What about other small, bright, and dense objects?
A white dwarf, for instance?
You also discount the potential for exotic photosynthetic life around the brown dwarves. For instance, here on earth normal green photosynthetic plants can absorb multiple photons of red freq light and combine the energy from them with some clever quantum mechanics to have enough energy to push a high energy electron into a chemical bond site.
It doesn't seem inconcievable that there could be very slow respiration organisms that have very large "leaves", and which collect near IR photons en mass. If the photon flux overall is high enough, they would gather enough photonic energy from the brown star to make chemical energy sources. (Granted, this would have to be near IR, not true IR, because sufficiently high real IR flux would toast the surface like a heat lamp. Water is also strongly opaque to IR and nIR light, so a water rich atmosphere would scatter it pretty heavily.)
A large world, with a reasonably "bright" brown star emitting lots of red and nIR light, and just enough gravitational tug, and you have the potential for some interesting surface life.
The biggest issue with chemical based fert is that it does not replenish organic sponge in the soil, which is required by soil bacteria. "Organic sponge" is essentially finely shredded cellulose that holds moisture, acts as a trap to retain water soluble minerals and nutrients, and as a feedstock for soil bacteria.
Ammonia based fertilizer contains very little carbon. So little in fact that the normal metabolic activities of soil bacteria cause net depletion of the organic sponge over time when it is used aggressively, like it is with industrial farming.
Ground up poop juice also contains chemically etched cellulose fibers, especially if cowpoop is used. This actively adds organic sponge to offset natural depletion.
This has several noteworthy effects in soil:
1) it provides a substrate in the soil for beneficial soil bacteria to live on.
2) it helps the soil to retain water more efficiently, reducing the need for irrigation.
3) it soaks in and holds soluble nutrients, reducing the amount of these substances (nitrate, phosphate, mineral salts such as carbonates and the like) that get washed away in runoff.
When you examine the amount of nitrogen added to sponge depleted soil using "conventional" practices against the total amount added using organic practices, you will find that the organic practice applies considerably less, but uses it more efficiently. This is due to the organic sponge.
In addition to the efficiency reductions associated with heavy industrial soil nitration, there are serious effects from the runoff that increases as the soil carbon decreases. (This creates a feedback loop where more and more industrial fertilizer is required to keep growing plants, most of which simply washes away.)
Many of the problems associated with artificial fertilizers could be resolved by blending the fertilizer with a sprayable organic fiber solution. (Make it goopy, and chellated in hydrated cellulose gel for instance.) This however will increase the unit price per litre, create controversy over "adding fillers", and a whole host of talking head nonsense concerning the simple fix.
What this article is saying, is that victor's decision to entangle his photons has a direct effect on the results that alice and bob get from their double blind measurements.
So, either there is retrograde communication on time's axis, or....
The decision that victor makes is predetermined, by the act of measurement undergone by alice and bob. (Meaning victor doesn't really have as much free will as he thinks he does.)
Proposed followup experiment:
Alice and bob examine their photons, tell each other, but not victor. Victor decides to entangle or not entangle. Examine new correlation.
This will test "does a correlation between alice and bob indicate that victor will entangle?".
If it does, you have a reasonably strong test case for many worlds.
IT does its end, marketing does its end. The result is a position and political stunt that attracts customers, and builds brand reputation.
The CIO =! IT infrastructure. He represents the guy at the board meeting who condenses hundreds of incident reports, purchase requisition forms, etc, into a 10 second soundbyte for the CEO and the other board members.
The cio is NOT fixing the damned laser printer for mabel in accounting. That's what bob is for.
The cio is who tells bob to make sure that chinese malware isn't running on mabel's cheap asian built multifunction fax/scanner/printer/copier. Bob is the one who actually does it.
In light of the increasing hacktivism, blackhat activities for purely financial reasons, and the negative press many corporations have been getting recently, it sounds like the CIO needs to get in touch with the director of marketing, and hatch a joint PR venture to scoop up customers burned by the competition's lax IT policies.
Eg, "did corporation X's shoddy security put your credit card through some crook's ATM? Here at corporation Y, we have proactively taken (enumerated technical steps) precautions and enacted aggressive protections to ensure that our customers are never put at risk, if we can at all prevent it. Our firm (big pr saber rattling shpeel)......(marketing shpeel about growth)......(blatant investor cuddling)...
Corporation Y, (company slogan)!"
That gives the CIO a hard datapoint about how his department is focused on the "business agenda" that the cocaine and sex addled CEO can understand.
You can still test for "sweet scent", and define "sweeter" objectively without humans these days.
Inside your nasal mucosa, there are olfactory nerve endings, covered in reactive receptor sites.
By either collecting some genuine receptors, or culturing the receptor complex on a substrate (such as a microchip), it is possible toe create an objectively repeatable aparatus that senses environmental molecules in exactly the same fashion as a human nose does.
By being able to examine receptor site binding/interaction with each target chemical, you can determine strength of interaction, duration of interaction, and percentage of site activation. This will give you many objective values for "sweetness."
This is similar to how artificial sweeteners are evaluated. Sweet sensing tastebuds react to hydroxyl groups on the target molecule. The more hydroxyl groups, and the better it docks in the receptor, the more intense the sensation of sweet. Sodium saccharine was designed specifically with this in mind, but it also binds with bitter receptors.
You don't need a blind human taste test. You can recreate the sensory organ, and get empirical data in a repeatable fashion. That is the definition of objective.
Seriously, while I love the idea, and really do wish them well, they are effectively just stinging a squad of ogres armed with flamethrowers.
The RSA, CIA, FBI, and DHS all have strongly vested interests in destroying private correspondence for anyone but themselves.
The MPAA, RIAA, and associated gaggle of goons act like they used a hornet's nest suppository at the mere mention that they are anything but "helpless victims" of intellectual property theft, and that the bad, bad, ISPs just wont beweeve dem! (While simultaneously arming a thermonuclear court case)
I don't see this startup ending well, for all the good it would bring to the world if they were.
I see them either being legally raped and blackballed by every major nation and media group, or becoming the victim of something akin to regulatory capture via last minute legislation if they somehow survive.
Have you ever tried doing this? I know I certainly have.
Applied Credit for a high SAT score, and high placements on an entry exam do *NOT* translate to removal of "required" courses at universities. At least, not the one I attended anyway. You are simply not getting out of public speaking, intro to psych, etc. You might be able to sneak out of algebra and straight to high level calculus, but guess what? You need so many seat-time credit hours to be awarded your degree. This means you will end up taking bulk filler classes to satisfy the degree requirements.
The educational system runs a good deal like a casino. They have carefully researched how to reliably milk students for their degrees, regardless of the initial state of knowledge and training of the student. Really, they should put an up-front pricetag on their degree programs, because that is really how it boils down in practice.
Gonna take those expensive credit requirements at some other college? Oh, what's that, the university you are trying to enter won't give you credit for those classes on your transcript? Oh, sucks to be you!
Planning an adult education on a budget is a lot like navigating a byzantine legal framework. Really, this is what guidance counsellors are supposed to help you with in theory, but the reality is that they try to guide you down standard pipelines that maximize university profits. Even if you ask for one, universities very rarely if ever will volunteer a list of transferrable/equivalent courses from other institutions. If you want to tailor a university degree on the cheap with transferred courses and testout credits, you have to dg into that mess of shit on your own, and hope they don't change their acceptance policies mid-degree.
Really, they *want* you in *their* lecture halls, paying *them* money for the priviledge, paying for a dormitory from *them*, and paying *them* for your parking tag. Sidestepping all that beurocracy by researching the system and exploiting equivlilencies with other, cheaper schools via state accredation status is seriously frowned on. In extreme cases, they will simply refuse to accept certain classes on your transcript, depsite normally accepting them.
The EU just want to be sure that the devices won't pick up any transmissions from the great old ones, what with the approach of may-eve and all.
Other little known tidbits: in addition to the cone shaped undulating turntables, and the chtulu antenna, the device has to withstand being in the same room with a drunken MP reading select passages from the necronomicon backwards, while rubbing on cats.
Oh, I agree. Their "think of all the money we will save by NOT PAYING PEOPLE by rushing development ahead 6 months! Uwee hee hee!" Antics are the biggest offender.
But our complacentness about just blithely accepting this as status quo is what prompts them to think they will get away with it.
Make that decision cost them money. Each and every time. It is the only way to reign in that madness.
That is why you post the reciept, and a short explanation why you bought it used.
There is a marketing saying: for every customer you satisfy, he tells 5 friends. For every customer you screw over, he tells 15.
The internet let's you show your displeasure, and the proof of the pudding to potentially millions.
There is no question about your legal purchase. There is no grounds to say you are a pirate. In fact, if you pay full price at gamestop for used, and post the reciept, the "you are a greedy cheepskate" argument is also shot down. They then have no choice but to accept the reason tendered. That reason will be different for each person. Share it.
If you can make the scaes fall from even a single 12 year old's eyes, it will have done its job.
For some reason, software companies feel that spaghetti wrapped in duct tape, (and in the case of game software), and that rough plots that are abrasive to the senses are "good enough", as long as they can "ship early!"
Nobody takes pride in their work or product anymore when it comes to software, except for independent hobby programmers.
It seems any time that *money!!* gets involved, quality slips, integrity dries up, and the bullshit gets deep. Really, it is just as much the public's insatiable desire for "WANT NAOW!" As it is the greed that feeds on it at fault.
We can't stop EA from being stupid assholes that ruin franchises and abuse studios. What we can do is control our side of the demand chain, and make their antics unprofitable.
The way to send EA the message is to buy their games used for 20$, and post pictures of the receipt on their forums as proof as part of the signature. If not their forum, any other forums you post at will do. Be sure the signature explains why you did this.
This is WORSE than not buying the game. Your making use of their support services actually COSTS them money, that will NEVER receive payment from you for. Hit them in the wallet, where it hurts the most.
The ask slashdot question was how to solve the soil fertility problem. Not how to solve human nature.
Humans fight each other over bullshit all the time. Catholics and protestants in ireland. Jews and arabs in the middle east. Vietnamese and laosians. On amd on and on.
I was asked how to solve the hunger. Creating world peace? Somebody else can solve that one.
Better is to provide them with food while they do the improvements. This way they don't become complacent and misuse chemical fertilizers as some kind of magic bullet.
Agreed that they need to eat now. Disagree that introducing them to liquid fertilizers that cause collateral soil damage is the best temporary solution.
The problem with quick easy fixes, is that people use them, then abuse them, and treat them like permanent ones.
We nerds in IT should be well aware of this by now. How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?
Same thing here. There is money to be made. LOTS of money to be made, by *NOT* properly improving the soil. Shafting starving vllagers for miracle grow while the soil's mineral content dries up, leaving them with soil that won't even grow weeds in the rainy season is *VERY* profitable.
That is why it must be avoided, and done right, if you really want the african people to not suffer.
Newsflash. Africa is suffering desertification, and the grasslands are mostly deep sand.
Here is what africa needs to do:
Healthy, fertile arable soil is about 50 parts clay, 20 parts sand, and 30 parts organic sponge. The types of clay in the 50% clay figure are important.
Parts of africa are loaded with clay and organic sponge. Parts of africa are loaded with sand.
Get the african nations to stop fighting each other over tarot roots, and get them to ship dirt to each other.
We have the technology to do this. It isn't hard. The benefits greatly outweigh the costs over time. Chemical fertilizers do not solve the soil nutrition and arability problems. Pouring miracle grow on sand won't help you for long.
Trade big shipments of river silt (organic sponge), heavy clay, and washed sand. Plow it into unproductive fields that are suffering deficits.
The problem is likely to be counterfiet material (stock material sold as 2025, or 7075, but is really some gods awful alloy of who knows what, but you would never know the difference because it weighs the same, mills the same, and looks the same...... until you do a hardness test, a conductivity test, and a vapor assa test.)
We literally order NAS and BACD nutplates and rivets by lots of 1 million. We go through those things like diabetic children dig through candy. It would be *really* easy for our suppliers to slip us a mickey, and sell us bogus nutplates. Those things have specifications they have to meet, concerning their material composition, degree of heat treat, size, and overal dimensions, including weight, and finish. Once cooked up though, are you *really* going to check each and every nutplate in a bin of 1 million to look for counterfeits?
That's the problem. Counterfeit rivets and nutplates throw a monkey wrench in a product's expected lifecycle. Shitty rivets crack out. They corrode. They induce the rest of the assembly to corrode. They respond incorrectly to changing pressure... on and on and on.
Similar with bad adhesives and finishes.
What, are you going to expect every plant in america to do wet chemistry testing on all their paints, primers, and sealants? In addition to vapor testing each and every rivet and nutplate?
Can't be done. Airplanes would cost billions of dollars each.
The US govt wants to crack down on it? Here's an idea: customs can do its fucking job, and search cargo containers from china for counterfiet goods.
That way the cheap chinese knockoffs don't get mixed into fungible supply bins, and we don't have this problem.
The issue with the cat being misidentified as being silicone based was not entirely in error. After reviewing the scan and command logs, your command "identify my cat" ran into a limitation of the internal verbal dictionary.
Basically, as far as we can determine, the tricorder looked up "cat" for synonyms, and determined that "pus" and "pussy" were suitable alternates.
It then locked onto the silicone vaginal simulator you keep in your closet, and properly identified its molecular composition.
We have forwarded the bug report to our naturnal language coding team, and hope to have a bugfix soon.
China will always win the pricewar for toxic materials handling, processing, and manufacture against the US and other western countries, as long as the US and other western countries enforce a minimum wage that is higher than china's, and enforces clean air and water policies.
Those things inject added costs of manufacture that do not diminish with scale. That is why china makes rare earth oxide powders, and almost nobody else does.
Other nontrivial issues include physical access to raw material, and willingness to exploit them. China wins both of those. Other than a PR pissing contest, it makes very little sense at all for the US to attempt to beach china's growing industrial base, when ours would by the numbers be simply to prohibitive to expand to that scale.
America needs to ditch the "we're #1" ideology and mantra. Elitism and egotism of that sort is destroying our country. A better approach would be to look at how european countries (the ones that are staying solvent anyway) do business. The US has more physical resources to work with, and by taking a few hints from nations without them, we would be better able to leverage what we have.
The US likes to treat the rest of the world like a giant walmart that they can pick and choose what they want from. That's not how the world really works. The US gets its way by waving nuclear dildos and increasingly worthless bills around. The situation is poignantly similar to "broken industrialists 'Old Money'" fallen on hard times, trying and failing miserably as the old contacts stop responding to cals, and the world moves on and leaves them behind.
Eventually the world will look at us, say "bitch, please!", and ignore us. That day is very fast approaching.
Given how clearly this tarrif will be ineffectual at combatting foriegn dominance in the solar collector market, even to mere peons like us, what other reasons besides trying to deal damage control for their own personal interests could there possibly be in enacting them?
Yes. Because the costs of implementing solar are prohibitive. Gas is currently cheaper.
Americans bitch mightily about the costs at the pump, and monthy billshock for energy.
If solar was sufficiently cheap to install, regardless of how that is accomplished, it would create an exodus away from fossil fuel energy. This means your 99% statistic will stop being a 99% statistic. That was the whole point.
Kansas, oklahoma, and nebraska are good dandidates for wind energy.
Here in kansas, we have an average daily windspeed of 12mph. This is suitable for large scale exploitation.
However, getting windfarms in seems to be like shitting gold bricks. Our leaders seem totally recalcitrant to commit to any binding obligations on the matter, local NIMBY groups try to tie proposals for windfarms down with impact studies on everything from fireflies to sparrows, and power companies complain about right of ways to run new power lines and build transformer stations.
I would expect az to have similar ptoblems, with the NIMBYs complaining about how it will effect desert scorpions, in concert with all the political red tape and foot dragging.
You know? The one where the psychologist chick fills his head with hundreds of "sensitivity" politically correct directives, transforming him into a total dumbass?
Except in this case, its the city making schools look that way.
NYC needs to wake up and smell the sewerage, and accept that you can't please everyone and it is retarded to try.
However, dumping doesn't make sense here. Properly maintained, a solar installation can reliably last for many decades with only minimal replacement.
Dumping exists to cause a mad rush of adoption, to set the hook for lock in. If adoption also translates to reduced demand later (see eg, computer sales figures from 1990 to today for an indicator of saturation with durable goods), then dumping makes significantly less sense.
More likely, china is trying to bolster capital to rapidly develop a thriving industrial production infrastructure, and the current situation provides a ripe opportunity who's time has come.
The US populace *DESPERATELY* wants to be rid of expensive and toxic fossil fuel use. So much so that they are willing to break the bank on one-off investments on domestic solar. (Something highly uncharacteristic of the typical us consumer's demographic profile)
China says "we can make solar cells for you! We can make them DIRT cheap!"
US consumers shout "SOLD!"
US regulators go "Oh No! OMGWTF! If they all switch to solar, we won't have as many reasons to stay in a state of purpetual war with the middle east, and our out-of-channel campaign funding sources will diminish! This is terrible! We have to act! We have to drive the prices of these deleterious cheap solar installs back up to protect our interests!"
So, they institute tarrifs to drive the prices up, in the hopes of preventing widespread solar adoption.
I would bet dollars to holes in doughnuts that the leading voices behind the tarrifs have memberships in the GOP, and hold shares in energy companies.
Slashdot Mirror
What about other small, bright, and dense objects?
A white dwarf, for instance?
You also discount the potential for exotic photosynthetic life around the brown dwarves. For instance, here on earth normal green photosynthetic plants can absorb multiple photons of red freq light and combine the energy from them with some clever quantum mechanics to have enough energy to push a high energy electron into a chemical bond site.
It doesn't seem inconcievable that there could be very slow respiration organisms that have very large "leaves", and which collect near IR photons en mass. If the photon flux overall is high enough, they would gather enough photonic energy from the brown star to make chemical energy sources. (Granted, this would have to be near IR, not true IR, because sufficiently high real IR flux would toast the surface like a heat lamp. Water is also strongly opaque to IR and nIR light, so a water rich atmosphere would scatter it pretty heavily.)
A large world, with a reasonably "bright" brown star emitting lots of red and nIR light, and just enough gravitational tug, and you have the potential for some interesting surface life.
The biggest issue with chemical based fert is that it does not replenish organic sponge in the soil, which is required by soil bacteria. "Organic sponge" is essentially finely shredded cellulose that holds moisture, acts as a trap to retain water soluble minerals and nutrients, and as a feedstock for soil bacteria.
Ammonia based fertilizer contains very little carbon. So little in fact that the normal metabolic activities of soil bacteria cause net depletion of the organic sponge over time when it is used aggressively, like it is with industrial farming.
here's an article from ACES on the subject
Ground up poop juice also contains chemically etched cellulose fibers, especially if cowpoop is used. This actively adds organic sponge to offset natural depletion.
This has several noteworthy effects in soil:
1) it provides a substrate in the soil for beneficial soil bacteria to live on.
2) it helps the soil to retain water more efficiently, reducing the need for irrigation.
3) it soaks in and holds soluble nutrients, reducing the amount of these substances (nitrate, phosphate, mineral salts such as carbonates and the like) that get washed away in runoff.
When you examine the amount of nitrogen added to sponge depleted soil using "conventional" practices against the total amount added using organic practices, you will find that the organic practice applies considerably less, but uses it more efficiently. This is due to the organic sponge.
In addition to the efficiency reductions associated with heavy industrial soil nitration, there are serious effects from the runoff that increases as the soil carbon decreases. (This creates a feedback loop where more and more industrial fertilizer is required to keep growing plants, most of which simply washes away.)
here's a paper for you.
Many of the problems associated with artificial fertilizers could be resolved by blending the fertilizer with a sprayable organic fiber solution. (Make it goopy, and chellated in hydrated cellulose gel for instance.) This however will increase the unit price per litre, create controversy over "adding fillers", and a whole host of talking head nonsense concerning the simple fix.
What this article is saying, is that victor's decision to entangle his photons has a direct effect on the results that alice and bob get from their double blind measurements.
So, either there is retrograde communication on time's axis, or....
The decision that victor makes is predetermined, by the act of measurement undergone by alice and bob. (Meaning victor doesn't really have as much free will as he thinks he does.)
Proposed followup experiment:
Alice and bob examine their photons, tell each other, but not victor. Victor decides to entangle or not entangle. Examine new correlation.
This will test "does a correlation between alice and bob indicate that victor will entangle?".
If it does, you have a reasonably strong test case for many worlds.
The implication was that you do both.
IT does its end, marketing does its end. The result is a position and political stunt that attracts customers, and builds brand reputation.
The CIO =! IT infrastructure. He represents the guy at the board meeting who condenses hundreds of incident reports, purchase requisition forms, etc, into a 10 second soundbyte for the CEO and the other board members.
The cio is NOT fixing the damned laser printer for mabel in accounting. That's what bob is for.
The cio is who tells bob to make sure that chinese malware isn't running on mabel's cheap asian built multifunction fax/scanner/printer/copier. Bob is the one who actually does it.
Bob is IT. The CIO isn't.
In light of the increasing hacktivism, blackhat activities for purely financial reasons, and the negative press many corporations have been getting recently, it sounds like the CIO needs to get in touch with the director of marketing, and hatch a joint PR venture to scoop up customers burned by the competition's lax IT policies.
Eg, "did corporation X's shoddy security put your credit card through some crook's ATM? Here at corporation Y, we have proactively taken (enumerated technical steps) precautions and enacted aggressive protections to ensure that our customers are never put at risk, if we can at all prevent it. Our firm (big pr saber rattling shpeel)... ...(marketing shpeel about growth)... ...(blatant investor cuddling)...
Corporation Y, (company slogan)!"
That gives the CIO a hard datapoint about how his department is focused on the "business agenda" that the cocaine and sex addled CEO can understand.
.... honestly people?
You can still test for "sweet scent", and define "sweeter" objectively without humans these days.
Inside your nasal mucosa, there are olfactory nerve endings, covered in reactive receptor sites.
By either collecting some genuine receptors, or culturing the receptor complex on a substrate (such as a microchip), it is possible toe create an objectively repeatable aparatus that senses environmental molecules in exactly the same fashion as a human nose does.
By being able to examine receptor site binding/interaction with each target chemical, you can determine strength of interaction, duration of interaction, and percentage of site activation. This will give you many objective values for "sweetness."
This is similar to how artificial sweeteners are evaluated. Sweet sensing tastebuds react to hydroxyl groups on the target molecule. The more hydroxyl groups, and the better it docks in the receptor, the more intense the sensation of sweet. Sodium saccharine was designed specifically with this in mind, but it also binds with bitter receptors.
You don't need a blind human taste test. You can recreate the sensory organ, and get empirical data in a repeatable fashion. That is the definition of objective.
Seriously, while I love the idea, and really do wish them well, they are effectively just stinging a squad of ogres armed with flamethrowers.
The RSA, CIA, FBI, and DHS all have strongly vested interests in destroying private correspondence for anyone but themselves.
The MPAA, RIAA, and associated gaggle of goons act like they used a hornet's nest suppository at the mere mention that they are anything but "helpless victims" of intellectual property theft, and that the bad, bad, ISPs just wont beweeve dem! (While simultaneously arming a thermonuclear court case)
I don't see this startup ending well, for all the good it would bring to the world if they were.
I see them either being legally raped and blackballed by every major nation and media group, or becoming the victim of something akin to regulatory capture via last minute legislation if they somehow survive.
Have you ever tried doing this? I know I certainly have.
Applied Credit for a high SAT score, and high placements on an entry exam do *NOT* translate to removal of "required" courses at universities. At least, not the one I attended anyway. You are simply not getting out of public speaking, intro to psych, etc. You might be able to sneak out of algebra and straight to high level calculus, but guess what? You need so many seat-time credit hours to be awarded your degree. This means you will end up taking bulk filler classes to satisfy the degree requirements.
The educational system runs a good deal like a casino. They have carefully researched how to reliably milk students for their degrees, regardless of the initial state of knowledge and training of the student. Really, they should put an up-front pricetag on their degree programs, because that is really how it boils down in practice.
Gonna take those expensive credit requirements at some other college? Oh, what's that, the university you are trying to enter won't give you credit for those classes on your transcript? Oh, sucks to be you!
Planning an adult education on a budget is a lot like navigating a byzantine legal framework. Really, this is what guidance counsellors are supposed to help you with in theory, but the reality is that they try to guide you down standard pipelines that maximize university profits. Even if you ask for one, universities very rarely if ever will volunteer a list of transferrable/equivalent courses from other institutions. If you want to tailor a university degree on the cheap with transferred courses and testout credits, you have to dg into that mess of shit on your own, and hope they don't change their acceptance policies mid-degree.
Really, they *want* you in *their* lecture halls, paying *them* money for the priviledge, paying for a dormitory from *them*, and paying *them* for your parking tag. Sidestepping all that beurocracy by researching the system and exploiting equivlilencies with other, cheaper schools via state accredation status is seriously frowned on. In extreme cases, they will simply refuse to accept certain classes on your transcript, depsite normally accepting them.
It's a racket. Has been for quite a while.
The EU just want to be sure that the devices won't pick up any transmissions from the great old ones, what with the approach of may-eve and all.
Other little known tidbits: in addition to the cone shaped undulating turntables, and the chtulu antenna, the device has to withstand being in the same room with a drunken MP reading select passages from the necronomicon backwards, while rubbing on cats.
They are very thurough is the EU.
Oh, I agree. Their "think of all the money we will save by NOT PAYING PEOPLE by rushing development ahead 6 months! Uwee hee hee!" Antics are the biggest offender.
But our complacentness about just blithely accepting this as status quo is what prompts them to think they will get away with it.
Make that decision cost them money. Each and every time. It is the only way to reign in that madness.
That is why you post the reciept, and a short explanation why you bought it used.
There is a marketing saying: for every customer you satisfy, he tells 5 friends. For every customer you screw over, he tells 15.
The internet let's you show your displeasure, and the proof of the pudding to potentially millions.
There is no question about your legal purchase. There is no grounds to say you are a pirate. In fact, if you pay full price at gamestop for used, and post the reciept, the "you are a greedy cheepskate" argument is also shot down. They then have no choice but to accept the reason tendered. That reason will be different for each person. Share it.
If you can make the scaes fall from even a single 12 year old's eyes, it will have done its job.
This surprises anyone?
For some reason, software companies feel that spaghetti wrapped in duct tape, (and in the case of game software), and that rough plots that are abrasive to the senses are "good enough", as long as they can "ship early!"
Nobody takes pride in their work or product anymore when it comes to software, except for independent hobby programmers.
It seems any time that *money!!* gets involved, quality slips, integrity dries up, and the bullshit gets deep. Really, it is just as much the public's insatiable desire for "WANT NAOW!" As it is the greed that feeds on it at fault.
We can't stop EA from being stupid assholes that ruin franchises and abuse studios. What we can do is control our side of the demand chain, and make their antics unprofitable.
The way to send EA the message is to buy their games used for 20$, and post pictures of the receipt on their forums as proof as part of the signature. If not their forum, any other forums you post at will do. Be sure the signature explains why you did this.
This is WORSE than not buying the game. Your making use of their support services actually COSTS them money, that will NEVER receive payment from you for. Hit them in the wallet, where it hurts the most.
US: 50+ federated states + a federal government that can regulate interstate commerce.
Africa: 50+ warring nations with penis envy problems, and no unifying structure at all.
The *real* difference.
The ask slashdot question was how to solve the soil fertility problem. Not how to solve human nature.
Humans fight each other over bullshit all the time. Catholics and protestants in ireland. Jews and arabs in the middle east. Vietnamese and laosians. On amd on and on.
I was asked how to solve the hunger. Creating world peace? Somebody else can solve that one.
Better is to provide them with food while they do the improvements. This way they don't become complacent and misuse chemical fertilizers as some kind of magic bullet.
Agreed that they need to eat now. Disagree that introducing them to liquid fertilizers that cause collateral soil damage is the best temporary solution.
The problem with quick easy fixes, is that people use them, then abuse them, and treat them like permanent ones.
We nerds in IT should be well aware of this by now. How many "temporary fixes" have your employers twisted into permanent ones?
Same thing here. There is money to be made. LOTS of money to be made, by *NOT* properly improving the soil. Shafting starving vllagers for miracle grow while the soil's mineral content dries up, leaving them with soil that won't even grow weeds in the rainy season is *VERY* profitable.
That is why it must be avoided, and done right, if you really want the african people to not suffer.
Rockdust (and volcanic clays) would be a good idea. Widespread removal of kelp and fish on a continental scale would destroy local fishing shoals.
Better would be controlled dredging of river deltas, and removing the organic sludge for export. That stuff is alive with biotics and mineral salts.
Newsflash. Rainforest is terrible soil.
Newsflash. Africa is suffering desertification, and the grasslands are mostly deep sand.
Here is what africa needs to do:
Healthy, fertile arable soil is about 50 parts clay, 20 parts sand, and 30 parts organic sponge. The types of clay in the 50% clay figure are important.
Parts of africa are loaded with clay and organic sponge. Parts of africa are loaded with sand.
Get the african nations to stop fighting each other over tarot roots, and get them to ship dirt to each other.
We have the technology to do this. It isn't hard. The benefits greatly outweigh the costs over time. Chemical fertilizers do not solve the soil nutrition and arability problems. Pouring miracle grow on sand won't help you for long.
Trade big shipments of river silt (organic sponge), heavy clay, and washed sand. Plow it into unproductive fields that are suffering deficits.
Watch shit fucking grow.
I work in aerospace. Ironically, in quality.
The problem is likely to be counterfiet material (stock material sold as 2025, or 7075, but is really some gods awful alloy of who knows what, but you would never know the difference because it weighs the same, mills the same, and looks the same...... until you do a hardness test, a conductivity test, and a vapor assa test.)
Other things likely counterfieted:
Bolts. Nuts. Nutplates. Washers. Rivets. Paint. Adhesives.
We literally order NAS and BACD nutplates and rivets by lots of 1 million. We go through those things like diabetic children dig through candy. It would be *really* easy for our suppliers to slip us a mickey, and sell us bogus nutplates. Those things have specifications they have to meet, concerning their material composition, degree of heat treat, size, and overal dimensions, including weight, and finish. Once cooked up though, are you *really* going to check each and every nutplate in a bin of 1 million to look for counterfeits?
That's the problem. Counterfeit rivets and nutplates throw a monkey wrench in a product's expected lifecycle. Shitty rivets crack out. They corrode. They induce the rest of the assembly to corrode. They respond incorrectly to changing pressure... on and on and on.
Similar with bad adhesives and finishes.
What, are you going to expect every plant in america to do wet chemistry testing on all their paints, primers, and sealants? In addition to vapor testing each and every rivet and nutplate?
Can't be done. Airplanes would cost billions of dollars each.
The US govt wants to crack down on it? Here's an idea: customs can do its fucking job, and search cargo containers from china for counterfiet goods.
That way the cheap chinese knockoffs don't get mixed into fungible supply bins, and we don't have this problem.
The neutrino beam is being worked on.
The issue with the cat being misidentified as being silicone based was not entirely in error. After reviewing the scan and command logs, your command "identify my cat" ran into a limitation of the internal verbal dictionary.
Basically, as far as we can determine, the tricorder looked up "cat" for synonyms, and determined that "pus" and "pussy" were suitable alternates.
It then locked onto the silicone vaginal simulator you keep in your closet, and properly identified its molecular composition.
We have forwarded the bug report to our naturnal language coding team, and hope to have a bugfix soon.
Thank you for using Tricorder!
China will always win the pricewar for toxic materials handling, processing, and manufacture against the US and other western countries, as long as the US and other western countries enforce a minimum wage that is higher than china's, and enforces clean air and water policies.
Those things inject added costs of manufacture that do not diminish with scale. That is why china makes rare earth oxide powders, and almost nobody else does.
Other nontrivial issues include physical access to raw material, and willingness to exploit them. China wins both of those. Other than a PR pissing contest, it makes very little sense at all for the US to attempt to beach china's growing industrial base, when ours would by the numbers be simply to prohibitive to expand to that scale.
America needs to ditch the "we're #1" ideology and mantra. Elitism and egotism of that sort is destroying our country. A better approach would be to look at how european countries (the ones that are staying solvent anyway) do business. The US has more physical resources to work with, and by taking a few hints from nations without them, we would be better able to leverage what we have.
The US likes to treat the rest of the world like a giant walmart that they can pick and choose what they want from. That's not how the world really works. The US gets its way by waving nuclear dildos and increasingly worthless bills around. The situation is poignantly similar to "broken industrialists 'Old Money'" fallen on hard times, trying and failing miserably as the old contacts stop responding to cals, and the world moves on and leaves them behind.
Eventually the world will look at us, say "bitch, please!", and ignore us. That day is very fast approaching.
Given how clearly this tarrif will be ineffectual at combatting foriegn dominance in the solar collector market, even to mere peons like us, what other reasons besides trying to deal damage control for their own personal interests could there possibly be in enacting them?
Yes. Because the costs of implementing solar are prohibitive. Gas is currently cheaper.
Americans bitch mightily about the costs at the pump, and monthy billshock for energy.
If solar was sufficiently cheap to install, regardless of how that is accomplished, it would create an exodus away from fossil fuel energy. This means your 99% statistic will stop being a 99% statistic. That was the whole point.
Kansas, oklahoma, and nebraska are good dandidates for wind energy.
Here in kansas, we have an average daily windspeed of 12mph. This is suitable for large scale exploitation.
However, getting windfarms in seems to be like shitting gold bricks. Our leaders seem totally recalcitrant to commit to any binding obligations on the matter, local NIMBY groups try to tie proposals for windfarms down with impact studies on everything from fireflies to sparrows, and power companies complain about right of ways to run new power lines and build transformer stations.
I would expect az to have similar ptoblems, with the NIMBYs complaining about how it will effect desert scorpions, in concert with all the political red tape and foot dragging.
You know? The one where the psychologist chick fills his head with hundreds of "sensitivity" politically correct directives, transforming him into a total dumbass?
Except in this case, its the city making schools look that way.
NYC needs to wake up and smell the sewerage, and accept that you can't please everyone and it is retarded to try.
However, dumping doesn't make sense here. Properly maintained, a solar installation can reliably last for many decades with only minimal replacement.
Dumping exists to cause a mad rush of adoption, to set the hook for lock in. If adoption also translates to reduced demand later (see eg, computer sales figures from 1990 to today for an indicator of saturation with durable goods), then dumping makes significantly less sense.
More likely, china is trying to bolster capital to rapidly develop a thriving industrial production infrastructure, and the current situation provides a ripe opportunity who's time has come.
The US populace *DESPERATELY* wants to be rid of expensive and toxic fossil fuel use. So much so that they are willing to break the bank on one-off investments on domestic solar. (Something highly uncharacteristic of the typical us consumer's demographic profile)
China says "we can make solar cells for you! We can make them DIRT cheap!"
US consumers shout "SOLD!"
US regulators go "Oh No! OMGWTF! If they all switch to solar, we won't have as many reasons to stay in a state of purpetual war with the middle east, and our out-of-channel campaign funding sources will diminish! This is terrible! We have to act! We have to drive the prices of these deleterious cheap solar installs back up to protect our interests!"
So, they institute tarrifs to drive the prices up, in the hopes of preventing widespread solar adoption.
I would bet dollars to holes in doughnuts that the leading voices behind the tarrifs have memberships in the GOP, and hold shares in energy companies.