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Comment: Re:beyond funny (Score 1) 117

by caseih (#46449081) Attached to: Interviews: ESR Answers Your Questions

Maybe I'm misreading your tone here, and you really are trying to be funny. If you're not, then what are you talking about? Climate change denial? Doesn't appear to me to be the case: http://www.esr.org/outreach/cl...

Pretty clear explanations on his site of why human factors are contributing to global climate change.

Comment: Re:End farming subsidies (Score 1) 543

by caseih (#46447551) Attached to: Meat Makes Our Planet Thirsty

This might be a good time to post a link to a fascinating radio program I just heard today on the chicken and hog industries. And it also has something to do with cattle too because these big food companies are starting to use their market clout to bring secret grower contracts to bear that undermine the free market, and, even if subsidies were eliminated, make the subsidy issue almost moot. It's honestly pretty scarey (and I say that as a farmer). And it's also directly relevant to this article and conversation.


I do know as a farmer that this system of food production is working its way into other food areas besides meat production. Potato production is now governed largely by secret contracts with regional monopolies who care only about their profits, though they pretended to be farmers' friends for many years. And when contracts result in farms not making enough money to be solvent, the big processors are extremely happy to help farmers out by buying their farms out. This means in Idaho much of the prime farmland is directly owned by the processors. At this point, the open market and subsidies are largely irrelevant now.

So far other bulk food commodities like wheat and soybeans still have an open market, but who knows what will happen as consolidation among grain buyers continues.

Comment: Re:A fractal of bad design. (Score 1) 254

by caseih (#46413177) Attached to: The New PHP

Just wasted a ton of time reading through that rebuttal thread. Wow. Eevee is very articulate and pleasant. ManiacDan on the other hand tries to turn just about every specific language criticism into, "no it's a feature!" and a personal attack on Eevee. It's clear that Eevee has broad experience in a variety of languages, including PHP, but ManiacDan has had very little recent experience outside of PHP. ManiacDan came off sounding more like a person defending the indefensible. But I suspect the same conversation would play out on the forums of most any language when specific criticisms are addressed.

And remember, whitespace-syntax of Python really *is* a feature. ;)

Comment: Re:Why use the Zend engine at all? (Score 1) 254

by caseih (#46410213) Attached to: The New PHP

Perhaps people should start using it more. It apparently is capable of running Drupal and Wordpress, and seems to give some significant performance benefits for those apps. For shops that already have a lot of Java infrastructure, and if they need to roll a PHP site with Drupal,Wordpress, or some other framework, using Quercus is a no-brainer (though you can argue that not using Drupal or Wordpress is a no-brainer). A lot of the security problems of PHP are mitigated. IE if you can manipulate bad PHP code, you're not going to get access to the webroot and Apache.

Had I known about Quercus when my employer rolled out its Drupal site a few years ago, I would have given Quercus a seriously try.

Comment: Spending stolen bitcoins and the blockchain (Score 1) 704

by caseih (#46397731) Attached to: Bitcoin Exchange Flexcoin Wiped Out By Theft

Question here. I've read several articles on how bitcoin works but I'm still unclear on specifics.

Unless the stolen bitcoins can be laundered and spent, they are worthless to the thieves. Sooner or later they'll want to spend or sell them. At that point, won't the distributed blockchain be notified of this transaction? '

Also what happens if a user had a backup of his bitcoins on a usb stick somewhere?

Comment: Re:ANDROID != LINUX (Score 2, Interesting) 487

by caseih (#46394461) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

Do you deny that Android apps can run on an Android stack on QNX or Windows? Android is the environment: the whole stack, of which a major component is a virtual machine. The bottom of the pyramid is the Linux kernel, as you say, but I maintain it's not technically an essential part and could be replaced, with enough effort. I'm not sure how well BlueStacks or Windroy run at present, but they certainly run on a Windows kernel. And I'm not saying the kernel of Android is likely to change. Only that it could very well have been different.

Yes you're right that by choosing Linux to be the kernel of Android, there have been benefits that flowed back into the community, though I do note that Android's kernel is still technically a fork of Linux, and hasn't yet been integrated into the mainline git repositories that I know of.

Not everyone shares your narrow definition of "operating system." The definition I was taught in uni, which is shared by some random wikipedia editor, is that the Operating System is a collection of software that manages resources and provides services for a program to run on top of it. By this definition, Android *is* the OS, and happens to have a Linux kernel at its core. It's also the reason that Stallman insists on Linux distributions, "GNU/Linux." Also, many distros correctly call themselves "Operating Systems." Debian calls itself "the Universal Operating System" and comes with either a Linux kernel or a FreeBSD kernel.

Comment: Re:ANDROID != LINUX (Score 4, Informative) 487

by caseih (#46393979) Attached to: Android Beats iOS As the Top Tablet OS

Yes but Linux is really just incidental. It might have been picked for cost, or stability, or openness, but it's irrelevant to Android and Android users, for all intents and purposes. Sure those of us that know how can install a posix userspace and get a Linux shell. But most people will never see beyond the apps, which are targeting a specific VM stack that could easily have been developed to run on a different kernel, either home-grown, or a commercial alternative like QNX. In fact we know this is true because there are ways of running Android apps on Blackberry and even MS Windows. So don't be too proud that Linux powers Android. Especially not until we can run Android on a stock Linux kernel. So far as I know Google still hasn't merged all their changes (some have been merged), so I consider Android's kernel a fork for now.


by caseih (#46393643) Attached to: Walmart Unveils Turbine-Powered WAVE Concept Truck

While that is true, rail companies just aren't interested in operating spur lines and connecting to a lot of smaller places. They only care about the mainlines where they can haul very long trains long distances. Around here the rail companies don't even want to talk to you about providing bulk goods cars unless you can fill 100 cars at a time. Only larger terminals have that much track on their land.

The end result is that trucks are required to get products to and from the railway, and at that point it's often cheaper to run the trucks all the way through.

Railways got a sweet deal; the land and tracks were originally paid for by the public. They have the land now in perpetuity. But they are interested in short-term quarterly profits (and having as large a profit as possible), so they aren't interested in expanding. Since everyone is only interested in their bottom like we have the situation that we find ourselves in now. It's not sustainable, obviously. But unless people are willing to dump serious public money into public works to promote rail, and have the guts to regulate it for the benefit of all the public, nothing is going to change.

Comment: Re:There's no such thing as free with Microsoft (Score 1) 392

by caseih (#46377047) Attached to: Free (Gratis) Version of Windows Could Be a Reality Soon

With the exception of the update reboot thing, you could also argue the real cost of Linux is the hours you spend with it as well. Every time I do a major distro update, it takes me about a full day to get back up and running 100%, making sure my data got moved over to the new install, setting up the services and daemons. Often config file formats have changed slightly, so I have to tweak my old config files. Sometimes new bugs and incompatibilities show up (looking at you, nVidia). Despite its reputation, I've found modern Linux distributions aren't very backwards compatible with older hardware. Just upgraded to a distro with 3.12 kernel from an old distro with 2.6.32. And no matter what I do I can't make the nVidia (any version) or nouveau drivers work with my integrated geforce 8200 video card properly (gnome 3 trying to composite windows hard locks my machine, openGL is iffy, any compositing with KDE or compiz also definitely hard locks). So $50 later I've got a video card coming to hopefully address this issue. The older kernel worked fine even with a very recent nVidia driver. However that's not supported any longer, and certainly not by the newer distro release.

Before you ask, yes I do know how to use Linux, in fact I've used it professionally and exclusively for many years. So this is in no way intended to a billy gates-style troll comment. Just a statement of fact.

There's the old adage that Linux is only free if your time is free. It is cheaper than Windows for me, both in terms of time and money, but it surely isn't free in cost. Sometimes it can be quite expensive.

Comment: Re:Exciting, but it will take a lot of work yet (Score 1) 56

by caseih (#46371689) Attached to: Inside Chris Anderson's Open-Source Drone Factory

Easy for you to say. Tell that to the researchers working in this area. Just shifting your angle of view is enough to change the colors dramatically. It doesn't matter that it's the same time, same aperature, etc. Trust me, even a slight change in perspective can alter the shades and make the shadows appear differently. It's not as simple as you make it out to be, believe me.

Not sure what you mean by land is homogeneous by definition. The crops move in the breeze, dirt is a different color from area to area. Fly east and it looks a certain way, fly west and it looks completely different.

Yes NDVI does show something about photosynthesis. Oh look, here's photosynthesis occurring. But what does that actually mean? Is this good? Is this bad? Photosynthesis occurs in all sorts of places. How can I use this information to maximize production and economy?

Anyway, like I say, I'm not trying to stop the progress of UAVs in agriculture, just trying to be realistic about the pace of progress and the problems that have yet to be overcome. Speaking as a hobbyist and a farmer. There are companies here now that will do mapping for me, but the actual bottom line is that they don't current pay for themselves.

Comment: Exciting, but it will take a lot of work yet (Score 3, Insightful) 56

by caseih (#46354331) Attached to: Inside Chris Anderson's Open-Source Drone Factory

A lot of people are getting excited about what drone can do in agriculture. Folks on the diydrones forum, when they find out my brother and I actually are farmers, get all excited to try to solve problems for us. The problem is, it's going to take a lot of work to make drones useful in agriculture. I attended a presentation recently by an professor specializing in remote sensing and agriculture. She uses satellites, planes, and drones to try to get useful data from crops. It would be really handy to determine crop disease or monitor moisture use, etc.

Turns out, though, these are very hard problems, and small UAVs are actually making it harder in the short term. Here's why. A UAV map of a field, typically is done at low altitude, but stitching together thousands of high res images taken as the aircraft passes back and forth across the field in a pattern. Stitching is done using standard image algorithms that try to identify common pixels to line things up. The problem with this is that the very process of stitching the images changes the data. Is this pixel really this color of green, or did it get changed to fit in better (exposure adjusted)? Also the crop looks very different when you pass over it one way vs another way. For example a silk rug changes color if you view it from a different angle or rub your hand across the nap. This becomes a problem with UAV mapping because the resolution is so high, and the number of pixels is so great. With satellite imagery stitching doesn't really enter into it.

And once you get your image, what does it mean? I see some dark spots. Are these individual plants, rocks, dirt clumps, or shadows? Or is it horrible disease? And even if you can detect a difference in the crop's NDVI pixel values, that does that mean? Is the plant just dry? Soil is naturally poorer? Or is disease. Sometimes disease shows up very clearly in an NDVI map taken from a drone. But in the end a human really has to walk the fields anyway, and take samples.

So the field (no pun intended) of UAV imagery is just getting started. I believe it will do cool things, but we have to be patient as we address the inherent problems with stitching, and also develops a means of understanding and exploring the data (google maps zooming for farmers' fields!).

For me the number one thing I'd like to get from UAV imagery would be accurate 3-d mapping of the topography for drainage purposes.

For right now, it's an expensive toy for some farmers to play with (UAV mapping and agronomy companies), and a project for researchers. And for me, UAVs are just a fun hobby.

Comment: Farmers wasting large amounts of water (Score 2) 362


Farming is under more pressure than any other industry to use water efficiently and effectively. And farmers are more aware than anyone else how scarce it is and how badly drought can affect them. Especially in California, irrigation is done using the most efficient means possible. Drip irrigation, low-pressure center pivots that put water down close to the plants. Irrigation losses to evaporation during irrigation are about as low as they can get. Current pivots are, depending on the wind, around 85% efficient, which is pretty good. Could we get better? maybe so. In the end, though, it still takes a lot of water to raise vegetables, grains, fruits. All things that, when they are in season, you enjoy, locally sourced.

I heard an astounding sound bite on the news once. A woman was upset about having her city water rationed in Reno, NV, and, I kid you not, said to the interviewer, "Why do farmers need all that water anyway? Why can't they buy their food at a grocery store like everyone else?" Just. Wow.

Comment: Universe and perfect simualtion are equivalent (Score 2) 745

by caseih (#46261633) Attached to: Mathematician: Is Our Universe a Simulation?

If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected. But philosophically, if one were to create a simulation, and that simulation is perfect and infinite in size and scope, then it is by definition the same as if you had created the universe. So really it doesn't matter, except to mathematicians whether or not it's a simulation or reality. It's fundamentally equivalent at this scale.
