The satellites aren't measuring food production. They're measuring primary production. My points about farming, which is the main thing humans to do modify the plant life on Earth, have to do with convenience. We farm where it's easy and cheap, so we don't usually bring new areas to biological production. We instead plow under whatever sorts of plants live where we want to farm and convert the land to producing crops that we like instead of the plants that naturally grow there. This results in little if any change in primary production measured in megatonnes of carbon reduced.
However, if you take a river that naturally flows out into the ocean and divert it into a dry area to irrigate crops, this likely does result in a change of primary production. But because of changes in agricultural methods, that's probably slacking off as we focus on getting more crop off the easiest to farm lands -- which already had plenty of water. So there's a slower rate of expansion of irrigation than there once was.
Actually, modern cosmology and quantum mechanics does a pretty good job of reducing everything. It's to the point where the creation of the universe can be explained by a quantum fluctuation with the energy equivalent of about 10 lbs of matter. That leaves only the laws of quantum mechanics as an unexplained prerequisite, and lots of people are working on explaining even that.
1. Quantum fluctuations happen with energies on the order of 4E16 Joules? Who knew!?!
2. The energy that exists in the universe also remains to be explained, along with how inflation could have occurred. I think we're still a long way from having a complete, coherent and plausible explanation for the first second of the universe's existence.
But I agree 100%, with water recyclers and desalination plants and greenhouses we could probably make deserts into breadbaskets but again here comes politics, you'll get the greenies screaming about threatening some lizard and the big agri lobbyists demanding protection and soon the whole thing would be another political clusterfuck.
Presently there's no need for any such thing. We have plenty of agricultural capacity on land that's already under cultivation.
The issue is changing from an E&M to an intensive care E&M. Same procedure, higher payout. Same goes for taking a common tests that are bundled and breaking them into smaller component tests. A few wears ago I met with an Ausie founder of a startup that was talking about how revolutionary their software was that would optimize billing codes to ensure maximum revenue per procedure by basically scanning a billing batch and re-coding it using more lucrative codes for the same procedures. I waked on doing any development for them.
If that's what they're doing it's easily detectable. Somebody at Medicare should be looking at the billing records and saying, "It can't be right for every procedure to be billed at the highest possible code when they're a regular full-service hospital. These people are cheating us and I have a red phone on my desk to the Department of Justice Prosecutor's office."
it's already been established that moving to electronic records helps track Medicare fraud. Yes, the system has a lot of gaps, but electronic tracking reduces them. If that wasn't true companies wouldn't use electronic purchasing systems to track expenditures, and the spreadsheet would just be an interesting foot note in computer history...
I gotta ask (since I'm far too lazy to read the article): Is this a lame attack on the existing administration?
Making billing and payment systems electronic reduces processing costs. That's the primary driver of the multi-industry-wide push to do all that electronically. It's really expensive to have humans transcribe things and add up columns of numbers.
I would love nothing more, but my company is primarily a government contractor, and until the departments we deal with start using open formats, we are stuck. As it is, we are pretty much looking at buying licenses for the remaining Office 2003 installs by the end of this year. So far our Office 2007 workstations still seem capable of dealing with anything Office 2010 throws at us.
So you need one person who converts files for customer consumption. Everybody else could use open source.
Indeed. We are running up against this with Excel 2003. While with the compatibility pack it can open Excel 2007 and 2010 files, the newer features do not work rendering 2003 little better than a glorified viewer for some of the spreadsheets being sent to some of our staff.
They can save the files they receive as Excel 2003 and then they're as fully functional as 2003 could make them.
What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.
I agree with this. But you can't *assume* laws exist to prevent it. The laws actually have to be legislated.
There ARE laws against voter coercion and vote buying and some other practices that are thought to be election tampering. But those are laws against specific behaviors and the numbering and recording of ballot numbers aren't among them.
Specifically, what's your legal reasoning? "I don't think" doesn't cut it in court. The judge's reasoning, right or wrong, is based on the law and spelled out in her opinion, and it's that reasoning that will be reviewed for appeal.
What problem were you trying to solve? There are a million or so green card holders in the USA right now. They aren't allowed to vote but are completely legal residents. There is an unknown number of aliens here on student and tourist and business visas. They're not allowed to vote either.
And there's me. I'm only allowed to vote in one place. With no validation of ballots, I could take my mail-in ballot, photocopy it 100 times, vote them however I like and mail them all in. 101 votes for Obamney instead of just one! Now let the Secretary of State try to figure out who should have won the election!
And whether things are on paper or not wasn't one of the things she considered. What she considered was whether the law says you have a right to a secret ballot and decided that you don't and never have had such a right.
Ultimately you have to explain how something can create itself AND dead empty space AND mass energy out of what we normally would think of as less than nothing. It's the Achilles heel of the creation paradigm. The non creation paradigm says that complex things can emerge out of simple antecedents but it still doesn't explain why there is a universe. We'll probably never know that.
Everyone should create a dozen fake Facebook accounts. When the number of accounts exceeds 15 billion maybe advertisers will catch on that they're paying for fuckall. But a Fakebook account isn't really much good without a bot to keep it uploading crap and clicking on random links.
a bot to exercise Google links would be a nice addition.
Passing a regular tax and or spending bill in the lame duck session is actually a good deal easier than passing a bill with any controversial provision in a pre-election session under no-debate, no-amendments 2/3 majority to pass rules. And there's no big incentive to get any kind of a visa bill passed right now. Seriously, how many of their constituents does this affect in the near term? NONE. So the bill was all about political maneuvering before the election so Rs could attempt to make a case that DS are anti student or anti business.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read Feynman on how school book selection really works. I'm sure it's the same mindless stupidity on software.
Now my boss is going to want me to implement it commercially.
The balloon industry pays more?
The satellites aren't measuring food production. They're measuring primary production. My points about farming, which is the main thing humans to do modify the plant life on Earth, have to do with convenience. We farm where it's easy and cheap, so we don't usually bring new areas to biological production. We instead plow under whatever sorts of plants live where we want to farm and convert the land to producing crops that we like instead of the plants that naturally grow there. This results in little if any change in primary production measured in megatonnes of carbon reduced.
However, if you take a river that naturally flows out into the ocean and divert it into a dry area to irrigate crops, this likely does result in a change of primary production. But because of changes in agricultural methods, that's probably slacking off as we focus on getting more crop off the easiest to farm lands -- which already had plenty of water. So there's a slower rate of expansion of irrigation than there once was.
Actually, modern cosmology and quantum mechanics does a pretty good job of reducing everything. It's to the point where the creation of the universe can be explained by a quantum fluctuation with the energy equivalent of about 10 lbs of matter. That leaves only the laws of quantum mechanics as an unexplained prerequisite, and lots of people are working on explaining even that.
1. Quantum fluctuations happen with energies on the order of 4E16 Joules? Who knew!?!
2. The energy that exists in the universe also remains to be explained, along with how inflation could have occurred. I think we're still a long way from having a complete, coherent and plausible explanation for the first second of the universe's existence.
But I agree 100%, with water recyclers and desalination plants and greenhouses we could probably make deserts into breadbaskets but again here comes politics, you'll get the greenies screaming about threatening some lizard and the big agri lobbyists demanding protection and soon the whole thing would be another political clusterfuck.
Presently there's no need for any such thing. We have plenty of agricultural capacity on land that's already under cultivation.
If that's what they're doing it's easily detectable.
If only someone was really looking... and there was the will to prosecute people for fraud.
You missed this? http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/May/12-ag-568.html and this? http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2011-08-29/Health-care-fraud-prosecutions-on-pace-to-rise-85/50180282/1 "WASHINGTON – New government statistics show federal health care fraud prosecutions in the first eight months of 2011 are on pace to rise 85% over last year due in large part to ramped-up enforcement efforts under the Obama administration...."
The issue is changing from an E&M to an intensive care E&M. Same procedure, higher payout. Same goes for taking a common tests that are bundled and breaking them into smaller component tests. A few wears ago I met with an Ausie founder of a startup that was talking about how revolutionary their software was that would optimize billing codes to ensure maximum revenue per procedure by basically scanning a billing batch and re-coding it using more lucrative codes for the same procedures. I waked on doing any development for them.
If that's what they're doing it's easily detectable. Somebody at Medicare should be looking at the billing records and saying, "It can't be right for every procedure to be billed at the highest possible code when they're a regular full-service hospital. These people are cheating us and I have a red phone on my desk to the Department of Justice Prosecutor's office."
it's already been established that moving to electronic records helps track Medicare fraud. Yes, the system has a lot of gaps, but electronic tracking reduces them. If that wasn't true companies wouldn't use electronic purchasing systems to track expenditures, and the spreadsheet would just be an interesting foot note in computer history... I gotta ask (since I'm far too lazy to read the article): Is this a lame attack on the existing administration?
Making billing and payment systems electronic reduces processing costs. That's the primary driver of the multi-industry-wide push to do all that electronically. It's really expensive to have humans transcribe things and add up columns of numbers.
I would love nothing more, but my company is primarily a government contractor, and until the departments we deal with start using open formats, we are stuck. As it is, we are pretty much looking at buying licenses for the remaining Office 2003 installs by the end of this year. So far our Office 2007 workstations still seem capable of dealing with anything Office 2010 throws at us.
So you need one person who converts files for customer consumption. Everybody else could use open source.
Indeed. We are running up against this with Excel 2003. While with the compatibility pack it can open Excel 2007 and 2010 files, the newer features do not work rendering 2003 little better than a glorified viewer for some of the spreadsheets being sent to some of our staff.
They can save the files they receive as Excel 2003 and then they're as fully functional as 2003 could make them.
What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.
I agree with this. But you can't *assume* laws exist to prevent it. The laws actually have to be legislated.
There ARE laws against voter coercion and vote buying and some other practices that are thought to be election tampering. But those are laws against specific behaviors and the numbering and recording of ballot numbers aren't among them.
It would indeed allow that. But the judge is saying there's no law that prevents the government from having such records.
How do you come to that conclusion?
Specifically, what's your legal reasoning? "I don't think" doesn't cut it in court. The judge's reasoning, right or wrong, is based on the law and spelled out in her opinion, and it's that reasoning that will be reviewed for appeal.
What problem were you trying to solve? There are a million or so green card holders in the USA right now. They aren't allowed to vote but are completely legal residents. There is an unknown number of aliens here on student and tourist and business visas. They're not allowed to vote either.
And there's me. I'm only allowed to vote in one place. With no validation of ballots, I could take my mail-in ballot, photocopy it 100 times, vote them however I like and mail them all in. 101 votes for Obamney instead of just one! Now let the Secretary of State try to figure out who should have won the election!
The barcodes ARE on paper.
And whether things are on paper or not wasn't one of the things she considered. What she considered was whether the law says you have a right to a secret ballot and decided that you don't and never have had such a right.
This one's definitely going up for appeal.
also very valuable for apes, since they don't eat much meat.
Ultimately you have to explain how something can create itself AND dead empty space AND mass energy out of what we normally would think of as less than nothing. It's the Achilles heel of the creation paradigm. The non creation paradigm says that complex things can emerge out of simple antecedents but it still doesn't explain why there is a universe. We'll probably never know that.
Apes don't require meat. Why would our hominid ancestors have required it?
Seriously who THE FUCK cares?
Everyone should create a dozen fake Facebook accounts. When the number of accounts exceeds 15 billion maybe advertisers will catch on that they're paying for fuckall. But a Fakebook account isn't really much good without a bot to keep it uploading crap and clicking on random links.
a bot to exercise Google links would be a nice addition.
But if nobody used their real name, address or relattionships they'd be safer. At least from stalkers.
Fox news has always supported President Obama.
Passing a regular tax and or spending bill in the lame duck session is actually a good deal easier than passing a bill with any controversial provision in a pre-election session under no-debate, no-amendments 2/3 majority to pass rules. And there's no big incentive to get any kind of a visa bill passed right now. Seriously, how many of their constituents does this affect in the near term? NONE. So the bill was all about political maneuvering before the election so Rs could attempt to make a case that DS are anti student or anti business.