But all it takes is one person to talk to both groups.
In reality it's hard enough. The truck delivers to the depot, the depot delivers to the airplane, the airplane delivers to another warehouse, and from there samples are delivered to storage. The storage facility will be storing all kinds of samples, including the legitimate ones, so the workers there will not know what is what. You'd need to trace specific containers with specific samples, and that's difficult.
Besides, the laws may be written in such a way that there is no time frame during which the samples have to be destroyed. So the government may order construction of the incinerator, and schedule it for the year 2100 or later. Until then the [frozen] samples have to be stored, you can't just dump them into the sewer, they are biohazard.
These aren't soldiers, they haven't signed an official secrets act, they won't stop blabbing.
Those are big assumptions. The techs may be employed by a large TLA (like FBI, which already runs a lot of labs) and TLAs do not like talkative employees. Anyway, if this scheme is allowed, then those techs won't be told either what are they analyzing. It would be just anonymous test tubes with numbers. The techs may blab all they want, they can't tell what they don't know. Only top managers would know. There are many DNA samples taken legitimately, at crime scenes and from suspects, and destruction of those materials is not a decision that lab techs may make. The techs will just take the tube from box A, analyze, and place into box B. Only computers would know where each test tube came from and where it should go.
Millions of samples are hard to hide.
Let's assume that 1ml of blood is taken for analysis (it's plenty.) The glass container will weigh, say, 0.01 kg (which is probably 10x too much, but as a guess it's good enough.) 100 samples = 1 kg, 100000 samples = 1 t, 1 million = 10 tons. That's *nothing* - it's 1/4 of one 18-wheeler trailer; and the lab will need to work for a year (27 kg per day) to process a million samples.
It's going to be done by basically ordinary medical technicians. And if every one of these people is told, "Oh, and illegally keep the whole sample as well," then it's going to get out because that many people can't keep anything secret.
That's a non-problem, and it has a solution already. Techs will be told to pack the samples up, after they are done with them, and load into this here truck, which "will take them to the destruction facility." The truck will take samples to the facility where a different group of workers is told to "store all incoming materials forever." This way only the person who instructed the truck driver knows what really happened to the samples; maybe even not him either.
There's less of a chance that a bad guy would randomly chose me. If he's going to go through the work of framing me, it'd be easier to do the crime clean
You do mention that you had experience with this system, and I haven't. But I read a lot of books, so I want to comment on a couple of things.
It is indeed unlikely that a criminal would randomly pick a stranger to frame. That stranger, even if found, probably has an alibi. Even the very fact of him not knowing the victim is working for him.
But the criminal may choose a specific person to frame; a person that knows the victim, has no alibi for the time of the crime, and can be shown to have reasons to commit the crime.
You say that it's easier for the criminal to keep the scene clean. I doubt that. Criminals don't walk onto the crime scene in bunny suits, and anything less than that is bound to leave evidence. So a smart criminal arranges to have plenty of easily detectable evidence that points away from him, toward the framed person. He still may drop a hair or a skin cell here and there, but if there is a wine glass with someone's else fingerprints and saliva on it, chances are that the police won't even search for other clues.
If a slow train is using a line, it bogs down the other trains in the same line.
Freight and passenger trains share tracks all the time. This problem is known since the first trains and first railroads, and there are solutions. For example, you can have short segments of spare tracks where a slower (freight) train can stay to allow a faster train to pass.
you'd be on that train for about 39 hours. Air France can do it in 11.
Another comment already mentioned that you'd probably have to land somewhere in between. But even ignoring that, after the airplane trip you go directly to bed and sleep for another 12 hours because you are tired, hungry, and your legs (or back) are in pain. You wake up and find your clock shifted relative to the local time.
On the other hand, assume that the train trip takes 39 hours (board at 6pm on Monday, disembark at 9am on Wednesday by your wristwatch). You will arrive relaxed, refreshed, well fed, and ready to go and do whatever you need to do. You lose Tuesday, but you lose entire day in the air trip too. What you gain here is convenience of sleeping on a real bed for two nights - sleeping as much as you want, reading news, working on your laptop, eating real food in the restaurant, and watching the scenery too. You arrive at convenient time, and your body has an extra day to adapt to new time zones as you cross them.
As someone else also mentioned, air travel requires fuels with high energy - currently only oil-based fuels meet the requirement. You can expect their price to go up, to infinity (unless abiotic origin of oil is proven and new oil fields are found.) However a train can run on electricity, since it doesn't need to carry the fuel on board. Electricity can be generated by renewable sources, and you can expect its price to go down as we develop better solar panels, better nuclear reactors and possibly even orbital solar power generators. Trains are sustainable; airplanes are not (until new fuels or batteries are invented.)
Did anyone think that, maybe, most hypothetical alien signals might encrypted?
Not so much encrypted as compressed. It costs energy to send redundant bits.
However SETI tries to find beacons that are intentionally built for us to find. Given that we don't run those beacons ourselves, it hinges on the theory that aliens are careless, or they know that it's safe to broadcast (how? - we may be highly advanced and bloodthirsty.)
Life produces things that other things don't produce. Oxygen in an atmosphere for instance.
Animals don't produce oxygen. Atmospheric composition is also not a good indicator; we can have 100 million people living on the Moon, under the surface, but it has no atmosphere. This is particularly relevant to intelligent life, which can create its own biosphere where necessary.
If you want to start talking about the life we don't know about and thus can't detect, go ahead. It's going to be either a very short conversation, or a very useless and made up one though.
It is most reasonable to expect an alien life to be alien to us. We will probably have machine intelligence (and life) within a century or two. Searching for lost keys only under the streetlight may be convenient but not very productive.
So.. what would it take to be able to detect the signs of life on other planets?
You'd have to have feet on the ground. Life even as we know it can hide in oceans and caves. And we know nothing about other lifeforms that may exist, so we can't test for them. See Solaris as just one example out of thousands.
So how big of an antenna would it take for, lets say, a civilisation on a remote solar system planet to detect the day to day RF activity on this planet?
Other people already commented on the physics of RF. But that could be dealt with - by building antenna arrays in space, for example.
A far tougher problem is the propagation delay. You could one day receive first feeble AM broadcasts from a planet 500 light years away, and the next day people from that planet show up in their FTL ships.
A more practical approach, if your civilization is really interested in monitoring other star systems, is to seed the galaxy with self-replicating probes that position themselves within target systems and wait for activity. If anything happens, they report back through FTL channels. Of course if FTL is really impossible then the whole idea is pretty pointless, and remote civilizations will never contact each other.
false information that concerns serious political matters (grave slander, etc...) will be quickly outed as such.
Not quickly enough. Remember McCain's black baby? If they throw enough dirt at you, some will stick. That's the whole idea. Internet offers infinite supplies of dirt and of dirt-flinging machines.
If I as a user posted
"The Senate Majority Leader and his family were killed in a car accident this morning!"
on this site would it be remotely reasonable to prosecute the owners of slashdot?
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can gather, the probability of legal action depends on harm that the action did or is expected to do. For example, if the post is about HungryHobo being flattened by the bus, and as result your job interview is canceled, you may have a good cause to sue the poster because he harmed you.
In political world much more is allowed - public figures routinely have to suffer harassment and name-calling and all kinds of humiliation from their opponents. But there is a line too, somewhere. It is also easier, and more worthwhile, to go after a specific journalist than after an anonymous poster on a forum. If you post the news it probably won't be reprinted by AP and BBC and Reuters; you'd be lucky if Google can find it. On the other hand, if your voice is loud, your message may be seen as more damaging.
There is also that issue of intentional lying. Even a good newspaper is bound to publish something in error now and then. They have a procedure for corrections: once notified, they publish the correction promptly and at a similar spot. Refusal to correct a blatant untruth would be seen as intent to lie to the audience, and I'm sure media laws forbid that.
So to summarize: IMO if you, a random guy, post your message deep in the thread, nothing will happen. If you manage to post a whole article on Slashdot, with hundreds of people discussing the false news, then it may be not beyond belief that Slashdot will be asked by SS to provide your IP, and then you will be "interviewed." It rarely happens, if ever, that a public figure initiates a lawsuit against publisher of damaging, false news - probably because it won't help.
With regard to Venezuela, I'd leave it to a local person to tell if the false news had sufficient threat level to warrant prosecution. There is a video of the Chavez talking about it, but my Spanish skills are near zero. If CNN were to show a fake exploding White House during prime time news, I'm sure heads would roll in Atlanta. As you likely know, the government of Georgia ordered fake news just a couple of days ago, and there are now demonstrations and threats of all kinds of action, legal and political, over that incident.
If I put up a forum and some random forum user posted saying that the US VP died in a freak accident involving a pie-eating contest and a pair of suspenders nobody but the most psychotically credulous would even think about taking it seriously.
Your example is exaggerated. However if you post that Senate Majority Leader *and* his family are killed in a car accident your information becomes believable. You will sow confusion, and it may give you (or your masters) some political advantage.
If you carry grudges from high school past the age of 20, you are definitely doing life wrong.
I don't think grudges are involved. It's probably because of lack of common ground. His high school colleagues (probably not friends even) were grouped together just by their location at the time. In my case, a good number of people I knew in school were complete blanks. Among others I knew a guy who drank alcohol heavily, for example - I'm not sure he is alive by now, and if he is I'd rather leave him alone. And I maintain contact with two guys because we have common interests (technology, electronics, etc.) Other people may also develop into something of interest to you, but so may anyone else - you won't be better off tracking their fate; statistically they are the same as any guy in the street.
This means that the "high school set" is chosen for us, and it is not optimal. We leave it behind as soon as we can, and then start building our own network of friends, out of people that interest us and to whom we are interesting. We may take a few contacts out of the school set, but generally it is not required. Once out of school, people get lots of new contacts and have wider choice. Of course one can have 500 friends of all kinds, but then dealing with them becomes a full time job.
Eventually, even the stupidest of managers will have to realize that the marketing idiots pushing for cloud computing and "app stores" are full of shit, and fire their sorry asses.
The PHBs are reading trade magazines, and as long as the propaganda of "cloud *" is going strong they won't move a finger. That would also show them for fools, if after years of push for cloud they suddenly reverse the course.
While in long term it may be better for the business to have locally deployed and executed tools, cloud stuff appeals with its instant gratification - pay a small fee, click on a URL and you are done, no need to hire a sysadmin, no need to do anything! As long as you are OK with trusting the cloud, you are doing great; not everyone needs complex, locally executed software. And if the cloud fails now and then, you deal with it as you deal with any failure. Your own servers are far more likely to fail then Google's.
it makes me yearn for the days when we wrote Java apps deployed to our own Solaris servers, and didn't have to deal with all of the stupidity involved with developing and deploying even a simple cloud app.
Hopefully someone will post a point by point comparison, to see which method requires less stupidity:-) My own software is delivered through JTAG, so I'm out of loop on this battle.
Perhaps, it depends on whether you use machines or not. If the leech field is on a hillside the labor will cost you extra.
As a reference, Able charges about $1,300 just to pump and inspect the tank, and I have a bill to prove it. I doubt they will install a new system for anything less than $50K.
You'd be best to keep wildlife off of your field, should they eat your crops before you harvest.
It's not humanly possible to do even in the USA. The fences around fields are just to mark property lines and hold cattle. Deer jump over the fences with ease, and coyotes crawl under, and wild pigs just go straight through.
Also not all wildlife is damaging your interests. A deer isn't going to eat much grass, compared to your 100 cows, and if you want you can eat the deer when it gets fat enough:-) If you are a farmer, coyotes and foxes aren't going to eat your alfalfa.
Fecal matter alone does not make the best Fertilizer - combining it with certain chemicals does.
The soil contains chemicals, water, bacteria, plants and small animals (worms, insects) to do that work for you. This is hardly a new discovery. Chemicals in a bag are needed only because of the bag. Perhaps they are an improvement, but one that isn't worth 3 cents or even 0.03 cents to a farmer. A city dweller might benefit from that improvement, though - if he cares (big if.)
Also, crapping on a carrot doesn't mean it'll grow bigger, it means you just infested it with waste that often carries diseases.
That's not exactly how it works. Fields are often fertilized with manure, and plants grow bigger on those nutrients. Plants's cells are pretty good on separating good and bad materials. Contamination is occurring primarily during the harvest, when bacteria are placed directly onto the produce. In any case, as I mentioned there are thousands of wild animals at or above your field, and you can't do anything about them. Typically they are not a health problem. But you are expected to carefully wash the produce anyway; that's the step that was probably missing
in those recent contamination stories in the news.
That is true. But it's not cheap to build such a system. You often need lots of land for the leech field, half a mile of various pipes, and the concrete tank, all underground. And you need the plumbing in the house. If you were to build a new septic system today, you probably need $50-100K to do that (not counting permits.)
If you're a poor peasant living in some place where they don't even have toilets, and you work your farm day in and day out - and you could take part of your earning to increase your production - wouldn't you invest?
No. If you are a farmer and have a field and you work in that field, with shovel, all day long, you might as well use the field. Your contribution will be minor, compared to all other wildlife that is there and isn't going to use this invention.
This device is useful only when a hole in the ground is not an option, like in a city. You'd still need to dispose of the device, though - by flinging it, perhaps?:-)
I think maybe Adblock Plus, or some other trustworthy party should generate a list of companies and adservers that comply with delivering non-intrusive, friendly, good quality ads so that users could allow those ads to go through, while blocking all other ad content.
By "going through" I presume you mean "download into/dev/null" if that's the option you select. It's one thing to download the ad to generate a valid view for the ad server, but it's a completely different thing to render it and see it. Same as the "mute" button on a TV remote. The ad is honestly served, but the viewer refused to look at it.
In general yes, I think Adblock Plus would benefit from such an option. The blocking subscriptions could be updated to include the "view" flag, and it could be configured by the user too. It's a half-measure, admittedly, because I am unsure about future of ads on Internet, but it is an easy thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
But all it takes is one person to talk to both groups.
In reality it's hard enough. The truck delivers to the depot, the depot delivers to the airplane, the airplane delivers to another warehouse, and from there samples are delivered to storage. The storage facility will be storing all kinds of samples, including the legitimate ones, so the workers there will not know what is what. You'd need to trace specific containers with specific samples, and that's difficult.
Besides, the laws may be written in such a way that there is no time frame during which the samples have to be destroyed. So the government may order construction of the incinerator, and schedule it for the year 2100 or later. Until then the [frozen] samples have to be stored, you can't just dump them into the sewer, they are biohazard.
These aren't soldiers, they haven't signed an official secrets act, they won't stop blabbing.
Those are big assumptions. The techs may be employed by a large TLA (like FBI, which already runs a lot of labs) and TLAs do not like talkative employees. Anyway, if this scheme is allowed, then those techs won't be told either what are they analyzing. It would be just anonymous test tubes with numbers. The techs may blab all they want, they can't tell what they don't know. Only top managers would know. There are many DNA samples taken legitimately, at crime scenes and from suspects, and destruction of those materials is not a decision that lab techs may make. The techs will just take the tube from box A, analyze, and place into box B. Only computers would know where each test tube came from and where it should go.
Millions of samples are hard to hide.
Let's assume that 1ml of blood is taken for analysis (it's plenty.) The glass container will weigh, say, 0.01 kg (which is probably 10x too much, but as a guess it's good enough.) 100 samples = 1 kg, 100000 samples = 1 t, 1 million = 10 tons. That's *nothing* - it's 1/4 of one 18-wheeler trailer; and the lab will need to work for a year (27 kg per day) to process a million samples.
It's going to be done by basically ordinary medical technicians. And if every one of these people is told, "Oh, and illegally keep the whole sample as well," then it's going to get out because that many people can't keep anything secret.
That's a non-problem, and it has a solution already. Techs will be told to pack the samples up, after they are done with them, and load into this here truck, which "will take them to the destruction facility." The truck will take samples to the facility where a different group of workers is told to "store all incoming materials forever." This way only the person who instructed the truck driver knows what really happened to the samples; maybe even not him either.
There's less of a chance that a bad guy would randomly chose me. If he's going to go through the work of framing me, it'd be easier to do the crime clean
You do mention that you had experience with this system, and I haven't. But I read a lot of books, so I want to comment on a couple of things.
It is indeed unlikely that a criminal would randomly pick a stranger to frame. That stranger, even if found, probably has an alibi. Even the very fact of him not knowing the victim is working for him.
But the criminal may choose a specific person to frame; a person that knows the victim, has no alibi for the time of the crime, and can be shown to have reasons to commit the crime.
You say that it's easier for the criminal to keep the scene clean. I doubt that. Criminals don't walk onto the crime scene in bunny suits, and anything less than that is bound to leave evidence. So a smart criminal arranges to have plenty of easily detectable evidence that points away from him, toward the framed person. He still may drop a hair or a skin cell here and there, but if there is a wine glass with someone's else fingerprints and saliva on it, chances are that the police won't even search for other clues.
If a slow train is using a line, it bogs down the other trains in the same line.
Freight and passenger trains share tracks all the time. This problem is known since the first trains and first railroads, and there are solutions. For example, you can have short segments of spare tracks where a slower (freight) train can stay to allow a faster train to pass.
you'd be on that train for about 39 hours. Air France can do it in 11.
Another comment already mentioned that you'd probably have to land somewhere in between. But even ignoring that, after the airplane trip you go directly to bed and sleep for another 12 hours because you are tired, hungry, and your legs (or back) are in pain. You wake up and find your clock shifted relative to the local time.
On the other hand, assume that the train trip takes 39 hours (board at 6pm on Monday, disembark at 9am on Wednesday by your wristwatch). You will arrive relaxed, refreshed, well fed, and ready to go and do whatever you need to do. You lose Tuesday, but you lose entire day in the air trip too. What you gain here is convenience of sleeping on a real bed for two nights - sleeping as much as you want, reading news, working on your laptop, eating real food in the restaurant, and watching the scenery too. You arrive at convenient time, and your body has an extra day to adapt to new time zones as you cross them.
As someone else also mentioned, air travel requires fuels with high energy - currently only oil-based fuels meet the requirement. You can expect their price to go up, to infinity (unless abiotic origin of oil is proven and new oil fields are found.) However a train can run on electricity, since it doesn't need to carry the fuel on board. Electricity can be generated by renewable sources, and you can expect its price to go down as we develop better solar panels, better nuclear reactors and possibly even orbital solar power generators. Trains are sustainable; airplanes are not (until new fuels or batteries are invented.)
Did anyone think that, maybe, most hypothetical alien signals might encrypted?
Not so much encrypted as compressed. It costs energy to send redundant bits.
However SETI tries to find beacons that are intentionally built for us to find. Given that we don't run those beacons ourselves, it hinges on the theory that aliens are careless, or they know that it's safe to broadcast (how? - we may be highly advanced and bloodthirsty.)
Life produces things that other things don't produce. Oxygen in an atmosphere for instance.
Animals don't produce oxygen. Atmospheric composition is also not a good indicator; we can have 100 million people living on the Moon, under the surface, but it has no atmosphere. This is particularly relevant to intelligent life, which can create its own biosphere where necessary.
If you want to start talking about the life we don't know about and thus can't detect, go ahead. It's going to be either a very short conversation, or a very useless and made up one though.
It is most reasonable to expect an alien life to be alien to us. We will probably have machine intelligence (and life) within a century or two. Searching for lost keys only under the streetlight may be convenient but not very productive.
So.. what would it take to be able to detect the signs of life on other planets?
You'd have to have feet on the ground. Life even as we know it can hide in oceans and caves. And we know nothing about other lifeforms that may exist, so we can't test for them. See Solaris as just one example out of thousands.
So how big of an antenna would it take for, lets say, a civilisation on a remote solar system planet to detect the day to day RF activity on this planet?
Other people already commented on the physics of RF. But that could be dealt with - by building antenna arrays in space, for example.
A far tougher problem is the propagation delay. You could one day receive first feeble AM broadcasts from a planet 500 light years away, and the next day people from that planet show up in their FTL ships.
A more practical approach, if your civilization is really interested in monitoring other star systems, is to seed the galaxy with self-replicating probes that position themselves within target systems and wait for activity. If anything happens, they report back through FTL channels. Of course if FTL is really impossible then the whole idea is pretty pointless, and remote civilizations will never contact each other.
Given that any intelligent god that wasn't born on earth would be (by definition) an extraterrestrial intelligence ...
A god may be[1] an ET, but not every ET has to be a god.
[1] Some gods are postulated to reside on Earth or inside Earth, see Greek gods for example.
false information that concerns serious political matters (grave slander, etc...) will be quickly outed as such.
Not quickly enough. Remember McCain's black baby? If they throw enough dirt at you, some will stick. That's the whole idea. Internet offers infinite supplies of dirt and of dirt-flinging machines.
If I as a user posted "The Senate Majority Leader and his family were killed in a car accident this morning!" on this site would it be remotely reasonable to prosecute the owners of slashdot?
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can gather, the probability of legal action depends on harm that the action did or is expected to do. For example, if the post is about HungryHobo being flattened by the bus, and as result your job interview is canceled, you may have a good cause to sue the poster because he harmed you.
In political world much more is allowed - public figures routinely have to suffer harassment and name-calling and all kinds of humiliation from their opponents. But there is a line too, somewhere. It is also easier, and more worthwhile, to go after a specific journalist than after an anonymous poster on a forum. If you post the news it probably won't be reprinted by AP and BBC and Reuters; you'd be lucky if Google can find it. On the other hand, if your voice is loud, your message may be seen as more damaging.
There is also that issue of intentional lying. Even a good newspaper is bound to publish something in error now and then. They have a procedure for corrections: once notified, they publish the correction promptly and at a similar spot. Refusal to correct a blatant untruth would be seen as intent to lie to the audience, and I'm sure media laws forbid that.
So to summarize: IMO if you, a random guy, post your message deep in the thread, nothing will happen. If you manage to post a whole article on Slashdot, with hundreds of people discussing the false news, then it may be not beyond belief that Slashdot will be asked by SS to provide your IP, and then you will be "interviewed." It rarely happens, if ever, that a public figure initiates a lawsuit against publisher of damaging, false news - probably because it won't help.
With regard to Venezuela, I'd leave it to a local person to tell if the false news had sufficient threat level to warrant prosecution. There is a video of the Chavez talking about it, but my Spanish skills are near zero. If CNN were to show a fake exploding White House during prime time news, I'm sure heads would roll in Atlanta. As you likely know, the government of Georgia ordered fake news just a couple of days ago, and there are now demonstrations and threats of all kinds of action, legal and political, over that incident.
Are you seriously saying it would be ok for the government to prosecute the owners of slashdot
I haven't said that at all. I only pointed out that your example is unrealistic.
If I put up a forum and some random forum user posted saying that the US VP died in a freak accident involving a pie-eating contest and a pair of suspenders nobody but the most psychotically credulous would even think about taking it seriously.
Your example is exaggerated. However if you post that Senate Majority Leader *and* his family are killed in a car accident your information becomes believable. You will sow confusion, and it may give you (or your masters) some political advantage.
If sexytime is true then you apply those two methods to a wrong object (self.) Or, possibly, I failed to understand your intent :-)
If you carry grudges from high school past the age of 20, you are definitely doing life wrong.
I don't think grudges are involved. It's probably because of lack of common ground. His high school colleagues (probably not friends even) were grouped together just by their location at the time. In my case, a good number of people I knew in school were complete blanks. Among others I knew a guy who drank alcohol heavily, for example - I'm not sure he is alive by now, and if he is I'd rather leave him alone. And I maintain contact with two guys because we have common interests (technology, electronics, etc.) Other people may also develop into something of interest to you, but so may anyone else - you won't be better off tracking their fate; statistically they are the same as any guy in the street.
This means that the "high school set" is chosen for us, and it is not optimal. We leave it behind as soon as we can, and then start building our own network of friends, out of people that interest us and to whom we are interesting. We may take a few contacts out of the school set, but generally it is not required. Once out of school, people get lots of new contacts and have wider choice. Of course one can have 500 friends of all kinds, but then dealing with them becomes a full time job.
How do you get the finder to say OK when the phone ask to be wiped?
Create a dialog with two buttons, "YES" and "NO". Wipe the phone regardless of which button is clicked :-)
What is a straight going to do with somebody else's cock?
There is an obvious, logical answer to that, but of course a Slashdot geek male would never figure it out :-)
Eventually, even the stupidest of managers will have to realize that the marketing idiots pushing for cloud computing and "app stores" are full of shit, and fire their sorry asses.
The PHBs are reading trade magazines, and as long as the propaganda of "cloud *" is going strong they won't move a finger. That would also show them for fools, if after years of push for cloud they suddenly reverse the course.
While in long term it may be better for the business to have locally deployed and executed tools, cloud stuff appeals with its instant gratification - pay a small fee, click on a URL and you are done, no need to hire a sysadmin, no need to do anything! As long as you are OK with trusting the cloud, you are doing great; not everyone needs complex, locally executed software. And if the cloud fails now and then, you deal with it as you deal with any failure. Your own servers are far more likely to fail then Google's.
it makes me yearn for the days when we wrote Java apps deployed to our own Solaris servers, and didn't have to deal with all of the stupidity involved with developing and deploying even a simple cloud app.
Hopefully someone will post a point by point comparison, to see which method requires less stupidity :-) My own software is delivered through JTAG, so I'm out of loop on this battle.
I guess it varies, depending on location. The area I live in is not very cheap. But otherwise you got a great deal!
No way. A septic system is installed for 10k-20k
Perhaps, it depends on whether you use machines or not. If the leech field is on a hillside the labor will cost you extra.
As a reference, Able charges about $1,300 just to pump and inspect the tank, and I have a bill to prove it. I doubt they will install a new system for anything less than $50K.
You'd be best to keep wildlife off of your field, should they eat your crops before you harvest.
It's not humanly possible to do even in the USA. The fences around fields are just to mark property lines and hold cattle. Deer jump over the fences with ease, and coyotes crawl under, and wild pigs just go straight through.
Also not all wildlife is damaging your interests. A deer isn't going to eat much grass, compared to your 100 cows, and if you want you can eat the deer when it gets fat enough :-) If you are a farmer, coyotes and foxes aren't going to eat your alfalfa.
Fecal matter alone does not make the best Fertilizer - combining it with certain chemicals does.
The soil contains chemicals, water, bacteria, plants and small animals (worms, insects) to do that work for you. This is hardly a new discovery. Chemicals in a bag are needed only because of the bag. Perhaps they are an improvement, but one that isn't worth 3 cents or even 0.03 cents to a farmer. A city dweller might benefit from that improvement, though - if he cares (big if.)
Also, crapping on a carrot doesn't mean it'll grow bigger, it means you just infested it with waste that often carries diseases.
That's not exactly how it works. Fields are often fertilized with manure, and plants grow bigger on those nutrients. Plants's cells are pretty good on separating good and bad materials. Contamination is occurring primarily during the harvest, when bacteria are placed directly onto the produce. In any case, as I mentioned there are thousands of wild animals at or above your field, and you can't do anything about them. Typically they are not a health problem. But you are expected to carefully wash the produce anyway; that's the step that was probably missing in those recent contamination stories in the news.
And rural places have septic tanks generally.
That is true. But it's not cheap to build such a system. You often need lots of land for the leech field, half a mile of various pipes, and the concrete tank, all underground. And you need the plumbing in the house. If you were to build a new septic system today, you probably need $50-100K to do that (not counting permits.)
If you're a poor peasant living in some place where they don't even have toilets, and you work your farm day in and day out - and you could take part of your earning to increase your production - wouldn't you invest?
No. If you are a farmer and have a field and you work in that field, with shovel, all day long, you might as well use the field. Your contribution will be minor, compared to all other wildlife that is there and isn't going to use this invention.
This device is useful only when a hole in the ground is not an option, like in a city. You'd still need to dispose of the device, though - by flinging it, perhaps? :-)
I think maybe Adblock Plus, or some other trustworthy party should generate a list of companies and adservers that comply with delivering non-intrusive, friendly, good quality ads so that users could allow those ads to go through, while blocking all other ad content.
By "going through" I presume you mean "download into /dev/null" if that's the option you select. It's one thing to download the ad to generate a valid view for the ad server, but it's a completely different thing to render it and see it. Same as the "mute" button on a TV remote. The ad is honestly served, but the viewer refused to look at it.
In general yes, I think Adblock Plus would benefit from such an option. The blocking subscriptions could be updated to include the "view" flag, and it could be configured by the user too. It's a half-measure, admittedly, because I am unsure about future of ads on Internet, but it is an easy thing to do.