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Man Tries To Live an Open Source Life For a Year
jfruh writes "Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand filmmaker living Berlin, will, on the 1st of August, begin an experiment in living an open source life for a year. But this is going way beyond just trading in his Mac for a Linux machine and Final Cut Pro for Novacut. He's also going to live in a house based on an open source design, and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.""
...if you try, why not go a year without DRM?
But... but... hasn't Stallman been doing this for years already?
I really don't want to know is how one programs in toilet paper. Worse, visions of managers telling me I have to eat more taco bell because my... production... is too low. Oh, the puns, the humanity. -_-
More seriously, it would be more accurate to say that he is trying to live a lifestyle in which only products that are part of the public domain or the mechanisms by which it operates must be made available for inspection, and any changes documented and also similarly made available, without cost. Considering how I have even found 'patent pending' stamped on spoons and forks (really, I mean... really?)... I don't imagine he'll be able to survive the year. At least not without a lot of rationalizing and hair pulling.
But while the experiment will probably ultimately fail, it will at least show beyond any doubt how deeply corporations have penetrated into every faucet of daily living. It is simply not possible to live in modern society without giving the devil his due.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
No woman for this guy. I guess they want the finer things in life!
You do realize that "Open Source Women" are the one with the pretty old professional skill set??? What about open source babies(whatever that means)?
Even then, he's gonna starve in the short term.... takes a while to grow. Guess he could make his own bow and go hunting & gathering...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
What a nettlesome individual you are!
Please pay your debts.
What makes you think that? Like many folks in Europe, Germans aren't big on GMO foods.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Honestly depending where he lives, he might not have an issue. Local farms are a source of meat, if you talk to the farmers you can find out what they feed their stock (most of them are more than glad to answer actually). Lots of foods can be foraged (I make trips once a week to forage as a hobby) and during the summer it can yield several pounds of berries at a time. These get canned, preserved, or jellied. I grow a huge garden and what I can't eat immediately gets either dehydrated or canned. Public water here has its contents documented, so we'll consider that open source. I grow my own hops, and brew my own beer with them. Honestly after a good growing season, I'd feel comfortable saying that I could live around 70% off of foraged and homegrown foods. I could easily up it to 90-100% but my fiance would kill me for taking over the yard. Not that my case is the norm (and foraging is a weird, albiet fun and fulfilling hobby to get into), but if he is dedicating himself to it and preparing in advance I don't think it would be that difficult.
...you consider that good?
condoms? Oh wait its moot....
I once spent 2 hours walking around with RMS looking for a restaurant that he liked AND served pepsi. This was in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, where most good restaurants have an exclusive deal with Coca Cola. In each place we entered, he asked if they served coke, and in a few places he insisted on speaking with the manager and when he got his way, he explained to him in gruesome details all the atrocities the Coca Cola company did in Colombia to workers.
I firmly believe in Free Software, and I admire RMS for everything he has done for the world. I try to uphold my principles, but this semi-religious thing of taking it to the extreme and avoiding anything even remotely related to something you disagree with, as if it was permanently tainted by immorality, is just plain stupid.
My company tries to free under the GPL as many products as possible, but if we freed certain things, we would be out of business. If I refused to use privative software at all, I couldn't even use a phone (even if the soft is free, the GSM firmware won't be).
What this guy is doing is just a publicity stunt, and a fairly stupid one at that. He thinks he's sending a message, but it's not the one he's thinking about.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process."
I'm completely in favour of free/open source software and related concepts wherever possible, but there is such a thing as taking it too far. Wherever the line is, demanding open source toilet paper is way over it.
I don't touch proprietary software and am in the computer industry. I contract with manufacturers to product freedom friendly products to developing tid bids of software.
It can be done. It's not that hard actually.
I took a dump today.. Seriously this is just attention seeking, link bait. If I didn't know better I'd think it was a paid /. add.
I have to ask, did he do the same or did he ever do the same about Chiquita Banana's? There are far worse companies than Coca Cola, and at the top is Chiquita. Hell, the term Banana Republic comes from them and what they did taking over government in South America.
Om, nomnomnom...
He should try weaning himself off with shareware before going pure open source.
While public domain, a complete listing of the laws of physics has not been made available to the public. He's going to have to find an alternate universe for his scheme.
Please excuse me if this is a stupid question, but since when has toilet paper had source code? I love open source software, and I've been a long time supporter of the movement, but I feel it weakens the open source software movement when you generalize it's meaning in such a way, because in order to change someone's mind, you need to have a clear and concise point! But whatever I'll get back to selling jewelry made out of found items and shopping at whole foods.
Why has this made its way to the main page ? Slow news, or people fishing for news ? This is just dumb and dumber!
It's a lot more than that; plenty of non-GE crops are patented. For example, say you go to buy a Fuji apple. What could be more open source than that right? Not if it is a Gale Gala, a patented bud sport of Fuji, or if he picks up a peach, it might be one of the many patented Flamin' Fury peaches. If he eats a carrot, it might have the patented line S-D813B as a parent, or if he eats a pepper, it might be the patented hybrid 9942815. Lots of plants, not just genetically engineered ones, are patented, so avoiding every patented fruit, vegetable, grain, nut, oil crop, ect. and any food produced with them would be quite the challenge.
I don't know how things are in Germany, but I'd have to imagine they grow their share of patented crops there, and even if they didn't he'd have to watch out for anything imported from countries where those varieties are grown. You'd pretty much have to eat exclusively whole fruits and vegetables that you know the variety, or things where the varieties are very likely to be not under patent like lychee or persimmon, and maybe things that haven't had much breeding work done on them like kiwanos and jícamas.
but this semi-religious thing of taking it to the extreme and avoiding anything even remotely related to something you disagree with, as if it was permanently tainted by immorality, is just plain stupid.
It's stupid for the individual because it's a pain and people will hate you for it. For the group, it's good. And the Free Software needs someone like rms. You don't see Apple saying "oh, but for some tasks Windows is just better". Like it or not, it'd weaken the message.
There are many cases were stupid extremists succeeded (take Gandhi, for instance: instead of taking the easy path, the idiot acted on his dangerous extremist ideas of the great English Empire not ruling India), but for some reason people only use the label extremist for people they disagree with.
What this guy is doing is just a publicity stunt, and a fairly stupid one at that.
Agreed, but I fear he isn't that stupid. He's asking for donations.
where do you live??
Open source toilet paper is no problem although it may not be easy to find other than special order from a paper mill. Just use undyed crepe paper. Crepe paper has been patent free for around a hundred years now. I'm not sure whether the paper mill dyes the crepe paper or whether it is dyed by a craft supplies company. If the latter, then it should be possible to buy some of the undyed crepe paper from the craft company, but again, it may be special order only.
This is the common toilet paper that was used in the Soviet Union and you can still find it on sale in every town in the former Soviet Union in their central markets. Of course nowadays it competes with more westernised toilet paper but many still prefer the cheap undyed stuff. It is also a greener product since it is not bleached.
If somebody would start a fad, then undyed crepe paper could once again become a common thing to buy. For instance, what if people made their own dyes from household ingredients like beetroot, onion skins, blueberries, and then used that to print decorative patterns on undyed crepe paper as a GREEN alternative to party decorations. Suddenly their would be a new market and the open source toilet paper users could discretely buy their supply from any craft supplies store.
No most crops are still non-gmo, well lab gmo. We've been modifying livestock and breeding plant species far beyond anything natural for centuries and playing with genes before we knew what genes where.
GMO is generally scary because it is done in a lab with white coats. The white coats apparently add the danger.
What is objectionable about existing toilet paper from an "open source" point of view? Plain toilet paper isn't a creative work (specialty paper with artwork on it might be), so it can't be copyrighted. And patents only last about 20 years while toilet paper has been manufactured for much longer than that, so any patents on the manufacturing process or the paper itself would have expired some time ago. Shouldn't he be OK if he just buys a generic store brand without any fancy new features or copyrighted art on the package?
Of course any toilet paper brand name is likely to be covered by a trademark, but if that is enough to make it not "open source", then Firefox is not open source software either.
Debit and credit cards are proprietary. Cash is closed source in order to deter counterfeits (like DRM). Bit coin is not suitable for every day use and mining depends on closed source graphics cards.
What I cringe about "open source" that it is used as some kind of synonym for something that makes everything automatically good. I bet that by large the biggest benefit of open source software is that it's usually free in cost.
you bastard! give dis peeple air!
I'm far more scared of Monsanto than I am of white coats.
Sent from my PDP-11
The pleasure centers of my body do, and who am I to argue with them? They're the product of millions of years of evolution, whereas I've only been around for a few decades.
When I had a similar problem in China, the waiter went across the street to buy soda for us (in Beijing a lot of restaurants only serve soup, not something to drink). I don't know if a similar solution would have worked in your situation.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nice guy never get the women, good looking (actually, more like showing fertility signs , big breast 8 figure for women, V figure big upper body muscle for men) ,rich, and so forth are the criteria which all sociological study shows make it really easy to find a mate on both side. Nice guy/women, or confident, humour, do not even enter the equation in the top criteria.
http://freebeer.org/blog/about
So, admit it. You're the one that swiped his laptop bag aren't you.....? ;-)
Nooo...its scary because no matter how hard we worked in centuries past we couldn't cross corn with a starfish, or fruit with squid and THAT is why GMO is scary, because frankly some of the shit they are coming up with can't even be truly classified as plant anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sounds like he lives on the street.
I guess I live an open source life since long ago and I'm a programmer so it's not as if I barely use my computer. I guess my house design is open source too since it probably was randomly done and you are welcome to copy it.
That guy should go fork himself...
Maybe he can convince Havanna to open source the recipe for their alfajores. That is time better spent than looking around for restaurants that serve Pepsi ;)
Selective breeding = tinkering with the source code.
Monsanto are fiddling with the binary.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sounds like the NW USA.
so if he gets a GPL'ed chick and modifies her in some way is he gonna share pics of that to the world as well?
bwahahahaha!
Well they're certainly big on something. http://maxcdn.fooyoh.com/files/attach/images/3004/096/153/005/fat_germans.jpg http://www.kragcollectorsassociation.org/yabbfiles/Attachments/SergeantSchultz.jpg
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not as painful as reading this shitty article.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Stalin is right. Read his website, and what you have there is a member of the Loony Left. I myself endorse Open Source software of Eric Raymond and the OSI, where there are no misleading or deceptive terms used to describe the product, and where the real practical reasons for doing it are highlighted. The fact that Eric Raymond doesn't back wacko Leftist causes like boycott _____ (fill in 90% of the world's businesses in RMS' case) is another big plus as far as I am concerned.
More complicated:
Selective breeding = tinkering with parameters and settings.
GM = changing part of the program binary.
Actually, it's quite fascinating, how flexible the genetic code is, because all dogs for instance share the same genetic code, the chihuahua has the same genes as the pitbull or the the scottish border collie. The only difference are the allels, the actual settings on the individual genes.
Until the year is up, since there is no readily available open source CPU to run any open source software on.
Still better than this.
I do. Fancy that; people are different.
I'm drinking pepsi from now on.
If I refused to use privative software at all, I couldn't even use a phone (even if the soft is free, the GSM firmware won't be).
Yes, you can. Try OsmocomBB (http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/). It's a free software GSM solution for several Motorola phones and the Neo Freerunner.
Fair enough. Now explain grafting.
You say this:
and I admire RMS for everything he has done for the world.
then you say this:
taking it to the extreme ... is just plain stupid.
The only reason he has done all of that stuff is BECAUSE he takes it to the extreme. You cannot have one without the other.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
One is that women are actually people too (I know this seems to amaze many geeks) and as such are varied in their wants and desires. What one woman finds ideal may utterly repulse another. There is no one "What women want," standard. Were there, it would be well known. In all of human interaction there is no One True Way(tm) that makes everyone happy, so any time someone tells you they know what it is all women want, you know they are full of shit.
Another is that women (like all people) lie about what they want. Not just to others, but to themselves too. You will see a woman claim they want one thing in a relationship and yet seek out the exact opposite time and time again. That is no coincidence or happenstance, it is because what they claim they want and what they actually want are not the same thing. This is particularly problematic when they haven't analyzed it for themselves and are lying to themselves, so they aren't even really aware of what it is they are actually seeking out.
So just because a woman says "What I really want is a nice, caring guy," that doesn't mean that is what she actually wants. Also even if she does it doesn't mean that it is a particularly high priority. She may have other attributes she values more but doesn't say. For example she may like a nice caring guy but place a far lower value on that than having a guy who has a lot of money and an "alpha male" personality. She'd take it all if she can get it, but when it comes down to it she'll trade nice for the higher priorities.
Finally there is the problem of unrealistic expectations, which again all humans suffer from but research indicates with regards to relationships women suffer from it more. Women rate the majority of men as below average. That is of course statistically impossible so the real problem is one of perception. A great many women feel they are having to settle for someone who isn't as "good" as they are. They have unrealistic expectations, and and unrealistic assessment of what they bring to the table.
You can see this in online dating profiles where you will have someone who specifies a massive list of must and must nots for their potential partner, something that cuts the potential dating pool down to essentially nobody. Thus they either remain single complaining about how bad everyone is or they "settle" for someone "beneath them" since nobody can meet their unreasonably high and specific standards.
For that matter, "settling" is what you have to do. Nobody is perfect, you have to deal with another person's flaws. Dan Savage has a bunch of great things to say on this topic but one of the best is that there's no "the one" out there, no perfect person for you. There's just the 0.64 that you round up. You find someone you love and you pay the prices of admission, dealing with the things they do that aren't perfect for you, because the whole package is worth it.
use a bidet or as in asia http://www.minishower.net/minish_commode.html
Absolutely, there are plenty of patented crops here in Germany, not just GMO - I'm going to have a lot of difficulty avoiding them. Luckily the organic movement has been shouting about 'frankenfoods' for a long time, so there's pretty good labelling of GMO crops - that part is easy. Here in my neighbourhood there is a very active movement of people involved in seed sovereignty, food politics, growing and selling heirloom strains. They should be able to point me in the right direction anyway - my 3m x 3m community garden plot won't keep me well-fed for long.
Southeast Pennsylvania, in the middle of a city.
Hi, I'm the one doing the stupid publicity stunt. Yes, it's a publicity stunt, but not for me, rather for the idea of free software, libre hardware, and alternative ways of licensing. I'm from outside the world of software and tech, and very few people I know have even heard of open source or copyleft. I want to reach those people, as well as publicise and give credit to people who are doing amazing work in the fields of free software and libre hardware. I'm not saying that everybody should try to live 100% open source. In the current situation and economic system, that would, as you say, be stupid. This is about taking an idea to an extreme to get people thinking about how products are licensed, to think about how different business models could work and affect their industries, and to rethink the way they live and the things they buy. And I'm quite prepared to look stupid doing it.
In true open souce spirit he will also not get paid for a year, will help anyone who asks and not het mad when everyone complains that the work he has done for free for them is crap.
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings. You could even argue, that the grafted plant is not a single individuum, but in fact two plants, or even more, if you graft more than one scion on the same stock. My parents once had a pear tree with at least five different scions. So grafting would be akin to have two (or more) copies of the same program with individual settings coupled together. I even have a setup like that running at a customer site, where a minimal Lotus Domino installation at one server works as connector between a non-IBM-software on the same computer and the real Domino server. The minimal Domino is grafted onto the original Domino installation.
I should probably explain a couple of key points about the project. Yes, it is a naive and impossible aim. I am probably not going to have lived 100% open source by the end of year, if that is even possible. But that does not mean that the project will have failed. The project is about the attempt and through that, I want to get the ideas of open source into as many people's minds as possible. As explained in my video, for some aspects of my life I won't be able to find a suitable solution, and I might not be able to be develop one, even with help from experts and others. This project is about trying to find the limits of the philosophy, both the current limits (as in where free software, libre hardware and open source stands today) and also the theoretical limits (could an 'open source' airline ever exist? should we allow access, modification and redistribution of swine flu?) It's also about trying to summarize and define different approaches - for many people, copyleft, permissive licenses, public domain and traditional copyright are unclear terms with unclear consequences, and I hope that by holding these ideas up against different products and services that we use in our everyday lives, people will gain a better understanding of them.
Lay in a stock of those and compost them afterwards, or just use a composting toilet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet
didn't end well. we all wound up going back to DRAM eventually
They went through relationship after relationship, meeting asshole after asshole
Then the statistics are right in front of you. When a person consistently has "problems" with everybody else, chances are the problem is with that one person, not everybody else. Life 101.
they'd settle for getting knocked up by some rich guy
Oh, the horror. They "settled" for somebody "less" than themselves, for the right price. Talk about finding the proof in the pudding! A person who judges the "worth" of other people (as if they have the slightest right) is the lesser human being, not the other way around. Life 102.
You haven't been around the block much, have you? Take it from somebody who's had enough bad luck in life to qualify as cursed: if you must blame somebody, there's only one person in the entire world that meets the prerequisites.
The other problem is if you happen to find a farmer growing non-patented seed, if there is another farmer in the next field using patented seed there will be cross-pollination by the wind so the next season crop has the patent markings in it. Even grain falling off a truck on its way to the mill sprouts by the road and contaminates farmers fields. Monsanto has been suing farmers for using/selling patented seed that the farmers didn't even know their heirloom seed had been contaminated this way (how many farmers have the genetic equipment to look for what's in there?).
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
Now explain grafting.
Grafting is easy: the recombinant GMO grain industry makes a big donation to a legislator's reelection campaign or to a PAC supporting that legislator, and the legislator ends up pushing policies that help GMO grain producers rent-seek.
Oh, you meant the other kind of grafting. That's analogous to loading plug-ins or creating a pipe between two programs.
he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.
Really, he doesn't know how to dig a hole? The only good toilet is a hole in the ground. Anything else isn't normal for the human body to use. Do you like shitting yourself while sitting on your chair? If you're not squatting to shit, that's what you're training your body to do.
Let me know how those open source antibiotics work out.
The OP is alright in the head. He just wants to take us higher. He's a sly fox though.
And I would be all for it if it helped. It's actually counter-productive to our cause. People look at you, and they think we are extremists. They think Free Software is not practical. They look at you, wiping your ass with sandpaper because soft tissue is privative, and they go "That's what using Free Software must be like".
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Not in Recoleta (It's the fanciest neighborhood in the city). Expensive restaurants, with big Coca Cola contracts. No way I could have walked in there with some other soda.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I'm still pissed at that situation. I can't believe somebody did that, specially since it was for sure somebody that was at the conference. I mean, not some random thief in the street, but a guy that actually went to his conference in the UBA. Incredible.
The story I told actually happened back in 2004. He still had a thinkpad back then.
http://www.stallman.org/photos/argentina/mar-del-plata/img_0851.jpg (that's in La Serranita, Mar del Plata, Argentina).
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Eric Raymond backs loony right causes like gun rights. Raymond is a gun nut. So much better, right ...
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Stalin is right. Read his website, and what you have there is a member of the Loony Left. I myself endorse Open Source software of Eric Raymond and the OSI, where there are no misleading or deceptive terms used to describe the product, and where the real practical reasons for doing it are highlighted. The fact that Eric Raymond doesn't back wacko Leftist causes like boycott _____ (fill in 90% of the world's businesses in RMS' case) is another big plus as far as I am concerned.
The stuff the RMS backs might be wacky at times, but the stuff that ESR backs and seems to believe in is plain scary at times (like taking guns on a plane to be able to shoot terrorists). I for one would not like to have a serious discussion with RMS, but I'd not even want to be in the same room as ESR.
Nooo...its scary because no matter how hard we worked in centuries past we couldn't cross corn with a starfish, or fruit with squid and THAT is why GMO is scary, because frankly some of the shit they are coming up with can't even be truly classified as plant anymore.
Mod parent insightful. Yeah sure it's interesting, but this is what the media doesn't seem to talk about. The reason people are afraid of GMO is the above, not because we've created something new. All you programmers out there, if you had two applications, say a word processor and tax software, and wanted to amalgamate them, to use the word processors abilities in the tax software say, you'd reuse a lot of the libraries and such and may copy and paste some code, but normally you'd have a lot of writing to do still to make things get integrated the way you want so you get the expected results. If you just copied a bunch of word processor code and pasted into where you guess is the right place in the tax software, well, who knows what would happen?
Well to joe public, the white lab coats are just copying and pasting code and doing only enough testing to make it appear safe. BPA, DEET, Bhopal: corporations and the almighty dollar have absolutely no freaking interest in seeing the general public taken care of. If they can get by the regulations for long enough then it'll pay off. That's all they need, ROI.
I lost interest at "open source" toilet paper......
So, no bank account then. (Most bank computers run Solaris; the few that run Linux still run a lot of closed-source software). And no credit card.
Probably no cash, either - I hear that governments get very protective about their currency when people try to copy it.
Can't buy anything anyway - shops use closed-source cash registers.
Can't drive anywhere - cars use closed-source software, and so do traffic lights. Can't listen to the radio or watch television either. Can't make phone calls. All in all, a pretty dull existence.
"Well to joe public, the white lab coats are just copying and pasting code and doing only enough testing to make it appear safe."
Then they're uneducated about it. Some of them still think the world's flat, you know.
More like a single chassis/trunk supporting multiple blades/grafts.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Haven't the Amish been doing this for years?
If he completes the year (to whatever degree is possible), and in so doing chronicles a list of (useful) open-source things that are missing, I can see how this stunt could be useful. Putting aside issues of whether we care about open-source TP and such, he could provide information similar to what the Blender Institute is trying hard to acquire (in their own field): what OSS improvements/additions are missing to make something (life, in this case) fully-operational without the need for proprietary solutions. ...Or it could just be a publicity stunt. Wait and see...
That's one of the reasons I still read /. and I'm quite willing to visit interesting sites like this to see what people have designed. h
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
As long as he doesn't ask me to boycott Coke, Android, Amazon and just about everything I'm likely to come into contact on a daily basis, I'm happy w/ him. As for gun rights, he is an American, and there is that pesky thing called the Second Amendment that guarantees citizens the right to bear arms. ESR isn't asking for the US to adapt some alien ideology like RMS regularly does.
I don't have a TV (and not for well over a decade now) and the only DVDs I have had in the last four years have been christmas presents (ripped and played on Linux). And for 18 years after passing my driving test, I hadn't had a car.
PS DVD players now often use Linux to play, and there's plenty of FOSS software for reading and playing them, so they don't actually count as non-FOSS.
http://flyingdogales.com/
Flying dog is an open source beer. That is a start.
So if we don't allow extreme on one side, then you must remove those extremes on the other. If you don't, then the extremes move away from the RMS side and over to the Randian neo-con libertarian nutcase side.
Your attitude is PRECISELY why the Overton Window shifts.
It sounds like grafting is something like cutting off your arm, and then surgically attaching someone else's arm, connecting the blood vessels etc., except that, unlike humans, plants apparently don't have the problem of foreign tissue rejection so these Frankenstein-like operations actually work on them.
Yes, and additionally, plants grow new arms all the time, so if you cut a branch from a plant, it will replace it with another branch. So you can cut many scions from a single plant and graft them on several stocks.
he knows how to use the three seashells.
Are we sure that David Blaine hasn't already done this?
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings.
Technically, that's not true, although I doubt the gene transfer will get into the fruit producing buds.
Reading comprehension, much?
When you find someone living on the street who can can and brew, lemme know. I've lived on the street, and it's a pitiful, tough existence, especially in the winter. Also, FYI, foraging is quite distinct from dumpster diving, as well.
Seems to me scubamage has his head on straight.
its scary because no matter how hard we worked in centuries past we couldn't cross corn with a starfish, or fruit with squid
Yeah, nature could never mix aphid with fungus or sea slug with algae or witchweed and sorghum, right?
and THAT is why GMO is scary
Appeal to nature. Even if your first point weren't horribly uninformed nonsense, it still wouldn't mean that genetic engineering is bad. It times past we couldn't isolate viruses kill them and inject them right into our veins, but that doesn't mean vaccines are bad either, and fallacies are especially bad when applied to highly studied topics.
because frankly some of the shit they are coming up with can't even be truly classified as plant anymore.
So a new protein suddenly changes what kingdom something is in? That's ridiculous. I guess that makes you a virus since humans need a viral transgene to develop the placenta.
If you HONESTLY trust a multinational megacorp like Monsanto to give a rat's ass what anything does, or its long term effects, when it will affect short term profits? Then I have some magic beans you might be interested in.
I have NO problem with coming up with new ways to makes plants better, to feed more people, etc, but what I DO have a problem with is trusting the health of the people of this planet, not to mention the future of the food supply, to corps worried about their stock prices.
As we have sadly seen over and over AND OVER again, from the superfund sites that our grandkids will be paying to clean up, from the poisoning of China to Bhopal, that if given a choice of doing the right thing or increasing profit when it comes to a multinational profit will win every. single. time. and when we are talking about the food supply of the entire planet its simply too damned dangerous to have a handful of megacorps control the whole thing. Hell look at all that has come out lately about drugs having horrible side effects that the corps covered up or ignored so they could get the drugs on the market, you think they will be ANY better when the product can be sold to billions?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No one is saying to fully trust Monsanto, or Syngenta, or Bayer, or any other multinational, nor is anyone saying that a monopoly on seeds is a good thing, although contrary to many claims that has not occurred, though ironically anti-GMO sentiment is helping Monsanto and other companies get there (what do you think having such high fear induced regulations that only large companies have the money to overcome does for competition? Monsanto must be loving the opposition to GMOs.). Of course you should be skeptical of them, but not so skeptical that you reject an overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of some vocal fringe. At that point skepticism becomes something else. Pretty much everyone in the relevant fields (save a few outliers oft quoted by biased cherrypicking anti-GE groups) agrees that GE crops are safe and that they have been beneficial, and no one has put forward a plausible mechanism for why inserting a gene is intrinsically going to suddenly make a crop dangerous. It's a case of strong science versus mostly nonsense. To reject the science simply because a corporation benefits makes as much sense as rejecting science because its implications would hurt corporations (like some of the controversy around climate change).
The whole anti-GE thing, at least the current form of it (I mean, there was legitimate scientific concern in the days before the Asilomar conference) was basically fabricated by activists with nothing else better to do (like when Jeremy Rifkin pulled the dangers of the Flavr Savr tomato straight out of his ass), and now we've got people who cite studies that say the exact opposite of their claims like this weasel (who isn't just some nobody but one of the big names in anti-GE). Meanwhile, the dangers of every other form of plant improvement (and like genetic engineering, they all have potential dangers [ever head of the Lenape potato or high psoralens photodermatitis inducing celery) get a free pass (and I'm not saying they are exceptionally dangerous just that it is horribly inconsistent to give GE such excessive scrutiny but ignore everything else). It really isn't much different than the 'controversies' over evolution, vaccines, or climate change.
So yeah, its good to skeptical, especially of big corporations, but skepticism does not mean you reject proof when you get it nor does it mean every piece of FUD has merit.
So a glass of piss and an identically shaped glass of beer[1] are the same, apart form the contents. I bet you're a programmer or something and you totally grok the difference between an object's structure and its contents. Awesome insight. Congratulations.
[1] other than Bud, obviously.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Allentown is only a city in the technical sense of the word. ;)
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
The lehigh valley is the 3rd largest metro area in Pennsylvania :)
All he needs is a bidet. That mysterious piece of European porcelain solves the problem and saves trees.
Dude.... you pal around IRC with Roy Schestowitz. You've got NO argument at all.
Was he that particular about the vegetables, cutlery, crockery and condiments? Did he check where they all came from? If not, he's just cherry-picking to make a point.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
More complicated:
Selective breeding = tinkering with parameters and settings.
GM = changing part of the program binary.
Actually, it's quite fascinating, how flexible the genetic code is, because all dogs for instance share the same genetic code, the chihuahua has the same genes as the pitbull or the the scottish border collie. The only difference are the allels, the actual settings on the individual genes.
spot on, as a longtime indoor horticulturist and hobbyiest breeder of many new varieties your analogy is great. about the grafting thing... how far do you want to take the analogy... gragting, cloning(not clones most of the time), tissue culture etc. GMO is scary but has nothing to do with selective breeding for a desired outcome. if two similar species could not mix all variety would be gone, we need hybrid vigor, only through natural means. Read, dont watch, " " The Bptany of Desire". Carry on.............
Reading comprehension, much?
When you find someone living on the street who can can and brew, lemme know.
Or have a yard - I guess that one was just a lame attempt at trolling.
I've lived on the street, and it's a pitiful, tough existence, especially in the winter. Also, FYI, foraging is quite distinct from dumpster diving, as well.
Seems to me scubamage has his head on straight.
Indeed - and am saying this as someone who does dumpster diving (shops throw away food before it goes old, no sense in letting that go to waste).
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Probably - I've never met a Coke "boycotter" who did not know of Chiquita evil. And as an activist I have known a whole lot (inc. myself).
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
And I'm quite prepared to look stupid doing it.
I think it's great what you do :)
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.