Poison and toxic in large enough quantities is, for intents and purposes, the same thing.
Actually, I cannot imagine something which is "poison" and not toxic at the dose. Conversely, I can imagine something toxic at dose which one would not label poison (water), but implicit in that is that you will only ingest small enough amounts, therefore, the expected dose is low enough.
Asking that GM food be proven safe is inane. It is exactly equivalent to asking for a formal proof that every computer program existing now and forever be proven. (hint, this is an impossible and absurd task)
Now asking that every GM food be tested in the same way we test medicines is not absurd (probably excessively cautious, but hey). There is a procedure to get new edible species approved, and I expect it was followed. Is it stringent enough? I don't know.
As for the "poison" (btw, please don't shout -- don't people know their netiquette anymore ?) remember that water is poisonous. Poison is a question of dose, for one, and poisons can be very specific. What is poisonous to insects might not be to humans and vice-versa.
Digression: when one produces an new species, it is usually done through forced mutation and selection. Meaning you got to where you think you wanted to go through a random process. The GM way is less random as you put in the characteristic you wanted in one step (conceptually -- cloning is hard, and gene insertion and expression a thoroughly non-trivial affair). Thus there is not particular reason a GM food would be less safe than a non-GM one, quite the contrary.
Digression 2: there is also this argument that horizontal (inter-species) transfer of genes do not happen in nature. This is wrong: a large part of our own DNA comes from bits from viruses, themselves having jumped between species and bringing genetic material with them. So GM food are not something that could not happen in nature.
Yes there is. There is the guarantee that if you depend on the software, no bankruptcies can kill off your support. Nor can you be chained to a single vendor.
If you are interested to having your business/occupation going on beyond the next quarter, than yes, Free software is good for you, even if you can't code. Even if you do not know what source code is.
Did you read a EULA recently? If your vendor doesn't like you, he can simply remove the right you have to use his software at whim. Or maybe just because he wants to. Clearly, if you are using proprietary software for anything else than games, you are a trusting fool.
About evaporation, remember that the latent heat of evaporation (of water) is considerable. It takes a lot of energy to evaporate water (and this is an isothermal process) and conversely condensing water gives out lots of energy.
Oh. Convection. The answer is always convection. Basically, 20 times more heat/energy gets transferred by moving stuff around than by radiation (this is not a random number, it is the ratio you expect between heat transfer in a still fluid vs in one that is turbulent).
Much circulation goes on. So although you have this gradient of temperature, heating up any part of the atmosphere ends up heating the whole thing pretty quickly. So in a sense where the heating up happens is not so important, because stuff will get mixed up pretty quickly.
You forgot that: a) vacuum is pretty good as an isolating "material" (think thermos bottles)
b) the Earth is continually being "heated up" by the sun.
so basically, the average temperature of the Earth-atmosphere system results from the energy radiating in from the sun which is not immediately reflected back (say a constant over long enough time frames), and the energy radiated back.
Now although the energy is eventually balanced, this tells you nothing about the temperature. The temperature at which you are radiating back the energy depends on how the energy radiating in was used/reflected/degraded. In fact simple thermodynamics tell you that each time something happens to energy (it gets reflected/absorbed, used for photosynthesis, etc.) parts of it degrade into more heat.
This heat accumulates and translates to higher temperatures. If our atmosphere interacts more with the radiation from the sun, basically, it gets hotter. CO2/water interact a lot, oxygen and nitrogen less. More CO2 means higher equilibrium temperatures.
No. Politicians pander to the lowest common denominator. The batshit crazy in each camp are important to consider, because their phobias will be served...
Speaking of phobias, in this case, the Greens are in effect arguing you should not fund a speculative research projects because... well.. It's got the Nuclear label on it.
Now, under no circumstance is it acceptable as an attitude to say "we don't know if that will work, let us instead do research which has certain outcomes". This is perfectly equivalent to saying we should give up research and only attempt not-too-novel engineering. And any political group which seriously defends this point should be fought vehemently.
Uhhh, no, we make very good fusion bombs. The difficulty in fusion is to get to high enough temperatures and pressures.
Now it happens that a fission weapon produces a lot of that (temperature and pressure). Now if your fusion device sits atop a nice proton source (say the white stuff which came in the box in which your computer came) and on the other side, a glass bowl of deuterium, and you encase the whole thing in high-density metal serving the role of reflectors for the protons... Well you just got yourself a very nice fusion device.
Simply for the sake of generating electricity, kick-starting your plant with an A-bomb is not a viable alternative...
Oh, the easy answer to that is Roe vs Wade. Not an amendment, but clearly something that ought to have been decided by the congress. Basically, I find it outrageous that there can even be a debate about the rights of a bunch of cells over that of a human being (the mother), but I find it disturbing that this rests on the very questionable interpretation of Justices: this is a question for the lawmakers, and clearly was not -- and could not ave been on the mind of the writers of the constitution.
Probably the right to bear arms ought also to be refined/redefined: are nuclear weapons admissible, and what is the threshold for a weapon that one has the right to bear?
you know, a set of conditions which were reunited only 17 times since the bill of rights probably indicates a bar set a tad too high... Also in the face of a political climate where posturing is more important than anything.
But it is a lesser evil, given that it is effectively impossible to get non-partisan agreement on anything, to reinterpret the damn thing rather than being stuck in the XVIIth century.
In any case, the SCOTUS is in practise free to effectively interpret it at will, so you might as well call it living: at least it is a honest reflection of reality.
Oh, and I forgot. These days, if something came up, like, say, finding that the constitution could be interpreted to mean that child prostitution is perfectly legal under certain sets of circumstances (which could happen, if the justices felt like it), you probably could not amend it, because of partisan lines.
Because the alternative, a constitution set in stone would basically mean no rights for blacks, not free speech, etc., etc.
See, people make mistakes, no biggy. And times change. So constitutions needs to be adapted as the circumstances change/bugs are found.
In fact, pretending the constitution should be "final" is basically evil. It literally means that you support slavery, on the sole grounds that this was in the original compromise. It also means you believe 17th century morals to be superior to that of today, after 3 centuries of philosophy, law and democratic experience.
this religious obsession for a piece of paper is the product of demented minds. Be obsessed about laws, rights, freedoms, yes. About the piece of paper? You are crazy.
Codes of laws should be re-written every 10 years for the purpose of updating/consolidating and clarifying.
Bubbles are created over time. Extremely easy access to credit when the economy is booming is a sure-fire way to get bubbles going.
Clearly, the fed-created mess we are in happened on Bush's non-watch with excessively low interest rates.
And the war... Pumping billions in the economy for the sake of -- I'm not even sure what the point was, is like a huge stimulus bill, when you really needed a restrictive monetary policy. And then the same guys who applauded that have decided that if it doesn't line Halliburton's pockets, then it must be a bad policy.
Here is a clue: the key is not spending/not spending. The key is "be contra-cyclic". So it is not the case that republicans were wrong then and right now. They were wrong then and probably wronger now. They did bust the economy. And now they are working very hard against recovery.
You can blame the bankers, and yes, they are guilty of excessive greed, but it is only because they could borrow money like there was no tomorrow that we ran into the wall.
Oh, no. Only in the US, it is: there are places in the world where asking this question is even illegal. And as clearly the survey is purely orthogonal to the question, it is absolutely shocking you would naturally ask it.
Especially since it is not taken into account anyway...
See, if you are going to measure empathy, and pass a judgement on a whole generation based on your results, you might try to make your test somewhat clever (it is amazingly transparent: anyone with an IQ above that of a potato will get 100% if he wants to), and you might want to have some introspection to better understand the implications and understatements of the questions you are asking. What they tell about you, before what the answers might tell you.
Because being transparently treated like morons will not normally push people to have neutral answers...
No, the world really is going much, much better than most people believe. This is important, because our decisions and our actions should g in the direction of fixing actual problems, not problems generally in the process of fixing themselves:)
You are giving without even the hope of having any effect, and you claim to not be empathetic?
You are the reason this test is absurd: indeed, the most selfless generation in 60 years does not consider itself "good". Because if they did, they would not be selfless!
I will claim that there is no such thing as a selfless act. Indeed, every action is the result of two competing forces, towards action and towards inaction.
What these forces are, empathy, social pressure, having a gun pointed to your head, sheer randomness is irrelevant: one can only measure the actions, and forever guess at the motivations.
If statistics tell us that the modern generation does more for its neighbour, then it is more empathetic for any practical meaning of the term.
How people describe themselves and their actions is more guided by the social norm, what is acceptable to say, than their actual feelings...
People do these things just because they seem obvious and right. Not because they feel compelled to do them because of moral/religious reasons.
Therefore, in the test, they also seem less empathetic: they would not feel for someone, this is useless, they would try to do something about it.
Also, the result probably indicates people are more honest, because they are more at peace with their actions. Indeed, the test is so amazingly transparent that it boggles the mind how anyone can claim to extract any information from it.
See, you have it all wrong. Helping others does not make you a good human being according to the research. No Sir/Madam.
What counts is the feeling/intention. Who cares about the results...
sarcasm off.
These researcher are part of the problem: too many people care only about the feelings and not the actual results of concrete actions. They do not measure real empathy, just how good you are at lying at amazingly transparent tests.
That the results are so low probably indicates people are in fact becoming more honest, and the world is clearly improving. Which is much more consistent with what we can observe around us.
In fact, this test is worse than that: it asks for your ethnic background. Basically, it assumes that you feel that you are more connected to a group of human based on essentially the colour of your skin.
And then the bastards claim that "young people these day have no empathy".
Also this test does not measure actual empathy (as in, what you do for your neighbour -- where current generations are in fact better than their elders) But essentially how good you are at emoting over things.
Claiming you care emotionally about the fate of uncounted souls less fortunate than you are is a lie. You are human, you can only feel about people you can see/know. But you can intellectually wish for a better world and work actively towards realising it.
That may not mean you will score high on this test, but that the world is in fact becoming a better place.
The very attitude of using GPL code and not actively trying to contribute back should be combated. Because were then do you draw the line? Obeying the letter and not the spirit of the licence is not good enough. Certainly should not be considered good enough.
For example: the whole KHTML/Webkit debacle. How can anyone be on the side of apple, who did all they were required to legally but still actively worked to wrest control of the project from the community (and sadly succeeded)? There is more at stake than just legality here.
Due to the excessive power a corporation has compared to an individual, the ability to bully, do propaganda campaigning, start frivolous lawsuits, they should be held to much higher ethical standards than individuals.
So yes, that they have there setup in such a way that the code cannot be modified by the users in a meaningful way makes them "some bastard making money out of stealing somebody else's work" because their product, and profit, and revenue would not exist but for the community. Morally, they owe something back, and probably legally too.
That they get away with it and get people to defend them because what they are doing is not sufficiently blatantly illegal boggles the mind.
You are wrong on many counts. One is that software still developed has its copyright resetted all the time, so duration of copyright is irrelevant here.
The company is depriving people from means of executing/modifying the code. Now if the unnamed device is equivalent to a Turing machine (and odds are it is) this is equivalent to depriving people of an infinity of functionality. Unlike a work of art where you could argue that modifications/derivations have value because of the original, and not only in and of themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Poison and toxic in large enough quantities is, for intents and purposes, the same thing.
Actually, I cannot imagine something which is "poison" and not toxic at the dose. Conversely, I can imagine something toxic at dose which one would not label poison (water), but implicit in that is that you will only ingest small enough amounts, therefore, the expected dose is low enough.
But this is sophistry.
Asking that GM food be proven safe is inane. It is exactly equivalent to asking for a formal proof that every computer program existing now and forever be proven. (hint, this is an impossible and absurd task)
Now asking that every GM food be tested in the same way we test medicines is not absurd (probably excessively cautious, but hey). There is a procedure to get new edible species approved, and I expect it was followed. Is it stringent enough? I don't know.
As for the "poison" (btw, please don't shout -- don't people know their netiquette anymore ?) remember that water is poisonous. Poison is a question of dose, for one, and poisons can be very specific. What is poisonous to insects might not be to humans and vice-versa.
Digression: when one produces an new species, it is usually done through forced mutation and selection. Meaning you got to where you think you wanted to go through a random process. The GM way is less random as you put in the characteristic you wanted in one step (conceptually -- cloning is hard, and gene insertion and expression a thoroughly non-trivial affair). Thus there is not particular reason a GM food would be less safe than a non-GM one, quite the contrary.
Digression 2: there is also this argument that horizontal (inter-species) transfer of genes do not happen in nature. This is wrong: a large part of our own DNA comes from bits from viruses, themselves having jumped between species and bringing genetic material with them. So GM food are not something that could not happen in nature.
Yes there is. There is the guarantee that if you depend on the software, no bankruptcies can kill off your support. Nor can you be chained to a single vendor.
If you are interested to having your business/occupation going on beyond the next quarter, than yes, Free software is good for you, even if you can't code. Even if you do not know what source code is.
Did you read a EULA recently? If your vendor doesn't like you, he can simply remove the right you have to use his software at whim. Or maybe just because he wants to. Clearly, if you are using proprietary software for anything else than games, you are a trusting fool.
About evaporation, remember that the latent heat of evaporation (of water) is considerable. It takes a lot of energy to evaporate water (and this is an isothermal process) and conversely condensing water gives out lots of energy.
For me, these diagrams are very much reasonable.
Oh. Convection. The answer is always convection. Basically, 20 times more heat/energy gets transferred by moving stuff around than by radiation (this is not a random number, it is the ratio you expect between heat transfer in a still fluid vs in one that is turbulent).
Much circulation goes on. So although you have this gradient of temperature, heating up any part of the atmosphere ends up heating the whole thing pretty quickly. So in a sense where the heating up happens is not so important, because stuff will get mixed up pretty quickly.
You forgot that:
a) vacuum is pretty good as an isolating "material" (think thermos bottles)
b) the Earth is continually being "heated up" by the sun.
so basically, the average temperature of the Earth-atmosphere system results from the energy radiating in from the sun which is not immediately reflected back (say a constant over long enough time frames), and the energy radiated back.
Now although the energy is eventually balanced, this tells you nothing about the temperature. The temperature at which you are radiating back the energy depends on how the energy radiating in was used/reflected/degraded. In fact simple thermodynamics tell you that each time something happens to energy (it gets reflected/absorbed, used for photosynthesis, etc.) parts of it degrade into more heat.
This heat accumulates and translates to higher temperatures. If our atmosphere interacts more with the radiation from the sun, basically, it gets hotter. CO2/water interact a lot, oxygen and nitrogen less. More CO2 means higher equilibrium temperatures.
No. Politicians pander to the lowest common denominator. The batshit crazy in each camp are important to consider, because their phobias will be served...
Speaking of phobias, in this case, the Greens are in effect arguing you should not fund a speculative research projects because... well.. It's got the Nuclear label on it.
Now, under no circumstance is it acceptable as an attitude to say "we don't know if that will work, let us instead do research which has certain outcomes". This is perfectly equivalent to saying we should give up research and only attempt not-too-novel engineering. And any political group which seriously defends this point should be fought vehemently.
Uhhh, no, we make very good fusion bombs. The difficulty in fusion is to get to high enough temperatures and pressures.
Now it happens that a fission weapon produces a lot of that (temperature and pressure). Now if your fusion device sits atop a nice proton source (say the white stuff which came in the box in which your computer came) and on the other side, a glass bowl of deuterium, and you encase the whole thing in high-density metal serving the role of reflectors for the protons... Well you just got yourself a very nice fusion device.
Simply for the sake of generating electricity, kick-starting your plant with an A-bomb is not a viable alternative...
Oh, the easy answer to that is Roe vs Wade. Not an amendment, but clearly something that ought to have been decided by the congress. Basically, I find it outrageous that there can even be a debate about the rights of a bunch of cells over that of a human being (the mother), but I find it disturbing that this rests on the very questionable interpretation of Justices: this is a question for the lawmakers, and clearly was not -- and could not ave been on the mind of the writers of the constitution.
Probably the right to bear arms ought also to be refined/redefined: are nuclear weapons admissible, and what is the threshold for a weapon that one has the right to bear?
you know, a set of conditions which were reunited only 17 times since the bill of rights probably indicates a bar set a tad too high... Also in the face of a political climate where posturing is more important than anything.
Ideally.
But it is a lesser evil, given that it is effectively impossible to get non-partisan agreement on anything, to reinterpret the damn thing rather than being stuck in the XVIIth century.
In any case, the SCOTUS is in practise free to effectively interpret it at will, so you might as well call it living: at least it is a honest reflection of reality.
Oh, and I forgot. These days, if something came up, like, say, finding that the constitution could be interpreted to mean that child prostitution is perfectly legal under certain sets of circumstances (which could happen, if the justices felt like it), you probably could not amend it, because of partisan lines.
Because the alternative, a constitution set in stone would basically mean no rights for blacks, not free speech, etc., etc.
See, people make mistakes, no biggy. And times change. So constitutions needs to be adapted as the circumstances change/bugs are found.
In fact, pretending the constitution should be "final" is basically evil. It literally means that you support slavery, on the sole grounds that this was in the original compromise. It also means you believe 17th century morals to be superior to that of today, after 3 centuries of philosophy, law and democratic experience.
this religious obsession for a piece of paper is the product of demented minds. Be obsessed about laws, rights, freedoms, yes. About the piece of paper? You are crazy.
Codes of laws should be re-written every 10 years for the purpose of updating/consolidating and clarifying.
Bubbles are created over time. Extremely easy access to credit when the economy is booming is a sure-fire way to get bubbles going.
Clearly, the fed-created mess we are in happened on Bush's non-watch with excessively low interest rates.
And the war... Pumping billions in the economy for the sake of -- I'm not even sure what the point was, is like a huge stimulus bill, when you really needed a restrictive monetary policy. And then the same guys who applauded that have decided that if it doesn't line Halliburton's pockets, then it must be a bad policy.
Here is a clue: the key is not spending/not spending. The key is "be contra-cyclic". So it is not the case that republicans were wrong then and right now. They were wrong then and probably wronger now. They did bust the economy. And now they are working very hard against recovery.
You can blame the bankers, and yes, they are guilty of excessive greed, but it is only because they could borrow money like there was no tomorrow that we ran into the wall.
Oh, no. Only in the US, it is: there are places in the world where asking this question is even illegal. And as clearly the survey is purely orthogonal to the question, it is absolutely shocking you would naturally ask it.
Especially since it is not taken into account anyway...
See, if you are going to measure empathy, and pass a judgement on a whole generation based on your results, you might try to make your test somewhat clever (it is amazingly transparent: anyone with an IQ above that of a potato will get 100% if he wants to), and you might want to have some introspection to better understand the implications and understatements of the questions you are asking. What they tell about you, before what the answers might tell you.
Because being transparently treated like morons will not normally push people to have neutral answers...
And you know what? That's great.
No, the world really is going much, much better than most people believe. This is important, because our decisions and our actions should g in the direction of fixing actual problems, not problems generally in the process of fixing themselves :)
I could dig up the stats, but hey, you can gogle for them yourself :)
You are giving without even the hope of having any effect, and you claim to not be empathetic?
You are the reason this test is absurd: indeed, the most selfless generation in 60 years does not consider itself "good". Because if they did, they would not be selfless!
But rejoice, the world is not going as bad as you think it is:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
I will claim that there is no such thing as a selfless act. Indeed, every action is the result of two competing forces, towards action and towards inaction.
What these forces are, empathy, social pressure, having a gun pointed to your head, sheer randomness is irrelevant: one can only measure the actions, and forever guess at the motivations.
If statistics tell us that the modern generation does more for its neighbour, then it is more empathetic for any practical meaning of the term.
How people describe themselves and their actions is more guided by the social norm, what is acceptable to say, than their actual feelings...
People do these things just because they seem obvious and right. Not because they feel compelled to do them because of moral/religious reasons.
Therefore, in the test, they also seem less empathetic: they would not feel for someone, this is useless, they would try to do something about it.
Also, the result probably indicates people are more honest, because they are more at peace with their actions. Indeed, the test is so amazingly transparent that it boggles the mind how anyone can claim to extract any information from it.
sarcasm on.
See, you have it all wrong. Helping others does not make you a good human being according to the research. No Sir/Madam.
What counts is the feeling/intention. Who cares about the results...
sarcasm off.
These researcher are part of the problem: too many people care only about the feelings and not the actual results of concrete actions. They do not measure real empathy, just how good you are at lying at amazingly transparent tests.
That the results are so low probably indicates people are in fact becoming more honest, and the world is clearly improving. Which is much more consistent with what we can observe around us.
In fact, this test is worse than that: it asks for your ethnic background. Basically, it assumes that you feel that you are more connected to a group of human based on essentially the colour of your skin.
And then the bastards claim that "young people these day have no empathy".
Also this test does not measure actual empathy (as in, what you do for your neighbour -- where current generations are in fact better than their elders) But essentially how good you are at emoting over things.
Claiming you care emotionally about the fate of uncounted souls less fortunate than you are is a lie. You are human, you can only feel about people you can see/know. But you can intellectually wish for a better world and work actively towards realising it.
That may not mean you will score high on this test, but that the world is in fact becoming a better place.
The very attitude of using GPL code and not actively trying to contribute back should be combated. Because were then do you draw the line? Obeying the letter and not the spirit of the licence is not good enough. Certainly should not be considered good enough.
For example: the whole KHTML/Webkit debacle. How can anyone be on the side of apple, who did all they were required to legally but still actively worked to wrest control of the project from the community (and sadly succeeded)? There is more at stake than just legality here.
Due to the excessive power a corporation has compared to an individual, the ability to bully, do propaganda campaigning, start frivolous lawsuits, they should be held to much higher ethical standards than individuals.
So yes, that they have there setup in such a way that the code cannot be modified by the users in a meaningful way makes them "some bastard making money out of stealing somebody else's work" because their product, and profit, and revenue would not exist but for the community. Morally, they owe something back, and probably legally too.
That they get away with it and get people to defend them because what they are doing is not sufficiently blatantly illegal boggles the mind.
You are wrong on many counts. One is that software still developed has its copyright resetted all the time, so duration of copyright is irrelevant here.
The company is depriving people from means of executing/modifying the code. Now if the unnamed device is equivalent to a Turing machine (and odds are it is) this is equivalent to depriving people of an infinity of functionality. Unlike a work of art where you could argue that modifications/derivations have value because of the original, and not only in and of themselves.