I'm no botanist, so I'll gladly defer to someone with some scientific data. But I do know you can change the color of hydrangea by adding iron to their soil. And you can change the flavor and to some extent the nutritional value of vegetables by changing the soil you grow them in. And I also know that air pollutants can settle into soil.
So it seems reasonable to extrapolate that some of the heavy metals and such coming from cars (and the many other polluters in a city) can find their way into soil, then to roots, then to vegetables.
But again, I have no data at hand and would love to see some either way.
Right. And what do they do with the stuff they clean out of the air? They don't just disappear it... the integrate it (or get malformed by it). So if you're growing food (the article does say "farms"), then you might possibly be risking producing contaminated, poisoned, and/or mutated food. I don't see NASA talking about eating the air-cleaners.
There's no better way to put a million people into a square mile than skyscrapers in a city. Leave Manhattan as Manhattan and instead focus your efforts on controlling waste and returning the Northeast to massive forests (for some reason Americans love to overlook the ridiculous logging that took place here while we bitch and moan about the rain forests).
I pretty much agree with everything you say, but... isn't the point of this silly exercise to be able to free up the land to go back to forests?
People seem to want to continue eating food, so... if we reforest the Eastern U.S., where does the food come from? While the stated concept may be ridiculous, the underlying idea of vertical farming (and/or hydroponics) may have some value...
Any concern about the dense air pollution in NYC getting into the food? Doesn't seem like particularly "organic" food when the plants are feeding on car exhaust and cigarette smoke...
It isn't particularly surprising that they would coordinate with Red Hat of all companies. After all, RHEL clearly exemplifies Red Hat's growing, Microsoft-emulating philosophy of "Give us the money, STFU, eat whatever dogfood we're shoveling, and love it. Oh and give us more money."
Let's see them work with the GNU Project instead.:D
I absolutely think personal transit should be door-to-door. And I think it would be cost-effective.
Around 1990, Mark A. Delucchi at UC Davis did studies on the social costs of automobiles. These include things like health costs from accidents and air pollution, taxes for highway maintenance, time lost in traffic jams, and so on. His calculations showed Americans were spending somewhere between $1.6 trillion and $3.2 trillion each year for highway transportation. (Even counting just the actual direct monetary costs, he counted between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion.)
Now I understand that there is a lot of profit too, like all the money doctors, insurers, etc. are making off this stuff, but nobody argues we should encourage smoking so doctors can get richer (and who makes money from a traffic jam?).
I think we can use those trillions much more effectively than having combustion vehicles careening all over the place.
Microsoft spending money on research does seem like a waste, since most of their top stuff is based on stolen ideas anyway. That, or old ideas they hype up into sounding like something people have to buy.
It is also worth noticing that current urban investments in car infrastructures are staggering. Not that it wouldn't be a major undertaking to convert to personal transit... but considering how many billions are currently poured into automobiles, it may be cost-effective.
Sure; most people love driving. It has become part of the "American way" for some reason.
But how does "liking" something compare to killing tens of thousands of people each year, causing massive destruction of ecosystems, causing other vast climactic changes, draining natural resources, and destroying watersheds (with pavement)?
Is a little enjoyment really worth all that? Can't you go drive bumper cars or play a driving game or something?
Heck, lots of guys enjoy having sex with lots of varied women every day. But something prevents them from grabbing the nearest hottie and having their way with her. I think it has something to do with... social responsibility.
If it scales up, it then can be compared to cars, not trains.
The benefits a system like this has over cars are: - Vastly reduced fatalities to occupants (though perhaps pedestrians can still be struck by them) - Vastly reduced production resources - instead of everyone having a car, you just "call a cab" - Vastly reduced pollution - since you can centralize the power source, instead of having cars spewing everywhere - Vastly reduced parking resources - these can just roam or idle in compact storage, instead of requiring parking spots at every house and every destination - Vastly reduced traffic congestion - since traffic is controlled by robotic overlords - Get as drunk as you want while you "drive" - or alternately, work, play, etc. while you are transported
That may be more feasible than it seems at first. Web applications usually want licensing for terms of use, but the actual source code is not redistributed.
A university is supposed to educate a child as to the world of software
Really? Maybe you are thinking of trade schools. A university is supposed to provide a well-rounded education. Indoctrinating into the world of Microsoft might be helpful in getting a white-collar-grunt job, but it is not in any way vital to a liberal arts education.
And anyway, a large percentage of universities use *nix and/or Macs. Are they all failing in their educational mission as well?
I didn't realize the conversation was limited to the U.S.
Also, how does conservation kill technology? As I just said above, why are corporations so wildly enthusiastic about "Green IT?" Because they suddenly grew a consciousness... or because they want to save money?
No, I'm saying conspicuous consumers should cut down a little. If one commutes less distance or drives a more efficient vehicle, for example, is one therefore poorer?
And I'm also also that everyone can benefit from energy savings. That does not make us poorer... it makes us richer. What do you think the whole "Green IT" thing is about? Does big enterprise really care about environmentalism, or are they thrilled about cutting the huge energy costs for traditional data centers?
There's another resource being unsustainably wasted on renewable energy, neodymium for neodymium-iron-boron magnets in wind turbines generators. Wind turbines produce even more worthless power than solar panels(see West Texas where wind farms pay ERCOT to take their electricity 20% of the time. If nobody wants the power ERCOT has to do the equivalent of running a giant toaster to get rid of it or the voltage and frequency would get out of wack).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no botanist, so I'll gladly defer to someone with some scientific data. But I do know you can change the color of hydrangea by adding iron to their soil. And you can change the flavor and to some extent the nutritional value of vegetables by changing the soil you grow them in. And I also know that air pollutants can settle into soil.
So it seems reasonable to extrapolate that some of the heavy metals and such coming from cars (and the many other polluters in a city) can find their way into soil, then to roots, then to vegetables.
But again, I have no data at hand and would love to see some either way.
You mean like USB and, I dunno... maybe mini-USB?
So everybody goes outside and blows smoke at the high-rise vegetable farm... They are open-air, after all, right?
Right. And what do they do with the stuff they clean out of the air? They don't just disappear it... the integrate it (or get malformed by it). So if you're growing food (the article does say "farms"), then you might possibly be risking producing contaminated, poisoned, and/or mutated food. I don't see NASA talking about eating the air-cleaners.
There's no better way to put a million people into a square mile than skyscrapers in a city. Leave Manhattan as Manhattan and instead focus your efforts on controlling waste and returning the Northeast to massive forests (for some reason Americans love to overlook the ridiculous logging that took place here while we bitch and moan about the rain forests).
I pretty much agree with everything you say, but... isn't the point of this silly exercise to be able to free up the land to go back to forests?
People seem to want to continue eating food, so... if we reforest the Eastern U.S., where does the food come from? While the stated concept may be ridiculous, the underlying idea of vertical farming (and/or hydroponics) may have some value...
Any concern about the dense air pollution in NYC getting into the food? Doesn't seem like particularly "organic" food when the plants are feeding on car exhaust and cigarette smoke...
It isn't particularly surprising that they would coordinate with Red Hat of all companies. After all, RHEL clearly exemplifies Red Hat's growing, Microsoft-emulating philosophy of "Give us the money, STFU, eat whatever dogfood we're shoveling, and love it. Oh and give us more money."
Let's see them work with the GNU Project instead. :D
...please!
Next best thing since the revival of the Commodore 64 :)
DHS - linux
FBI - linux
Navy - linux
Air Force - linux
Wonder why those agencies are using such an "unsecure" platform...?
Check out the moderation on this admitted (though somewhat true) flamebait.
At the moment, it's reading:
Moderation -1
40% Flamebait
30% Troll
30% Insightful
Mission accomplished. :)
I absolutely think personal transit should be door-to-door. And I think it would be cost-effective.
Around 1990, Mark A. Delucchi at UC Davis did studies on the social costs of automobiles . These include things like health costs from accidents and air pollution, taxes for highway maintenance, time lost in traffic jams, and so on. His calculations showed Americans were spending somewhere between $1.6 trillion and $3.2 trillion each year for highway transportation. (Even counting just the actual direct monetary costs, he counted between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion.)
Now I understand that there is a lot of profit too, like all the money doctors, insurers, etc. are making off this stuff, but nobody argues we should encourage smoking so doctors can get richer (and who makes money from a traffic jam?).
I think we can use those trillions much more effectively than having combustion vehicles careening all over the place.
Microsoft spending money on research does seem like a waste, since most of their top stuff is based on stolen ideas anyway. That, or old ideas they hype up into sounding like something people have to buy.
It is also worth noticing that current urban investments in car infrastructures are staggering. Not that it wouldn't be a major undertaking to convert to personal transit... but considering how many billions are currently poured into automobiles, it may be cost-effective.
Sure; most people love driving. It has become part of the "American way" for some reason.
But how does "liking" something compare to killing tens of thousands of people each year, causing massive destruction of ecosystems, causing other vast climactic changes, draining natural resources, and destroying watersheds (with pavement)?
Is a little enjoyment really worth all that? Can't you go drive bumper cars or play a driving game or something?
Heck, lots of guys enjoy having sex with lots of varied women every day. But something prevents them from grabbing the nearest hottie and having their way with her. I think it has something to do with... social responsibility.
If it scales up, it then can be compared to cars, not trains.
The benefits a system like this has over cars are:
- Vastly reduced fatalities to occupants (though perhaps pedestrians can still be struck by them)
- Vastly reduced production resources - instead of everyone having a car, you just "call a cab"
- Vastly reduced pollution - since you can centralize the power source, instead of having cars spewing everywhere
- Vastly reduced parking resources - these can just roam or idle in compact storage, instead of requiring parking spots at every house and every destination
- Vastly reduced traffic congestion - since traffic is controlled by robotic overlords
- Get as drunk as you want while you "drive" - or alternately, work, play, etc. while you are transported
Any day you get to legitimately use "horked" in a public post can't be all bad. :P
That may be more feasible than it seems at first. Web applications usually want licensing for terms of use, but the actual source code is not redistributed.
A university is supposed to educate a child as to the world of software
Really? Maybe you are thinking of trade schools. A university is supposed to provide a well-rounded education. Indoctrinating into the world of Microsoft might be helpful in getting a white-collar-grunt job, but it is not in any way vital to a liberal arts education.
And anyway, a large percentage of universities use *nix and/or Macs. Are they all failing in their educational mission as well?
/.'s lack of an edit button strikes again. I realized my mistake just after I posted.
Ah well... such is the road (c'est la via). :P
I didn't realize the conversation was limited to the U.S.
Also, how does conservation kill technology? As I just said above, why are corporations so wildly enthusiastic about "Green IT?" Because they suddenly grew a consciousness... or because they want to save money?
No, I'm saying conspicuous consumers should cut down a little. If one commutes less distance or drives a more efficient vehicle, for example, is one therefore poorer?
And I'm also also that everyone can benefit from energy savings. That does not make us poorer... it makes us richer. What do you think the whole "Green IT" thing is about? Does big enterprise really care about environmentalism, or are they thrilled about cutting the huge energy costs for traditional data centers?
It's right in the original article:
There's another resource being unsustainably wasted on renewable energy, neodymium for neodymium-iron-boron magnets in wind turbines generators. Wind turbines produce even more worthless power than solar panels(see West Texas where wind farms pay ERCOT to take their electricity 20% of the time. If nobody wants the power ERCOT has to do the equivalent of running a giant toaster to get rid of it or the voltage and frequency would get out of wack).
Use less energy.
No, it can't solve everything, but more conservation would be vastly more helpful than trying to exploit new energy sources.
Not unlike the word "iPhone" itself... which Apple announced they would use even though clearly Cisco already held the trademark to it.