This point of view lacks a certain understanding. The model of feeding soybeans to cows is HORRIBLE (albeit, very common today). Only practical in the factory farming paradigm. Cows should be on a pasture, eating grass. Also, food is more than ratios of protein and other components. Without the right processing, little of the nutrition from the soybean is available to us directly.
For a real primer on nutrition, cutting through our modern propaganda on the issue, watch this video.
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/9164/Nourishing-Traditional-Diets--The-Key-To-Vibrant-Health
The long-lasting war that NO ONE SEEMS TO BE TALKING ABOUT, that costs us billions and billions, and puts such an incredibly huge percentage of our population behind bars.
Over 800,000 Americans arrested JUST LAST YEAR for JUST marijuana offenses. This is a travesty and it needs to end! Why the hell isn't anyone TALKING About it in this damn election!
Joshua
Since the public education in this system was DESIGNED to dumb people down, and supress natural human ingenuity and intelligence, preparing them to live in a hierarchical industrialized nation. I'd rather see the PUBLIC education system dismantled!
This is a perfect example of the majority rules vote failing to manifest an outcome that a majority really want. I am a big believer in the consensus process, where no decision can stand that any of the group block, therefore the discussion takes longer, but the outcome is acceptable to all. Also consensus minus one is a good variant, meaning that ONE blocker does not suffice.
However, with the exception of carpooling, he acknowledges he is hard-pressed to find instances where sustained sharing of valuable things is prevalent in the world outside information technology. For most goods and services, sharing will remain the exception not the rule. But Mr Benkler has identified an intriguing alternative.
Obviously Mr. Benkler has never been to a Rainbow Gathering, where all essentials (food, warmth, shelter) are shared, and some more frivolous things are bartered for.;)
I think it's very important to remember here that fuels (both alcohol and biodiesel) can be made quite readily not just from a farmed crop (sugar cane, hemp, algae, whatever), but can also be made from waste in a large variety of ways ranging in efficiency and applications.
Alcohol can be made from newspapers or any other cellulose, starch OR glucose rich biomass. There is even currently large tax subsidies in the US for the production and use of alcohol as fuel. Alcohol of several forms can also be made from methane gas, which is a biproduct of the decompositon of shit without air.
Biodiesel is far from being a new idea that the FIRST diesel engine, premiered by Rudolph Diesel at the world's fair in Paris in the year 1900, ran on peanut oil. The most interesting thing about oil is that behind nearly every grocery store and restaurant (in the US as well as some other industrialized countries) has a big bin that contains anywhere from 50 - 300 gallons of oil, used to fry french fries and chicken and all the other deep fried goodies that American's (not to mention the Brits!) enjoy so much. I know so many hippies that run their buses (and other diesel vehichles) on this oil, it just needs to be filtered first and heated before putting it into the engine. Obviously this is not a solution to large scale commercial production, but in this situation now, it gets a lot of people around.
Amazing, when you consider that this technology is over 8000 years old in China, and is INCREDIBLY COMMON in the third world today. In Indonesia and India and South America, etc., this is done daily.
Cheers, Joshua
Ethanol can be produced by many things, other than corn. It can be produced by wood chips, and other waste products...
And as for the energy input in making ethanol, there is indeed the sun, and there are many other things that burn other than fossil fuels. One that comes readily to my mind as being appropriate to the production of ethanol is methane gas, easily produced from shit, including our own, which is a resource far defying the limits of abundance!
The thing about this development I don't understand is that most gasoline engines can be converted to run on ethanol, so what is the point of using ethanol to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to run a car when you can just burn the ethanol in a combustion engine and get the same energy that way... especially considering the amount of engines out there that could readily run the fuel.
Cheers, Joshua
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
I know how it sounds, but I feel quite strongly that what is needed really is a new innovation in this area, and eventually, it should be at the OS level (and the filesystem level as well).
I would like a heierarchy of object classificiations (where one object could be in many different classifications, and even blocks of an object (like a paragraph, page, piece of a video clip( can be in classifications). Hell, I would start the heierarchy with people, places, and things. contacts go under people, places (both in meatspace and cyberspace) makes seems sensible, and things is everything else. Even letters and words as objects acting as a dictionary, and eventually even a spell-check.
Another thing I've been considering is what if I could create a file, and give it all it's classifications, and then finalize it by creating it a public key and signing it with my key, thus vouching for it. Of course, I've also been thinking about a distributed server organization for communications... creating a prototol framework using the email namespace (and recognizing old email headers and responding to them accordingly), where whatever data the user wanted to store could be stored on the server (including public key, files, communications logs [email], etc.) and the server could be queried as to the status of that user, allowing something like the buddy lists so prevelant in today's communications world).
Then, if you've got the framework for digital encryption and signatures turned by by default, you can encrypt everything user to user, and also if you're really paranoid, you can encrypt machine to machine on top of that.
Anyway, I guess I've gotten off the topic, but I really think that a new general data-storage method is needed... files and directories are FAR too limited.
For my money, one of the most effective ways to deal with terrorism would be to get the highest possible percentage of the population to carry concealed weapons...but perhaps that's just me.;-)
I agree! An armed society is a polite society, and I'd much rather be shot by anyone other than the police, or at least, anyone doing it for reasons that are theirs, not because they were told to do it! If you have a personal motivation to shoot me, I can at least respect that! I'd rather deal with terrorists than the police any day!
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but concrete breaks down after about 80 years. That's not to say it's not still effective in some applications after it's structure has changed, but as far as I know, after 80 years, it turns to powder (very tightly compacted powder, granted, but powder none the less). Concrete seems to be quite a ubiquitis building material these days (and for some time now), and I was wondering if anyone had any notions of alternatives to concrete?
I would very much like to know how secure common encryption (such as modern PGP) from a government. I mean, I assume they can crack anything using brute force at least with Crays and whatnot, but how much effort does it take on their part, or more importantly, do they have some kind of back doors as I've heard rumors of? Basically, how easy is it for the government to read my PGP encrypted e-mail? If not much so, what would you recommend?
All your reasons why collecting asteroids would be quite difficult are valid. I also think that it would be an interesting, and likely fruitful, way to answer this rathering important question. More importantly however, I think that we have lots and lots of other reasons to go get us some ansteroids. There's a big asteroid belt out there with a lot of useful minerals, where we don't have a pesky ecosystem to worry about destroying, we can do all the damn mining we want on any unocupied asteroids we should find out there.
Although of course this would be an imense venture, probably requiring a permanent base on the moon and who knows where else, but it would remove the dependency of technology on earth from our fragile ecosystem, and let's face it, we've taken a lot of the easy metals out of the ground, and it's only going to get harder and harder to find. Another important point to remember is that although going up is expensive, going down is dirt cheap.;)
I heard about this bill like a week ago on smokedot and although I didn't get through the whole damn thing, I was a touch confused about this bit:
SEC. 1503. CLARIFICATION OF SUNSET PROVISION IN USA
PATRIOT ACT.
Section 224(a) of the USA PATRIOT ACT (Public Law 107-56) is amended by inserting before the period the following: ''and any provision of law amended or modified by this title and the amendments made by this title (except for the sections excepted) shall take effect January 1, 2006, as in effect on the day before the effective date of this Act''.
Now... I suspect that says something like the PATRIOT act isn't going to expire like it was supposed to. And will someone please tell me what the fuck AMBER stands for?
There are a few shows on TV that I think are almost worth watching. However, the thing I really hate about television is that I have absolutely no control over when I watch what. I am at the mercy of the networks for my scheduling. I think that it would be beneficial (particularly to us geeks, but I think, to the public in general) to make a transition our video consumption away from the broadcasted TV signals, the few to many distribution method, and move towards using what we have on the internet, the many to many distribution.
One way, perhaps to speed this transition, which I would consider a form of activism, would be to set up such a grand TV ripping station and every week let's say, burn a few CDs/DVDs for different types of people. A disc of cartoons, some friends are mine are into sports so we'll burn one for them too, and of course the news, and C-SPAN and whatever else we feel like. Not to mention of course, all the movie channels.
This would of course, be highly illegal and expensive and make no money, but I think it would be a grand gesture in the fight against intelectual property.
Cheers, Joshua
At the moment, I'm over half way through my first of Benford's books. My dad recomended it to me, "Time-Scape" is the name, it's quite good, but much as you describe.
I must say, though, that the best science fiction writer I've read of late is Orsen Scott Card! Most famous for his Ender series (all great, imho), my favorite of his books so far was called "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus." This book combined science fiction and historical fiction in a most remarkable way, and I would highly recommend it.
I think that the biggest problem with WiFi is not it's limited range, but the fact that it was designed with corporate users in mind, not community networking. 802.11 would be a better solution if it meshed easily and every node acted as a router, transmitting packets for it's neighbors. Fortunately, some companies are working on the problem now, but it's a damn shame it wasn't done right the first time.
Has anyone managed to download it yet from one of the p2p's? If so, which one, and which copy? I tried to download the second Harry Potter movie and got a pr0n and the first Harry Potter movie instead!
A lot of the posters on this one seem to want 640x480 screens, and keyboards, and 3" CD-RWs and all sorts of other stuff. I think that the new PocketPC machines are getting pretty close to what I want (despite Micro$oft). Transcriber is getting almost passable, and that is important because I definitely want handwriting recognition, but for some kinds of data entry (until voice recognition becomes practical, of course). One feature I would definitely want is a software based (I hate those hardware data entry bits on the bottom of some palms... just wastes screen space) FITALY keyboard. In a contest, people were typing over 80 wpm on these fitaly keyboards, so I'd much rather have that than that stupid little qwerty keyboard that PocketPCs have (although both wouldn't hurt, of course).
One of the key features for me is that it be very small and light. I need to be able to carry it around in my pocket, and it needs to be durable and well-built so I don't have to worry about it breaking quite so much. And obviously, the more storage space the better. a gig would be nice, but 10 gigs would be better. It'd be nice to be able to toss a couple of movies on there, or a few simpsons or something for a wait. Batterly life is also important, as is 802.11b (or eventually UWB or whatever else we end up with). That's pretty much the list, far as I can think of.
Yeah, and if petrolium were the ONLY thing that you could make plastics from, this might worry me, but this is FAR from the case. Infact, the most abundant plant-based source of cellulose on the planet (the raw material for plastics) is the stalk of the hemp plant.
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy Now! ...
Economic Update with Richard Wolff
Counterspin
Real Time with Bill Maher (though he does rather piss me off sometimes)
This point of view lacks a certain understanding. The model of feeding soybeans to cows is HORRIBLE (albeit, very common today). Only practical in the factory farming paradigm. Cows should be on a pasture, eating grass. Also, food is more than ratios of protein and other components. Without the right processing, little of the nutrition from the soybean is available to us directly. For a real primer on nutrition, cutting through our modern propaganda on the issue, watch this video. http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/9164/Nourishing-Traditional-Diets--The-Key-To-Vibrant-Health
The cause of diseases mostly IS malnutrition!
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/9164/Nourishing-Traditional-Diets--The-Key-To-Vibrant-Health
The long-lasting war that NO ONE SEEMS TO BE TALKING ABOUT, that costs us billions and billions, and puts such an incredibly huge percentage of our population behind bars. Over 800,000 Americans arrested JUST LAST YEAR for JUST marijuana offenses. This is a travesty and it needs to end! Why the hell isn't anyone TALKING About it in this damn election! Joshua
Since the public education in this system was DESIGNED to dumb people down, and supress natural human ingenuity and intelligence, preparing them to live in a hierarchical industrialized nation. I'd rather see the PUBLIC education system dismantled!
This is a perfect example of the majority rules vote failing to manifest an outcome that a majority really want. I am a big believer in the consensus process, where no decision can stand that any of the group block, therefore the discussion takes longer, but the outcome is acceptable to all. Also consensus minus one is a good variant, meaning that ONE blocker does not suffice.
;)
My two cents.
Joshua
I think it's very important to remember here that fuels (both alcohol and biodiesel) can be made quite readily not just from a farmed crop (sugar cane, hemp, algae, whatever), but can also be made from waste in a large variety of ways ranging in efficiency and applications.
;)
Alcohol can be made from newspapers or any other cellulose, starch OR glucose rich biomass. There is even currently large tax subsidies in the US for the production and use of alcohol as fuel. Alcohol of several forms can also be made from methane gas, which is a biproduct of the decompositon of shit without air.
Biodiesel is far from being a new idea that the FIRST diesel engine, premiered by Rudolph Diesel at the world's fair in Paris in the year 1900, ran on peanut oil. The most interesting thing about oil is that behind nearly every grocery store and restaurant (in the US as well as some other industrialized countries) has a big bin that contains anywhere from 50 - 300 gallons of oil, used to fry french fries and chicken and all the other deep fried goodies that American's (not to mention the Brits!) enjoy so much. I know so many hippies that run their buses (and other diesel vehichles) on this oil, it just needs to be filtered first and heated before putting it into the engine. Obviously this is not a solution to large scale commercial production, but in this situation now, it gets a lot of people around.
I just bought a diesel bus yesterday.
Joshua
was a very similar story, and someone involved in the project wrote a book about it, and it was made into a hilarious movie called The Pentagon Wars with Cary Elwes and Kelsey Grammar. Had me laughing out loud! Alas, I have been totally unable to find this movie on any p2p networks. :(
Amazing, when you consider that this technology is over 8000 years old in China, and is INCREDIBLY COMMON in the third world today. In Indonesia and India and South America, etc., this is done daily. Cheers, Joshua
Ethanol can be produced by many things, other than corn. It can be produced by wood chips, and other waste products... And as for the energy input in making ethanol, there is indeed the sun, and there are many other things that burn other than fossil fuels. One that comes readily to my mind as being appropriate to the production of ethanol is methane gas, easily produced from shit, including our own, which is a resource far defying the limits of abundance! The thing about this development I don't understand is that most gasoline engines can be converted to run on ethanol, so what is the point of using ethanol to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to run a car when you can just burn the ethanol in a combustion engine and get the same energy that way... especially considering the amount of engines out there that could readily run the fuel. Cheers, Joshua
I would like a heierarchy of object classificiations (where one object could be in many different classifications, and even blocks of an object (like a paragraph, page, piece of a video clip( can be in classifications). Hell, I would start the heierarchy with people, places, and things. contacts go under people, places (both in meatspace and cyberspace) makes seems sensible, and things is everything else. Even letters and words as objects acting as a dictionary, and eventually even a spell-check. Another thing I've been considering is what if I could create a file, and give it all it's classifications, and then finalize it by creating it a public key and signing it with my key, thus vouching for it. Of course, I've also been thinking about a distributed server organization for communications... creating a prototol framework using the email namespace (and recognizing old email headers and responding to them accordingly), where whatever data the user wanted to store could be stored on the server (including public key, files, communications logs [email], etc.) and the server could be queried as to the status of that user, allowing something like the buddy lists so prevelant in today's communications world).
Then, if you've got the framework for digital encryption and signatures turned by by default, you can encrypt everything user to user, and also if you're really paranoid, you can encrypt machine to machine on top of that.
Anyway, I guess I've gotten off the topic, but I really think that a new general data-storage method is needed... files and directories are FAR too limited.
Cheers, Joshua
I agree! An armed society is a polite society, and I'd much rather be shot by anyone other than the police, or at least, anyone doing it for reasons that are theirs, not because they were told to do it! If you have a personal motivation to shoot me, I can at least respect that! I'd rather deal with terrorists than the police any day!
Cheers, Joshua
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but concrete breaks down after about 80 years. That's not to say it's not still effective in some applications after it's structure has changed, but as far as I know, after 80 years, it turns to powder (very tightly compacted powder, granted, but powder none the less). Concrete seems to be quite a ubiquitis building material these days (and for some time now), and I was wondering if anyone had any notions of alternatives to concrete?
Thank you, Joshua
Although of course this would be an imense venture, probably requiring a permanent base on the moon and who knows where else, but it would remove the dependency of technology on earth from our fragile ecosystem, and let's face it, we've taken a lot of the easy metals out of the ground, and it's only going to get harder and harder to find. Another important point to remember is that although going up is expensive, going down is dirt cheap. ;)
My two cents. Joshua
Now... I suspect that says something like the PATRIOT act isn't going to expire like it was supposed to. And will someone please tell me what the fuck AMBER stands for?
Cheers, Joshua
One way, perhaps to speed this transition, which I would consider a form of activism, would be to set up such a grand TV ripping station and every week let's say, burn a few CDs/DVDs for different types of people. A disc of cartoons, some friends are mine are into sports so we'll burn one for them too, and of course the news, and C-SPAN and whatever else we feel like. Not to mention of course, all the movie channels.
This would of course, be highly illegal and expensive and make no money, but I think it would be a grand gesture in the fight against intelectual property. Cheers, Joshua
I must say, though, that the best science fiction writer I've read of late is Orsen Scott Card! Most famous for his Ender series (all great, imho), my favorite of his books so far was called "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus." This book combined science fiction and historical fiction in a most remarkable way, and I would highly recommend it.
Cheers, Joshua
I think that the biggest problem with WiFi is not it's limited range, but the fact that it was designed with corporate users in mind, not community networking. 802.11 would be a better solution if it meshed easily and every node acted as a router, transmitting packets for it's neighbors. Fortunately, some companies are working on the problem now, but it's a damn shame it wasn't done right the first time.
Cheers, Joshua
Has anyone managed to download it yet from one of the p2p's? If so, which one, and which copy? I tried to download the second Harry Potter movie and got a pr0n and the first Harry Potter movie instead!
Cheers, Joshua
I do, my last car got about 35 mpg, and a full size school bus I rode in for a time got about 6 mpg. Of course, this is the U$A.
I read somewhere the notion of making fiber out of hemp plastics. Not to mention just about anything else. ;)
Cheers, Joshua
One of the key features for me is that it be very small and light. I need to be able to carry it around in my pocket, and it needs to be durable and well-built so I don't have to worry about it breaking quite so much. And obviously, the more storage space the better. a gig would be nice, but 10 gigs would be better. It'd be nice to be able to toss a couple of movies on there, or a few simpsons or something for a wait. Batterly life is also important, as is 802.11b (or eventually UWB or whatever else we end up with). That's pretty much the list, far as I can think of.
Cheers, Joshua
Yeah, and if petrolium were the ONLY thing that you could make plastics from, this might worry me, but this is FAR from the case. Infact, the most abundant plant-based source of cellulose on the planet (the raw material for plastics) is the stalk of the hemp plant.
Cheers, Joshua