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Comment Re:11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed to Water Ri (Score 0, Offtopic) 330

Actually, the main crop that is quite profitable but requires vast amounts of water is not rice, but nuts, specifically Almonds.

I like almonds, but they kind of bind me up, you know? We make almond milk and add some flax oil and then use the almond pulp to make delicious cakes. It's better that way. If you put some ground flax seed in with the almond pulp, it makes you shit like a goose so it all works out.

I think the fact that I know these things is a sign I'm getting old. Oh well.

Comment Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... (Score 5, Informative) 156

No, don't make the ads so obnoxious. I wouldn't block them if advertisers wouldn't pig out on my resources and force me to turn off the sound so I'm not embarrassed or distracted by some loud jingle, with blinking text, frenetic animation, and a flashing background. When ads take more than 5% of my bandwidth, RAM, and CPU, and make my browser unstable, I do something about it. If I have to reposition windows to hide obnoxiously distracting animation, I'll block it. IF it's not easy to block, I'll quit visiting the website.

Comment Re:Stimulation via Content? (Score 5, Insightful) 88

Better question is, if you can directly stimulate the brain and cause pleasure, why bother opening your eyes?

Oh right. Because movies are with propaganda, and the point of the brain stimulation is to break your capacity for critical evaluation.

I'll pass, thanks. I read Spider Robinson, I know how this turns out, and I don't feel like being found sitting in a pile of my own excrement with a beatific grin on my face...

Comment Re: The Pirate Bay (Score 1) 302

Well, the ones I helped build provide food for the community farmers in their individual plots, and they also provide freshly picked vegetables to local upscale restaurants, and they also provide several tons of food to the food bank each year, and they conduct weekly educational sessions, inviting the people who go to the food bank to be direct participants in what is keeping them alive each day.

One of them is surrounded by a "wall of food", a kind of a hedge built entirely of perennial food bearing plants. I ended up coming into that project later in its history, it was your traditional "grid of personal plots in a field" type of urban garden, and the first meeting I went to was a discussion about how to prevent starving homeless people from stealing food from the plots. The wall of food was my idea, inspired by Geoff Lawton's system of building food forests.

"Liking farming" didn't really have that much to do with it for most of the people concerned.

Comment Re: The Pirate Bay (Score 2) 302

Working hard to protect human culture from those who would prefer to see it surrounded by a most and accessed via a toll bridge controlled by them?

It's not just about having access for myself, it's also about cutting off the money supply to the industry.

Having the Library of Alexandria for myself isn't going to protect me from the ignorance of savages. Only ensuring that they too have a copy can do that.

Comment Re:I find this amusing... (Score 2) 250

Will people latch on to this and try to disseminate it? Probably.

Will they be any more impartial than the news media?
Doubtful.

Eventually people might realize that they can't trust reporting, that they must survey things for themselves, and that they shouldn't trust people who make decisions without surveying things for themselves, because those people don't know shit. Probably not, but it could happen.

They'll be old by then, though, and another generation of naive people will be fleeced.

Comment Re:Riiiiight. (Score 1) 233

I suspect part of the reason for the choice of QNX has nothing to do with technical merit or niches. It's out of a religious belief in capitalism, and doubts that a "communist" effort like Linux can really be sustained. Or in other words, FUD. Microsoft has exploited this belief very well. What does Ford use internally on the desktop? Large companies as a rule are conservative, and Ford is a bit more conservative than average for a large company and an automaker. Expect it's mostly Windows. That they recently were partnered with MS practically guarantees it.

As to the niche QNX occupies, yes, Linux doesn't fit well, but there are free choices. There are other microkernel based OSes that have the advantage of being open source and free. Minix 3, for instance. Better to put resources towards making Minix 3 into a quality, realtime OS, and formally prove its correctness, than accept never being allowed to examine the QNX source code. I should think part of Ford's deal with QNX is access to the source code.

Comment Mods on crack? (Score 3, Insightful) 880

Crusades are easy, that would be a response to 100 years of Muslim rape, slaughter, and forced conversion in Spain.

Aside from the fact that Christians did exactly the same when they reconquered the Iberian peninsula, and aside from the fact that in that time Muslim societies were far more liberal than any Christian society (Jews usually fled to Muslim countries from Christian countries), would you mind explaining why no bloody crusade ever went west to Spain, but all East to Jerusalem?

The crusades were the product of a fanatical Christian society, with the motivation of paradise for the soldiers and spoils of war for the commanders. They sacked, plundered, raped anything between Europe and Jerusalem, and that includes Costantinople that at the time was Christian. Which was expected of any serious army at that time. The pretext for war was the "liberation" of Jerusalem, and the real drive was a combination of poverty, ignorance, greed and religion. So the crusades were pretty much the ISIS of the second millenium.

Do read up some history lest you spout more of such nonsense.

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