From what I can see in the linked articles, it seems to be superior to classical multiplexing PCR in that it has a higher parallel detection capability. I agree, though, that this is not necessary in the vast majority of clinical situations. There still might be fringe cases where something like it could be used in a medical setting. However, I rather view it as a new, valuable research tool. Being able to quickly "population-type" a microbial environment could be very useful in a variety of fields. They just are doing the medical and bio-terror PR thing, but in truth, this looks like a shiny new tool for basic research to me.
Organic materials are just a class of chemicals - nothing to do with life as such. By now, it is pretty clear from spectroscopic measurements that the universe is full of simple organic matter like methane, methanol, ethanol, acetic acid, simple amino acids and the like. So it is not that surprising that this comet fragments carry organics. They form all the time, all over the place. This is of course essential for the formation for life, but the availability of small organics is not the critical step.
I called it a troll because it is very hard to lead a rational discussion on patent matters at the best of times. The article at issue here uses very loaded language from the beginning - e.g. the "government-created mess". This is designed to incite a flamefest, in my opinion.
Regardless of the trolling-or-not-issue, the whole topic is half-arsed, not remotely thought through. The questions you are asking are good ones that aim at the heart of the problem. There is a deeper issue, though: What exactly *is* an industry standard for the purpose of this? Who defines it?
Is completely clueless trolling in the summary the new standard on/. now? What does the fact of a "standard" being "trademarked" have to do with patent issues? How do you compensate patent holders if you invalidate their patent ex post facto? What "mess the government created"? Holy cow, this summary is a new low. Besides, if the author of the summary explicitly states that "he is not stupid", well, we can pretty sure about his intellectual capacity.
I actually am a biochemist, so I know my share about gene tech. I see possible uses for GMO crops, but they are not what is implemented. The vast majority of GMO use is about vendor lock-in, about creating oligopolies controlling food production without real long-term benefit for the farmer. Roundup-ready is not about increasing the solar conversion efficiency - it's about short term profit increase. How you can file that under "communism" is beyond me, though. We are witnessing the absolute pinnacle of market economy here - inevitable concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, who use it to leverage their politics. Since when is externalizing costs in any way communist? That's the defining characteristic of market capitalism. As for the leaders to be shot - I was not referring to the brazilian leaders, I was referring to Monsanto's. That can be done in country...
In addition to Food, INC., I suggest having a look at "We feed the world". Unfortunately, I only know a German version online (it was produced in Austria), but there should be subtitled versions available.
That more or less makes you a Deist - God as the cosmic engineer that set up the boundary conditions and let things run from there. On the one hand, a quite reasonable philosophy. If God is almighty, why would he need to meddle, as it is in his power to set up the system to run the way he wants from the beginning. On the other hand, I personally find it a somewhat anemic worldview, which has no naturalistic explanation power and defines god as something so remote that it has no significant ethical dimension. Just my personal view - I myself am an atheist, but I can certainly respect your position.
If you think that the GMO-agrobusiness does anything for fighting hunger - think again and have a look at, for example, Brazil. Brazil is the largest agricultural exporter in the world, mostly soy beans used for feeding livestock in Europe and the US. They are in the business of flattening the the rainforests in Amazonia for that purpose. Huge agricultural production, deep in the pockets of the agrobusiness - and yet, there are more than 14 million malnourished and hungering people in Brazil. Yeah, those agrocorps sure help fighting hunger. Their leaders, their minions and their paid-for politicos oughtta be taken out and shot summarily.
One time use - seeds are here already, and actually have been for a long time. They are called "hybrid seeds" and are made by artificial cross-pollination, so you don't even need genetech for it. You basically get a heterozygous seed that won't produce a stable offspring generation. Most vegetable seeds are already hybrid and provided by very few seed manufacturers today. 5000 years of agriculture have already been undone and replaced by an industrial machinery using farmers as little more than indentured slaves.
Actually, you got an interesting point here... Let us, for a moment, assume, that the deniers are in fact the Lizard People, or at least their agents. What do we know about lizards? Right - they are poikilothermic, not able to generate their own body heat. They need a warm environment to get their bodies to working temperature. Now, who would have to gain from a warmer climate? Us homoiothermic mammals, who actually can operate very well in cold environments? Or the Lizard People, who need the external heat? It all becomes clear now. There is no "anthropogenic" global warming - it is, in fact, reptilogenic global warming! What we are looking at is a huge geoengineering project run by the Lizard People in preparation for their takeover!
I am not exactly sure how your inability to use a dead simple platform which works for about 99,999% of the users is in anyway tied to a failure of Steam. Care to elaborate? And yes, there is an offline mode. Do you also blame map makers for your inability of distinguishing your arsehole from a hole in a ground even with a map?
From what I have read, they make about 10% of gross revenue in profits. That's still 25 billions a year. I might be wrong, though, quoting from memory here. Still definitely a metric fuckton of cash, which should be squeezed out of them in case this gets worse.
No, it goes both ways - the government is deep in the pockets of corporations like BP, enacting laws to their profit - and they squeeze out every last bit of profit on the back of the rest of society. Sorry if I have been unclear. I definitely agree with you that the government enables the "evilness" (I actually don't like to talk in this kind of moral categories here, BP is simply acting rational under the current boundary conditions). My criticism was intended to be aimed at the whole political structure that makes this kind of stuff possible, and, of course, at the people who still believe holding up the status quo is in their best interest as members of the diminishing middle class. I would not agree that diminishing the role of the government would help, though. My point is that the we, the citizens, have to make a clear point as to for whose benefit the government does exist. And that's not the top 1% of the food chain.
True, spun. There is still some good discussion around here, even if it gets drowned sometimes. For me, slashdot seems heavily influenced by the current style of the American political debate amplified by the Internet effect, which is polarized like nothing I have witnessed personally before - not even when I worked in the USA a couple of years ago (then again, that was in academic circles in Southern California, which have the tendency to become an echo chamber themselves at times). Well, your sig says it all, basically.
Is there someone with an agenda against you, or is the amount of Troll mods you catch in this thread something systemic about the current slashdot crowd? At times I despair trying to actually argue some point here. Slaves, begging for the whip, in the vague hope that, if they only beg long enough, they might be the ones wielding it themselves some day...
You got a good point there. Reputation is indeed a valuable asset for a corporation, and I believe you a right in saying that BP will pay dearly in that currency.
And here comes the next fallacy. Who did speak about "replacing oil tomorrow"? We have been speaking out for the replacement of oil as an energy source (note, not as a chemical resource) for years if not decades. No one was interested, because, hey, there's lot of it. Now the shallow wells are running dry, and high-risk deep sea drilling operations are going on with the predictable consequences. To the second point - I was a bit unclear. I am not speaking for burdening down the corporations as such with taxation, I am speaking for taxing the dividends and other effortless capital gains which only further wealth accumulation and the increase of social disparity.
I can only give you a German source. They cite German biologists, who speak from their experience from an oil spill in the North Sea, amd some World Wildlife Fund guy who has data from the "Prestige" spill in spain, where an intensive cleaning effort was made. He is basically saying "If you can catch them at all for cleaning, they are already too far gone."
Actually, you basically can't clean birds. It is just a feelgood measure. At the point where you pick them up, they have been trying to clean themselves already, thereby ingesting a huge amount of crude. Even if you get them clean and they don't die from the stress, they die of organ failure due to the toxicity rather sooner than later. The average survival time for a cleaned bird is 1-5 days, from the last data I have seen. It would be better to just euthanize them.
Why exactly is it that the corporate apologists *always* fall back on either a strawman or a false dichotomy? As if there was no alternative between drilling for as much oil as we can get our hands on and living in sub-saharan conditions. As for the cleanup in the Gulf - you realize that the liability of BP is capped by law at a ridiculously low amount? As always, the profit is funneled to the corps, mostly bypassing taxation, while the externalities are offloaded on society. If all those investments into drilling for oil under ever more extreme conditions, which were largely funded by tax-breaks and deregulation, would have been directed to alternative energy sources and infrastructures, we would be quite a bit closer to the point where we could finally stop squandering a valuable chemical resource like oil by burning it.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I can see in the linked articles, it seems to be superior to classical multiplexing PCR in that it has a higher parallel detection capability. I agree, though, that this is not necessary in the vast majority of clinical situations. There still might be fringe cases where something like it could be used in a medical setting. However, I rather view it as a new, valuable research tool. Being able to quickly "population-type" a microbial environment could be very useful in a variety of fields. They just are doing the medical and bio-terror PR thing, but in truth, this looks like a shiny new tool for basic research to me.
Whoa, dude... Haven't had shrooms this potent for years! What's your source for the stuff?
Organic materials are just a class of chemicals - nothing to do with life as such. By now, it is pretty clear from spectroscopic measurements that the universe is full of simple organic matter like methane, methanol, ethanol, acetic acid, simple amino acids and the like. So it is not that surprising that this comet fragments carry organics. They form all the time, all over the place. This is of course essential for the formation for life, but the availability of small organics is not the critical step.
I called it a troll because it is very hard to lead a rational discussion on patent matters at the best of times. The article at issue here uses very loaded language from the beginning - e.g. the "government-created mess". This is designed to incite a flamefest, in my opinion.
Regardless of the trolling-or-not-issue, the whole topic is half-arsed, not remotely thought through. The questions you are asking are good ones that aim at the heart of the problem. There is a deeper issue, though: What exactly *is* an industry standard for the purpose of this? Who defines it?
Is completely clueless trolling in the summary the new standard on /. now? What does the fact of a "standard" being "trademarked" have to do with patent issues? How do you compensate patent holders if you invalidate their patent ex post facto? What "mess the government created"? Holy cow, this summary is a new low. Besides, if the author of the summary explicitly states that "he is not stupid", well, we can pretty sure about his intellectual capacity.
I actually am a biochemist, so I know my share about gene tech. I see possible uses for GMO crops, but they are not what is implemented. The vast majority of GMO use is about vendor lock-in, about creating oligopolies controlling food production without real long-term benefit for the farmer. Roundup-ready is not about increasing the solar conversion efficiency - it's about short term profit increase. How you can file that under "communism" is beyond me, though. We are witnessing the absolute pinnacle of market economy here - inevitable concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, who use it to leverage their politics. Since when is externalizing costs in any way communist? That's the defining characteristic of market capitalism. As for the leaders to be shot - I was not referring to the brazilian leaders, I was referring to Monsanto's. That can be done in country...
In addition to Food, INC., I suggest having a look at "We feed the world". Unfortunately, I only know a German version online (it was produced in Austria), but there should be subtitled versions available.
That more or less makes you a Deist - God as the cosmic engineer that set up the boundary conditions and let things run from there. On the one hand, a quite reasonable philosophy. If God is almighty, why would he need to meddle, as it is in his power to set up the system to run the way he wants from the beginning. On the other hand, I personally find it a somewhat anemic worldview, which has no naturalistic explanation power and defines god as something so remote that it has no significant ethical dimension. Just my personal view - I myself am an atheist, but I can certainly respect your position.
If you think that the GMO-agrobusiness does anything for fighting hunger - think again and have a look at, for example, Brazil. Brazil is the largest agricultural exporter in the world, mostly soy beans used for feeding livestock in Europe and the US. They are in the business of flattening the the rainforests in Amazonia for that purpose. Huge agricultural production, deep in the pockets of the agrobusiness - and yet, there are more than 14 million malnourished and hungering people in Brazil. Yeah, those agrocorps sure help fighting hunger. Their leaders, their minions and their paid-for politicos oughtta be taken out and shot summarily.
One time use - seeds are here already, and actually have been for a long time. They are called "hybrid seeds" and are made by artificial cross-pollination, so you don't even need genetech for it. You basically get a heterozygous seed that won't produce a stable offspring generation. Most vegetable seeds are already hybrid and provided by very few seed manufacturers today. 5000 years of agriculture have already been undone and replaced by an industrial machinery using farmers as little more than indentured slaves.
...or else the entire unit will overlord...
Well, I for one most certainly welcome... Nah. Not going there.
Actually, you got an interesting point here... Let us, for a moment, assume, that the deniers are in fact the Lizard People, or at least their agents. What do we know about lizards? Right - they are poikilothermic, not able to generate their own body heat. They need a warm environment to get their bodies to working temperature. Now, who would have to gain from a warmer climate? Us homoiothermic mammals, who actually can operate very well in cold environments? Or the Lizard People, who need the external heat? It all becomes clear now. There is no "anthropogenic" global warming - it is, in fact, reptilogenic global warming! What we are looking at is a huge geoengineering project run by the Lizard People in preparation for their takeover!
I am not exactly sure how your inability to use a dead simple platform which works for about 99,999% of the users is in anyway tied to a failure of Steam. Care to elaborate? And yes, there is an offline mode. Do you also blame map makers for your inability of distinguishing your arsehole from a hole in a ground even with a map?
Next installations of this magnificent series:
How do you tie your shoelaces?
Where to keep my cash?
And wait for the grand season finale:
How to wipe your arse!
From what I have read, they make about 10% of gross revenue in profits. That's still 25 billions a year. I might be wrong, though, quoting from memory here. Still definitely a metric fuckton of cash, which should be squeezed out of them in case this gets worse.
Thanks for providing that summary. I got a bit lazy there ;)
No, it goes both ways - the government is deep in the pockets of corporations like BP, enacting laws to their profit - and they squeeze out every last bit of profit on the back of the rest of society. Sorry if I have been unclear. I definitely agree with you that the government enables the "evilness" (I actually don't like to talk in this kind of moral categories here, BP is simply acting rational under the current boundary conditions). My criticism was intended to be aimed at the whole political structure that makes this kind of stuff possible, and, of course, at the people who still believe holding up the status quo is in their best interest as members of the diminishing middle class. I would not agree that diminishing the role of the government would help, though. My point is that the we, the citizens, have to make a clear point as to for whose benefit the government does exist. And that's not the top 1% of the food chain.
True, spun. There is still some good discussion around here, even if it gets drowned sometimes. For me, slashdot seems heavily influenced by the current style of the American political debate amplified by the Internet effect, which is polarized like nothing I have witnessed personally before - not even when I worked in the USA a couple of years ago (then again, that was in academic circles in Southern California, which have the tendency to become an echo chamber themselves at times). Well, your sig says it all, basically.
So... don't you think there is something systemically wrong with the liability passed on to society while a small minority rakes in the profits?
Is there someone with an agenda against you, or is the amount of Troll mods you catch in this thread something systemic about the current slashdot crowd? At times I despair trying to actually argue some point here. Slaves, begging for the whip, in the vague hope that, if they only beg long enough, they might be the ones wielding it themselves some day...
You got a good point there. Reputation is indeed a valuable asset for a corporation, and I believe you a right in saying that BP will pay dearly in that currency.
And here comes the next fallacy. Who did speak about "replacing oil tomorrow"? We have been speaking out for the replacement of oil as an energy source (note, not as a chemical resource) for years if not decades. No one was interested, because, hey, there's lot of it. Now the shallow wells are running dry, and high-risk deep sea drilling operations are going on with the predictable consequences. To the second point - I was a bit unclear. I am not speaking for burdening down the corporations as such with taxation, I am speaking for taxing the dividends and other effortless capital gains which only further wealth accumulation and the increase of social disparity.
I can only give you a German source. They cite German biologists, who speak from their experience from an oil spill in the North Sea, amd some World Wildlife Fund guy who has data from the "Prestige" spill in spain, where an intensive cleaning effort was made. He is basically saying "If you can catch them at all for cleaning, they are already too far gone."
Actually, you basically can't clean birds. It is just a feelgood measure. At the point where you pick them up, they have been trying to clean themselves already, thereby ingesting a huge amount of crude. Even if you get them clean and they don't die from the stress, they die of organ failure due to the toxicity rather sooner than later. The average survival time for a cleaned bird is 1-5 days, from the last data I have seen. It would be better to just euthanize them.
Why exactly is it that the corporate apologists *always* fall back on either a strawman or a false dichotomy? As if there was no alternative between drilling for as much oil as we can get our hands on and living in sub-saharan conditions. As for the cleanup in the Gulf - you realize that the liability of BP is capped by law at a ridiculously low amount? As always, the profit is funneled to the corps, mostly bypassing taxation, while the externalities are offloaded on society. If all those investments into drilling for oil under ever more extreme conditions, which were largely funded by tax-breaks and deregulation, would have been directed to alternative energy sources and infrastructures, we would be quite a bit closer to the point where we could finally stop squandering a valuable chemical resource like oil by burning it.