Creating biochar from woody vegetation sequesters carbon for up to tens of thousands of years. The stuff is also a great soil ammendment. About 33% of the carbon in woody waste can be converted to biochar. This is charcoal in a form that is biochemically inert but with physical structures that, like reefs, promote a rich ecology-- but in the soil rather than in sea water.
It is reasonable to presume that naturally composting woody vegetation on the forest floor is undergoing a process of conversion that is broadly similar to biochar manufacture, though much slower: a couple of years as opposed to a couple of hours. That suggests that for every 10 tons of forest litter generated in a year, somewhere between 1 and 3 tons is sequestered as the final product of composting after a year or two.
It is not too long a step from this to recognizing that the more vibrant soil ecologies of a forest are holding a lot more carbon in the form of microorganisms than can be found in corn fields or wheat fields. While that is not "sequestered" in the same way as biochar, carbon in those ecosystems is removed from the daily CO2 cycle (by moving it into cycles measured in 10k years).
The summary: planting trees, especially deciduous in climates with a cold season, does "sequester" carbon for the long term (in the sense that carbon is moved from the daily CO2 cycle to much longer CO2 cycles). While only a fraction of the carbon in a dead tree is "sequestered" in that way, there are multipliers in the soil ecosystems that significantly increase the amount of carbom removed from the daily cycle.
Go plant a tree. At present it is the best thing a person can do to directly counter the increasing CO2 levels.
What seems to be missing from these accounts (I have not done an exhaustive search of them, though) is that Tudor was clever enough to recognize that waste from one local industry-- the saw mills of New England-- could be used as one of the key raw materials of his distributed ice product. He was one of the first to recognize that a waste stream could be repurposed this way.
New England still had plenty of waterwheel driven lumber mills at the time, and was in a unique position to create an ice distribution network servicing both sides of the Atlantic. Except for Alaska that was milling a lot of lumber for the San Francisco build up, there were few regions with all three components: natural ice, lots of saw dust (or the equivalent lightweight, cheap insulation), and good harbors.
All I can see on this Slashdot thread is mis-matched anecdotes.
That's the nature of slashdot, no matter what the subject of any given thread.
I read slashdot at least daily, sometimes visiting several times a day if a topic is of great interest to me. But I don't read it for information about any subject. I read it to find out what the attitudes and biases of one vocal segment of the technoratti are. Sometimes that helps me shape my own opinion; sometimes it helps me identify where I should invest my limited argumentative resources. But almost never does slashdot give me any solid information; it is always just a jumbled of mismatched anecdotes.
There can be little question that what the USA needs now is another Teddy Roosevelt trust-buster. Big corporations-- and banks-- are exerting way too much influence on the USA's politics and marketplace. Time to do what T.R. did about100 years ago: use government to regulate Big Business so that the marketplace and politics can work the way the founding fathers intended. Instead of twisting governments-- state as well as federal-- to do what Big Business thinks is best for themselves.
I'm not sure that Saint Hilliary is earthy enough to get the job done. I'm not sure that Ms Warren has the skills and shrewdness of thought the work requires. Maybe they could combine forces.
What I am pretty sure of is we need a Mommy in the White House who can restore order in the nursery and rumpus room and do whatever enforcement is needed to get all the kids to play nicely with each other.
An excellent discussion and I learned a couple of things.
I will continue to use.png for archival needs where bandwidth issues do not apply, and I can avoid worrying about the copy-of-copy degradation of.jpg without the excessive size of.tiff or other lossless formats. I will convert to.jpg at as high compression as is workable when preparing images for the web.
This leads to another question, now that several persons who know something about this stuff are gathered together on this one thread:
Blender can work with images from a number of different sources and these can be stored within the.blend database. These might be reference images during modeling or textures used in the finished product. They are usualy the major contributor to the size of the.blend file. So, does anyone know whether there would be an advantage to using one image format over another when working with Blender?
Why is there no mention of Portable Network Graphics in this discussion?.png has an alpha channel, has broad support, and uses *lossless* compression. What's not to like? It does not compress as tightly as highly compressed.jpg, but as several have pointed out, that's not as big an issue any more.
So am I missing something? Or is it just some kind of marketing thing that.png does not see much use?
If YOU had read the studies, you would know that the risk of lung cancer was a major talking point only for the anti-smoking marketeers, who felt that the very high risks of smoking induced heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were not scary enough to cause addicts to give up their habit.
To continue smoking or to give it up is the one decision that will have the greatest impact on a person's health twenty years and more down the road. Whether this is from the nicotine addiction or from all the other crud in inhaled tobacco smoke is an unknown.
From what I understand, there is little doubt climate change is happening, the questions is to what extent the impact of humans may be responsible.
That is not the question.
The question is, now that climate change has become inevitable, what should we do about it?
The answer varies considerably for different values of "we". However for most values of "we", it would make sense to do what can be done to reduce the greenhouse gases our human activities produce. For while this might not make a difference, it might make a big difference since everything suggests that that the climate's near future is characterized by one or more tipping points, and even a minor reduction in the rate of greenhouse gas production could be enough to keep from tumbling over a cliff.
You are conflating Linux with the desktop environments that it supports. Don't do that. It just demonstrates how ignorant you are, and is rather annoying.
Linux is not built like Windows. A Linux distro consists of its Linux kernel and one or more desktop environments supported by the kernel. I am currently running the Ubuntu Studio version using the XFCE desktop with elements from Gnome and KDE blended in. It works pretty well: several years now without any system crashes, has handled several full distro upgrades without any issues. I can't count how many times the Linux kernel has upgraded. The kernel upgrades install with no more disturbance than a message saying that the computer needs to reboot for the new stuff to become active.
Exactly. I'm sure that sooner or later the IAU will talk it over with the semanticists and fix the problems. I'm thinking it would be better if that would happen sooner rather than later. And I strongly believe that, committee inertia being what it is, poking at the problem will help it get addressed sooner.
My concern is with researchers from other fields who have cause to visit the astronomy silo but do not live there. We are more than a century past the time when any field of science could define its terminology in isolation from the rest of the community of scholars. Astronomy needs to look at its short-sighted parochial practices and use a wide field of view more often.
The definitions do define the scope of research, especially research by persons in other fields who are visiting the astronomy silo but are not residents of it.
SKOS does not work well with murky or badly designed definitions or classification schemes. See comment #48550243.
Astronomy isn't just about stars and planets any more. At least, it shouldn't be, it should be part of the larger community of scientists and contributing its share to the common goal of greater understanding.
Thanks for bringing up SKOS. This kind of semantic thesaurus has become an increasingly important tool in researching the literature of any field. This is especially true when the researcher might be following citations that lead him/her outside their particular area of expertise or into a natural language where he/she is not fluent.
Of course if the thesaurus is wrong, then literature that might otherwise be very important to a research project might well be overlooked. So building taxonomies-- classification hierarchies-- that are compatible with SKOS concepts is quite important. Especially at this time in the history of science where the most profound discoveries are no longer those that build the silos higher or deeper, but those that find the connections between silos. Such as the work that is being done by geologists and biologists into the role of some clays in the protobiotic formation of some proteins.
The IAU definitions of "planet", "dwarf planet", and other denizens of the solar system is not SKOS compliant. It should be, but it cannot be. The IAU defined this terminology in 2006. But SKOS did not become a completed W3C Recommendation until 2009; it had not even reached the stage of Recommendation Proposal in 2006.
So evidently the astronomers did as best they could with the tools available to laymen in the information management field in 2006. I think we can expect that the astronomers will revise their schema to better fit with the worldwide community of scholars when they next meet. Almost certainly they will bring some expertise in information management to that upcoming meeting. In the meantime, it is useful to keep in mind that the current definitions and taxonomy are not necessarily going to be regarded as valid, or even useful, a few short years from now.
Fortunately NASA is dominated by engineers who do not have to put up with stupid definitions developed by committees of astronomers. It takes persons with great vision to get hard data from Mars, Jupiter space, and soon Pluto. The vision of the International Astronomical Union is too microscopic to really be of much use.
Astronomers are now adding more and more epicycles to the definition of "planet" as used in their jargon. That's stupid.
The Keplerian solution is apparently too simple to grasp: A planet is one the set of {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune}. Everything else is not a planet. That is a reasonable and sufficient definition of "planet" in the current astronomical jargon.
Meanwhile, those who wish to communicate in English can talk about planets without bothering to be so specific. There is a value in this. English is capable of handle concepts like regarding the Earth and Moon as a binary planet, where the gravitational interplay between the two bodies has uniquely shaped both, and given rise to significant activity not found elsewhere in the solar system. Such as tides, the effects of tides on ocean currents and weather, the influence tides have had on the evolution of life, the influence of tides and weather on human cultures, and so on.
Apparently none of these phenomena are of any interest to astronomy (despite Fred Hoyle's great book from many years ago) since they have defined their jargon in such a way that astronomy is excluded from participating in exploring such exciting concepts.
And here I thought the purpose of "technical terminology" was to improve communications between experts within a field by assigning strict definitions to certain words. In the field of linguistics, this is called a "jargon", and can be used to refer to the trade talk of nuclear physicists or that of plumbers or carpenters, etc. Of course astronomers don't study linguistics so it is not surprising that they don't know this term.
Within their jargon, astronomers can mangle, mutilate, extend, or transmogrify whatever words they feel is necessary. But they have no business attempting to dictate anything about language to the general population. Going so far out of their area of expertise just demonstrates that some astronomers are know-it-all assholes.
Astronomers can have their "dwarf planets", and can define a planet such that anything like a planet that happens to orbit another star has to be called something else. But trying to make the common English language conform to their jargon is as silly as their current definition of what a planet is.
By the way, a more succinct and valid definition of "planet" within the current accepted jargon of astronomers is this: "A planet is a member of the following set: { Mecury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune }".
And I see no reason why objects that meet all the requirements of being a planet but happen to orbit some other star cannot be planets. Wow, astronomy has now gone all the way from a parochial Earth-centered view of the Universe, to a parochial Sol-centered view.
But I guess you've got to expect stupid results when astronomers with no training in linguistics, taxonomy, or any related field step way out of their area of expertise to dictate about stuff to the rest of us.
Having RTFA, it is evident to me that the reason the abstract lacked any redeeming quality of any kind is because the article itself had no redeeming quality of any kind.
Slashdot: I wasted several minutes of my life reading TFA. I want them back.
That seems to be true of Apple products. But there are Android devices that are not built that way, and I think the same is true of at least some of the Chromebooks. I've done module level repairs on Asus netbooks and Acer laptops in the last few years, and I expect that Chromebooks of the same level of quality would be built as modular units. Not as monolithic "got to put it in the landfill because somebody spilled cola on the keyboard" crap.
But I may be wrong. I don't buy completely unrepairable trash, no matter what the price; I won't even look at it. (Part of the reason I haven't owned any Apple products since I gave up my Apple ][+ 30 years ago.) Back in the day, I used to custom build IBM compatible PCs by buying empty cases and fitting them with power supples, IO cards, memory sticks, drives, peripherals, and what-not for the soho market. So I have a lot of experience in computer maintenance that is almost impossible to acquire these days. Except of course for the gamers who are into the liquid nitrogen cooling systems so they can overclock to ridiculous speeds while using GPUs that all by themselves have a hundred times more computing power than was used to build the stuff that put a man on the Moon. Way back when. I wonder if anyone now alive will see THAT happen again.
He has a pretty good chromebook junkyard that he lets the kids have access to to fix things before they have to pay for a replacement.
That is a great concept! I doubt that there is any school system that does not have a closet somewhere where dead Chromebooks could be stored. When the inventory becomes large enough, an elective high school course in tearing down, diagnosing, and repairing them would get some of them back in service while providing the students a great hands-on learning opportunity in problem solving and general shop procedures.
While many schools would not have a teacher with the requisite technical skills to take on such a class, most large school systems would be able to recruit volunteer "teaching assistants" from the local Free Geek computer recycling center. That recycling center might possibly provide access to shop space and tools, too. But given enough lead time and a willingness to canvas local businesses, the needed equipment (screwdrivers, testing frames, nuts and bolts storage containers, etc) could be obtained gratis. And I would expect that upon a properly presented request, Google would provide some help in getting a program up and running.
One of the things school administrators are likely to overlook (since to date they have not been schooled in looking at it) is the cost associated with the waste stream of broken student electronic gizmos. Like Chromebooks or iPads, etc. This needs to be corrected. Slashdot readership can take a role in helping local school systems come to terms with these end-of-service-life problems.
Why didn't you just create a google account in your name and let him use it?
As someone who successfully parented a child through her teenage years, how the hell else could you give your child appropriately guided access to the Internet? The web is full of dangers for grandparent newbies who had been around the block several times before most slashdot readers were even born. It would be totally irresponsible, a complete case of child abuse, to turn a kid who has not yet even learned how to use his or her moral compass loose on the web without close adult supervision.
Very few, if any, kids who cannot yet get a drivers license should have their own accounts on the web. Let those accounts be in a parent's or guardian's name, where there is at least the possibility of intervening before the kid gets sucked into trouble.
I sometimes make exceptions and respond to AC posts. This is an instance. Since I am procrastinating on some other thing.
Objective reality is in the mind of the beholder. And nowhere else.
I could offer a book list for you to read up about this, but I won't, because it would be very long and I doubt very much that you would bother to do the work. Since it would only deprive you of the comfort of your 19th century world view.
Instead I would suggest that you google on the difference between science and philosophy, and on the limitations of the scientific method. But I doubt that many with your point of view will do that either. That's okay: for every great thinker, we also need a multitude of lab techs, code monkeys, and admin assistants who can have perfectly comfortable lives using a pre-twentieth century mental framework.
BTW, whatever an imagined thing is, it is as independent of the instrument that produced it as the sound of music is independent of the chorus that is singing it. Learning something about the underlying physiology will be interesting, but at most that will be like learning how a violin is put together, and will say nothing at all about how the fiddle is played (or the music produced).
Slashdot Mirror
Creating biochar from woody vegetation sequesters carbon for up to tens of thousands of years. The stuff is also a great soil ammendment. About 33% of the carbon in woody waste can be converted to biochar. This is charcoal in a form that is biochemically inert but with physical structures that, like reefs, promote a rich ecology-- but in the soil rather than in sea water.
It is reasonable to presume that naturally composting woody vegetation on the forest floor is undergoing a process of conversion that is broadly similar to biochar manufacture, though much slower: a couple of years as opposed to a couple of hours. That suggests that for every 10 tons of forest litter generated in a year, somewhere between 1 and 3 tons is sequestered as the final product of composting after a year or two.
It is not too long a step from this to recognizing that the more vibrant soil ecologies of a forest are holding a lot more carbon in the form of microorganisms than can be found in corn fields or wheat fields. While that is not "sequestered" in the same way as biochar, carbon in those ecosystems is removed from the daily CO2 cycle (by moving it into cycles measured in 10k years).
The summary: planting trees, especially deciduous in climates with a cold season, does "sequester" carbon for the long term (in the sense that carbon is moved from the daily CO2 cycle to much longer CO2 cycles). While only a fraction of the carbon in a dead tree is "sequestered" in that way, there are multipliers in the soil ecosystems that significantly increase the amount of carbom removed from the daily cycle.
Go plant a tree. At present it is the best thing a person can do to directly counter the increasing CO2 levels.
What seems to be missing from these accounts (I have not done an exhaustive search of them, though) is that Tudor was clever enough to recognize that waste from one local industry-- the saw mills of New England-- could be used as one of the key raw materials of his distributed ice product. He was one of the first to recognize that a waste stream could be repurposed this way.
New England still had plenty of waterwheel driven lumber mills at the time, and was in a unique position to create an ice distribution network servicing both sides of the Atlantic. Except for Alaska that was milling a lot of lumber for the San Francisco build up, there were few regions with all three components: natural ice, lots of saw dust (or the equivalent lightweight, cheap insulation), and good harbors.
All I can see on this Slashdot thread is mis-matched anecdotes.
That's the nature of slashdot, no matter what the subject of any given thread.
I read slashdot at least daily, sometimes visiting several times a day if a topic is of great interest to me. But I don't read it for information about any subject. I read it to find out what the attitudes and biases of one vocal segment of the technoratti are. Sometimes that helps me shape my own opinion; sometimes it helps me identify where I should invest my limited argumentative resources. But almost never does slashdot give me any solid information; it is always just a jumbled of mismatched anecdotes.
There can be little question that what the USA needs now is another Teddy Roosevelt trust-buster. Big corporations-- and banks-- are exerting way too much influence on the USA's politics and marketplace. Time to do what T.R. did about100 years ago: use government to regulate Big Business so that the marketplace and politics can work the way the founding fathers intended. Instead of twisting governments-- state as well as federal-- to do what Big Business thinks is best for themselves.
I'm not sure that Saint Hilliary is earthy enough to get the job done. I'm not sure that Ms Warren has the skills and shrewdness of thought the work requires. Maybe they could combine forces.
What I am pretty sure of is we need a Mommy in the White House who can restore order in the nursery and rumpus room and do whatever enforcement is needed to get all the kids to play nicely with each other.
There is such technology. On Earth. In space there are limitations of weight and energy consumption to contend with.
An excellent discussion and I learned a couple of things.
I will continue to use .png for archival needs where bandwidth issues do not apply, and I can avoid worrying about the copy-of-copy degradation of .jpg without the excessive size of .tiff or other lossless formats. I will convert to .jpg at as high compression as is workable when preparing images for the web.
This leads to another question, now that several persons who know something about this stuff are gathered together on this one thread:
Blender can work with images from a number of different sources and these can be stored within the .blend database. These might be reference images during modeling or textures used in the finished product. They are usualy the major contributor to the size of the .blend file. So, does anyone know whether there would be an advantage to using one image format over another when working with Blender?
Why is there no mention of Portable Network Graphics in this discussion? .png has an alpha channel, has broad support, and uses *lossless* compression. What's not to like? It does not compress as tightly as highly compressed .jpg, but as several have pointed out, that's not as big an issue any more.
So am I missing something? Or is it just some kind of marketing thing that .png does not see much use?
If YOU had read the studies, you would know that the risk of lung cancer was a major talking point only for the anti-smoking marketeers, who felt that the very high risks of smoking induced heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were not scary enough to cause addicts to give up their habit.
To continue smoking or to give it up is the one decision that will have the greatest impact on a person's health twenty years and more down the road. Whether this is from the nicotine addiction or from all the other crud in inhaled tobacco smoke is an unknown.
From what I understand, there is little doubt climate change is happening, the questions is to what extent the impact of humans may be responsible.
That is not the question.
The question is, now that climate change has become inevitable, what should we do about it?
The answer varies considerably for different values of "we". However for most values of "we", it would make sense to do what can be done to reduce the greenhouse gases our human activities produce. For while this might not make a difference, it might make a big difference since everything suggests that that the climate's near future is characterized by one or more tipping points, and even a minor reduction in the rate of greenhouse gas production could be enough to keep from tumbling over a cliff.
You are conflating Linux with the desktop environments that it supports. Don't do that. It just demonstrates how ignorant you are, and is rather annoying.
Linux is not built like Windows. A Linux distro consists of its Linux kernel and one or more desktop environments supported by the kernel. I am currently running the Ubuntu Studio version using the XFCE desktop with elements from Gnome and KDE blended in. It works pretty well: several years now without any system crashes, has handled several full distro upgrades without any issues. I can't count how many times the Linux kernel has upgraded. The kernel upgrades install with no more disturbance than a message saying that the computer needs to reboot for the new stuff to become active.
Exactly. I'm sure that sooner or later the IAU will talk it over with the semanticists and fix the problems. I'm thinking it would be better if that would happen sooner rather than later. And I strongly believe that, committee inertia being what it is, poking at the problem will help it get addressed sooner.
My concern is with researchers from other fields who have cause to visit the astronomy silo but do not live there. We are more than a century past the time when any field of science could define its terminology in isolation from the rest of the community of scholars. Astronomy needs to look at its short-sighted parochial practices and use a wide field of view more often.
See comment #48550243.
The definitions do define the scope of research, especially research by persons in other fields who are visiting the astronomy silo but are not residents of it.
SKOS does not work well with murky or badly designed definitions or classification schemes. See comment #48550243.
Astronomy isn't just about stars and planets any more. At least, it shouldn't be, it should be part of the larger community of scientists and contributing its share to the common goal of greater understanding.
Thanks for bringing up SKOS. This kind of semantic thesaurus has become an increasingly important tool in researching the literature of any field. This is especially true when the researcher might be following citations that lead him/her outside their particular area of expertise or into a natural language where he/she is not fluent.
Of course if the thesaurus is wrong, then literature that might otherwise be very important to a research project might well be overlooked. So building taxonomies-- classification hierarchies-- that are compatible with SKOS concepts is quite important. Especially at this time in the history of science where the most profound discoveries are no longer those that build the silos higher or deeper, but those that find the connections between silos. Such as the work that is being done by geologists and biologists into the role of some clays in the protobiotic formation of some proteins.
The IAU definitions of "planet", "dwarf planet", and other denizens of the solar system is not SKOS compliant. It should be, but it cannot be. The IAU defined this terminology in 2006. But SKOS did not become a completed W3C Recommendation until 2009; it had not even reached the stage of Recommendation Proposal in 2006.
So evidently the astronomers did as best they could with the tools available to laymen in the information management field in 2006. I think we can expect that the astronomers will revise their schema to better fit with the worldwide community of scholars when they next meet. Almost certainly they will bring some expertise in information management to that upcoming meeting. In the meantime, it is useful to keep in mind that the current definitions and taxonomy are not necessarily going to be regarded as valid, or even useful, a few short years from now.
Fortunately NASA is dominated by engineers who do not have to put up with stupid definitions developed by committees of astronomers. It takes persons with great vision to get hard data from Mars, Jupiter space, and soon Pluto. The vision of the International Astronomical Union is too microscopic to really be of much use.
Astronomers are now adding more and more epicycles to the definition of "planet" as used in their jargon. That's stupid.
The Keplerian solution is apparently too simple to grasp: A planet is one the set of {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune}. Everything else is not a planet. That is a reasonable and sufficient definition of "planet" in the current astronomical jargon.
Meanwhile, those who wish to communicate in English can talk about planets without bothering to be so specific. There is a value in this. English is capable of handle concepts like regarding the Earth and Moon as a binary planet, where the gravitational interplay between the two bodies has uniquely shaped both, and given rise to significant activity not found elsewhere in the solar system. Such as tides, the effects of tides on ocean currents and weather, the influence tides have had on the evolution of life, the influence of tides and weather on human cultures, and so on.
Apparently none of these phenomena are of any interest to astronomy (despite Fred Hoyle's great book from many years ago) since they have defined their jargon in such a way that astronomy is excluded from participating in exploring such exciting concepts.
And here I thought the purpose of "technical terminology" was to improve communications between experts within a field by assigning strict definitions to certain words. In the field of linguistics, this is called a "jargon", and can be used to refer to the trade talk of nuclear physicists or that of plumbers or carpenters, etc. Of course astronomers don't study linguistics so it is not surprising that they don't know this term.
Within their jargon, astronomers can mangle, mutilate, extend, or transmogrify whatever words they feel is necessary. But they have no business attempting to dictate anything about language to the general population. Going so far out of their area of expertise just demonstrates that some astronomers are know-it-all assholes.
Astronomers can have their "dwarf planets", and can define a planet such that anything like a planet that happens to orbit another star has to be called something else. But trying to make the common English language conform to their jargon is as silly as their current definition of what a planet is.
By the way, a more succinct and valid definition of "planet" within the current accepted jargon of astronomers is this: "A planet is a member of the following set: { Mecury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune }".
And I see no reason why objects that meet all the requirements of being a planet but happen to orbit some other star cannot be planets. Wow, astronomy has now gone all the way from a parochial Earth-centered view of the Universe, to a parochial Sol-centered view.
But I guess you've got to expect stupid results when astronomers with no training in linguistics, taxonomy, or any related field step way out of their area of expertise to dictate about stuff to the rest of us.
Stupid astronomers. What would Galileo say?
Having RTFA, it is evident to me that the reason the abstract lacked any redeeming quality of any kind is because the article itself had no redeeming quality of any kind.
Slashdot: I wasted several minutes of my life reading TFA. I want them back.
That seems to be true of Apple products. But there are Android devices that are not built that way, and I think the same is true of at least some of the Chromebooks. I've done module level repairs on Asus netbooks and Acer laptops in the last few years, and I expect that Chromebooks of the same level of quality would be built as modular units. Not as monolithic "got to put it in the landfill because somebody spilled cola on the keyboard" crap.
But I may be wrong. I don't buy completely unrepairable trash, no matter what the price; I won't even look at it. (Part of the reason I haven't owned any Apple products since I gave up my Apple ][+ 30 years ago.) Back in the day, I used to custom build IBM compatible PCs by buying empty cases and fitting them with power supples, IO cards, memory sticks, drives, peripherals, and what-not for the soho market. So I have a lot of experience in computer maintenance that is almost impossible to acquire these days. Except of course for the gamers who are into the liquid nitrogen cooling systems so they can overclock to ridiculous speeds while using GPUs that all by themselves have a hundred times more computing power than was used to build the stuff that put a man on the Moon. Way back when. I wonder if anyone now alive will see THAT happen again.
He has a pretty good chromebook junkyard that he lets the kids have access to to fix things before they have to pay for a replacement.
That is a great concept! I doubt that there is any school system that does not have a closet somewhere where dead Chromebooks could be stored. When the inventory becomes large enough, an elective high school course in tearing down, diagnosing, and repairing them would get some of them back in service while providing the students a great hands-on learning opportunity in problem solving and general shop procedures.
While many schools would not have a teacher with the requisite technical skills to take on such a class, most large school systems would be able to recruit volunteer "teaching assistants" from the local Free Geek computer recycling center. That recycling center might possibly provide access to shop space and tools, too. But given enough lead time and a willingness to canvas local businesses, the needed equipment (screwdrivers, testing frames, nuts and bolts storage containers, etc) could be obtained gratis. And I would expect that upon a properly presented request, Google would provide some help in getting a program up and running.
One of the things school administrators are likely to overlook (since to date they have not been schooled in looking at it) is the cost associated with the waste stream of broken student electronic gizmos. Like Chromebooks or iPads, etc. This needs to be corrected. Slashdot readership can take a role in helping local school systems come to terms with these end-of-service-life problems.
Why didn't you just create a google account in your name and let him use it?
As someone who successfully parented a child through her teenage years, how the hell else could you give your child appropriately guided access to the Internet? The web is full of dangers for grandparent newbies who had been around the block several times before most slashdot readers were even born. It would be totally irresponsible, a complete case of child abuse, to turn a kid who has not yet even learned how to use his or her moral compass loose on the web without close adult supervision.
Very few, if any, kids who cannot yet get a drivers license should have their own accounts on the web. Let those accounts be in a parent's or guardian's name, where there is at least the possibility of intervening before the kid gets sucked into trouble.
Yes! Much better. Thank you.
I sometimes make exceptions and respond to AC posts. This is an instance. Since I am procrastinating on some other thing.
Objective reality is in the mind of the beholder. And nowhere else.
I could offer a book list for you to read up about this, but I won't, because it would be very long and I doubt very much that you would bother to do the work. Since it would only deprive you of the comfort of your 19th century world view.
Instead I would suggest that you google on the difference between science and philosophy, and on the limitations of the scientific method. But I doubt that many with your point of view will do that either. That's okay: for every great thinker, we also need a multitude of lab techs, code monkeys, and admin assistants who can have perfectly comfortable lives using a pre-twentieth century mental framework.
BTW, whatever an imagined thing is, it is as independent of the instrument that produced it as the sound of music is independent of the chorus that is singing it. Learning something about the underlying physiology will be interesting, but at most that will be like learning how a violin is put together, and will say nothing at all about how the fiddle is played (or the music produced).
I like your sig. But it would be better with the closing quotation mark.