However some people are allergic, even deadly allergic to brazil nuts and a study at the University of Nebraska found that those with this allergy was also allergic to the soy that received the brazil nut gene. If said soy went on the market it could of killed someone.
Big deal. If you cross-breed a brazil nut with just about anything you can, you get a plant that will kill somebody who is seriously allergic to brazil nuts. This should not come as a surprise. Gene splicing has not introduced any new risks that did not previously exist.
If scientists guaranteed 100% there would be no adverse affects of genetic engineering
They can't guarantee that about anything, and they most definitely can't, don't, and won't guarantee it about the food you buy in the supermarket - everything from insecticide traces to nut oil contamination is discovered on a regular basis. It's hardly even newsworthy any more; at most, you might read about it in your local paper or see a sign in the store from the relevant food standards agency. People die from the nut contamination caused by cheap, shoddy, procedures for packaging and handling every year. I don't see why you expect gene splicing to be any different to what you get in the supermarket today.
As other people have pointed out though, right now they're working on making the heavy water that would go in a breeder reactor, it's not clear that they actually have the capability yet. The real showdown will happen once they actually have a reactor built and fueled which is capable of breeding plutonium from natural or low-enriched uranium. Allowing them to have that capability would be tacit acceptance of an Iran which is not only nuclear, but has the capability of producing nuclear cruise missles, and perhaps thermonuclear weapons as well.
Now you're just being alarmist. Posession of plutonium does not equal the ability to construct a viable nuclear weapon. It is INCREDIBLY HARD to persuade a plutonium device to explode in a fashion that does any more damage than blowing your damnfool hand off. If you just make a critical mass, it explodes so quickly that it destroys itself before a significant amount of the plutonium can react; the resulting explosion is typically smaller than you would get from a chemical explosive of the same size (which is tiny). It takes years of research and many, many large, noisy tests (which cannot be concealed, due to their necessary scale) before you can figure out how to build one - and you can be assured that all the current nuclear powers keep that information tightly controlled. You can get the general principle from Wikipedia, but you can't get the all-important design schematics for how to build something that will actually explode properly - and even if you had the schematics, you still need to build a production plant that is accurate enough to make them. The US and USSR poured billions into the project for years before they got the things working, and you can't hide spending on that scale either.
Iran don't have a nuclear weapons program. It would be obvious if they did. They are large, expensive, and noisy. There is no point fussing about their reactors until they have a weapons program.
If you want to worry about something, worry about the 50 nuclear warheads that are just outright missing from the 'official' nuclear superpowers (11 of those are US warheads) - most of those were last seen in submarines which went down and were never recovered; there is no fundamental reason why they couldn't be salvaged by somebody. If you really, really want to worry about plutonium in particular, worry about the metric tons of plutonium lost by the US arms industry alone (enough to build over 50 warheads, goodness knows how much the other nations have lost).
Additionally, breeder reactors do not indicate an intention to produce nuclear weapons. Breeder reactors indicate a serious intent to build nuclear power plants that supply cheap, minimally-polluting energy to a nation. India and (probably) China have been working on this for years. They are a necessary component of a realistic plan for nuclear power. The US has been falsely playing them up as 'weapons plants' because the US government is dominated by the coal and oil industries, who don't want a viable large-scale nuclear power operation in the US. Without breeder reactors, you get huge quantities of nasty spent fuel coming out of your main power reactors, which you then have to bury in a mountain or something stupid like that. The correct (and well-understood) method for dealing with it is to reprocess it, which involves putting most of it in a breeder reactor to convert it from fertile material to fissile material, which then goes back into the power plants as fuel; the amount of waste from this process is minimal and most of it has a half life measured in decades, not millenia.
Lastly, all commercial light-water reactors breed fuel and produce plutonium. It's a fundamental part of how fission power works. 'Non-breeder' reactors just aren't designed to get the fissile material out easily, that's all - they burn it instead, to produce power. Despite this, the method for getting weapons-grade plutonium out of a power plant is well-documented and u
The animal rights activists probably think highly of themselves as brave and courageous but truth be told they just do these incredibly mean and destructive things, then go back to their drab little lives and 9-to-5 jobs at the end of the weekend. They probably believe they are making great sacrifices for their cause, and even compare themselves and their cause to the great causes they've all read about.
The irony here is that you just dropped 'animal rights activists' into a sentence that was previously used to describe first those engaged in the War on Drugs, then the War on Terror, and now the War on Moisture.
The sad part is that I can't tell the difference any more.
Ah, that old straw man. Are schools teaching computing or Windows? All the basic skills they need to use any computer GUI can be taught with Linux just as well as Windows.
Wrong question. Here's the right one: what are the schools teaching?
I spent some time doing tech support at a few secondary schools once, and I observed what passes for 'IT' lessons. The teachers don't know how to use Windows, let alone the pupils, and they certainly aren't teaching them anything about Windows. What they do is teach them how to use a word processor, change the font size and colour, and print stuff out. Then they go on to do similar stuff with spreadsheets, maybe some trivial database stuff with a proprietary database application (they never use Access, it's too complex), some drawing package (not photoshop, too expensive - often MS Paint), and spend most of their time playing flash games on the web when the teacher isn't watching.
Furthermore, loads of schools do all this on Macs, not Windows. And ten years ago, they did it on Acorn Archimedes, not Windows.
And lastly, none of the staff have ever been trained to use Windows. Some of them may have been 'trained' to use Office - but probably not. I have never met a teacher that I would consider to be an 'advanced' Office user, and only a handful who knew anything more complex than changing the font. So, there's no 'training' problem here (aside from the more general problem of having no meaningful IT training).
In the non-IT subjects, they use Word as an electronic typewriter. Period. None of the other Office applications are used. Occasionally they use the internet for research, or some of those cruddy 'edutainment' games, but none of it is particularly important - it's more a way to keep the kids interested, thinly veiled as education. I can't see any particular reason why they would need anything else. Their typewriter needs could be fulfilled by notepad, so any old word processor will be more than adequete.
There is absolutely no technical or educational reason why Linux-based platforms would not be adequete substitutes. The ultimate proof of this is that the MacOSX platform is already demonstrated to be an adequete substitute. So, why haven't they switched yet? Well, quite frankly because school management is often the epitome of political corruption. Purchasing decisions are made for purely political reasons, and the teachers are always griping about how this is bad for the pupils. I saw one school where the conversion of Windows to MacOSX occurred (despite moans from everybody, including the entire IT staff)... and the Apple vendor gave the headteacher about £10k-£20k worth of miscellaneous Apple equipment for his home, including a large plasma TV.
So, that's how you get a school to switch to Linux. Bribery.
True, selective breeding has been going on for a long tyme, but that's not the same as inserting the gene from a fish into the tomato
I do not believe that current gene-splicing technology is capable of inserting fish genes into a tomato plant with any kind of practical reliability (you're lucky if it does anything at all, and even if it does, it'll probably just kill the plant), because a given gene sequence just doesn't code the same trait in a radically different type of organism - e.g. instructions for producing insulin are not particularly meaningful to an organism that doesn't *have* a pancreas. My understanding is that practical cross-genus splicing would represent a major step forward, but would require far deeper understanding of how the gene coding works than we currently posess, and probably more precise gene-splicing techniques (we cannot currently assemble an arbitrarily selected gene sequence, just copy one that already exists).
[As far as I'm aware, that oft-quoted 'fish genes into a tomato' project has not yet produced any meaningful results - they can splice the gene into the plant okay, but the executives say it looks 'promising', which is executive-speak for "it doesn't actually work at present but we're still funding it". They might get lucky and find a way to get the damn thing to stay alive and actually produce the desired protein, but 'luck' is the operative word here.]
Cases like brazil nuts and soybeans are more subtle... but there's no particular reason to expect that the results will be any more spectacular than those that can be achieved via cross-breeding. They have common ancestors, after all, so there's no particular reason why those traits *shouldn't* exist in a species that could be cross-bred.
What people fear are unforeseen long-term consequences of messing with genetics and releasing the results of that into the wild. Once it's out, it's extremely difficult to undo any damage.
It's rather late to be fearing that. Farmers and gardeners have been messing with genetics and releasing the results of that into the wild for over a thousand years - it's called "selective cross-breeding". Just about everything food product you buy in the supermarket was created by science, not chance, and has been for as long as you've been alive.
You'd have a point, except that the company usually doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a new kind of corn - they get a government grant for millions of dollars, and spend that on developing it instead. It gets pretty hard to justify at this point.
What GM food will do is to pollute the world's plants by gene migration from GM plants to other plants (already seen and documented) and impact us in many unforseen ways (e.g. the butterflies dying from GM-altered plants).
Of course, selective breeding already 'pollutes' the world's plants by gene migration via cross-pollenation (seen, documented, and well-understood by the world's gardeners - or did you think roses came in all those colours by chance? most are hybrids with other flowering plants). The butterfly thing was, if not exactly 'forseen' by the people who made it, pretty bloody obvious. The plants were designed to resist insects by generating their own insectisides, insectisides kill butterflies anyway with traditional farming, it's reasonable to expect that the new technique would still kill butterflies. I expect the company who produced that crop was unsurprised by this result. If you want to make war on insectisides, go ahead - but don't blame it on 'GM food'.
Realistically, most of the current gene-splicing techniques aren't doing anything that couldn't be accomplished with traditional selective cross-breeding, they're just massively cheaper and faster and more reliable (it can take years of careful work to breed a particular trait into a plant, particularly if you have to cross several species to get it; gene splicing can do it in a few weeks or months). Our gene splicing technology is not currently at the level where you can stick cow genes into a tomato plant and expect it to produce milk; the species being spliced must be approximately similar before you start, so we're mostly limited to what could be done with careful breeding. Farmers and gardeners have been cross-breeding plants and animals for centuries, and it hasn't wrecked the world yet. The current practice of careful study of the impact of gene-spliced crops, through controlled field trials, is a sound one, and far more careful than people have been about introducing new lifeforms into the wild in the past (rabbits in.au, grey squirrels in.uk, etc). The current public hysteria, on the other hand, is nothing more than tabloid noise. Gene splicing may not be intrinsically 'safe', but it can be made safer than common farming techniques (like heavy insectiside use) with reasonable levels of care, which are currently being applied.
No. Americans are, by and large, materialistic. Some other countries have similar cultures. Some people not in those countries are materialistic anyway. But by and large, people are poor, starving, and live in China, and you cannot judge their values by looking at Americans.
The lesson here is that humans are not fundamentally materialistic; this is a lifestyle choice. It is a choice that makes certain demands on you, which may include being less happy in order to have more stuff. You do have the option to choose otherwise.
Who cares if there is some waste / inefficiency / lack of elegance in the program
That is exactly the culture of mediocrity that people are complaining about. The very fact that you think this is okay is a damning indictment of your society. That "eh, it doesn't matter if we don't the best we can, so long as we do something" attitude lies behind just about every stupid thing you hear about these days.
That $6.6 billion of "wasteful" R&D is one of the few things I like about Microsoft. Long-term research without a guarantee of short-term returns is a good thing
Or at least, it would be a good thing if they didn't operate a "patent and forget" policy for most of it. All that research, and the only thing it accomplishes is to lock down fields so that nobody, anywhere, can work in them.
Since when is the recipient of an unauthorized copy guilty of copyright infringement? I though it was just the provider of the unauthorized copy.
She wasn't 'convicted' in the normal sense, she's just being punished for attempting to pervert the course of justice. That effectively precludes consideration of whether or not she committed the relevent unlawful action.
There is, however, the possibility of appeal on the grounds that the action wasn't unlawful in the first place. Hard to say how likely that would be to win.
Still, this was a pretty stupid move for the defendant. There are all kinds of good defenses against the bullshit cases that the RIAA are using, and she just blew her chances of being able to use most of them. She must have had some really incriminating pornography on that drive.
The word google meant nothing (I know there are other views). And now some other organization should cash in? What are googles options here?
If the registrar starts discriminating based on the word used, instead of blindly passing everything through, then google can make a case against the registrar for trademark infringement - because the registrar is explicitly selling a mark owned by google. They will not necessarily win the case, but they should have a fair chance.
This was probably a stupid move by the registrar. Let the lawsuits commence!
The ability to make useful predictions should never be thought of as a factor in determining scientific validity for several reasons; the most important reason is that "useful" is a completely subjective term.
Almost all definitions of English words are completely subjective, by definition. That's how human languages work. You can only form a truly objective description in maths, and few English words are amenable to a mathematical definition. 'Science' is not one of them. (An example of a word that can be given a truly objective definition is 'zero').
The word 'useful' is not strictly required for this definition to function, but it is included to eliminate corner cases such as speculation on non-existant laws of physics (like Star Trek physics), which can produce predictions but is more sensibly classified as 'science fiction' than 'science'.
Others range from the defintions inability to exclude non-naturalistic explanations
That's a flaw in your 'naturalism', which falsely excludes much of computer science (as it's a pure thought-experiment invented by humans, and therefore its laws are often subjective, not objective), scientific studies of literature (like some branches of computational linguistics), almost all branches of psychology, etc. It's a better definition precisely *because* it doesn't make these mistakes.
to the de-emphasization of actually understanding the relevent phenomena (rather than just being able to predict the result).
This is also an intentional improvement. Focusing on 'understanding' the phenomena leads to rejecting statistical inference as 'unscientific' because it simply predicts patterns without understanding their causes. A reasonable definition of 'science' should not exclude such methods. Education is about understanding, but science does not have to be. There is a specific term for science that focuses on understanding and not just useful predictions: this is known as 'pure research' (or 'basic research'). The fact that we bother to classify research into pure and applied variants emphasises that 'understanding' is not fundamental to science, only part of it.
This definition is founded upon the notion of the scientific method, which is the underpinning of science (using the scientific method is a necessary but not quite sufficient condition for something to be science, but one which only a scientist is qualified to understand, so it's not a particularly useful definition). The scientific method does not require understanding, merely a falsifiable hypothesis that makes testable predictions. You can find a more detailed discussion in that article, in and around the section 'Problem of demarcation'. If you compress the ideas in that section into one sentence without using any technical language, you get something roughly equivalent to what I said.
You will note that even this discussion is founded on subjective concepts like 'evidence' and 'pertinent', which have been the cause of many heated debates between scientists - particularly about what constitutes evidence in the more obscure fields of research. A classic example from high-energy physics: if a particular experiment would validate a hypothesis, but the machine to perform the experiment costs X billion dollars and there's only one of them in the world, is it evidence even though nobody else can repeat the experiment and we cannot prove the machine is not introducing a bias in the results? Opinion is divided on the subject; results are traditionally considered tentative until several independent teams have replicated them, because of the problem of instrument bias.
(All matters on which there is significant dissent are of course subjective, by trivial contradiction from the definition of 'objective'; few things in the human experience are truly objective, which is why it's rarely a very interesting observation to make. It is necessary to work with the subjective reality that one has, instead of pining for the objective reality that one wishes one had.)
Are these new changes happening out of some desire to resemble the old Windows software as little as possible? Is there some kind of necessity to change the interface? Does it need a complete overhaul?
"Yes", because otherwise nobody would buy it. Every version of Windows has to appear different to ignorant managers, in order to get them to fall for MS marketing's claims about how much better it is and how they should fork over millions for it.
The irony is that when faced with the option of converting to Redhat and slashing costs, they turn around and complain about how different it is.
Because the ninth planet set a precedent that has allowed everybody and their dog to claim that they've found the tenth planet. And astronomers are really really sick of that.
Good luck with that whole "rest of your career" thing you thought you had.
Which means he'll become either one of those dodgy 'consultants' that mows down your money without producing anything, or else (more likely ) he'll work as a professional spammer.
There's numerous peripheral reasons... but mostly, the legal system is just very slow to begin with, and SCO's lawyers have been delaying the case as much as they possibly can. They probably can eventually get penalised like this, but it won't be seriously considered for a long time yet (maybe next year, maybe the year after).
Are sales declining because of anticipation of this?
Only with those people who have forgotten that (a) directx10 will only work with vista, (b) it is unlikely that we will see vista this year, and (c) vista is going to cost more than a high-end video card.
The launchd daemon also provides a big performance boost to your system
That part is probably a marketing lie. Inactive daemons do not typically consume appreciable system resources. Not even on macosx. 'Average memory footprint' is a made-up term. Inactive daemons do not increase the resident set size appreciably, since most of their data gets paged out and spends all its time on disk (and their code is mapped from disk anyway, so that isn't kept in memory). The last time I measured the resident size of the inactive processes on my unix boxes, it was 10Mb on all of them; the processor usage was too small to be measured.
About the only 'performance' impact this will have is to avoid pointless waiting at boot time, which isn't a hugely interesting detail.
These people complaining about phones getting more features are in the same category as people complining that computers are too fast and have too much memory.
It's not 'more features' that I complain about, personally. It's the fact that every time they add a new feature, they make all the other features just a little bit more painful and difficult to use. Every time they add a new capability, they cripple it in the name of 'productising'. I hate the idea of a cellphone that you can install software on, but that software can't access any of the, y'know, *phone* stuff, because that would threaten the business model of some of the carriers. I hate cellphones that crash, or have 20 minutes of battery life, or slow down if you don't reboot them every few days.
And I really, really hate the idea of using wince on a cellphone.
That's what people are really complaining about. It's just that most of them only notice that it's the phones with more features that suck more.
It wouldn't be very difficult for a net cafe owner to set up an MIM attack and have their own self-signed certificate. Your browser *should* throw a warning
Um, excuse me? All the workstations in the net cafe will have the cafe owner's CA certificate installed, which will validate all the MIM attack certificates for them (assuming that they didn't just have a modified version of firefox installed that lied about the SSL status). SSL is completely and totally worthless when the attacker controls the workstation you are using.
The only thing SSL does is to ensure that communication between two secure endpoints cannot be accessed by somebody who merely controls the channel between them. It cannot be of any use to you if your endpoint is not secure.
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The patent lobby is a pack of liars, obviously. This should not be a surprise to you.
Big deal. If you cross-breed a brazil nut with just about anything you can, you get a plant that will kill somebody who is seriously allergic to brazil nuts. This should not come as a surprise. Gene splicing has not introduced any new risks that did not previously exist.
They can't guarantee that about anything, and they most definitely can't, don't, and won't guarantee it about the food you buy in the supermarket - everything from insecticide traces to nut oil contamination is discovered on a regular basis. It's hardly even newsworthy any more; at most, you might read about it in your local paper or see a sign in the store from the relevant food standards agency. People die from the nut contamination caused by cheap, shoddy, procedures for packaging and handling every year. I don't see why you expect gene splicing to be any different to what you get in the supermarket today.
Now you're just being alarmist. Posession of plutonium does not equal the ability to construct a viable nuclear weapon. It is INCREDIBLY HARD to persuade a plutonium device to explode in a fashion that does any more damage than blowing your damnfool hand off. If you just make a critical mass, it explodes so quickly that it destroys itself before a significant amount of the plutonium can react; the resulting explosion is typically smaller than you would get from a chemical explosive of the same size (which is tiny). It takes years of research and many, many large, noisy tests (which cannot be concealed, due to their necessary scale) before you can figure out how to build one - and you can be assured that all the current nuclear powers keep that information tightly controlled. You can get the general principle from Wikipedia, but you can't get the all-important design schematics for how to build something that will actually explode properly - and even if you had the schematics, you still need to build a production plant that is accurate enough to make them. The US and USSR poured billions into the project for years before they got the things working, and you can't hide spending on that scale either.
Iran don't have a nuclear weapons program. It would be obvious if they did. They are large, expensive, and noisy. There is no point fussing about their reactors until they have a weapons program.
If you want to worry about something, worry about the 50 nuclear warheads that are just outright missing from the 'official' nuclear superpowers (11 of those are US warheads) - most of those were last seen in submarines which went down and were never recovered; there is no fundamental reason why they couldn't be salvaged by somebody. If you really, really want to worry about plutonium in particular, worry about the metric tons of plutonium lost by the US arms industry alone (enough to build over 50 warheads, goodness knows how much the other nations have lost).
Additionally, breeder reactors do not indicate an intention to produce nuclear weapons. Breeder reactors indicate a serious intent to build nuclear power plants that supply cheap, minimally-polluting energy to a nation. India and (probably) China have been working on this for years. They are a necessary component of a realistic plan for nuclear power. The US has been falsely playing them up as 'weapons plants' because the US government is dominated by the coal and oil industries, who don't want a viable large-scale nuclear power operation in the US. Without breeder reactors, you get huge quantities of nasty spent fuel coming out of your main power reactors, which you then have to bury in a mountain or something stupid like that. The correct (and well-understood) method for dealing with it is to reprocess it, which involves putting most of it in a breeder reactor to convert it from fertile material to fissile material, which then goes back into the power plants as fuel; the amount of waste from this process is minimal and most of it has a half life measured in decades, not millenia.
Lastly, all commercial light-water reactors breed fuel and produce plutonium. It's a fundamental part of how fission power works. 'Non-breeder' reactors just aren't designed to get the fissile material out easily, that's all - they burn it instead, to produce power. Despite this, the method for getting weapons-grade plutonium out of a power plant is well-documented and u
The irony here is that you just dropped 'animal rights activists' into a sentence that was previously used to describe first those engaged in the War on Drugs, then the War on Terror, and now the War on Moisture.
The sad part is that I can't tell the difference any more.
Wrong question. Here's the right one: what are the schools teaching?
I spent some time doing tech support at a few secondary schools once, and I observed what passes for 'IT' lessons. The teachers don't know how to use Windows, let alone the pupils, and they certainly aren't teaching them anything about Windows. What they do is teach them how to use a word processor, change the font size and colour, and print stuff out. Then they go on to do similar stuff with spreadsheets, maybe some trivial database stuff with a proprietary database application (they never use Access, it's too complex), some drawing package (not photoshop, too expensive - often MS Paint), and spend most of their time playing flash games on the web when the teacher isn't watching.
Furthermore, loads of schools do all this on Macs, not Windows. And ten years ago, they did it on Acorn Archimedes, not Windows.
And lastly, none of the staff have ever been trained to use Windows. Some of them may have been 'trained' to use Office - but probably not. I have never met a teacher that I would consider to be an 'advanced' Office user, and only a handful who knew anything more complex than changing the font. So, there's no 'training' problem here (aside from the more general problem of having no meaningful IT training).
In the non-IT subjects, they use Word as an electronic typewriter. Period. None of the other Office applications are used. Occasionally they use the internet for research, or some of those cruddy 'edutainment' games, but none of it is particularly important - it's more a way to keep the kids interested, thinly veiled as education. I can't see any particular reason why they would need anything else. Their typewriter needs could be fulfilled by notepad, so any old word processor will be more than adequete.
There is absolutely no technical or educational reason why Linux-based platforms would not be adequete substitutes. The ultimate proof of this is that the MacOSX platform is already demonstrated to be an adequete substitute. So, why haven't they switched yet? Well, quite frankly because school management is often the epitome of political corruption. Purchasing decisions are made for purely political reasons, and the teachers are always griping about how this is bad for the pupils. I saw one school where the conversion of Windows to MacOSX occurred (despite moans from everybody, including the entire IT staff)... and the Apple vendor gave the headteacher about £10k-£20k worth of miscellaneous Apple equipment for his home, including a large plasma TV.
So, that's how you get a school to switch to Linux. Bribery.
I do not believe that current gene-splicing technology is capable of inserting fish genes into a tomato plant with any kind of practical reliability (you're lucky if it does anything at all, and even if it does, it'll probably just kill the plant), because a given gene sequence just doesn't code the same trait in a radically different type of organism - e.g. instructions for producing insulin are not particularly meaningful to an organism that doesn't *have* a pancreas. My understanding is that practical cross-genus splicing would represent a major step forward, but would require far deeper understanding of how the gene coding works than we currently posess, and probably more precise gene-splicing techniques (we cannot currently assemble an arbitrarily selected gene sequence, just copy one that already exists).
[As far as I'm aware, that oft-quoted 'fish genes into a tomato' project has not yet produced any meaningful results - they can splice the gene into the plant okay, but the executives say it looks 'promising', which is executive-speak for "it doesn't actually work at present but we're still funding it". They might get lucky and find a way to get the damn thing to stay alive and actually produce the desired protein, but 'luck' is the operative word here.]
Cases like brazil nuts and soybeans are more subtle... but there's no particular reason to expect that the results will be any more spectacular than those that can be achieved via cross-breeding. They have common ancestors, after all, so there's no particular reason why those traits *shouldn't* exist in a species that could be cross-bred.
It's rather late to be fearing that. Farmers and gardeners have been messing with genetics and releasing the results of that into the wild for over a thousand years - it's called "selective cross-breeding". Just about everything food product you buy in the supermarket was created by science, not chance, and has been for as long as you've been alive.
You'd have a point, except that the company usually doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a new kind of corn - they get a government grant for millions of dollars, and spend that on developing it instead. It gets pretty hard to justify at this point.
Of course, selective breeding already 'pollutes' the world's plants by gene migration via cross-pollenation (seen, documented, and well-understood by the world's gardeners - or did you think roses came in all those colours by chance? most are hybrids with other flowering plants). The butterfly thing was, if not exactly 'forseen' by the people who made it, pretty bloody obvious. The plants were designed to resist insects by generating their own insectisides, insectisides kill butterflies anyway with traditional farming, it's reasonable to expect that the new technique would still kill butterflies. I expect the company who produced that crop was unsurprised by this result. If you want to make war on insectisides, go ahead - but don't blame it on 'GM food'.
Realistically, most of the current gene-splicing techniques aren't doing anything that couldn't be accomplished with traditional selective cross-breeding, they're just massively cheaper and faster and more reliable (it can take years of careful work to breed a particular trait into a plant, particularly if you have to cross several species to get it; gene splicing can do it in a few weeks or months). Our gene splicing technology is not currently at the level where you can stick cow genes into a tomato plant and expect it to produce milk; the species being spliced must be approximately similar before you start, so we're mostly limited to what could be done with careful breeding. Farmers and gardeners have been cross-breeding plants and animals for centuries, and it hasn't wrecked the world yet. The current practice of careful study of the impact of gene-spliced crops, through controlled field trials, is a sound one, and far more careful than people have been about introducing new lifeforms into the wild in the past (rabbits in
No. Americans are, by and large, materialistic. Some other countries have similar cultures. Some people not in those countries are materialistic anyway. But by and large, people are poor, starving, and live in China, and you cannot judge their values by looking at Americans.
The lesson here is that humans are not fundamentally materialistic; this is a lifestyle choice. It is a choice that makes certain demands on you, which may include being less happy in order to have more stuff. You do have the option to choose otherwise.
That is exactly the culture of mediocrity that people are complaining about. The very fact that you think this is okay is a damning indictment of your society. That "eh, it doesn't matter if we don't the best we can, so long as we do something" attitude lies behind just about every stupid thing you hear about these days.
Or at least, it would be a good thing if they didn't operate a "patent and forget" policy for most of it. All that research, and the only thing it accomplishes is to lock down fields so that nobody, anywhere, can work in them.
She wasn't 'convicted' in the normal sense, she's just being punished for attempting to pervert the course of justice. That effectively precludes consideration of whether or not she committed the relevent unlawful action.
There is, however, the possibility of appeal on the grounds that the action wasn't unlawful in the first place. Hard to say how likely that would be to win.
Still, this was a pretty stupid move for the defendant. There are all kinds of good defenses against the bullshit cases that the RIAA are using, and she just blew her chances of being able to use most of them. She must have had some really incriminating pornography on that drive.
If the registrar starts discriminating based on the word used, instead of blindly passing everything through, then google can make a case against the registrar for trademark infringement - because the registrar is explicitly selling a mark owned by google. They will not necessarily win the case, but they should have a fair chance.
This was probably a stupid move by the registrar. Let the lawsuits commence!
Almost all definitions of English words are completely subjective, by definition. That's how human languages work. You can only form a truly objective description in maths, and few English words are amenable to a mathematical definition. 'Science' is not one of them. (An example of a word that can be given a truly objective definition is 'zero').
The word 'useful' is not strictly required for this definition to function, but it is included to eliminate corner cases such as speculation on non-existant laws of physics (like Star Trek physics), which can produce predictions but is more sensibly classified as 'science fiction' than 'science'.
That's a flaw in your 'naturalism', which falsely excludes much of computer science (as it's a pure thought-experiment invented by humans, and therefore its laws are often subjective, not objective), scientific studies of literature (like some branches of computational linguistics), almost all branches of psychology, etc. It's a better definition precisely *because* it doesn't make these mistakes.
This is also an intentional improvement. Focusing on 'understanding' the phenomena leads to rejecting statistical inference as 'unscientific' because it simply predicts patterns without understanding their causes. A reasonable definition of 'science' should not exclude such methods. Education is about understanding, but science does not have to be. There is a specific term for science that focuses on understanding and not just useful predictions: this is known as 'pure research' (or 'basic research'). The fact that we bother to classify research into pure and applied variants emphasises that 'understanding' is not fundamental to science, only part of it.
This definition is founded upon the notion of the scientific method, which is the underpinning of science (using the scientific method is a necessary but not quite sufficient condition for something to be science, but one which only a scientist is qualified to understand, so it's not a particularly useful definition). The scientific method does not require understanding, merely a falsifiable hypothesis that makes testable predictions. You can find a more detailed discussion in that article, in and around the section 'Problem of demarcation'. If you compress the ideas in that section into one sentence without using any technical language, you get something roughly equivalent to what I said.
You will note that even this discussion is founded on subjective concepts like 'evidence' and 'pertinent', which have been the cause of many heated debates between scientists - particularly about what constitutes evidence in the more obscure fields of research. A classic example from high-energy physics: if a particular experiment would validate a hypothesis, but the machine to perform the experiment costs X billion dollars and there's only one of them in the world, is it evidence even though nobody else can repeat the experiment and we cannot prove the machine is not introducing a bias in the results? Opinion is divided on the subject; results are traditionally considered tentative until several independent teams have replicated them, because of the problem of instrument bias.
(All matters on which there is significant dissent are of course subjective, by trivial contradiction from the definition of 'objective'; few things in the human experience are truly objective, which is why it's rarely a very interesting observation to make. It is necessary to work with the subjective reality that one has, instead of pining for the objective reality that one wishes one had.)
"Yes", because otherwise nobody would buy it. Every version of Windows has to appear different to ignorant managers, in order to get them to fall for MS marketing's claims about how much better it is and how they should fork over millions for it.
The irony is that when faced with the option of converting to Redhat and slashing costs, they turn around and complain about how different it is.
Because the ninth planet set a precedent that has allowed everybody and their dog to claim that they've found the tenth planet. And astronomers are really really sick of that.
This argument is too long and complicated. I offer a simpler one, based on a goal-oriented view of science:
The purpose of science is to make useful, accurate predictions. Can a given idea make any useful predictions? No? Then it's not science.
(The distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' sciences lies in the degree of accuracy of the predictions)
Which means he'll become either one of those dodgy 'consultants' that mows down your money without producing anything, or else (more likely ) he'll work as a professional spammer.
There's numerous peripheral reasons... but mostly, the legal system is just very slow to begin with, and SCO's lawyers have been delaying the case as much as they possibly can. They probably can eventually get penalised like this, but it won't be seriously considered for a long time yet (maybe next year, maybe the year after).
Only with those people who have forgotten that (a) directx10 will only work with vista, (b) it is unlikely that we will see vista this year, and (c) vista is going to cost more than a high-end video card.
That part is probably a marketing lie. Inactive daemons do not typically consume appreciable system resources. Not even on macosx. 'Average memory footprint' is a made-up term. Inactive daemons do not increase the resident set size appreciably, since most of their data gets paged out and spends all its time on disk (and their code is mapped from disk anyway, so that isn't kept in memory). The last time I measured the resident size of the inactive processes on my unix boxes, it was 10Mb on all of them; the processor usage was too small to be measured.
About the only 'performance' impact this will have is to avoid pointless waiting at boot time, which isn't a hugely interesting detail.
It's not 'more features' that I complain about, personally. It's the fact that every time they add a new feature, they make all the other features just a little bit more painful and difficult to use. Every time they add a new capability, they cripple it in the name of 'productising'. I hate the idea of a cellphone that you can install software on, but that software can't access any of the, y'know, *phone* stuff, because that would threaten the business model of some of the carriers. I hate cellphones that crash, or have 20 minutes of battery life, or slow down if you don't reboot them every few days.
And I really, really hate the idea of using wince on a cellphone.
That's what people are really complaining about. It's just that most of them only notice that it's the phones with more features that suck more.
Oh dear.
Um, excuse me? All the workstations in the net cafe will have the cafe owner's CA certificate installed, which will validate all the MIM attack certificates for them (assuming that they didn't just have a modified version of firefox installed that lied about the SSL status). SSL is completely and totally worthless when the attacker controls the workstation you are using.
The only thing SSL does is to ensure that communication between two secure endpoints cannot be accessed by somebody who merely controls the channel between them. It cannot be of any use to you if your endpoint is not secure.