UEFI and HW-based DRM are elements of the national security surveillance police state control grid. If you want to access the internet, your HW & SW must conform to these new standards. There won't be any choice.
In the not-so-distant future your vehicle will be driving you, on a number of highways -- Smart Roads.
You'll just be a passenger in either case. As will we all.
And you don't think that UEFI-based HW-level DRM enabled, for both the booted OS AND every application that accesses the internet will not become a requirement at some point in the not-too-distant future? Requirements for unique user ID for access to the internet are already being seriously discussed by the PTB. UEFI is the camel's nose under the tent flap scenario. Internet access is the chain, and DRM is the ball. We will all be prisoners in a full spectrum national security surveillance police state.
But by all means, be the early adopters of a technology that will soon be both obsolete and illegal. UEFI and DRM will soon enough be the law of the land, or at least another decision of the Unitary Executive. You must learn not only to obey, but also to love Big Brother. Anything else would be construed as a Thought Crime, and the next thing you know, you're in Room 101 in one of FEMA "re-education" camps. You will awaken, at some point.
That's hilarious. UEFI is all about who has control over your computer, the corporate government or the user. Big Brother says that you can only load an OS that has paid the Gatekeeper's fee. Applications will be next, so a uniform level of security would be involved in engaging in any internet commerce or correspondence, not for the user's sake but for the "security of the internet". Central to that would be the authenticated unique identity of any user connected to the internet. And when will your ISP inform you that you can no longer run an application or a game on your machine which accesses the internet without having your computer's UEFI Boot Monitor enabled, the unique internet user ID generated & broadcasting, and every application having official UEFI DRM certificates? This is not a stretch of the imagination. This is the direction that personal computers, and particularly the clamp-down of internet freedom has been headed for 15 years. Remember the Clipper Chip agenda? DRM restrictions go quite a bit further in invasion of privacy than Clipper ever threatened, not just privacy but also ability to run any SW without an authorized certificate authority.
The Apple laptop I bought 10 years had EFI, and it was possible for me to halt the boot sequence, then have it boot-strap into a Forth application which ran like a demon without the OS overhead. Apple shipped those with no EFI boot ROM password, but the user could set up a root password which avoided a lot of potential problems. UEFI is either enabled or disabled, but if it is enabled, the Gatekeeper for the Boot ROM AUTH Key is Microsoft, and Red Hat acknowledges that the User must pay (est. $99) for each machine OS "upgrade".
How many alternative OS Vendors will be locked out of that market by UEFI's steep per user machine fee? What happens to alternative SW Vendors -- will they be able to survive when their customers would be forced to pay to get a per machine fee? The UEFI is the spawn of Satan himself -- the Mark of The Beast -- Everyone gets a universal internet ID number with UEFI. You just have to love it when monopoly-minded crony corporate interests run the regulatory and enforcement arms of government No harm to the special interests, so there was no foul. "Keep moving, people. Nothing to see here." Like a Jedi mind-trick, "The kleptocratic monopolies of which you seek are not here". LOLZ
UEFI is an OEM Software Vendor's bald-faced grab at monopoly power. Microsoft would be the key generator. Redhat would pay Microsoft a one-time fee per user machine, which RH figures likely to be a one-time $99 fee. This charge would be per machine, not per user, as it is likely that no 2 computers on the same network can have the same key. How many linux users not running servers would be willing to pay their OEM Linux Software Vendor an extra $100 over the current cost of that software per machine? What impact would this have on the number of desktop linux users? How many would forego any switch from the Microsoft OS pre-installed for an extra additional $100, per machine?
IIRC, when Microsoft first began trying to compete with Server Software against the the Big Iron Server Vendors, flexibility in number of connected clients, and owning the HW and the SW license was considerably cheaper than an annual HW & SW service agreement. Digital Equipment, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems are gone, Microsoft has so much influence over HW manufacturers that an effort was made to rein in competition. Control of the UEFI Boot AUTH Key by a self-avowed SW monopoly would appear to, in one fell swoop, destroy a segment of the Desktop OS competition AND create a robust new revenue stream at the same time. The crony corporatists are greedy vampires, as one named John D. was quoted as saying "Competition is a sin."
So, which recently topping $1 Billion in revenues OEM SW Vendor just climb into bed, figuratively speaking, with Microsoft? Red Hat? Gee whiz, I wonder how many of Red Hat's plethora of desktop linux competition, or for that matter, any *nix-like OS Vendor would care for their product to be automatically boosted in price by $100 (minimum) to establish an UEFI Boot AUTH Key "Associate" account with Microsoft? When is More Evil just too much?
Free market capitalism, by definition, should be operating on a level playing field of regulation and enforcement. The greater and greater concentration of economic power and influence in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations is hardly an indication of a vibrant free market. But that is a symptom of corporatism, and when government is in alliance with those crony corporate interests instead of the general well-being of all taxpayers, it is called corporate socialism also sometimes known as national socialism or fascism.
There were power lines at the edge of the road in the easement, but I don't believe that the power lines were a factor.
The coupled bats fell straight down onto the hood of my car. It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that I saw them just before they hit the car, seen as a dark blob, which then bounced slightly and remained motionless until they 'revived' as I previously narrated. My headlights were on, I was driving slowly (~20 mph), and there was a full moon & clear night sky.
Of course, bats use echo-location when flying during their normal nocturnal existence, which is quite good enough for them to feed copiously on insects, but AFAIK they still have eyesight & vision. No telling what they thought of the large bipedal just feet away from their landing spot, except perhaps "Danger".
Aside: This is only tangentially relevant to TFA, but I hope it gets a pass from the moderators and not modded down as OffTopic:
Preface: Bats are kind of like mice with flappable wings. One would expect that they would have that knack of flying, pretty much instinctively. One would not expect them to thwart Darwin's Law, survival of the fittest, by doing 'stupid' things while flying, but...
True Story: I was driving home from work one night and was only a block away from home in a residential neighborhood, when something fell out of the sky and loudly hit the hood of my car. I stopped, engine still running and headlights on, to get out and see what had happened. A bat, with it's wings wrapped around something or other, had fallen out of the sky. As I was contemplating retrieving the combo windshield squeegee / ice scraper from the trunk to brush this poor dead creature off my hood, it separated from what it fell from the sky with and flew away. Almost immediately, a second bat roused itself and flew from the hood in presumed pursuit of the first bat. The only thing that I could figure is that those 2 bats were copulating in mid-air, lost control, and plummeted down to earth and landed on my car's hood.
I'm not a biologist, nor have I ever played one on TV, but it would seem that the act of 2 small mammals copulating in mid-air would violate the base instinct of survival that falling out of the sky might negate. Unless... unless they routinely know that such a fall is non-lethal, and other base instincts kick into play. Kids. You let them out to run around without supervision in the evening after a big supper (of bugs), and the next thing you know, they're getting into trouble. And yes, there was a full moon that night.
Question: (Directed to anyone who might actually know): Was I fortunate to see a common occurrence, something that very few people have an opportunity to see, or were those bats engaged in very risky behavior that they managed to survive?
Inquiring minds want to know, and Bing has so few good answers.
Not only are USA jobs not secure, the tech head-hunters routinely inflate job requirements in order to fill IT positions with cheaper foreign workers. Compound this with new vetting processes dealing with security background checks, especially directed by the government, and there is a (surprise, surprise) shortage of skilled IT workers.
The only IT jobs available in my 'stomping grounds' have switched to requiring a TS security clearance, which can take up to 18 months and cost the equivalent of 2 years salary. Many employers are disinclined to hire new talent for a year or more before placing them into the IT slots that require a security clearance. At first, many of those jobs were taken by exiting veterans with preexisting security clearances. But after new stop-loss programs and recycling veterans through multiple overseas tours of duty, many of the unscathed survivors can make far more money working as military mercenaries through defense contractors.
Then there is the DHS largely unadvertised policy of black-balling people that arouse the ire of the Powers That Be. That is what happened to me. I made the mistake of publicly challenging the official fairy tale about the events leading up to and subsequent to the terror attack of 9/11/2001 by way of Letters To The Editor at the Washington Post. None of my letters were posted, but the PTB black-balled me from employment, basically anywhere.
That IBM would reject Cloud storage is totally understandable, or at least I understand it. The most sensitive information My Company would want to preserve from prying eyes is stored on Hollerith Cards pre-positioned in RFIDed burn bags. Everything else is stored on an internal fiber optic ring network on a robust ftp server running patched Novell 4.0.1. & Unix Services. Try to match that for a category of ancient information security (and no, cuneiform-engraved-into-beeswax-on-stone doesn't count).
Direct cylinder injection of small quantities of water would alleviate both pre-ignition detonation and excessive combustion chamber heat, but would complicate engine design (a second injector per cylinder, plus plumbing & computer controls) and drive up manufacturing costs substantially. While bringing higher engine efficiency would be beneficial to consumers, it would negatively impact the fiscal bottom line of USA's petroleum industry. Who do you think the USA government favors more, lower costs to consumers or greater profits to energy companies?
Apparently, you're not a vehicle racing enthusiast. Otherwise, you would know that the highest performance racing engines use alcohol (methanol) as fuel, not gasoline. Methanol requires a rather extensive re-engineering of the entire fuel system, since it is destructive to many of the plastic & rubber components there unlike the usual 10% ethanol found in today's gasoline blends. A widespread consumer switch to methanol-powered vehicles would be anathema to the petroleum industry, since all the methanol required to power all USA vehicles could be produced from the cellulose from domestic plant materials such as sawdust.
In the USA there is no political will to overthrow crony corporate petroleum interests in favor of new energy start-ups that could offer the USA real energy independence, even when the huge costs of overseas military adventures required to secure foreign energy sources are factored in. Some of the biggest chunks of corporate welfare are hidden from taxpayers in plain sight.
Because the EPA has made it so Diesel is ridiculously expensive.
Well, not so much the EPA as petroleum chemistry itself. More gasoline can be extracted from crude oil than an equivalent amount of diesel fuel, since hydrogenation is used to create more ingredients for gasoline blends that aren't suitable for diesel fuel. Fewer gallons of fuel derived from a given barrel of oil by economic necessity demands a higher cost. And without any surprise, the energy density of gasoline is lower than that of diesel, even before ethanol is blended into gasoline. Ethanol is an oxygen donor suitable for reducing emissions, not an additive designed to improve mileage.
This sounds like a near-perfect solution for my ideal, a serial diesel-electric hybrid vehicle whose diesel engine is only used to run a generator to recharge the batteries. Diesel engines designed to run only at a fixed RPM can be far more fuel efficient than any gasoline engine. These should have already been made available in the USA marketplace, particularly ones whose batteries can also optionally be charged via household mains power or a bank of photovoltaic panels. I'm still waiting for USA vehicle manufacturers to catch up with available technologies, which never seems to happen without outside coercion.
The USA's vehicle emissions and crash standards appear to be designed to protect crony corporate interests rather than either the environment or passenger safety. USA consumers are constrained from purchasing many foreign vehicles that would more closely match their demand for fuel-efficient vehicles, to the fiscal benefit of the USA automotive industry AND the USA energy companies. The GW Bush regime delayed the USA introduction of low sulphur diesel fuels long enough for enhanced emissions standards to kick in, and largely kill off the early popularity of VW's TDI technology.
A veritable flood of highly fuel efficient vehicles based upon TDI type technology would have done far more to lower aggregate vehicle emissions than the tightening of emissions standards itself accomplished. Improvements in USA driver & passenger safety to a certain extent could be accomplished by an influx of vehicles equipped with anti-lock braking & stability control replacing older vehicles. There are already different USA fuel & emission standards applied to distinct weight & usage classes of vehicles, and vehicle curb weight impacts both fuel economy and safety standards.
The political will necessary to legislate the entry of light-weight very fuel efficient vehicles in order to let consumers themselves decide via the capitalist marketplace is needed. USA vehicle manufacturers have no particular compulsion to adopt such expensive new technologies as this diesel-like timed direct injection gasoline engine would appear to promise, regardless of the level of government incentives offered. But the USA is no longer a free market of capitalism, and most legislation & regulation is designed to meet the needs of crony corporate special interests, not the needs of the majority of citizens. What happened to the electric car, and whatever happened to transportation based upon hydrogen fueled vehicles?
Government subsidies for ethanol additives to gasoline have drastically driven up consumer food prices, while falling far short of the promises made for vehicle emissions since fuel mileage drops with the percentage of alcohol added. It could not be otherwise, since fuel energy density drops correspondingly. Ethanol-enriched fuels, over all, has been a disaster for USA consumers. OTOH, Corporate socialism is doing rather well, since it is predicated upon "privatized profit and socialized risk". "I'm the government, and I'm here to help you" is a simile apropos to corporate rather than citizen benefit.
Don't smoke, don't feed the homeless, don't pick which lightbulb you like, etc., etc.
Your own food is too fatty, salty, etc.
Liberals don't believe in a right to privacy except for the sexual sphere of life. They are busybodies par excellance.
Both main USA political parties seem to be very well politicians with all the traits of Tyrannical Authoritarian Kleptocrats. Look at who keeps "cheer-leading" for more wars overseas, and then look at who keeps legislating for a more repressive "national security" surveillance police state on the brink of martial law domestically ---- both parties are well-represented in those TAK categories.
Disclaimer: I am all for more personal rights and liberties, rather than bigger government holding all the liberties to all our rights, so that would put me in a small minority of either political party, at least as far as representative among those in elective office.
The USA's Department of Defense used to be called the War Department, but that was before the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA and NSA -- you know, before George Orwell's 'NewSpeak' took over and continuous serial perpetual warfare became the new normal.
Which came first, perpetual wars against enumerable shadowy enemies OR the intelligence agencies that 'discover' such 'threats' AND the military industrial complex? The answer can be easily resolved by answering the question, "Who benefits?".
The USA and UK are 'country cousins separated by a common language' bound into sovereign debt slavery by the same masters, the crony corporate socialist military industrial complex jobs-preservation agenda, private for-profit central bankster-vampires that feed off of sovereign debt, and the globalist new world order new Roman Empire 'axis-of-evil'. EMP weapons, Al Qaeda 'Air Force' threat to the Olympics, Iranian 'loose nukes', M-80 equivalent underwear bombers, and disgruntled 'returning veterans' that support the Constitution & Ron Paul are all part of the 'War OF Terror' political theatre. All are designed by our kleptocratic masters to attempt to maintain the unsustainable economic order based upon the petrodollar, fiat fractional reserve banking, and neo-colonial perpetual warfare, all while reducing the productive Middle Class into neo-feudal serfs.
I would dispute that the rest of the world 'lives in peace'. Rather, much of the rest of the world that is in conflict where NATO is not involved is still struggling with addressing previous generations of colonial empire. NATO-involved conflicts and pending conflicts are driven by neo-colonial aspirations revolving about nearly obsolete petroleum-based crony corporate interests. The memes of 'divide & conquer', 'order out of chaos', and perpetual warfare are shared by both traditional colonialism and neo-colonialism. George Orwell's "1984" was not so much a dystopian political novel as much as a blueprint for the ascension to world domination by the tyrannical technocratic authoritarians, the international bankster cabal.
"War is peace." "Freedom is slavery." "Ignorance is strength." "Those that control the present control the past, and those that control the past will control the future." "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia (or was that Eurasia?)." The class hierarchy can only be maintained by organizing society around resistance to an external threat, while the expenditure on military is designed to remove excessive manufacturing capacity from benefitting the masses. "If you want to know the future, imagine a jack-boot stomping a human face, forever." You must learn to not only obey but also to love Big Brother, lest you be dragged away to Room 101. Thought crimes will be more severely punished than real crimes, especially economic crimes waged against the 'proles'. Doesn't this all have the ring of relevance, and truth?
Let's presume that building an advanced technology starship is the ultimate goal, and we don't have that technology yet. Let's also presume that no one will repeal the laws of gravity any time soon. The prerequisites to starship construction wouldn't rely upon technology that is currently out of reach. The premise is that building and launching any starship from a low gravity environment is far preferable to launching it from Earth. The first of those "baby steps" towards building starships is developing the technology to perform robotic asteroid mining. Low orbit robotic refining, smelting, and construction would be the next step.
Rather than building a space station / shipyard in Low Earth Orbit, build it closer to the asteroid source of the materials in Low Mars Orbit. That location also puts mankind closer to the water & carbon-based fuel resources we already know exist on the moons of Mars and Saturn. Even supposing that it takes 30 years to get that combined space station & dockyard built, it doesn't preclude parallel scientific discovery of technologies that would make realist travel between the stars possible. But it would give humanity the infrastructure necessary to build such starships, even if we don't know what those technologies will be or what the starship design would ultimately look like. We already have a good idea of what a LEO / LMO space station / dockyard would look like if it is to be human habitable -- a vast spinning wheel, with spaceship docking and construction "dry-dock" near the hub.
The construction of Moon bases and Mars bases for human habitation would go more quickly with a space-based source of materials, rather than fighting Earth's gravity like we are doing now. Extraterrestrial sources of necessary raw materials would break any reliance upon Moon or Mars based resources such as water and carbon-based fuels for anything other than short-term emergency measures would be a good thing. Governments waste far too much money on useless military junk that predisposes those governments to view every problem as a raised nail when their only tool is a hammer. Not surprisingly, most of the USA's Military Industrial Complex has also been involved in space exploration. The money is there for such a vast & bold enterprise -- it's only a matter of political will to refocus our efforts & monies on space exploration & construction rather than destruction.
Fear-mongering for fun & profit seems to be the new & improved USA business model, especially for governments at every level. Afraid of terrorists? Obviously, they are everywhere, and can strike at any time. Be afraid. Surrender all your rights & liberties, and (especially) your money to the government. The "war on terror" will save you, even from yourself. The DHS has spent over $1 Trillion fighting "terrorism" since its' founding. Is life without any risks whatsoever really living? And can one even prove that the benefit outweighs the cost, when success is only proven with a negative result? And the only positive results, aka real terrorism, for the past 25 years have been government promulgated?
The "war on terror" is a black hole the USA throws money into, without actually making anyone safer. In fact, just the opposite is the case. Vastly increased sovereign debt threatens those very government programs & infrastructure that do help to keep us safe, healthy, and happy. Our infrastructure, like bridges, public health system, national power grid, water purification plants all suffer from competition with the "war on terror". OMG, man-made carbon dioxide is threatening us with global warming -- quick, let's ship all our industries overseas. OMG, there are religious fundamentalists half a world away that hate us for our freedoms -- quick, let's spend $4.5 Trillion in 10 years on perpetual warfare against these people. Surely they will not hate us any more if we drop money-bombs on them along with bloody expensive military ordinance, including their wedding parties and funerals. OMG, someone smuggled the equivalent of an M-80 firecracker in their pants onto a USA-bound plane -- quick, let's spend $250 Billion on terahertz-wave body scanners and place them everywhere, not just airports. Before we surrender more of our individual rights & liberties or more blood & treasure, let's get the answer to "Who benefits, and why?"
The truth is, if you feel personally at risk of bodily harm due to acts of terrorism, go out and buy even 1 lottery ticket because the odds against you winning are only 1 in 175 Million, while an act of terrorism (a real act of terrorism not fabricated by government) is closer to 1 in 1,000 Million. Feeling "lucky" -- buy that lottery ticket. Ignore things like auto accidents with uninsured drunken drivers, or getting struck by lightening four weekends in a row when you go play golf.
Industrial Control Systems have no business with internet access to operational processes, rather than merely an alarm or data monitoring channel, in any case.
It is one thing to bleat in the press about global warming, which is happening to every planet in the solar system, and another thing to blame global warming only on mankind. Let's ignore the one factor that makes the most sense for every every planet in our solar system, changes in the Sun. Let's cripple all of the economies of the developed world, and send our wealth to the international banksters as penance for not being "carbon-neutral". It's not as if the international banksters, or Al Gore, don't have enough of our money already.
I suppose that all of those robotic probes that mankind has landed throughout the solar system are generating so much CO2 from their internal combustion engines that we are causing the global warming of these other planets (besides Earth). It just could not be cyclical changes in the Sun, or the impending arrival of an exo-planet with enough mass to cause tectonic plate shifts and resistance to rotation of the Earth's molten core, could it?
Focusing on CO2 levels, instead of radiation from nuclear power plant failures, use of depleted uranium for warfare, deadly chemicals in our air, soil, & water, and genetic franken-foods aren't the bigger threats is really, really short-sighted & misdirected.
Not the BSOD. If the OP had used open source "tripwire" on known-good files in each filesystem on his Macbook, and saved the resultant data output to a USB thumbdrive formatted with FAT32, the OP would have had a good chance of determining all corrupted files. In this case, an ounce of prevention would have prevented several pounds of "cure".
London is the very last place I would want to be this summer. False flag terror attacks are used by every government to create an external threat that justifies consolidation of police state powers, especially democracies. The USA has had our false flag attacks, beginning with the USS Maine in Havana Harbor through to 9/11. The British have been somewhat less prolific in their false flag terror attacks, but they are trending toward more as the drumbeats for war with Iran beat louder, just like their 5/11 (?) metro transit attack.
One thing about SA missiles in London -- there's always a chance for an errant missile to strike the City of London (where the real global terrorists are located) rather than kill some videographer with more ambition than common sense in a plane over the Olympics.
The way things are going now in the USA, I'm not certain the USA's Big Brother nanny state would let me leave the USA, or once gone let me return, or while gone strip me of my citizenship and put me on a drone "hit list". The German Nazis lost World War 2, but found a new home for their best National Socialists (fascists) thanks to Operation Paperclip right here in the USA.
3/4 of Earth is covered in water. Water is comprised of 2hydrogen and 1oxygen, both useful products separately but when combined turn back into water. Only the method of splitting water apart should be a question solved by regional conditions, not limited to civilian nuclear energy. New methods to economically store metallic hydrogen will evolve.
I call balderdash! Only something so valuable as to be utterly priceless can defy rational thought to the extent that it isn't even considered, and hence of no value, like the value of the condition of the environment of "spaceship Earth" we would leave to our progeny.
Nuclear energy (civilian nuclear energy) isn't even viable economically, and only came into being in the USA to support the military nuclear weapons programs. The Department of Energy spun up the Tennessee Valley Authority under the threat to civilian power companies that their (TVA) nuclear energy "would be too cheap to meter". Of course, they lied, and the civilian power companies only committed to nuclear power when massive "corporate welfare" flowed in from the government. Those subsidies included, but were not limited to (1) grants for nuclear plant design, (2) passed legislation to underwrite power company liability by the taxpayer, (3) grants to fund nuclear fuel rod assemblies, (4) wide latitude in operational deregulation, (5) leave in limbo used fuel rod reprocessing, and (6) leave largely unaddressed the issue of nuclear power plant decommissioning and hazardous waste disposal (100's of metric tons of low-level radioactive waste && multiple metric tons of high-level radioactive waste, plus whatever is stored in the prerequisite cooling ponds.)
One question neither answered nor acknowledged by the civilian nuclear power industry or the government is the longer-term period of radioactive waste management. At least one reactor (#3 ?) at Fukushima Dai-ichi used a hotter, more dangerous blend of uranium and plutonium called MOX. This has a radioactive half-life of 20,000 years. At that rate, even 500,000 years later (25xTau) this waste would still be deadly to all living things, and would need to be re-packaged periodically. Does any capitalist society actually plan that far into the future, as well as funding such a long-term project? Hardly so. That is the nature of the economic order we live under, corporate socialism (aka fascism). We have to leave it to science fiction writers to imagine such a future -- like "A Canticle For Leibowitz". Yes, a new technocratic religion is borne...
There are solutions, just not "legal" ones thanks to governments controlled by multinational corporations and corrupt international bankers.
HEMP || Use hemp (Cannabis sativa variety) to replace wood for cooking. Cannabis can grow in poor soil. Hemp seeds are highly nutritious (double entendre intended). One hectare of hemp (grown for fiber) can replace more that 4 hectares of forests, and can also be used to make building construction materials.
PYROLIZATION || Easily constructed ovens can be used to pyrolyze hemp fiber into flammable cooking gas, and to create bio-char.
TERRA PRETA || This is a farming technique that uses bio-char to enrich soil. It provides an "anchor" for healthy micro-biotics to convert natural fertilizers into plant-ready usable nutrients. The fertilizers feed the micro-biotic organisms, and these organisms feed the cultivated plants. Over time, the percentage of carbon in the soil actually increases, due to the life cycle of those useful micro-biotic organisms.
MANURE || Properly treated manure (mulching) can be safely used to help enrich that terra preta treated soil.
Most areas of Africa have the ability to feed themselves, if only governments and greedy multinational corporations get out of the way, including such evil corporations as Monsanto. GMO seeds are, by definition, unsustainable, as well as dangerous to other living organisms in the food chain, especially humans. Sequestration of carbon (credits) through the use of terra preta farming techniques could provide the seed money for the micro-finance of sustainable agriculture at the village level. There is no good reason why solar power / photovoltaics cannot be employed with dramatically good results to operate pumps for wells for irrigation and drinking water, as well as purifying that water for drinking. Good solutions are available to improve the lives of millions of people, instead of using them as lab rats for eugenics-inspired Big Pharma medicines, vaccines, etcetera.
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UEFI and HW-based DRM are elements of the national security surveillance police state control grid. If you want to access the internet, your HW & SW must conform to these new standards. There won't be any choice.
In the not-so-distant future your vehicle will be driving you, on a number of highways -- Smart Roads.
You'll just be a passenger in either case. As will we all.
And you don't think that UEFI-based HW-level DRM enabled, for both the booted OS AND every application that accesses the internet will not become a requirement at some point in the not-too-distant future? Requirements for unique user ID for access to the internet are already being seriously discussed by the PTB. UEFI is the camel's nose under the tent flap scenario. Internet access is the chain, and DRM is the ball. We will all be prisoners in a full spectrum national security surveillance police state.
But by all means, be the early adopters of a technology that will soon be both obsolete and illegal. UEFI and DRM will soon enough be the law of the land, or at least another decision of the Unitary Executive. You must learn not only to obey, but also to love Big Brother. Anything else would be construed as a Thought Crime, and the next thing you know, you're in Room 101 in one of FEMA "re-education" camps. You will awaken, at some point.
That's hilarious.
UEFI is all about who has control over your computer, the corporate government or the user.
Big Brother says that you can only load an OS that has paid the Gatekeeper's fee. Applications will be next, so a uniform level of security would be involved in engaging in any internet commerce or correspondence, not for the user's sake but for the "security of the internet". Central to that would be the authenticated unique identity of any user connected to the internet. And when will your ISP inform you that you can no longer run an application or a game on your machine which accesses the internet without having your computer's UEFI Boot Monitor enabled, the unique internet user ID generated & broadcasting, and every application having official UEFI DRM certificates?
This is not a stretch of the imagination. This is the direction that personal computers, and particularly the clamp-down of internet freedom has been headed for 15 years. Remember the Clipper Chip agenda? DRM restrictions go quite a bit further in invasion of privacy than Clipper ever threatened, not just privacy but also ability to run any SW without an authorized certificate authority.
The Apple laptop I bought 10 years had EFI, and it was possible for me to halt the boot sequence, then have it boot-strap into a Forth application which ran like a demon without the OS overhead. Apple shipped those with no EFI boot ROM password, but the user could set up a root password which avoided a lot of potential problems. UEFI is either enabled or disabled, but if it is enabled, the Gatekeeper for the Boot ROM AUTH Key is Microsoft, and Red Hat acknowledges that the User must pay (est. $99) for each machine OS "upgrade".
How many alternative OS Vendors will be locked out of that market by UEFI's steep per user machine fee? What happens to alternative SW Vendors -- will they be able to survive when their customers would be forced to pay to get a per machine fee? The UEFI is the spawn of Satan himself -- the Mark of The Beast -- Everyone gets a universal internet ID number with UEFI. You just have to love it when monopoly-minded crony corporate interests run the regulatory and enforcement arms of government No harm to the special interests, so there was no foul. "Keep moving, people. Nothing to see here." Like a Jedi mind-trick, "The kleptocratic monopolies of which you seek are not here". LOLZ
UEFI is an OEM Software Vendor's bald-faced grab at monopoly power. Microsoft would be the key generator. Redhat would pay Microsoft a one-time fee per user machine, which RH figures likely to be a one-time $99 fee. This charge would be per machine, not per user, as it is likely that no 2 computers on the same network can have the same key. How many linux users not running servers would be willing to pay their OEM Linux Software Vendor an extra $100 over the current cost of that software per machine? What impact would this have on the number of desktop linux users? How many would forego any switch from the Microsoft OS pre-installed for an extra additional $100, per machine?
IIRC, when Microsoft first began trying to compete with Server Software against the the Big Iron Server Vendors, flexibility in number of connected clients, and owning the HW and the SW license was considerably cheaper than an annual HW & SW service agreement. Digital Equipment, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems are gone, Microsoft has so much influence over HW manufacturers that an effort was made to rein in competition. Control of the UEFI Boot AUTH Key by a self-avowed SW monopoly would appear to, in one fell swoop, destroy a segment of the Desktop OS competition AND create a robust new revenue stream at the same time. The crony corporatists are greedy vampires, as one named John D. was quoted as saying "Competition is a sin."
So, which recently topping $1 Billion in revenues OEM SW Vendor just climb into bed, figuratively speaking, with Microsoft? Red Hat? Gee whiz, I wonder how many of Red Hat's plethora of desktop linux competition, or for that matter, any *nix-like OS Vendor would care for their product to be automatically boosted in price by $100 (minimum) to establish an UEFI Boot AUTH Key "Associate" account with Microsoft? When is More Evil just too much?
Free market capitalism, by definition, should be operating on a level playing field of regulation and enforcement. The greater and greater concentration of economic power and influence in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations is hardly an indication of a vibrant free market. But that is a symptom of corporatism, and when government is in alliance with those crony corporate interests instead of the general well-being of all taxpayers, it is called corporate socialism also sometimes known as national socialism or fascism.
There were power lines at the edge of the road in the easement, but I don't believe that the power lines were a factor.
The coupled bats fell straight down onto the hood of my car. It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that I saw them just before they hit the car, seen as a dark blob, which then bounced slightly and remained motionless until they 'revived' as I previously narrated. My headlights were on, I was driving slowly (~20 mph), and there was a full moon & clear night sky.
Of course, bats use echo-location when flying during their normal nocturnal existence, which is quite good enough for them to feed copiously on insects, but AFAIK they still have eyesight & vision. No telling what they thought of the large bipedal just feet away from their landing spot, except perhaps "Danger".
Aside: This is only tangentially relevant to TFA, but I hope it gets a pass from the moderators and not modded down as OffTopic:
Preface: Bats are kind of like mice with flappable wings. One would expect that they would have that knack of flying, pretty much instinctively. One would not expect them to thwart Darwin's Law, survival of the fittest, by doing 'stupid' things while flying, but ...
True Story: I was driving home from work one night and was only a block away from home in a residential neighborhood, when something fell out of the sky and loudly hit the hood of my car. I stopped, engine still running and headlights on, to get out and see what had happened. A bat, with it's wings wrapped around something or other, had fallen out of the sky. As I was contemplating retrieving the combo windshield squeegee / ice scraper from the trunk to brush this poor dead creature off my hood, it separated from what it fell from the sky with and flew away. Almost immediately, a second bat roused itself and flew from the hood in presumed pursuit of the first bat. The only thing that I could figure is that those 2 bats were copulating in mid-air, lost control, and plummeted down to earth and landed on my car's hood.
I'm not a biologist, nor have I ever played one on TV, but it would seem that the act of 2 small mammals copulating in mid-air would violate the base instinct of survival that falling out of the sky might negate. Unless ... unless they routinely know that such a fall is non-lethal, and other base instincts kick into play. Kids. You let them out to run around without supervision in the evening after a big supper (of bugs), and the next thing you know, they're getting into trouble. And yes, there was a full moon that night.
Question: (Directed to anyone who might actually know): Was I fortunate to see a common occurrence, something that very few people have an opportunity to see, or were those bats engaged in very risky behavior that they managed to survive?
Inquiring minds want to know, and Bing has so few good answers.
Not only are USA jobs not secure, the tech head-hunters routinely inflate job requirements in order to fill IT positions with cheaper foreign workers. Compound this with new vetting processes dealing with security background checks, especially directed by the government, and there is a (surprise, surprise) shortage of skilled IT workers.
The only IT jobs available in my 'stomping grounds' have switched to requiring a TS security clearance, which can take up to 18 months and cost the equivalent of 2 years salary. Many employers are disinclined to hire new talent for a year or more before placing them into the IT slots that require a security clearance. At first, many of those jobs were taken by exiting veterans with preexisting security clearances. But after new stop-loss programs and recycling veterans through multiple overseas tours of duty, many of the unscathed survivors can make far more money working as military mercenaries through defense contractors.
Then there is the DHS largely unadvertised policy of black-balling people that arouse the ire of the Powers That Be. That is what happened to me. I made the mistake of publicly challenging the official fairy tale about the events leading up to and subsequent to the terror attack of 9/11/2001 by way of Letters To The Editor at the Washington Post. None of my letters were posted, but the PTB black-balled me from employment, basically anywhere.
That IBM would reject Cloud storage is totally understandable, or at least I understand it. The most sensitive information My Company would want to preserve from prying eyes is stored on Hollerith Cards pre-positioned in RFIDed burn bags. Everything else is stored on an internal fiber optic ring network on a robust ftp server running patched Novell 4.0.1. & Unix Services. Try to match that for a category of ancient information security (and no, cuneiform-engraved-into-beeswax-on-stone doesn't count).
Now, you young whippersnapper, get off my lawn ...
Direct cylinder injection of small quantities of water would alleviate both pre-ignition detonation and excessive combustion chamber heat, but would complicate engine design (a second injector per cylinder, plus plumbing & computer controls) and drive up manufacturing costs substantially. While bringing higher engine efficiency would be beneficial to consumers, it would negatively impact the fiscal bottom line of USA's petroleum industry. Who do you think the USA government favors more, lower costs to consumers or greater profits to energy companies?
Apparently, you're not a vehicle racing enthusiast. Otherwise, you would know that the highest performance racing engines use alcohol (methanol) as fuel, not gasoline. Methanol requires a rather extensive re-engineering of the entire fuel system, since it is destructive to many of the plastic & rubber components there unlike the usual 10% ethanol found in today's gasoline blends. A widespread consumer switch to methanol-powered vehicles would be anathema to the petroleum industry, since all the methanol required to power all USA vehicles could be produced from the cellulose from domestic plant materials such as sawdust.
In the USA there is no political will to overthrow crony corporate petroleum interests in favor of new energy start-ups that could offer the USA real energy independence, even when the huge costs of overseas military adventures required to secure foreign energy sources are factored in. Some of the biggest chunks of corporate welfare are hidden from taxpayers in plain sight.
Because the EPA has made it so Diesel is ridiculously expensive.
Well, not so much the EPA as petroleum chemistry itself. More gasoline can be extracted from crude oil than an equivalent amount of diesel fuel, since hydrogenation is used to create more ingredients for gasoline blends that aren't suitable for diesel fuel. Fewer gallons of fuel derived from a given barrel of oil by economic necessity demands a higher cost. And without any surprise, the energy density of gasoline is lower than that of diesel, even before ethanol is blended into gasoline. Ethanol is an oxygen donor suitable for reducing emissions, not an additive designed to improve mileage.
This sounds like a near-perfect solution for my ideal, a serial diesel-electric hybrid vehicle whose diesel engine is only used to run a generator to recharge the batteries. Diesel engines designed to run only at a fixed RPM can be far more fuel efficient than any gasoline engine. These should have already been made available in the USA marketplace, particularly ones whose batteries can also optionally be charged via household mains power or a bank of photovoltaic panels. I'm still waiting for USA vehicle manufacturers to catch up with available technologies, which never seems to happen without outside coercion.
The USA's vehicle emissions and crash standards appear to be designed to protect crony corporate interests rather than either the environment or passenger safety. USA consumers are constrained from purchasing many foreign vehicles that would more closely match their demand for fuel-efficient vehicles, to the fiscal benefit of the USA automotive industry AND the USA energy companies. The GW Bush regime delayed the USA introduction of low sulphur diesel fuels long enough for enhanced emissions standards to kick in, and largely kill off the early popularity of VW's TDI technology.
A veritable flood of highly fuel efficient vehicles based upon TDI type technology would have done far more to lower aggregate vehicle emissions than the tightening of emissions standards itself accomplished. Improvements in USA driver & passenger safety to a certain extent could be accomplished by an influx of vehicles equipped with anti-lock braking & stability control replacing older vehicles. There are already different USA fuel & emission standards applied to distinct weight & usage classes of vehicles, and vehicle curb weight impacts both fuel economy and safety standards.
The political will necessary to legislate the entry of light-weight very fuel efficient vehicles in order to let consumers themselves decide via the capitalist marketplace is needed. USA vehicle manufacturers have no particular compulsion to adopt such expensive new technologies as this diesel-like timed direct injection gasoline engine would appear to promise, regardless of the level of government incentives offered. But the USA is no longer a free market of capitalism, and most legislation & regulation is designed to meet the needs of crony corporate special interests, not the needs of the majority of citizens. What happened to the electric car, and whatever happened to transportation based upon hydrogen fueled vehicles?
Government subsidies for ethanol additives to gasoline have drastically driven up consumer food prices, while falling far short of the promises made for vehicle emissions since fuel mileage drops with the percentage of alcohol added. It could not be otherwise, since fuel energy density drops correspondingly. Ethanol-enriched fuels, over all, has been a disaster for USA consumers. OTOH, Corporate socialism is doing rather well, since it is predicated upon "privatized profit and socialized risk". "I'm the government, and I'm here to help you" is a simile apropos to corporate rather than citizen benefit.
Don't smoke, don't feed the homeless, don't pick which lightbulb you like, etc., etc.
Your own food is too fatty, salty, etc.
Liberals don't believe in a right to privacy except for the sexual sphere of life. They are busybodies par excellance.
Both main USA political parties seem to be very well politicians with all the traits of Tyrannical Authoritarian Kleptocrats. Look at who keeps "cheer-leading" for more wars overseas, and then look at who keeps legislating for a more repressive "national security" surveillance police state on the brink of martial law domestically ---- both parties are well-represented in those TAK categories.
Disclaimer: I am all for more personal rights and liberties, rather than bigger government holding all the liberties to all our rights, so that would put me in a small minority of either political party, at least as far as representative among those in elective office.
The USA's Department of Defense used to be called the War Department, but that was before the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA and NSA -- you know, before George Orwell's 'NewSpeak' took over and continuous serial perpetual warfare became the new normal.
Which came first, perpetual wars against enumerable shadowy enemies OR the intelligence agencies that 'discover' such 'threats' AND the military industrial complex? The answer can be easily resolved by answering the question, "Who benefits?".
The USA and UK are 'country cousins separated by a common language' bound into sovereign debt slavery by the same masters, the crony corporate socialist military industrial complex jobs-preservation agenda, private for-profit central bankster-vampires that feed off of sovereign debt, and the globalist new world order new Roman Empire 'axis-of-evil'. EMP weapons, Al Qaeda 'Air Force' threat to the Olympics, Iranian 'loose nukes', M-80 equivalent underwear bombers, and disgruntled 'returning veterans' that support the Constitution & Ron Paul are all part of the 'War OF Terror' political theatre. All are designed by our kleptocratic masters to attempt to maintain the unsustainable economic order based upon the petrodollar, fiat fractional reserve banking, and neo-colonial perpetual warfare, all while reducing the productive Middle Class into neo-feudal serfs.
I would dispute that the rest of the world 'lives in peace'. Rather, much of the rest of the world that is in conflict where NATO is not involved is still struggling with addressing previous generations of colonial empire. NATO-involved conflicts and pending conflicts are driven by neo-colonial aspirations revolving about nearly obsolete petroleum-based crony corporate interests. The memes of 'divide & conquer', 'order out of chaos', and perpetual warfare are shared by both traditional colonialism and neo-colonialism. George Orwell's "1984" was not so much a dystopian political novel as much as a blueprint for the ascension to world domination by the tyrannical technocratic authoritarians, the international bankster cabal.
"War is peace." "Freedom is slavery." "Ignorance is strength." "Those that control the present control the past, and those that control the past will control the future." "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia (or was that Eurasia?)." The class hierarchy can only be maintained by organizing society around resistance to an external threat, while the expenditure on military is designed to remove excessive manufacturing capacity from benefitting the masses. "If you want to know the future, imagine a jack-boot stomping a human face, forever." You must learn to not only obey but also to love Big Brother, lest you be dragged away to Room 101. Thought crimes will be more severely punished than real crimes, especially economic crimes waged against the 'proles'. Doesn't this all have the ring of relevance, and truth?
Let's presume that building an advanced technology starship is the ultimate goal, and we don't have that technology yet. Let's also presume that no one will repeal the laws of gravity any time soon. The prerequisites to starship construction wouldn't rely upon technology that is currently out of reach. The premise is that building and launching any starship from a low gravity environment is far preferable to launching it from Earth. The first of those "baby steps" towards building starships is developing the technology to perform robotic asteroid mining. Low orbit robotic refining, smelting, and construction would be the next step.
Rather than building a space station / shipyard in Low Earth Orbit, build it closer to the asteroid source of the materials in Low Mars Orbit. That location also puts mankind closer to the water & carbon-based fuel resources we already know exist on the moons of Mars and Saturn. Even supposing that it takes 30 years to get that combined space station & dockyard built, it doesn't preclude parallel scientific discovery of technologies that would make realist travel between the stars possible. But it would give humanity the infrastructure necessary to build such starships, even if we don't know what those technologies will be or what the starship design would ultimately look like. We already have a good idea of what a LEO / LMO space station / dockyard would look like if it is to be human habitable -- a vast spinning wheel, with spaceship docking and construction "dry-dock" near the hub.
The construction of Moon bases and Mars bases for human habitation would go more quickly with a space-based source of materials, rather than fighting Earth's gravity like we are doing now. Extraterrestrial sources of necessary raw materials would break any reliance upon Moon or Mars based resources such as water and carbon-based fuels for anything other than short-term emergency measures would be a good thing. Governments waste far too much money on useless military junk that predisposes those governments to view every problem as a raised nail when their only tool is a hammer. Not surprisingly, most of the USA's Military Industrial Complex has also been involved in space exploration. The money is there for such a vast & bold enterprise -- it's only a matter of political will to refocus our efforts & monies on space exploration & construction rather than destruction.
Let's get it done ... beginning tomorrow morning.
Fear-mongering for fun & profit seems to be the new & improved USA business model, especially for governments at every level. Afraid of terrorists? Obviously, they are everywhere, and can strike at any time. Be afraid. Surrender all your rights & liberties, and (especially) your money to the government. The "war on terror" will save you, even from yourself. The DHS has spent over $1 Trillion fighting "terrorism" since its' founding. Is life without any risks whatsoever really living? And can one even prove that the benefit outweighs the cost, when success is only proven with a negative result? And the only positive results, aka real terrorism, for the past 25 years have been government promulgated?
The "war on terror" is a black hole the USA throws money into, without actually making anyone safer. In fact, just the opposite is the case. Vastly increased sovereign debt threatens those very government programs & infrastructure that do help to keep us safe, healthy, and happy. Our infrastructure, like bridges, public health system, national power grid, water purification plants all suffer from competition with the "war on terror". OMG, man-made carbon dioxide is threatening us with global warming -- quick, let's ship all our industries overseas. OMG, there are religious fundamentalists half a world away that hate us for our freedoms -- quick, let's spend $4.5 Trillion in 10 years on perpetual warfare against these people. Surely they will not hate us any more if we drop money-bombs on them along with bloody expensive military ordinance, including their wedding parties and funerals. OMG, someone smuggled the equivalent of an M-80 firecracker in their pants onto a USA-bound plane -- quick, let's spend $250 Billion on terahertz-wave body scanners and place them everywhere, not just airports. Before we surrender more of our individual rights & liberties or more blood & treasure, let's get the answer to "Who benefits, and why?"
The truth is, if you feel personally at risk of bodily harm due to acts of terrorism, go out and buy even 1 lottery ticket because the odds against you winning are only 1 in 175 Million, while an act of terrorism (a real act of terrorism not fabricated by government) is closer to 1 in 1,000 Million. Feeling "lucky" -- buy that lottery ticket. Ignore things like auto accidents with uninsured drunken drivers, or getting struck by lightening four weekends in a row when you go play golf.
Industrial Control Systems have no business with internet access to operational processes, rather than merely an alarm or data monitoring channel, in any case.
It is one thing to bleat in the press about global warming, which is happening to every planet in the solar system, and another thing to blame global warming only on mankind. Let's ignore the one factor that makes the most sense for every every planet in our solar system, changes in the Sun. Let's cripple all of the economies of the developed world, and send our wealth to the international banksters as penance for not being "carbon-neutral". It's not as if the international banksters, or Al Gore, don't have enough of our money already.
I suppose that all of those robotic probes that mankind has landed throughout the solar system are generating so much CO2 from their internal combustion engines that we are causing the global warming of these other planets (besides Earth). It just could not be cyclical changes in the Sun, or the impending arrival of an exo-planet with enough mass to cause tectonic plate shifts and resistance to rotation of the Earth's molten core, could it?
Focusing on CO2 levels, instead of radiation from nuclear power plant failures, use of depleted uranium for warfare, deadly chemicals in our air, soil, & water, and genetic franken-foods aren't the bigger threats is really, really short-sighted & misdirected.
Not the BSOD.
If the OP had used open source "tripwire" on known-good files in each filesystem on his Macbook, and saved the resultant data output to a USB thumbdrive formatted with FAT32, the OP would have had a good chance of determining all corrupted files. In this case, an ounce of prevention would have prevented several pounds of "cure".
Check out http://tripwire.org./
London is the very last place I would want to be this summer. False flag terror attacks are used by every government to create an external threat that justifies consolidation of police state powers, especially democracies. The USA has had our false flag attacks, beginning with the USS Maine in Havana Harbor through to 9/11. The British have been somewhat less prolific in their false flag terror attacks, but they are trending toward more as the drumbeats for war with Iran beat louder, just like their 5/11 (?) metro transit attack.
One thing about SA missiles in London -- there's always a chance for an errant missile to strike the City of London (where the real global terrorists are located) rather than kill some videographer with more ambition than common sense in a plane over the Olympics.
The way things are going now in the USA, I'm not certain the USA's Big Brother nanny state would let me leave the USA, or once gone let me return, or while gone strip me of my citizenship and put me on a drone "hit list". The German Nazis lost World War 2, but found a new home for their best National Socialists (fascists) thanks to Operation Paperclip right here in the USA.
3/4 of Earth is covered in water. Water is comprised of 2hydrogen and 1oxygen, both useful products separately but when combined turn back into water. Only the method of splitting water apart should be a question solved by regional conditions, not limited to civilian nuclear energy. New methods to economically store metallic hydrogen will evolve.
I call balderdash!
Only something so valuable as to be utterly priceless can defy rational thought to the extent that it isn't even considered, and hence of no value, like the value of the condition of the environment of "spaceship Earth" we would leave to our progeny.
Nuclear energy (civilian nuclear energy) isn't even viable economically, and only came into being in the USA to support the military nuclear weapons programs. The Department of Energy spun up the Tennessee Valley Authority under the threat to civilian power companies that their (TVA) nuclear energy "would be too cheap to meter". Of course, they lied, and the civilian power companies only committed to nuclear power when massive "corporate welfare" flowed in from the government. Those subsidies included, but were not limited to (1) grants for nuclear plant design, (2) passed legislation to underwrite power company liability by the taxpayer, (3) grants to fund nuclear fuel rod assemblies, (4) wide latitude in operational deregulation, (5) leave in limbo used fuel rod reprocessing, and (6) leave largely unaddressed the issue of nuclear power plant decommissioning and hazardous waste disposal (100's of metric tons of low-level radioactive waste && multiple metric tons of high-level radioactive waste, plus whatever is stored in the prerequisite cooling ponds.)
One question neither answered nor acknowledged by the civilian nuclear power industry or the government is the longer-term period of radioactive waste management. At least one reactor (#3 ?) at Fukushima Dai-ichi used a hotter, more dangerous blend of uranium and plutonium called MOX. This has a radioactive half-life of 20,000 years. At that rate, even 500,000 years later (25xTau) this waste would still be deadly to all living things, and would need to be re-packaged periodically. Does any capitalist society actually plan that far into the future, as well as funding such a long-term project? Hardly so. That is the nature of the economic order we live under, corporate socialism (aka fascism). We have to leave it to science fiction writers to imagine such a future -- like "A Canticle For Leibowitz". Yes, a new technocratic religion is borne ...
There are solutions, just not "legal" ones thanks to governments controlled by multinational corporations and corrupt international bankers.
HEMP || Use hemp (Cannabis sativa variety) to replace wood for cooking. Cannabis can grow in poor soil. Hemp seeds are highly nutritious (double entendre intended). One hectare of hemp (grown for fiber) can replace more that 4 hectares of forests, and can also be used to make building construction materials.
PYROLIZATION || Easily constructed ovens can be used to pyrolyze hemp fiber into flammable cooking gas, and to create bio-char.
TERRA PRETA || This is a farming technique that uses bio-char to enrich soil. It provides an "anchor" for healthy micro-biotics to convert natural fertilizers into plant-ready usable nutrients. The fertilizers feed the micro-biotic organisms, and these organisms feed the cultivated plants. Over time, the percentage of carbon in the soil actually increases, due to the life cycle of those useful micro-biotic organisms.
MANURE || Properly treated manure (mulching) can be safely used to help enrich that terra preta treated soil.
Most areas of Africa have the ability to feed themselves, if only governments and greedy multinational corporations get out of the way, including such evil corporations as Monsanto. GMO seeds are, by definition, unsustainable, as well as dangerous to other living organisms in the food chain, especially humans. Sequestration of carbon (credits) through the use of terra preta farming techniques could provide the seed money for the micro-finance of sustainable agriculture at the village level. There is no good reason why solar power / photovoltaics cannot be employed with dramatically good results to operate pumps for wells for irrigation and drinking water, as well as purifying that water for drinking. Good solutions are available to improve the lives of millions of people, instead of using them as lab rats for eugenics-inspired Big Pharma medicines, vaccines, etcetera.