Bringing up the doctor isn't fair, there's probably some hyper-spacial sensing and processing machine the size of Manhattan inside the sonic screwdriver using Time Lord Technology (tm), and you simply can't tell from the 3-D part. The real problem is simply trying to detect and analyze different kinds of radiation. Look at the difference between a radio-telescope and the Chandra space telescope.
We are at the threshold of true tele-presence, and the need or even desire for physical presence may soon be relegated to the dust bins of history. There are fewer and fewer places one "Has" to be, which means that one is left with places to be by choice. That suggests working from home a lot (and we need to begin to teach our children the need for self discipline, and the likely remote visibility that employers will demand.) For a little while, the haves will be able to game the system with cheap third world labor, but in the end a global,flat playing field will allow an engineer in California, the opportunity to make a serious contribution to a project in Mumbai, just as easily as a doctor in Singapore, can perform a robotic surgery on a patient in South Africa.
Would be to record the lecture, preferably with a small video camera, but audio in many cases is sufficient when combined with written notes. The laptop can be saved for later use, and the student can have a conversation with the Prof. to make video notes and lecture content available for the class as extra credit. Good for grades, no distraction, and you can use the laptop where it will actually do some good. The last thing we need is to make things harder for our attention deficit progeny.
This is way cool. I built (when I was just a young'n and still have) a 3 tube regenerative radio with 6 hand wound air coils providing me with 5 shortwave and 1 AM broadcast band of reception. I also have an old crystal set around the house somewhere. Old radios are almost more fun than the law should allow. I also have a project kit laying around someplace for receiving long wave transmissions to locate and record lightning anywhere in the world. With the sun becoming a bit more active the shorter SW Bands should be seeing some activity.
Oh, and contrary to what folks are saying, there are all kinds of chips with only a few transisters on them (including RFIDs and a host of analog and linear ICs.) In fact the 555 timer is in all probability, the most used chip on the planet.
Hello? Are you for a moment suggesting that pre-fetching and pipe-lining aren't algorithmic solutions to hardware problems? There isn't a CPU on the planet that hasn't utilized dozens of improved algorithms designed expressly to make the hardware perform certain tasks faster, more efficiently, with less power, or in parallel with other components. Just because the language you write in, is spelled with atoms of silicon, doesn't mean the process is any less abstract. This is why the line between hardware and software continues to grow every more subtle and diffuse.
In human behavior... What is hardware, wetware, and data? How could you even possibly begin to distinguish what is what, when one thing physically alters the other?
You are right, what I say contradicts him, as it contradicts you, because you're both looking at a universe through a soda straw. Open up your perspective to see the larger picture and nature of it's interrelated parts.
The problem is that by allowing corporations to grow into monopolies and mega-corporations who have diversified and subsumed entire markets, the only way to vote with your wallet is to move into a cave and start knocking out stone axes. Take any major industry... food for example. If you do a little research you find that it all boils down to half a dozen super corporations, that control everything from the seed that's planted to the packaging that arrives at your grocery store. What are you going to do? How are you going to vote? Do you honestly plan to stop eating at restaurants or buying the 95% percent of the food on the shelves that contains the wheat, soy, or corn products produced by those mega-corporations? You know the ones, that are receiving billions of dollars of your tax dollars in subsidies for the privilege of better controlling your life. Go a little further. Those same companies are also producing the ethanol that is mixed with the gas you drive your car with, or the soy oil that is used in everything from fried food to industrial solvents, or even the chemicals derived from wheat and corn that find their way into everything from textiles to plastic bottles to computers.
WAKE UP! If you spend a dollar anywhere, any more, you voted for them. Voting with your wallet is now a quaint and sadly naive concept. The time for sleep walking is over, if you want a vote you'd better get real clear where your votes are currently going.
Excuse me, but who do you think controls government? Over the last 30 years, there has been a steady erosion of checks and balances, middle class earning power and quality of life, and civil rights and freedom. At the heart of all of this has been the wholesale purchase of our government by commercial interests. At this point in the game, big business writes law, polices itself (or doesn't as the case may be), and has the vast majority of our representatives in it's pocket (in fact, forcing the need of multi-million dollar political campaigns for offices from Dog Catcher on up, ensures that only candidates who've been vetted by the money interests even get a chance to play in the political arena.) If government sucks, its because big business bought it, and now we're being governed by self obsessed, greedy capitalists who put personal profit ahead of justice, dignity, or the future of human advance.
If you're at all interested in government that isn't a brazen travesty, let's declare business a religion, and separate it from government so that the two might function apart as designed and immeasurably improve the human condition. While we're at it, we might also consider teaching ethics and social responsibility in our business schools... just a thought.
Computer Science is growing up. The sign of this is that it's becoming clear that there are many different fields and perspectives housed under the one tent. In fact there're so many now, to limit Computer Science to any small set of studies or viewpoints is to argue against how far we've come. Just as Biology was once the collecting and studying of living organisms (and now spans fields as disparate as Taxonomy and Epigenetics), Computer Sscience includes entire areas of study bordering on and overlapping with electronics, material science, information science, mathematics, physics (including quantum), genetics and neurobiology, and electromechanics. Add to that the grave need for ethical studies, and to more deeply appreciate how the digital world is impinging on the analog one, and you have entire subcategories of "Computer Science" that merit their own distinct fields of inquiry. The fact is, that CS has given us an entirely new perspective about our universe. Space-time as quantized information. Look at how the abstractions of language and thought have changed the way we see ourselves and the process of our ontology. We now freely and commonly speak about meme space, social engineering, complex systems organization, and simulation as aspects of our daily lives.
Algorithms are simply the brute mental force required to reduce a chosen problem space into a solution set. Just as proofs are the mental gymnastics required to render truths from mathematical postulates and hypothesis. One can wander quite rightly into the more solid aspects of the machines of computing, or with equal validity blaze trails in the more deeply esoteric or philosophical aspects on computational theory. One might even begin to abstract the entire conversation surrounding the philosophical nature of "Problem and Solution" to see if there aren't larger, more encompassing information spaces that might yield entirely new possibilities and truths.
All of these things are Computer Science, and its time we began teaching our children just how broad the horizons are, to this fascinating realm.
Arguably, any twit who chooses a path based on superstition or magical thinking has just rendered that path a religion... which isn't to say that there aren't some religions that occasionally rise above magical thinking (I find Zen a rather enlightened way of seeing things.) However, I also find that mental health demands one regularly distinguishes oneself from one's point of view, or all too soon, you don't have one, it has you.
I'm an engineer, amateur scientist, and advocate for organic farming.
Many of the chemicals used in pesticides (pyrethroids, organophosphates, carbamates, etc.) have been clearly determined to be: Human Carcinogens, Mutagens, Abortives, Hormone Analogs, Irritants and Toxins (particularly Neurotoxins.) As a chemist and biologist, I'm certain you can understand just how bloody difficult it is to make a chemical that kills one class of invertebrates (Insecta), and has virtually no impact whatsoever on any other class. I'd be more than happy to sit down and discuss absorption, uptake, metabolism, cytotoxicity, the most common effects and their biological mechanism of any of these chemicals. I would also be happy to talk about their impact and biological pathways on micro and macrofauna including Fish, Bird, Reptile, and Mammalian species (and let's not forget Homo Sapiens.) Though a quick look at the impact of these chemicals on a wide variety of species (eg. DDT on the Brown Pelican and Peregrine Falcon), and the statistical information surrounding the dramatic increase of Cancer, Miscarriage, Birth Defect, Neurological Disease and Negative Childhood Epidemiology among farm workers (age, sex, race, and economically normalized for fair comparison), should provide sufficient evidence to make any open minded scientists more than a wee bit uncomfortable with spraying these chemical all over the scenery and particularly the watershed for much of this country.
This is not emotional. This is simple science. Like the mistaken agricultural misuse of antibiotics to increase animal health and yield, in fact producing nothing more than super-colonies of antibiotic resistant bacteria for miles surrounding such farms. You speak of emotion. There is an equally emotion-based use of the magic of modern chemistry to solve problems whose solutions themselves become the new problems. Case in point, this is as much a magical thinking, superstitious problem as any "Being afraid of chemicals." There are thousands of places on the planet, where the trade-off in human suffering demands extraordinary measures. Killing off a plague of malarial mosquitoes immediately jumps to mind. Using the chemical equivalent of an atom bomb to make you fruit prettier however, seems to me, a poor use of this technology. Let's "Right Size" our chemical arsenal, and save the extreme solution for the extreme circumstances.
Clearly you're not an organic farmer, nor do you apparently know anything about organic farming.
You're right, all crops are fertilized. However, you're mistaken about how organic farms are fertilized. While large commercial farms use fertilizers that have a tremendous load on the environment in both use of fresh water and petrochemicals (read oil), organic farming uses both old and new technologies. Anything from advanced composting and intelligent use of crop stubble to introduced nitrogen fixing bacteria and proper crop rotation. This leads to dramatically enhanced soil fertility and crop yield without the inherent downside of chemical fertilizers.
Likewise you're right, organic farms use pesticides, you're wrong however on the methods and types. Some methods are indeed ancient, and have proven effective even by today's standards. Others are cutting edge including biological pesticides and pheromones (that sicken and kill pests or interrupt their reproduction), use of predatory species, combined crops that mutually deter each others pests, and breakthrough growing methods that dramatically enhance crop resistance without the introduction of toxic chemicals. By the way if you haven't studied the impact of chemical pesticides on farm workers, or the significant amounts of pesticides found in certain foods ( href="http://green.yahoo.com/blog/daily_green_news/332/the-new-dirty-dozen-12-foods-to-eat-organic-and-avoid-pesticide-residue.html" target - "_blank">Dirty Dozen) and their known risk to consumers, you may want to think twice about chowing down on certain fruits and veggies that aren't organic.
You are almost completely mistaken about organic farms being large industrial farms. Most are boutique farms, one reason they have higher prices. Another is that they can command higher prices because people are willing to pay extra for food which are intrinsically cleaner and less likely to end up causing them cancer in 30 years. As far as what you call "normal food" the big four "Big Agro" crops are Wheat, Soy, Corn, and Cotton, and their price is low because their industrial agro-business corporations take tens of billions of your tax dollars home every year in the form of subsidies. If you did some honest accounting, I think you'd find your "Cheap Produce" way more expensive than you ever imagined. Of course that's the problem with these issues. The real world is complex, and simple world views tend to be over simplistic, and filled with mistakes and short-cut generalizations.
By far the most important aspect of modern organic farming, is that it is part of a growing movement to farm in a way that is productive, sustainable, does not poison the earth (look at every major study on mega-farming and the harm it does to the fundamental structure and composition of soil), the water (look at studies on depleted aquifers, toxic farm run-off, and ocean dead-zones caused by careless agricultural practices the world over), and air (ever breath the choking fumes coming from a commercial farm? The release of toxic ammonia, methane, pesticides and other poisonous emissions, not to mention the simple stench of the chemical fertilizers?)
There has been a growing "Strip Mining" mentality regarding most human endeavor, build bigger and better fishing boats until the fish are all gone, build farms that cover entire mid-western states, and burn up the human and natural resources at an ever accelerating pace, turn agricultural land in other places into more suburban sprawls and strip malls. When is enough, enough? When is choosing a path that doesn't end in a depleted environment, a burnt out economy, or a shattered global policy for human interaction going to be a priority for all of us. This isn't an argument for taking less, its a commitment to taking better. There's a great line from the movie "The book of Eli", where Eli tells a young woman that before it all went to hell, "We didn't know what was precious. We threw things away that people kill each other for now..." That's a future worth avoiding. Or
Either the person has a legitimate condition limiting mental or emotional function, and as such needs to be protected from themselves (i.e. Dementia, Psychosis, Alzheimer, etc.)
OR
Someone has just paid their idiot tax. Being, promoting, empowering, electing, and/or justifying stupid is expensive, and our society is continually finding new and more interesting ways of paying that tax every day.
Don't you think this point of view is just a wee bit convoluted... I mean its all your tax dollars, whether or not its the USPS or some other government agency choosing to foot the bill.
Determine if this is indeed a viable side business (and I assert it is). The fleet of USPS vehicles is potentially a superb resource because they travel to virtually all roads and to every person who receives mail at a mailbox once a day. Collecting sensor and (broad spectrum) photographic information, could prove useful for anything from locating "Gang Bangers" to analyzing the effects of climate change on native vegetation. Such a bank of environmental information would certainly become an invaluable resource. Since the information is collected on the "People's Dime", the information should belong to the people and be made available to government agencies, businesses, schools, and private citizens. As well the privacy and security of "The People" must be secured whenever possible, so as to limit access to people, or their residences to extraordinary circumstances with extensive legal checks and balances. Having this much information collected about John Q. Public's day to day existence would necessitate some kind of extensive policy on the collection and utilization of third party public information (i.e. business video, phone and Wifi interception, urban microphones, aerial and satellite surveillance of public spaces, etc.) To date this collection has been heavily weighted to the benefit of business and government, and against common privacy. The nation needs to address this now before things spiral completely out of control (and the wholesale convincing of the American people to abdicate their civil rights by shaking the terrorist boogie-man at them "booga-booga" needs to come to a crashing halt!!!)
The goal should be to obtain the value and power of an accurate, timely, and comprehensive national data-set, without giving Big Brother the keys to the kingdom. In the end, the only issue is what value does this information provide, what with it cost us in time, money and most of all personal privacy. As a distant incentive, it might make the USPS a viable business venture, but it hardly seems significant considering the titanic social issues concerned.
Not so... the cycle of respiration between plants and animals is every bit as natural as the gas exchange that happens in every plant and animal at a cellular level. The system was expressly designed to manage exactly this interchange.
A far more accurate comparison would be burning the rain forest, or dumping untold tons of carbon, sulphur, nitrate, phosphate, and combustion products into our air and water. These chemicals acidify our environment, change the salinity of the sea, ultimately impacting the haline cycle and produce huge dead zones in the oceans. This is precisely like using the planet we require for our livelihood as a toilet.
So FSCK the JVM. Create a VM that is inherently not Java's, look carefully at what made the JVM great, as well as what made it horrible, weed out as much of the horrible as humanly possible. Port as many major languages to the new VM as time and resource allow. Wash and repeat.
Leave Oracle to sit in it's litterbox in the throws of onanistic bliss with it's proprietary toys. By the time the Oracle Board of Directors has settled into their afterglow, the reports informing them that they've succeeded in profoundly buggering themselves should be in, and the ultimate conclusions obvious even to them.
There is nothing to get mad at here. Just sad. Thinking with the little head is always a bad plan.
Oracle purchased the "Golden Goose", and it has every right to butcher the critter in the misguided hope that it can get all the eggs out at once. This makes Larry a man who thinks he can divorce his acquisitions from the Open Source community and still have something of value. This is simply a delusion. He will wake up soon and discover that not only has he rendered his purchase worthless, he's generated such a profound amount of ill will from the people with whom he is beholden for his business, that all aspects of his business will be horribly impacted.
We have plenty of excellent languages to build with, and most have been ported to VMs. I see no reason to spend more than a few minutes mourning Java, point and laugh at the fool on the hill, and getting back to work on Python, or Ruby, or whatever environment floats your future boats.
Oh, and Larry, old Chinese proverb says "Be careful when burning bridges that you are not standing on one when you set it ablaze."
This is exactly right, sequestering energy in a highly complex system with millions or billions of feedback loops, produces effects which are difficult to predict and are not intuitive. Increasing energy causes chaotic change. The Thermodynamicist Prigogine spoke of dissipative structures. Adding energy to steady state systems has little effect as the system absorbs the energy up to it's limit, and which point the system becomes perturbed, and goes into chaotic fluctuation (and continues to do so until it arrives at the next steady state.)
Ocean acidification is reflective of a fundamental change in global environment. The "Rise of Slime" is a powerful indication that the chemistry and biology of our oceans is going through a revolutionary transformation. Even fresh water lakes are showing increasing signs of anaerobic bacterial growth, expanding growth of both cyanobacteria and blue green algae, and acidification.
The accurate term now is climate and ecological change. The wise woods-man knows not to defecate close to where he masticates. It's time the species got that lesson, and stopped using the world we rely on as a toilet. The growing changes indicate wild swings and a system slipping into chaos.
There are many stressful jobs, IT, Technical Support, Air Traffic Controller. They have several key things in common;
High levels of responsibility
High degrees of skill and intelligence required to perform the job well
Serious repercussions for mistakes and failing to perform at a consistently high level
Potential high levels of anxiety
People being dealt with are not always at their best (eg. bright and cheery), especially when there are problems being faced
Frequent on call status
Unplanned incidents can frequently disrupt planned work, and are hard to schedule around (urgent circumstances often displace important tasks)
Often, unable to directly impact the key choices needed ensure success (eg. there are laws, bosses, or policies over which you have little or no control impinging on your ability to perform your job, and sometimes putting in the unenviable position of having all the responsibility with none of the authority.)
It's not the least bit surprising that folks can get a little bent doing work like this.
Others here talk about the proper maintenance of the human machine. As nerds and geeks, keeping the hardware in top condition is an obvious aspect of addressing stress, but one also needs to look at the software... or in this case the wetware. Stress doesn't exist out there. There is no thing "Stress". It is a conversation you have with yourself. Literally, it lives in a framework of conversation you have with yourself about who you are, how the world works, and what impinges on your survival and continued happiness. The minute you begin to unravel how these conversations live, and are articulated, you can begin to see that Stress is the natural process of you being confronted by life, and that its as vital as breathing. As soon as you can begin to experience stress not as something to be avoided or resisted, but just another emotional reaction in a sea of emotional reactions, you are free to experience your stress, and let it pass right through. Every time you play, you exert yourself physically, mentally or emotionally, you stress yourself. It's how we become strong. If life simply unfolds and you can celebrate every aspect of it, there is nothing to worry about, nothing to fear and nothing to resist. You can create new conversations that leave you empowered and inspired, which are just as valid as the conversations that leave you fearful and frustrated, and they have the added benefit of providing you with a life that doesn't suck. It begins by shifting how you hold yourself as being responsible. From the victim of blame by others, to one who chooses to be accountable for causing a desired result. Since you have no power to change what others think, you can only address the mess in your own head, and lead the march towards sanity by example.
No Problem, change the bar to a post apocalyptic decor, have the waitrons wear gas-masks, and serve flaming shotz. The bar will triple it's business as the "New IN Place", and the wait staff will be able to protect themselves from toxic fumes. Everyone wins... Profit!!!
Looking at Lady Gaga at the MTV Awards in her butcher shop couture, made me a lot of things... but calm and sedate weren't among them. She should have made her purse out of a barf bag.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure anyone sporting a "Skin Bassoon" would be forced to limit his amorous endeavors to large animal husbandry...
Why yes Mrs. Smith, our man Johnson performs cow inseminations... why do you ask???
I heard an off color Tuba joke once. Would that count?
Bringing up the doctor isn't fair, there's probably some hyper-spacial sensing and processing machine the size of Manhattan inside the sonic screwdriver using Time Lord Technology (tm), and you simply can't tell from the 3-D part. The real problem is simply trying to detect and analyze different kinds of radiation. Look at the difference between a radio-telescope and the Chandra space telescope.
Will it tell me what kind of alien leaves a green spectral trail and craves sugar water???
We are at the threshold of true tele-presence, and the need or even desire for physical presence may soon be relegated to the dust bins of history. There are fewer and fewer places one "Has" to be, which means that one is left with places to be by choice. That suggests working from home a lot (and we need to begin to teach our children the need for self discipline, and the likely remote visibility that employers will demand.) For a little while, the haves will be able to game the system with cheap third world labor, but in the end a global ,flat playing field will allow an engineer in California, the opportunity to make a serious contribution to a project in Mumbai, just as easily as a doctor in Singapore, can perform a robotic surgery on a patient in South Africa.
Would be to record the lecture, preferably with a small video camera, but audio in many cases is sufficient when combined with written notes. The laptop can be saved for later use, and the student can have a conversation with the Prof. to make video notes and lecture content available for the class as extra credit. Good for grades, no distraction, and you can use the laptop where it will actually do some good. The last thing we need is to make things harder for our attention deficit progeny.
This is way cool. I built (when I was just a young'n and still have) a 3 tube regenerative radio with 6 hand wound air coils providing me with 5 shortwave and 1 AM broadcast band of reception. I also have an old crystal set around the house somewhere. Old radios are almost more fun than the law should allow. I also have a project kit laying around someplace for receiving long wave transmissions to locate and record lightning anywhere in the world. With the sun becoming a bit more active the shorter SW Bands should be seeing some activity.
Oh, and contrary to what folks are saying, there are all kinds of chips with only a few transisters on them (including RFIDs and a host of analog and linear ICs.) In fact the 555 timer is in all probability, the most used chip on the planet.
Hello? Are you for a moment suggesting that pre-fetching and pipe-lining aren't algorithmic solutions to hardware problems? There isn't a CPU on the planet that hasn't utilized dozens of improved algorithms designed expressly to make the hardware perform certain tasks faster, more efficiently, with less power, or in parallel with other components. Just because the language you write in, is spelled with atoms of silicon, doesn't mean the process is any less abstract. This is why the line between hardware and software continues to grow every more subtle and diffuse.
In human behavior... What is hardware, wetware, and data? How could you even possibly begin to distinguish what is what, when one thing physically alters the other?
You are right, what I say contradicts him, as it contradicts you, because you're both looking at a universe through a soda straw. Open up your perspective to see the larger picture and nature of it's interrelated parts.
The problem is that by allowing corporations to grow into monopolies and mega-corporations who have diversified and subsumed entire markets, the only way to vote with your wallet is to move into a cave and start knocking out stone axes. Take any major industry... food for example. If you do a little research you find that it all boils down to half a dozen super corporations, that control everything from the seed that's planted to the packaging that arrives at your grocery store. What are you going to do? How are you going to vote? Do you honestly plan to stop eating at restaurants or buying the 95% percent of the food on the shelves that contains the wheat, soy, or corn products produced by those mega-corporations? You know the ones, that are receiving billions of dollars of your tax dollars in subsidies for the privilege of better controlling your life. Go a little further. Those same companies are also producing the ethanol that is mixed with the gas you drive your car with, or the soy oil that is used in everything from fried food to industrial solvents, or even the chemicals derived from wheat and corn that find their way into everything from textiles to plastic bottles to computers.
WAKE UP! If you spend a dollar anywhere, any more, you voted for them. Voting with your wallet is now a quaint and sadly naive concept. The time for sleep walking is over, if you want a vote you'd better get real clear where your votes are currently going.
Excuse me, but who do you think controls government? Over the last 30 years, there has been a steady erosion of checks and balances, middle class earning power and quality of life, and civil rights and freedom. At the heart of all of this has been the wholesale purchase of our government by commercial interests. At this point in the game, big business writes law, polices itself (or doesn't as the case may be), and has the vast majority of our representatives in it's pocket (in fact, forcing the need of multi-million dollar political campaigns for offices from Dog Catcher on up, ensures that only candidates who've been vetted by the money interests even get a chance to play in the political arena.) If government sucks, its because big business bought it, and now we're being governed by self obsessed, greedy capitalists who put personal profit ahead of justice, dignity, or the future of human advance.
If you're at all interested in government that isn't a brazen travesty, let's declare business a religion, and separate it from government so that the two might function apart as designed and immeasurably improve the human condition. While we're at it, we might also consider teaching ethics and social responsibility in our business schools... just a thought.
Computer Science is growing up. The sign of this is that it's becoming clear that there are many different fields and perspectives housed under the one tent. In fact there're so many now, to limit Computer Science to any small set of studies or viewpoints is to argue against how far we've come. Just as Biology was once the collecting and studying of living organisms (and now spans fields as disparate as Taxonomy and Epigenetics), Computer Sscience includes entire areas of study bordering on and overlapping with electronics, material science, information science, mathematics, physics (including quantum), genetics and neurobiology, and electromechanics. Add to that the grave need for ethical studies, and to more deeply appreciate how the digital world is impinging on the analog one, and you have entire subcategories of "Computer Science" that merit their own distinct fields of inquiry. The fact is, that CS has given us an entirely new perspective about our universe. Space-time as quantized information. Look at how the abstractions of language and thought have changed the way we see ourselves and the process of our ontology. We now freely and commonly speak about meme space, social engineering, complex systems organization, and simulation as aspects of our daily lives.
Algorithms are simply the brute mental force required to reduce a chosen problem space into a solution set. Just as proofs are the mental gymnastics required to render truths from mathematical postulates and hypothesis. One can wander quite rightly into the more solid aspects of the machines of computing, or with equal validity blaze trails in the more deeply esoteric or philosophical aspects on computational theory. One might even begin to abstract the entire conversation surrounding the philosophical nature of "Problem and Solution" to see if there aren't larger, more encompassing information spaces that might yield entirely new possibilities and truths.
All of these things are Computer Science, and its time we began teaching our children just how broad the horizons are, to this fascinating realm.
Arguably, any twit who chooses a path based on superstition or magical thinking has just rendered that path a religion... which isn't to say that there aren't some religions that occasionally rise above magical thinking (I find Zen a rather enlightened way of seeing things.) However, I also find that mental health demands one regularly distinguishes oneself from one's point of view, or all too soon, you don't have one, it has you.
Awesome!
I'm an engineer, amateur scientist, and advocate for organic farming.
Many of the chemicals used in pesticides (pyrethroids, organophosphates, carbamates, etc.) have been clearly determined to be: Human Carcinogens, Mutagens, Abortives, Hormone Analogs, Irritants and Toxins (particularly Neurotoxins.) As a chemist and biologist, I'm certain you can understand just how bloody difficult it is to make a chemical that kills one class of invertebrates (Insecta), and has virtually no impact whatsoever on any other class. I'd be more than happy to sit down and discuss absorption, uptake, metabolism, cytotoxicity, the most common effects and their biological mechanism of any of these chemicals. I would also be happy to talk about their impact and biological pathways on micro and macrofauna including Fish, Bird, Reptile, and Mammalian species (and let's not forget Homo Sapiens.) Though a quick look at the impact of these chemicals on a wide variety of species (eg. DDT on the Brown Pelican and Peregrine Falcon), and the statistical information surrounding the dramatic increase of Cancer, Miscarriage, Birth Defect, Neurological Disease and Negative Childhood Epidemiology among farm workers (age, sex, race, and economically normalized for fair comparison), should provide sufficient evidence to make any open minded scientists more than a wee bit uncomfortable with spraying these chemical all over the scenery and particularly the watershed for much of this country.
This is not emotional. This is simple science. Like the mistaken agricultural misuse of antibiotics to increase animal health and yield, in fact producing nothing more than super-colonies of antibiotic resistant bacteria for miles surrounding such farms. You speak of emotion. There is an equally emotion-based use of the magic of modern chemistry to solve problems whose solutions themselves become the new problems. Case in point, this is as much a magical thinking, superstitious problem as any "Being afraid of chemicals." There are thousands of places on the planet, where the trade-off in human suffering demands extraordinary measures. Killing off a plague of malarial mosquitoes immediately jumps to mind. Using the chemical equivalent of an atom bomb to make you fruit prettier however, seems to me, a poor use of this technology. Let's "Right Size" our chemical arsenal, and save the extreme solution for the extreme circumstances.
Clearly you're not an organic farmer, nor do you apparently know anything about organic farming.
You're right, all crops are fertilized. However, you're mistaken about how organic farms are fertilized. While large commercial farms use fertilizers that have a tremendous load on the environment in both use of fresh water and petrochemicals (read oil), organic farming uses both old and new technologies. Anything from advanced composting and intelligent use of crop stubble to introduced nitrogen fixing bacteria and proper crop rotation. This leads to dramatically enhanced soil fertility and crop yield without the inherent downside of chemical fertilizers.
Likewise you're right, organic farms use pesticides, you're wrong however on the methods and types. Some methods are indeed ancient, and have proven effective even by today's standards. Others are cutting edge including biological pesticides and pheromones (that sicken and kill pests or interrupt their reproduction), use of predatory species, combined crops that mutually deter each others pests, and breakthrough growing methods that dramatically enhance crop resistance without the introduction of toxic chemicals. By the way if you haven't studied the impact of chemical pesticides on farm workers, or the significant amounts of pesticides found in certain foods ( href="http://green.yahoo.com/blog/daily_green_news/332/the-new-dirty-dozen-12-foods-to-eat-organic-and-avoid-pesticide-residue.html" target - "_blank">Dirty Dozen) and their known risk to consumers, you may want to think twice about chowing down on certain fruits and veggies that aren't organic.
You are almost completely mistaken about organic farms being large industrial farms. Most are boutique farms, one reason they have higher prices. Another is that they can command higher prices because people are willing to pay extra for food which are intrinsically cleaner and less likely to end up causing them cancer in 30 years. As far as what you call "normal food" the big four "Big Agro" crops are Wheat, Soy, Corn, and Cotton, and their price is low because their industrial agro-business corporations take tens of billions of your tax dollars home every year in the form of subsidies. If you did some honest accounting, I think you'd find your "Cheap Produce" way more expensive than you ever imagined. Of course that's the problem with these issues. The real world is complex, and simple world views tend to be over simplistic, and filled with mistakes and short-cut generalizations.
By far the most important aspect of modern organic farming, is that it is part of a growing movement to farm in a way that is productive, sustainable, does not poison the earth (look at every major study on mega-farming and the harm it does to the fundamental structure and composition of soil), the water (look at studies on depleted aquifers, toxic farm run-off, and ocean dead-zones caused by careless agricultural practices the world over), and air (ever breath the choking fumes coming from a commercial farm? The release of toxic ammonia, methane, pesticides and other poisonous emissions, not to mention the simple stench of the chemical fertilizers?)
There has been a growing "Strip Mining" mentality regarding most human endeavor, build bigger and better fishing boats until the fish are all gone, build farms that cover entire mid-western states, and burn up the human and natural resources at an ever accelerating pace, turn agricultural land in other places into more suburban sprawls and strip malls. When is enough, enough? When is choosing a path that doesn't end in a depleted environment, a burnt out economy, or a shattered global policy for human interaction going to be a priority for all of us. This isn't an argument for taking less, its a commitment to taking better. There's a great line from the movie "The book of Eli", where Eli tells a young woman that before it all went to hell, "We didn't know what was precious. We threw things away that people kill each other for now..." That's a future worth avoiding. Or
Either the person has a legitimate condition limiting mental or emotional function, and as such needs to be protected from themselves (i.e. Dementia, Psychosis, Alzheimer, etc.)
OR
Someone has just paid their idiot tax. Being, promoting, empowering, electing, and/or justifying stupid is expensive, and our society is continually finding new and more interesting ways of paying that tax every day.
Don't you think this point of view is just a wee bit convoluted... I mean its all your tax dollars, whether or not its the USPS or some other government agency choosing to foot the bill.
Determine if this is indeed a viable side business (and I assert it is). The fleet of USPS vehicles is potentially a superb resource because they travel to virtually all roads and to every person who receives mail at a mailbox once a day. Collecting sensor and (broad spectrum) photographic information, could prove useful for anything from locating "Gang Bangers" to analyzing the effects of climate change on native vegetation. Such a bank of environmental information would certainly become an invaluable resource. Since the information is collected on the "People's Dime", the information should belong to the people and be made available to government agencies, businesses, schools, and private citizens. As well the privacy and security of "The People" must be secured whenever possible, so as to limit access to people, or their residences to extraordinary circumstances with extensive legal checks and balances. Having this much information collected about John Q. Public's day to day existence would necessitate some kind of extensive policy on the collection and utilization of third party public information (i.e. business video, phone and Wifi interception, urban microphones, aerial and satellite surveillance of public spaces, etc.) To date this collection has been heavily weighted to the benefit of business and government, and against common privacy. The nation needs to address this now before things spiral completely out of control (and the wholesale convincing of the American people to abdicate their civil rights by shaking the terrorist boogie-man at them "booga-booga" needs to come to a crashing halt!!!)
The goal should be to obtain the value and power of an accurate, timely, and comprehensive national data-set, without giving Big Brother the keys to the kingdom. In the end, the only issue is what value does this information provide, what with it cost us in time, money and most of all personal privacy. As a distant incentive, it might make the USPS a viable business venture, but it hardly seems significant considering the titanic social issues concerned.
Not so... the cycle of respiration between plants and animals is every bit as natural as the gas exchange that happens in every plant and animal at a cellular level. The system was expressly designed to manage exactly this interchange.
A far more accurate comparison would be burning the rain forest, or dumping untold tons of carbon, sulphur, nitrate, phosphate, and combustion products into our air and water. These chemicals acidify our environment, change the salinity of the sea, ultimately impacting the haline cycle and produce huge dead zones in the oceans. This is precisely like using the planet we require for our livelihood as a toilet.
So FSCK the JVM. Create a VM that is inherently not Java's, look carefully at what made the JVM great, as well as what made it horrible, weed out as much of the horrible as humanly possible. Port as many major languages to the new VM as time and resource allow. Wash and repeat.
Leave Oracle to sit in it's litterbox in the throws of onanistic bliss with it's proprietary toys. By the time the Oracle Board of Directors has settled into their afterglow, the reports informing them that they've succeeded in profoundly buggering themselves should be in, and the ultimate conclusions obvious even to them.
There is nothing to get mad at here. Just sad. Thinking with the little head is always a bad plan.
Oracle purchased the "Golden Goose", and it has every right to butcher the critter in the misguided hope that it can get all the eggs out at once. This makes Larry a man who thinks he can divorce his acquisitions from the Open Source community and still have something of value. This is simply a delusion. He will wake up soon and discover that not only has he rendered his purchase worthless, he's generated such a profound amount of ill will from the people with whom he is beholden for his business, that all aspects of his business will be horribly impacted.
We have plenty of excellent languages to build with, and most have been ported to VMs. I see no reason to spend more than a few minutes mourning Java, point and laugh at the fool on the hill, and getting back to work on Python, or Ruby, or whatever environment floats your future boats.
Oh, and Larry, old Chinese proverb says "Be careful when burning bridges that you are not standing on one when you set it ablaze."
This is exactly right, sequestering energy in a highly complex system with millions or billions of feedback loops, produces effects which are difficult to predict and are not intuitive. Increasing energy causes chaotic change. The Thermodynamicist Prigogine spoke of dissipative structures. Adding energy to steady state systems has little effect as the system absorbs the energy up to it's limit, and which point the system becomes perturbed, and goes into chaotic fluctuation (and continues to do so until it arrives at the next steady state.)
Ocean acidification is reflective of a fundamental change in global environment. The "Rise of Slime" is a powerful indication that the chemistry and biology of our oceans is going through a revolutionary transformation. Even fresh water lakes are showing increasing signs of anaerobic bacterial growth, expanding growth of both cyanobacteria and blue green algae, and acidification.
The accurate term now is climate and ecological change. The wise woods-man knows not to defecate close to where he masticates. It's time the species got that lesson, and stopped using the world we rely on as a toilet. The growing changes indicate wild swings and a system slipping into chaos.
Tell me this won't lead to sentences like "Excuse me, but could I please borrow a cup of red light???"
There are many stressful jobs, IT, Technical Support, Air Traffic Controller. They have several key things in common;
It's not the least bit surprising that folks can get a little bent doing work like this.
Others here talk about the proper maintenance of the human machine. As nerds and geeks, keeping the hardware in top condition is an obvious aspect of addressing stress, but one also needs to look at the software... or in this case the wetware. Stress doesn't exist out there. There is no thing "Stress". It is a conversation you have with yourself. Literally, it lives in a framework of conversation you have with yourself about who you are, how the world works, and what impinges on your survival and continued happiness. The minute you begin to unravel how these conversations live, and are articulated, you can begin to see that Stress is the natural process of you being confronted by life, and that its as vital as breathing. As soon as you can begin to experience stress not as something to be avoided or resisted, but just another emotional reaction in a sea of emotional reactions, you are free to experience your stress, and let it pass right through. Every time you play, you exert yourself physically, mentally or emotionally, you stress yourself. It's how we become strong. If life simply unfolds and you can celebrate every aspect of it, there is nothing to worry about, nothing to fear and nothing to resist. You can create new conversations that leave you empowered and inspired, which are just as valid as the conversations that leave you fearful and frustrated, and they have the added benefit of providing you with a life that doesn't suck. It begins by shifting how you hold yourself as being responsible. From the victim of blame by others, to one who chooses to be accountable for causing a desired result. Since you have no power to change what others think, you can only address the mess in your own head, and lead the march towards sanity by example.
No Problem, change the bar to a post apocalyptic decor, have the waitrons wear gas-masks, and serve flaming shotz. The bar will triple it's business as the "New IN Place", and the wait staff will be able to protect themselves from toxic fumes. Everyone wins... Profit!!!
Looking at Lady Gaga at the MTV Awards in her butcher shop couture, made me a lot of things... but calm and sedate weren't among them. She should have made her purse out of a barf bag.
That udderly fascinating...
Microsoft had to give up on the "Nipple Mouse(tm)", because it kept shocking mother and baby.