One of the things that goes on in permaculture is the idea of being careful about water use when growing even traditionally water-intensive crops. The idea is that you can actually do a LOT without a lot of water, and also that many mature ecosystems (including rain forests) tend to recycle a lot of their water in the form of transpiration turning into rainfall.

So while we need a lot of water to be used in agriculture, it can be done efficiently, and with a surprisingly low level of water input even in arid environments.

Namely Apple suing Motorola over patent infringements regarding Android. Apple has been careful not to sue Google, so Google took the hint and bought one of the defendants, namely Motorola.

This is a good thing. It means that Apple can no longer go around intimidating Android vendors regarding patents without confronting the software vendor. The short-term verdict will probably be a mixed loss on both sides, but the long-term victory will be to Google and Android.

given the current state of air travel hassles in the US, do people even travel for recreation anymore?

Honestly I travelled a lot last year, and absolutely none of it was for recreation. It was far and away the largest expense I had.

While I don't disagree with Gould regarding the issue of physics in classrooms, I really think it would be better to keep the epistemology clear and well-taught and stop talking about scientific facts outside of the fact that "so-and-so observed such-and-such and this is the data that was recorded."

The fact is that we consistently observe apples falling. We model this using various gravitational models (relativistic, Newtonian, etc). Only an idiot might say that if he drops an apple it won't fall as the default position. But this does not necessarily validate existing gravitational models.

Heisenberg repeatedly argued that data does not imply theory (see his book "Physics and Philosophy"). There is always room for competing models in science. No model can remotely be labeled as "fact."

Well, I would strike the word "true" from the Socrates statement.

The problem with this is that all knowledge should be seen as tentative because we cannot separate the model we build from our understanding of what we are modelling. Every scientific theory is a model, and every scientific theory will probably be superceded by a different one at some point. So what we mean by truth in science is about predictive value, not about ontological value.

So for example, Newtonian gravity is true. It has predictive value. A very different understanding of gravity found in relativity theory is slightly more true, in the sense that it has slightly better predictive value. Sometime we will probably have an even more true, and yet similarly ontologically incompatible understanding of gravity.

As Heisenberg put it, E=mc^2 is nothing more than a quantified version of Heraclitus's statement that fire is the prima materia.....

I am still pretty sure that large hadrons are the stuff of science fiction.

Well, not sure I like fuel cells or the market that Apple is going for here. There may be a silver lining here in that this may delay the entrance of these for the main stream for another 20 years!

Well there's a difference between something like coal which is very energy dense and burns and something like natural bas which is not very energy dense comparatively but poses a much greater explosion hazard.

Please call me when the TSA stops allowing jet (coal) jewelry for airline passengers.

On the other hand, you *can* release your own GPL'd fork and use the GPL to tightly control what you have, and therefore force your customers into dependency on you. This is why single-vendor projects are (almost always) GPL'd....

The article is interesting because it suggests that the big reason for the trend is the movement away from single-vendor open source projects. Vendors who want to control their own projects (MySQL AB, for example, now Oracle) LOVE the GPL because it gives them *control.* That control is lost with community developed projects, and so the calculus there is different.

I actually think that for community-developed projects, the BSD license is the way to go but for single-vendor projects the GPL is much better. In the end though the GPL also protects projects from proprietary forks when the pace of development is very slow. For projects where the pace of development is high, then the GPL offers really very little if any additional protection (as in Apache or PostgreSQL).

I know it is very different for different people. If I don't have caffeine for a couple weeks, I lose my ability to function. For example, I can't show up anywhere on time.

I should have probably clarified I am functioning better than I would be if I was on prescription medication. The caffeine and the choices above really help. However during periods of heavy stress it isn't enough by itself. I have also had to learn to be comfortable with a lot more uncertainty than most people because I literally can't cope with the stress.

But again, I was medicated with a number of different medications for years I can no longer tolerate reasonably. So it is perhaps for the better.

As for your question
I avoid alarm clocks because I find that waking up suddenly seems to make my ADD worse. I use them occasionally but maybe a few times a year....

The other tips I have that work for me:

1) Get plenty of sleep
2) Avoid alarm clocks when you can
3) Avoid too much time in front of the TV
4) Regular exercise and breaks from work help
5) ++caffeine......
6) I avoid too much sugar, particularly on an empty stomach

I have been able to manage better w/o medication on this regime than I could with medication before/

No doubt that such counts as a search if the GPS device records such a location as per Karo v. United States.

However, the question that Knotts explicitly left unanswered was something different, namely whether surveillance of public spaces can ever be sufficiently pervasive to raise 4th Amendment concerns independent of the general lack of protection of public space. This sort of dragnet surveillance was explicitly not decided in that case or indeed any case since. And while such dragnet surveillance doesn't really fit into 4th Amendment search jurisprudence, part of the issue is that it is sufficiently recent that courts haven't had to confront the issues involved.

No, I think it just makes the ADD worse, just like it can interfere (in many people) with sleeping well.

Anyway, redshift has done wonders for my ADD and my sleep schedule.....

but where can you possibly draw the line? I mean if my friend copies it, the friend is the one creating the unauthorized copies, right?