Woah, woah, careful now. There are people who might be deeply injured by sentiments like "YouTube isn't the entire Internet" or "YouTube is owned by Google."
..."West," Texas, actually. The town was named West. I'm not sure what possesses people to name a town "West," and it's too early in the morning to go looking it up, but there you go.
Valid—and normally I'd defend that point myself; the irony of such a recent story condemning other sites for doing the same thing, however, was just too tempting. (And many do have communities themselves, though obviously not as well-developed.)
Well, technically you need a Genuine-certified copy of Windows to download it, but, um, why are you pointing that out? Unless you have Windows already, it's not going to have any use to you at all. You might as well say the same thing about all Windows-based software, at which point I would have to point out that you're being a bit silly.
As a Canadian, I can already tell where you live—in the prairies, across the border from Alberta or possibly Saskatchewan. A vast, empty wasteland full of farmers so used to oil subsidies that they have no compassion left for others. Try to pretend they're dislocated Texans instead of actual Canadians; the rest of our country already does.
And that's why this is posted on the physics pre-print server arXiv, and not in a reputable biology-related journal. There are numerous other confounding factors to be considered, too; we believe, for example, that bacteria have simplified as time proceeded, making them irrelevant to predicting the complexity of the last universal common ancestor.
If you look at the actual paper abstract carefully, you'll notice that it lapses into unabashed transhumanist fantasy in the last sentence or two. Not that there's anything wrong with transhumanist fantasy, but it certainly doesn't belong in a paper about abiogenesis and the molecular clock.
I'm with you on engineering against abiotic factors, but I don't think it's a good plan to put the onus on farmers to rotate and manage crops properly, as with the Bt-resistant rootworms. It seems that unless you're planting the crops yourself, escape and resistance must be expected. That's why I'm so convinced it's all Red Queen scenario.
...as for crop diversity, we don't necessarily need to dig into entirely new species. Ethiopia has loads of unexploited strains of wheat and similar grains that could lend sufficient security. (Short of coating our crops in dead locusts, anyway.)
It wouldn't require a control or anything, just some research and a paper trail audit. The necessary information might even be in the files for one of the many court cases drug companies have gotten into over the years.
We've had lots of exciting arguments about that very question in the past, and I think the consensus is "yes, but there are still a lot of inefficiencies in that." Advertising, lobbying, kickbacks to doctors for endorsement and regulatory processes that are both bloated and insufficient can eat away at that money very quickly. Research costs themselves may be inflated due to the absence of market pressures forcing reagent and equipment suppliers to keep their prices down—ironically, due to patent-supported monopolies.
I'm not exactly sure how much of the budget goes this way, but when you stack it all up, it seems like it could potentially be quite a lot.
Jeez, relax. Neutral genes mutate and die out after a little while because there's no point in keeping them around (they may even be slightly burdensome.) My honest opinion is that these genetic engineering programs are pointless, since they'll simply cause the environment around them to attain corresponding levels of aggressiveness. Higher yield? More for pests to chew on! Herbicide resistance? Herbicide-resistant weeds!—even if these genes couldn't spread to them.
It's all very foolish, but engineered plant genes as a general rule are not hazardous to human health. If I were writing a paper right now I would say that there "is no evidence they affect human health" because you can't write a paper without covering your butt in every conceivable way, but the truth is that plants have been evolving for a billion and a half years separately from us, and they have had no problems killing us when they wanted to. We took all that junk out through domestication, and the kinds of meddling we've been doing are not in areas of the plant genome where this could be a real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't mean that, although it is a byproduct of what I do mean.
...as a statistician, I feel obliged to point out that racial profiling by security forces is probably biasing the results.
Somehow, I definitely expected that.
Woah, woah, careful now. There are people who might be deeply injured by sentiments like "YouTube isn't the entire Internet" or "YouTube is owned by Google."
A tad, but it grows on you after a while. Perhaps post-apocalyptic, we'll see some settlements named merely "Upper," "New," and "-upon-Tweed."
Admittedly, I haven't gotten into one of those... since Monday.
I would've dug up a more subtle one if I wasn't behind on a paper today. Alas.
So many competing interests! Tiiiime to chooooose...
Oh no, I've been compromised!
..."West," Texas, actually. The town was named West. I'm not sure what possesses people to name a town "West," and it's too early in the morning to go looking it up, but there you go.
Valid—and normally I'd defend that point myself; the irony of such a recent story condemning other sites for doing the same thing, however, was just too tempting. (And many do have communities themselves, though obviously not as well-developed.)
Well, technically you need a Genuine-certified copy of Windows to download it, but, um, why are you pointing that out? Unless you have Windows already, it's not going to have any use to you at all. You might as well say the same thing about all Windows-based software, at which point I would have to point out that you're being a bit silly.
But if it doesn't slow the computer down to an unusable crawl, how will anyone ever feel safe?!
(except yours)
I can see it now, in the CNN comments section: "wtf, what's up with all of these non-tech stories on slashdot"
Well, for starters, they both begin with "W"—what more evidence could you need?!
Don't blow a fuse; the answer was just in the news! Flaaaming hypocriiiites...
(To the tune of "Reading Rainbow.")
But CISPA is your PAL, man!
As a Canadian, I can already tell where you live—in the prairies, across the border from Alberta or possibly Saskatchewan. A vast, empty wasteland full of farmers so used to oil subsidies that they have no compassion left for others. Try to pretend they're dislocated Texans instead of actual Canadians; the rest of our country already does.
And that's why this is posted on the physics pre-print server arXiv, and not in a reputable biology-related journal. There are numerous other confounding factors to be considered, too; we believe, for example, that bacteria have simplified as time proceeded, making them irrelevant to predicting the complexity of the last universal common ancestor.
If you look at the actual paper abstract carefully, you'll notice that it lapses into unabashed transhumanist fantasy in the last sentence or two. Not that there's anything wrong with transhumanist fantasy, but it certainly doesn't belong in a paper about abiogenesis and the molecular clock.
I'm with you on engineering against abiotic factors, but I don't think it's a good plan to put the onus on farmers to rotate and manage crops properly, as with the Bt-resistant rootworms. It seems that unless you're planting the crops yourself, escape and resistance must be expected. That's why I'm so convinced it's all Red Queen scenario.
...as for crop diversity, we don't necessarily need to dig into entirely new species. Ethiopia has loads of unexploited strains of wheat and similar grains that could lend sufficient security. (Short of coating our crops in dead locusts, anyway.)
I guess it had to happen sooner or later.
It wouldn't require a control or anything, just some research and a paper trail audit. The necessary information might even be in the files for one of the many court cases drug companies have gotten into over the years.
We've had lots of exciting arguments about that very question in the past, and I think the consensus is "yes, but there are still a lot of inefficiencies in that." Advertising, lobbying, kickbacks to doctors for endorsement and regulatory processes that are both bloated and insufficient can eat away at that money very quickly. Research costs themselves may be inflated due to the absence of market pressures forcing reagent and equipment suppliers to keep their prices down—ironically, due to patent-supported monopolies.
I'm not exactly sure how much of the budget goes this way, but when you stack it all up, it seems like it could potentially be quite a lot.
Jeez, relax. Neutral genes mutate and die out after a little while because there's no point in keeping them around (they may even be slightly burdensome.) My honest opinion is that these genetic engineering programs are pointless, since they'll simply cause the environment around them to attain corresponding levels of aggressiveness. Higher yield? More for pests to chew on! Herbicide resistance? Herbicide-resistant weeds!—even if these genes couldn't spread to them.
It's all very foolish, but engineered plant genes as a general rule are not hazardous to human health. If I were writing a paper right now I would say that there "is no evidence they affect human health" because you can't write a paper without covering your butt in every conceivable way, but the truth is that plants have been evolving for a billion and a half years separately from us, and they have had no problems killing us when they wanted to. We took all that junk out through domestication, and the kinds of meddling we've been doing are not in areas of the plant genome where this could be a real problem.
Monsanto thought of that. It's widely hailed as one of their worse ideas.