Actually, the karmic comeuppance to internet trolls is pretty fabulous here. Imagine a crowd sounding like a YouTube comment section. We'd... better just leave them to it.

But rapid-composting systems will render sewage into safe, non-smelly fertilizer in a year, provided you're not full of medications or using any fiendish chemicals. It'll get all the rest of the nutrients too. Really, all we need to do is replicate and rev up a natural system, and reclaim *all* the nutrients. There's a reason we aren't all drowning in dinosaur shit.

Seriously, a fancy jig to get just one nutrient back sounds like a money grab rather than a working whole system.

Actually, have you played it? The UI is highly unintuitive for single player. Even if you think you're creating a single player game, it will still set you up with a game that will quit out if the internet connection fails. You have to get right-clicky and dig around for "play offline" options on the map listing.

So, they're ramming their options down player's throats: playing with the net-speaking kiddies over the internet for goofy achievement badges, or play a linear railroaded single-player campaign that feels as if it were written by a thirteen year old. I hope these releases make some change, because this isn't the Starcraft I remember.

Since browsing this conversation, I had to give mpd a try with Cantata client. Almost perfect! I just want to have ratings and tags for mood/tempo/setting and so forth, preferably built into the server.

I'm going for Clementine because it's bothered me the least. It still has some key features lacking. The smart playlists do not allow the inclusion of a song into another playlist as a criterion. If you sort by a column, no other columns will be sorted; sort by artists and album and track will be random. However, from what I've looked at in the source code, some modest changes to the commands it's sending to its SQL backend should be the answer.

Why that's not top priority on their buglist over some damn nyancat visualizer, I'll never know, but it's still one of the best in the mix.

It is teetering close to a run-away process, and most of the world still has its foot all the way down on the gas.

I am in despair of the industrialized world being any different from the many civilizations that destroyed their land base and then imploded - the Nile, Babylon, Greece, Easter Island, the Maya, the list goes on. The destructive acidification of the soils where tobacco was grown was a major factor in the American Civil War - with that and the Dust Bowl and ongoing topsoil loss, the USA is well on its way to doing the same.

We managed to fix the soil with applications of lime and crushed shells, but we're going to have to learn deeply about the ecology of soil, not just its chemistry, if we're ever to make this. Following this broken system all the way down threatens the planet with a mass extinction like it's never seen.

It's possible to feed humanity and keep the ecosystem thriving in a win-win scenario. That's what the Pre-Columbian Amazon jungle was: agriculture totally unlike that which turned the Middle East into a desert. That's our best hope of getting carbon back into the ground where it belongs in a way that naturally increases fertility. http://www.underwoodgardens.com/soil-building/terra-preta-magic-soil-of-the-lost-amazon/

The parent is right. The people who work their way to the top are the rare exceptions, and nobody born into wealth is going to understand what that took. Inter-generational wealth doesn't mean inter-generational lessons, and it rapidly turns into entitlement to use wealth as social clout to secure more wealth.

Most of all - it's used to trample the ability of others to negotiate what they earn from their work. Come on, if you're not a CEO or major shareholder - how likely is it that capitalism is working to create profits? Most people are being reduced to a minimum or less in this system, and Adam Smith didn't write with ultra-wealthy and ultra-poor people in mind. That would just be feudalism by any other name. Students of history know how dark that gets.

I was home schooled in part and knew others, but I can see how it left gaps in some subjects depending on the expertise of the parents. I personally developed a deficit in higher math while being taught out of history and science books full of creationist young-earth theories. I made up for that later, and I got better, but I think home schooling is a wildcard. I honestly think that those who are serious about home schooling - and serious is the only responsible way to be about it - ought to be forming co-ops to minimize the risk of gaps in teaching expertise.

Using renewables effectively takes a bit of rethinking beyond just plugging them into the same old centralized industrial model. You don't need to generate the equivalent amount of power to a coal plant, because you are free to deploy it onsite. You can adjust it for a minimum of conversions between AC/DC or voltages, and you don't have to put it across a sprawling electric grid and lose power to electric resistance. Hell - they make DC air conditioners with directly coupled solar panels now. Think about it - they're going to get power when you need it most. You can't do that with coal.

You can also produce just a little more than enough with broad-based redundancy. A coal plant needs to shut down every once in a while, and it needs a backup plant or two; this means that overproduction of electricity is endemic in the mainstream economy, and needless with renewables.

A more complete vision of renewables is highly dispersed, diverse, efficient, and democratized. It's also deadly to the fossil fuel industry. They're going to do their darnedest to make sure that the public gets incomplete and out of date information about renewables for that very reason.

Do you really want to make the argument that people shouldn't care about a precious ecosystem if they don't have the money to go tour it themselves?

Also, this is baseload electricity. You don't have to generate all your power using it, but it can account for power when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. A smart microgrid could deploy this along with wind turbines or kite generators, and perhaps biomass incinerators. That's freedom: you don't have to go to war with a tinpot dictator over it. You don't have solar spills in the ocean. You don't have ruined marshes and rivers with it. You don't have power concentrated in corrupt hands. Most of the cost comparisons fossil fuel shills trot out simply omit all the environmental and political troubles that petroleum causes, needlessly in light of the alternative.

If our entire geopolitical system wasn't a huge subsidy to oil, we'd be adopting this technology for reasons including cost and benefit, and be the better for it.

There are supposed to be predators keeping these creatures in check. Unfortunately, we've overfished the oceans and polluted them so heavily that this problem is only set to grow.

I prefer a developer-friendly, open source environment for my gaming, when I do it. Of course, some of my favorite things are modding them and programming them - there's such a huge kick in things like putting a "Best of Both Worlds" Borg Cube into Homeworld, or writing a GURPS-like skill system for a MUD. I personally think that people that merely consume content instead of creating even a little of it somewhere are missing out.

As such, Steam's making the first console platform that even comes close to what I want. I think they're going to have a good shot at raiding the other console's home turf.

It's not just privacy. It's the right not to be scrutinized by an agency of a government that calls its own dissenting citizens who speak out about oil spills, bloody wars on false pretenses, dangerous chemical pollution, or corruption "terrorists". It's a right to have a voice and dignity and due process in a law-abiding country instead of being tampered with and manipulated by bought politicians serving as the lackeys of their for-profit corporate donors.

This ties into every issue anywhere that the NSA and related agencies project power, and that's all over the globe. It's everywhere a grassroots needs to step up to a corporate/government/financial juggernaut about anything, including the women in school in Pakistan.

This government will give everything you've sent or received through your phone or your laptop to a foreign agency with at most a rubber stamp from a court that the public knows nothing about, but will - yes - hand the educational system of America over to predatory lenders and ensconced social elites rather than earnest teachers and staff.

The government that is invading privacy is also denying your right to know about what is in your food and your medicine. Seen the recent headline about Bayer? This same government that has invaded all of our privacy still guarded Bayer's secrecy when its medication for hemophiliacs was infected with HIV and has thus allowed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to be infected, to protect Bayer's profits at the cost of lives.

This government will record your every call, but it won't prosecute the banks which shredded the world's economy and have illegally foreclosed homes - some of which were owned by people who'd bought them with cash with no bank involved, ever, for "lack of evidence."

And yes, this government will send drones over skies foreign and domestic, and without due process fire missiles, napalm, chemicals, and bullets made of radioactive waste into civilian areas all over the planet, including Pakistan. Schools count, but imagine going to school where the missiles can fall arbitrarily. It will call the instigators of these crimes leaders, and the whistleblowers traitors, and use these privacy-invading tools to manipulate people and hunt down those who step out of line.

This government will protect Wall Street while infiltrating dissenting movements with psy-ops and undercover agitators who generate the props for cheap propaganda to justify gestapo tactics in a supposedly free country, and use its surveillance tools to know better how to deliver its deceitful war. PRISM is an abuse of power meant to help politicians abuse even more power at will.

Malala and Snowden have both done awesome things in the face of power that would crush them and kill them and then lie to the public about the whole matter, and it'd be stupid to compare their personal level of heroism. I mean, some of us might only get the clear opportunity to get a cat out of a tree, whatever our merit. Snowden got a chance to expose an oppressor of a much more central and global nature. That's what makes his arena more widely significant, and I think that deserves consideration.

Does anyone remember that money was invented in Lydia, what is now Turkey, to lubricate the barter of things you actually worked for? It's an abstraction of direct means of sustenance, and it's supposed to represent valuable resources and work.

Entire empires - the Inca, for example - have never used this abstraction. The Inca had an even allotment of labor time in exchange for an even share out of the empire's storehouses. They left us amazing agricultural insights, cities of amazing stonework, and fabulous textiles. Anyone who thinks that stock market derivatives are wealth or that the only alternatives to capitalism are poverty or Joe Stalin can chew on that.

Money as we know it has gotten to be a more devilish abstraction than anything us programming nerds would ever allow. It's gotten to be a tool to make sure that CEOs, shareholders, and bankers have all the clout, and hence, nearly all the take. They get paid in digital money for throwing around digital money to their advantage so much that, if wealth were perfectly equal in America, we'd all make $100,000, have a home paid for, have a college education paid for, or some other configuration of lifestyle. I'm not saying that perfect equality is the way to go, but I'm saying that the way clout has overridden value of labor shows that money is now deeply broken.

One of the smartest things anybody said to me was,

"Trust is the only real currency."

Not only that, the first people to call themselves libertarians were also anarcho-syndicalist socialists. In the USA where people have been conditioned to think of socialism as a big-scary-government thing, a minimally hierarchic socialism has been excised from most thought and language. Libertarians in the USA don't even know their roots. So, TFA has some pretty shallow caricatures to work with from the start.