All that carbon used to be locked up inside plants/animals (some living, some dead--like coal and oil). I suppose they could scrape the bacteria off every few weeks and put it in an oil barrel, but where do we stack the barrels? Put 'em underground to turn into oil next year?
The solution is very simple. You burn the plants that you're growing in your power plant to generate electricity! Instead of digging up coal, removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air, you use a comparatively closed cycle of taking carbon out of the air and then putting it back in. Essentially you've moved to an indirect solar power system; you're storing solar energy in the form of biomass. Biomass isn't a particuarly popular form of generation these days (except as a way of also disposing of unwanted plant matter, which is essentially the problem that you're proposing) but it does have the wonderful property of combining the energy density of fossil fuels with the non-greenhouse causing properties of other renewable energy sources. You can bet it's going to get more popular over time.
Maybe because Ylönen is actually in the same boat as Bezos, et. al. He submitted ssh as an open standard, which was upstanding of him. Then he turned around and tried to trademark the name of the open standard. Now he's decided that OpenSSH is taking too much of his business, and he's trying to shut them down by preventing them from using the name of the protocol in their program name.
Quite frankly, OpenSSH is not confusingly similar to ssh, or even SSH. Trying to sue them for trademark infringement (while simultaneously letting anyone else using ssh or SSH in their name slide by) is just slimy business practice. Why doesn't Ylönen just do what's right and try to compete on the basis of quality of software, not by using questionable legal tactics to try to run them out of business?
One other thing that they mentioned is that it's possible to break the encryption by spoofing packets. All you have to do is to guess the IP address of a packet and you can inject a second packet with the IP changed to one of your choice. It automatically get decrypted at the base station and sent to your choice of destination. This would then give you the basis for a known cyphertext attack, which would obviously be bad. The potential for this kind of attack is very serious.
Of a comment that Larry Wall made when talking about Metallica vs. Napster- that Napster users who compared sharing mp3s with Free Software didn't understand the difference between taking (sharing mp3s that are under copyright) and giving (turning your software over to others through Free Software licenses). Microsoft apparently doesn't understand the difference between giving and taking, either. Free Software isn't a legal threat to proprietary IP because Free Software is about giving, not taking. Software become Free when its author decides to give it away, not when other people decide to take it. Anyone can keep their software proprietary so long as they play by the rules and don't incorporate code with a license like the GPL. The only way that Free Software is a threat is the old fashioned way- by producing a better product at a better price.
This is bizarre. We're supposed to believe that it's unconstitutional to use the best available statistical sampling approaches to figure out how many people live in a given area, but that it's just fine to rely on the neighbors or a guess based on toys in the yard? What in hell was the Supreme Court smoking?
For all the paranoia that's being spouted here, it's nice to hear that the census is taking steps to deal with the issue, which is actually the main thrust of the article. The Census department itself is the one that stepped up and admitted that this is an issue, not some third party that's threatening to break everyone's privacy. They're deliberately fuzzing the data to remove individually identifying data, and even taking steps that may decrease it's usefullness (like letting it out in bigger aggregate blocks) in order to make it even harder. Perhaps the best quote was at the end of the article:
The re-identification process is highly complex and doesn't have a high yield: In a Census Bureau test, only 10 percent of survey participants could be re-identified. But that is enough for the bureau to be concerned.
"I think many people feel they could probably obtain information easier from some other source than trying to obtain it from a census file," says the bureau's Ms. Zayatz, "but we're still very protective."
That does not sound like a government agency that's eager to breach people's privacy.
The U.S. Constitution says the purpose of the Census is to make an "actual enumeration."
This is a bit of a distortion. The phrase "actual Enumeration" is part of the sentence:
The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
IOW, the "actual Enumeration" refers to the process of taking the Census, and does not mean that only a direct counting of individuals is allowable. IMO the recent Supreme Court ruling to the contrary was exactly the same kind of political decision that resulted in us getting our current president. That said, the Constitution says that the Census must be performed in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, but it does not exclude its use for other purposes. In fact, it says that it is to be carried out as Congress directs, so Congress clearly has the right to design the Census as it sees fit.
You unenlightened pig! I thought that we had gotten past the day when small minded bigots discriminated against couples just because they're the same bytesex. There's nothing that to prevent homobytesexual couples from raising child processes just as well as traditional couples. You're probably one of those religious bigots who are always promoting vi over emacs, KDE over GNOME, BSD over Linux, or vice versa. You should be ashamed of yourself.
You have this backward. The natural situation is that everyone has the right to copy anything they damn well feel like. Restrictions on the right to copy are the artificial creation of the government. The people who have been irresponsible are the ones who have abused their government granted monopoly on the right to copy music to charge 500%+ markup on CDs, ignoring the nominal purpose of the copying restriction- to reward the creators of the music. Now that the real cost of music duplication has gone through the floor thanks to the elimination of the need for a permanent physical medium, they're engaged in pointless and idiodic whining about alleged lost profits. Those who would prevent others from copying music need to start being responsible.
But this is a reasonable complaint. He makes several comments that IMO are right on the mark. There are a whole bunch of projects (not just KDE 2.0, which you seem to be focusing on) that have seen serious schedule slippage. Why? Because they tried to do too much. They aimed further than they could see, and that meant that they had serious changes in component APIs as they discovered problems. Every time the API changed, they had to go back and rework the other components that depended on it, resulting in wasted effort.
I think that Miguel's view is something like this. If they aim to produce the "Blue Sky" version of Gnome, it will wind up taking twice as long as they expect, and users will be stuck with the existing version that whole time. If they go for the "aim low" version instead, it will come out much faster and provide a stepping stone to where they want to be. It's quite likely that they'll actually reach the "Blue Sky" point just as fast as if they had started straight for it, but with the added benefit of an improved version for general use while getting there.
However my feeling is that the 'stable' version, once released, is left to itself. At least, I never read of Gnome 1.2.x ( that is a
version with the same functions of 1.2 but with more bug fixing ).
That's only because GNOME is a tied set of components, rather than a monolithic system. When they moved to GNOME 1.2, they upgraded all of the components at once, but since then they've patched each part independently as needed. There hasn't been a GNOME 1.2.1 (or 1.2 SP1), but there have been gnome-core-1.2.1, gnome-libs-1.2.1, etc. Different components have different patch numbers now because they've required different amounts of patching, but IIRC every single component has undergone some minor changes since 1.2 was released.
Actually, slashdot is a non-zero sum game. When I have moderator points and mod somebody up, my own karma doesn't go down. Total karma is allowed to increase. OTOH, if I mod a stupid troll down, my karma doesn't increase to compensate, so it's also possible for total karma to decrease. But if everyone follows the moderator guidelines and uses their mod points more to mod up good posts than to mod down bad ones, karma will tend to increase over time.
This does make me wonder, though, whether they address the problem of spoofed
packets? Presumably, if they don't trust the client, they keep track of where each player is, and can therefore determine
whether, according to the rules, a player can do what his packets are saying he's doing.
I fail to see how the issue of spoofed packets has anything to do with client-side security. The key is that they don't have to let the client tell them what the player is doing. The client tells the server what the player is trying to do, and the server decides whether or not he succeeds. This eliminates a lot of possible security holes, because all critically important rules decisions are made by the server. So long as the game design limits players to broadly defined actions (i.e. I'll try to shoot him with an arrow, rather than letting the player aim precisely) the scope for cheating is greatly diminished.
Most left wing theory is built upon the presumption that life is a zero sum game (when people start talking about "redistribution of wealth" you know they are a bit nuts). People often mistakenly assume that someone's gain is necessarily someone else's loss.
Nonesense. This is almost exactly backwards. The theory of redistribution of wealth is that given that money has diminishing marginal utility, you can increase total utility by taking something away from the richest people and giving it to the poorest. Imagine, for instance, that person A has $1 billion and four others are flat broke. If you take $4 million from A and give $1 million each to the other four, A will hardly even notice that it's gone, but the people who receive the money will be much, much better off. That's positive sum.
Big Macs. They have the additional advantage that they are not only exactly the same size everywhere, but are of exactly identical molecular composition, unlike credit cards.
And, of course, it's possible that the inventors of the algorithm are using one of those data sets that are particularly easily compressible. The article claims only that their 8:1 compression was on text in binary format, not straight ASCII. If they were using MS Word documents, or something encoded in 16 bit/character unicode, an 8:1 compression might be reasonable.
Obviously nVidia and Creative must not agree with you, then. After all, they seem to think that it's worth a premium to buy the Cadillac of fans instead of the run of the mill ones. Certainly there are a lot of overclockers who think that the absolute best CPU fan is worth spending money on. It may be that GPU makers are now pushing the limits to the point that they have to push their chips to the very limit in order to get the performance they want, in which case the very best fan may be more necessary than luxury.
In any case, the fact that the patent is being infringed is indirect evidence that it's actually a good idea. After all, people are much more likely to try to steal good ideas than stupid ones. The fact that a company is willing to risk litigation by infringing on a patent rather than just working around it suggests that the idea is worth copying.
nVidia isn't being sued because they're making infringing fans, but because they're buying fans from a company (ADDA) that is allegedly infringing another company's patent (Sunonwealth).
Not quite. nVidia and Creative aren't being sued for buying the fans, they're being sued for importing them. Reading between the lines a bit here, it sounds as though ADDA is probably making and selling the fans in a country that has very weak, if any, patent protection. If they don't directly do business somewhere that does have strong patent protection, Sunonwealth can't get results by suing them directly, because they won't be able to collect on any judgment that they win. The article makes it sound as though that's already happened, in fact. Instead they have to go after the companies that buy the fans and import them into countries that do have strong patent laws. This is like suing a company that imports illegal copies of DVDs; you can't sue the people doing the copying because the country where they're based will laugh at you, so you have to go after the importer.
The best way to settle all of these law suits is for all of the lawyers to fight it out with clubs and other blunt objects.
This is just stupid. Lawsuits like this are not generally the fault of the lawyers; they're the fault of the business guys. The lawyers don't just say, "Hey, let's sue somebody today." Their bosses decide to sue somebody as a business decision, and they send the lawyers to do the dirty work. If you make lawsuits into deathmatches between the lawyers, all you'll get are big, hulking, dumb lawyers who look like they belong in the WWF and are good at pulverizing people. If you really want to cut down on suits like this, make the CEOs duke it out when the companies get involved in a lawsuit. They're the ones who are making the decision to sue, after all, so you want them to suffer the consequences of frivolous lawsuits.
Remember, lawyers most often get paid for their time in court, getting ready for court, etc. Therefore, it is in their best interest, not the interest of their clients, to have long and protracted legal disputes. They get paid either way.
Not really. Most corporations have their legal people on staff, so they're going to collect their salary whether they're in a lawsuit or not. We're not talking about personal injury lawyers, here. When that isn't the case, the plaintif's attorney's often get a percentage of the settlement rather than an hourly fee, so they get the best return on their time if they get a fast settlement, rather than a drawn out case where they might wind up with nothing.
However, I don't
think one can include the cost of the antivirus software in your estimate. Even if there were to CIH, Melissa, or Love Bug, we
would still be running the software.
But this doesn't follow. If there were no viruses at all, you wouldn't need to worry about them as a source of data problems, and you wouldn't need to spend the $24 per client for anti-virus software. What that means is that the threat of a virus alone is enough to force you to add costs, so there's a cost associated with viruses even for well run shops that don't actually get infected. It's not a direct cost, but it still exists.
I'm beginning to wonder if this is just a case of bad luck or whether these rebates are only a scam by companies to get people to
buy the products due to the advertised after-rebate prices, and then they figure that most people won't submit the rebate requests
to begin with and for those that do, they will make it as difficult as possible to receive the promised rebate money."
Gee, do you think that might be the case? Well duh. Rebates have always been that kind of scam, and on every product, not just computer equipment. Most people don't bother to cut coupons, much less turn in their receipts for rebate money. They've always been based on the idea that people will jump at the apparently low price but never bother to ask for their money back. That's why some states have truth in advertizing laws that don't let businesses publish after rebate prices, or only publish them in smaller type than the tag price.
On the "cleaner and sharper looking" front, Evolution looks great! I've gotta try that sometime soon. Can anyone
compare it to Netscape mail (which lacks the calendaring, of course, but I mostly use Netscape for mail/news
anyway).
Well, I'm not a really heavy user or anything, but I've completely given up on Netscape mail in favor of Evolution. I haven't had any problems with it (except that during one upgrade the Helix Update didn't retrieve a necessary library and it took me a while to figure out why it wasn't working) and I've found that some of the automatic filtering options are very useful. I forward all of my mail from my other accounts to my home computer, and it's great to be able to auto-recognize and highlight the forwarded mail.
How many companies have you seen rush a product to market, only to find unforseen problems once it is too late to do anything about it?
But this quote is good evidence that these problems are hardly distinctive to genetic engineering. Companies produce new products with potentially serious health, environmental, and other consequences every day. Look at worries about cell phones causing brain damage, food additives causing cancer, cars causing pollution, etc. We don't even blink when people create those things, but suddenly flinch when people start talking about genetic engineering. There's no rational reason to be especially worried about things produced by genetic engineering relative to other processes- particularly when you're talking about a big thing like a goat that's comparatively easy to keep from escaping and reproducing in the wild.
If anything, genetic engineering like this seems likely to be safer than trying to produce new synthetic materials with the same properties. After all, spider silk is something that already exists in nature, so we'd have a pretty good idea if coming in contact with it were likely to cause cancer, acting like Steve Ballmer, or the like. The goat produced silk is chemically identical, just derived from a different source. And we already have some idea of the environmental impact of raising goats. Compare that to a new synthetic polymer. Because it would be completely novel, rather than simply a new way of producing an existing thing, we would actually need to study it much more carefully to be sure that it had no terrible consequences. And we'd also need to look very carefully at the environmental consequences of the factories set up to produce it, since their impact would not be known either.
Not necessarily. Some scientists have seriously considered genetically engineering animals so that the males excrete engineered proteins in their semen. It would certainly make a very interesting web shooter.
One thing that I'm a bit suspicious about is this quote:
Turner got the idea while teaching at McGill University in Montreal in 1992, after learning that scientists had isolated three spider genes that code for silk proteins. "It was a purely serendipitous find. The silk gland of spiders and the milk gland of goats are almost identical. Teats equal spinnerets."
While there may be some biochemical similarities, my understanding is that part of the reason that spider silk is as strong as it is is because of the precise physical arrangement of the protein fibers relative to each other, and that the spiders' glands contain special protein machinery that guarantees correct alignment. IOW, even if you can get the protein, you still have to "spin" it in a special way to get the properties you want, and the goats aren't equipped to do that. So there's a serious question about whether or not the engineered silk will actually be useful. Don't start saving for your ultralight climbing ropes yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is very simple. You burn the plants that you're growing in your power plant to generate electricity! Instead of digging up coal, removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air, you use a comparatively closed cycle of taking carbon out of the air and then putting it back in. Essentially you've moved to an indirect solar power system; you're storing solar energy in the form of biomass. Biomass isn't a particuarly popular form of generation these days (except as a way of also disposing of unwanted plant matter, which is essentially the problem that you're proposing) but it does have the wonderful property of combining the energy density of fossil fuels with the non-greenhouse causing properties of other renewable energy sources. You can bet it's going to get more popular over time.
Maybe because Ylönen is actually in the same boat as Bezos, et. al. He submitted ssh as an open standard, which was upstanding of him. Then he turned around and tried to trademark the name of the open standard. Now he's decided that OpenSSH is taking too much of his business, and he's trying to shut them down by preventing them from using the name of the protocol in their program name.
Quite frankly, OpenSSH is not confusingly similar to ssh, or even SSH. Trying to sue them for trademark infringement (while simultaneously letting anyone else using ssh or SSH in their name slide by) is just slimy business practice. Why doesn't Ylönen just do what's right and try to compete on the basis of quality of software, not by using questionable legal tactics to try to run them out of business?
One other thing that they mentioned is that it's possible to break the encryption by spoofing packets. All you have to do is to guess the IP address of a packet and you can inject a second packet with the IP changed to one of your choice. It automatically get decrypted at the base station and sent to your choice of destination. This would then give you the basis for a known cyphertext attack, which would obviously be bad. The potential for this kind of attack is very serious.
Of a comment that Larry Wall made when talking about Metallica vs. Napster- that Napster users who compared sharing mp3s with Free Software didn't understand the difference between taking (sharing mp3s that are under copyright) and giving (turning your software over to others through Free Software licenses). Microsoft apparently doesn't understand the difference between giving and taking, either. Free Software isn't a legal threat to proprietary IP because Free Software is about giving, not taking. Software become Free when its author decides to give it away, not when other people decide to take it. Anyone can keep their software proprietary so long as they play by the rules and don't incorporate code with a license like the GPL. The only way that Free Software is a threat is the old fashioned way- by producing a better product at a better price.
This is bizarre. We're supposed to believe that it's unconstitutional to use the best available statistical sampling approaches to figure out how many people live in a given area, but that it's just fine to rely on the neighbors or a guess based on toys in the yard? What in hell was the Supreme Court smoking?
For all the paranoia that's being spouted here, it's nice to hear that the census is taking steps to deal with the issue, which is actually the main thrust of the article. The Census department itself is the one that stepped up and admitted that this is an issue, not some third party that's threatening to break everyone's privacy. They're deliberately fuzzing the data to remove individually identifying data, and even taking steps that may decrease it's usefullness (like letting it out in bigger aggregate blocks) in order to make it even harder. Perhaps the best quote was at the end of the article:
That does not sound like a government agency that's eager to breach people's privacy.
This is a bit of a distortion. The phrase "actual Enumeration" is part of the sentence:
IOW, the "actual Enumeration" refers to the process of taking the Census, and does not mean that only a direct counting of individuals is allowable. IMO the recent Supreme Court ruling to the contrary was exactly the same kind of political decision that resulted in us getting our current president. That said, the Constitution says that the Census must be performed in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, but it does not exclude its use for other purposes. In fact, it says that it is to be carried out as Congress directs, so Congress clearly has the right to design the Census as it sees fit.
You unenlightened pig! I thought that we had gotten past the day when small minded bigots discriminated against couples just because they're the same bytesex. There's nothing that to prevent homobytesexual couples from raising child processes just as well as traditional couples. You're probably one of those religious bigots who are always promoting vi over emacs, KDE over GNOME, BSD over Linux, or vice versa. You should be ashamed of yourself.
You have this backward. The natural situation is that everyone has the right to copy anything they damn well feel like. Restrictions on the right to copy are the artificial creation of the government. The people who have been irresponsible are the ones who have abused their government granted monopoly on the right to copy music to charge 500%+ markup on CDs, ignoring the nominal purpose of the copying restriction- to reward the creators of the music. Now that the real cost of music duplication has gone through the floor thanks to the elimination of the need for a permanent physical medium, they're engaged in pointless and idiodic whining about alleged lost profits. Those who would prevent others from copying music need to start being responsible.
But this is a reasonable complaint. He makes several comments that IMO are right on the mark. There are a whole bunch of projects (not just KDE 2.0, which you seem to be focusing on) that have seen serious schedule slippage. Why? Because they tried to do too much. They aimed further than they could see, and that meant that they had serious changes in component APIs as they discovered problems. Every time the API changed, they had to go back and rework the other components that depended on it, resulting in wasted effort.
I think that Miguel's view is something like this. If they aim to produce the "Blue Sky" version of Gnome, it will wind up taking twice as long as they expect, and users will be stuck with the existing version that whole time. If they go for the "aim low" version instead, it will come out much faster and provide a stepping stone to where they want to be. It's quite likely that they'll actually reach the "Blue Sky" point just as fast as if they had started straight for it, but with the added benefit of an improved version for general use while getting there.
That's only because GNOME is a tied set of components, rather than a monolithic system. When they moved to GNOME 1.2, they upgraded all of the components at once, but since then they've patched each part independently as needed. There hasn't been a GNOME 1.2.1 (or 1.2 SP1), but there have been gnome-core-1.2.1, gnome-libs-1.2.1, etc. Different components have different patch numbers now because they've required different amounts of patching, but IIRC every single component has undergone some minor changes since 1.2 was released.
Actually, slashdot is a non-zero sum game. When I have moderator points and mod somebody up, my own karma doesn't go down. Total karma is allowed to increase. OTOH, if I mod a stupid troll down, my karma doesn't increase to compensate, so it's also possible for total karma to decrease. But if everyone follows the moderator guidelines and uses their mod points more to mod up good posts than to mod down bad ones, karma will tend to increase over time.
I fail to see how the issue of spoofed packets has anything to do with client-side security. The key is that they don't have to let the client tell them what the player is doing. The client tells the server what the player is trying to do, and the server decides whether or not he succeeds. This eliminates a lot of possible security holes, because all critically important rules decisions are made by the server. So long as the game design limits players to broadly defined actions (i.e. I'll try to shoot him with an arrow, rather than letting the player aim precisely) the scope for cheating is greatly diminished.
Nonesense. This is almost exactly backwards. The theory of redistribution of wealth is that given that money has diminishing marginal utility, you can increase total utility by taking something away from the richest people and giving it to the poorest. Imagine, for instance, that person A has $1 billion and four others are flat broke. If you take $4 million from A and give $1 million each to the other four, A will hardly even notice that it's gone, but the people who receive the money will be much, much better off. That's positive sum.
Big Macs. They have the additional advantage that they are not only exactly the same size everywhere, but are of exactly identical molecular composition, unlike credit cards.
And, of course, it's possible that the inventors of the algorithm are using one of those data sets that are particularly easily compressible. The article claims only that their 8:1 compression was on text in binary format, not straight ASCII. If they were using MS Word documents, or something encoded in 16 bit/character unicode, an 8:1 compression might be reasonable.
Obviously nVidia and Creative must not agree with you, then. After all, they seem to think that it's worth a premium to buy the Cadillac of fans instead of the run of the mill ones. Certainly there are a lot of overclockers who think that the absolute best CPU fan is worth spending money on. It may be that GPU makers are now pushing the limits to the point that they have to push their chips to the very limit in order to get the performance they want, in which case the very best fan may be more necessary than luxury.
In any case, the fact that the patent is being infringed is indirect evidence that it's actually a good idea. After all, people are much more likely to try to steal good ideas than stupid ones. The fact that a company is willing to risk litigation by infringing on a patent rather than just working around it suggests that the idea is worth copying.
Not quite. nVidia and Creative aren't being sued for buying the fans, they're being sued for importing them. Reading between the lines a bit here, it sounds as though ADDA is probably making and selling the fans in a country that has very weak, if any, patent protection. If they don't directly do business somewhere that does have strong patent protection, Sunonwealth can't get results by suing them directly, because they won't be able to collect on any judgment that they win. The article makes it sound as though that's already happened, in fact. Instead they have to go after the companies that buy the fans and import them into countries that do have strong patent laws. This is like suing a company that imports illegal copies of DVDs; you can't sue the people doing the copying because the country where they're based will laugh at you, so you have to go after the importer.
This is just stupid. Lawsuits like this are not generally the fault of the lawyers; they're the fault of the business guys. The lawyers don't just say, "Hey, let's sue somebody today." Their bosses decide to sue somebody as a business decision, and they send the lawyers to do the dirty work. If you make lawsuits into deathmatches between the lawyers, all you'll get are big, hulking, dumb lawyers who look like they belong in the WWF and are good at pulverizing people. If you really want to cut down on suits like this, make the CEOs duke it out when the companies get involved in a lawsuit. They're the ones who are making the decision to sue, after all, so you want them to suffer the consequences of frivolous lawsuits.
Not really. Most corporations have their legal people on staff, so they're going to collect their salary whether they're in a lawsuit or not. We're not talking about personal injury lawyers, here. When that isn't the case, the plaintif's attorney's often get a percentage of the settlement rather than an hourly fee, so they get the best return on their time if they get a fast settlement, rather than a drawn out case where they might wind up with nothing.
But this doesn't follow. If there were no viruses at all, you wouldn't need to worry about them as a source of data problems, and you wouldn't need to spend the $24 per client for anti-virus software. What that means is that the threat of a virus alone is enough to force you to add costs, so there's a cost associated with viruses even for well run shops that don't actually get infected. It's not a direct cost, but it still exists.
Gee, do you think that might be the case? Well duh. Rebates have always been that kind of scam, and on every product, not just computer equipment. Most people don't bother to cut coupons, much less turn in their receipts for rebate money. They've always been based on the idea that people will jump at the apparently low price but never bother to ask for their money back. That's why some states have truth in advertizing laws that don't let businesses publish after rebate prices, or only publish them in smaller type than the tag price.
Well, I'm not a really heavy user or anything, but I've completely given up on Netscape mail in favor of Evolution. I haven't had any problems with it (except that during one upgrade the Helix Update didn't retrieve a necessary library and it took me a while to figure out why it wasn't working) and I've found that some of the automatic filtering options are very useful. I forward all of my mail from my other accounts to my home computer, and it's great to be able to auto-recognize and highlight the forwarded mail.
But this quote is good evidence that these problems are hardly distinctive to genetic engineering. Companies produce new products with potentially serious health, environmental, and other consequences every day. Look at worries about cell phones causing brain damage, food additives causing cancer, cars causing pollution, etc. We don't even blink when people create those things, but suddenly flinch when people start talking about genetic engineering. There's no rational reason to be especially worried about things produced by genetic engineering relative to other processes- particularly when you're talking about a big thing like a goat that's comparatively easy to keep from escaping and reproducing in the wild.
If anything, genetic engineering like this seems likely to be safer than trying to produce new synthetic materials with the same properties. After all, spider silk is something that already exists in nature, so we'd have a pretty good idea if coming in contact with it were likely to cause cancer, acting like Steve Ballmer, or the like. The goat produced silk is chemically identical, just derived from a different source. And we already have some idea of the environmental impact of raising goats. Compare that to a new synthetic polymer. Because it would be completely novel, rather than simply a new way of producing an existing thing, we would actually need to study it much more carefully to be sure that it had no terrible consequences. And we'd also need to look very carefully at the environmental consequences of the factories set up to produce it, since their impact would not be known either.
Not necessarily. Some scientists have seriously considered genetically engineering animals so that the males excrete engineered proteins in their semen. It would certainly make a very interesting web shooter.
One thing that I'm a bit suspicious about is this quote:
While there may be some biochemical similarities, my understanding is that part of the reason that spider silk is as strong as it is is because of the precise physical arrangement of the protein fibers relative to each other, and that the spiders' glands contain special protein machinery that guarantees correct alignment. IOW, even if you can get the protein, you still have to "spin" it in a special way to get the properties you want, and the goats aren't equipped to do that. So there's a serious question about whether or not the engineered silk will actually be useful. Don't start saving for your ultralight climbing ropes yet.