If a dog bit a member of my family for teasing it, I would make sure it was put down. Thankfully, I live in a civilised country, so I would get the help of the police in this venture. Biting a human with so little provocation shows that either the dog is not fit to live in a civilised country, or the owner is not fit to have a dog.
He didn't say anything about whose fault it would be, he merely talked about differences of probabilities for different scenarios (whether fault was implied, I can't tell). I would hate to live in a place where the risk of rape went up markedly with the shortness of the dress, but if I did, I would be a fool not to recognise that. What is the correct response to recognising that, apart from doing what you can to change that? Should women dress more conservatively? I don't know, but considering it would not be a bad idea.
The question to answer that question is, will it cost billions of dollars? Copenhagen Suborbitals are proving* that space travel can be a hobbyist project. Granted, there is a long way from suborbital to the moon, but just getting where they are now would have been called impossible twenty years ago.
Another point is that hacker space activity usually is more about the process than the goal. So what if they never put a man on the moon, if they put one in LEO and have fun on the way, that's a win.
*Pending their actual succes, and assuming the capsule will not burn on reentry.
Shortly after I had written the comment I realised I knew that gene for resistance towards glyphosate originates from a bacterium. I don't know how I hadn't connected that mentally.
I wouldn't call it scary. I don't see why genes from bacteria or animals should be more frightening than genes from plants. They might be more or less frightening than the genes altered with random mutations used in breeding, depending on your point of view.
Breeding only selects on the allele level (except for the seldom situation of an actual and not life threatening gene mutation). That means you don't get any new genes into your lifestock, you just recombine the alleles and then select for the best combinations.
Mutagens and/or radiation are used to introduce mutations that can be selected for (at least in plants, animals might be too fragile for that to be a good idea).
Genetic engineering puts genes that come from completely different livings into the genome, e.g. bacterial genes into plants, vertebrate genes into bacteria etc.pp. You don't get that type of modifications with breeding.
Are there any examples of that kind of GM organism making it to the field? There are plenty of examples in the lab, but I thought none of them were used where they can spread.
Regular breeding is the breeding of existing varieties of a species in the hope to achieve a better offspring.
Usually after treating with mutagens or radiation. You have to have some variation to choose from. So yes, they are different: In GM, we pretty much know what we put in there, but not where it ends up, which might make bad things happen. In tradtional breeding, we don't know what we put in there OR where it ends up, raising the chance of bad things happening.
Lookup Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser if you don't believe me. For comparison, this would be like (not just kind of similar, but almost exactly the same as) suing someone for copyright infringement after finding a copy of your virus on their system, which they did not put there, and then winning.
You mean the patent case where Schmeiser discovered the cross-polination, selected for it by spraying a field with roundup, and selectively planted the seeds from the surviving plants the next year? Yes, that is exactly like a copyright case where you have done nothing to get the infringing copy.
Only if the first generation is a hybrid. In that case, each parent is a pure line (inbred to the point where their family trees are sticks), so what it gives on to the next generation is controlled. That means the offspring willhave well-defined charectaristics. The 2nd generation will be a random mix, thanks to genetic recombination (actually, I'm not sure that's what happens in plants, but something to that effect happens).
In which cases? That is often postulated based on the case of Percy Schmeiser, when the true story was that he discovered the cross-polination, selected for it by spraying a field with roundup, harvested the surviving plants and planted these seeds the next year. This is a far cry form just cross polination. Are there any other cases I am not aware of where this has been expanded upon?
According to wikipedia, that case said if you discover that your crops are crossbred by drift, kill the non-resistant plant on a field with roundup, harvest that separately and use that to plant next years crop, your are infringing. That is not quite what TFS makes this case sound like. Monsanto has done plenty of awful things, why do you make it so easy to counter your arguments by modifying the story? I imagine you might have been misled by said documentary, but please, check the facts of the case. It rarely is as simple as documentaries make it out to be, and it is far to easy to disregard your valid points if you don't check for that.
Monsanto has not just been "cross-pollinating" crops. They have been mixing in genes from animals, not just plants, some of them genetically modified themselves. That is NOT something that normally happens in nature.
What plants are examples of that? I thought all of the genetically modified plants grown in the wild had only recieved genes from other plants. In the lab it is common to introduce genes from other kingdoms (the green fluorescent protein is from a jellyfish, I believe, and is often used as a marker), but those organisms are not the same that are used outside of the lab.
Emulation doesn't always works when interconnecting with hardware. I have seen several cases of computers controlling old analytical instruments running windows 3.11 (or windows 95, or...), as the software wont work on newer OS'es, and emulation doeesn't works, as the software assumes some exact timing that isn't replicated in emulation (we think that is why, anyway).
So the really short version is that HFCS has the same effect as the same amount of sucrose? And the villain is really refined (fructose-containing) sugars and higher caloric intake?
Not entirely:"It assumes a better system is possible without putting any thought into what might get in the way of such a system." is basically saying "But what if the omnipotent, omniscient god really wasn't all-powerful, or at least not more clever than me?". Of course, this is all silly, the only god which is consistent with the way the world is designed and run is mad and evil. Cthulhu fhtagn.
The GI of fructose is 19, the GI of glucose is 100. HFCS is about half of each. If I understand GI correctly, HFCS will probably have a GI around the average of the two, around 60. This is right around the 65 of sucrose. While that is lower than the GI for glucose, it seems to be pretty much where sugars end up. Am I missing something?
And if global mean temperature is to vague a concept, flowers open earlier in the spring than they have done before. It is only in one place, so the global mean temperature is a better meassure, but the methodology is easier understand for the flowering.
There's a world of difference between selective breeding and playing mix-n-match genomes hands-on via gene-splicing.
There is indeed a difference: Gene splicing is like being blindfolded and throwing darts at a wall, hoping some of them hits the bullseye and sticks. Selective breeding is throwing a junkyard at the same wall, and hoping some of the junk that hits the bullseye is arrow-shaped enough to stick. I'm not quite sure why the second approach is thought of as better.
Most people in modern economies are on salaries with fixed hours and thus have little incentive to work more anyway.
Quite a lot of people are working part time, if the economic incentive to go to full time (or just more hours) was higher, some of them would probably do so. Besides, if the tax was lowered, the unions might agree to a longer work-week (or not press as hard for a shorter work-week), as their members would get more of the extra money.
Productivity is more strongly influenced by surrounding factors in the work environment. In fact, shorter working hours often means a higher productivity for the hours in which work is done.
Indeed, but I am not sure that higher average productivity will follow from a shorter work-week: People are perfectly capable of being ineffective even in a shorter work-week. I think this has more to do with management than anything else.
The minority of people who do have flexible incomes - contractors and the self-employed - have just as much incentive to work as they did before.
How do they have the same incentive to work if their effective hourly wage goes down?
Economists are well avare of the problems with survey-based research.* The research is based on actual behaviour. The example I am best aware of was done a few years ago after Sweden reformed their tax system: because the system change was extremely complex, the change in people's marginal tax varied enough that you could compare how the change affected people's work-hours. It turned out that a lower marginal tax did indeed mean more workhours. This is not the only such investigation, and they do show different results (IIRC, one done in Britain showed close to no correlation). I am in no way qualified to asses the literature, so I will go with the consensus of the experts: With the situation in Denmark, a lower marginal tax will expand the work supply. I don't know what the consensus is on other countries.
*I would imagine a survey would slant the other way, that people would be less inclined to answer that they would work more for more money, but that probably shows the difference between our cultures (assuming you are not from Denmark).
There isn't a set amount of money people need, but there is diminishing returns on money. That makes your argument plausible, it might be that (some) people would work less if the tax rate was lowered. The consensus among economists (backed up by research, of course) is that, at least at the tax rate Denmark has (highest marginal tax is 56%, a lot of people are at that level), lowering the taxes will result in people working more, on average.
At a certain point having a "welfare state" might become cheaper overall. Then most of them won't bother to steal if you provide them with food, shelter and tv/"youtube"/game consoles/parks.
I'm not sure that works as well as you would imagine. Theft is still a problem in Denmark, where we do have a welfare state (of course, one should really do a comparison of Northern European countries, and try to correlate the degree of welfare state to the crime rate, but even there, ause and effect might be hard to tell apart). It seems to be mostly drug addicts and Eastern European gangs doing the theft.
Of course, if we are talking about the price of a welfare state, be sure to include the lesser amount of work hours being produced. Higher taxes means less incentive to work, and higher social benefits means lesser incentive to work. Even though people are not only economic creatures, that reduced incentive does have an effect on the amount of work people are willing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
If a dog bit a member of my family for teasing it, I would make sure it was put down. Thankfully, I live in a civilised country, so I would get the help of the police in this venture. Biting a human with so little provocation shows that either the dog is not fit to live in a civilised country, or the owner is not fit to have a dog.
He didn't say anything about whose fault it would be, he merely talked about differences of probabilities for different scenarios (whether fault was implied, I can't tell). I would hate to live in a place where the risk of rape went up markedly with the shortness of the dress, but if I did, I would be a fool not to recognise that. What is the correct response to recognising that, apart from doing what you can to change that? Should women dress more conservatively? I don't know, but considering it would not be a bad idea.
The question to answer that question is, will it cost billions of dollars? Copenhagen Suborbitals are proving* that space travel can be a hobbyist project. Granted, there is a long way from suborbital to the moon, but just getting where they are now would have been called impossible twenty years ago.
Another point is that hacker space activity usually is more about the process than the goal. So what if they never put a man on the moon, if they put one in LEO and have fun on the way, that's a win.
*Pending their actual succes, and assuming the capsule will not burn on reentry.
Shortly after I had written the comment I realised I knew that gene for resistance towards glyphosate originates from a bacterium. I don't know how I hadn't connected that mentally.
I wouldn't call it scary. I don't see why genes from bacteria or animals should be more frightening than genes from plants. They might be more or less frightening than the genes altered with random mutations used in breeding, depending on your point of view.
Breeding only selects on the allele level (except for the seldom situation of an actual and not life threatening gene mutation). That means you don't get any new genes into your lifestock, you just recombine the alleles and then select for the best combinations.
Mutagens and/or radiation are used to introduce mutations that can be selected for (at least in plants, animals might be too fragile for that to be a good idea).
Genetic engineering puts genes that come from completely different livings into the genome, e.g. bacterial genes into plants, vertebrate genes into bacteria etc.pp. You don't get that type of modifications with breeding.
Are there any examples of that kind of GM organism making it to the field? There are plenty of examples in the lab, but I thought none of them were used where they can spread.
Regular breeding is the breeding of existing varieties of a species in the hope to achieve a better offspring.
Usually after treating with mutagens or radiation. You have to have some variation to choose from. So yes, they are different: In GM, we pretty much know what we put in there, but not where it ends up, which might make bad things happen. In tradtional breeding, we don't know what we put in there OR where it ends up, raising the chance of bad things happening.
Lookup Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser if you don't believe me. For comparison, this would be like (not just kind of similar, but almost exactly the same as) suing someone for copyright infringement after finding a copy of your virus on their system, which they did not put there, and then winning.
You mean the patent case where Schmeiser discovered the cross-polination, selected for it by spraying a field with roundup, and selectively planted the seeds from the surviving plants the next year? Yes, that is exactly like a copyright case where you have done nothing to get the infringing copy.
Only if the first generation is a hybrid. In that case, each parent is a pure line (inbred to the point where their family trees are sticks), so what it gives on to the next generation is controlled. That means the offspring willhave well-defined charectaristics. The 2nd generation will be a random mix, thanks to genetic recombination (actually, I'm not sure that's what happens in plants, but something to that effect happens).
In which cases? That is often postulated based on the case of Percy Schmeiser, when the true story was that he discovered the cross-polination, selected for it by spraying a field with roundup, harvested the surviving plants and planted these seeds the next year. This is a far cry form just cross polination. Are there any other cases I am not aware of where this has been expanded upon?
It's pretty harsh to call open source a thin veneer of rational arguments hiding a ideological philosophy based on logical fallacies.
According to wikipedia, that case said if you discover that your crops are crossbred by drift, kill the non-resistant plant on a field with roundup, harvest that separately and use that to plant next years crop, your are infringing. That is not quite what TFS makes this case sound like. Monsanto has done plenty of awful things, why do you make it so easy to counter your arguments by modifying the story? I imagine you might have been misled by said documentary, but please, check the facts of the case. It rarely is as simple as documentaries make it out to be, and it is far to easy to disregard your valid points if you don't check for that.
Monsanto has not just been "cross-pollinating" crops. They have been mixing in genes from animals, not just plants, some of them genetically modified themselves. That is NOT something that normally happens in nature.
What plants are examples of that? I thought all of the genetically modified plants grown in the wild had only recieved genes from other plants. In the lab it is common to introduce genes from other kingdoms (the green fluorescent protein is from a jellyfish, I believe, and is often used as a marker), but those organisms are not the same that are used outside of the lab.
Emulation doesn't always works when interconnecting with hardware. I have seen several cases of computers controlling old analytical instruments running windows 3.11 (or windows 95, or...), as the software wont work on newer OS'es, and emulation doeesn't works, as the software assumes some exact timing that isn't replicated in emulation (we think that is why, anyway).
I suppose you can use both a herbicide and an herbicide, but in the same sentence? How did that H become silent all of the sudden?
So the really short version is that HFCS has the same effect as the same amount of sucrose? And the villain is really refined (fructose-containing) sugars and higher caloric intake?
Not entirely:"It assumes a better system is possible without putting any thought into what might get in the way of such a system." is basically saying "But what if the omnipotent, omniscient god really wasn't all-powerful, or at least not more clever than me?". Of course, this is all silly, the only god which is consistent with the way the world is designed and run is mad and evil. Cthulhu fhtagn.
The GI of fructose is 19, the GI of glucose is 100. HFCS is about half of each. If I understand GI correctly, HFCS will probably have a GI around the average of the two, around 60. This is right around the 65 of sucrose. While that is lower than the GI for glucose, it seems to be pretty much where sugars end up. Am I missing something?
And if global mean temperature is to vague a concept, flowers open earlier in the spring than they have done before. It is only in one place, so the global mean temperature is a better meassure, but the methodology is easier understand for the flowering.
There's a world of difference between selective breeding and playing mix-n-match genomes hands-on via gene-splicing.
There is indeed a difference: Gene splicing is like being blindfolded and throwing darts at a wall, hoping some of them hits the bullseye and sticks. Selective breeding is throwing a junkyard at the same wall, and hoping some of the junk that hits the bullseye is arrow-shaped enough to stick. I'm not quite sure why the second approach is thought of as better.
Most people in modern economies are on salaries with fixed hours and thus have little incentive to work more anyway.
Quite a lot of people are working part time, if the economic incentive to go to full time (or just more hours) was higher, some of them would probably do so. Besides, if the tax was lowered, the unions might agree to a longer work-week (or not press as hard for a shorter work-week), as their members would get more of the extra money.
Productivity is more strongly influenced by surrounding factors in the work environment. In fact, shorter working hours often means a higher productivity for the hours in which work is done.
Indeed, but I am not sure that higher average productivity will follow from a shorter work-week: People are perfectly capable of being ineffective even in a shorter work-week. I think this has more to do with management than anything else.
The minority of people who do have flexible incomes - contractors and the self-employed - have just as much incentive to work as they did before.
How do they have the same incentive to work if their effective hourly wage goes down?
Economists are well avare of the problems with survey-based research.* The research is based on actual behaviour. The example I am best aware of was done a few years ago after Sweden reformed their tax system: because the system change was extremely complex, the change in people's marginal tax varied enough that you could compare how the change affected people's work-hours. It turned out that a lower marginal tax did indeed mean more workhours. This is not the only such investigation, and they do show different results (IIRC, one done in Britain showed close to no correlation). I am in no way qualified to asses the literature, so I will go with the consensus of the experts: With the situation in Denmark, a lower marginal tax will expand the work supply. I don't know what the consensus is on other countries.
*I would imagine a survey would slant the other way, that people would be less inclined to answer that they would work more for more money, but that probably shows the difference between our cultures (assuming you are not from Denmark).
There isn't a set amount of money people need, but there is diminishing returns on money. That makes your argument plausible, it might be that (some) people would work less if the tax rate was lowered. The consensus among economists (backed up by research, of course) is that, at least at the tax rate Denmark has (highest marginal tax is 56%, a lot of people are at that level), lowering the taxes will result in people working more, on average.
I think GPP was a Poe. Though by it's nature, it is hard to be sure.
At a certain point having a "welfare state" might become cheaper overall. Then most of them won't bother to steal if you provide them with food, shelter and tv/"youtube"/game consoles/parks.
I'm not sure that works as well as you would imagine. Theft is still a problem in Denmark, where we do have a welfare state (of course, one should really do a comparison of Northern European countries, and try to correlate the degree of welfare state to the crime rate, but even there, ause and effect might be hard to tell apart). It seems to be mostly drug addicts and Eastern European gangs doing the theft.
Of course, if we are talking about the price of a welfare state, be sure to include the lesser amount of work hours being produced. Higher taxes means less incentive to work, and higher social benefits means lesser incentive to work. Even though people are not only economic creatures, that reduced incentive does have an effect on the amount of work people are willing to do.
As a chemist, I will say that the silica thing makes sense, as long as the silica is present as chains or more extended networks.