The Humanure Handbook (full text online!) describes how to replace your toilet with a sawdust filled bucket, compost it in your backyard, and make superb compost.
You too can break that nasty habit of pooping in drinking water.
All of what he says applies to more mundane forms of compost as well.
"The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and
Hill and its companion book "Student Manual
for the Art of Electronics" by Hayes and Horowitz.
This will walk you through analog and digital
circuit design and construction, and culminates
with the building of a 68000 based fully
functioning computer with I/O, buses, the works.
I had the pleasure of taking an electronics
course taught by Mr. Hayes, and building your
very own computer is fun. It is also time consuming, complicated, and frustrating. You'll
also need a moderate amount of equipment such
as an oscilloscope, power supply, function generator, DVM, and the like.
These are of course just the beginning of the debate. Recently, Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schafly (a pairing that boggles the mind) have united in an attempt to raise awareness regarding the commercial exploitation of children. There is advertising in this country that is targeted at children age 2!! The idea is to develop brand preferences to insure future profits. This makes me want to vomit.
All the Slashdot posts in the world will NOT CHANGE A THING. Go out and GET ORGANIZED.
Reading this reporter's article is not the least bit surprising. Reports of secret company physicals, assurances that the chemicals aren't dangerous - this has been done over and over again in US history.
A report that shows infant mortality dropping by half in the vicinity of nuclear reactors after their shutdown has just been released. See the story here. Again, in light of the historical activities of corporations when it comes to safety & profits, this is not surprising.
Basically, companies in a capitalist system will always place profit ahead of worker's health. Go read your history books. The only way to prevent this and insure worker safety involves two things: goverment regulation and oversight, and worker organization. Coal mining, making steel, railroads, have all been through this before. Go look up the mortality rates for railroad workers in the early 1900's before they started striking en masse for reform.
Reform for worker's health will only come at the initiative of organized workers. Capitalism just plain doesn't give a shit because the capital-owning class doesn't put their bodies at risk. If you want a starting place for the history of this sort of thing, try Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Ralph Reed no longer works for the Christian Coalition - he now runs Century Strategies, a political lobbying & campaign group. He left the CC shortly before they lost their tax exemption when the IRS determined they were not a non-partisan group (no big surprise to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe).
So many people on Slashdot bitch on and on about corporations running things or having an undue influence in public affairs in the States. There is one candidate who is actively campaigning against the current state of affairs. Check out Ralph Nader & the Green Party at www.votenader.org and www.greens.org.
NetBSD seems to move more quickly with technical enhancements than OpenBSD. I have found the performance to be better with NetBSD 1.4.1 (and -current) than with OpenBSD 2.6. By this I mean things like running a compile or two in the background - OpenBSD would get sort of sluggish, the mouse would get jerky in X, etc. With NetBSD it's hard to tell that the system is ever busy. This is an entirely subjective observation, I have never really tried to benchmark either.
NetBSD is available and well supported and a large number of platforms, and has a very polished and well-done quality to its code. Compare the network or disk driver code with Linux, you'll see what I mean. But back to OpenBSD...
I've found the NetBSD community to be much friendlier and tolerant than OpenBSD, whose tone is largely set by Theo De Raadt, who, despite his considerable technical accomplishments, is lacking in the people skills department.
NetBSD is also secure, judging by the number of security advisories for it, so saying that OpenBSD is secure by design does not mean that NetBSD is not (despite what the OpenBSD docs may imply).
Fuel cells can convert hydrogen & oxygen directly to water & electricity, with no combustion system and no pollutants. Silent too for good measure.
These systems are under active development, as they are still too expensive to be used commercially.
What we need now are massive government subsidies to push this hydrogen-algae phenomemon forward (provided it can provide useful yields, and a cancellation of all those subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which are dirty, polluting, and a long-term dead end.
And guess why? Because the people wanted them, because the people buy them, and because the people will continue to buy them. That is called "satisfying demand". Would you rather commute to work in a horse-driven carriage?
If consumerism is so natural, then why do corporations spend something like $450 BILLION a year to keep it going? And start marketing products in the US to children at age 2?
Power vacuum gets filled quickly. So, tell me, if you don't want the corporations to have power, who is to have it? Government? No, thank you very much. A brief look at history, even only of the XX century is a pretty convincing argument to give government as little power as possible.
On the other hand, a democratically elected government with an active citizenry is accountable to those citizens. A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.
The price *is* lower, of course. Otherwise why would anyone bother ? The whole point is to make cattle bigger and meatier quicker, so you can sell more cow more quickly. There is some evidence - which is pretty weak - that the hormones used may be slightly carcinogenic.
You're forgetting that increased growth also causes more infection & disease in the cow. This then requires heavy doses of antibiotics, which leads to increased numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A similar problem exists with poultry - the practice of high-density raising of chickens has led to many of our salmonella antibiotics becoming ineffective.
So which do you want, cheap meat or better antibiotics? Is the tradeoff worth it? Are you _really_ sure that BGH isn't carcinogenic?
The FDA ruled that genetic modification of food was in the same class as food additives. In other words, including genes from other species in your corn is equivalent to Red Dye #2.
There is a serious conflict of interest in the FDA and the agricultural industry (ditto for the USDA & FCC): senior FDA folks go on to six figure jobs at Monsanta, ADM, etc. when they leave public service. You think they're going to bite the hand that feeds them?
I have met both John Swain and Steve Reucroft, and they are both very intelligent and talented physicists. They have basic homepages at Northeastern (be gentle on the server, it's a rather ancient Alpha):
Slashdot Mirror
The Humanure Handbook (full text online!) describes how to replace your toilet with a sawdust filled bucket, compost it in your backyard, and make superb compost.
You too can break that nasty habit of pooping in drinking water.
All of what he says applies to more mundane forms of compost as well.
This will walk you through analog and digital circuit design and construction, and culminates with the building of a 68000 based fully functioning computer with I/O, buses, the works.
I had the pleasure of taking an electronics course taught by Mr. Hayes, and building your very own computer is fun. It is also time consuming, complicated, and frustrating. You'll also need a moderate amount of equipment such as an oscilloscope, power supply, function generator, DVM, and the like.
Welcome to the adhoc, seat of the pants world of Linux kernel design.
Amen.
Here are some other links to inform all you Slashdotters of the way the world works these days: advertising
Corporate use of DNA
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
Corporate control of democracy
These are of course just the beginning of the debate. Recently, Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schafly (a pairing that boggles the mind) have united in an attempt to raise awareness regarding the commercial exploitation of children. There is advertising in this country that is targeted at children age 2!! The idea is to develop brand preferences to insure future profits. This makes me want to vomit.
All the Slashdot posts in the world will NOT CHANGE A THING. Go out and GET ORGANIZED.
A report that shows infant mortality dropping by half in the vicinity of nuclear reactors after their shutdown has just been released. See the story here. Again, in light of the historical activities of corporations when it comes to safety & profits, this is not surprising.
Basically, companies in a capitalist system will always place profit ahead of worker's health. Go read your history books. The only way to prevent this and insure worker safety involves two things: goverment regulation and oversight, and worker organization. Coal mining, making steel, railroads, have all been through this before. Go look up the mortality rates for railroad workers in the early 1900's before they started striking en masse for reform.
Reform for worker's health will only come at the initiative of organized workers. Capitalism just plain doesn't give a shit because the capital-owning class doesn't put their bodies at risk. If you want a starting place for the history of this sort of thing, try Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States .
Ralph Reed no longer works for the Christian Coalition - he now runs Century Strategies, a political lobbying & campaign group. He left the CC shortly before they lost their tax exemption when the IRS determined they were not a non-partisan group (no big surprise to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe).
So many people on Slashdot bitch on and on about corporations running things or having an undue influence in public affairs in the States. There is one candidate who is actively campaigning against the current state of affairs. Check out Ralph Nader & the Green Party at www.votenader.org and www.greens.org.
NetBSD is available and well supported and a large number of platforms, and has a very polished and well-done quality to its code. Compare the network or disk driver code with Linux, you'll see what I mean. But back to OpenBSD...
I've found the NetBSD community to be much friendlier and tolerant than OpenBSD, whose tone is largely set by Theo De Raadt, who, despite his considerable technical accomplishments, is lacking in the people skills department.
NetBSD is also secure, judging by the number of security advisories for it, so saying that OpenBSD is secure by design does not mean that NetBSD is not (despite what the OpenBSD docs may imply).
These systems are under active development, as they are still too expensive to be used commercially.
What we need now are massive government subsidies to push this hydrogen-algae phenomemon forward (provided it can provide useful yields, and a cancellation of all those subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which are dirty, polluting, and a long-term dead end.
Here's a link.
If consumerism is so natural, then why do corporations spend something like $450 BILLION a year to keep it going? And start marketing products in the US to children at age 2?
Power vacuum gets filled quickly. So, tell me, if you don't want the corporations to have power, who is to have it? Government? No, thank you very much. A brief look at history, even only of the XX century is a pretty convincing argument to give government as little power as possible.
On the other hand, a democratically elected government with an active citizenry is accountable to those citizens. A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.
You're forgetting that increased growth also causes more infection & disease in the cow. This then requires heavy doses of antibiotics, which leads to increased numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A similar problem exists with poultry - the practice of high-density raising of chickens has led to many of our salmonella antibiotics becoming ineffective.
So which do you want, cheap meat or better antibiotics? Is the tradeoff worth it? Are you _really_ sure that BGH isn't carcinogenic?
Cell phone industry research has shown that the phones can cause brain tumors in humans - and the industry is trying to quash their own researcher!
There is a serious conflict of interest in the FDA and the agricultural industry (ditto for the USDA & FCC): senior FDA folks go on to six figure jobs at Monsanta, ADM, etc. when they leave public service. You think they're going to bite the hand that feeds them?
Swain
Reucroft