Not to mention the whole electric sheep situation.
Furthermore, I think the movie ruined the Voigt-Kampff test. The questions in the book would not elicit an emotional respone in most people today. I am not going to get emotional about the poor wasp being smashed, or the calf whose skin is has been turned into a leather wallet. We would fail the very definition of what it is to be human in the book, but you can't show that without showing just how emotionally precious animals are, which the movie really doesn't.
Early homonids? Sumerians? Not that much evolution have been going on in humans in the last 6.000 years (300 generations is far too short a time if you don't have a massive pressure, like humans wanting the damn dog to look ridiculous). They weren't that different from people today, except for the culture. If you took an infant from that time and let it grow up in our culture, it would fit right in as an adult.
It's a cubesat, which, according to WP "In 2004, with their relatively small size, CubeSats could each be made and launched for an estimated $65,000–$80,000.", so 35.000$ is a significant part of the total budget.
Traditional science, which I believe is what you're referring to, which has what we might call "the standard model" etc. is built on some fundamental assumptions, including:
* the conditions in the world today have existed forever, right back until the big bang, before which nothing existed.[...]
No it isn't. If it was, testing for temporal variation in the fundamental constants would not be science, which it is. The only thing that can be kind of described as a basic assumption in science is that the world makes sense, i.e. that we can find laws of nature (I guess that is close to the second assumption you mentioned), but as every scientific experimatn is a test of this, it isn't even really a assumption.
As for creationism, it's main assumption is "goddidit is a valid explanation for anything we don't currently understand or want to understand" and, perhaps "If it is written in this one book is must be correct. This only goes for this one book, and we ignore the many parts where it contraditcts itself".
Traditional science uses the above assumptions to try to find details of the world(s) around us.
No need for the "traditional" here, science is using observation to tell us things about the world around us.
Creation science looks at the world around us and tries to find evidence in support of the worldview assuming the assumptions of that worldview.
Trying to make your observations fit your preconceptions is not science. It is about as far from sceince as anything comes.
For a lot of it, yes. 42% of human DNA consists of retrotranposons or remnants of retrotransposons, and much of that is whole or partial copies of the same strand. We don't need 500.000 LINEs, most of them broken, or 1.500.000 SINEs. Pseudogenes are mostly useless, as can be seen from their mostly constant rate of mutations (if they weren't useless, selection would keep down the rate of mutation as the harmful mutations would be weeded out).
There is certainly a lot we do not know about non-coding DNA, and some of it is surely useful (as can be seen from the rate of mutations), but for much of it, we can say that it serves very little function, if any.
Sure, there is a lot of things we don't know about non-coding DNA, but there are quite a lot of DNA which we do know performs at most very little useful work. Things like pseudogenes, SINEs and LINEs (the last two might be useful, but we don't need 500.000 and 1.500.000 copies of them, respectively, especially not when most of the copies are broken). A lot of or DNA is certainly junk, but that is not an acurate description of all non-coding DNA.
There are many pieces of evidence pointing to the fact that all known life share a common descent. For example, the basic biochemistry of all known life is similar, and the proteins that support the biochemistry is similar. Furthermore, the differences in the protein structure of the same protein follow the phylogenetic tree (based on how similar the species are). The first could be the only way to do it, the second is pretty damning, the third is outrageosly implausible if not caused by common descent.
That does not mean that all terran life shares a common descent (life with a completely different biochemistry would be hard to detect, or even recognize as life), or, if that is the case today, that that have always been the case. Life might have started several times, with one of the strains eventually outcompeting all of the others. This means that common descent is not necessarily a death stroke for alien life.
This definition is crap though. If animal A can interbreed with animal B, and animal B with C, but A cannot with C, then you cannot define the species.
This makes all definitions of species crap. Species is a human construct that nature does not care about. As long as you are aware of that, it is fine to use definitions with problematic corner cases.
AFAIK, you are mostly correct. For simple programs, it is very much possible to read ahead and load the correct data. The problem arises with things like "if" statements, where you don't know which branch is going to be taken before it is taken, which can cause misses, which does take a long time to fix (the relevant parts needs to be retrieved from RAM). I'm sure they are much more advanced than that today, and bigger caches will also help, as you can load both branches, but that is the general idea.
I agree, you should have that kind of thing in the contract, and you should check what the terms are before you start doing buisness. This is easier with banks, who are bound by law to have certain levels of compensation (depending on local legislature), and who have a brand to protect. However, it is not impossible with bitcoins, just harder, so it isn't a dealbreaker, but another thing to remember when you evaluate the alternatives.
This [...] assumes that everything students do is driven by money.
Not necessarily, it can be much more subtle. As a university employee, it is easy to see why spending more on university is a good idea, and harder to see why taxing production more is a bad idea (and vica versa for people owning production facilities). This makes it easier to agree with left-wing politicies than with right-wing ones*. The views of the professors will affect (or even effect) the views of the students, so it is possible to end up with students being left-wing for economic reasons, without it being for their own, short-sighted selfinterest.
*In this post, left-wing is defined as high-tax, high-public-spending, and right-wing is the opposite. This doesn't match the US political system, but that is another point.
D) Inflation affects bitcoin just like everything else. You're right that the GP is silly for thinking that his "fractions of a percent a year" is at all meaningful, but that 2-3% loss each year is a constant, and it will hit you regardless of whether or not you're investing your money. So it's always a guaranteed loss. It should be treated as a sunk cost, and investing versus not investing should be looked at separately.
Bitcoin is designed to be deflationary. That might not be a good thing, but inflation should not affect it, in other ways than it getting worth more in relation to inflationary currencies.
Yes, for example, in the case aluded to by GGPP, the broker covered the loses. See, so different from a bank, where the customer would also not lose anything!
Monsanto owns a patent on those genes and courts ruled that this is a violation of Monsanto's patents, even if the contamination is accidental.
Why, oh, why didn't you use your examples of that earlier this year? Oh, what is that on the WP page you linked to?
He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds[...] and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup [...]. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km) of canola.
So he DID know that his plants was contaminated, and made sure he planted those seeds? It's almost as if the claims in your post are not based on anything.
According to the resources I can find online, they believed that the machines had caused unemployment and lowered the textile workers' standard of living. A traditional/. analogy including buggy whip makers comes to mind.
To understand the difference, think of like Tetris. Hybridization is arranging the blocks to form patterns. Some patterns can be advantageous and desirable, while others are not. GMO, is altering the blocks themselves to form the patterns.
You will often start by bathing the seed in mutagens or hard radiation to effect changes in the blocks. How is this different from GMO, except for the blindfolding?
At least with hybridization you are taking two species and breeding them together. This could have happened naturally, and is much less prone to danger.
Ah, the naturalistic fallacy.
Biological warfare is conducted in protected laboratories for this reason, and GMO is biological warfare in that you cannot possibly state with credulity and assurance that the consequences of your actions will not bring great harm to our current ecosystems.
As opposed to selective breeding, where you can? Or is selective breeding also biological warfare?
Rolling it out is also a continuous process. Compare that to round-up ready corn which went from the lab to practically 100% of the crop in like a decade.
It would make sense to limit the speed of introduction (when that is possible. This is often not practically possible for e.g. disease resistance), but this applies to all cultivars, regardless of their origin.
In GMO we don't necessarily have a clue about the systemic effects of the changes. So we take a couple of genes that have a primary effect of increasing pesticide resistence, but what we don't notice is that in the original organism harmful secondary effects were repressed by the existence of other genes, genes we didn't splice into the new organism. At best GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.
That applies in equal measure to selective breeding, except that there are many more potentially harmful pathways which may be affected by it. At worst GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.
For values of "survive" that does not cover metabolism or reproduction. It might be possible to bring it back to life afterwards, but it wouldn't be alive if those conditions was all it ever experienced, which is more or less the case for the martian surface.
It isn't like we did selective breeding thousands of years ago and then stopped and have been testing the results ever since. It is a continual process, where each new cultivar has exactly the same potential for problems as any other, older cultivars had when they where new, and a slightly higher potential than new GMO cultivars (in GMO, we know what is added, if not where, in selective breeding, we know neither).
There is now evidence that such engineering has caused collapse of bee colonies.
Do you have a quote for that? Last I heard, neonecotinoids were the most likely cause of CCD, and I can't find any references to plant being genetically modified to make neonecotinoids.
Imagine that next year, thanks to your allergy to some weed and the wonders of genetic engineering, you are now also allergic to wheat, corn, soybeans and carrots that contain the popular new plant-pesticide.
Assuming we do not transfer genes which produce known allergens (I assume we are not, please inform me if I am mistaken), this isn't more of a problem than it already is other crop modification techniques.
You could say they were different, in that selective breeding is blindly causing mutations and trying to select mostly the beneficial ones, whereas in GMO, we have a pretty good idea of what is being added, if not where. That makes selective breeding worse. As for your car analogy, nature is already full of self-replicators out to kill us, so unless you call for the destruction of all non-farming life, it really isn't applicable to this debate.
Half of what is spend by the pharmaceutical industry today is still a lot of money. Any system that administrates so much money is ripe for corruption (as we can see with the pharmaceutical industry today). It needs a well-designed system for keeping that in check. We have such a system today, even if it doesn't perform perfectly. Building up a new such system is going to be a hard, long and error-prone process. It may be better to do it slowly, so that the inevitable mistakes is made when the system is smaller. But I agree that it must be possible to do it in a better way than is done today.
The vast majority of Big Pharma's expenditure is on advertising. Much of the funding to create their drugs actually comes from the taxpayer, because the fundamental research is carried out at public universities.
Going from fundamental research, which usually identifies a target, designing tens of thousands of candidate drugs, weeding out the 99% which doesn't work, and the 99% of the rest that is unacceptable in humans, doing phase 1, 2 and 3 human trials on the remaining 10 is not cheap. While I agree that the way it is done today is not ideal, there is no guarantee that another specific way will be better, and making the change to another way is going to be complicated. I still think we should do it, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the whole electric sheep situation.
Furthermore, I think the movie ruined the Voigt-Kampff test. The questions in the book would not elicit an emotional respone in most people today. I am not going to get emotional about the poor wasp being smashed, or the calf whose skin is has been turned into a leather wallet. We would fail the very definition of what it is to be human in the book, but you can't show that without showing just how emotionally precious animals are, which the movie really doesn't.
Early homonids? Sumerians? Not that much evolution have been going on in humans in the last 6.000 years (300 generations is far too short a time if you don't have a massive pressure, like humans wanting the damn dog to look ridiculous). They weren't that different from people today, except for the culture. If you took an infant from that time and let it grow up in our culture, it would fit right in as an adult.
It's a cubesat, which, according to WP "In 2004, with their relatively small size, CubeSats could each be made and launched for an estimated $65,000–$80,000.", so 35.000$ is a significant part of the total budget.
Traditional science, which I believe is what you're referring to, which has what we might call "the standard model" etc. is built on some fundamental assumptions, including: * the conditions in the world today have existed forever, right back until the big bang, before which nothing existed.[...]
No it isn't. If it was, testing for temporal variation in the fundamental constants would not be science, which it is. The only thing that can be kind of described as a basic assumption in science is that the world makes sense, i.e. that we can find laws of nature (I guess that is close to the second assumption you mentioned), but as every scientific experimatn is a test of this, it isn't even really a assumption.
As for creationism, it's main assumption is "goddidit is a valid explanation for anything we don't currently understand or want to understand" and, perhaps "If it is written in this one book is must be correct. This only goes for this one book, and we ignore the many parts where it contraditcts itself".
Traditional science uses the above assumptions to try to find details of the world(s) around us.
No need for the "traditional" here, science is using observation to tell us things about the world around us.
Creation science looks at the world around us and tries to find evidence in support of the worldview assuming the assumptions of that worldview.
Trying to make your observations fit your preconceptions is not science. It is about as far from sceince as anything comes.
For a lot of it, yes. 42% of human DNA consists of retrotranposons or remnants of retrotransposons, and much of that is whole or partial copies of the same strand. We don't need 500.000 LINEs, most of them broken, or 1.500.000 SINEs. Pseudogenes are mostly useless, as can be seen from their mostly constant rate of mutations (if they weren't useless, selection would keep down the rate of mutation as the harmful mutations would be weeded out).
There is certainly a lot we do not know about non-coding DNA, and some of it is surely useful (as can be seen from the rate of mutations), but for much of it, we can say that it serves very little function, if any.
Sure, there is a lot of things we don't know about non-coding DNA, but there are quite a lot of DNA which we do know performs at most very little useful work. Things like pseudogenes, SINEs and LINEs (the last two might be useful, but we don't need 500.000 and 1.500.000 copies of them, respectively, especially not when most of the copies are broken). A lot of or DNA is certainly junk, but that is not an acurate description of all non-coding DNA.
There are many pieces of evidence pointing to the fact that all known life share a common descent. For example, the basic biochemistry of all known life is similar, and the proteins that support the biochemistry is similar. Furthermore, the differences in the protein structure of the same protein follow the phylogenetic tree (based on how similar the species are). The first could be the only way to do it, the second is pretty damning, the third is outrageosly implausible if not caused by common descent.
That does not mean that all terran life shares a common descent (life with a completely different biochemistry would be hard to detect, or even recognize as life), or, if that is the case today, that that have always been the case. Life might have started several times, with one of the strains eventually outcompeting all of the others. This means that common descent is not necessarily a death stroke for alien life.
This definition is crap though. If animal A can interbreed with animal B, and animal B with C, but A cannot with C, then you cannot define the species.
This makes all definitions of species crap. Species is a human construct that nature does not care about. As long as you are aware of that, it is fine to use definitions with problematic corner cases.
AFAIK, you are mostly correct. For simple programs, it is very much possible to read ahead and load the correct data. The problem arises with things like "if" statements, where you don't know which branch is going to be taken before it is taken, which can cause misses, which does take a long time to fix (the relevant parts needs to be retrieved from RAM). I'm sure they are much more advanced than that today, and bigger caches will also help, as you can load both branches, but that is the general idea.
I agree, you should have that kind of thing in the contract, and you should check what the terms are before you start doing buisness. This is easier with banks, who are bound by law to have certain levels of compensation (depending on local legislature), and who have a brand to protect. However, it is not impossible with bitcoins, just harder, so it isn't a dealbreaker, but another thing to remember when you evaluate the alternatives.
This [...] assumes that everything students do is driven by money.
Not necessarily, it can be much more subtle. As a university employee, it is easy to see why spending more on university is a good idea, and harder to see why taxing production more is a bad idea (and vica versa for people owning production facilities). This makes it easier to agree with left-wing politicies than with right-wing ones*. The views of the professors will affect (or even effect) the views of the students, so it is possible to end up with students being left-wing for economic reasons, without it being for their own, short-sighted selfinterest.
*In this post, left-wing is defined as high-tax, high-public-spending, and right-wing is the opposite. This doesn't match the US political system, but that is another point.
D) Inflation affects bitcoin just like everything else. You're right that the GP is silly for thinking that his "fractions of a percent a year" is at all meaningful, but that 2-3% loss each year is a constant, and it will hit you regardless of whether or not you're investing your money. So it's always a guaranteed loss. It should be treated as a sunk cost, and investing versus not investing should be looked at separately.
Bitcoin is designed to be deflationary. That might not be a good thing, but inflation should not affect it, in other ways than it getting worth more in relation to inflationary currencies.
The customers also don't lose money: "Both Palatinus and Tong have said they'll cover the loss for their customers.". At least if you choose a good broker. How to evaluate good brokers is left as an exercise to the reader.
Yes, for example, in the case aluded to by GGPP, the broker covered the loses. See, so different from a bank, where the customer would also not lose anything!
Lithobreaking is an accepted strategy for landing probes. Preferably not too heavy or fragile probes, though.
Monsanto owns a patent on those genes and courts ruled that this is a violation of Monsanto's patents, even if the contamination is accidental.
Why, oh, why didn't you use your examples of that earlier this year?
Oh, what is that on the WP page you linked to?
He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds[...] and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup [...]. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km) of canola.
So he DID know that his plants was contaminated, and made sure he planted those seeds? It's almost as if the claims in your post are not based on anything.
According to the resources I can find online, they believed that the machines had caused unemployment and lowered the textile workers' standard of living. A traditional /. analogy including buggy whip makers comes to mind.
To understand the difference, think of like Tetris. Hybridization is arranging the blocks to form patterns. Some patterns can be advantageous and desirable, while others are not. GMO, is altering the blocks themselves to form the patterns.
You will often start by bathing the seed in mutagens or hard radiation to effect changes in the blocks. How is this different from GMO, except for the blindfolding?
At least with hybridization you are taking two species and breeding them together. This could have happened naturally, and is much less prone to danger.
Ah, the naturalistic fallacy.
Biological warfare is conducted in protected laboratories for this reason, and GMO is biological warfare in that you cannot possibly state with credulity and assurance that the consequences of your actions will not bring great harm to our current ecosystems.
As opposed to selective breeding, where you can? Or is selective breeding also biological warfare?
Rolling it out is also a continuous process. Compare that to round-up ready corn which went from the lab to practically 100% of the crop in like a decade.
It would make sense to limit the speed of introduction (when that is possible. This is often not practically possible for e.g. disease resistance), but this applies to all cultivars, regardless of their origin.
In GMO we don't necessarily have a clue about the systemic effects of the changes. So we take a couple of genes that have a primary effect of increasing pesticide resistence, but what we don't notice is that in the original organism harmful secondary effects were repressed by the existence of other genes, genes we didn't splice into the new organism. At best GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.
That applies in equal measure to selective breeding, except that there are many more potentially harmful pathways which may be affected by it. At worst GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.
For values of "survive" that does not cover metabolism or reproduction. It might be possible to bring it back to life afterwards, but it wouldn't be alive if those conditions was all it ever experienced, which is more or less the case for the martian surface.
It isn't like we did selective breeding thousands of years ago and then stopped and have been testing the results ever since. It is a continual process, where each new cultivar has exactly the same potential for problems as any other, older cultivars had when they where new, and a slightly higher potential than new GMO cultivars (in GMO, we know what is added, if not where, in selective breeding, we know neither).
There is now evidence that such engineering has caused collapse of bee colonies.
Do you have a quote for that? Last I heard, neonecotinoids were the most likely cause of CCD, and I can't find any references to plant being genetically modified to make neonecotinoids.
Imagine that next year, thanks to your allergy to some weed and the wonders of genetic engineering, you are now also allergic to wheat, corn, soybeans and carrots that contain the popular new plant-pesticide.
Assuming we do not transfer genes which produce known allergens (I assume we are not, please inform me if I am mistaken), this isn't more of a problem than it already is other crop modification techniques.
You could say they were different, in that selective breeding is blindly causing mutations and trying to select mostly the beneficial ones, whereas in GMO, we have a pretty good idea of what is being added, if not where. That makes selective breeding worse. As for your car analogy, nature is already full of self-replicators out to kill us, so unless you call for the destruction of all non-farming life, it really isn't applicable to this debate.
Half of what is spend by the pharmaceutical industry today is still a lot of money. Any system that administrates so much money is ripe for corruption (as we can see with the pharmaceutical industry today). It needs a well-designed system for keeping that in check. We have such a system today, even if it doesn't perform perfectly. Building up a new such system is going to be a hard, long and error-prone process. It may be better to do it slowly, so that the inevitable mistakes is made when the system is smaller. But I agree that it must be possible to do it in a better way than is done today.
Drug development isn't cheap.
The vast majority of Big Pharma's expenditure is on advertising. Much of the funding to create their drugs actually comes from the taxpayer, because the fundamental research is carried out at public universities.
Going from fundamental research, which usually identifies a target, designing tens of thousands of candidate drugs, weeding out the 99% which doesn't work, and the 99% of the rest that is unacceptable in humans, doing phase 1, 2 and 3 human trials on the remaining 10 is not cheap. While I agree that the way it is done today is not ideal, there is no guarantee that another specific way will be better, and making the change to another way is going to be complicated. I still think we should do it, though.