Actually no, I haven't read him. That was just a back of the envelope thing. I have more than a passing interest in farming and it bothers me when people describe overpopulation as the cause of food shortages.
That's a little bit shortsighted. Even if it wouldn't have disastrous effects on human society (like the immortals becoming so rich and powerful that the mortals are mere slaves), it would put evolution of mankind to a stop. [...]
Hey, wait a minute. Aren't corporations immortal?
Have they become so rich and powerful that mortals are mere slaves?
People's reactions are all over the map when you look at death and life extension. Socially, we are being conditioned to emphasize quality of life over duration. I disagree with that philosophy, but that is a conversation for another day.
The Methuselah project is strongly anti-quack. The chap running the show has had to work very hard to open the conversation. Said another way, he has spent the last 10 years dragging "real science" kicking and screaming into recognizing that increasing a human lifespan is a worthwhile task. You couldn't tell it from a photograph, but the chap is quite smart.
The immortality institute I haven't gotten a real feel for. I'm familiar with them from their support of various Cryonics groups.
I am registered to be a future resident at the Cryonics institute. The arguments for and against the future viability of Cryonics are inconclusive, but the alternative (decomposition) was enough to convince me.
In the end it really comes down to outlook. I, for one, relish life and will cling to it as long as my bacon-laced arteries will allow.
Last I checked, we're consuming resources faster then we're replenishing them. Even if we went back to an extremely efficient hunter/gatherer life style and give up on cities and technology, we still wouldn't have enough land to support our current population.
This assertion doesn't pass a sniff test.
First, a hunter gatherer lifestyle is not an efficient way to gather food. Massive amounts of energy are expended in searching for small returns.
Second, the land surface area of the earth is over 14 trillion hectares. Dividing that by 7 billion people gives you 2 hectares per person. If you keep the sustainable parts of modern agriculture you can pull between 2 and 6 million calories per hectare without any dead dinosaur inputs. At 750 thousand calories per person/year, you could feed the earth on 875 million to 2.4 billion hectares. In concrete terms, that is a land mass between the size of India and China.
So I'll counter your unsupported assertion with one of my own.
Food shortages and hunger are actually political problems disguised as resource allocation problems.
But do they really have to shred all the books just to scan them?
No. A book scanning machine is capable of scanning a book non-destructively. My unsubstantiated guess is that they are less harmful to the book than your average reader.
You can build one if you'd like. Instructable The automated page turners on the commercial models are awesome. Youtube video
See also: Seed Savers Exchange At its core, SSE is a centralized tracker for gardeners for peer to peer seed exchange. That said, SSE also sells and distributes a subset of their seed varieties to keep the lights on and encourage heirloom planting. They have an account at the Norway seed bank, and use it for offsite backups of rare seedstock. This is a worst-case scenario backup for cataclysmic events like nuclear war or insane seed-eating fungii.
The latter solution is well in the works by hundreds of beekeepers around the country. I bought my bees from a chap that lost more than 90% of his hives to Varroa mites and small hive beetles. He didn't treat them with antibiotics or antifungals, but instead kept the remaining colonies and split them to make new hives. Now we have resistant strains of survivor bees that work well for our environment and the threats within it.
For beef to be certifiably organic, its mother must have been fed organic feed during the last trimester, no antibiotics are permitted in feed or in therapeutic doses, you can't feed it plastic/urea/manure or litter, and it must be traceable from birth to slaughter.
You CAN raise it in a confined feeding operation and you CAN feed it primarily a corn based diet.
Organic certification costs depend on your location, size, and certifier./me wants to start a grass fed beef herd multi-species rotationally grazed with other livestock*. I have $1,000 budgeted annually to cover the cost of certification, and my state (TN) has cost share programs that will cover half of it.
This is correct -- in Formula 1, the pinnacle of open-wheel auto racing, you are limited to 8 engines per driver per season. This has been in place since the 2009 season.
Was this an attempt to control the cost of racing? The staffing alone must cost a bajazillion dollars on a competitive team, does limiting the engine count make a serious difference?
Perhaps in high school science this is correct, but the real world is significantly more complex than that model allows. The size of a tire's contact patch has a significant effect in skidpad testing and a corresponding negative effect on fuel economy.
I feel that diving a rebreather is safer than open circuit for the same dive and gas profiles. Yes, a rebreather can encourage a diver to reach beyond their limits. Yes, they are more technically complex than open circuit. Even with those caveats it is very comforting to have hours of air to sort out a problem, instead of minutes.
(I dive wrecks, my caves are made of steel.)(Don't listen to me, I'm crazy. I dive homebuilt kit.)
Job titles are fatally flawed by inconsistent expectation and application. That said, they ARE used to form opinions about one's work history in the thirty seconds it takes to review a resume.
"swarms of angry bees" are a fictional movie construct, much like the fabled "Unix system" of Jurassic park.
A swarm of bees is incredibly tame. Here is an example of a package, an artificial swarm, being installed in a hive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek7dDtZ0lK8 Note the "bang the box of bees" step at 4:00.
If you are more than 10 feet from a hive you'll be hard pressed to get stung other than stepping on a forager.
Thoughts: 1. The adage that aerial forces cannot take or hold terrain remains true. 2. Higher resolution cameras or operating at closer range could have changed the outcome of this.
This rule was created after a chap managed to find a way to hot-piggyback another chip on one of the the proms in a machine, causing it to load his software. He'd then pull the piggybacked hardware leaving a machine with no evidence of tampering other than the code in RAM. He would then set a machine to Jackpot, walk away, and an accomplice come behind and win it all.
His name was Dennis Nikrasch. There is a CourtTv Masterminds episode about him.
Excluding PVP games, the house is honest. They have the advantage and that should be a known and accepted fact. Slot machines are on a fixed payout schedule, and the casino will tell you what their target Payout % is if you ask.... This is why I play poker.
When the CATS prize was open, a balloon launched rocket idea was floated, but died after difficulties during the initial launch. To my untrained eye, I think the idea has merit. This is within the range of an amateur scientist and has the bonus cool factors for fire, explosion, and space travel.
I have the displeasure of working with Great Plains regularly, and this isn't surprising at all.
A couple of points for the panic stricken:
1. Great Plains uses SQL logins and it hashes the passwords of users created from within GP. Since 9.0, it salts this hash using the sql server name. A GP user other than sa can NOT login to SQL Enterprise Manager with their GP credentials. That encryption has NOT been broken (yet). (That WOULD be a real problem.)
2. The ability to decrypt the System password is useless if you can't query the system password from the database. If your users have the ability to query any table in the database directly, then you have a bigger problem than weak encryption.
3. GP overlays role and task based security on top of the SQL login mechanism. Having the decrypted System Password is less useful if your application user doesn't have the ability to reach the User Setup or Security Options menus. These menus should be turned off for everyone not in the GP PowerUser role.
Is this great for GP? No. Neither is it the harbinger of the apocalypse.
MythTv is NOT that hard to configure. Getting the hardware working properly is.
I spent three months dinking around trying to make a name brand and a white box PVR-250 work together in the same system. When I finally gave up and bought two PC HDTV 5500 vendor supported on linux cards then it "just worked".
Several countries have Anti-Satellite (ASAT) weapons available or in development. Satellites are relatively fragile and conventional explosive should be effective. "Nuking" is not required. The debris field would be an issue.
Perhaps it would be possible to destroy or incapacitate the transmitter antenna with an aircraft mounted laser? Aiming it would be non-trivial. On the plus side, we could make popcorn.
Insert arbitrary joke about sharks and lasers here.
Scientific evidence is not evaluated on reasonable doubt, but by the Daubert standard. Part of this includes "general acceptance by the scientific community". IMHO and IANAL, this is too new to be generally accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no, I haven't read him. That was just a back of the envelope thing. I have more than a passing interest in farming and it bothers me when people describe overpopulation as the cause of food shortages.
Hey, wait a minute. Aren't corporations immortal?
Have they become so rich and powerful that mortals are mere slaves?
:(
People's reactions are all over the map when you look at death and life extension. Socially, we are being conditioned to emphasize quality of life over duration. I disagree with that philosophy, but that is a conversation for another day.
The Methuselah project is strongly anti-quack. The chap running the show has had to work very hard to open the conversation. Said another way, he has spent the last 10 years dragging "real science" kicking and screaming into recognizing that increasing a human lifespan is a worthwhile task. You couldn't tell it from a photograph, but the chap is quite smart.
The immortality institute I haven't gotten a real feel for. I'm familiar with them from their support of various Cryonics groups.
I am registered to be a future resident at the Cryonics institute. The arguments for and against the future viability of Cryonics are inconclusive, but the alternative (decomposition) was enough to convince me.
In the end it really comes down to outlook. I, for one, relish life and will cling to it as long as my bacon-laced arteries will allow.
This assertion doesn't pass a sniff test.
First, a hunter gatherer lifestyle is not an efficient way to gather food. Massive amounts of energy are expended in searching for small returns.
Second, the land surface area of the earth is over 14 trillion hectares. Dividing that by 7 billion people gives you 2 hectares per person. If you keep the sustainable parts of modern agriculture you can pull between 2 and 6 million calories per hectare without any dead dinosaur inputs. At 750 thousand calories per person/year, you could feed the earth on 875 million to 2.4 billion hectares. In concrete terms, that is a land mass between the size of India and China.
So I'll counter your unsupported assertion with one of my own.
Food shortages and hunger are actually political problems disguised as resource allocation problems.
You'll catch a lot of flack for wanting to live a very very long time. Ignore it. There are others out there too.
You might be interested in the immortality institute and the Methuselah project. Links gratuitously provided...
http://www.imminst.org/
http://www.mprize.org/
Finally, if the current pace of scientific development isn't quite fast enough:
http://www.cryonics.org/
In my humble opinion, dying is severely overrated and should be put off for a rainy day in the far far future.
For Readability, the readability widget is great. For sensibility, sorry mate. They don't make journalists like that any more.
But do they really have to shred all the books just to scan them?
No. A book scanning machine is capable of scanning a book non-destructively. My unsubstantiated guess is that they are less harmful to the book than your average reader.
You can build one if you'd like. Instructable The automated page turners on the commercial models are awesome. Youtube video
See also: Seed Savers Exchange At its core, SSE is a centralized tracker for gardeners for peer to peer seed exchange. That said, SSE also sells and distributes a subset of their seed varieties to keep the lights on and encourage heirloom planting. They have an account at the Norway seed bank, and use it for offsite backups of rare seedstock. This is a worst-case scenario backup for cataclysmic events like nuclear war or insane seed-eating fungii.
The latter solution is well in the works by hundreds of beekeepers around the country. I bought my bees from a chap that lost more than 90% of his hives to Varroa mites and small hive beetles. He didn't treat them with antibiotics or antifungals, but instead kept the remaining colonies and split them to make new hives. Now we have resistant strains of survivor bees that work well for our environment and the threats within it.
Evolution rocks!
-Ellie
For beef to be certifiably organic, its mother must have been fed organic feed during the last trimester, no antibiotics are permitted in feed or in therapeutic doses, you can't feed it plastic/urea/manure or litter, and it must be traceable from birth to slaughter.
You CAN raise it in a confined feeding operation and you CAN feed it primarily a corn based diet.
Organic certification costs depend on your location, size, and certifier. /me wants to start a grass fed beef herd multi-species rotationally grazed with other livestock*. I have $1,000 budgeted annually to cover the cost of certification, and my state (TN) has cost share programs that will cover half of it.
This is correct -- in Formula 1, the pinnacle of open-wheel auto racing, you are limited to 8 engines per driver per season. This has been in place since the 2009 season.
Was this an attempt to control the cost of racing? The staffing alone must cost a bajazillion dollars on a competitive team, does limiting the engine count make a serious difference?
Perhaps in high school science this is correct, but the real world is significantly more complex than that model allows. The size of a tire's contact patch has a significant effect in skidpad testing and a corresponding negative effect on fuel economy.
Displays PDFs?
Less than $50?
Buy.
I feel that diving a rebreather is safer than open circuit for the same dive and gas profiles. Yes, a rebreather can encourage a diver to reach beyond their limits. Yes, they are more technically complex than open circuit. Even with those caveats it is very comforting to have hours of air to sort out a problem, instead of minutes.
(I dive wrecks, my caves are made of steel.)(Don't listen to me, I'm crazy. I dive homebuilt kit.)
error.
Job titles are fatally flawed by inconsistent expectation and application. That said, they ARE used to form opinions about one's work history in the thirty seconds it takes to review a resume.
Are you certain? I've seen similar tearaway connectors on deep fryers.
"swarms of angry bees" are a fictional movie construct, much like the fabled "Unix system" of Jurassic park.
A swarm of bees is incredibly tame. Here is an example of a package, an artificial swarm, being installed in a hive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek7dDtZ0lK8
Note the "bang the box of bees" step at 4:00.
If you are more than 10 feet from a hive you'll be hard pressed to get stung other than stepping on a forager.
I watched the full video.
Thoughts:
1. The adage that aerial forces cannot take or hold terrain remains true.
2. Higher resolution cameras or operating at closer range could have changed the outcome of this.
This rule was created after a chap managed to find a way to hot-piggyback another chip on one of the the proms in a machine, causing it to load his software. He'd then pull the piggybacked hardware leaving a machine with no evidence of tampering other than the code in RAM. He would then set a machine to Jackpot, walk away, and an accomplice come behind and win it all.
His name was Dennis Nikrasch. There is a CourtTv Masterminds episode about him.
Excluding PVP games, the house is honest. They have the advantage and that should be a known and accepted fact. Slot machines are on a fixed payout schedule, and the casino will tell you what their target Payout % is if you ask. ... This is why I play poker.
IANAMunitionsExpert, but this looks like a small ground based cluster bomb, not an RPG.
I second Model Rocketry.
When the CATS prize was open, a balloon launched rocket idea was floated, but died after difficulties during the initial launch. To my untrained eye, I think the idea has merit. This is within the range of an amateur scientist and has the bonus cool factors for fire, explosion, and space travel.
I have the displeasure of working with Great Plains regularly, and this isn't surprising at all.
A couple of points for the panic stricken:
1. Great Plains uses SQL logins and it hashes the passwords of users created from within GP. Since 9.0, it salts this hash using the sql server name. A GP user other than sa can NOT login to SQL Enterprise Manager with their GP credentials. That encryption has NOT been broken (yet). (That WOULD be a real problem.)
2. The ability to decrypt the System password is useless if you can't query the system password from the database. If your users have the ability to query any table in the database directly, then you have a bigger problem than weak encryption.
3. GP overlays role and task based security on top of the SQL login mechanism. Having the decrypted System Password is less useful if your application user doesn't have the ability to reach the User Setup or Security Options menus. These menus should be turned off for everyone not in the GP PowerUser role.
Is this great for GP? No. Neither is it the harbinger of the apocalypse.
-ellie
Mod Parent Up.
MythTv is NOT that hard to configure. Getting the hardware working properly is.
I spent three months dinking around trying to make a name brand and a white box PVR-250 work together in the same system. When I finally gave up and bought two PC HDTV 5500 vendor supported on linux cards then it "just worked".
Several countries have Anti-Satellite (ASAT) weapons available or in development. Satellites are relatively fragile and conventional explosive should be effective. "Nuking" is not required. The debris field would be an issue.
Perhaps it would be possible to destroy or incapacitate the transmitter antenna with an aircraft mounted laser? Aiming it would be non-trivial. On the plus side, we could make popcorn.
Insert arbitrary joke about sharks and lasers here.
Scientific evidence is not evaluated on reasonable doubt, but by the Daubert standard. Part of this includes "general acceptance by the scientific community". IMHO and IANAL, this is too new to be generally accepted.
:D
Quick, everyone go read the Truth Machine.