Sounds like you've never had the pleasure of administrating Windows on a large scale. For that I envy you. I maintain about 700 Windows desktops, mostly XP, some Windows 7, and I can tell you that indeed Windows on the desktop is the hardest to administer and consumes most of my time. Even with Windows 7 there are no remote management capabilities outside of AD, hence the need for LanDesk or Altiris. I don't think a single, patched, XP system lasts more than a week without Malware. Windows 7 is much better in that regard. To do all this I have a crew of 4 people that work on fixing Windows installs constantly. And they are very competent technicians too.
My linux desktops are much easier to maintain. Without any specialized tools I can do standardized installs, perform maintenance and updates, and install software. In my previous job I maintained some 200 Linux workstations at a university all by myself. Without expensive third-party software, you just can't do that on Windows. Is it any wonder that Citrix-style solutions are popular? The fact that Windows in the recent past has been so bad that you have to buy all kinds of kludges (Antivirus, etc) just to get it to function is likely the reason for the size of the software industry, which has a highly inflated sense of its own value. I guess we can say Microsoft was only doing its duty to promote the economic well-being of the other players in this Software "ecosystem."
But of course we all share the blame for this disaster. The root cause, after all, is our collective demand that BP drill for oil and sell it to us. Of course it's likely there were specific things that specific individuals did or did not do that precipitated this disaster, and yes they will have pay for their errors. But I worry about vilifying BP too much. It is almost as if we're trying to assuage our own consciences by mistakenly thinking that if we can just get BP to take the blame then everything will be alright and we can keep on living the consumption lifestyle.
Gotta love the quotes from the wonderfully progressive Republican party folks including this gem from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): "[Shelby congratulated SpaceX on what] 'NASA accomplished in 1964,' [and] added that the company's success 'must not be confused with progress for our nation's human spaceflight."
That's really rich seeing that NASA can't even do what SpaceX has done. Welcome back to 1964, maybe, we SpaceX is now years ahead of the now hopefully defunct Aries I program, despite NASA's extensive experience, which SpaceX is benefiting from. Even more ironic that a Republican senator is unhappy that private enterprise is doing something that a government agency is apparently unable to do. Oh how the Republican party has fallen. They're now caught by their own positions. I mean are they for private enterprise and the free market or not?
I doubt the Russians are bothered. They don't have any exclusive contracts for resupply other than their obligations and commitments anyway. Both the ESA ATV and Japanese HTV both have flown successful cargo missions to the space station, and are expected to become essential to the resupply of the station over the next few years. I can't remember about the ATV, but the HTV certainly carries a lot more cargo than the Progress freighters and can be attached to the larger ports on the American side of the station, allowing standard racks of equipment to be delivered. Progress and the ATV both us the smaller docking hatches and are more restricted in the kinds of cargo they can carry.
particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
You don't believe that this car project ever existed? Or are you doubting the reasons for its destruction?
Anyway, no matter how you look at it, the government's actions in destroying the remaining cars and the specifications and research pertaining to this project were wrong. Plain and simple. That's what most people here are upset about, not that they want a government car. But rather that the knowledge gained during this exercise should be freely available to all. What this story sounds like (whether or not this is true is debatable) is that industry pushed the government to destroy the cars and information largely because, being public research, there was no way for them to have exclusive access to whatever came of this program. As a result, all of the innovations ended up being developed in Europe and Japan.
Of course, apparently HP has a patent on a way of making toner abrasive so it wears out the drum faster, allowing them to sell more drums to customers. In fact most HP printers combine the toner with the drum, making their printers some of the more expensive ones to replace toner in.
Doesn't seem to work. Google comes back and says "We're sorry... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
I think that some torque would, by definition, be removed, as there is a relationship between speed and torque. Just like HP and Torque are different, more of one usually also means you have more of the other.
My understanding has always been that it's easier to subtract speed than add it, which is why the variable subtractor input doesn't require a lot of power compared to the power passing through the system.
But that does not answer your question. Makes me want to break out my Legos and model it. I wonder how one could measure torque on a spinning shaft cheaply.
When you combine GV with a SIP service with free-incoming calls like Gizmo or Sipgate, then it suddenly becomes a lot more useful. I can now make and receive calls at very little cost. In fact it's now so cheap and so reliable that I've canceled my cell plan and only use a prepaid cell for the few times I don't have access to my sip phone. My cell phone is SIP-enabled, so anywhere there's wifi I can call via GV and SIP. Even if GV's outbound calling was a penny a minute, it would still be the cheapest way of calling I can find right now. As long as people are calling me via my GV number, Google is still making money.
If you want to use GV outside of the US, just get a free sipgate number.
It's loud. Plus you have to have a heavy hydraulic system (pump, oil reservoir, valving, etc). In practice an electric motor gives you most of the same benefits of a hydrostatic system, but it's a lot lighter and doesn't require an oil system. Of course batteries are heavy, but aren't strictly needed (as in a locomotive).
A few years ago I heard of a design that used small hydraulic motors connected to each car wheel via clutches that would efficiently overcome the propensity of a differential to send power where you don't need it. Basically when slippage was detected, the clutches would engage and the faster wheel would act as a pump, sending fluid to drive the other wheel. The beauty was that if you tied all four wheels into the same system, you could get on-demand four wheel drive as well.
Another prototype I heard of used a hydrostatic system to charge up a nitrogen accumulator in a form of regenerative braking system.
Hydrostatics also has limitations in the amount of power you can transmit. Every large combine harvester we've ever owned has had a hydrostatic transmission, but no tractor ever has had. Combines typically don't pull things; driving power is minimal compared to the power consumed by threshing. Whereas in a tractor, it's all about driving power (outside of PTO applications). You just can't really put 500 HP of pulling power through hydrostatics. Most hydraulic motors are gear motors, which means the oil spins little gears. Under high load, oil slips past the gears without turning them. Compare that to electric where on a daily basis Locomotives pass thousands of horsepower from big diesel engines to the wheels with electric motors.
Hate to reply to my own post, but here is a fairly detailed explanation of John Deere's IVT: http://salesmanual.deere.com/sales/salesmanual/en_NA/tractors/2006/feature/transmissions/8030_option_code_1127_1137_ivt_trans.html . The relevant part is "The John Deere IVT uses a hydromechanical, power-splitting design where a portion of the power is transmitted mechanically and a portion hydrostatically. A hydromechanical transmission is more efficient than a purely hydrostatic transmission because gears carry power more efficiently than a hydraulic pump and motor. By careful selection of the gearing, the John Deere IVT carries a maximum of the power mechanically both at normal field working speeds and at transport speeds, taking maximum advantage of the higher mechanical efficiency while providing the control and versatility of a hydrostatic." And of course this power-splitting is done via a planetary gear system.
I say this not to take away from the D-Drive's awesomeness (John Deere doesn't do reverse without shifting a gear), but to help offer explanations of how it actually works.
At first blush, I'd say that both Toyota and John Deere have already produced something similar. What he appears to have, however, is a system that can smoothly transition (with power) through neutral and reverse. That indeed could be the cool, patented part, as the rest of his transmission is pretty well understood and actually in production already in many of the applications they list for their invention. I don't see any patent application listed, so I can't tell for sure exactly where his breakthrough is.
Here's the fundamental principle by which his transmission works, though: Basically the idea is you supply driving power to a planetary gear system and then use another variable system such as an electronic motor or, in John Deere's case, a hydraulic motor, to take speed (but not power) away from the output shaft by spinning part of the planetary system. If you understand how a planetary gearbox works, this makes sense. So in John Deere's case, the less-efficient hydraulic motor uses a tiny amount of power to control how the actual, geared, power is transmitted to the wheels. Using this system JD has a completely variable system with a particular gear range (this is a tractor after all) that has a powered neutral stop. In the pictures and video you'll note he has two electric motors that control the ratio.
Toyota does something similar with their hybrids, although it's more of a way to efficiently (and brilliantly, I might add) blend the gasoline motor's power with the electric system in an infinitely variable way.
Another way of implementing an IVT, though I don't think it is as efficient, is to use a differential. Power comes in the normal part of the differential (IE spinning the entire gear assembly), and then power comes out one side, and an electric or hydraulic motor attached to the other side (Where the wheels would normally go). You can then use the motor to change the apparent gear ratio, and even reverse it.
This comment is very ignorant. As I look at the projected budget deficits for the next few years I'm struck by the fact that the vast majority of this deficit is really the war coming due. Things like the health bill don't even figure in (the CBO calculates the health bill is paid for from other budget savings). So basically the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which countries we now have a huge moral obligation to fix things, have cost us trillions of dollars, and continue to cost u, that we haven't really paid for yet, and can't afford to pay for.
The republicans are big on the idea of tax cuts, but they are traditionally the ones who run up spending and increase government size (goes back to Reagan). The hypocrisy coming out of that party is mind-blowing. Bush simultaneously decreased taxes, increased spending by a staggering amount, and increased the size of reach of government by an unprecedented amount, more than at any other time in recent history. The party of small government I think not.
Honestly, if we had plowed even some of the money we've wasted in Iraq over the years (IE if we'd not gone to war) into things like NASA, we could have paid for constellation several times over and covered social programs and other important things easily. Scientists are clamouring to send new robotic missions to the planets. As one scientist involved put it to me, 3 days of war in Iraq and Afghanistan could pay for an entire mission to Europa. Three days!
Not true in Israel. The only thing that is keeping them in their present system is the fact that no single party can ever get enough seats to change it. In other words the system is serving the parties' interests more than it serves the people. It's very sad indeed. If that's really what you want, then go for it.
If you have done testing and produced reproduce-able, peer-reviewed papers on the subject I definitely would love to see them. Cause so far it seems like the GMO debate is a lot like the vaccination debate. Not based on great science.
While I'm not concerned about the human health problems of GMO food, I am concerned about genes traveling between plants and creating super weeds, like the weeds presented in the article.
As for only buying organic, that is good for you. However the majority of folks either do not have access to such foods or cannot afford them. That's the simple fact. I agree 100% with Louise Fresco on this one.
Indeed "traditional" agriculture as you call it works in a lot of areas. In many areas of the west where we are dependent on irrigation, they don't work so well at all. And the very fact that commodity prices are so low pretty much prohibits more costly, organic, ways of doing things. I've been following organic farming for some time. I have yet to see how I can implement it on the scale I need to to stay in business. This is the catch-22 of modern agriculture. We need the scale we have (in fact we need to increase it dramatically), but at the same time we have to be environmentally friendly. We depend on the environment for our livelihood, indeed for our very lives.
I looked at that web page but I'm a little unsure of what Take Back Parliament is calling for. Are they calling for a system where the number of seats in parliament for a party is proportional to their percentage of the popular vote? If so then this is a recipe for disaster, in my opinion. Under such a scheme how would you get direct representation from ridings in parliament? How would you ever get a majority government? Israel has a proportional representation system (the Knesset) and it's complete and utter chaos much of the time. In fact, many Israelis consider it broken and are calling for reform to create a more American-style system. As a consequence of Israel's system, frequent elections and very frequent reversal of policies which makes it very hard to make progress on many issues.
There are quite a few comment being posted by people who clearly aren't farmers and don't have a real clue as to where their food comes from. In fact several folks express a deep ignorance, which I could excuse, but then they go on to make claims and call for action. As a medium-scale farmer myself, I feel like I know enough about the issues to reply accurately. In no particular order, I state a few points.
1. Farmers are price takers. In other words, if you want to change agriculture, you have to do it on the demand side of the equation. If you think that raising costs for farmers will change behavior, you are wrong; that will merely drive farmers out of business. Instead maybe try to figure out why the price of food in the supermarket seems to have no relation to the commodity prices farmers are paid. Near as I can tell, the amount of wheat in a loaf of bread is pennies. Yet a loaf of bread is running at $3 in some places. If the current food prices trickled down to farmers, they could more easily absorb the increased cost of certain herbicide regulations, etc.
2. Unless you want to condemn billions of people to death, world food production has to double over the next 15 years, according to most forecasters. The only way I can see to do this is by trying to develop more environmentally sustainable methods of high-intensity farming that reduce our reliance on herbicides. As well I agree with Louise Fresco who thinks that agriculture can and should be done on rooftops and balconies in cities everywhere. Or maybe even city parks. Get city folks more involved with the food production process.
3. Permaculture and other similar ideas are good ones, but they don't scale very well in our economy, and forcing it through regulation won't work either (see #1). Currently just a few percent of the world's population now provide food for the rest and this number is dropping because of tremendous economic pressures placed on farmers. In other words farm life is a lot more strenuous that city life, and commodity prices have been pushed (by you, the city folk) to historic lows. Only the largest operators now remain. If you are willing to pay between even more for your food, perhaps more small permaculture farms would pop up.
4. Contributing to #2, European and American subsidies are having a tremendous negative impact on food production around the world. These subsidies keep the prices artificially low, effectively eliminating all but subsistence agriculture in Africa, and promoting the use of herbicides on a mass scale across the developed world. At the same time the subsides are promoting the practices that bring about the problems mentioned in the article. Indeed write your congressmen or EU parliamentarian on this one and demand that subsidies be removed.
5. Computer vision and herbicides only really work well in the practice of fallowing. It's easy to spot something green amongst a fallow field that's all brown, and spray it. And even there the cost of such a system is quite prohibitive still, so it hasn't reached the actual market yet. Computer vision in the fruit industry has little bearing on the issues of roundup resistant weeds in the article. The main food crops are cereals, legumes, and oilseeds. In these cases, weed control by vision is a lot harder as at the early stages it is hard even for a human to discern between a weed and a crop plant. It's not at all like an orchard. Crops are seeded in narrow rows, but the rows themselves are not little lines; we try to spread the seed out get get better germination and better growth. Thus weed and crop plants can be anywhere in 6-inch wide strips, the average distance between each strip's center is between 6 and 10", typically (we're not talking about row crops here). I am a CS major and follow computer vision developments. We're just not there yet. So there's nothing to write Congress about yet. Hopefully that will change in the future.
6. Tillage is the number one reason we now have the overall weed proble
Already does that. NX has supported proxying VNC via the NX protocol for some time. Just make a new connection, set the Desktop to "VNC" and then tell the NX server which machine you want to connect to over VNC. Works like this:
NX client --nxprotocol--> NX Server --vncprotocol--> someotherhost
Now we just need a web-based, fast NX client! Guess I could run nxclient in a x11vnc session via guacamole. haha
As for Guacamole, this is cool technology, but being Java-based is a huge minus. I'm certainly not going to deploy an entire heavy-weight app server on my VPS just to have this functionality. Thanks to the parent poster for reminding me that I already have NX and it can do VNC!
No, it doesn't matter whether you use SI or the silly gibi, mibi prefixes. 4 Tbit is not 512 GB or 512 GiB. It's 500 GB or about 476 GiB by my calculations. 4000000000 / 8 is 500000000 bytes.
Last time this came up on slashdot, someone brought up this handy little device that looks and acts like a floppy drive (to the controller) but lets you use usb sticks instead:
Can't blame you for not reading the article, since it was dry. But if you would read the article you'd know that you're wrong. ogg was not designed specifically for ogg vorbis. It was designed as a generic container for all sorts of streams, right from the beginning. Before you post next time, please consider whether what you are saying is actual fact or just something you made up based on what you thought you knew.
Re:Ban lifted, but limited to one per person.
on
Israel Repeals iPad Ban
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And of course things that we (the TSA anyway) consider security threats--like water bottles, and nail clippers with a pointy file on airplains--are seen as harmless to them. I think maybe they understand some things about terrorism that we don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you've never had the pleasure of administrating Windows on a large scale. For that I envy you. I maintain about 700 Windows desktops, mostly XP, some Windows 7, and I can tell you that indeed Windows on the desktop is the hardest to administer and consumes most of my time. Even with Windows 7 there are no remote management capabilities outside of AD, hence the need for LanDesk or Altiris. I don't think a single, patched, XP system lasts more than a week without Malware. Windows 7 is much better in that regard. To do all this I have a crew of 4 people that work on fixing Windows installs constantly. And they are very competent technicians too.
My linux desktops are much easier to maintain. Without any specialized tools I can do standardized installs, perform maintenance and updates, and install software. In my previous job I maintained some 200 Linux workstations at a university all by myself. Without expensive third-party software, you just can't do that on Windows. Is it any wonder that Citrix-style solutions are popular? The fact that Windows in the recent past has been so bad that you have to buy all kinds of kludges (Antivirus, etc) just to get it to function is likely the reason for the size of the software industry, which has a highly inflated sense of its own value. I guess we can say Microsoft was only doing its duty to promote the economic well-being of the other players in this Software "ecosystem."
But of course we all share the blame for this disaster. The root cause, after all, is our collective demand that BP drill for oil and sell it to us. Of course it's likely there were specific things that specific individuals did or did not do that precipitated this disaster, and yes they will have pay for their errors. But I worry about vilifying BP too much. It is almost as if we're trying to assuage our own consciences by mistakenly thinking that if we can just get BP to take the blame then everything will be alright and we can keep on living the consumption lifestyle.
Gotta love the quotes from the wonderfully progressive Republican party folks including this gem from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): "[Shelby congratulated SpaceX on what] 'NASA accomplished in 1964,' [and] added that the company's success 'must not be confused with progress for our nation's human spaceflight."
That's really rich seeing that NASA can't even do what SpaceX has done. Welcome back to 1964, maybe, we SpaceX is now years ahead of the now hopefully defunct Aries I program, despite NASA's extensive experience, which SpaceX is benefiting from. Even more ironic that a Republican senator is unhappy that private enterprise is doing something that a government agency is apparently unable to do. Oh how the Republican party has fallen. They're now caught by their own positions. I mean are they for private enterprise and the free market or not?
Youtube is already serving some videos with WebM and HTML5, as well as h.264.
I doubt the Russians are bothered. They don't have any exclusive contracts for resupply other than their obligations and commitments anyway. Both the ESA ATV and Japanese HTV both have flown successful cargo missions to the space station, and are expected to become essential to the resupply of the station over the next few years. I can't remember about the ATV, but the HTV certainly carries a lot more cargo than the Progress freighters and can be attached to the larger ports on the American side of the station, allowing standard racks of equipment to be delivered. Progress and the ATV both us the smaller docking hatches and are more restricted in the kinds of cargo they can carry.
You don't believe that this car project ever existed? Or are you doubting the reasons for its destruction?
Anyway, no matter how you look at it, the government's actions in destroying the remaining cars and the specifications and research pertaining to this project were wrong. Plain and simple. That's what most people here are upset about, not that they want a government car. But rather that the knowledge gained during this exercise should be freely available to all. What this story sounds like (whether or not this is true is debatable) is that industry pushed the government to destroy the cars and information largely because, being public research, there was no way for them to have exclusive access to whatever came of this program. As a result, all of the innovations ended up being developed in Europe and Japan.
Of course, apparently HP has a patent on a way of making toner abrasive so it wears out the drum faster, allowing them to sell more drums to customers. In fact most HP printers combine the toner with the drum, making their printers some of the more expensive ones to replace toner in.
Doesn't seem to work. Google comes back and says "We're sorry... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
I think that some torque would, by definition, be removed, as there is a relationship between speed and torque. Just like HP and Torque are different, more of one usually also means you have more of the other.
My understanding has always been that it's easier to subtract speed than add it, which is why the variable subtractor input doesn't require a lot of power compared to the power passing through the system.
But that does not answer your question. Makes me want to break out my Legos and model it. I wonder how one could measure torque on a spinning shaft cheaply.
When you combine GV with a SIP service with free-incoming calls like Gizmo or Sipgate, then it suddenly becomes a lot more useful. I can now make and receive calls at very little cost. In fact it's now so cheap and so reliable that I've canceled my cell plan and only use a prepaid cell for the few times I don't have access to my sip phone. My cell phone is SIP-enabled, so anywhere there's wifi I can call via GV and SIP. Even if GV's outbound calling was a penny a minute, it would still be the cheapest way of calling I can find right now. As long as people are calling me via my GV number, Google is still making money.
If you want to use GV outside of the US, just get a free sipgate number.
It's loud. Plus you have to have a heavy hydraulic system (pump, oil reservoir, valving, etc). In practice an electric motor gives you most of the same benefits of a hydrostatic system, but it's a lot lighter and doesn't require an oil system. Of course batteries are heavy, but aren't strictly needed (as in a locomotive).
A few years ago I heard of a design that used small hydraulic motors connected to each car wheel via clutches that would efficiently overcome the propensity of a differential to send power where you don't need it. Basically when slippage was detected, the clutches would engage and the faster wheel would act as a pump, sending fluid to drive the other wheel. The beauty was that if you tied all four wheels into the same system, you could get on-demand four wheel drive as well.
Another prototype I heard of used a hydrostatic system to charge up a nitrogen accumulator in a form of regenerative braking system.
Hydrostatics also has limitations in the amount of power you can transmit. Every large combine harvester we've ever owned has had a hydrostatic transmission, but no tractor ever has had. Combines typically don't pull things; driving power is minimal compared to the power consumed by threshing. Whereas in a tractor, it's all about driving power (outside of PTO applications). You just can't really put 500 HP of pulling power through hydrostatics. Most hydraulic motors are gear motors, which means the oil spins little gears. Under high load, oil slips past the gears without turning them. Compare that to electric where on a daily basis Locomotives pass thousands of horsepower from big diesel engines to the wheels with electric motors.
Hate to reply to my own post, but here is a fairly detailed explanation of John Deere's IVT: http://salesmanual.deere.com/sales/salesmanual/en_NA/tractors/2006/feature/transmissions/8030_option_code_1127_1137_ivt_trans.html . The relevant part is "The John Deere IVT uses a hydromechanical, power-splitting design where a portion of the power is transmitted mechanically and a portion hydrostatically. A hydromechanical transmission is more efficient than a purely hydrostatic transmission because gears carry power more efficiently than a hydraulic pump and motor. By careful selection of the gearing, the John Deere IVT carries a maximum of the power mechanically both at normal field working speeds and at transport speeds, taking maximum advantage of the higher mechanical efficiency while providing the control and versatility of a hydrostatic." And of course this power-splitting is done via a planetary gear system.
I say this not to take away from the D-Drive's awesomeness (John Deere doesn't do reverse without shifting a gear), but to help offer explanations of how it actually works.
At first blush, I'd say that both Toyota and John Deere have already produced something similar. What he appears to have, however, is a system that can smoothly transition (with power) through neutral and reverse. That indeed could be the cool, patented part, as the rest of his transmission is pretty well understood and actually in production already in many of the applications they list for their invention. I don't see any patent application listed, so I can't tell for sure exactly where his breakthrough is.
Here's the fundamental principle by which his transmission works, though: Basically the idea is you supply driving power to a planetary gear system and then use another variable system such as an electronic motor or, in John Deere's case, a hydraulic motor, to take speed (but not power) away from the output shaft by spinning part of the planetary system. If you understand how a planetary gearbox works, this makes sense. So in John Deere's case, the less-efficient hydraulic motor uses a tiny amount of power to control how the actual, geared, power is transmitted to the wheels. Using this system JD has a completely variable system with a particular gear range (this is a tractor after all) that has a powered neutral stop. In the pictures and video you'll note he has two electric motors that control the ratio.
Toyota does something similar with their hybrids, although it's more of a way to efficiently (and brilliantly, I might add) blend the gasoline motor's power with the electric system in an infinitely variable way.
Another way of implementing an IVT, though I don't think it is as efficient, is to use a differential. Power comes in the normal part of the differential (IE spinning the entire gear assembly), and then power comes out one side, and an electric or hydraulic motor attached to the other side (Where the wheels would normally go). You can then use the motor to change the apparent gear ratio, and even reverse it.
This comment is very ignorant. As I look at the projected budget deficits for the next few years I'm struck by the fact that the vast majority of this deficit is really the war coming due. Things like the health bill don't even figure in (the CBO calculates the health bill is paid for from other budget savings). So basically the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which countries we now have a huge moral obligation to fix things, have cost us trillions of dollars, and continue to cost u, that we haven't really paid for yet, and can't afford to pay for.
The republicans are big on the idea of tax cuts, but they are traditionally the ones who run up spending and increase government size (goes back to Reagan). The hypocrisy coming out of that party is mind-blowing. Bush simultaneously decreased taxes, increased spending by a staggering amount, and increased the size of reach of government by an unprecedented amount, more than at any other time in recent history. The party of small government I think not.
Honestly, if we had plowed even some of the money we've wasted in Iraq over the years (IE if we'd not gone to war) into things like NASA, we could have paid for constellation several times over and covered social programs and other important things easily. Scientists are clamouring to send new robotic missions to the planets. As one scientist involved put it to me, 3 days of war in Iraq and Afghanistan could pay for an entire mission to Europa. Three days!
Not true in Israel. The only thing that is keeping them in their present system is the fact that no single party can ever get enough seats to change it. In other words the system is serving the parties' interests more than it serves the people. It's very sad indeed. If that's really what you want, then go for it.
If you have done testing and produced reproduce-able, peer-reviewed papers on the subject I definitely would love to see them. Cause so far it seems like the GMO debate is a lot like the vaccination debate. Not based on great science.
While I'm not concerned about the human health problems of GMO food, I am concerned about genes traveling between plants and creating super weeds, like the weeds presented in the article.
As for only buying organic, that is good for you. However the majority of folks either do not have access to such foods or cannot afford them. That's the simple fact. I agree 100% with Louise Fresco on this one.
Indeed "traditional" agriculture as you call it works in a lot of areas. In many areas of the west where we are dependent on irrigation, they don't work so well at all. And the very fact that commodity prices are so low pretty much prohibits more costly, organic, ways of doing things. I've been following organic farming for some time. I have yet to see how I can implement it on the scale I need to to stay in business. This is the catch-22 of modern agriculture. We need the scale we have (in fact we need to increase it dramatically), but at the same time we have to be environmentally friendly. We depend on the environment for our livelihood, indeed for our very lives.
I looked at that web page but I'm a little unsure of what Take Back Parliament is calling for. Are they calling for a system where the number of seats in parliament for a party is proportional to their percentage of the popular vote? If so then this is a recipe for disaster, in my opinion. Under such a scheme how would you get direct representation from ridings in parliament? How would you ever get a majority government? Israel has a proportional representation system (the Knesset) and it's complete and utter chaos much of the time. In fact, many Israelis consider it broken and are calling for reform to create a more American-style system. As a consequence of Israel's system, frequent elections and very frequent reversal of policies which makes it very hard to make progress on many issues.
There are quite a few comment being posted by people who clearly aren't farmers and don't have a real clue as to where their food comes from. In fact several folks express a deep ignorance, which I could excuse, but then they go on to make claims and call for action. As a medium-scale farmer myself, I feel like I know enough about the issues to reply accurately. In no particular order, I state a few points.
1. Farmers are price takers. In other words, if you want to change agriculture, you have to do it on the demand side of the equation. If you think that raising costs for farmers will change behavior, you are wrong; that will merely drive farmers out of business. Instead maybe try to figure out why the price of food in the supermarket seems to have no relation to the commodity prices farmers are paid. Near as I can tell, the amount of wheat in a loaf of bread is pennies. Yet a loaf of bread is running at $3 in some places. If the current food prices trickled down to farmers, they could more easily absorb the increased cost of certain herbicide regulations, etc.
2. Unless you want to condemn billions of people to death, world food production has to double over the next 15 years, according to most forecasters. The only way I can see to do this is by trying to develop more environmentally sustainable methods of high-intensity farming that reduce our reliance on herbicides. As well I agree with Louise Fresco who thinks that agriculture can and should be done on rooftops and balconies in cities everywhere. Or maybe even city parks. Get city folks more involved with the food production process.
3. Permaculture and other similar ideas are good ones, but they don't scale very well in our economy, and forcing it through regulation won't work either (see #1). Currently just a few percent of the world's population now provide food for the rest and this number is dropping because of tremendous economic pressures placed on farmers. In other words farm life is a lot more strenuous that city life, and commodity prices have been pushed (by you, the city folk) to historic lows. Only the largest operators now remain. If you are willing to pay between even more for your food, perhaps more small permaculture farms would pop up.
4. Contributing to #2, European and American subsidies are having a tremendous negative impact on food production around the world. These subsidies keep the prices artificially low, effectively eliminating all but subsistence agriculture in Africa, and promoting the use of herbicides on a mass scale across the developed world. At the same time the subsides are promoting the practices that bring about the problems mentioned in the article. Indeed write your congressmen or EU parliamentarian on this one and demand that subsidies be removed.
5. Computer vision and herbicides only really work well in the practice of fallowing. It's easy to spot something green amongst a fallow field that's all brown, and spray it. And even there the cost of such a system is quite prohibitive still, so it hasn't reached the actual market yet. Computer vision in the fruit industry has little bearing on the issues of roundup resistant weeds in the article. The main food crops are cereals, legumes, and oilseeds. In these cases, weed control by vision is a lot harder as at the early stages it is hard even for a human to discern between a weed and a crop plant. It's not at all like an orchard. Crops are seeded in narrow rows, but the rows themselves are not little lines; we try to spread the seed out get get better germination and better growth. Thus weed and crop plants can be anywhere in 6-inch wide strips, the average distance between each strip's center is between 6 and 10", typically (we're not talking about row crops here).
I am a CS major and follow computer vision developments. We're just not there yet. So there's nothing to write Congress about yet. Hopefully that will change in the future.
6. Tillage is the number one reason we now have the overall weed proble
Already does that. NX has supported proxying VNC via the NX protocol for some time. Just make a new connection, set the Desktop to "VNC" and then tell the NX server which machine you want to connect to over VNC. Works like this:
NX client --nxprotocol--> NX Server --vncprotocol--> someotherhost
Now we just need a web-based, fast NX client! Guess I could run nxclient in a x11vnc session via guacamole. haha
As for Guacamole, this is cool technology, but being Java-based is a huge minus. I'm certainly not going to deploy an entire heavy-weight app server on my VPS just to have this functionality. Thanks to the parent poster for reminding me that I already have NX and it can do VNC!
No, it doesn't matter whether you use SI or the silly gibi, mibi prefixes. 4 Tbit is not 512 GB or 512 GiB. It's 500 GB or about 476 GiB by my calculations. 4000000000 / 8 is 500000000 bytes.
Last time this came up on slashdot, someone brought up this handy little device that looks and acts like a floppy drive (to the controller) but lets you use usb sticks instead:
http://www.floppytousb.com/
This should work on all the synths, CNC machines, sewing machines, etc.
Oops. That should have read "ogg was not designed specifically for vorbis."
Can't blame you for not reading the article, since it was dry. But if you would read the article you'd know that you're wrong. ogg was not designed specifically for ogg vorbis. It was designed as a generic container for all sorts of streams, right from the beginning. Before you post next time, please consider whether what you are saying is actual fact or just something you made up based on what you thought you knew.
And of course things that we (the TSA anyway) consider security threats--like water bottles, and nail clippers with a pointy file on airplains--are seen as harmless to them. I think maybe they understand some things about terrorism that we don't.