GM is right. Batteries _are_ very expensive and have relatively poor energy storage compared to hydrocarbons. And if Tesla's growth rate continues, their demand for batteries will more than outstrip current production in just a few years (provided they continue to grow, which I have serious doubts about). That will in turn drive up prices even more. That should provide some domestic opportunities perhaps. But I'm very doubtful that electric cars really have that much growth potential. Will countries rapidly deploy infrastructure (many more power stations, transmission lines, charging stations)? I kind of doubt it. As bad and dirty as oil is, it's relatively cheap to move around and store. Add to this the fact that batteries, while recyclable, don't last that long especially under heavy and rapid duty cycles. All types of batteries wear out. And there are lots of tradeoffs with regard to energy density, safety, etc. Kudos to Tesla for trying to solve these problems, and being willing to sacrifice their money to do it.
Over the years the NSA has contributed what seemed like positive things to computer security in general, and Linux specifically. They have helped correct some algorithms to make them more secure, and implemented things like SELinux.
However, now that their other actions and intentions have been starkly revealed, any and all things the NSA does (and has done) are now cast into steep doubt. Which is unfortunately because the NSA has a lot of really smart cryptographers and mathematicians that could greatly contribute to information security.
Now, however, their ability to contribute in any positive way to the open source community, or even to the industry at large, is gone forever. No one will trust them again. A sad loss for them, but also a potential loss for everyone. Nothing will quite be the same from here on out. And in the long run, without the help of smart, honest mathematicians and cryptographers, our security across the board will suffer. It's not the the revelations caused the damage, but that the NSA sabotaged things. Shame on them. Kudos to Snowden for helping us learn the extent of the damage.
And microkernels continue to remain in the realm of academics and theory, and not in the real world. Even Windows went down the microkernel route for a while with Windows NT, early versions, but for for performance reasons hacked and thunked things to the point that we're essentially back to a monolithic kernel now, with everything important running in-kernel, and in ring-0. Graphics moved back to ring-0, network drivers, etc.
Darwin, though based on a microkernel core, is a hybrid kernel with a large BSD subsystemThe coupling between the core and the BSD system is so tight and depended on that the result is quite monolithic.
Despite your dislike of RMS, he also thought as you do, that microkernels were the future, and so the infamous GNU Herd kernel is a microkernel. Herd is nowhere to be found, really, and no longer matters compared to the monolithic kernels of Windows, BSD, Linux, and others.
Microkernels vs monolithic remind me of the old CISC vs RISC debate. Thought unlike CPUs where RISC lost but actually won because CISC ended up being layered on top of RISC (or VLIW at least), monolithic seems to have soundly won and likely won't go away until RAM is as fast as CPU registers to make message passing fast.
Yeah. It would open up a lot of possibilities, for sure if it were efficient to plant and harvest mixed crops that way.
As for tillage, in my area many farmers don't till much at all anymore, though that increases reliance on herbicide, which has its own set of problems (resistance, mainly).
I and my brothers farm a "big agriculture" farm of about 3000 acres. We're smack dab in the middle of harvest, with about 1000 acres to go. And we have no employees other than ourselves. Just the four of us (family farm). We're heavily mechanized. three of us run the harvest usually. Two on the combines, one on the trucks. We can knock down a 130 acre field in about 8 or 9 hours.
And all this barely is enough income to fund the farm (capital costs can be huge!), and pay for 4 families.
Other farms that grow other more labor-intensive (and more lucrative) crops do hire a lot of unskilled labor, but we're running into an interesting problem. Modern farm machinery requires interaction with a computer screen right there in the machine. As well a good working knowledge of math is required as ratios and calculations are needed all the time when setting machines, figuring out how much product is needed, etc. But many of the unskilled laborers that can be hired lack basic reading and writing skills.
Anyway, I'd love a swarm of little robots to craw along the soil between the rows of plants and pick weeds. Eliminating herbicide use would be huge! And if we could somehow mechanically zap harmful insects but leave the beneficial ones alone, that'd also be wonderful. That'd still leave me with having to fight fungal infections, but it'd be a great start.
That's a very good question. But you can also bet that there are a lot of parties around the world who have a strong interest in knowing if this is true or not. They also have access to the source code, and can build it themselves (I don't believe the NSA quite has the influence to propagate a Thomson compiler attack). I bet that if such a backdoor was discovered by China or Russia, that they'd use it as a propaganda weapon and we'd thus know about it.
But in the meantime, we don't know that it's not compromised, but a compromise is not likely. Or at least not as likely as Windows, or any other commercial, closed-source operating system.
But Android really isn't Linux. But even the parts of Android that are linux (the posix API that apps can reach out to), it's not x86. Hence you cannot just port netflix from android to a Linux desktop.
I highly recommend the memoir, "Skunkworks" by Ben Rich, who was Kelly Johnson's successor. He tells a great story of the building of the U-2 program, and also later projects including the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117 stealth fighter. Amazing stories.
According to Ben Rich, it was Dick Chaney who ultimately got the SR-71 canceled, and instructed them to destroy all the plans, tooling, and parts for building the aircraft. Ostensibly this was to prevent any other nation from ever learning its secrets. And all this was because Chaney's cronies owned companies who made spy satellites. Even though a lot of analysts argued we still needed aircraft for some surveillance, they decided to go with satellites. Which of course other nations know where they are and when they go overhead. And since then the U-2 has still flown because there are missions that only an aircraft can perform.
Even as recent as the gulf war (yes I'm old enough to consider 1991 as recent) these aging spy planes were pressed into action because they were all we had, and they performed their task very well. Have to admire how well the military does being yanked around so much by politics (and of course they dish the politics right back... sequester and all that). But with all the abuses revealed of late by Private Manning, perhaps it's only fitting that the military is in decline, along with the nation, and has had its toys taken away.
In fact the Internet, as originally envisioned, hasn't existed for some years now and may never exist again. It's not just that ISPs are forbidding servers, it's that their asymmetric I/O speeds combined with network-address translation fundamentally changed the game from a peer to peer network to a producer/consumer network. The only way to serve up your own content right now is to buy server in a data center, or use an existing service. Just to route around the fundamental brokenness of our modern-day internet, I have to buy a VPS, which is run by a company that pays the big network providers big bucks for peering. Pretty depressing, really.
I wonder how a transition to IPv6 will change all this. Will all ISPs simply assign non-routeable addresses?
Just use your distro's package manager, whatever it may be. Synaptic is only for distros that have apt-get and dpkg as their package manager. Other distros have other front-ends for installing software, and they are almost always installed by default, so look in your system menus. On Fedora there's the built-in software manager, and of course the yum commandline command.
Honestly building software from source should only be done if you want the latest bleeding edge software. And it's fraught with difficulty because often dependencies that ship with your distro are too old for the latest source code. It's always easiest to wait for a packaged binary, which on my system is about as easy as double-clicking a setup.exe.
As I type this I'm compiling wine from source because I have a very old distribution that is no longer supported in any way by anyone but me at this point. But that's what I've chosen to run for now until I have time to upgrade (and decide what distro to use... Fedora, Mint, or Mint Debian Edition?).
Funny I have always felt the same way as you about Windows. Quite often while working with windows, often just trying to make it useable for me, I feel like I'm wasting precious time. Then I got back to my comfortable desktop and feel a lot better.
I have used linux for many years but I don't follow what are rambling on about with installing wine. I install it with aptitude install wine and things are just fine. The handy winetools script installs a bunch of things and it works for the one or two apps that I run with it occasionally. On one box I install from the latest git code just to see how things are progressing. But if you're having trouble building from source, then this route is not for you (on any OS).
Funny about how you keep dvds and hard drives full of msi's and exes and drivers! For me I just keep a copy of my home directory. Everything else I can install from a net install of Mint or some other distro, and just about everything I use daily is in the repos. Linux hardware support seems quite good to me these days. Even Nvidia's driver is in repos. It's a different paradigm is all. To me the command line is no different than navigating the depths of the registry on windows.
Is it possible to run a Wayland display server in a big full-screen window on X11? That would be a fairly easy way to test wayland out and develop using the wayland GTK or Qt libraries. One huge advantage to this would be that I don't need to wait for driver support. As long as X11 had a driver, I'd be good to go. Since Wayland would be writing through (presumably) openGL to a full screen window, none of X11's asynchronous speed problems would be noticeable; waylands renderings within the window would all be snappy and synchronized. Granted too many layers of redirection could become a problem.
This is a similar idea (stop-gap of course) to what SuSE did years ago with the old Xglx project, which ran on top of X11 and opengl, which was eventually phased out in favor of AIGLX and Xrender.
No that's not what I'm talking about. Workspace Manager does not appear to be related to this at all, if I'm reading its description right. I'm talking about the pager itself. It's the little display that's always on the screen in the tray or menu bar. It's like what Cinnamon has, but instead of just boxes with numbers around to represent the desktops, it has little thumbnails of the running apps, including the app's icon if the window is big enough. Either way this little bit of feedback is essential for my use of virtual desktops. Not only to remind me of where I am, but to remind me what I have on the other workspaces. I like this feedback even though I use certain desktops for certain tasks consistently.
This is a feature that's been with X11 desktops for more than 20 years. It's the one feature that keeps me on Mate to be honest. Otherwise cinnamon would probably work fine for me.
As for compiz, I have it configured exactly to my liking and I really like it. Would really miss the configuration I've got set up if I had to switch to cinnamon.
Cinnamon and Gnome 3 still are missing one vital feature from Gnome 2 and Mate. That is the key feature of showing window previews in the pager. This is a powerful feature that helps make virtual desktops a bit more easy to use. Seeing a bunch of boxes with numbers in them is far less useful. This sort of thing has been available in old X11 pagers for about 20 years or more. Why can Cinnamon not do it too? I rely on this feature to mind me what apps are running where.
Every time I read about setting up hotlines between governments on various things, I think of this classic episode from Yes, Prime Minister, "The Grand Design."
Prime Minister: So in an emergency I can get straight through to the Soviet president?
General: Theoretically, yes.
PM: Theoretically?
General: It's what we tell journalists. Ha Ha Ha. In fact we did once get through to the Kremlin, but only to a switchboard operator.
PM: Couldn't the operator put you through?
General: We never found out. Didn't seem to speak much English.
PM: How often is it tested?
Sir Humphreys: Well they try not to test it too often. It tends to create unnecessary panic at the other end and panic is always a good thing to avoid where nuclear weapons are concerned, don't you think?
When Canada phased out leaded gas some years ago, you could buy an additive for older engines that you just poured in the gas tank. So I imagine that something similar could be done for exempt aircraft. Mixing in a tank first would probably be much cheaper than modifying a carb and much safer.
"ugly" is in the eye of the beholder - frankly, I find KDE and Gnome to be ugly (especially the font rendering... shit, it's 2013, can't you figure out how to render fonts yet?) As far as flexibility, Windows is a lot more flexible that any Linux I've tried when it comes to multi-monitor setups without me having to muck with configs. And my settings don't randomly get lost.
Indeed it is in the eye of the beholder. Fonts are one area that any recent distro has over windows in my opinion. Windows fonts just look strange and always have, probably due to the hinting. The best fonts I've ever seen are on linux when you turn off hinting entirely and enable subpixel-rendering.
I don't understand why you are making a big deal out of building wayland. X11 is very difficult to build (took hours the last time I did it). Who cares? When it's ready, you will be able to install it with aptitude install wayland. Building from source is always more complicated than installing from a binary package. This has nothing to do with support. why the attitude?
Wanted to comment on the "when the genetic crops fail" comment. GMO crops don't "fail" any differently than heirloom crops do. An ecological disaster that wipes out GMO crops is going to wipe out "bio-diversified" crops too. Your argument is thus a fallacy.
Perhaps you are referring to monoculture. However monoculture as a problem has nothing to do with GMO crop. Non-GMO crops can be just as mono-cultured as GMO. There is interesting research going on now into the idea of growing multiple crops together. This addresses the monoculture problem while still having the advantages of scale (irrigation systems are fixed size and go in a circle). One example is growing peas and canola together, say alternating rows. Between the two crops weeds should be fairly well managed (since canola is the most common weed in pea fields anyway!). The peas are nitrogen fixing, so that will benefit the canola, reducing input costs. And with standard harvesting equipment you can harvest them both together in one pass. All that's required is a way of separating the seeds, which is fairly easy because canola is small and peas are large.
Excellent points. Sometimes I forget how things are down there in the corn belt. Even here in Canada, my neighbors to the east (next province over) are now starting to come to terms with the consequences of not rotating Canola like they should.
Just to help people understand why crop rotation is often cheated on, consider that corn is a very lucrative crop. Soybeans, the second choice, is about 2/3 of the profit of corn. And wheat is possibly 1/2 of corn. A heavily-leveraged farm is going to be sorely tempted to to maximize short-term profits. Yes it will come crashing down eventually.
On my farm, multiplying seed canola brings me more than double the income per acre of any of my other crops. We joke about rotating snow canola snow canola, but we know we can't do that and so we have to be careful and plan things out as best we can. We constantly look for alternate crops to try, that we can grow with our current equipment. Some work out, some don't. This year we're trying dry beans and faba beans.
Perhaps you should go work with farmers for a bit (real family farms... yes they still exist) and get a grasp of their current methodology, both the how and the why. Then you can take your position with knowledge rather than fear.
Your arguments are fairly scattered, so it's hard to pin them down and reply logically to them. Monsanto isn't forcing farmers to buy their seed. Rather they offer a distinct advantage over the heirloom varieties and that appeals to farmers, and they actually have a small benefit to the environment in the short term by dramatically reducing soil weed seed load. Also labor is very expensive. Cutting labor costs can make the difference between being in business or not. Most importantly, the market has spoken, and it wants what the RR varieties deliver. Clean crops, high yields. Do I as a farmer love Monsanto? Not really. They are just a big company. Is Monstanto wrong for making a farmer sign a contract to grow seed from them? No that's within their right. Every seed company out there has round-up ready stuff now, so it's not just Monsanto anymore. =
The widespread use of glyphosate is having negative impacts, but not in the areas that you fear. The chemistry of glyphosate is well understood and how plants are killed by it or metabolize it are well understood. Heavy reliance on glyphosate is causing weeds to be selected for resistance. And drift from spraying is causing damage to shelterbelts all across the midwest, which is going to be a huge regret in the near future.
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about with stealing Indian farms.
In short, there are many reasons to be concerned with chemical farming, but your reasons aren't them.
Slashdot Mirror
GM is right. Batteries _are_ very expensive and have relatively poor energy storage compared to hydrocarbons. And if Tesla's growth rate continues, their demand for batteries will more than outstrip current production in just a few years (provided they continue to grow, which I have serious doubts about). That will in turn drive up prices even more. That should provide some domestic opportunities perhaps. But I'm very doubtful that electric cars really have that much growth potential. Will countries rapidly deploy infrastructure (many more power stations, transmission lines, charging stations)? I kind of doubt it. As bad and dirty as oil is, it's relatively cheap to move around and store. Add to this the fact that batteries, while recyclable, don't last that long especially under heavy and rapid duty cycles. All types of batteries wear out. And there are lots of tradeoffs with regard to energy density, safety, etc. Kudos to Tesla for trying to solve these problems, and being willing to sacrifice their money to do it.
Over the years the NSA has contributed what seemed like positive things to computer security in general, and Linux specifically. They have helped correct some algorithms to make them more secure, and implemented things like SELinux.
However, now that their other actions and intentions have been starkly revealed, any and all things the NSA does (and has done) are now cast into steep doubt. Which is unfortunately because the NSA has a lot of really smart cryptographers and mathematicians that could greatly contribute to information security.
Now, however, their ability to contribute in any positive way to the open source community, or even to the industry at large, is gone forever. No one will trust them again. A sad loss for them, but also a potential loss for everyone. Nothing will quite be the same from here on out. And in the long run, without the help of smart, honest mathematicians and cryptographers, our security across the board will suffer. It's not the the revelations caused the damage, but that the NSA sabotaged things. Shame on them. Kudos to Snowden for helping us learn the extent of the damage.
And microkernels continue to remain in the realm of academics and theory, and not in the real world. Even Windows went down the microkernel route for a while with Windows NT, early versions, but for for performance reasons hacked and thunked things to the point that we're essentially back to a monolithic kernel now, with everything important running in-kernel, and in ring-0. Graphics moved back to ring-0, network drivers, etc.
Darwin, though based on a microkernel core, is a hybrid kernel with a large BSD subsystemThe coupling between the core and the BSD system is so tight and depended on that the result is quite monolithic.
Despite your dislike of RMS, he also thought as you do, that microkernels were the future, and so the infamous GNU Herd kernel is a microkernel. Herd is nowhere to be found, really, and no longer matters compared to the monolithic kernels of Windows, BSD, Linux, and others.
Microkernels vs monolithic remind me of the old CISC vs RISC debate. Thought unlike CPUs where RISC lost but actually won because CISC ended up being layered on top of RISC (or VLIW at least), monolithic seems to have soundly won and likely won't go away until RAM is as fast as CPU registers to make message passing fast.
Yeah. It would open up a lot of possibilities, for sure if it were efficient to plant and harvest mixed crops that way.
As for tillage, in my area many farmers don't till much at all anymore, though that increases reliance on herbicide, which has its own set of problems (resistance, mainly).
I and my brothers farm a "big agriculture" farm of about 3000 acres. We're smack dab in the middle of harvest, with about 1000 acres to go. And we have no employees other than ourselves. Just the four of us (family farm). We're heavily mechanized. three of us run the harvest usually. Two on the combines, one on the trucks. We can knock down a 130 acre field in about 8 or 9 hours.
And all this barely is enough income to fund the farm (capital costs can be huge!), and pay for 4 families.
Other farms that grow other more labor-intensive (and more lucrative) crops do hire a lot of unskilled labor, but we're running into an interesting problem. Modern farm machinery requires interaction with a computer screen right there in the machine. As well a good working knowledge of math is required as ratios and calculations are needed all the time when setting machines, figuring out how much product is needed, etc. But many of the unskilled laborers that can be hired lack basic reading and writing skills.
Anyway, I'd love a swarm of little robots to craw along the soil between the rows of plants and pick weeds. Eliminating herbicide use would be huge! And if we could somehow mechanically zap harmful insects but leave the beneficial ones alone, that'd also be wonderful. That'd still leave me with having to fight fungal infections, but it'd be a great start.
That's a very good question. But you can also bet that there are a lot of parties around the world who have a strong interest in knowing if this is true or not. They also have access to the source code, and can build it themselves (I don't believe the NSA quite has the influence to propagate a Thomson compiler attack). I bet that if such a backdoor was discovered by China or Russia, that they'd use it as a propaganda weapon and we'd thus know about it.
But in the meantime, we don't know that it's not compromised, but a compromise is not likely. Or at least not as likely as Windows, or any other commercial, closed-source operating system.
I use FBReader and Amazons's Kindle App. With FBReader, I use ivona TTS and the TTS reader plugin and listen to books.
The Kindle App can read any book in mobi format, DRM or not. Calibre works well for this.
What problems do you have with those two apps?
But Android really isn't Linux. But even the parts of Android that are linux (the posix API that apps can reach out to), it's not x86. Hence you cannot just port netflix from android to a Linux desktop.
I highly recommend the memoir, "Skunkworks" by Ben Rich, who was Kelly Johnson's successor. He tells a great story of the building of the U-2 program, and also later projects including the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117 stealth fighter. Amazing stories.
According to Ben Rich, it was Dick Chaney who ultimately got the SR-71 canceled, and instructed them to destroy all the plans, tooling, and parts for building the aircraft. Ostensibly this was to prevent any other nation from ever learning its secrets. And all this was because Chaney's cronies owned companies who made spy satellites. Even though a lot of analysts argued we still needed aircraft for some surveillance, they decided to go with satellites. Which of course other nations know where they are and when they go overhead. And since then the U-2 has still flown because there are missions that only an aircraft can perform.
Even as recent as the gulf war (yes I'm old enough to consider 1991 as recent) these aging spy planes were pressed into action because they were all we had, and they performed their task very well. Have to admire how well the military does being yanked around so much by politics (and of course they dish the politics right back... sequester and all that). But with all the abuses revealed of late by Private Manning, perhaps it's only fitting that the military is in decline, along with the nation, and has had its toys taken away.
In fact the Internet, as originally envisioned, hasn't existed for some years now and may never exist again. It's not just that ISPs are forbidding servers, it's that their asymmetric I/O speeds combined with network-address translation fundamentally changed the game from a peer to peer network to a producer/consumer network. The only way to serve up your own content right now is to buy server in a data center, or use an existing service. Just to route around the fundamental brokenness of our modern-day internet, I have to buy a VPS, which is run by a company that pays the big network providers big bucks for peering. Pretty depressing, really.
I wonder how a transition to IPv6 will change all this. Will all ISPs simply assign non-routeable addresses?
Just use your distro's package manager, whatever it may be. Synaptic is only for distros that have apt-get and dpkg as their package manager. Other distros have other front-ends for installing software, and they are almost always installed by default, so look in your system menus. On Fedora there's the built-in software manager, and of course the yum commandline command.
Honestly building software from source should only be done if you want the latest bleeding edge software. And it's fraught with difficulty because often dependencies that ship with your distro are too old for the latest source code. It's always easiest to wait for a packaged binary, which on my system is about as easy as double-clicking a setup.exe.
As I type this I'm compiling wine from source because I have a very old distribution that is no longer supported in any way by anyone but me at this point. But that's what I've chosen to run for now until I have time to upgrade (and decide what distro to use... Fedora, Mint, or Mint Debian Edition?).
Funny I have always felt the same way as you about Windows. Quite often while working with windows, often just trying to make it useable for me, I feel like I'm wasting precious time. Then I got back to my comfortable desktop and feel a lot better.
I have used linux for many years but I don't follow what are rambling on about with installing wine. I install it with aptitude install wine and things are just fine. The handy winetools script installs a bunch of things and it works for the one or two apps that I run with it occasionally. On one box I install from the latest git code just to see how things are progressing. But if you're having trouble building from source, then this route is not for you (on any OS).
Funny about how you keep dvds and hard drives full of msi's and exes and drivers! For me I just keep a copy of my home directory. Everything else I can install from a net install of Mint or some other distro, and just about everything I use daily is in the repos. Linux hardware support seems quite good to me these days. Even Nvidia's driver is in repos. It's a different paradigm is all. To me the command line is no different than navigating the depths of the registry on windows.
Is it possible to run a Wayland display server in a big full-screen window on X11? That would be a fairly easy way to test wayland out and develop using the wayland GTK or Qt libraries. One huge advantage to this would be that I don't need to wait for driver support. As long as X11 had a driver, I'd be good to go. Since Wayland would be writing through (presumably) openGL to a full screen window, none of X11's asynchronous speed problems would be noticeable; waylands renderings within the window would all be snappy and synchronized. Granted too many layers of redirection could become a problem.
This is a similar idea (stop-gap of course) to what SuSE did years ago with the old Xglx project, which ran on top of X11 and opengl, which was eventually phased out in favor of AIGLX and Xrender.
No that's not what I'm talking about. Workspace Manager does not appear to be related to this at all, if I'm reading its description right. I'm talking about the pager itself. It's the little display that's always on the screen in the tray or menu bar. It's like what Cinnamon has, but instead of just boxes with numbers around to represent the desktops, it has little thumbnails of the running apps, including the app's icon if the window is big enough. Either way this little bit of feedback is essential for my use of virtual desktops. Not only to remind me of where I am, but to remind me what I have on the other workspaces. I like this feedback even though I use certain desktops for certain tasks consistently.
This is a feature that's been with X11 desktops for more than 20 years. It's the one feature that keeps me on Mate to be honest. Otherwise cinnamon would probably work fine for me.
As for compiz, I have it configured exactly to my liking and I really like it. Would really miss the configuration I've got set up if I had to switch to cinnamon.
Cinnamon and Gnome 3 still are missing one vital feature from Gnome 2 and Mate. That is the key feature of showing window previews in the pager. This is a powerful feature that helps make virtual desktops a bit more easy to use. Seeing a bunch of boxes with numbers in them is far less useful. This sort of thing has been available in old X11 pagers for about 20 years or more. Why can Cinnamon not do it too? I rely on this feature to mind me what apps are running where.
In what ways is Qt massively flawed? You claim those of us unaware of them are green, but then you say absolutely nothing to enlighten us.
Pretty sure the NSAKEY thing was debunked a long time ago (even in the wikipedia article you linked to!).
Every time I read about setting up hotlines between governments on various things, I think of this classic episode from Yes, Prime Minister, "The Grand Design."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=diuQiXt5qE4#t=45s
Prime Minister: So in an emergency I can get straight through to the Soviet president?
General: Theoretically, yes.
PM: Theoretically?
General: It's what we tell journalists. Ha Ha Ha. In fact we did once get through to the Kremlin, but only to a switchboard operator.
PM: Couldn't the operator put you through?
General: We never found out. Didn't seem to speak much English.
PM: How often is it tested?
Sir Humphreys: Well they try not to test it too often. It tends to create unnecessary panic at the other end and panic is always a good thing to avoid where nuclear weapons are concerned, don't you think?
When Canada phased out leaded gas some years ago, you could buy an additive for older engines that you just poured in the gas tank. So I imagine that something similar could be done for exempt aircraft. Mixing in a tank first would probably be much cheaper than modifying a carb and much safer.
Indeed it is in the eye of the beholder. Fonts are one area that any recent distro has over windows in my opinion. Windows fonts just look strange and always have, probably due to the hinting. The best fonts I've ever seen are on linux when you turn off hinting entirely and enable subpixel-rendering.
And they should know since many of them worked on these very features in X11.
I don't understand why you are making a big deal out of building wayland. X11 is very difficult to build (took hours the last time I did it). Who cares? When it's ready, you will be able to install it with aptitude install wayland. Building from source is always more complicated than installing from a binary package. This has nothing to do with support. why the attitude?
Wanted to comment on the "when the genetic crops fail" comment. GMO crops don't "fail" any differently than heirloom crops do. An ecological disaster that wipes out GMO crops is going to wipe out "bio-diversified" crops too. Your argument is thus a fallacy.
Perhaps you are referring to monoculture. However monoculture as a problem has nothing to do with GMO crop. Non-GMO crops can be just as mono-cultured as GMO. There is interesting research going on now into the idea of growing multiple crops together. This addresses the monoculture problem while still having the advantages of scale (irrigation systems are fixed size and go in a circle). One example is growing peas and canola together, say alternating rows. Between the two crops weeds should be fairly well managed (since canola is the most common weed in pea fields anyway!). The peas are nitrogen fixing, so that will benefit the canola, reducing input costs. And with standard harvesting equipment you can harvest them both together in one pass. All that's required is a way of separating the seeds, which is fairly easy because canola is small and peas are large.
Excellent points. Sometimes I forget how things are down there in the corn belt. Even here in Canada, my neighbors to the east (next province over) are now starting to come to terms with the consequences of not rotating Canola like they should.
Just to help people understand why crop rotation is often cheated on, consider that corn is a very lucrative crop. Soybeans, the second choice, is about 2/3 of the profit of corn. And wheat is possibly 1/2 of corn. A heavily-leveraged farm is going to be sorely tempted to to maximize short-term profits. Yes it will come crashing down eventually.
On my farm, multiplying seed canola brings me more than double the income per acre of any of my other crops. We joke about rotating snow canola snow canola, but we know we can't do that and so we have to be careful and plan things out as best we can. We constantly look for alternate crops to try, that we can grow with our current equipment. Some work out, some don't. This year we're trying dry beans and faba beans.
Perhaps you should go work with farmers for a bit (real family farms... yes they still exist) and get a grasp of their current methodology, both the how and the why. Then you can take your position with knowledge rather than fear.
Your arguments are fairly scattered, so it's hard to pin them down and reply logically to them. Monsanto isn't forcing farmers to buy their seed. Rather they offer a distinct advantage over the heirloom varieties and that appeals to farmers, and they actually have a small benefit to the environment in the short term by dramatically reducing soil weed seed load. Also labor is very expensive. Cutting labor costs can make the difference between being in business or not. Most importantly, the market has spoken, and it wants what the RR varieties deliver. Clean crops, high yields. Do I as a farmer love Monsanto? Not really. They are just a big company. Is Monstanto wrong for making a farmer sign a contract to grow seed from them? No that's within their right. Every seed company out there has round-up ready stuff now, so it's not just Monsanto anymore. =
The widespread use of glyphosate is having negative impacts, but not in the areas that you fear. The chemistry of glyphosate is well understood and how plants are killed by it or metabolize it are well understood. Heavy reliance on glyphosate is causing weeds to be selected for resistance. And drift from spraying is causing damage to shelterbelts all across the midwest, which is going to be a huge regret in the near future.
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about with stealing Indian farms.
In short, there are many reasons to be concerned with chemical farming, but your reasons aren't them.