They cause crime. That's demonstrably true. It's just that crime falls so much that additional gun deaths are masked. Then this happens: http://thesocietypages.org/soc...
Yeah, and also ban all gun death research. No data = no problem! Ignorance is strength!
I think the best way forward would be to take a page from those nice police officers in Cleveland and just legalize shooting anyone carrying a gun. Outright and without any questions.
Except that nobody actually collects those stats. CDC is expressly forbidden from studying gun death epidemiology. Well, truth has always been the enemy of conservatives.
Because gun nuts are totally trembling in fear that they might be deprived of their penis-extenders. And they won't be able to protect their homes and precious little children without at least AR-15 and a bazooka.
For the record, I support gun ownership with strict background checks, regular checks for gun safety and mandatory serial numbers on firing pins.
Please, tell me your address. I'll park my gas tanker near your house. Oh, it's triggered to self-explode if anybody tries to move it. And it leaks oil and stinks just a little.
It's a Constitutional right to move around, right?
Bullshit. I probably have the most complicated tax situation (being a citizen of one country, living in another, filing taxes in a third one and having significant US income without SSN) and US taxes were not a problem at all apart from understanding the tax forms. And regular expats won't even have to pay anything unless you earn more than about $200k and live in a tax-haven country like Singapore.
It's in part a cycle -- land to humans to waste to land. Only in part as nitrogen can oxidize to go back to the air, so it needs to get fixed again by bacteria.
Actually, you excrete most of your nitrogen through kidneys. Pig/human dung contains just 0.3% of nitrogen by weight. Anyway, you can read historical data - human waste is not enough, even using it for compost required to lay fields fallow one year out of three or four (depending on location).
"Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones"
The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation"
That's because the total amount of fertilizers used is huge. Very little of it is lost, but even that can cause trouble.
What that shows is that alternatives have worked. China is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. If they could do it, it shows the US could do it and other countries could do it.
It was not nearly the most densely populated place (England was) before the 20-th century. China was pretty average compared to European countries.
Still, you can't compare what you presumably had to do with limited tools and limited materials and limited information in a (probably) limited climate on impoverished soils with what is really possible with good tools, abundant materials, abundant information, in a good climate on well prepared soils.
We had lots of information, good enough manual tools and adequate soil. It still takes A LOT of labor if pesticides are not used. Real industrial farming is way more economic and might actually be _healthier_ for the environment, because pesticides allow no-till agriculture.
I see. I'll try not to assume that context might explain a lot.:-) Still, at the very least, it may be something like how someone who works with Microsoft products a lot might never think that open source software is possible or even better sometimes? Have you studied organic agriculture? Have you read Widdowson's book?
I certainly studied the organic farming including the 'Holistic' book. It's pretty much the same story as alternative medicine vs. actual medicine - the parts of alternative medicine that work simply become medicine. I've also studied the opposite opinions that pure organic farming is not sustainable and so far it definitely looks like it.
For example, while humans don't fix nitrogen, human waste contains a lot of nitrogen from food that is eaten.
:facepalm: And where does nitrogen in food come from?
Considering how much fertilizer is wasted in modern systems, you can see that this was a big deal in China as part of a closed cycle including other techniques to restore soil fertility.
Very little fertilizer is lost in modern agriculture in relative terms.
Granted there are other issues with pathogens and contamination from "night soil", but nonetheless
Pathogens are not a problem, they are outcompeted by soil bacteria during composting.
China is an example of doing wihout the Haber process for 4000 years and still supporting big populations by other means.
facepalm^2. China's population grew 3 _times_ during the last century virtually without increasing the land use, because of the fertilizers and pesticides.
If we wanted to do rotational cropping and intercropping to just feed humans, it seems to me it is likely quite feasible, especially with agricultural robots to manage that complexity instead of a lot of manual labor.
Still won't work. You'll need livestock for manure (to concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients). And agricultural robots are a pipe dream. Unlike you, I actually helped to grow my own food (lean years after the USSR collapse) so I appreciate the amount labor required for that.
And I also worked with the Great Evil (Monsanto) on actual modern agriculture to appreciate the difference.
Duh. So perhaps these billions of people should eat tree bark instead of wheat, rice and corn? Fruit trees are _easy_ - they grow slowly and don't require much fertilizer anyway.
And with most vegetables you have the same problem - if they are high-yield and annual then you need fertilizer. Even beans (that can fix their own nitrogen) produce less yield in dry weight than wheat with fertilizer.
Also: bushles? In what age do you live? What is a bushel?
It's a standard unit for crop yield measurement (1 bushel of wheat is 27 kg) in the US. It's stupid but traditional, kinda like hydrologists use acre-feet for water storage data.
Wow! 1909 is so modern. Not. Since that time wheat yields were improved by more than 5 times with the help of fertilizers.
Human waste does not help with nitrogen as humans can't _fix_ atmospheric nitrogen. You can use animals to help to _concentrate_ nitrogen from pastures into small fields, but this simply does not scale.
As for 'holding capacity' - that's such a bullshit that only greenie hippies with granola for brains can buy it. In a typical fertilized soil the concentration of nitrogen is usually around 25 parts per _million_ by weight. Meanwhile, potassium is naturally about 100ppm with huge variation (from 40ppm to 130ppm) having little effect on crops. The rest of micronutrients like zinc or iron are even less.
For comparison, sodium levels are usually around 500-700ppm.
Yeah, sure. Please show me a "permaculture" that provides at least 40 bushels of wheat per acre with the total costs less than $6 per bushel. This is about average performance now, with top cultivars and agricultural techniques allowing to go up to 150 bu/ac yields (but they also have higher costs).
Legumes help, but their nitrogen content is way too low to support non-happy-hippie agriculture where you actually need high yields. It's useful to _decrease_ the dependency on nitrogen fertilizers, but they can't replace them. And slow-release fertilizers are very well used in traditional agriculture.
And "nitrogen displacing micronutrients" is a pure BS.
This very topic is discussed in "Entertaining Physics" printed first in 1912. And I'm sure it has been discussed even earlier.
Mathematically it's an example of a degenerate orbit with one zero semi-axis, and the orbital period can be simply calculated from Kepler's laws.
What's more interesting, it even holds true if you do not move through the center of the Earth! For example, a train from any place on Earth to any other place on Earth will move all by itself and always arrive at destination in about 45 minutes (neglecting the oblateness of the Earth and need to compensate for Coriolis forces and friction) if you put it inside a completely straight tunnel.
Each financial transaction over NFC includes a cryptographic signature. All the attacks on NFC basically involve signal interception and/or retransmission. The next generation of NFC systems will include distance-bounding protocols to combat even that possibility.
I'm was an H-1B and I came to the US for a salary that put me in the top tax bracket. My job description included development of critical medical systems.
H1B is simply an employment visa, that could be used for many purposes. There actually are no other options, even for highly qualified professionals (L1 requires corporate relationships, B1-in-lieu-of-H is extremely rare and Green Card processing takes way too much time).
Slashdot Mirror
They can do it right now with child porn or drugs. Why should I care specifically about guns?
They cause crime. That's demonstrably true. It's just that crime falls so much that additional gun deaths are masked. Then this happens: http://thesocietypages.org/soc...
Crime rates in the U.S. have fallen dramatically with gun ownership.
And in Germany they fell without gun ownership.
Can I open a bar and a trash dump near your house?
Lots of countries restrict gun ownership and yet are much freer than the US. So I call BS on this.
Then this militia replaced the local gang and business was back to normal.
Yeah, and also ban all gun death research. No data = no problem! Ignorance is strength!
I think the best way forward would be to take a page from those nice police officers in Cleveland and just legalize shooting anyone carrying a gun. Outright and without any questions.
Except that nobody actually collects those stats. CDC is expressly forbidden from studying gun death epidemiology. Well, truth has always been the enemy of conservatives.
There's a simple solution for that problem. Own a gun => go to jail law. After a few years most of guns will naturally be cleared from streets.
Because gun nuts are totally trembling in fear that they might be deprived of their penis-extenders. And they won't be able to protect their homes and precious little children without at least AR-15 and a bazooka.
For the record, I support gun ownership with strict background checks, regular checks for gun safety and mandatory serial numbers on firing pins.
Please, tell me your address. I'll park my gas tanker near your house. Oh, it's triggered to self-explode if anybody tries to move it. And it leaks oil and stinks just a little.
It's a Constitutional right to move around, right?
I fucking HOPE that government confiscates guns from these gun-fondlers. They are demostratably NOT responsible gun owners.
Bullshit. I probably have the most complicated tax situation (being a citizen of one country, living in another, filing taxes in a third one and having significant US income without SSN) and US taxes were not a problem at all apart from understanding the tax forms. And regular expats won't even have to pay anything unless you earn more than about $200k and live in a tax-haven country like Singapore.
1) Vulkan does away with OpenGL state so it's easy to wrap.
2) It exists, see: piglit ( http://piglit.freedesktop.org/ ).
3..5]) Good idea.
Welcome to the exciting world of Trisolarium!
It's in part a cycle -- land to humans to waste to land. Only in part as nitrogen can oxidize to go back to the air, so it needs to get fixed again by bacteria.
Actually, you excrete most of your nitrogen through kidneys. Pig/human dung contains just 0.3% of nitrogen by weight. Anyway, you can read historical data - human waste is not enough, even using it for compost required to lay fields fallow one year out of three or four (depending on location).
"Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones" The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation"
That's because the total amount of fertilizers used is huge. Very little of it is lost, but even that can cause trouble.
What that shows is that alternatives have worked. China is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. If they could do it, it shows the US could do it and other countries could do it.
It was not nearly the most densely populated place (England was) before the 20-th century. China was pretty average compared to European countries.
Still, you can't compare what you presumably had to do with limited tools and limited materials and limited information in a (probably) limited climate on impoverished soils with what is really possible with good tools, abundant materials, abundant information, in a good climate on well prepared soils.
We had lots of information, good enough manual tools and adequate soil. It still takes A LOT of labor if pesticides are not used. Real industrial farming is way more economic and might actually be _healthier_ for the environment, because pesticides allow no-till agriculture.
I see. I'll try not to assume that context might explain a lot. :-) Still, at the very least, it may be something like how someone who works with Microsoft products a lot might never think that open source software is possible or even better sometimes? Have you studied organic agriculture? Have you read Widdowson's book?
I certainly studied the organic farming including the 'Holistic' book. It's pretty much the same story as alternative medicine vs. actual medicine - the parts of alternative medicine that work simply become medicine. I've also studied the opposite opinions that pure organic farming is not sustainable and so far it definitely looks like it.
For example, while humans don't fix nitrogen, human waste contains a lot of nitrogen from food that is eaten.
:facepalm: And where does nitrogen in food come from?
Considering how much fertilizer is wasted in modern systems, you can see that this was a big deal in China as part of a closed cycle including other techniques to restore soil fertility.
Very little fertilizer is lost in modern agriculture in relative terms.
Granted there are other issues with pathogens and contamination from "night soil", but nonetheless
Pathogens are not a problem, they are outcompeted by soil bacteria during composting.
China is an example of doing wihout the Haber process for 4000 years and still supporting big populations by other means.
facepalm^2. China's population grew 3 _times_ during the last century virtually without increasing the land use, because of the fertilizers and pesticides.
If we wanted to do rotational cropping and intercropping to just feed humans, it seems to me it is likely quite feasible, especially with agricultural robots to manage that complexity instead of a lot of manual labor.
Still won't work. You'll need livestock for manure (to concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients). And agricultural robots are a pipe dream. Unlike you, I actually helped to grow my own food (lean years after the USSR collapse) so I appreciate the amount labor required for that.
And I also worked with the Great Evil (Monsanto) on actual modern agriculture to appreciate the difference.
And with most vegetables you have the same problem - if they are high-yield and annual then you need fertilizer. Even beans (that can fix their own nitrogen) produce less yield in dry weight than wheat with fertilizer.
Also: bushles? In what age do you live? What is a bushel?
It's a standard unit for crop yield measurement (1 bushel of wheat is 27 kg) in the US. It's stupid but traditional, kinda like hydrologists use acre-feet for water storage data.
Wow! 1909 is so modern. Not. Since that time wheat yields were improved by more than 5 times with the help of fertilizers.
Human waste does not help with nitrogen as humans can't _fix_ atmospheric nitrogen. You can use animals to help to _concentrate_ nitrogen from pastures into small fields, but this simply does not scale.
As for 'holding capacity' - that's such a bullshit that only greenie hippies with granola for brains can buy it. In a typical fertilized soil the concentration of nitrogen is usually around 25 parts per _million_ by weight. Meanwhile, potassium is naturally about 100ppm with huge variation (from 40ppm to 130ppm) having little effect on crops. The rest of micronutrients like zinc or iron are even less.
For comparison, sodium levels are usually around 500-700ppm.
Yeah, sure. Please show me a "permaculture" that provides at least 40 bushels of wheat per acre with the total costs less than $6 per bushel. This is about average performance now, with top cultivars and agricultural techniques allowing to go up to 150 bu/ac yields (but they also have higher costs).
You certainly CAN grow stuff with little or no fertilizers, that's what humanity did for millenia. You just can't do it with high enough yields.
Legumes help, but their nitrogen content is way too low to support non-happy-hippie agriculture where you actually need high yields. It's useful to _decrease_ the dependency on nitrogen fertilizers, but they can't replace them. And slow-release fertilizers are very well used in traditional agriculture.
And "nitrogen displacing micronutrients" is a pure BS.
This very topic is discussed in "Entertaining Physics" printed first in 1912. And I'm sure it has been discussed even earlier.
Mathematically it's an example of a degenerate orbit with one zero semi-axis, and the orbital period can be simply calculated from Kepler's laws.
What's more interesting, it even holds true if you do not move through the center of the Earth! For example, a train from any place on Earth to any other place on Earth will move all by itself and always arrive at destination in about 45 minutes (neglecting the oblateness of the Earth and need to compensate for Coriolis forces and friction) if you put it inside a completely straight tunnel.
Bing! Wrong.
Each financial transaction over NFC includes a cryptographic signature. All the attacks on NFC basically involve signal interception and/or retransmission. The next generation of NFC systems will include distance-bounding protocols to combat even that possibility.
I'm was an H-1B and I came to the US for a salary that put me in the top tax bracket. My job description included development of critical medical systems.
H1B is simply an employment visa, that could be used for many purposes. There actually are no other options, even for highly qualified professionals (L1 requires corporate relationships, B1-in-lieu-of-H is extremely rare and Green Card processing takes way too much time).