20080517
CCD killing the bees, but cellphones are not the cause, oil is!
Cellphones seem to be the lupus of diagnosis, and as Dr. Gregory House would tell you "It's never lupus."Unless you are a beekeeper who is beekeeping directly next to a cellphone tower, it is not cellphones. But if it concerns you that much, feel free to contact your local congressman or senator and persuade him or her to pass some sort of legislation that will change the frequencies of telephone communication towers or file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission or the National Telecommunications & Information Adminstration.
On the other hand, consider the other factors that are going on. The Environmental factors. Between Global Warming, the increase of poisonous Carbon Dioxide emissions due to vehicles with poor gas mileage (the CO2 argument should be a no brainer given that smoke is used commonly in beekeeping), unstable weather patterns (i.e. droughts and floods), the short-sighted "genius" experts at the major chemical companies (who obviously aren't geniuses), the environmental policies in nations such as the United States, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, the invasion of forgein species, diseases, and viruses, and the MSM (mainstream media) and their advertizers selling us this "Going Green" campaign by telling us to buy things that are not very environmentally friendly or that you won't find at the local hardware store or that are not in your budget (clearly you are not going to find an affordable solar panel to prop up on your roof without it being avaiable in only a few locations (like two states over), costing you an arm and a leg, while living in an apartment or rental property that has a no "home improvement" policy), we are living a a "perfect storm" of problems right now.
It's not fair, really. You can't "go green" and save the bees if you use cellphones as a straw man while at the same time you don't have the supplies, income, or availabity (especially if you live in a "fly-over state") to make the changes you want to make but can't make because of a few people who live on the coast and think that they can solve environmental problems with their bachlors degree in liberal arts or marketing.
A serious problem demands serious solutions not just for the short term but for the long term as well.
Cellphones are off the hook as far as we know, and most beekeeping organizations and websites will agree. If radio devices were at fault, we would ban the use of Shortwave, HAM radio, or CB radios for police and fire departments. But not just radio with those frequencies. AM, FM, Weather Radio, satilite, and low-power stations would also be banned. Why not blame television--not just for the bogus content to get you to buy stuff you don't need--but for the use of electronic components that use radio for broadcast? Lets not forget WIFI, Bluetooth, Infrared TV remotes, UV black lightbulbs, even THE SUN which emits all sorts of rays at various frequencies.
We need to consider that if electromagnetic fields (though vital to speicies such as bees, birds, and other migratory life forms) are at fault, they would have all died when Guglielmo Marconi created the radio sometime around 1900, the EM fields are not at fault. In fact, the magnetic poles are moving, but we have no control over that as this is a natural process that occurs about every few thousand years. Man and bees both survived the last magnetic pole reversal the last time and their is a good chance we will survive it the next time it happens.
I still wake up in the morning to the sound of songbirds, and the birds aren't dying. In fact many species are on the rise again.
Bees on the other hand are in trouble, and the problem for that is simply in the air we breathe. Pollution, chemicals, diseases, viruses, greenhouse gasses like Carbon Dioxide.
I have a friend who was telling me about this problem the other day about how the atmosphere's oxygen supply is depleating due to the reduction of plants and trees and the increase of poorly efficent vehicles. It is like that scene from the movie Apollo 13 when the astronauts need to build an air scrubber to create more oxygen or they will die from the CO2 in the ship. Plants are the air scrubbers. They create oxygen and they also act as windbreakers. Too much wind can strip away top soil that smaller plants need to grow and that bees need to pollenate.
If you live in an urban area, you know doubt have seen the "stellar" tree trimming that power companies like Ameren (in Missouri and Illionois) for example have done to preserve the power grid. IT SUCKS! The trees look lopsided, the trees get sick because the man in the cherry picker is not Edward Scissorhands, and eventually the tree dies and has to be cut down. This is what should be known as Urban Deforestation. As much as the rainforest is a big deal with environmentalists, for the rest of us who are more concerned about the trees in our own backyard, this is a disaster equivalent to those loggers in Brazil who are chopping away at the Amazon.
But when your carbon dioxide output is greater than your oxygen production, you end out with more severe thunderstorms than knock out the power grid. I don't see the electric company putting down another tree somewhere to replace the one that was cut down, and we still get brownouts and blackouts due to weather and poor energy conservation. And the temperatures are still rising in the summer so more fans need to be used to keep people cool or worse from dying.
The root of this problem has one traceable source. Oil Consumption.
With the MSM telling people to go buy Hummers and Jeeps to go on that offroading excursion that they will never do at $4 per gallon and 16 MPG City, it should be pretty obvious what causes the most problems. Now I'm not saying that factories and chemical companies are off the hook, not by a long shot. But not everyone owns a large factory or a greenhouse full of genentically engineered mutants. But everyone who needs to go to work and get food and supplies uses a car and a car needs gas to go places and gas is made of light sweet crude oil.
At $120+ per barrel, and since no one in Saudi Arabi owns a Toyota Prius since gas is under a dollar there, the #1 cause must be is certainly and with no contest of argument has to be OIL!
But big companies such as Exxon-Mobile are not doing anything, even though they have NO environmental policy and after nearly 20 years have not cleaned up so much as a drop of oil from the 1989 Exxon-Vadez Oil Spill. The government has leaveyed bill fines against the oil conglomorate to this day, but Exxon, despite making $400 BILLION in profits last year has not paid it off as they have continued to weasil their way out of paying for this disaster. They've paid only about $5 million in damages, when they own more than $250 million plus interest not just to the State of Alaska, but to all the fishermen, environmental organizations, and other people who where effected by this disaster.
If you had a friend that broke something that was of great value who never paid back the damages ever, would you still want to be friends with them? Then why buy gas from Exxon-Mobile or any other major company that makes promises about environmental stewardship but does not keep it?
The automobile industry can also take some blame for this. America could have had cars as efficent as Toyota or Honda ten years ago, but the upper management at Ford, GM, Chrystler still look at making effecent cars as exciting as getting teeth pulled. SUVs are popular because the trucking industry has big trucks that can crush little car. This intimidated people. The auto execs, who have stock in the oil industry, and their shareholders (mostly people from the oil industry in a quid pro quo relationship) took advantage of our fears, and sold us these big-ass SUVs and encouraged others to do so with marketing towards celebrities and advertisements. And we bought it hook, line, and sinker. And now it is the little things, in this case bees, that are suffering.
Now we are talking about switching to ethanol, of which is TOXIC to bees and can drive up the cost of food for human consumption.
So what do we do? Everyone who is living in confort who does not have to worry about losing their jobs, the price of gas and food increasing, who can afford the efficent cars but buy the gas guzzlers instead, who pretty much run the goverment, the big corporations, and have a silver spoon in their mouth while offering alot of bad advice or advice that we can't implement because the resources that should be available are not available in our domestic marketing area continues to be indifferent of the environment. They're in their safehaven bubble blind to the life outside of the coastal cities. The only reason they care about Global Warming is that their favorite golf course will be underwater.
But what about the rest of us? The government has about as much knowledge about farming as they do technology. NONE. And since the people at Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Shell, BP, Citgo, and ExxonMobile are not Jerry Baker and sure as hell are not Mr. Wizard, we're in deep trouble.
Sure you have people like Al Gore telling us that we are in trouble. It's like having your next door neighbor telling you that your house being on fire is a bad thing. No sh*t, Sherlock!
Why don't we spend less time telling people they are in trouble and spend more time FIXING THE DAMN PROBLEM!
The government, the big companies, and especially Al Gore are not going to fix this problem. WE HAVE TO! No more of this "Can't someone else do it?" mindset. We're in serious trouble all those big shots are giving us is a small water gun to put out a six alarm fire.
We need to get back to basics. We need to kick the oil habit completely. The bees are suffercating, soon the humans will too, unless we can find a solution.
Labels: Cars, diy, energy, environment, gardening, manbearpig, scary, science
posted by Bushido Hacks 5/17/2008 03:32:00 PM (0) comments top
20071225
Watch Out for the Archive Manager Bug in GNOME
A scary situation occured last week that I should have mentioned earlier.There is a but in GNOME's Archive Manager that will cause Linux, or hopefully GNOME to my knowlege, to crash.
Linux doesn't crash, Bushido. That is crazy talk.
True, but not every operating system is perfect. This seems more like a glitch that was probably overlooked by the GNOME developers. Fortunately, no serious damage occured to the system.
What happens is when you open a .zip file with the Archive Manager program, then click extract you get a message about how bash can't extract the files because there are to many arguments. A little while later OH SHI--
The best way to avoid this from happening is to use the console instead of the Archive Manager program.
Just type the following line to extract a .zip file.
unzip filename.zip
Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
Labels: bugs, linux, ohshi, scary, software
posted by Bushido Hacks 12/25/2007 05:35:00 PM (0) comments top
20071223
Safely upgrading PalmOS for the Treo
Palm recently had an update available for the Treo 680 that nearly scared me to death last night when the USB port on the older computer I use to sync with my PDA. Supposedly this update should improve battery life. (Tip: Hop onto eBay and look for a battery with double or more charge storage. The inital battery stores at least 1200 mAh (milliAmpere-hours). For all you physics majors out there, that is about 4320 coulombs (1 coulomb = 1 Ampere-second). The electronics industry likes to use mAh.) While it might be true, it actually adds alot of crap software to your PDA.Flashing your PDA is RISKY, as previously entries will show.
But the people who wrote the instructions for the update wrote four different versions of the instructions.
So here is what you should do.
1. Sync your PDA. Back up everything first. Back up any third party programs to your SD card.
2. Find a spare SD card. You don't need a large SD card. A 256MB will do, though you'll only need about 20 MB. Do NOT use the same SD card that you store your stuff on. It needs to be blank. You can find a 256MB card down at Target for like $10.
3. Go to the Palm website where the update is. Read everything.
4. Use the IT instructions. When you get to this page, use the instructions for IT and Enterprise.
5. Download the update file, extract files to spare SD card. This step is listed in the IT instructions, but it is important to list here considering the following step.
6. Reboot the PDA. With NO SD card in the PDA at all (you can still leave your SIM card in the PDA), take the battery out and put it back in. (That is if you have a Treo 680).
7. Plug-in AC Adapter. You are going to need it plugged in for this operation.
8. Put in the SD card with the update program on it. It should start automatically, but if it doesn't go back to step 6 and perform a hard reset.
9. Follow the rest of the instructions on the website.
10. When the entire update process is complete, remove the other SD card with the update on it. Put it some place where you can use it again when the next update comes out.
11. Put the SD card you use for your stuff back in, but don't put the programs that need to be on your PDA back on the PDA. They may be reloaded after the next step.
10. Resync your PDA with your computer. After you since, reinstall any outstanding programs that may not have been put back after syncing.
What I can't believe is that this update DID NOT come with a Java VM.
I plan to have more stuff to talk about after the Holidays. Fall has been sort of a dry spell here at this website, and after reading some of my old archives, I realized that many of the things that I talked about doing an am able to do now and am ready to explain here in the new year. I would like to get some wiki entries wrtten up for Eclipse, Android, Treo, and syncing on Linux within the next month or so. These are promises I would like to keep as they are what people really want. Not some discount for some sudoku game. (I never liked sudoku. Crosswords are better.)
So until next time, Merry Christmas!
Labels: handhelds, palm, phone, scary
posted by Bushido Hacks 12/23/2007 03:52:00 PM (0) comments top
