Yeah, I noticed that. I also noticed the SF electoral office opposed it bitterly, & stalled so much it couldn't be used in the first election it was supposed to be used in, more or less arguing that San Franciscans were too stupid to use it correctly : ). And they still take weeks to deliver a count..
I used to work for the Australian Electoral Commission - 99% turnout (ok, voting is compulsory), popn 20 million, preferential voting (ie you number the candidates 1-100 (senate races frequently have > 100 candidates)), pencil-and-paper only. Two-party preferred result by 10pm on election night after polls close at 6pm.
Imagine my shock when I moved to San Francisco and was around for my first city election - 40% turnout, popn 800,000, with a first-past-the-post system (ie tick the canddiate you want, no preferences - talk about watered-down 'democracy' for retards), mixed pencil & paper and electronic. TWO *WEEKS* to produce a result.
Not a clue. Not a fucking *clue*. Americans wouldn't recognize a functioning democratic system if it slapped them in the face.
Sounds reasonable. Although at the moment most of the 'commercial' pot growers in the US and Australia (the two places where I've worked doing research on drug use) pull the whole plant to facilitate processing and improve security. A minor argument for legalization perhaps : )
"Hemp extracts more nutrients per hectare than grain crops, removing about two to three times as much nitrogen, three to six times as much phosphorus, and 10 to 22 times as much potassium per hectare, owing to fast biomass production.
Therefore, to achieve an optimum hemp yield, at least twice as much nutrient must be available in an easily assimilable form as will finally be removed from the soil by the leaf-free harvest. Fertilizer rates vary depending on soil type, end use of the plant and crop rotation. A three-year, but preferably a four-year rotation, such as cereals, clover for green manure, corn, hemp and then back to cereals is recommended to help maintain soil fertility."
Source: Government of Canada, Agriculture Canada: Report on Hemp, Bi-Weekly Bulletin, December 16, 1994 Vol. 7 No. 23, by Gordon Reichert.
So yes, industrial hemp growers (and industrial pot growers) do both long rotation cycles and use lots of fertilizer in order to continute to get good yields. Ditch weed (along with any other kind of weed growing in sporadic clumps) will grow just fine anywhere where there's enough nutrients in the soil - whether it's being replenished from nutrients being brought from downstream, or, to quote the report above again, "up to 70 per cent of the nutrients absorbed by the plants [can be] returned to the soil, in particular with the large numbers of falling leaves" - ie ditch weed sheds leaves, dies, rots, and generally forms a nutrient source for next year's crop. Commerical production of any sort screws this just slightly by removing most of the plants which would have been next year's fertilizer.
.. although cannabis does have a nasty tendency to strip all nutrients out of the ground. It's definitely true that (as every 'American 'legalize pot' advocate knows) the early US govt mandated farmers in some areas to grow it, and no less a personage than Washington himself grew it (for hemp for ropes for battleships), one of the major reasons they had to actually Mandate it was because any land planted for cannabis had to be left fallow for longer than most other crops.
I'm sorry, but I have to have another round on this:
I keep seeing Americans jabber on about their rights, but, for crying out loud, read your constitution and the rulings of the US Supreme Court. After 300 years of crufty caselaw and, I'm sorry, a well thought out but somewhat naive constitution (that made the mistake of specifically enumerating 'rights' to the exclusion of anything anyone at the time didn't think of) you're now one of the most controlled, restricted "democracies" on earth. {/end rant}
"you have the RIGHT to do with your body what you want"
If you're in the USA, Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) says you don't have anything of the sort. This case specifically addresses your right to do as you will with your body. Even when it comes to protecting your own health, let alone using whatever drugs the govt has decided to have a moral panic about this year.
Have a read someday. This case really does define your (American) rights:
http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/vaccines/Jacobson _v_Massachusetts.htm
I'm a resident alien in the US and call home regularly. Echelon etc have been around for ages; I basically assume any call I make that's not via VoIP is going through some sort of surveillance filter. With VoIP calls I at least have the option of adding encryption, and doing so in a transparent-to-the-end-user way so my mother will actually use it. By contrast, while I *could* use hardware to add encryption to a non-VoIP call, but my mother would never use it.
"Those computers are generally ruggidized to MilSpec"
..aaah, not so much. I worked in the gold industry in Australia on and off for 10 years, and while you did indeed see the occasional toughbook, it was usually in the hands of that industry's answer to the PHB, busily showing off his uselessly-expensive new toy and never seeing a spec of dust; more rarely in the hands of a geologist in remote exploration camps. Actual production sites (ie places where we actually bogged dirt out of the ground) used the usual consumer crap. I can't imagine the oil game being much different.
It doesn't matter if he's a psycho rapist or not - the role of the cops is to find out if he broke the law right then. If making sexually suggestive remarks to your daugter is an offence in your jurisdiction, then the information they need to charge him (or place a restraining order on him) is in your daughter's statement. If he has a prior record as a psycho rapist and it's part of his parole conditions not to make suggestive remarks to young ladies then the information they need to charge him with breach of parole is in his police/parole record (which they have..) and your daughter's statement. In neither case is knowing what books he's borrowed from the public library going to make any difference at all - it's just the police being halfwits.
Which is not to say guys making suggestive remarks to women is not a problem - quite the opposite. However, I've usually found that the rest of the frat boys don't think you're so hot when you have multiple restraining orders out on you. And the cops don't need your library records to make that happen..
Ahh, you'd be an American then, correct? Funny thing is, in much of the rest of the world, a waiter throwing out an obnoxious patron who started throwing around lines like "I pay your salary,..." would be applauded by the rest of the patrons. Just because you're paying doesn't give you a right to be a dick to another human being.
i've been reading project gutenburg texts via weasel (formerly gutenpalm) for a couple of years now. Both are free, and more to the point gutenberg texts are, well, text of the non-drm'd ascii variety.
the thing that's really held me back is i've never seen a book i wanted to buy available for online purchase, let alone in a plain-ascii form unencumbered by a need for a particular reader or bizzare and frustrating licensing requirements. i'm well aware of the reasons publishers don't want to release their precious ip into the wild this way, but there you have it - the only form i'd be interested in buying an ebook, they can't sell it in. impasse.
company i worked for years back got sick of everyone complaining about the wait for an elevator (two only in large old building) - the company priced retrofitting building & was quoted something in the millions (structural changes to building needed). someone mentioned having heard the idea of sticking full-length mirrors beside the elevator doors - people tend to spend time checking out how they look (or how the person next to them looks) & the *subjective* wait becomes much shorter. sure enough, less complaints about the wait after the mirrors were installed.
this 'smart elevator' thing sounds like the reverse - it actually *increases* the wait time; most people experience being *in* the elevator as actually going somewhere and hence less annoying than waiting for an elevator to show up in the first place. can't see it catching on.
not just indy and underground - some big budget films used pixelvision for effect. The main one that comes to mind is 1994's 'Nadja' http://imdb.com/title/tt0110620/
i've noticed that most of the coffeeshops i still like to go to just to drink coffee and hang out with people have limited numbers of people using laptops. i've also noticed that the reason not many people use laptops is the shop has few or no publicly accessible power outlets. ie your laptop use is limited to the life of your battery - the kind of people who want to spend six hours hunched over their laptop are go elsewhere.
i'm waiting to see how long it takes places drowning in the 'six hour wifi session and one cup of coffee people' to just blank their power outlets off. way less hassle than trying to enforce purchase per hour rules or other annoyances.
i'm kind of waiting for if you want to use your laptop, you're limited to battery life
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I noticed that. I also noticed the SF electoral office opposed it bitterly, & stalled so much it couldn't be used in the first election it was supposed to be used in, more or less arguing that San Franciscans were too stupid to use it correctly : ). And they still take weeks to deliver a count..
I used to work for the Australian Electoral Commission - 99% turnout (ok, voting is compulsory), popn 20 million, preferential voting (ie you number the candidates 1-100 (senate races frequently have > 100 candidates)), pencil-and-paper only. Two-party preferred result by 10pm on election night after polls close at 6pm.
Imagine my shock when I moved to San Francisco and was around for my first city election - 40% turnout, popn 800,000, with a first-past-the-post system (ie tick the canddiate you want, no preferences - talk about watered-down 'democracy' for retards), mixed pencil & paper and electronic. TWO *WEEKS* to produce a result.
Not a clue. Not a fucking *clue*. Americans wouldn't recognize a functioning democratic system if it slapped them in the face.
'rtfa' i guess.. still, i wonder if it can be distilled into a 10 second soundbite.
The problem is, if it takes a 13 page paper to explain it, it's too complicated to explain to Joe & Jane voter.
Five year olds need cellphones so they can call their lawyers when RIAA sues them for filesharing. Duh.
Sounds reasonable. Although at the moment most of the 'commercial' pot growers in the US and Australia (the two places where I've worked doing research on drug use) pull the whole plant to facilitate processing and improve security. A minor argument for legalization perhaps : )
"Hemp extracts more nutrients per hectare than grain crops, removing about two to three times as much nitrogen, three to six times as much phosphorus, and 10 to 22 times as much potassium per hectare, owing to fast biomass production. Therefore, to achieve an optimum hemp yield, at least twice as much nutrient must be available in an easily assimilable form as will finally be removed from the soil by the leaf-free harvest. Fertilizer rates vary depending on soil type, end use of the plant and crop rotation. A three-year, but preferably a four-year rotation, such as cereals, clover for green manure, corn, hemp and then back to cereals is recommended to help maintain soil fertility."
Source: Government of Canada, Agriculture Canada: Report on Hemp, Bi-Weekly Bulletin, December 16, 1994 Vol. 7 No. 23, by Gordon Reichert.
So yes, industrial hemp growers (and industrial pot growers) do both long rotation cycles and use lots of fertilizer in order to continute to get good yields. Ditch weed (along with any other kind of weed growing in sporadic clumps) will grow just fine anywhere where there's enough nutrients in the soil - whether it's being replenished from nutrients being brought from downstream, or, to quote the report above again, "up to 70 per cent of the nutrients absorbed by the plants [can be] returned to the soil, in particular with the large numbers of falling leaves" - ie ditch weed sheds leaves, dies, rots, and generally forms a nutrient source for next year's crop. Commerical production of any sort screws this just slightly by removing most of the plants which would have been next year's fertilizer.
.. although cannabis does have a nasty tendency to strip all nutrients out of the ground. It's definitely true that (as every 'American 'legalize pot' advocate knows) the early US govt mandated farmers in some areas to grow it, and no less a personage than Washington himself grew it (for hemp for ropes for battleships), one of the major reasons they had to actually Mandate it was because any land planted for cannabis had to be left fallow for longer than most other crops.
I'm sorry, but I have to have another round on this:
I keep seeing Americans jabber on about their rights, but, for crying out loud, read your constitution and the rulings of the US Supreme Court. After 300 years of crufty caselaw and, I'm sorry, a well thought out but somewhat naive constitution (that made the mistake of specifically enumerating 'rights' to the exclusion of anything anyone at the time didn't think of) you're now one of the most controlled, restricted "democracies" on earth. {/end rant}
"you have the RIGHT to do with your body what you want" If you're in the USA, Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) says you don't have anything of the sort. This case specifically addresses your right to do as you will with your body. Even when it comes to protecting your own health, let alone using whatever drugs the govt has decided to have a moral panic about this year. Have a read someday. This case really does define your (American) rights: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/vaccines/Jacobson _v_Massachusetts.htm
I'm a resident alien in the US and call home regularly. Echelon etc have been around for ages; I basically assume any call I make that's not via VoIP is going through some sort of surveillance filter. With VoIP calls I at least have the option of adding encryption, and doing so in a transparent-to-the-end-user way so my mother will actually use it. By contrast, while I *could* use hardware to add encryption to a non-VoIP call, but my mother would never use it.
"Those computers are generally ruggidized to MilSpec"
..aaah, not so much. I worked in the gold industry in Australia on and off for 10 years, and while you did indeed see the occasional toughbook, it was usually in the hands of that industry's answer to the PHB, busily showing off his uselessly-expensive new toy and never seeing a spec of dust; more rarely in the hands of a geologist in remote exploration camps. Actual production sites (ie places where we actually bogged dirt out of the ground) used the usual consumer crap. I can't imagine the oil game being much different.
ahh, the devil is in the details as usual : ) slashdot strikes again..
It doesn't matter if he's a psycho rapist or not - the role of the cops is to find out if he broke the law right then. If making sexually suggestive remarks to your daugter is an offence in your jurisdiction, then the information they need to charge him (or place a restraining order on him) is in your daughter's statement. If he has a prior record as a psycho rapist and it's part of his parole conditions not to make suggestive remarks to young ladies then the information they need to charge him with breach of parole is in his police/parole record (which they have..) and your daughter's statement. In neither case is knowing what books he's borrowed from the public library going to make any difference at all - it's just the police being halfwits.
Which is not to say guys making suggestive remarks to women is not a problem - quite the opposite. However, I've usually found that the rest of the frat boys don't think you're so hot when you have multiple restraining orders out on you. And the cops don't need your library records to make that happen..
Ahh, you'd be an American then, correct? Funny thing is, in much of the rest of the world, a waiter throwing out an obnoxious patron who started throwing around lines like "I pay your salary, ..." would be applauded by the rest of the patrons. Just because you're paying doesn't give you a right to be a dick to another human being.
i never thought of using latex as a quick way to improve readability of text files - very nice. and thanks.
i've been reading project gutenburg texts via weasel (formerly gutenpalm) for a couple of years now. Both are free, and more to the point gutenberg texts are, well, text of the non-drm'd ascii variety.
the thing that's really held me back is i've never seen a book i wanted to buy available for online purchase, let alone in a plain-ascii form unencumbered by a need for a particular reader or bizzare and frustrating licensing requirements. i'm well aware of the reasons publishers don't want to release their precious ip into the wild this way, but there you have it - the only form i'd be interested in buying an ebook, they can't sell it in. impasse.
"what does this button do?"
company i worked for years back got sick of everyone complaining about the wait for an elevator (two only in large old building) - the company priced retrofitting building & was quoted something in the millions (structural changes to building needed). someone mentioned having heard the idea of sticking full-length mirrors beside the elevator doors - people tend to spend time checking out how they look (or how the person next to them looks) & the *subjective* wait becomes much shorter. sure enough, less complaints about the wait after the mirrors were installed.
this 'smart elevator' thing sounds like the reverse - it actually *increases* the wait time; most people experience being *in* the elevator as actually going somewhere and hence less annoying than waiting for an elevator to show up in the first place. can't see it catching on.
how is this different from gnod, other than having some bizzare split basic-free/premium-pay_for_service model instead of being free?
"What does this imply for cosmology and particle physics, both of which have been worrying about other aspects of dark matter?"
You're asking slashdot?
"how will the IT world handle this change?"
change? you mean your hardware clock isn't set to UT?
not just indy and underground - some big budget films used pixelvision for effect. The main one that comes to mind is 1994's 'Nadja' http://imdb.com/title/tt0110620/
then there's the ICD-10 codes for morbidity and mortality related to spacecraft:
X52 - Prolonged stay in weightless environment
V95.4 - Spacecraft accident injuring occupant
here's the full ICD-10
http://www3.who.int/icd/vol1htm2003/fr-icd.htm
at the WHO site - use the searchbox on the left to find more fun stuff.
i've noticed that most of the coffeeshops i still like to go to just to drink coffee and hang out with people have limited numbers of people using laptops. i've also noticed that the reason not many people use laptops is the shop has few or no publicly accessible power outlets. ie your laptop use is limited to the life of your battery - the kind of people who want to spend six hours hunched over their laptop are go elsewhere.
i'm waiting to see how long it takes places drowning in the 'six hour wifi session and one cup of coffee people' to just blank their power outlets off. way less hassle than trying to enforce purchase per hour rules or other annoyances.
i'm kind of waiting for if you want to use your laptop, you're limited to battery life