood his position.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2007/04/einstein_and_the_mind_of_god.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Did_Einstein_believe_in_God

Windows' NTFS is a journalling filesystem -> http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_NTFS_journaling

---

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

NTFS file system maintains a change journal. When any change is made to a file or directory in a volume, the change journal for that volume is updated with a description of the change and the name of the file or directory. Change journals are also needed to recover file system indexing - for example after a computer or volume failure. The ability to recover indexing means the file system can avoid the time-consuming process of reindexing the entire volume in such cases."

---

* MOST modern Operating Systems've incorporated this feature, afaik...

APK

P.S.=>

"Sure, Windows doesn't take kindly to critical system writes failing, but it's nice that the failure scenario does let you mount the drive on another machine read-only to pull your data off it." - by Guspaz (556486) on Saturday October 06, @03:28AM (#41566523) Homepage

There IS that, after you give yourself RIGHTS to said newly imported volume, but you shouldn't really HAVE to, per the above - whatever you HAD on your system, prior to write-commission during crash, should still be there & in "tip-top shape" (minus changes that DIDN'T COMMIT cleanly, that is)...

... apk

FWIW:

"Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light.[27] Many earlier inventors had previously devised incandescent lamps, including Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Did_Nikola_Tesla_invent_the_light_bulb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

"How is eating less meat and having what little you do eat be grassfed/organic hurting the environment?"

"How is eating local grassfed beef hurting the environment?"

You are right in spirit, the downside is determining what constitutes "less". If everyone switched to local organic grassfed beef, we'd run out of beef in a day. Industrial farming was invented because we eat a lot of meat as a nation, too much than can be grown on an organic scale (IMHO). Even with the best practices for sustainable cattle, American's eat a colossal amount of beef. So the question is: how much is "less?" I don't have an answer, but if I had a gun to my head I would guess 1oz per year would be the limit to feed everyone beef sustainable, based on: the avereage american diet of 62lbs [1], 63,280 organic cows in 2008 [2], and 96m head of beef cattle in the USA in 2008 [3]. That's .07% of beef cattle in the US as organic, so 62lbs*16oz/lb *0.07%=992oz *.07% = .7oz round to 1oz.

Huh, my math seems wrong, but assuming we could sustainable multiply local organic by 10x, that's still 7oz of beef per year.

Yeah, we eat a lot of effing beef.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_pound_of_beef_does_the_average_American_consume_each_year
[2] http://www.agmrc.org/commodities__products/livestock/beef/organic-beef/
[3] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/statistics-information.aspx

Approximately 70% of earth's surface is, literally, covered with water. And over 65% of the earth's surface has water but is not being used to grow crops http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_of_earths_surface_is_covered_by_salt_water_only.

The problem isn't the lack of surface with water, it's that we are choosing to grow the wrong crops. Some people are starting to grow the right crops http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9606/18/t_t/saltwater.farms/index.html for the 65% of earth's surface that is still open for growing.

Quit boxing your thinking into the narrow bounds of believing that "land" has to have air on top of it.

As for what's missing in Africa ... that would be "stable government".

If you're a pacifist, you can't really vanquish evil, so you shouldn't be a threat to the rest of us, even if you might think that we are evil.

There are apparently 6 million Jainists in India.
Your "rest of us" may not be quite the same as the "rest of us" to those living in India - who may be born into Jainist culture, and who as such may be induced into acting according to its beliefs.
Which, like I said above, protect the "world" by hurting the people who practice them.

As for vanquishing evil, they sure as hell seem to be very busy trying to vanquish it in themselves, under a presupposition that there IS evil there to vanquish.
Which is not really that much different from, say, everyone being a sinner by default in Christianity - an evil built-in into every human being, sentencing one to eternal suffering (hell, samsara... same thing) which you can only get rid off by following this handy-dandy set of rules available from your local church or temple.

And taking the "they are only hurting themselves - let them" approach is in fact rather selfish, and questions arguing religion at all as long as you can cover your own ass from its influence.
It's kinda like saying of someone "He's an alcoholic - but he's a joyful drunk and he never beats his wife".

Oh, by the way, where is my appeal to authority?

Sorry, you may not have done it intentionally, but that "Sam Harris evidently disagrees with you." bit and then linking to him talking, instead of say to a Wikipedia article about Jainism, smells a lot of ipse dixit.

Also, his talk there is a bit jarring at places - and I'm not talking about his obvious bias towards Islam.
He talks about religious extremism and fundamentalism not being a problem - if the religion itself is not "bad".
Which is nonsense.

Religions are bad because they are deluding, exploiting and hurting people by presenting them a false image of the entirety of EVERYTHING, which is akin to teaching children that they can fly off rooftops if they say the right magic words.
They give people a faulty, easily shatterable foundation on which they're instructed to build their entire lives and their views of the world - leaving them morally and emotionally crippled or forced to accept cognitive dissonances at every turn when the whole thing falls down.
And they all have both their "good" rules (Thou shalt not kill etc.) as well as the "bad" ones.

But I am more worried about him using not one, not two but THREE different logical fallacies when comparing Bin Laden to Jim Jones and David Koresh.

First it's inconsistent comparison, comparing actual cult leaders who ascribed very specific religious and magical roles to themselves (FFS Koresh believed himself to be Jesus) - with a guy who is "simply" a terrorist.
Then, he sneaks in argument from ignorance - cause "you really have to be an acrobat to figure out how he is distorting the faith".
And then he tops that off with affirmative conclusion from a negative premise - because all he says about Bin Laden is that he is NOT like a cult leader.
All that in under two minutes.

All that shit REALLY makes me question his logical processes and how susceptible to cognitive dissonance he actually is. Or even his motivation.
You don't need to lie and use faulty logic when talking about religious issues from an atheist standpoint.
Or make up "gradations of evil".

You simply point at things and explain how they are factually, logically, historically or in any other way faulty compared to the real world.
Religion does not stand to logical scrutiny - by design.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_Muhammad_a_pedophile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Muhammad#Muhammad.27s_marriages

I'll direct you the conquest of Jericho and other cities by the people of the Exodus after leaving Egypt. Remind you that owning slaves was common in the ancient world, even among Jews and early Christians, and is shown in the Bible. One man's King is anothers Dictator. And of course there's the whole bit where their values back then are not our values today, hell it's even true of 100 years ago. The whole concept of "18 is magically an adult" is a product of the last 30-40 years, cause in the late 1800s you still found girls being married off at age 12.

Just to keep things in perspective.

well, if you were aware that it would be used for murder by the guy who you told it to. otoh, if you believed that it would prevent murder you'd be off the hook.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_can_you_be_accessory_to_murder