"Our results indicate that forest soils such as these will not significantly mitigate anthropogenic C inputs to the atmosphere. The organic matter pools receiving large annual C inputs have short mean residence times, while those with slow turnover rates receive small annual inputs."
This study was done on loblolly pines in the South. You have to keep something in mind here, this study is not going to be accurate when you look at forests in more arid climates such as the West. The biomass simply isn't going to decay as quickly in drier climates.
The second study you cited seems to be based on deciduous forests, specifically sweetgums. Again, not relevant to the spruce, fir, pine forests of the West.
Show me a similar study with similar results on arid climate evergreens like bristlecones and pinons. The lodgepole pines and, to a lesser extent, ponderosa pines that are being decimated by pine beetle are expected to have a "shelf-life" of 7-10 years after death.
Another consideration is that the fallen needles and decayed wood helps promote fertile soil for the plants to continue on in subsequent generations. So while that aspect of the biomass does decay more quickly, it is also reabsorbed back into new growth more quickly.
stuff he said (why does copy/paste not work sometimes on this silly box?)
Trees live longer than "a couple of decades". I'm sure you know this, as do others, that many trees live hundreds of years, and some live thousands.
Also, dead trees can be used for other purposes, like building things keeping the carbon locked. This is one method being looked at to help offset the massive carbon release coming between now and the next ten years or so due to the millions of acres of forest in the Western US being ravaged by rice-sized beetles.
Besides, scientifically altered trees are nothing new, just like scientifically altered dogs are nothing new. People have been hybridizing trees (and most plants) for a long time just like they've been doing selective breeding with dogs to get the desired characteristics. There are a lot of very smart people making new trees. These trees have superior characteristics to those already found in nature. They grow faster, live longer, get bigger, and look better.
If you're telling me that this isn't an avenue worth considering, I think you might be high on another plant. Trees are something we use already, and replacing the crappy old Elm or Ash trees (among many others) with new hybrids that are more resistant to disease and pests is a good thing to do.
Watch a documentary or two. Animals raised in an environment where they aren't exposed to typical bugs don't develop the same strong immune system as animals exposed to these things since birth. Imagine you were born in a box and lived your whole life in that box. After some time your immune system would become suppressed and you would need this stuff to survive.
This reminds me of a study I once read about (I think it was done in Germany) where they looked at the immune systems of children raised on farms and were regularly exposed to livestock. They compared this to the immune systems of children raised in an urban setting and found that kids who grow up with regular exposure to animals had a stronger immune system. Same concept.
I like to eat animals, but it is troubling to know the truth about how they are raised. I feel fortunate to live in a region where it is possible to raise animals in a less manufactured way.
they keep sticking to old formulae and pump out crap like Madden NFL games year after year to avert "risk".
I pretty much disagree with this, but solely based on the Madden series.
I have always been a fan of football games. 1st and 10 at the arcade was awesome, then there was Tecmo and the Front Page Sports series, then Madden decided it was the king.
Now, it has been a few season since I've played Madden, as PC gamers are no longer a demographic, but what annoyed me for the years after Madden 2000 was that they kept ADDING crap to the game that made it a worse game. I liked the additions of adding the pre-snap features, but they started getting so convoluted and you were no longer playing FOOTBALL.
With a few exceptions for minor rule changes and rosters, the game doesn't change. It's still blocking and tackling.
I think it's fairly obvious that one of the places where a tablet can shine is specifically for device controller UI applications. It's compact and all one has to do to make it control a device is to stick a mini-webserver on it, after which your UI can be simple static webpages plus hardware control/monitor scripts. That's why I bought one (MID-006) directly from China a couple of months ago, to enable me to experiment in this area. Other places where it makes sense is as an e-reader and casual websurfing.
The first thing I thought was the fact that it brings a simple UI to printers with web access and all that jazz. Maybe this means in a few years I won't have to listen to people complain about not being able to print something. The way we print stuff is still pretty archaic, well, in the sense that it often requires further reading to do it right.
Sure it works, and in fact does so for a bunch of people. That's why there is truth to security through obscurity, because if someone doesn't know about your system and isn't interested in targeting it, you can keep out all the script kiddies by boilerplating security.
Remember, it isn't necessarily about securing the information absolutely, it's about taking realistic measures to adopt a policy that works and provides an acceptable amount of risk.
Think of a small copy-print shop, for example. Customers might come in and use computers to run prints of some document that contains sensitive information (or whatever). They open it off their thumb drive or email or something, and then print off a dozen copies. Is the shop owner going to go to the trouble of making sure all the customer computer's hard drives don't contain forensically traceable remnants of that document? Of course not, this is a highly unlikely scenario.
Of course, running a system with default passwords is kind of silly in the type of environment described in TFA.
And people wonder why the NSA and is trying to promote education.
Of course, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Sure, they're a bureaucracy, and therefore inefficient (or whatever you want to call it). If they do nothing, then it's their fault for not doing anything. If they do something, they get ridiculed for doing it wrong (even if it's an improvement).
We all know there is an insane amount of holes in all sorts of industries, yet it hardly appears as what is currently being done is enough. People tend to be all hat and no cattle. It's nice to walk around and talk about how bad the problem is, but it's better to actually do something about it.
I thought they might actually talk about something meaningful. With businesses using facebook and its ilk for conducting business, I thought TFA might talk about how small businesses are using it incorrectly and turning off customers or something.
It seems a lot more pertinent, as people tend to think that it is either a great tool for communication, both positive AND negative.
It looks like we're starting to see (to a greater degree) new phones coming out too quickly to match the market.
I've no idea about statistics, but I imagine that most people get a discount on their phone by signing up for two years. If new and better phones are coming out every six months, this is going to cause a problem under the current plans. It wasn't as bad with PCs and laptops, simply because people aren't locked into using them for the duration of a contract. I think it's great that my snazzy new phone is going to be less than that only a few months after I bought it, but I'm not even going to consider any kind of upgrade until my contract allows me to.
This. While I played in little league and high school, I was always capable of switch hitting (I'm right handed) but my coaches would never allow me to hit lefty. In an all-star game once, I decided to bat lefty against a right-handed pitcher I knew well (I always had trouble with his curve). I went down 0-2 and when my coach told me to switch back, I shook him off and then laid down the most beautiful drag bunt possible (I then stole 2nd and 3rd and scored on a sac fly, haha!)
My eyesight has always been around 20-15. I haven't played ball in years, but the last time I went to the batting cages, I stepped in to the 80 mph cage and was doing alright hitting righty, but was a little disappointed. I switch around to lefty and was hammering every pitch because of my right-eye dominance.
Although, another explanation for righties hitting well from the left side is that their right arms are generally stronger. This means their lead arm is helping to get the bat through the contact zone quicker and more powerfully.
Sure, that's great and all, for me and you, but we're talking about typical users. This, while relatively simple, is out of the question for most people.
What I'm inferring here is that you believe users simply don't care what OS they run. I agree, to a point. They care as much as it will be able to run things properly and without issue. The malware, well that's surely a point in Ubuntu's favor, for now. But what about the users that want to run some kind of specific app? Sure, there are often Linux replacements for things, but not everything is accessible from Ubuntu's repository. This leads to downloading arcane file types that need to be installed by typing a cryptic command into a terminal. Your typical home user is simply not going to do this, period. It's like a jump back to... heck, I dunno, it's more arcane than installing DOS programs (minus the TSR memory management thing).
Don't get me wrong, I run 10.04 netbook edition on my Eee, and I like it for the most part, but even as a savvy user, I have many more issues with it than I do with Windows. Flash pages crash more than occasionally, WiFi is still kind of weird, Most of the games won't even fit on the screen (seriously, why bother releasing a netbook edition with games if they aren't able to fit on a netbook screen?). Ubuntu has a very apparent lack of polish, and this is what will turn most users off.
today i'm paying $120 a month for cable TV, digital unlimited phone over my cable, a DVR and the lowest level of broadband from time warner which averages out to 5mbps on average.
Think about this statement.
Ten years ago, what did you expect to do with your internet connection? Web, email, maybe some downloads, possibly voice. Now look at what you can do with it today. It is an all encompassing entertainment and communication medium. Regardless of what the price as done in the last decade, you are getting WAY MORE VALUE out of that connection than before. Personally, I'm willing to pay $80/mo for my cell phone service simply because I can carry internet around with me. This is totally worth it, as I can still attend school while on vacation or whatever.
Comparing services now to services then is not accurate. They are simply not the same services.
I think it's too late. It's already a race to the top of the corporate food chain.
Any corporate entity with enough money will start to diversify into other areas, that's a given. What is happening, though, is that these giants get bigger and more diverse. Imagine what we might see in 50 years. No wonder LUH and THX stopped taking sedation.
Now, I know this isn't the same deal, but it sure makes the concept proposed in the article a much more attractive idea for subdivisions and local neighborhoods. I know that my apartment management company would probably go for this as soon as it became available. It makes our building more attractive to renters, and with around 30 units, it means they can either tack on the extra $10-15/mo to rent or simply include it as a perk for living there. Granted, I would still prefer to have my own personal connection, but this could provide (at least for me) a reliable backup in case something happens to my connection.
Please don't take this as definitive advice if you're thinking of doing the same. Depending on where you live and how your local flora is adapted, urine may in fact kill everything you plant. This is why you can purchase those dietary supplements for pets so that their urine doesn't leave dead spots all over your garden (which kind of works, but not really, at least from what I've seen).
I have told this to people and they often think it's gross. I find it interesting.
While I was living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I would regularly pee outside. I had a specific spot that was on the side of a big mound of some kind of sandstone (I'm not a geologist, don't know what it was).
After awhile, I noticed that my spot has started to grow some kind of green material, I'm not sure if it was some kind of algae, lichen, or what, but it was definitely there. I've always been curious about this, science-wise.
I take it at face value because I believe it as much as it is words coming from Jobs' mouth. This is to say, I don't believe it much at all. In all fairness to him, I don't believe much of what is said by any corporate honchos.
Face value, the apparent worth as opposed to the real worth.
Slashdot Mirror
there's an app for that.
So, in fact, there really is NO reason to make us turn our cell phones off during takeoff and landing? I thought so.
"Our results indicate that forest soils such as these will not significantly mitigate anthropogenic C inputs to the atmosphere. The organic matter pools receiving large annual C inputs have short mean residence times, while those with slow turnover rates receive small annual inputs."
This study was done on loblolly pines in the South. You have to keep something in mind here, this study is not going to be accurate when you look at forests in more arid climates such as the West. The biomass simply isn't going to decay as quickly in drier climates.
The second study you cited seems to be based on deciduous forests, specifically sweetgums. Again, not relevant to the spruce, fir, pine forests of the West.
Show me a similar study with similar results on arid climate evergreens like bristlecones and pinons. The lodgepole pines and, to a lesser extent, ponderosa pines that are being decimated by pine beetle are expected to have a "shelf-life" of 7-10 years after death.
Another consideration is that the fallen needles and decayed wood helps promote fertile soil for the plants to continue on in subsequent generations. So while that aspect of the biomass does decay more quickly, it is also reabsorbed back into new growth more quickly.
stuff he said (why does copy/paste not work sometimes on this silly box?)
Trees live longer than "a couple of decades". I'm sure you know this, as do others, that many trees live hundreds of years, and some live thousands.
Also, dead trees can be used for other purposes, like building things keeping the carbon locked. This is one method being looked at to help offset the massive carbon release coming between now and the next ten years or so due to the millions of acres of forest in the Western US being ravaged by rice-sized beetles.
Besides, scientifically altered trees are nothing new, just like scientifically altered dogs are nothing new. People have been hybridizing trees (and most plants) for a long time just like they've been doing selective breeding with dogs to get the desired characteristics. There are a lot of very smart people making new trees. These trees have superior characteristics to those already found in nature. They grow faster, live longer, get bigger, and look better.
If you're telling me that this isn't an avenue worth considering, I think you might be high on another plant. Trees are something we use already, and replacing the crappy old Elm or Ash trees (among many others) with new hybrids that are more resistant to disease and pests is a good thing to do.
Geez, what is this kind of garbage TFA is? Terrible.
No wonder people don't RTFA most of the time, it's crap like this and the comments are more interesting to read.
Watch a documentary or two. Animals raised in an environment where they aren't exposed to typical bugs don't develop the same strong immune system as animals exposed to these things since birth. Imagine you were born in a box and lived your whole life in that box. After some time your immune system would become suppressed and you would need this stuff to survive.
This reminds me of a study I once read about (I think it was done in Germany) where they looked at the immune systems of children raised on farms and were regularly exposed to livestock. They compared this to the immune systems of children raised in an urban setting and found that kids who grow up with regular exposure to animals had a stronger immune system. Same concept.
I like to eat animals, but it is troubling to know the truth about how they are raised. I feel fortunate to live in a region where it is possible to raise animals in a less manufactured way.
they keep sticking to old formulae and pump out crap like Madden NFL games year after year to avert "risk".
I pretty much disagree with this, but solely based on the Madden series.
I have always been a fan of football games. 1st and 10 at the arcade was awesome, then there was Tecmo and the Front Page Sports series, then Madden decided it was the king.
Now, it has been a few season since I've played Madden, as PC gamers are no longer a demographic, but what annoyed me for the years after Madden 2000 was that they kept ADDING crap to the game that made it a worse game. I liked the additions of adding the pre-snap features, but they started getting so convoluted and you were no longer playing FOOTBALL.
With a few exceptions for minor rule changes and rosters, the game doesn't change. It's still blocking and tackling.
That's funny. You explained exactly how I felt about FF7. Haven't played anything after it, but I imagine it was the same formula.
Granted, the series was pretty formulaic before FF7, it just seemed that with FF7 the story became primary and the gameplay came second.
I think it's fairly obvious that one of the places where a tablet can shine is specifically for device controller UI applications. It's compact and all one has to do to make it control a device is to stick a mini-webserver on it, after which your UI can be simple static webpages plus hardware control/monitor scripts. That's why I bought one (MID-006) directly from China a couple of months ago, to enable me to experiment in this area. Other places where it makes sense is as an e-reader and casual websurfing.
The first thing I thought was the fact that it brings a simple UI to printers with web access and all that jazz. Maybe this means in a few years I won't have to listen to people complain about not being able to print something. The way we print stuff is still pretty archaic, well, in the sense that it often requires further reading to do it right.
Sadly it also never works.
Sure it works, and in fact does so for a bunch of people. That's why there is truth to security through obscurity, because if someone doesn't know about your system and isn't interested in targeting it, you can keep out all the script kiddies by boilerplating security.
Remember, it isn't necessarily about securing the information absolutely, it's about taking realistic measures to adopt a policy that works and provides an acceptable amount of risk.
Think of a small copy-print shop, for example. Customers might come in and use computers to run prints of some document that contains sensitive information (or whatever). They open it off their thumb drive or email or something, and then print off a dozen copies. Is the shop owner going to go to the trouble of making sure all the customer computer's hard drives don't contain forensically traceable remnants of that document? Of course not, this is a highly unlikely scenario.
Of course, running a system with default passwords is kind of silly in the type of environment described in TFA.
And people wonder why the NSA and is trying to promote education.
Of course, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Sure, they're a bureaucracy, and therefore inefficient (or whatever you want to call it). If they do nothing, then it's their fault for not doing anything. If they do something, they get ridiculed for doing it wrong (even if it's an improvement).
We all know there is an insane amount of holes in all sorts of industries, yet it hardly appears as what is currently being done is enough. People tend to be all hat and no cattle. It's nice to walk around and talk about how bad the problem is, but it's better to actually do something about it.
I thought they might actually talk about something meaningful. With businesses using facebook and its ilk for conducting business, I thought TFA might talk about how small businesses are using it incorrectly and turning off customers or something.
It seems a lot more pertinent, as people tend to think that it is either a great tool for communication, both positive AND negative.
Mod him up. This is good stuff.
It looks like we're starting to see (to a greater degree) new phones coming out too quickly to match the market.
I've no idea about statistics, but I imagine that most people get a discount on their phone by signing up for two years. If new and better phones are coming out every six months, this is going to cause a problem under the current plans. It wasn't as bad with PCs and laptops, simply because people aren't locked into using them for the duration of a contract. I think it's great that my snazzy new phone is going to be less than that only a few months after I bought it, but I'm not even going to consider any kind of upgrade until my contract allows me to.
This. While I played in little league and high school, I was always capable of switch hitting (I'm right handed) but my coaches would never allow me to hit lefty. In an all-star game once, I decided to bat lefty against a right-handed pitcher I knew well (I always had trouble with his curve). I went down 0-2 and when my coach told me to switch back, I shook him off and then laid down the most beautiful drag bunt possible (I then stole 2nd and 3rd and scored on a sac fly, haha!)
My eyesight has always been around 20-15. I haven't played ball in years, but the last time I went to the batting cages, I stepped in to the 80 mph cage and was doing alright hitting righty, but was a little disappointed. I switch around to lefty and was hammering every pitch because of my right-eye dominance.
Although, another explanation for righties hitting well from the left side is that their right arms are generally stronger. This means their lead arm is helping to get the bat through the contact zone quicker and more powerfully.
Sure, that's great and all, for me and you, but we're talking about typical users. This, while relatively simple, is out of the question for most people.
I have a very large family
I suppose this is typical.
What I'm inferring here is that you believe users simply don't care what OS they run. I agree, to a point. They care as much as it will be able to run things properly and without issue. The malware, well that's surely a point in Ubuntu's favor, for now. But what about the users that want to run some kind of specific app? Sure, there are often Linux replacements for things, but not everything is accessible from Ubuntu's repository. This leads to downloading arcane file types that need to be installed by typing a cryptic command into a terminal. Your typical home user is simply not going to do this, period. It's like a jump back to... heck, I dunno, it's more arcane than installing DOS programs (minus the TSR memory management thing).
Don't get me wrong, I run 10.04 netbook edition on my Eee, and I like it for the most part, but even as a savvy user, I have many more issues with it than I do with Windows. Flash pages crash more than occasionally, WiFi is still kind of weird, Most of the games won't even fit on the screen (seriously, why bother releasing a netbook edition with games if they aren't able to fit on a netbook screen?). Ubuntu has a very apparent lack of polish, and this is what will turn most users off.
today i'm paying $120 a month for cable TV, digital unlimited phone over my cable, a DVR and the lowest level of broadband from time warner which averages out to 5mbps on average.
Think about this statement.
Ten years ago, what did you expect to do with your internet connection? Web, email, maybe some downloads, possibly voice. Now look at what you can do with it today. It is an all encompassing entertainment and communication medium. Regardless of what the price as done in the last decade, you are getting WAY MORE VALUE out of that connection than before. Personally, I'm willing to pay $80/mo for my cell phone service simply because I can carry internet around with me. This is totally worth it, as I can still attend school while on vacation or whatever.
Comparing services now to services then is not accurate. They are simply not the same services.
I think it's too late. It's already a race to the top of the corporate food chain.
Any corporate entity with enough money will start to diversify into other areas, that's a given. What is happening, though, is that these giants get bigger and more diverse. Imagine what we might see in 50 years. No wonder LUH and THX stopped taking sedation.
Now, I know this isn't the same deal, but it sure makes the concept proposed in the article a much more attractive idea for subdivisions and local neighborhoods. I know that my apartment management company would probably go for this as soon as it became available. It makes our building more attractive to renters, and with around 30 units, it means they can either tack on the extra $10-15/mo to rent or simply include it as a perk for living there. Granted, I would still prefer to have my own personal connection, but this could provide (at least for me) a reliable backup in case something happens to my connection.
Please don't take this as definitive advice if you're thinking of doing the same. Depending on where you live and how your local flora is adapted, urine may in fact kill everything you plant. This is why you can purchase those dietary supplements for pets so that their urine doesn't leave dead spots all over your garden (which kind of works, but not really, at least from what I've seen).
I have told this to people and they often think it's gross. I find it interesting.
While I was living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I would regularly pee outside. I had a specific spot that was on the side of a big mound of some kind of sandstone (I'm not a geologist, don't know what it was).
After awhile, I noticed that my spot has started to grow some kind of green material, I'm not sure if it was some kind of algae, lichen, or what, but it was definitely there. I've always been curious about this, science-wise.
Sounds to me like a good way to get your battleship sunk by an enemy that had access to lightbulbs.
One of us is confused. I am not confused.
I take it at face value because I believe it as much as it is words coming from Jobs' mouth. This is to say, I don't believe it much at all. In all fairness to him, I don't believe much of what is said by any corporate honchos.
Face value, the apparent worth as opposed to the real worth.
The SprintTV thing won't work over wifi. It pops up a thing that says so. I've never tried using it really, just the once, so I don't even care.
Maybe this is "reason" stuff won't work over wifi, because they don't want it to. Bah, whatever. Welcome to 2010. Marketing 1 - Engineering 0