The organic standards do not allow any GM ingredients. If it is certified organic it is non-GM.
How do you define "non-GM"? If I cross my Cherokee Purple tomato with my San Martino tomatoes in a lab, does that make them "genetically modified"? The genes have indeed been modified and the offspring is different than the parents. What if a bee makes the cross for me in my back yard?
Also, remember, snake venom is organic. That doesn't mean it's safe.
Even if your claim of doubled land use is true, cheaper, more abundant food won't matter when we can't eat it because we're all dead.
We are all dead? Why would we all be dead?
I don't know if you noticed, but when pesticides and synthetic fertilizers kill people, they are immediately banned. Hell, not a single person died from DDT, for example, and it's been banned world wide. Many have made quite a convincing case that the banning of DDT has actually CAUSED human deaths, not saved them.
That's why permaculture is the answer. Nice symbiotic relationships that give you good veg and fruit while keeping away the weeds, providing ground cover to stop erosion and water loss, and detering the insects.
Personally, i've never had a problem with insects or weeds even before i heard about permaculture, then again i'm Special®.
No amount of "permaculture" will keep Bermuda grass from growing in a garden surrounded by it. Just as no amount of permaculture will kill a tomato horn worm, stink bug, or aphid infestation.
You've obviously never grown your own food. Easiest to tell is organic versus non-organic hydroponic veg.
I wonder when the religion of science will be replaced by actual science in the general populace.
Whether I use BT or Sevin Dust to kill caterpillars has no effect on the taste of the tomatoes I grow.
However, I had a bumper crop this year in the midst of the worst drought in years due to an organic fertilizer. I don't think it being organic had anything to do with. I think it was the fact that it was the most complete fertilizer I can find (Tomato Tone). While it's certified organic, I'd hardly call ground bird feathers, crab meal, kelp, bone meal and blood meal natural food for a tomato plant.
As for hydroponic growing, the plant ONLY gets what you give it, so yeah, you change the ingredients, you are going to get a different product. I'm sure you'll find that if you plant it in the ground and drown it in chemical pesticides and fertilizers, you'll get a totally different flavor than any type of hydroponic growing. It's same way that a tomato grown in Mississippi tastes different than one grown in Georgia. They are fed different stuff. But that doesn't make one any better than the other.
Also, isn't "organic hydroponic" kind of an oxymoron?
Bacterium genes are spliced into vegetables as one of the most common forms of GMO crops. In general, it's not unusual for genes to be lifted from one genome and inserted into another that would be vanishingly improbable to happen in the wild.
I won't say "impossible" because some genes are thought to have been transferred between species through viruses, but it's a very very rare occurrence.
I'll also head this off and say that I'm not philosophically opposed to genetic manipulation of foodstuffs.
BT, as a bacteria is completely safe for humans and animals, and even most insects. It really only affects the gut of caterpillars. It occurs natrually in the soil and is considered completely organic. Other forms of BT can affect mosquitoes, fruit flies, and various gnats in the larval stage. I can literally spray my tomatoes with BT, pick them and eat them the same day without washing them (not that I would) with no ill effects.
If could could make a plant produce the BT toxin on its own, this would be a huge boon for the food industry. It would make many crops immune to various worms and caterpillars. The only thing that could be a problem is that one person in 100,000,000 that may have an allergy to the BT toxin that simply has not been found yet because it may just give them gas making them believe it's the cabbage that's giving them gas.
My only issue is that I detest mass produce produce as it simply lacks flavor compared to the stuff I grow myself. I use organic fertilizer, not because I'm against non-organic, but because Tomato Tone works the best and it happens to be organic. I also make my own compost because I'm cheap. The difference is that I pick the fruit when it starts to become ripe naturally. My tomatoes are picked when THEY decide they are ripe, not when the calendar says they need to be on the truck. My fruit ripens naturally on the vine or on the counter (birds eat anything red in the garden) and is eaten when it's perfect. It's not stored in an ethylene gas chamber and forced to ripen and my stuff is never in the fridge. Sure, I can buy produce that gets the treatment I give my own, but heirloom tomatoes run about $5.00 each. Why would I pay that when I can grow over 100 lbs a year?
My point is that it's not the GM that makes mass produced food suck. It's the mass produce part that makes mass produced food suck. A tomato that makes its own BT should be as good as a non-BT tomato if grown properly.
That is why that the board I'm about to drop in my machine since ECS IS LYING BASTARDS* has 4 DDR 2 slots, as i already had 4x2Gb of DDR 2 800MHz and frankly 8Gb is all I can ever see needing for quite awhile. So at least on the AMD side boards CAN be found that are quite nice and still take DDR 2, and as far as RAM goes CL and ebay is your friend there.
*- Don't trust ECS and their stupid CPU charts! mine clearly states it supports ALL 95w 6 cores yet the bitch would NOT fire with a nice new 6 core. Tried it in another board, nothing wrong with the chip, its just ECS lies their ass off about what their board supports! But at least the Asrock says in giant letters supports six cores and has Crossfire which the ECS didn't but thanks to those lying bastards I'm gonna spend most of the night yanking boards, from now on Gigabyte or Asrock FTW and ECS can kiss my ass!.
You could have probably just upgraded the BIOS or given ECS tech support a chance. Or maybe you already tried that.
if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today?
I don't know about that. I've been a huge fan of Blizzard games since... Well since Warcraft. Not World of Warcraft. Not Warcraft III or even Warcraft II, but Warcraft itself. I spent hours upon hours playing that game. All against the computer as there was no "multiplayer" anything back then. After playing WarII, WarIII and then Starcraft and now Starcraft II, when I got back and look at the original Warcraft... well, quite frankly, it kinda sux.
There was an old helicopter game for the Apple II that a buddy of mine had. It was awesome. Unfortunately, I couldn't play it much because it was his game and he liked the power of telling me not to play. Of course, the bastard wouldn't let me copy the disk either, even though my//c was lightyears ahead of his Apple II. Well, about 6 months ago, I looked up that game and found out that I can now play it under Flash for free. I tried it. It sucked. Nothing about the game changed. It was exactly as I remember it. It's just that playing a 2-D scroller with keyboard controls isn't nearly as fun as it used to be.
I don't understand why they did this at all. A steam catapult is relatively simple mechanically, and any pipefitting company can work on it as long as they have the appropriate government qualifications. Our carriers are going to have nuclear reactors for a long time, and that means a readilly-available source of steam. Going to magnetic launchers just hints to me that the principal contractor wanted to drive up the costs in order to increase their profit, and the ability for them to charge out the ass for aftermarket service and parts.
From what I understand, the magnetic catapults are much more reliable and preform much better than using extremely high pressured steam. Components tend to break when place them under high pressure, release the pressure in an instant and the slowly pressurize it again.
The connection is "social conservatives" are ripe for manipulation because of the emotional nature of the narrow band of issues they really care about: hating gays, making Christianity the national religion and criminalizing abortion.
Strange. I'm fairly "social conservative" and I don't hate gays or want to Christianity a national religion. For that matter, no laws should be based solely on any religion. Of course, I am against abortion because I don't feel that man should be able to determine when someone is human and when someone is not. When governments are able to start declaring that someone is NOT human, very bad things happen. I'm "socially conservative" because I have children in the house and would like to be able to turn on the TV without hearing and seeing non-stop sex jokes while the channel is set to something other than Nickelodeon. (I also feel that any cable channel should have no rules, but channels over the airwaves....)
Hmmmm. I guess that means you are either ignorant or a liar. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you are simply ignorant. That means that you should not be spouting off about things you know nothing about which is especially inexcusable in this information age we live in.
He is also using "Teabagger", a term commonly associated with a homosexual sex act, as an insult. It's the equivalent of calling someone "gay" or a "faggot". That not only makes him bias, but a bigot as well.
When you think about it, first posts do represent roughly 1% (give or take) of all posts
Maybe when you think about it.. The last 10 stories with comments contain approximately 1766 posts, or around 177 posts per story. I don't know how you do math, but in that scenario, 1 != 1% Many stories frequently get 300-500+ posts. First posts aren't anywhere close to 1% on slashdot.
Yes, but keep in mind that there is not just one comment per story that claims to be first post. Of course, there can be only one, but many will try.
Anti-semantic. Not supporting the state of Israel is now anti-semantic ? He is offering peaceful protest. No more, no less.
What rubbish. Is someone who, for example votes against the current Government in Israel now anti-semantic ?
Sorry, but ignoring missiles launched from school yards into entire Israeli neighborhoods and blowing a fuse when Israel bull dozes the single house that produced those missiles is what I'd call anti-Semitic. You may call it a double standard, and you'd be correct, but you would have a hard time making the case that it is not caused by Clem being blinded by antisemitism.
This has nothing to do with software freedom. It's not a question of whether Mint should have the right to do it, but whether they are jerks or not by doing it.
If I remember correctly, the last time I used Mint (years ago), it was set up in such a way that the income gleaned from the Google searches from the default browser, Firefox, went to Mint and NOT Firefox. I also seem to remember that there was no way of changing this.
Actually, after a bit of research, it appears that it's worse. From reading this, it looks like Mint has its own search engine option that it has slipped into Firefox. HERE is a writeup on it. HERE is the official Mint word on the whole thing:
The reason it is different is because instead of using the default plugin we now distribute our own and take advantage of a Google Custom Search Engine. The reason it it is different from the default Google search is because Google doesn’t offer the same features to Custom search engines as it does when searching directly from google.com. The reason we changed from default google to a custom engine is because it generates a lot of revenue and this single plugin could potentially make Linux Mint into a company which actually hires full-time employees.
Seems this isn't the first time Mint has done this. Don't get me wrong, they deserve money for the work they do, but not at the expense of those that made the tools that make Mint and other Linux distro's worth using.
Note that it says "NASA May Send Landers to Europa", not "SpaceX..." or "Private space exploration firms....".
Private industry can never replace the important need for publicly funded, government sponsored exploration of space.
Lewis and Clark were not funded by "private industry". They could not have been funded by private industry, and if they could have been, it would have made it a much less wonderful expedition.
Yes, Lewis and Clark were funded by government, but they were private individuals, just as Space-X will be funded by government, but remain a private company. You could have also used Columbus as an example, but he too was government funded.
No one is saying that government should get out of space exploration. They are saying that government should play more of a management/executive role and less of a worker role. In other words, the government should say, "Space-X, I want to go to Jupiter" instead of "NASA, hire some engineers, make a rocket capable of getting to Jupiter, make a launch site, a place to store that rocket, a bunch of training facilities and whatever else you may need to get us to Jupiter... GO!"
Face it, religion is a business. Same as any others, the corner stones are money and power. Only difference to any other ordinary business is that the priorities are reversed.
Yeah, because Tim Tebow makes a fortune doing his charity and missionary work. That whole football thing is just a ruse. Of course, we all know that Tebow, or Colt McCoy or even Baylor's Robert Griffin III would never complete a pass if they didn't serve their time serving others. The receivers would simply refuse to catch the ball. For that matter all the people who sell all their belongings to go help the poor in destitute parts of the world are making a huge investment, trading their belongings for unlimited power and wealth.
I'm not saying that there are not those that use religion as a business, but they are the exception, not the rule. For every megachurch you see on TV, there are thousands of small town, churches full of people who are not there for money and power. Turn off the 700 Club and go see what real religion is all about. It's not on TV.
Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.
This needs to be repeated. We used SINCGARS when I was in the Army over 20 years ago. I can not be jammed. I can not be eavesdropped. It changes frequency over 100 times a second. If you gave the guy who invented it the previous 10 minutes of frequencies, he could not tell you what the next frequency is going to be.
Again, this was over 20 years ago. I seriously hope that our military is at least using the same SINCGARS I used when I was in the Army.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
Most of the programmers I know don't care about timelines, eyecandy, popularity or selling points. These guys are computer nerds. Just as car nerds want their hot rods to purr when idle and roar when pushed, most programmers want their code to run fast, efficient and clean. The problem is that programmers are under thumb of timelines and feature bloat put on them by management and sales.
This is not necessarily a bad thing as if it were not for deadlines, no programs would ever be finished. Yes, code is more inefficient, but that is only because the hardware has allowed it to be. It does not hurt the bottom line if a customer has to wait 1.5 seconds for program to launch or 3. The bottom line is what management cares about, and to be fair, it is what drives business and keeps Red Bull stocked in the break room fridge.
You are correct, sir. I was referring to the GGP post that recycled good are valuable. Yes, they have value, but it costs more to collect, sort and reprocess than the finished product is worth.
As for compost, yes, it has value as well. I don't know if the finished product is more valuable than the cost to pick up and let it go through the composting process, however. My city gave us bins for compost. I fill it composted material, all right, but I let it sit in my back yard and rot. I've been running my own compost piles for years. The city just gave me a giant container to do it in. I get another pile without actually having to make a pile. I'm not giving my city my compost for free. For me, it is worth it. I don't know if the city is saving/making money of the deal.
If it were valuable, we wouldn't be paying to have it hauled away and recycled. Not only would the city do it for free, but there would be private companies competing to buy your recyclables.
Sorry, but recycling costs more than the value of materials gleaned from it, with the exception of metals. This is why you see people picking up cans and recycling them on their own. Plastics, paper, glass and so on cost more in energy and labor that it is to create new stuff.
Or more likely, just refuse to collect garbage with substantial compostable materials.
We have a composing program here and it works fine. As a Canadian, the standard selfish American "fuck that shit" response to this kind of stuff is always humorous. I mean my god.. when you eat a banana, you toss the peel into a different bin. Tiny bit of effort, huge benifits to everyone! American response: "HAWR I PAY TAXES WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO DO THAT SHIT!!"
Ya pain in the ass, but basically they are saying "we will provide this service as long as you obey the rules". Put stuff where it doesn't belong and your service should be stopped. You figure out what to do with your own garbage - you created it after-all, it is your responsibility not the responsibility of the rest of us.
If I take responsibility for my own trash, does that mean that I don't have to pay for pickup? I'm asking because as far as I know, trash pickup is paid by taxes. There is no way to opt-out of taxes.
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The organic standards do not allow any GM ingredients. If it is certified organic it is non-GM.
How do you define "non-GM"? If I cross my Cherokee Purple tomato with my San Martino tomatoes in a lab, does that make them "genetically modified"? The genes have indeed been modified and the offspring is different than the parents. What if a bee makes the cross for me in my back yard?
Also, remember, snake venom is organic. That doesn't mean it's safe.
Even if your claim of doubled land use is true, cheaper, more abundant food won't matter when we can't eat it because we're all dead.
We are all dead? Why would we all be dead?
I don't know if you noticed, but when pesticides and synthetic fertilizers kill people, they are immediately banned. Hell, not a single person died from DDT, for example, and it's been banned world wide. Many have made quite a convincing case that the banning of DDT has actually CAUSED human deaths, not saved them.
That's why permaculture is the answer. Nice symbiotic relationships that give you good veg and fruit while keeping away the weeds, providing ground cover to stop erosion and water loss, and detering the insects.
Personally, i've never had a problem with insects or weeds even before i heard about permaculture, then again i'm Special®.
No amount of "permaculture" will keep Bermuda grass from growing in a garden surrounded by it. Just as no amount of permaculture will kill a tomato horn worm, stink bug, or aphid infestation.
You've obviously never grown your own food. Easiest to tell is organic versus non-organic hydroponic veg.
I wonder when the religion of science will be replaced by actual science in the general populace.
Whether I use BT or Sevin Dust to kill caterpillars has no effect on the taste of the tomatoes I grow.
However, I had a bumper crop this year in the midst of the worst drought in years due to an organic fertilizer. I don't think it being organic had anything to do with. I think it was the fact that it was the most complete fertilizer I can find (Tomato Tone). While it's certified organic, I'd hardly call ground bird feathers, crab meal, kelp, bone meal and blood meal natural food for a tomato plant.
As for hydroponic growing, the plant ONLY gets what you give it, so yeah, you change the ingredients, you are going to get a different product. I'm sure you'll find that if you plant it in the ground and drown it in chemical pesticides and fertilizers, you'll get a totally different flavor than any type of hydroponic growing. It's same way that a tomato grown in Mississippi tastes different than one grown in Georgia. They are fed different stuff. But that doesn't make one any better than the other.
Also, isn't "organic hydroponic" kind of an oxymoron?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis
Bacterium genes are spliced into vegetables as one of the most common forms of GMO crops. In general, it's not unusual for genes to be lifted from one genome and inserted into another that would be vanishingly improbable to happen in the wild.
I won't say "impossible" because some genes are thought to have been transferred between species through viruses, but it's a very very rare occurrence.
I'll also head this off and say that I'm not philosophically opposed to genetic manipulation of foodstuffs.
BT, as a bacteria is completely safe for humans and animals, and even most insects. It really only affects the gut of caterpillars. It occurs natrually in the soil and is considered completely organic. Other forms of BT can affect mosquitoes, fruit flies, and various gnats in the larval stage. I can literally spray my tomatoes with BT, pick them and eat them the same day without washing them (not that I would) with no ill effects.
If could could make a plant produce the BT toxin on its own, this would be a huge boon for the food industry. It would make many crops immune to various worms and caterpillars. The only thing that could be a problem is that one person in 100,000,000 that may have an allergy to the BT toxin that simply has not been found yet because it may just give them gas making them believe it's the cabbage that's giving them gas.
My only issue is that I detest mass produce produce as it simply lacks flavor compared to the stuff I grow myself. I use organic fertilizer, not because I'm against non-organic, but because Tomato Tone works the best and it happens to be organic. I also make my own compost because I'm cheap. The difference is that I pick the fruit when it starts to become ripe naturally. My tomatoes are picked when THEY decide they are ripe, not when the calendar says they need to be on the truck. My fruit ripens naturally on the vine or on the counter (birds eat anything red in the garden) and is eaten when it's perfect. It's not stored in an ethylene gas chamber and forced to ripen and my stuff is never in the fridge. Sure, I can buy produce that gets the treatment I give my own, but heirloom tomatoes run about $5.00 each. Why would I pay that when I can grow over 100 lbs a year?
My point is that it's not the GM that makes mass produced food suck. It's the mass produce part that makes mass produced food suck. A tomato that makes its own BT should be as good as a non-BT tomato if grown properly.
If only they did not have an anti-gay agenda, I would concur.
The Salvation Army is not anti-gay. Sure, they are not pro-gay, but that doesn't make the anti-gay.
That's a tight hole.
That's what she said.
Shouldn't that be "That's what HE said"?
Never mind. I just read your username.
I was also thinking:
Answer: That's a tight hole.
Clue: Name something your mother will never hear.
That is why that the board I'm about to drop in my machine since ECS IS LYING BASTARDS* has 4 DDR 2 slots, as i already had 4x2Gb of DDR 2 800MHz and frankly 8Gb is all I can ever see needing for quite awhile. So at least on the AMD side boards CAN be found that are quite nice and still take DDR 2, and as far as RAM goes CL and ebay is your friend there.
*- Don't trust ECS and their stupid CPU charts! mine clearly states it supports ALL 95w 6 cores yet the bitch would NOT fire with a nice new 6 core. Tried it in another board, nothing wrong with the chip, its just ECS lies their ass off about what their board supports! But at least the Asrock says in giant letters supports six cores and has Crossfire which the ECS didn't but thanks to those lying bastards I'm gonna spend most of the night yanking boards, from now on Gigabyte or Asrock FTW and ECS can kiss my ass!.
You could have probably just upgraded the BIOS or given ECS tech support a chance. Or maybe you already tried that.
if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today?
I don't know about that. I've been a huge fan of Blizzard games since... Well since Warcraft. Not World of Warcraft. Not Warcraft III or even Warcraft II, but Warcraft itself. I spent hours upon hours playing that game. All against the computer as there was no "multiplayer" anything back then. After playing WarII, WarIII and then Starcraft and now Starcraft II, when I got back and look at the original Warcraft... well, quite frankly, it kinda sux.
There was an old helicopter game for the Apple II that a buddy of mine had. It was awesome. Unfortunately, I couldn't play it much because it was his game and he liked the power of telling me not to play. Of course, the bastard wouldn't let me copy the disk either, even though my //c was lightyears ahead of his Apple II. Well, about 6 months ago, I looked up that game and found out that I can now play it under Flash for free. I tried it. It sucked. Nothing about the game changed. It was exactly as I remember it. It's just that playing a 2-D scroller with keyboard controls isn't nearly as fun as it used to be.
I don't understand why they did this at all. A steam catapult is relatively simple mechanically, and any pipefitting company can work on it as long as they have the appropriate government qualifications. Our carriers are going to have nuclear reactors for a long time, and that means a readilly-available source of steam. Going to magnetic launchers just hints to me that the principal contractor wanted to drive up the costs in order to increase their profit, and the ability for them to charge out the ass for aftermarket service and parts.
From what I understand, the magnetic catapults are much more reliable and preform much better than using extremely high pressured steam. Components tend to break when place them under high pressure, release the pressure in an instant and the slowly pressurize it again.
The connection is "social conservatives" are ripe for manipulation because of the emotional nature of the narrow band of issues they really care about: hating gays, making Christianity the national religion and criminalizing abortion.
Strange. I'm fairly "social conservative" and I don't hate gays or want to Christianity a national religion. For that matter, no laws should be based solely on any religion. Of course, I am against abortion because I don't feel that man should be able to determine when someone is human and when someone is not. When governments are able to start declaring that someone is NOT human, very bad things happen. I'm "socially conservative" because I have children in the house and would like to be able to turn on the TV without hearing and seeing non-stop sex jokes while the channel is set to something other than Nickelodeon. (I also feel that any cable channel should have no rules, but channels over the airwaves....)
Hmmmm. I guess that means you are either ignorant or a liar. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you are simply ignorant. That means that you should not be spouting off about things you know nothing about which is especially inexcusable in this information age we live in.
Teabagger
Oops, your bias is showing (maturity level, too).
He is also using "Teabagger", a term commonly associated with a homosexual sex act, as an insult. It's the equivalent of calling someone "gay" or a "faggot". That not only makes him bias, but a bigot as well.
Maybe when you think about it..
The last 10 stories with comments contain approximately 1766 posts, or around 177 posts per story. I don't know how you do math, but in that scenario, 1 != 1%
Many stories frequently get 300-500+ posts. First posts aren't anywhere close to 1% on slashdot.
Yes, but keep in mind that there is not just one comment per story that claims to be first post. Of course, there can be only one, but many will try.
Clem has made anti-semantic remarks
Anti-semantic. Not supporting the state of Israel is now anti-semantic ?
He is offering peaceful protest. No more, no less.
What rubbish. Is someone who, for example votes against the current Government in Israel now anti-semantic ?
Sorry, but ignoring missiles launched from school yards into entire Israeli neighborhoods and blowing a fuse when Israel bull dozes the single house that produced those missiles is what I'd call anti-Semitic. You may call it a double standard, and you'd be correct, but you would have a hard time making the case that it is not caused by Clem being blinded by antisemitism.
This has nothing to do with software freedom. It's not a question of whether Mint should have the right to do it, but whether they are jerks or not by doing it.
If I remember correctly, the last time I used Mint (years ago), it was set up in such a way that the income gleaned from the Google searches from the default browser, Firefox, went to Mint and NOT Firefox. I also seem to remember that there was no way of changing this.
Actually, after a bit of research, it appears that it's worse. From reading this, it looks like Mint has its own search engine option that it has slipped into Firefox. HERE is a writeup on it. HERE is the official Mint word on the whole thing:
The reason it is different is because instead of using the default plugin we now distribute our own and take advantage of a Google Custom Search Engine. The reason it it is different from the default Google search is because Google doesn’t offer the same features to Custom search engines as it does when searching directly from google.com. The reason we changed from default google to a custom engine is because it generates a lot of revenue and this single plugin could potentially make Linux Mint into a company which actually hires full-time employees.
Seems this isn't the first time Mint has done this. Don't get me wrong, they deserve money for the work they do, but not at the expense of those that made the tools that make Mint and other Linux distro's worth using.
Maybe, but it's pretty obvious that the GP to your post is anti-Christian.
Just like reality. Ok, reality isn't anti-christian, it's just that christian beliefs are disproved by reality.
Great! If you could provide the proof, we can end all this religion nonsense right now.
Note that it says "NASA May Send Landers to Europa", not "SpaceX..." or "Private space exploration firms....".
Private industry can never replace the important need for publicly funded, government sponsored exploration of space.
Lewis and Clark were not funded by "private industry". They could not have been funded by private industry, and if they could have been, it would have made it a much less wonderful expedition.
Yes, Lewis and Clark were funded by government, but they were private individuals, just as Space-X will be funded by government, but remain a private company. You could have also used Columbus as an example, but he too was government funded.
No one is saying that government should get out of space exploration. They are saying that government should play more of a management/executive role and less of a worker role. In other words, the government should say, "Space-X, I want to go to Jupiter" instead of "NASA, hire some engineers, make a rocket capable of getting to Jupiter, make a launch site, a place to store that rocket, a bunch of training facilities and whatever else you may need to get us to Jupiter... GO!"
Contrary to popular belief among religious fundamentalists, most atheists are not anti-Christmas.
Maybe, but it's pretty obvious that the GP to your post is anti-Christian.
Face it, religion is a business. Same as any others, the corner stones are money and power. Only difference to any other ordinary business is that the priorities are reversed.
Yeah, because Tim Tebow makes a fortune doing his charity and missionary work. That whole football thing is just a ruse. Of course, we all know that Tebow, or Colt McCoy or even Baylor's Robert Griffin III would never complete a pass if they didn't serve their time serving others. The receivers would simply refuse to catch the ball. For that matter all the people who sell all their belongings to go help the poor in destitute parts of the world are making a huge investment, trading their belongings for unlimited power and wealth.
I'm not saying that there are not those that use religion as a business, but they are the exception, not the rule. For every megachurch you see on TV, there are thousands of small town, churches full of people who are not there for money and power. Turn off the 700 Club and go see what real religion is all about. It's not on TV.
Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.
This needs to be repeated. We used SINCGARS when I was in the Army over 20 years ago. I can not be jammed. I can not be eavesdropped. It changes frequency over 100 times a second. If you gave the guy who invented it the previous 10 minutes of frequencies, he could not tell you what the next frequency is going to be.
Again, this was over 20 years ago. I seriously hope that our military is at least using the same SINCGARS I used when I was in the Army.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
Most of the programmers I know don't care about timelines, eyecandy, popularity or selling points. These guys are computer nerds. Just as car nerds want their hot rods to purr when idle and roar when pushed, most programmers want their code to run fast, efficient and clean. The problem is that programmers are under thumb of timelines and feature bloat put on them by management and sales.
This is not necessarily a bad thing as if it were not for deadlines, no programs would ever be finished. Yes, code is more inefficient, but that is only because the hardware has allowed it to be. It does not hurt the bottom line if a customer has to wait 1.5 seconds for program to launch or 3. The bottom line is what management cares about, and to be fair, it is what drives business and keeps Red Bull stocked in the break room fridge.
You are correct, sir. I was referring to the GGP post that recycled good are valuable. Yes, they have value, but it costs more to collect, sort and reprocess than the finished product is worth.
As for compost, yes, it has value as well. I don't know if the finished product is more valuable than the cost to pick up and let it go through the composting process, however. My city gave us bins for compost. I fill it composted material, all right, but I let it sit in my back yard and rot. I've been running my own compost piles for years. The city just gave me a giant container to do it in. I get another pile without actually having to make a pile. I'm not giving my city my compost for free. For me, it is worth it. I don't know if the city is saving/making money of the deal.
Good post, but one point sticks out:
Compostable material is valuable...
If it were valuable, we wouldn't be paying to have it hauled away and recycled. Not only would the city do it for free, but there would be private companies competing to buy your recyclables.
Sorry, but recycling costs more than the value of materials gleaned from it, with the exception of metals. This is why you see people picking up cans and recycling them on their own. Plastics, paper, glass and so on cost more in energy and labor that it is to create new stuff.
Or more likely, just refuse to collect garbage with substantial compostable materials.
We have a composing program here and it works fine. As a Canadian, the standard selfish American "fuck that shit" response to this kind of stuff is always humorous. I mean my god.. when you eat a banana, you toss the peel into a different bin. Tiny bit of effort, huge benifits to everyone! American response: "HAWR I PAY TAXES WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO DO THAT SHIT!!"
I refer you to the following:
Penn & Teller's Bullshit: Recycling
Ya pain in the ass, but basically they are saying "we will provide this service as long as you obey the rules". Put stuff where it doesn't belong and your service should be stopped. You figure out what to do with your own garbage - you created it after-all, it is your responsibility not the responsibility of the rest of us.
If I take responsibility for my own trash, does that mean that I don't have to pay for pickup? I'm asking because as far as I know, trash pickup is paid by taxes. There is no way to opt-out of taxes.