Everyone here seems to be adding their own opinions none of which are suggested or demonstrated in the article. The basis for the conversation is that the green revolution should have made it possible for us to increase the green biomass.
No, there is no such "basis for the conversation", and there never was.
Wherever did you get this idea that it was "possible for us to increase the green biomass", or the idea that we were even trying to do that?
Earth reached its carrying capacity for plant life several hundred million years ago. Mankind is not going to increase or decrease that. Mankind doesn't even know how to begin to control the total biomass. The earth is on an energy budget dictated by the sun. Plants are going to grow at their own rate, and they are going to cover the earth wherever there is sun and water.
That this guy, staring at photos taken in the mere past 30 years, sees no change is indication that things are working exactly as they always have. Totally out of the control of man.
I agree that Land ownership rights by individual farmers would, all by itself, improve production, and also improve preservation of the soil. If the land is theirs, people take care of it. Given just a modicum of education, even subsistence agricultural yields are expected to increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years.
There would be no real need to sell it off to larger farms (this type of farming really only works well on flat land suitable for mechanization). With more production comes greater wealth. With greater wealth comes fewer pointless babies.
What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.
Well, that's a nice theory, but its simply not true.
The amount of land dedicated to farming has not substantially increased, (in fact it has decreased) as farming becomes more efficient. Vast tracts of the midwest have returned to forest because there is simply no economic need to keep these lands under the plow.
Measurement of plant tonnage via satellite imagery has revealed that plants still grow just about everywhere they ever did. Wow. Major revelation.
Yet the satellites seem to miss the fact that global food production has more than tripled since 1961, and worldwide, we are only using 7% more land in the process. In North America Europe, and Russia, we are actually cultivating less land, and producing vastly more food. Marginal lands have fallen fallow, and returned to prairie or forest of a 2 hundred years ago.
Measuring the area covered by plants says nothing about the tonnage harvested every year off of that land. Nor does it say anything about the reduced pollution produced in the process, and the return of natural flora coverage. The total forest area in the U.S. has been relatively stable for the last 100 years (currently about 747 million acres). The species may change (they always have over time). But its not because we have converted the land to farming. For the last 100 years, the biggest threat to forests has been housing development, not farming.
People vote at home, not in union halls. America can't keep a secret, so if there was any vote buying going on it would be all over the press.
Vote by mail works well in Washington State, as well as elsewhere. And it's still a secret ballot because of double envelope mail back. Vote counting is observed by party representatives, with no reports of irregularities except in King County (Seattle), which was the last county holding out against vote by mail.
Anonymous is good, no doubt, but I'd say that pseudonyms are often better because a pseudonym, even if they are personally unknown, helps set context. Comments on issues which are complex often can't realistically be partitioned to be exhaustive in themselves. For some people here, at least, I'm familiar with their basic worldview from their other posts, and their comment or argument can placed in that wider context for deeper consideration, at least implicitly.
I'm way to memory challenged to keep track of my own world view, let alone that of the people who's posts I read or reply to.
I suggest it's sort of intellectually dishonest if you evaluate a posting in a certain way based on who posted it rather than what was posted. Ideas should be evaluated based on their content rather than their source.
After all, isn't checking who posted something sort of running afoul of the Fallacy of Ad hominem?
That said, I tend to discount AC postings unless the subject matter is one where they might have a legitimate need to hide, so, in a sense I'm guilty of the same thing.
It isn't JUST the 1%-ers. It's also the people who would seek to replace them straight up, and the people who readily and willingly enable them to be the 1%.
Once you eliminate the top 1%, the next group automatically becomes the top 1% whether they seek to be or not. Its a perfect formula to accomplish nothing at all while making a big petulant noise. Sort of like the Occupy movement in general.
They were 1 centimeter away from the back side of the phone.
Don't you think someone would notice that? The exploit was not NFC specific, and BOTH sender and receiver had to be manipulated to authorizet the transmission. Way to troll.
No, you can't do it with wifi or bluetooth. The range is too great, and its too easy to hack.
Actually you can't do any of this stuff at all, because as soon as TSA authorizes any of this stuff, the other phone makers are going to be in court demanding no special favors to one company.
Its a useless patent, because government wouldn't dare try to implement it.
Its that "securing airfields outside the range of attack" bit that is getting harder and harder.
Any place close enough is also likely close enough to have a not insignificant population of sympathizers living there. Rent a base to a foreign air force, and piss off a certain percentage of your population.
Realistically, if you draw a line 500 miles in from the sea, you have the effective range of naval manned aircraft. Draw a line 1,500 miles in from the sea and you have Cruise Missile range.
For much of the world, 1500 miles coverage is sufficient for Air launched or naval launched Cruise Missile coverage.
Carriers might not be useful for an attack on China or Russia, who have large land-masses, an active air-defense system, and several thousand cheap missiles to launch at a carrier or its air wing.
However, against an adversary with only a couple hundred missiles in their arsenal they are likely to be in service for another hundred years, as there is nothing even remotely on the horizon (no pun intended) to replace them for long range missions.
Carriers replacing battle ships brought a whole new concept. The only new concept around these days is Drones.
But until a massive scale-up occurs, the drone payload is pitifully small, their self defense capability totally absent, and you still have to launch them from somewhere. Drones are more likely to be launched from carriers than they are to replace carriers.
I doubt there are any current manufacturers still in business. And even if there are, they are probably only making electric models.
However, there are probably a gazillion of these things moldering away in warehouses or scrap heaps, or corporate basements, or still for sale as re-furbs. The problem is that they are http://mytypewriter.com/1960sorlater.aspx>expensive and becoming impossible to maintain.
The difference here is that Google will insist on knowing who you are, but they will issue you a pre-approved sock puppet when dealing with social media.
On IRC nobody knew Beth14 a Detective with the NYPD Vice Squad. On Google+, at least Google will know.
Actually, I think Google is attempting to patent lying.
So now when Billy Hazkzor say "No, Mom, I didn't drop all those cheetos on the carpet, it was my friend Fred" he gets sent to his room and served a summons at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'm pretty sure that " long time Twitter users and members of the technorati" are mutually exclusive classes.
Trees are the default crop. Been this way since mankind was swinging from branch to branch,
We are greening the desert. More rain has fallen in the Sahara in the last decade than in the previous two millenia. I doubt htis is good.
Why would it be bad? The Sahara has been growing for several hundred years, and halting or reversing that growth could well be positive.
This.
Everyone here seems to be adding their own opinions none of which are suggested or demonstrated in the article. The basis for the conversation is that the green revolution should have made it possible for us to increase the green biomass.
No, there is no such "basis for the conversation", and there never was.
Wherever did you get this idea that it was "possible for us to increase the green biomass", or the idea that we were even trying to do that?
Earth reached its carrying capacity for plant life several hundred million years ago. Mankind is not going to increase or decrease that. Mankind doesn't even know how to begin to control the total biomass. The earth is on an energy budget dictated by the sun. Plants are going to grow at their own rate, and they are going to cover the earth wherever there is sun and water.
That this guy, staring at photos taken in the mere past 30 years, sees no change is indication that things are working exactly as they always have. Totally out of the control of man.
I agree that Land ownership rights by individual farmers would, all by itself, improve production, and also improve preservation of the soil.
If the land is theirs, people take care of it. Given just a modicum of education, even subsistence agricultural yields are expected
to increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years.
There would be no real need to sell it off to larger farms (this type of farming really only works well on flat land suitable for mechanization).
With more production comes greater wealth. With greater wealth comes fewer pointless babies.
Global warning (ooops, "Climate Change", will do that all by itself.
What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.
Well, that's a nice theory, but its simply not true.
The amount of land dedicated to farming has not substantially increased, (in fact it has decreased) as farming becomes more efficient. Vast tracts of the
midwest have returned to forest because there is simply no economic need to keep these lands under the plow.
This whole theory is nothing but a huge rehash of the Limits To Growth, cited in TFA. Yet 40 years hence, LTG has been proven wrong in just about every single prediction they made. Their methodology and assumptions were simply wrong.
Measurement of plant tonnage via satellite imagery has revealed that plants still grow just about everywhere they ever did. Wow. Major revelation.
Yet the satellites seem to miss the fact that global food production has more than tripled since 1961, and worldwide, we are only using 7% more land in the process. In North America Europe, and Russia, we are actually cultivating less land, and producing vastly more food. Marginal lands have fallen fallow, and returned to prairie or forest of a 2 hundred years ago.
Measuring the area covered by plants says nothing about the tonnage harvested every year off of that land. Nor does it say anything about the reduced pollution produced in the process, and the return of natural flora coverage. The total forest area in the U.S. has been relatively stable for the last 100 years (currently about 747 million acres). The species may change (they always have over time). But its not because we have converted the land to farming. For the last 100 years, the biggest threat to forests has been housing development, not farming.
How many Guidos are there in the world?
People vote at home, not in union halls. America can't keep a secret, so if there was any vote buying going on it would be all over the press.
Vote by mail works well in Washington State, as well as elsewhere.
And it's still a secret ballot because of double envelope mail back.
Vote counting is observed by party representatives, with no reports of irregularities except in King County (Seattle), which was the last county holding out against vote by mail.
Someone posting a link to a project that "has been taken offline" needs their head examined.
Anonymous is good, no doubt, but I'd say that pseudonyms are often better because a pseudonym, even if they are personally unknown, helps set context. Comments on issues which are complex often can't realistically be partitioned to be exhaustive in themselves. For some people here, at least, I'm familiar with their basic worldview from their other posts, and their comment or argument can placed in that wider context for deeper consideration, at least implicitly.
I'm way to memory challenged to keep track of my own world view, let alone that of the people who's posts I read or reply to.
I suggest it's sort of intellectually dishonest if you evaluate a posting in a certain way based on who posted it rather than what was posted.
Ideas should be evaluated based on their content rather than their source.
After all, isn't checking who posted something sort of running afoul of the Fallacy of Ad hominem?
That said, I tend to discount AC postings unless the subject matter is one where they might have a legitimate need to hide, so, in a sense I'm guilty of the same thing.
The story was written by Qedward and posted by Soulkill.
How much more Anonymous do you need to be?
Note: the french had to do it... REPEATEDLY.
It isn't JUST the 1%-ers. It's also the people who would seek to replace them straight up, and the people who readily and willingly enable them to be the 1%.
Once you eliminate the top 1%, the next group automatically becomes the top 1% whether they seek to be or not.
Its a perfect formula to accomplish nothing at all while making a big petulant noise. Sort of like the Occupy movement in general.
Dude ; Read.
NFC requires that you have the phone awake, and that you tap the screen to confirm the transfer.
If they pick your pocket they aren't going to use NFC.
Every time I'm bumped and the guy asks me to open my phone and tap OK, it sticks in my mind.
They were 1 centimeter away from the back side of the phone.
Don't you think someone would notice that? The exploit was not NFC specific, and BOTH sender and receiver had to be manipulated to authorizet the transmission. Way to troll.
No, you can't do it with wifi or bluetooth. The range is too great, and its too easy to hack.
Actually you can't do any of this stuff at all, because as soon as TSA authorizes any of this stuff, the other
phone makers are going to be in court demanding no special favors to one company.
Its a useless patent, because government wouldn't dare try to implement it.
You won't be attacking anybody with anything smaller.
Ah, dude, you aren't fitting many of these in a panel-van:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MQ-1_Predator_P1230014.jpg
Predator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MQ-9_Afghanistan_takeoff_1_Oct_07.JPG
Reaper is a pretty big aircraft, and I assure you the support base is extensive.
Unless you want Somali Pirates having the best naval carriers in the world, you probably are are going to need people on your boats.
Nobody has successfully landed a drone on a pitching carrier deck, so I have no clue where you were going with that.....
Its that "securing airfields outside the range of attack" bit that is getting harder and harder.
Any place close enough is also likely close enough to have a not insignificant population of sympathizers living there. Rent a base to a foreign air force, and piss off a certain percentage of your population.
Realistically, if you draw a line 500 miles in from the sea, you have the effective range of naval manned aircraft.
Draw a line 1,500 miles in from the sea and you have Cruise Missile range.
For much of the world, 1500 miles coverage is sufficient for Air launched or naval launched Cruise Missile coverage.
Carriers might not be useful for an attack on China or Russia, who have large land-masses, an active air-defense system, and several thousand cheap missiles to launch at a carrier or its air wing.
However, against an adversary with only a couple hundred missiles in their arsenal they are likely to be in service for another hundred years, as there is nothing even remotely on the horizon (no pun intended) to replace them for long range missions.
Carriers replacing battle ships brought a whole new concept.
The only new concept around these days is Drones.
But until a massive scale-up occurs, the drone payload is pitifully small, their self defense capability totally absent, and you still have to launch them from somewhere. Drones are more likely to be launched from carriers than they are to replace carriers.
I doubt there are any current manufacturers still in business.
And even if there are, they are probably only making electric models.
However, there are probably a gazillion of these things moldering away in warehouses or scrap heaps, or corporate basements, or still for sale as re-furbs.
The problem is that they are http://mytypewriter.com/1960sorlater.aspx>expensive and becoming impossible to maintain.
The difference here is that Google will insist on knowing who you are, but they will issue you a pre-approved sock puppet when dealing with social media.
On IRC nobody knew Beth14 a Detective with the NYPD Vice Squad.
On Google+, at least Google will know.
Actually, I think Google is attempting to patent lying.
So now when Billy Hazkzor say "No, Mom, I didn't drop all those cheetos on the carpet, it was my friend Fred" he gets sent to his room and served a summons at the same time.