--the two techniques I am aware of that can store energy without using batteries are large capacitor banks, and just pumping water uphill someplace with the off-peak demand generated power. It's stored there as a potential, released on demand to fall back down and run something like a small pelton wheel or something. It's already being done for that matter, on big scales anyway, several large power plants do this. I've also seen some references to those air powered cars, just compressed air as an energy storage potential.
And batteries aren't bad, sane useage and they last for years and years, and can be rebuilt. So far, my storage batteries that are from 1998 are still working just fine. Plain old flooded lead acid, just I slapped a piece of modern gear on them, called a desulphator. That and never draining them dry works just great.
I think if the problems are approached from two directions it makes more sense. You have to put just as much effort into reducing demand as possible, along with increasing production, from various sources and in a more localised manner. Every time you can eliminate a watt demand, through a better built appliance or use, you reduce the amount of production needed. Instead of an incandescent light, a compact fluorescent or an LED array. Instead of a computer that needs liquid cooling, how about just being happy with a smaller processor that can struggle by with passive cooling? On a bigger scale, instead of having your furnace or AC kick on every 15 minutes from massively underinsulated homes, how about having them only kick on twice a day? I've SEEN that in the superinsulated houses I've worked on in the past. The energy savings are simply incredible. So, they just need less energy to work, and they work even better than traditional construction.
We have solutions, a few changes in the way people think can do wonders. The deal is, there is no "one"solution, there are hundreds of them, because each situation is slightly different. You plan out what is best for you, then do it. Waiting for government to do it, or waiting to see if the big guys are just gonna cut you some deal that is a better deal for you than it is for them is the true "wishful thinking" that is impractical and isn't going to work.
..... putting millions back to work in the manufacturing industries inside the US? Two and a half million manufacturing jobs lost in the past few years, how about just start building and deploying the technology that we have now, that works? Ask any of them guys currently out of work "hey, you want your old job back, same pay, but now you'll be making a model A wind charger instead?" What do you think they'd say to that?
When we decided to mass produce "stuff",instead of custom build it one at a time method, it took off, all of a sudden joe average not only got the benefit of having modern tech, he had a job that let him afford that tech! Why is it that anytime we see any sort of big government solution to a problem it revolves around a handful of giant international corporations making even more profits?
Smaller scale, distributed energy production means more jobs for more people,practical jobs, too, less points of energy failure or political machinations, more national security, not less. What's wrong with all that? There are millions of roofs inside the US just sitting baking in the sun every day, accomplishing not much other than wearing out the shingles. A million hilltops all over, the breeze just blowing on by, untapped. Hundreds of thousands of farms still not collecting and using the methane that could be garnered. How about as simple an idea as mandating tougher INSULATION standards on new buildings? 2x4 crappy built butt joint r-18 insulated walls are like ancient technology, but are still being made brand new, banks still pop for 20 year mortgages for that sort of non-quality construction, and it "passes code". Why, it's ill thought out and ridiculously energy wasteful. Modern building techniques at the medium and lower scales are teh suxs, really, they are pure crap. I'm amazed people even buy them, they certainly aren't going to last and people are buying guaranteed energy hog homes, or leasing energy hog commercial space. Dollar for dollar, just better construction efforts and more insulation results in a better energy savings and over all savings to the economy than any scheme, nuclear or anything else. I'm a solar and wind advocate, but I'm the first to admit that just better designed and more insulated buildings are the best deal out there to drop energy demand. If you don't NEED the massive constant energy input in the first place, isn't that a better idea? Here's another, how about mandating more recycling, force these international profiteers to take back their old worn out stuff for recycling, instead of just dumping it? And for more R&D and deployment of the renewables, how about bringing back 100% tax credits, not a deduction, a pure credit? When we had that, adoption of renewables was just proceeding great,interest was up, people were getting them, the small companies out there doing the new work required were making some decent inroads on improving the various technology, but then it ceased and it slowed down, just when things were looking good. Perhaps a few giant monopolies got scared, they saw their generations long dominance being disrupted. I don't know but that is what it looked like to me back then.
Nukes have some place in the scheme of things, but really, incredibly complex and dangerous and expensive tech to basically produce a heat source. That's all they do, make "hot" that not only is hot now, the resultant stuff stays hot and has to be literally guarded with military forces for the next several--whatever thousands of years it takes. That's critical mass societal arrogance to think we can do that. Ye gads, we got millions and millions of acres of "heat source" hanging around doing basically nothing in the south west. And all over any place else that gets even a modicum of normal rainfall we got several million more acres of land that could be put to use with such cross-useage practical crops as industrial hemp, a HUGE untapped resource that has energy and manufacturing useages. And the frozen methane hydrates locked into place all over the planet, sur
I see people still don't get it in a lot of cases. Fedora is not Redhat, Redhat is not Fedora. They are cousins, but not the same distro.
I don't code or work in IT but at least I fully understand the differences here.
Fedora is the unsupported beta community distro for hobbyists and developers. They decided on a more or less close to carved in stone release schedule, and it gets released whether every single thing is fixed or not. That's just the decision they made. It's gonna have bugs, some whoppers, some picayune, *all the time*. It's the place they *want* the bugs to show up, so that they get found out and worked on there, not in the Redhat supported version, which is older, and more refined. that's the one they don't want any bugs in, as much as possible.
Red Hat holds back, releases much more stable stuff,less often, and it's supported. that's the new paradigm, how they significantly changed their company, and I think it's a darn good idea.
I don't think there's a problem dual booting redhat and xp, as far as I know anyway.
They use Fedora to test NEW stuff, that's why they have TWO different deals there with DIFFERENT names and why fedora is 100% free. It's the decision they made last year, for _*exactly*_ these sorts of reasons as this dual boot MBR partition whammy. Stuff happens. It is not designed to run critical business applications, nor should it be used to run critical personal applications where you have zero backup or way to recover from running a beta ware pretty much bleeding edge free product.
Now, if I have that wrong, excuse me, but that's what I have gathered since last year. I don't have a dual boot machine, but I have a machine with windows on it, it boots just fine. So I can boot anything I want to boot. hardware used is so cheap now it's almost free, and in a lot of cases it is free for the hauling off, so there's little excuse to lose data. My windows machine costed me less than 10$, I bought a skid load of pentiums and a couple of pentium 2's for that amount. It's a 333 running 98se, I use it mostly for my cheap digital camera, some place to store my pictures I want to save. That's really all the important data I have. I don't store them on my fedora box, because I know "stuff can happen" when you are upgrading and trying testing and beta ware all the time. And for that matter, used hard drives are practically free, it's just not that hard to have a completely separate hard drive where you stash your stuff you don't want to lose. And you can have the separate hard drive in most towers, and physically unplug the drive you want to be sure of, for that matter, when trying out new stuff. Ya, I know it's fun to have a huge harddrive and stick all sorts things on there,but then again, when something happens, you are screwed. It's the "all the eggs in one basket" thing you are taught as a kid to watch out for, because it's a *bad idea* to do that.
And I'm glad, too. I put FC2 on yesterday, and it wouldn't upgrade, but it would and did do a clean install with custom package selection, it runs really really well here. If I had had stuff on there I wanted to keep, whether it was data or another partition with another OS, well, tough noogies, I woulda been SOL, and it would have been MY fault for being a lamer, not fedoras fault.
I don't know about anyone else, but that's how I keep them separate. I wouldn't put beta stuff on a critical machine, personal or business, and I'm certainly not going to get angry with such an amount of free work given to me when you are told in advance there is likely to be "gotchas" and then you get one.
it's such an old political scam it has its own catch phrase.
I remember as a grade school kid being asked "are you a democrat or a republican?", as if those are the only choices. It's mass conditioining/brainwashing, and it takes a long time for most people to finally realise how effective it really is. A lot never realise it.
You ask, how to get around it? Exactly what we are doing now, pointing out there is little practical difference once you get to the specifics of what one criminal cartel promises/says/does as opposed to the other. They are both criminal cartels. And at the very tippy top, they are both run by international billionaire fascists, who also own the media empires, etc. They are feudalists, always have been fuedalists, and have generations of practice in how to control the various populations and the political processes. They fund and start both sides of all the major wars, for instance, and profit from them. It goes way, way back. Fascinating once you start delving into it.
So, all you can do is educate, point people to some data, let them figure out what has happened to them, then they usually can logic-out what to do next-if they are so inclined, a lot aren't, until such a time as they become a victim-of their OWN side, their "team" victimises them some how and they go WTF? If you can catch them then, you can reason, offer some data.. Throwing it all at once in their face is too much too quick, most can't or won't accept the fact of how they have been so seriously misled and lied to their entire lives, they fall into immediate denial-usually anyway. It takes time for people to chip away at pre conceived notions, and it's easy to slide back into a comfort zone of what you are willing to look at, let alone accept.
Here's an example from a post further up. A mention was made of a critique of moores film at the NY post, here's the full quote from there:
"NOTHING NEW
MICHAEL Moore's anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11" isn't even original. Two years ago, "9/11: The Road to Tyranny," a real documentary by Alex Jones, had most of the "facts" Moore uses in his scatter-shot diatribe. Jones, who is less interested in making money than the self-aggrandizing Moore, released his film for free on his Web site www.infowars.com, where it drew legions of new fans, including producer Curt Johnson, who is hiring Jones as a consultant on a political action thriller titled "Wake Up."
The deal is, moore is a big hit with the types who associate with criminal gang A, as opposed to criminal gang B-not to say his films aren't at least somewhat provocative and well done-I thought "roger and me" was excellent. But a REAL independent non aligned film maker has a difficult job getting his films out. The same as REAL independent news people are so rare in mass media broadcast venues. They serve their globalist masters, and a major part of their jobs is not to broadcast news or educate, it's to perpetuate the "divide and conquer" scam that has always been so successful.
The main tool we have now is the internet, because so far, it's not controllable like the "media" thing was in the past. So, that's what I used, I just wish we would have had this back in the 60's, stuff would be a LOT different now. I remember when I wrote back then it had to be picked up and run by an "underground" paper, or you literally had to go pay to have it printed yourself andf just hand the stuff out. Very expensive, hard to do, hard to reach a lot of people. And it's also why it's so important NOW to keep the internet as free from government regulation and big money control as possible, whichever nation you happen to reside in, because ALL nations have "the approved" press, they all offer up partial truths and lies mixed with just enough truth to make it seem to be credible, and when most of the people in the various places ONLY get their news from those places, and ONLY get their "education" from government run indoctrination "schools", they will continue to be brainwashed into following the "pa
this is my first post to/. with my new system, FC2. I just finished installing it awhile ago, been customizing, got my mp3 media streams working. Now here's the weird part. At first, it would NOT install. Got it in the mail this afternoon and went to it. Kept aborting some where's near the beginning of the install. Now I don't have a lot of new machines to try, mostly I have this old PP200 with 228 meg ram as my "main" machine, this is what I use. What I found out, it wasn't the media, it was the dang Cd player! I tried 4 different old Cdplayers out of the junk box until I found one that was smooth as silk, zip bap boom, I did a custom install, here I am. Same old crummy small HDD of 8 gigs, same old 1996 computar, but, it wouldn't read the disk *well enough* except with one of these other (old no name brand whatever, "aafrey" on the label for a name)Cd drives, which I will now permanently install in the machine. Right now it's hanging on the top by the cables. Now, why would that be? All the CD drives *work*, just not with these install disks, not good enough anyway. The one that was always with the machine always worked before, and managed to start the install fine, several times, just wouldn't finish it.
You tell me, I know not why this is. I will say the only clue I can see is it is the alleged fastest cd, at 40x. The others are all older 2,4,8 whatevers, but still functional.
FWIW
BTW, FC2 is *very nice*. A scosh faster, default fonts seem nicer, all in all like it better than FC1 so far. I did an all Gnome install, then some other stuff, the newer gnome is nice as well, but I don't like the newer gedit layout arrangement, but it's still useable. Haven't looked much past that yet, though, just browsing and listening.
Anyway, one of my little bros is a small boss-action honcho at sun, I will be sure to razz him a good one on your experiences... heh heh heh
I've tried that too,before, but I'll have to retry it. Last I used it there was something I didn't like about it, I but can't remember now what it was.
All in all so far I more or less like mozilla. Has most of the features I want, renders most pages OK, seems to be fairly stable. Of course I was always a netscape fan going way back to when I was using 2.0 with netcom as my ISP. I think I used an earlier version too, and I remember using mosaic just a tad, but not very much.
And this is funny, but real audio 2 was decent enough too, for my purposes anyway. Little box with play/pause/ etc, just enough to do the job. Lightweight, I could hear net streams with a 14.4 modem on old slow machines.
We all like new features, this is a granted. It would just be nice if smarter coding resulted in the new features being useable on existing architecture without having to be bleeding edge or near bleeding edge. We seem to have reached quite practical levels for a lot of purposes with around the pentium 2 class machines. I know that hardware won't be going backweards, but I see software not really advancing as much, because they have the ability to produce newer/better codee without requiring an automatic hardware upgrade, it's just harder mostly, near as I can see, so they don't do it. It wouldn't really bother me personally for the "advances" to slow down a little, having stuff be obsolete every 6 months or something seems sorta wasteful.
the gene that causes the plant to become sterile can spread with the pollen, introducing the gene into another plant of the same species. The original plant then doesn't produce sterile seeds, then the plant next door that gets effected can't, either. Cross pollination happens all the time in nature. I'll give you a common example that hits home gardeners all the time. This has happened to me a few times when city gardening. Say you are growing some squash to eat. Some neighbor down the street is growing ornamental gourds, common for home crafts people to make decorations and birdhouses, etc. The pollen from the gourds gets on your squash as they are flowering. The fruit that then grows turns into this blend with more gourd-like tendencies, and it's quite inedible, and any of the seeds from that also contain the gourd patterns. This sort of thing is the main problem with GM seeds in general, you can't stop the wind and insects, etc from this cross pollination deal.
And as regards monsanto anyway,the "terminator" gene just shows their mindset that they would even *think* making such a critter was a good idea in the first place. Corporate nuttitude and arrogance and greed taken to an extreme. So far, all they have admitted to is a temporary undefined suspension, not an outright ban on doing it. And they only reason they even did a temp ban was all the citizen activism that ranked them personally and in government -space. Left to their own, this stuff might be out there already. We've already got a problem with starlink corn spreading, and some GM modified wheat and some others, they can't control it once it's released on "test farms". The canola in the original, it's spreading now and is hard to control, in places where they don't want canola to grow, and it's harder to get rid of than even a "normal" weed because it's been bred to be resistant to herbicide.
I don't have any easy answers for this sort of research. On the one hand I can see a few decent possibilities for it, on the other hand I can see a much larger potential for *really* screwing up bad. Corporations in general have a pretty dismal track record when it comes to this sort of thing, take ground water pollution for an example. Their mindset -> " Hmm,great potential for this quarter's bottom line profits to just dump toxic waste. Let's do it!" 10 to 20 years later society pays a big price for that short term profit. Same sort of deal here, generally speaking.
It's weasly, always was. They said they won't promise not to do it, and that they might still be doing internal research, etc. Deal is, you want to trust that? It's worse than SCO. I mean, they were actually gonna do it at first. I wouldn't bet against them continuing to develop it.
I'm not against research, I am against just thinking up weird biological creations anf turning them loose. It's irresponsible to the max. I don't think our society as a whole is near advanced enough socially or philosphically for those sorts of decisions, even if the science is adequate for the mere creation. "Greed" runs our business and politics too much.
I'll try that, but how do you do it? Is it as simple as booting, and just running opera 5.0 (have to find that, I was trying the latest version) then, and never turning on IE? I'm not much of a winbows guy, I got given this toshiba as a junker. All I did was recover some personal data the owner wanted (which I did, it had a really messed up hard drive), then I cleaned it up, got some anti vir and a firewall, and tried out some browsers on it, to at least make it useable. Any tips, etc, greatfully appreciated.
... since day one, several years ago. yes, he replanted seed. No he didn't steal it, not by my definition anyway. No, he didn't spray, negating any alleged "benefit" from the seed.
And my main concern hasn't been addressed with this decision,this is quite true, that will require another court case I guess. and yes, there are several issues now with labeling food, you can slide by now with some pretty impure stuff and still call it organice, at least by federal laws. that's a side issue, but valid.
The main concern with GM crops is *you can't keep it out of your field if you don't want them*. Anyone in your area plants it, YOU can still be "growing it", even if you planted another seed, due to cross pollination. That's the big issue. Well, one of them, but it's big.
And FYI, all my loot I make comes from farming, I am employed on a farm now, started working farms when I was 9 years old. I pay attention to these issues, and feel quite justified in my opinions when I state the reasons. Some things about modern farming I like,for example I like the efforts to produce energy on farms via waste recovery and methane production, etc, like we have discussed here, but some suck rubber donkey dong, and "round up ready" GM seeds falls into the latter category. It's just a throughly bad idea, and will only go to create a more powerful global food monopoly. If you cannot or will not understand why a FOOD monopoly isn't a good idea, there's nothing I can say that would matter, so we'll let that slide, I can't help you then, or really explain it any better. In my opinion, based on the basically easy to understand data of how crops grow and how the food business works, it will NOT help farmers, nor will it make your food cheaper, and it will certainly make your food more poisonous. It WILL make monsanto more money, that's about it. It will COST everyone else, in a variety of ways.
clarification, I don't think "round up ready" modified gene plants could cause a famine. They could cause huge economic loss, especially in the third world where donated grains (bulk donated food) are used as seeds to grow more food,though. It's one of the reasons a lot of third world countries are resisting donated GM crops right now.
What I was referring to is the "terminator" gene modified food crops. THOSE could easily cause global famine, once almost all normal food crops have a terminator gene strain introduced into the "wild" and it starts to spread. It could get out of hand easily. And they haven't stopped working on them, and sometime they will release them, so I say it's a credible threat.
yes, for around 80 years now, since artificial fertilisers and sprays became popular, monoculture has taken over big time. They will plant one, or at most two crops in the same place, year after year. They apply a fertiliser that is nitrogen, phosphorus and pottasium, but they don't re-apply all the micronutrients that plants require, and wind up in the food we eat. that number is coincidently also 80, so sorry for the confusion. They also don't add enough carbon back to the soil, which is loosely called the "tilth" in the soil, whcih causes topsoil loss, inefficient water usage, excess runoff going directly into streams instead of soaking in, and requiring heavier equipment all the time to do the same work. the soil becomes compacted, dead almost, it takes heavier equipment to work it once the soil loses tilth.
These micronutrients have a lot to do with your over-all health, but they gradually get sucked out of the soil, but you don't get them. You still get big crops, I won't dispute that, but the nutritional quality drops severely. That's why people take vitamins and mineral supplements-that stuff just isn't in the food anymore in the quantities it used to be, and even then it's not near as good as just having the vitamins and minerals directly in the food itself. It also gradually weakens the plants, meaning they are less resistant to diseases and to insect depradations, requiring more spray, sprays which are in essence, WMD put onto your food. there's really not a lot of difference.
Now with this "round up ready" stuff, it's designed so that they can REALLY spray that crap hard, directly on the food, and the slop over kills the weeds in between. It makes it easier to control the weeds that way, because a general over spray is easier to perform than spot sprays or cultivation to control weeds, which is the "old fashioned" way to do it. that's all I do, cultivation and a cover mulch, BTW.
So, with generation after generation of monoculture in the same ground and using sprays and only artificial fertiliser you are gonna get weaker plants, less nutritious plants for the humans and other critters that eat them,and more poison on the plants. And PAY for that.
Another thing, GM canola in canada is classed as a weed now when it escapes, because it takes just a ton of different sprays to eradicate it if it gets into someplace where you don't want it. It's called a "super weed".
And the main reason so many farmers are using it is simple,it's not because their seed is all that great, the old canola (rape seed) worked perfectly fine and they could save seed every year, saving money, etc, it's because if you got just *one* bozo in the area who uses it, it's no use, you're screwed, your crop will get infected, and monsanto will find out, and sue you, or the threat is there and has been for several years now. So, the farmers take the path of least resistance and basically pay a bribe to be left alone, and "jump on the bandwagon", and then they can't "un jump" they become stuck, they become corporate employees.
I worked on farms off an on all my life,I am now in fact, and I know VERY few truly independent farmers, vast majority are just 7 day a week underpaid corporate employees.
Like I said above though, the truly scary one is terminator gene plants. they are gonna screw the pooch with that one once they start using it on a big scale. Tons of stuff on the web about it.
I've got sealed metal cans of pure strain open pollinated seeds. I am saving them for such time in the future when I can grow my food inside sealed greenhouses, as I think that might be the only way to do it, even then it will be iffy.
...OSX except for webshots, so I can't relate. Jobs took a dedicated macfanatic (moi), someone who's still got a functioining 512k kicking around someplace, and priced at least one guy out of his products. Just when they were getting cheap enough, zap, they keep upping the ante. Then I discoverd open source and linux, etc, haven't looked back. I like and endorse the philosophy, and the quality is there, just need some skull sweat now and then.
On iCab, all I know is on my olden daze macs, it's still the best browser. Just upgraded on my powerbook 1400 (166/64) a coupla weeks ago in fact. And I can surf perfectly adequately with even an old 25 mghz machine (280c PB, 68k moto) and just a little ram using iCab.
Of course, that goes to the OS as well, we keep losing ground it appears, the newer stuff needs orders of magnitudes more powerful machines just to maintain even ground.
side issue, but I had wished apple would have open sourced classic OS when they switched, I always liked it. Safe to use (more or less, mostly more, I never had any issues with it), easy to use, performed well. I mean, what would it be to mac anyway? None of the old machines can run OSX, but some people will hang on to them. Apple being thoughtful like that to old fans would go a long way to restoring loyalty and perhaps more of an urge to upgrade to a new machine and OSX. They won't even bust loose with some downloads of like 8.6.
..what we are surpirsed is that 99% of the population has no clue about the food they eat other than it comes from the supermarket automagically.
We've been lobbying against this stuff for years, for that very reason, it infects our stuff, and then they claim ownership? Huh? Howzzat again?
Just wait. If you are just hearing about roundup ready and cross pollination and infection, wait to you hear about terminator genes and cross pollination. Ohh, that's a goody. Makes a plant live one year, then all it's offspring is infertile. Think on that one for a bit. Think about the winds, how they cross borders, let alone mere fields and counties. Give it a few years once they start using that sort of seed, you'll have one company "owning" the planets food supply, then their stuff will get borken and--not much food at all. It very easily could happen, you aren't stopping the wind.
Lotta groovy short term profits though, until that happens.
After that, can't say. Most likely world class famine at a minimum.
Stealing thoughts? Naw, I just license them, because thoughts can't be owned, merely copied and expanded upon.....
heh heh heh heh
I FIRMLY believe that most people would get a significant health boost from a better diet. You can't suck all the micronutrients out of the soil for 80 years and not think that the food is of lesser quality. They put back into the soil basically 2-6 nutrients (N-P-K and a few minerals like lime, etc), but strip out 80. Bound to be some nutrition lost there. Not to mention all the various sprays and whatnots that get put on and in food. If al queda sprayed nerve gas on some farm someplace they would call it a "terrorist attack on the nations food supply!" But it gets done daily all over, just not by al queda. It gets done by al monsanto-da, and saddam bin dow-ssein.
there are just untold millions of computers out there still on the net, running minimal RAM. I've tried a bunch of them, sad to say older versions of explorer seem to require the least amount, of any of the well known browsers I've tried. My latest was on a toshiba satellite laptop, only 16 megs of ram, tried moz, firefox, opera, and it had explorer 5, 5 worked the best. I'd like an alternative, moz functionality (more or less), with minimum resources. I'll be giving this thing a tryout.
On my old macs, iCab is the one to beat, now there's a full featured browser that is light, although lately it's been creeping up as well.
--just asking because there are a plethora of modern diseases that are exacerbated by a crummy diet.
I know it's not the total cause (if there is one) but it doesn't hurt to look, here's a quick google search clicky for you.
My personal opinion is that diet is still a major overlooked causality for a number of ailments. Crummy fuel=crummy performance, whether a mechanical engine, or a biochemical one.
and that is a large, non commercial email system. All the members sign up, pay a fee of some sort of adequate folding money for an email account, something high enough to make it practical to have an account, and impractical enough for spammers to use it. It's like a built from scratch giant whitelist. Any infractions, you are out. Something like the proposed google email system, that big I mean, but zero commercial traffic, none, not for any reason. The fees go to pay for the servers and bandwith, etc of the org that runs it. It would be viral in the sense that you as joe emailer tell your friends/whomever you normally conduct non commercial email with "here's my new address, it's restricted. The company doesn't allow commercial email at all, in fact, zero mail gets inside the system from outside the system. the email must orginate and terminate totally inside the system of registered users.. You can email me at this addy,after you register yourself, but don't CC to people outside, no spam or ads are allowed,you have to do your best on keeping your own computer clean, you assume responsbility for that, and this is how you can contact me now if you want to, your choice".
Then stick with it.
The main problem with email is it's so easy to have unlimited emails, so easy to create them. If an email addy was actually worth as much as say your snail mail addy or your phone number, it wouldn't be quite as bad. I don't think it would ever get perfect, but I bet it could eliminate the bulk of the bad stuff. What would an email addy that good be worth per year? I guess that's a variable, perhaps a downpayment, then a bandwith charge over a certain amount of traffic in and out of your box.
And no, I really don't have any technical details of how to go about it, outside my area of expertise. Maybe it's impossible, I don't know, but it seems like it *should* be possible. And there's nothing stopping anyone from keeping their "old" style email in addition, but at least it would be one account you know was mostly rid of spam and viruses and whatnot right from the git-go..
Instead of adding the taxes to vonage, why not eliminate the taxes the other guys (you and me) pay for telephony? On my POTS bill, various taxes, surchargers, whatever seem to make up a decent chunk of the total. And I have *no* idea how much of that is really necessary, or just a waste. Government tends to get bigger, it's expensesd go up, so they say "see, our expenses go up so we have to charge you more". they get more, inevitably try to spend more than what they have, and the cycle is repeated. I don't know where it will end (collapse probably), but it's a verifiable phenomenon. We have something like 3 million laws (last I knew, call it some huge number) on the books now across the US, and all they do every year is write new ones, which inevitable gives rise to-more taxes.
The ultimate bottom line in this particular phone argument is the government wants to eventually heavily regulate the internet, with taxes being only a part of it. That's just something you can smell coming. It just infuriates them that they right now have so little control over the net, something that no other segment of society can claim, all the rest has been hijacked by excessive government regulations, taxes, fees, licenses, permissions granted and removed, etc. Allowing them a toe hold is just that. The old analogy is the camels nose under the tent flap, eventually the camel is all the way inside the tent.
A society that has freer and more universal exchange of ideas gets better off, just like a society that has a freer and more pervasive infrastructure in other areas is better off.
I think limited taxes to help develop infrastructure are OK, but in the real world they are never removed, they seem to always go up, and then new taxes added to the old.
I have no easy answer to the question, because I don't think one exists, not in any practical terms anyway. A pure laissez faire market approach will inevitably wind up with a single private monopoly owning that niche, so I think that's a bad idea. A pure government run everything is a REAL bad idea. So, we are stuck with what's left, which is really what we have now,it's a blend on a case by case basis with a lot of debate all the time. I tend to fall onto the side of "enough's enough" on government taxes. How about a spell of "no new taxes on anything" for a coupla generations, see what happens. We have been doing it the opposite way for a long time now, and it's really starting to hurt. A society that costs 50% of it's wealth produced just to run itself into a deficit is not an example of anything being run efficiently. Or sanely for that matter.
it's probably not possible to compare an exact tradeoff on a one to one basis. In the aggregate though, it's better if both the rural and urban areas help subsidise each other because both gain. Better roads,basic infrastructure of utilities, etc, in the rural areas help to lower costs on the goods and services that the rural areas provide the urban areas and make it more liveable. These would be, food, water, energy, lumber, raw materials for manufacturing, etc. This is a very good deal to the urbanites and suburbanites, because all that stuff they need is not produced in suburban or urban areas. And rural people get taxed in ways that help urbanites, for example, some general taxes go to subsidise mass transit, something the rural people rarely use.
We can't really exist as separate stand alone communities, so it just makes sense for the areas where there is surplus to share with the areas that have greater needs. It seems to work out Ok when we do it, granted, there's always a certain limit or level of bureaucratic overhead that could be improved upon.
I can say, if I had had even slow dial up internet when I was a kid in school, in a very rural area, it certainly would have helped me. Local libraries I used to use were very small, limited selection, and very hard to get to on a daily basis for research, and the school library was even smaller. I doubt that has changed much, so having net connection and cheaper phone service has got to be a major help in a lot of ways.
.. and of the other thoughtful replies on the thread. This goes to help prove a point I've tried to make several times, but being a non coder I am at a loss how to present it without sounding overly churlish. The point is, software is usually presented with no warranty. The argument is, that it can't be done. I have always thought it could be done, that very good code could be released, but it wasn't, for the various reasons outlined in this thread, all of which CAN be addressed, but for the most part, are not.
I guess my point is, as a company/developer/project takes on quality and auditing as job 1,rather than just rush it out the door when it's "good enough", their market star will shine, because they have so little *true* competition then.
... being interviewed on the radio several times now. The gist of it is, she's in the forefront of proving that the vote is hijacked in this nation,and it's a BIG story. We still have millions who think the vote has actual meaning. If they really, really knew howq corrupt it is, we might have "social unrest" over it, and deservedly so, IMO. It goes to the top. The goons at the top don't want it to get out any more than it has already, they want to keep this charade going. There have been pleas for people to mirror or cache her site, because of attempts to shut her down, illegally via hacking, ddos, etc, then quasi legal attempts like this. It has less to do with hacking, and more to do with the government* trying to keep the actual information hidden, like they strive to do with any other criminal activity they engage in.
*government = fascist elements in government that make up a "shadow" government, not all government employees are in on this, obviously, just the ones who give the major orders.
It's also an attempt to just scare people off, "oh no, if I visit this website I'll get on a list!"
Well, I been there before (her site), guess I'll go again. The more people on bogus government lists, the less they can do with them in the future.
Has anyone here actually gotten any correctly labeled porn spam yet? That will be more of a test of it's effectiveness than anything else really. I am guessing there will be little correctly labeled.
... it might work. Forced (government mandated)it probably won't. Smart people are doing similar right now, but in our society (US I am speaking of now), they are put down and ridiculed. I've long been a proponent of survivalism, which is to have backups for all your critical needs-as opposed to wants- and to be a producer on-site for as much as possible, and to work at home or as close to home as possible. Your energy, food, water, and so on can be entirely produced where you live, or at least a great part of it.. The bad part is as soon as you want to take it past single family homes into a small community, you get labeled as a cult or something, subject to government interference, suspicion by locals, etc. It sucks but there ya go. If you TRY to do the right thing,with energy, conservation, etc, both extremes of the neocon globalist right and the forced communistic globalist left will attack you, because your independence (of them) threatens their social outlook they seek to impose by force.
I think it's *possible*, but I don't see any large scale efforts towards those goals until the crisis hits hard, then it will be too expensive to mitigate effectively.
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--the two techniques I am aware of that can store energy without using batteries are large capacitor banks, and just pumping water uphill someplace with the off-peak demand generated power. It's stored there as a potential, released on demand to fall back down and run something like a small pelton wheel or something. It's already being done for that matter, on big scales anyway, several large power plants do this. I've also seen some references to those air powered cars, just compressed air as an energy storage potential.
And batteries aren't bad, sane useage and they last for years and years, and can be rebuilt. So far, my storage batteries that are from 1998 are still working just fine. Plain old flooded lead acid, just I slapped a piece of modern gear on them, called a desulphator. That and never draining them dry works just great.
I think if the problems are approached from two directions it makes more sense. You have to put just as much effort into reducing demand as possible, along with increasing production, from various sources and in a more localised manner. Every time you can eliminate a watt demand, through a better built appliance or use, you reduce the amount of production needed. Instead of an incandescent light, a compact fluorescent or an LED array. Instead of a computer that needs liquid cooling, how about just being happy with a smaller processor that can struggle by with passive cooling? On a bigger scale, instead of having your furnace or AC kick on every 15 minutes from massively underinsulated homes, how about having them only kick on twice a day? I've SEEN that in the superinsulated houses I've worked on in the past. The energy savings are simply incredible. So, they just need less energy to work, and they work even better than traditional construction.
We have solutions, a few changes in the way people think can do wonders. The deal is, there is no "one"solution, there are hundreds of them, because each situation is slightly different. You plan out what is best for you, then do it. Waiting for government to do it, or waiting to see if the big guys are just gonna cut you some deal that is a better deal for you than it is for them is the true "wishful thinking" that is impractical and isn't going to work.
..... putting millions back to work in the manufacturing industries inside the US? Two and a half million manufacturing jobs lost in the past few years, how about just start building and deploying the technology that we have now, that works? Ask any of them guys currently out of work "hey, you want your old job back, same pay, but now you'll be making a model A wind charger instead?" What do you think they'd say to that?
When we decided to mass produce "stuff",instead of custom build it one at a time method, it took off, all of a sudden joe average not only got the benefit of having modern tech, he had a job that let him afford that tech! Why is it that anytime we see any sort of big government solution to a problem it revolves around a handful of giant international corporations making even more profits?
Smaller scale, distributed energy production means more jobs for more people,practical jobs, too, less points of energy failure or political machinations, more national security, not less. What's wrong with all that? There are millions of roofs inside the US just sitting baking in the sun every day, accomplishing not much other than wearing out the shingles. A million hilltops all over, the breeze just blowing on by, untapped. Hundreds of thousands of farms still not collecting and using the methane that could be garnered. How about as simple an idea as mandating tougher INSULATION standards on new buildings? 2x4 crappy built butt joint r-18 insulated walls are like ancient technology, but are still being made brand new, banks still pop for 20 year mortgages for that sort of non-quality construction, and it "passes code". Why, it's ill thought out and ridiculously energy wasteful. Modern building techniques at the medium and lower scales are teh suxs, really, they are pure crap. I'm amazed people even buy them, they certainly aren't going to last and people are buying guaranteed energy hog homes, or leasing energy hog commercial space. Dollar for dollar, just better construction efforts and more insulation results in a better energy savings and over all savings to the economy than any scheme, nuclear or anything else. I'm a solar and wind advocate, but I'm the first to admit that just better designed and more insulated buildings are the best deal out there to drop energy demand. If you don't NEED the massive constant energy input in the first place, isn't that a better idea? Here's another, how about mandating more recycling, force these international profiteers to take back their old worn out stuff for recycling, instead of just dumping it? And for more R&D and deployment of the renewables, how about bringing back 100% tax credits, not a deduction, a pure credit? When we had that, adoption of renewables was just proceeding great,interest was up, people were getting them, the small companies out there doing the new work required were making some decent inroads on improving the various technology, but then it ceased and it slowed down, just when things were looking good. Perhaps a few giant monopolies got scared, they saw their generations long dominance being disrupted. I don't know but that is what it looked like to me back then.
Nukes have some place in the scheme of things, but really, incredibly complex and dangerous and expensive tech to basically produce a heat source. That's all they do, make "hot" that not only is hot now, the resultant stuff stays hot and has to be literally guarded with military forces for the next several--whatever thousands of years it takes. That's critical mass societal arrogance to think we can do that. Ye gads, we got millions and millions of acres of "heat source" hanging around doing basically nothing in the south west. And all over any place else that gets even a modicum of normal rainfall we got several million more acres of land that could be put to use with such cross-useage practical crops as industrial hemp, a HUGE untapped resource that has energy and manufacturing useages. And the frozen methane hydrates locked into place all over the planet, sur
I see people still don't get it in a lot of cases.
Fedora is not Redhat, Redhat is not Fedora. They are cousins, but not the same distro.
I don't code or work in IT but at least I fully understand the differences here.
Fedora is the unsupported beta community distro for hobbyists and developers. They decided on a more or less close to carved in stone release schedule, and it gets released whether every single thing is fixed or not. That's just the decision they made. It's gonna have bugs, some whoppers, some picayune, *all the time*. It's the place they *want* the bugs to show up, so that they get found out and worked on there, not in the Redhat supported version, which is older, and more refined. that's the one they don't want any bugs in, as much as possible.
Red Hat holds back, releases much more stable stuff,less often, and it's supported. that's the new paradigm, how they significantly changed their company, and I think it's a darn good idea.
I don't think there's a problem dual booting redhat and xp, as far as I know anyway.
They use Fedora to test NEW stuff, that's why they have TWO different deals there with DIFFERENT names and why fedora is 100% free. It's the decision they made last year, for _*exactly*_ these sorts of reasons as this dual boot MBR partition whammy. Stuff happens. It is not designed to run critical business applications, nor should it be used to run critical personal applications where you have zero backup or way to recover from running a beta ware pretty much bleeding edge free product.
Now, if I have that wrong, excuse me, but that's what I have gathered since last year. I don't have a dual boot machine, but I have a machine with windows on it, it boots just fine. So I can boot anything I want to boot. hardware used is so cheap now it's almost free, and in a lot of cases it is free for the hauling off, so there's little excuse to lose data. My windows machine costed me less than 10$, I bought a skid load of pentiums and a couple of pentium 2's for that amount. It's a 333 running 98se, I use it mostly for my cheap digital camera, some place to store my pictures I want to save. That's really all the important data I have. I don't store them on my fedora box, because I know "stuff can happen" when you are upgrading and trying testing and beta ware all the time. And for that matter, used hard drives are practically free, it's just not that hard to have a completely separate hard drive where you stash your stuff you don't want to lose. And you can have the separate hard drive in most towers, and physically unplug the drive you want to be sure of, for that matter, when trying out new stuff. Ya, I know it's fun to have a huge harddrive and stick all sorts things on there,but then again, when something happens, you are screwed. It's the "all the eggs in one basket" thing you are taught as a kid to watch out for, because it's a *bad idea* to do that.
And I'm glad, too. I put FC2 on yesterday, and it wouldn't upgrade, but it would and did do a clean install with custom package selection, it runs really really well here. If I had had stuff on there I wanted to keep, whether it was data or another partition with another OS, well, tough noogies, I woulda been SOL, and it would have been MY fault for being a lamer, not fedoras fault.
I don't know about anyone else, but that's how I keep them separate. I wouldn't put beta stuff on a critical machine, personal or business, and I'm certainly not going to get angry with such an amount of free work given to me when you are told in advance there is likely to be "gotchas" and then you get one.
it's such an old political scam it has its own catch phrase.
I remember as a grade school kid being asked "are you a democrat or a republican?", as if those are the only choices. It's mass conditioining/brainwashing, and it takes a long time for most people to finally realise how effective it really is. A lot never realise it.
You ask, how to get around it? Exactly what we are doing now, pointing out there is little practical difference once you get to the specifics of what one criminal cartel promises/says/does as opposed to the other. They are both criminal cartels. And at the very tippy top, they are both run by international billionaire fascists, who also own the media empires, etc. They are feudalists, always have been fuedalists, and have generations of practice in how to control the various populations and the political processes. They fund and start both sides of all the major wars, for instance, and profit from them. It goes way, way back. Fascinating once you start delving into it.
So, all you can do is educate, point people to some data, let them figure out what has happened to them, then they usually can logic-out what to do next-if they are so inclined, a lot aren't, until such a time as they become a victim-of their OWN side, their "team" victimises them some how and they go WTF? If you can catch them then, you can reason, offer some data.. Throwing it all at once in their face is too much too quick, most can't or won't accept the fact of how they have been so seriously misled and lied to their entire lives, they fall into immediate denial-usually anyway. It takes time for people to chip away at pre conceived notions, and it's easy to slide back into a comfort zone of what you are willing to look at, let alone accept.
Here's an example from a post further up. A mention was made of a critique of moores film at the NY post, here's the full quote from there:
"NOTHING NEW
MICHAEL Moore's anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11" isn't even original. Two years ago, "9/11: The Road to Tyranny," a real documentary by Alex Jones, had most of the "facts" Moore uses in his scatter-shot diatribe. Jones, who is less interested in making money than the self-aggrandizing Moore, released his film for free on his Web site www.infowars.com, where it drew legions of new fans, including producer Curt Johnson, who is hiring Jones as a consultant on a political action thriller titled "Wake Up."
The deal is, moore is a big hit with the types who associate with criminal gang A, as opposed to criminal gang B-not to say his films aren't at least somewhat provocative and well done-I thought "roger and me" was excellent. But a REAL independent non aligned film maker has a difficult job getting his films out. The same as REAL independent news people are so rare in mass media broadcast venues. They serve their globalist masters, and a major part of their jobs is not to broadcast news or educate, it's to perpetuate the "divide and conquer" scam that has always been so successful.
The main tool we have now is the internet, because so far, it's not controllable like the "media" thing was in the past. So, that's what I used, I just wish we would have had this back in the 60's, stuff would be a LOT different now. I remember when I wrote back then it had to be picked up and run by an "underground" paper, or you literally had to go pay to have it printed yourself andf just hand the stuff out. Very expensive, hard to do, hard to reach a lot of people. And it's also why it's so important NOW to keep the internet as free from government regulation and big money control as possible, whichever nation you happen to reside in, because ALL nations have "the approved" press, they all offer up partial truths and lies mixed with just enough truth to make it seem to be credible, and when most of the people in the various places ONLY get their news from those places, and ONLY get their "education" from government run indoctrination "schools", they will continue to be brainwashed into following the "pa
this is my first post to /. with my new system, FC2. I just finished installing it awhile ago, been customizing, got my mp3 media streams working. Now here's the weird part. At first, it would NOT install. Got it in the mail this afternoon and went to it. Kept aborting some where's near the beginning of the install. Now I don't have a lot of new machines to try, mostly I have this old PP200 with 228 meg ram as my "main" machine, this is what I use. What I found out, it wasn't the media, it was the dang Cd player! I tried 4 different old Cdplayers out of the junk box until I found one that was smooth as silk, zip bap boom, I did a custom install, here I am. Same old crummy small HDD of 8 gigs, same old 1996 computar, but, it wouldn't read the disk *well enough* except with one of these other (old no name brand whatever, "aafrey" on the label for a name)Cd drives, which I will now permanently install in the machine. Right now it's hanging on the top by the cables. Now, why would that be? All the CD drives *work*, just not with these install disks, not good enough anyway. The one that was always with the machine always worked before, and managed to start the install fine, several times, just wouldn't finish it.
You tell me, I know not why this is. I will say the only clue I can see is it is the alleged fastest cd, at 40x. The others are all older 2,4,8 whatevers, but still functional.
FWIW
BTW, FC2 is *very nice*. A scosh faster, default fonts seem nicer, all in all like it better than FC1 so far. I did an all Gnome install, then some other stuff, the newer gnome is nice as well, but I don't like the newer gedit layout arrangement, but it's still useable. Haven't looked much past that yet, though, just browsing and listening.
Anyway, one of my little bros is a small boss-action honcho at sun, I will be sure to razz him a good one on your experiences... heh heh heh
I've tried that too,before, but I'll have to retry it. Last I used it there was something I didn't like about it, I but can't remember now what it was.
All in all so far I more or less like mozilla. Has most of the features I want, renders most pages OK, seems to be fairly stable. Of course I was always a netscape fan going way back to when I was using 2.0 with netcom as my ISP. I think I used an earlier version too, and I remember using mosaic just a tad, but not very much.
And this is funny, but real audio 2 was decent enough too, for my purposes anyway. Little box with play/pause/ etc, just enough to do the job. Lightweight, I could hear net streams with a 14.4 modem on old slow machines.
We all like new features, this is a granted. It would just be nice if smarter coding resulted in the new features being useable on existing architecture without having to be bleeding edge or near bleeding edge. We seem to have reached quite practical levels for a lot of purposes with around the pentium 2 class machines. I know that hardware won't be going backweards, but I see software not really advancing as much, because they have the ability to produce newer/better codee without requiring an automatic hardware upgrade, it's just harder mostly, near as I can see, so they don't do it. It wouldn't really bother me personally for the "advances" to slow down a little, having stuff be obsolete every 6 months or something seems sorta wasteful.
the gene that causes the plant to become sterile can spread with the pollen, introducing the gene into another plant of the same species. The original plant then doesn't produce sterile seeds, then the plant next door that gets effected can't, either. Cross pollination happens all the time in nature. I'll give you a common example that hits home gardeners all the time. This has happened to me a few times when city gardening. Say you are growing some squash to eat. Some neighbor down the street is growing ornamental gourds, common for home crafts people to make decorations and birdhouses, etc. The pollen from the gourds gets on your squash as they are flowering. The fruit that then grows turns into this blend with more gourd-like tendencies, and it's quite inedible, and any of the seeds from that also contain the gourd patterns. This sort of thing is the main problem with GM seeds in general, you can't stop the wind and insects, etc from this cross pollination deal.
And as regards monsanto anyway,the "terminator" gene just shows their mindset that they would even *think* making such a critter was a good idea in the first place. Corporate nuttitude and arrogance and greed taken to an extreme. So far, all they have admitted to is a temporary undefined suspension, not an outright ban on doing it. And they only reason they even did a temp ban was all the citizen activism that ranked them personally and in government -space. Left to their own, this stuff might be out there already. We've already got a problem with starlink corn spreading, and some GM modified wheat and some others, they can't control it once it's released on "test farms". The canola in the original, it's spreading now and is hard to control, in places where they don't want canola to grow, and it's harder to get rid of than even a "normal" weed because it's been bred to be resistant to herbicide.
I don't have any easy answers for this sort of research. On the one hand I can see a few decent possibilities for it, on the other hand I can see a much larger potential for *really* screwing up bad. Corporations in general have a pretty dismal track record when it comes to this sort of thing, take ground water pollution for an example. Their mindset -> " Hmm,great potential for this quarter's bottom line profits to just dump toxic waste. Let's do it!" 10 to 20 years later society pays a big price for that short term profit. Same sort of deal here, generally speaking.
It's weasly, always was. They said they won't promise not to do it, and that they might still be doing internal research, etc. Deal is, you want to trust that? It's worse than SCO. I mean, they were actually gonna do it at first. I wouldn't bet against them continuing to develop it.
I'm not against research, I am against just thinking up weird biological creations anf turning them loose. It's irresponsible to the max. I don't think our society as a whole is near advanced enough socially or philosphically for those sorts of decisions, even if the science is adequate for the mere creation. "Greed" runs our business and politics too much.
I'll try that, but how do you do it? Is it as simple as booting, and just running opera 5.0 (have to find that, I was trying the latest version) then, and never turning on IE? I'm not much of a winbows guy, I got given this toshiba as a junker. All I did was recover some personal data the owner wanted (which I did, it had a really messed up hard drive), then I cleaned it up, got some anti vir and a firewall, and tried out some browsers on it, to at least make it useable. Any tips, etc, greatfully appreciated.
... since day one, several years ago. yes, he replanted seed. No he didn't steal it, not by my definition anyway. No, he didn't spray, negating any alleged "benefit" from the seed.
And my main concern hasn't been addressed with this decision,this is quite true, that will require another court case I guess. and yes, there are several issues now with labeling food, you can slide by now with some pretty impure stuff and still call it organice, at least by federal laws. that's a side issue, but valid.
The main concern with GM crops is *you can't keep it out of your field if you don't want them*. Anyone in your area plants it, YOU can still be "growing it", even if you planted another seed, due to cross pollination. That's the big issue. Well, one of them, but it's big.
And FYI, all my loot I make comes from farming, I am employed on a farm now, started working farms when I was 9 years old. I pay attention to these issues, and feel quite justified in my opinions when I state the reasons. Some things about modern farming I like,for example I like the efforts to produce energy on farms via waste recovery and methane production, etc, like we have discussed here, but some suck rubber donkey dong, and "round up ready" GM seeds falls into the latter category. It's just a throughly bad idea, and will only go to create a more powerful global food monopoly. If you cannot or will not understand why a FOOD monopoly isn't a good idea, there's nothing I can say that would matter, so we'll let that slide, I can't help you then, or really explain it any better. In my opinion, based on the basically easy to understand data of how crops grow and how the food business works, it will NOT help farmers, nor will it make your food cheaper, and it will certainly make your food more poisonous. It WILL make monsanto more money, that's about it. It will COST everyone else, in a variety of ways.
clarification, I don't think "round up ready" modified gene plants could cause a famine. They could cause huge economic loss, especially in the third world where donated grains (bulk donated food) are used as seeds to grow more food,though. It's one of the reasons a lot of third world countries are resisting donated GM crops right now.
What I was referring to is the "terminator" gene modified food crops. THOSE could easily cause global famine, once almost all normal food crops have a terminator gene strain introduced into the "wild" and it starts to spread. It could get out of hand easily. And they haven't stopped working on them, and sometime they will release them, so I say it's a credible threat.
pretty impressive! I never fooled with an atari, had no idea they were capable of this.
yes, for around 80 years now, since artificial fertilisers and sprays became popular, monoculture has taken over big time. They will plant one, or at most two crops in the same place, year after year. They apply a fertiliser that is nitrogen, phosphorus and pottasium, but they don't re-apply all the micronutrients that plants require, and wind up in the food we eat. that number is coincidently also 80, so sorry for the confusion. They also don't add enough carbon back to the soil, which is loosely called the "tilth" in the soil, whcih causes topsoil loss, inefficient water usage, excess runoff going directly into streams instead of soaking in, and requiring heavier equipment all the time to do the same work. the soil becomes compacted, dead almost, it takes heavier equipment to work it once the soil loses tilth.
These micronutrients have a lot to do with your over-all health, but they gradually get sucked out of the soil, but you don't get them. You still get big crops, I won't dispute that, but the nutritional quality drops severely. That's why people take vitamins and mineral supplements-that stuff just isn't in the food anymore in the quantities it used to be, and even then it's not near as good as just having the vitamins and minerals directly in the food itself. It also gradually weakens the plants, meaning they are less resistant to diseases and to insect depradations, requiring more spray, sprays which are in essence, WMD put onto your food. there's really not a lot of difference.
Now with this "round up ready" stuff, it's designed so that they can REALLY spray that crap hard, directly on the food, and the slop over kills the weeds in between. It makes it easier to control the weeds that way, because a general over spray is easier to perform than spot sprays or cultivation to control weeds, which is the "old fashioned" way to do it. that's all I do, cultivation and a cover mulch, BTW.
So, with generation after generation of monoculture in the same ground and using sprays and only artificial fertiliser you are gonna get weaker plants, less nutritious plants for the humans and other critters that eat them,and more poison on the plants. And PAY for that.
Another thing, GM canola in canada is classed as a weed now when it escapes, because it takes just a ton of different sprays to eradicate it if it gets into someplace where you don't want it. It's called a "super weed".
And the main reason so many farmers are using it is simple,it's not because their seed is all that great, the old canola (rape seed) worked perfectly fine and they could save seed every year, saving money, etc, it's because if you got just *one* bozo in the area who uses it, it's no use, you're screwed, your crop will get infected, and monsanto will find out, and sue you, or the threat is there and has been for several years now. So, the farmers take the path of least resistance and basically pay a bribe to be left alone, and "jump on the bandwagon", and then they can't "un jump" they become stuck, they become corporate employees.
I worked on farms off an on all my life,I am now in fact, and I know VERY few truly independent farmers, vast majority are just 7 day a week underpaid corporate employees.
Like I said above though, the truly scary one is terminator gene plants. they are gonna screw the pooch with that one once they start using it on a big scale. Tons of stuff on the web about it.
I've got sealed metal cans of pure strain open pollinated seeds. I am saving them for such time in the future when I can grow my food inside sealed greenhouses, as I think that might be the only way to do it, even then it will be iffy.
...OSX except for webshots, so I can't relate. Jobs took a dedicated macfanatic (moi), someone who's still got a functioining 512k kicking around someplace, and priced at least one guy out of his products. Just when they were getting cheap enough, zap, they keep upping the ante. Then I discoverd open source and linux, etc, haven't looked back. I like and endorse the philosophy, and the quality is there, just need some skull sweat now and then.
On iCab, all I know is on my olden daze macs, it's still the best browser. Just upgraded on my powerbook 1400 (166/64) a coupla weeks ago in fact. And I can surf perfectly adequately with even an old 25 mghz machine (280c PB, 68k moto) and just a little ram using iCab.
Of course, that goes to the OS as well, we keep losing ground it appears, the newer stuff needs orders of magnitudes more powerful machines just to maintain even ground.
side issue, but I had wished apple would have open sourced classic OS when they switched, I always liked it. Safe to use (more or less, mostly more, I never had any issues with it), easy to use, performed well. I mean, what would it be to mac anyway? None of the old machines can run OSX, but some people will hang on to them. Apple being thoughtful like that to old fans would go a long way to restoring loyalty and perhaps more of an urge to upgrade to a new machine and OSX. They won't even bust loose with some downloads of like 8.6.
..what we are surpirsed is that 99% of the population has no clue about the food they eat other than it comes from the supermarket automagically.
We've been lobbying against this stuff for years, for that very reason, it infects our stuff, and then they claim ownership? Huh? Howzzat again?
Just wait. If you are just hearing about roundup ready and cross pollination and infection, wait to you hear about terminator genes and cross pollination. Ohh, that's a goody. Makes a plant live one year, then all it's offspring is infertile. Think on that one for a bit. Think about the winds, how they cross borders, let alone mere fields and counties. Give it a few years once they start using that sort of seed, you'll have one company "owning" the planets food supply, then their stuff will get borken and--not much food at all. It very easily could happen, you aren't stopping the wind.
Lotta groovy short term profits though, until that happens.
After that, can't say. Most likely world class famine at a minimum.
first, yes, my bad, should have said her, not he.
Stealing thoughts? Naw, I just license them, because thoughts can't be owned, merely copied and expanded upon.....
heh heh heh heh
I FIRMLY believe that most people would get a significant health boost from a better diet. You can't suck all the micronutrients out of the soil for 80 years and not think that the food is of lesser quality. They put back into the soil basically 2-6 nutrients (N-P-K and a few minerals like lime, etc), but strip out 80. Bound to be some nutrition lost there. Not to mention all the various sprays and whatnots that get put on and in food. If al queda sprayed nerve gas on some farm someplace they would call it a "terrorist attack on the nations food supply!" But it gets done daily all over, just not by al queda. It gets done by al monsanto-da, and saddam bin dow-ssein.
That REALLY don't compute.
Oh well, big garden = "good" this year. I dig it!
there are just untold millions of computers out there still on the net, running minimal RAM. I've tried a bunch of them, sad to say older versions of explorer seem to require the least amount, of any of the well known browsers I've tried. My latest was on a toshiba satellite laptop, only 16 megs of ram, tried moz, firefox, opera, and it had explorer 5, 5 worked the best. I'd like an alternative, moz functionality (more or less), with minimum resources. I'll be giving this thing a tryout.
On my old macs, iCab is the one to beat, now there's a full featured browser that is light, although lately it's been creeping up as well.
--just asking because there are a plethora of modern diseases that are exacerbated by a crummy diet.
I know it's not the total cause (if there is one) but it doesn't hurt to look, here's a quick google search clicky for you.
My personal opinion is that diet is still a major overlooked causality for a number of ailments. Crummy fuel=crummy performance, whether a mechanical engine, or a biochemical one.
and that is a large, non commercial email system. All the members sign up, pay a fee of some sort of adequate folding money for an email account, something high enough to make it practical to have an account, and impractical enough for spammers to use it. It's like a built from scratch giant whitelist. Any infractions, you are out. Something like the proposed google email system, that big I mean, but zero commercial traffic, none, not for any reason. The fees go to pay for the servers and bandwith, etc of the org that runs it. It would be viral in the sense that you as joe emailer tell your friends/whomever you normally conduct non commercial email with "here's my new address, it's restricted. The company doesn't allow commercial email at all, in fact, zero mail gets inside the system from outside the system. the email must orginate and terminate totally inside the system of registered users.. You can email me at this addy,after you register yourself, but don't CC to people outside, no spam or ads are allowed,you have to do your best on keeping your own computer clean, you assume responsbility for that, and this is how you can contact me now if you want to, your choice".
Then stick with it.
The main problem with email is it's so easy to have unlimited emails, so easy to create them. If an email addy was actually worth as much as say your snail mail addy or your phone number, it wouldn't be quite as bad. I don't think it would ever get perfect, but I bet it could eliminate the bulk of the bad stuff. What would an email addy that good be worth per year? I guess that's a variable, perhaps a downpayment, then a bandwith charge over a certain amount of traffic in and out of your box.
And no, I really don't have any technical details of how to go about it, outside my area of expertise. Maybe it's impossible, I don't know, but it seems like it *should* be possible. And there's nothing stopping anyone from keeping their "old" style email in addition, but at least it would be one account you know was mostly rid of spam and viruses and whatnot right from the git-go..
Instead of adding the taxes to vonage, why not eliminate the taxes the other guys (you and me) pay for telephony? On my POTS bill, various taxes, surchargers, whatever seem to make up a decent chunk of the total. And I have *no* idea how much of that is really necessary, or just a waste. Government tends to get bigger, it's expensesd go up, so they say "see, our expenses go up so we have to charge you more". they get more, inevitably try to spend more than what they have, and the cycle is repeated. I don't know where it will end (collapse probably), but it's a verifiable phenomenon. We have something like 3 million laws (last I knew, call it some huge number) on the books now across the US, and all they do every year is write new ones, which inevitable gives rise to-more taxes.
The ultimate bottom line in this particular phone argument is the government wants to eventually heavily regulate the internet, with taxes being only a part of it. That's just something you can smell coming. It just infuriates them that they right now have so little control over the net, something that no other segment of society can claim, all the rest has been hijacked by excessive government regulations, taxes, fees, licenses, permissions granted and removed, etc. Allowing them a toe hold is just that. The old analogy is the camels nose under the tent flap, eventually the camel is all the way inside the tent.
A society that has freer and more universal exchange of ideas gets better off, just like a society that has a freer and more pervasive infrastructure in other areas is better off.
I think limited taxes to help develop infrastructure are OK, but in the real world they are never removed, they seem to always go up, and then new taxes added to the old.
I have no easy answer to the question, because I don't think one exists, not in any practical terms anyway. A pure laissez faire market approach will inevitably wind up with a single private monopoly owning that niche, so I think that's a bad idea. A pure government run everything is a REAL bad idea. So, we are stuck with what's left, which is really what we have now,it's a blend on a case by case basis with a lot of debate all the time. I tend to fall onto the side of "enough's enough" on government taxes. How about a spell of "no new taxes on anything" for a coupla generations, see what happens. We have been doing it the opposite way for a long time now, and it's really starting to hurt. A society that costs 50% of it's wealth produced just to run itself into a deficit is not an example of anything being run efficiently. Or sanely for that matter.
it's probably not possible to compare an exact tradeoff on a one to one basis. In the aggregate though, it's better if both the rural and urban areas help subsidise each other because both gain. Better roads,basic infrastructure of utilities, etc, in the rural areas help to lower costs on the goods and services that the rural areas provide the urban areas and make it more liveable. These would be, food, water, energy, lumber, raw materials for manufacturing, etc. This is a very good deal to the urbanites and suburbanites, because all that stuff they need is not produced in suburban or urban areas. And rural people get taxed in ways that help urbanites, for example, some general taxes go to subsidise mass transit, something the rural people rarely use.
We can't really exist as separate stand alone communities, so it just makes sense for the areas where there is surplus to share with the areas that have greater needs. It seems to work out Ok when we do it, granted, there's always a certain limit or level of bureaucratic overhead that could be improved upon.
I can say, if I had had even slow dial up internet when I was a kid in school, in a very rural area, it certainly would have helped me. Local libraries I used to use were very small, limited selection, and very hard to get to on a daily basis for research, and the school library was even smaller. I doubt that has changed much, so having net connection and cheaper phone service has got to be a major help in a lot of ways.
.. and of the other thoughtful replies on the thread. This goes to help prove a point I've tried to make several times, but being a non coder I am at a loss how to present it without sounding overly churlish. The point is, software is usually presented with no warranty. The argument is, that it can't be done. I have always thought it could be done, that very good code could be released, but it wasn't, for the various reasons outlined in this thread, all of which CAN be addressed, but for the most part, are not.
I guess my point is, as a company/developer/project takes on quality and auditing as job 1,rather than just rush it out the door when it's "good enough", their market star will shine, because they have so little *true* competition then.
I hope it happens.
... being interviewed on the radio several times now. The gist of it is, she's in the forefront of proving that the vote is hijacked in this nation,and it's a BIG story. We still have millions who think the vote has actual meaning. If they really, really knew howq corrupt it is, we might have "social unrest" over it, and deservedly so, IMO. It goes to the top. The goons at the top don't want it to get out any more than it has already, they want to keep this charade going. There have been pleas for people to mirror or cache her site, because of attempts to shut her down, illegally via hacking, ddos, etc, then quasi legal attempts like this. It has less to do with hacking, and more to do with the government* trying to keep the actual information hidden, like they strive to do with any other criminal activity they engage in.
*government = fascist elements in government that make up a "shadow" government, not all government employees are in on this, obviously, just the ones who give the major orders.
It's also an attempt to just scare people off, "oh no, if I visit this website I'll get on a list!"
Well, I been there before (her site), guess I'll go again. The more people on bogus government lists, the less they can do with them in the future.
Has anyone here actually gotten any correctly labeled porn spam yet? That will be more of a test of it's effectiveness than anything else really. I am guessing there will be little correctly labeled.
... it might work. Forced (government mandated)it probably won't. Smart people are doing similar right now, but in our society (US I am speaking of now), they are put down and ridiculed. I've long been a proponent of survivalism, which is to have backups for all your critical needs-as opposed to wants- and to be a producer on-site for as much as possible, and to work at home or as close to home as possible. Your energy, food, water, and so on can be entirely produced where you live, or at least a great part of it.. The bad part is as soon as you want to take it past single family homes into a small community, you get labeled as a cult or something, subject to government interference, suspicion by locals, etc. It sucks but there ya go. If you TRY to do the right thing,with energy, conservation, etc, both extremes of the neocon globalist right and the forced communistic globalist left will attack you, because your independence (of them) threatens their social outlook they seek to impose by force.
I think it's *possible*, but I don't see any large scale efforts towards those goals until the crisis hits hard, then it will be too expensive to mitigate effectively.