Funny, I recently bought a place and I'm planting a garden. The soil is so clay heavy I could throw it on a wheel, and fire it to at least earthenware temperatures. This also means a rototiller is useless, so I've been using a shovel to remove the grass layer, which I pile up around the edges of the bed, a fork to break up the top 10 inches of clay, and then a wheelbarrow and shovel to cart over topsoil from a pile I had delivered. In a post-apocolypse world, we can omit the delivered dirt, because you wouldn't choose such crappy soil to start with.

I'm 45, not a weightlifter, runner ... not even a regular exerciser. I'm a little chubby from sitting at a desk all the time. In about about an hour and half I can dig up, till with a fork, and wheel barrow over a 10" layer of top soil to do a 10x10 area. This gives me about 20" of planting bed, the 10" I broke up with a fork and the 10" I dumped on top, the grass clumps act like the frame for a raised bed. If this was done in good dirt without the need for added topsoil, subtract half an hour because of easy digging and no dirt hauling.

If I did two of those beds per day, one in the morning and one in the evening, I could dig up 1400 sq ft in a week.

It looks like I'd need about 23,000 square feet to feed myself, but some of that can be made up with space devoted to animals -- most though still goes to garden.
http://www.treehugger.com/gree...

I started this post feeling sort of positive, but tilling soil in this manner burns 4-500 calories per hour. Do this for three hours per day on a 2000 calorie/day diet, and you're going to turn into a rail fast. If it was only 400 calories to dig 100 sq ft of easy soil, and I had to dig 15000 sq ft, I'm going to need an extra 60,000 calories to make it -- an extra month's worth of food to invest in labor to plant a garden. It is sounding increasingly unrealistic to hand dig a garden in the absence of outside inputs, i.e., food for the digger.

"Touchscreen in the mid-80's? "

Didn't Englebart have a demo video of a CAD like system displayed on round monitors in the 60s? Maybe it was someone else but I clearly remember watching a video of a person manipulating the size of screws to place in holes. Can't remember if he used two pens or not but that is kind of like pinch/zoom. I just wish I could figure out how to find that video again.

Well, this is having it both ways for the NSA. They have a very elastic use of English, i.e., they say data is not collected when it is gathered, only when it is queried. No you are saying that once its collected, they don't need a warrant because they already got it.

Now -- I think they should have a warrant to collect information (and by collect, I mean that in the normal human sense of the word, not the DC sense). But that's not how things are being applied right now, and your interpretation if it gained currency, when coupled with the NSA's, would mean the end of all warrant requirements, because nobody collects data till they look at it (NSA) and the data is already collected so there's no problem looking at it (You).

Where's the flood of April First stories? Do I have the date wrong? Is the lack of them the joke? Am I not getting the jokes?

the other side of that coin and probably more persuasive to a jury: Costco should have thought enough of the children, even if they are poor children, to not poison them.

When you say "Republicans", do you mean the New GOP (aka Democrats) or the Old GOP (aka parody of itself)?

Once upon a time, Federal prosecutors got prison time for 1100 banksters in the S&L crisis (which was 1/40th the size of the "meltdown"). Exactly how many did Obama prosecute?

And remember, it was under the current regime that GWB's due process free detention was expanded to include due process free execution, via secret legal memo no less.

You Democrats make me want to puke. You're like a bunch of Nixons. Hell, Obamacare is just Nixon's healthcare plan with the liberal parts stripped out. And of course, Obama's NSA would have made Nixon cream his pants ... hourly.

So just sneak off and have a heart attack already you partisan retard. Here's the hint: DNC===GOP===FuckingBastards

Term limit idea: one term in any part (i.e., no going to the senate after being in the house) and you get summarily executed at the end of the term.

That would attract some strange people to politics. Not sure if they'd be more dangerous than what we have though.

No -- this hill slid five or six times in the last 60 years, and he said it's gonna keep on sliding. Back when, people weren't building there. More recently, probably with a little help from the housing bubble, people built it up.

Don't forget to subtract the value of the land. The house might blow away, but the land will still be there and it must be worth some amount over zero.

Ah yes, I'm sure you have never used language in anything but a literally exact manner. Certainly you have never used hyperbole, metaphor, idiom, or the 3rd or 4th definition of a word. Conversation with you must be scintillating. Oh -- add sarcasm to that list.

All that is true. But when a kid has no guidance on what to select, it's just a dice roll on whether he selects something useful.

Your answer is is to choose better parents and spend exponentially more on those who will always need help with eating?

... a marvelous but little known institution called the "public library".

You are showing your own lack of perspective. Explain how this works for kids who do not have access to a public library because as kids they

1) can't drive
2) aren't on a bus line
3) can't walk 30 miles to town each way to get to a library

When I was in grade school in a rural area, we did get the bookmobile coming by every other week for a couple hours. Of course, the selection of materials that you can fit in a bus is absolutely nothing like what you would find in a big city library. One of the first books I read was LOTR. Very influential -- for me, that meant spending a lot of time in the woods looking for hobbits. That's time I could have spent better (botany, biology, mycology, geology for example), but I had nobody to give me that sort of educational guidance.

You must be a teacher. A couple years ago I overheard some teachers saying almost exactly the same thing: "gifted students take care of themselves."

Except ... When everything is super easy, it is easy to learn how to coast with no effort. Then when things get hard, the reality check can be horribly destructive. And while it is true that left to his/her(*) own devices, a 12 year old is going to take care of himself, with the brain still developing it's a total crapshoot as to whether he'll be making choices that will be personally helpful in life.

Finally, there will be some example of some city kid learning everything in the college library on his own. Awesome. Except millions of kids don't have that opportunity because they don't live in a great city, or even a city, nor have access to a library anywhere but at school (a tiny crappy one). When all you have to do is look out the window and daydream, you don't learn many useful life skills.

(*) last male/female

I'm not calling Gates a Hitler, this isn't really a godwin thing. But Hitler was a vegetarian and perhaps even an antivivisectionist (early form of animal rights). This illustrates that you can find good in even the most heinous people.

That Gates is using his arguably ill-gotten gains for good purposes, doesn't make him a hero. It makes him a creep who has a little good in him (although philanthropy like his is usually more about a different kind of personal aggrandizement). Secondly, think how chilling his whole law-and-order-protect-the-government stance is coming from Gates (essentially Microsoft) -- just one more bit of evidence we live in a proto-fascist America.

You assume there is no other evidence.

I'm always amazed at how much faith slashdotters put into simple stratagems that might be used at trial. Reality is very messy.