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Comment Re:c++? (Score 1) 407

Care to explain why C++ does not fulfill "Alan Kay's definition of OO"?
It has classes, but method dispatch is tied to the class hierarchy ... I doubt Alan Kay made any statement about that. ... so if you want to really adopt an OO style you need to use multiple inheritance and pure abstract base classes,
This is complete nonsense as it has no influence on method dispatch.

Comment Re:Climate change phobia (Score 1) 341

You are an idiot.
There is no known and no imagined natural cause that can change the climate in such a rate, with that speed and impact, as we observ it right now.
So the 'low resolution' of historical data is just fine. On top of that: the resolution is not so low as you think. Sea level changes are an extremely precise measurement.

Comment Re:Yes, Haber's life is an example of that irony (Score 1) 224

In perma cultures vegetables work just fine.
You simply intermix them with the trees. There are also solutions that require less or no fertilizer for traditional farming, like planting alfalfa between the wheat/corn and between grass on meadows.
In germany many farmers have enough cattle to use their waste as fertilizers (actually they produce often to much waste considering the size of the farms). But I never dug into that matter. If I plant a perma culture orchard it will be based around vegetables and fruit trees anyway. Perhaps a few simple animals, chickens and goats or something, nothing fancy.

Regarding the billions, yes, plenty of cultures, e.g. ananas/pineapple or bananas, basically everything you can think of, is grown in monocultures. Many of those can be changed into intermixed cultures, reducing need for fertilizer and pesticides.

So a bushel is close to half a "Zentner", the german measurement which is 100pounds/50kg. Perhaps I can memorize that for future reference. I believe field yield is still measured in Zentner ... instead of 100kg units or tons.

Comment Re:amazing (Score 1) 279

For most things it can only be estimated.

E.g. playing chess. It took "Big Blue" about 11.5 GFLOPs to beat Kasparov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So the assumption is, the brain needs similar power. Which is ofc not the case as it works with associative memory and other short cuts the machine has not.

Hearing e.g. works mainly already on the first level where the sound waves are stimulating hairs in the cochlea, which are connected to roughly 30,000 neurons. So both ears produce input signals for 60,000 neurons like something 100 to 200 times per second. I see now my estimate that one ear needs 20k FLOPs processing power is likely much to low.

OTOH there is plenty of additional processing going on for detecting the direction of the direction to the sound source and estimated distance etc.

Comment Re:Nothing important. (Score 1) 203

Let's give some examples [worldbank.org]: Nigeria has a population growth rate of 2.3% (which is a doubling time of just over 30 years). India and Indonesia still have population growth rates of 1.3% (doubling time of roughly 55 years). Pakistan has a population growth rate of 1.8% (doubling time of roughly 39 years). These rates are all due to reproduction and include a bit of emigration.
Extremely good examples.
100 years ago the grows was like 30% or bigger.

Food is an export product of the US and the high demand for food globally helps put more pressure on the US's agriculture resources. Less demand means less land put under the plow.
Even worse :D supporting my point. No one forces the USA to destroy their own farming area, just to sell "a bit of food" to foreign countries (destroying the farming economy btw with that in those countries, to be able to buy land cheap there, doing the same destruction there as well)
Blaming population growth there is just cynic. Farm land is destroyed because the big food companies try to manipulate world, just like the oil companies.

My view is that this is typical environmental Calvinism that ignores overpopulation, the elephant in the room. There is no problem. The planet can hold 4 times as many people without problems, perhaps even ten times. The way our economy/politics works is the problem, and that is what the CoR is pointing out.

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