Left out: consumers will choose not to buy GMO because of FUD, which is irrational, which is why I understand the lack of respect from farmers and food producers. They see GMO and assume it's going to kill them, like they think vaccines will give their kids autism. It's quite clear that's what's happening, it's not that consumers are generally fine with GMO but would demand the cost be lowered to reflect the lowered cost of production. The consumers are, indeed, a bit crazy, which allows the farmers and food producers to justify their greed.
Labeling is fine and fair. They don't want to simply because of greed. GMO is cheaper to produce, and they don't want to pass the savings onto you the consumer. They know consumers will choose non-GMO and they won't be able to charge as much for it.
To their credit, it's not logical on the part of consumers for reasons discussed throughout this thread, so it's not exactly like they're trying to get away with a malicious omission. They're not putting poisons in there and refusing to tell consumers. So I understand why they don't respect consumers enough to inform them, but the main drive is profit.
Also, I learned here on slashdot that security is relative. "End all be all in security" doesn't exist. Even Fort Knox can be broken into. If SSL is "fine," then what is GP complaining about? That Kim Dotedu didn't invent some protocol that gives 100% security, which we all realize is impossible?
The poblem is that large parts of it can't pay enough for us to bother getting it to them.
This would be a problem that GMO could overcome in theory though. If you make a strain of corn or rice that can grow in terrible soil and make a lot of food, we wouldn't need to ship them tons of corn from our fields to theirs, they could grow their own.
I would point out that often with starvations, the problem is often more political. IE "Yes, those people are starving, but we don't care much for them, and we have guns and a lot of pride, so no, you can't give them food. God/dear leader/we will feed them without your help or they'll starve. Or maybe we just want them to die." GMOs can't overcome that. Though I would really love to see a giant corn monster invade North Korea...
Studying GMO for long term? If only someone had thought of that before and looked into it and published the results of their studies!
Both the US General Accounting Office (in a review of FDA procedures requested by Congress) and the FAO/WHO have confirmed that long term studies of the effect of GM food on humans are not feasible, for reasons including: there is no plausible hypothesis to test; very little is known about the potential long-term effects of any foods; identification of such effects is further confounded by the great variability in the way people react to foods; and epidemiological studies are not likely to differentiate the health effects of GM foods from the many undesirable effects of conventional foods.
We don't test anything for 20+ years before we deploy it, partly because that would prevent any progress on such areas (yes, profits are important to progress.) Including drugs which we KNOW are doing abnormal things to the body: that's the point is to modify the body. GMO, on the other hand, we have little indication that it's doing anything that regular foods don't do.
It's like blindly copy & pasting huge swaths of code and changing a few numbers in a complex genetics program because it seems to have some of the results we want, but we really don't know if it has only the results we want, we don't really know what the fuck we're doing.
That's what we have always done. Since the dawn of recorded history. Aside from fish, we've domesticated nearly everything you eat. The difference is that now we actually know what we're doing in terms of genetics, wheras before it was completely blind.
Studies on metabolites have shown that GMO foods are much closer to the "natural" strain than the "natural" strains are to each other. If you eat GMO corn, you know it's the same thing as the line of corn it was derived from aside from the specific genes added. If you eat a different line of corn, there are literally thousands of metabolites that are different. If you fear uncertainty, you're better off eating GMO lines of foods you're comfortable with than lines created by more traditional techniques.
How much do you know about Asteroid Mining? Not much. And neither do these guys, because nobody has tried it before and there are still more unknowns than knowns.
Ah, that sounds like a good reason for no one to ever try it.
Hey, Orville and Wilbur, dumbasses, YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO FLY, MORONS! NO ONE DOES! THERE ARE MORE UNKNOWNS THAN KNOWNS! GIVE UP!
Context is important though. Kind of like how saying "information wants to be free" could be the motto of both the EFF and some cyber crime organization intending to steal credit card numbers.
Most Christian organizations are opposed to gay rights. The difference is that the lobbyists from the Catholic Church have a lot more influence than WBC's signs.
So I'd say "No, they're not the same: Westboro Baptist Church is a bunch of amateurs."
No, it sounds like JSTOR was urging MIT to clamp down on JSTOR access, not push to prosecute Aaron.
Kind of like if you own a chain of retail stores, and you tell a store manager to crack down on shoplifting or you're going to fire him, and the store manager shoots the next shoplifter he sees. You didn't tell him to go that far overboard, or shoot anyone, or shoot that one specifically.
but I can see how prosecutorial discretion has the ability to continue our society's descent to a place where being a felon is so ubiquitous it's no longer a Big Red F.
Oh, don't worry, they'd never let it get watered down to that point. They'll make sure "felon" still makes people think they're horrible people. Kind of like how they label people "sex offender" for a ton of crimes that have nothing to do with sex, but most people would still see that as a mark of a pervert, rather than someone who got drunk and peed in public.
They found it in dividing cells. Cancer cells divide, which is the problem, as that causes tumors. I'm assuming they used multiple cell lines, some cancerous and some not, and found it present more in cancer cells than in normal cells.
It says they're also found in S phase cells, when the DNA is being replicated. This might contribute to cancer through genomic instability. There is a LOT of DNA to copy each cell cycle. The DNA polymerase is an impressive bit of evolved machinery, if each DNA base pair were the size of a railroad tie, the polymerase would be zipping along at a thousand miles an hour, copying the railroad tracks nearly perfectly as it does. It's also pretty good at catching its own mistakes. However, changes in the structure of DNA can cause a much higher frequency of errors in copying, and consequently, can increase the rates of mutation. It might skip copying a gene important for preventing the cell from dividing.
Perhaps most importantly though, these structures being present more in cancer cells than in normal cells means they might be good targets for identifying cells that are cancerous. Perhaps we can find a drug that directly or indirectly destroys those structures when they are present in such a way that the cell itself will be killed. That would be far more targeted than current chemotherapy, which attacks all dividing cells.
Big if of course. At this point, as far as published stuff goes, it's not yet to the point where it is going to lead to something useful in hospitals in the definite future.
There was at least a double negative in there, and possibly sarcasm, so I'm confused about which direction you were going with it. Source of funding doesn't necessarily prevent a scientist from being honest, but in this case to be safe and given the character of the Kochs, one should assume that Koch funded studies will be lies supporting the Kochs.
Jesus, I hope not. If denialists are coming up with "Yeah, it's real" then the truth must be "OH DEAR GOD IT'S FAR WORSE THAN WE EXPECTED."
Maybe all the honest researchers already realized it's hopeless, quit, short sold their houses to go out in a haze of cocaine and hookers before the earth burns up.
I thought their monetizing plan would probably be more akin to dropbox's monetizing plan. I'm not sure what that would be, and I haven't been able to actually start using mega, but it sounds like dropbox, only a lot more secure.
That's a weird generalization. Have you ever been an expat? The initial excitement lasts maybe a few weeks, you're still in vacation mode. Eventually though, you crave familiarity your R&R. Going out and sampling the local culture doesn't occupy the same space as leisure, it's just not relaxing.
When I was living overseas, I spent every weekend going out and seeing as much as I could. Evenings during weekdays, on the other hand, I wanted to relax. I played a lot of CivIII and spent a lot of time IMing with friends back home. Working all day and then being a tourist or trying to have cultural experiences got exhausting to the point where neither was any fun.
OP was only commenting on the legality of what he was doing. He wasn't saying it was immoral.
Just because we agree with the laws that swiss banks are enabling people to break and disagree with the laws that mega is enabling people to break doesn't mean there aren't parallels.
Yes you can. A modified ames test would be a pretty easy start. I don't know if they did one or not. I'd guess they would have, they're not expensive. Shield themselves from liability if nothing else. "Your cancer couldn't have been from the machine: it doesn't cause much increased mutagenesis by the ames test."
Based on the way the West has acted in "The War Against Terror", the terrorist *have* won. They have us jumping at shadows, wasting millions of dollars on useless schemes, and all they have to do is make scary noises from time to time.
I'd argue that actually, it was only the lobbyists and government who won. The terrorists aren't just trying to make our lives difficult or waste tax dollars. They're trying to accomplish a wide variety of idiotic, unrealistic things. Get into the afterlife, make everyone join their religion or die, and get the US out of their holy lands. And they're obviously utter failures across the board on that. People don't blow themselves up in order to waste 2 hours of your life or a boatload of tax dollars.
I skimmed at least one of TFAs. Didn't see anything about any participant being mad about it. It did say something along the lines of "We told these people they'd be anonymous." So there is an important issue of informed consent here: the researchers were wrong when they were getting permission. Hopefully no lawyers hear about this.
It also points out that as a consequence, the data can't be distributed freely, since it could be traced back and used to discriminate against people whose only crime was trying to help science and having faulty genes.
So, no, this isn't a simple matter of "people getting mad," this is serious consequences.
So you acknowledge it's a problem, but don't like any of the solutions, and will be ripped off no matter which way you go?
Sounds like... virtually every other real world problem. When my car breaks down, I grit my teeth and prepare to be screwed over. I don't protest and let the consequences of leaving my car broken happen (like losing my job.)
Even if you dismiss economist Bjorn Lomborg as an "anti-warmist", nobody has really refuted his calculations: that the cost of reducing CO2 warming by 1 degree C over the course of 100 years is about the same that it would cost to completely end world hunger... and that's taking changed conditions and population into account.
Which is more important?
ARE we going to end world hunger if we don't spend the money preventing climate change? Because if it's just going to be frittered away on slightly cheaper electricity, shipping parts overseas to be assembled and then shipped back to be sold a few days faster, not using public transit, and slightly more hamburgers, then I'd say preventing climate change is more important.
Slashdot Mirror
Left out: consumers will choose not to buy GMO because of FUD, which is irrational, which is why I understand the lack of respect from farmers and food producers. They see GMO and assume it's going to kill them, like they think vaccines will give their kids autism. It's quite clear that's what's happening, it's not that consumers are generally fine with GMO but would demand the cost be lowered to reflect the lowered cost of production. The consumers are, indeed, a bit crazy, which allows the farmers and food producers to justify their greed.
Labeling is fine and fair. They don't want to simply because of greed. GMO is cheaper to produce, and they don't want to pass the savings onto you the consumer. They know consumers will choose non-GMO and they won't be able to charge as much for it.
To their credit, it's not logical on the part of consumers for reasons discussed throughout this thread, so it's not exactly like they're trying to get away with a malicious omission. They're not putting poisons in there and refusing to tell consumers. So I understand why they don't respect consumers enough to inform them, but the main drive is profit.
Also, I learned here on slashdot that security is relative. "End all be all in security" doesn't exist. Even Fort Knox can be broken into. If SSL is "fine," then what is GP complaining about? That Kim Dotedu didn't invent some protocol that gives 100% security, which we all realize is impossible?
The danger with GMO crops is what we don't know about gene splicing and the like
Yes we do.
The poblem is that large parts of it can't pay enough for us to bother getting it to them.
This would be a problem that GMO could overcome in theory though. If you make a strain of corn or rice that can grow in terrible soil and make a lot of food, we wouldn't need to ship them tons of corn from our fields to theirs, they could grow their own.
I would point out that often with starvations, the problem is often more political. IE "Yes, those people are starving, but we don't care much for them, and we have guns and a lot of pride, so no, you can't give them food. God/dear leader/we will feed them without your help or they'll starve. Or maybe we just want them to die." GMOs can't overcome that. Though I would really love to see a giant corn monster invade North Korea...
Children already have quite a robust resistance to cauliflower viruses. Being, you know, humans and not cauliflowers or any type of plant...
Both the US General Accounting Office (in a review of FDA procedures requested by Congress) and the FAO/WHO have confirmed that long term studies of the effect of GM food on humans are not feasible, for reasons including: there is no plausible hypothesis to test; very little is known about the potential long-term effects of any foods; identification of such effects is further confounded by the great variability in the way people react to foods; and epidemiological studies are not likely to differentiate the health effects of GM foods from the many undesirable effects of conventional foods.
Wiki
We don't test anything for 20+ years before we deploy it, partly because that would prevent any progress on such areas (yes, profits are important to progress.) Including drugs which we KNOW are doing abnormal things to the body: that's the point is to modify the body. GMO, on the other hand, we have little indication that it's doing anything that regular foods don't do.
It's like blindly copy & pasting huge swaths of code and changing a few numbers in a complex genetics program because it seems to have some of the results we want, but we really don't know if it has only the results we want, we don't really know what the fuck we're doing.
That's what we have always done. Since the dawn of recorded history. Aside from fish, we've domesticated nearly everything you eat. The difference is that now we actually know what we're doing in terms of genetics, wheras before it was completely blind.
Studies on metabolites have shown that GMO foods are much closer to the "natural" strain than the "natural" strains are to each other. If you eat GMO corn, you know it's the same thing as the line of corn it was derived from aside from the specific genes added. If you eat a different line of corn, there are literally thousands of metabolites that are different. If you fear uncertainty, you're better off eating GMO lines of foods you're comfortable with than lines created by more traditional techniques.
How much do you know about Asteroid Mining? Not much. And neither do these guys, because nobody has tried it before and there are still more unknowns than knowns.
Ah, that sounds like a good reason for no one to ever try it.
Hey, Orville and Wilbur, dumbasses, YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO FLY, MORONS! NO ONE DOES! THERE ARE MORE UNKNOWNS THAN KNOWNS! GIVE UP!
Fundamentalism: a movement that insists a holy book be taken literally, but only the parts that the movement believes in.
Context is important though. Kind of like how saying "information wants to be free" could be the motto of both the EFF and some cyber crime organization intending to steal credit card numbers.
Are all Christians the same as Westboro Baptist?
Most Christian organizations are opposed to gay rights. The difference is that the lobbyists from the Catholic Church have a lot more influence than WBC's signs.
So I'd say "No, they're not the same: Westboro Baptist Church is a bunch of amateurs."
No, it sounds like JSTOR was urging MIT to clamp down on JSTOR access, not push to prosecute Aaron.
Kind of like if you own a chain of retail stores, and you tell a store manager to crack down on shoplifting or you're going to fire him, and the store manager shoots the next shoplifter he sees. You didn't tell him to go that far overboard, or shoot anyone, or shoot that one specifically.
but I can see how prosecutorial discretion has the ability to continue our society's descent to a place where being a felon is so ubiquitous it's no longer a Big Red F.
Oh, don't worry, they'd never let it get watered down to that point. They'll make sure "felon" still makes people think they're horrible people. Kind of like how they label people "sex offender" for a ton of crimes that have nothing to do with sex, but most people would still see that as a mark of a pervert, rather than someone who got drunk and peed in public.
They found it in dividing cells. Cancer cells divide, which is the problem, as that causes tumors. I'm assuming they used multiple cell lines, some cancerous and some not, and found it present more in cancer cells than in normal cells.
It says they're also found in S phase cells, when the DNA is being replicated. This might contribute to cancer through genomic instability. There is a LOT of DNA to copy each cell cycle. The DNA polymerase is an impressive bit of evolved machinery, if each DNA base pair were the size of a railroad tie, the polymerase would be zipping along at a thousand miles an hour, copying the railroad tracks nearly perfectly as it does. It's also pretty good at catching its own mistakes. However, changes in the structure of DNA can cause a much higher frequency of errors in copying, and consequently, can increase the rates of mutation. It might skip copying a gene important for preventing the cell from dividing.
Perhaps most importantly though, these structures being present more in cancer cells than in normal cells means they might be good targets for identifying cells that are cancerous. Perhaps we can find a drug that directly or indirectly destroys those structures when they are present in such a way that the cell itself will be killed. That would be far more targeted than current chemotherapy, which attacks all dividing cells.
Big if of course. At this point, as far as published stuff goes, it's not yet to the point where it is going to lead to something useful in hospitals in the definite future.
There was at least a double negative in there, and possibly sarcasm, so I'm confused about which direction you were going with it. Source of funding doesn't necessarily prevent a scientist from being honest, but in this case to be safe and given the character of the Kochs, one should assume that Koch funded studies will be lies supporting the Kochs.
Jesus, I hope not. If denialists are coming up with "Yeah, it's real" then the truth must be "OH DEAR GOD IT'S FAR WORSE THAN WE EXPECTED."
Maybe all the honest researchers already realized it's hopeless, quit, short sold their houses to go out in a haze of cocaine and hookers before the earth burns up.
I thought their monetizing plan would probably be more akin to dropbox's monetizing plan. I'm not sure what that would be, and I haven't been able to actually start using mega, but it sounds like dropbox, only a lot more secure.
That's a weird generalization. Have you ever been an expat? The initial excitement lasts maybe a few weeks, you're still in vacation mode. Eventually though, you crave familiarity your R&R. Going out and sampling the local culture doesn't occupy the same space as leisure, it's just not relaxing.
When I was living overseas, I spent every weekend going out and seeing as much as I could. Evenings during weekdays, on the other hand, I wanted to relax. I played a lot of CivIII and spent a lot of time IMing with friends back home. Working all day and then being a tourist or trying to have cultural experiences got exhausting to the point where neither was any fun.
OP was only commenting on the legality of what he was doing. He wasn't saying it was immoral.
Just because we agree with the laws that swiss banks are enabling people to break and disagree with the laws that mega is enabling people to break doesn't mean there aren't parallels.
It's not actually something you can test.
Yes you can. A modified ames test would be a pretty easy start. I don't know if they did one or not. I'd guess they would have, they're not expensive. Shield themselves from liability if nothing else. "Your cancer couldn't have been from the machine: it doesn't cause much increased mutagenesis by the ames test."
Based on the way the West has acted in "The War Against Terror", the terrorist *have* won. They have us jumping at shadows, wasting millions of dollars on useless schemes, and all they have to do is make scary noises from time to time.
I'd argue that actually, it was only the lobbyists and government who won. The terrorists aren't just trying to make our lives difficult or waste tax dollars. They're trying to accomplish a wide variety of idiotic, unrealistic things. Get into the afterlife, make everyone join their religion or die, and get the US out of their holy lands. And they're obviously utter failures across the board on that. People don't blow themselves up in order to waste 2 hours of your life or a boatload of tax dollars.
I skimmed at least one of TFAs. Didn't see anything about any participant being mad about it. It did say something along the lines of "We told these people they'd be anonymous." So there is an important issue of informed consent here: the researchers were wrong when they were getting permission. Hopefully no lawyers hear about this.
It also points out that as a consequence, the data can't be distributed freely, since it could be traced back and used to discriminate against people whose only crime was trying to help science and having faulty genes.
So, no, this isn't a simple matter of "people getting mad," this is serious consequences.
So you acknowledge it's a problem, but don't like any of the solutions, and will be ripped off no matter which way you go?
Sounds like... virtually every other real world problem. When my car breaks down, I grit my teeth and prepare to be screwed over. I don't protest and let the consequences of leaving my car broken happen (like losing my job.)
Even if you dismiss economist Bjorn Lomborg as an "anti-warmist", nobody has really refuted his calculations: that the cost of reducing CO2 warming by 1 degree C over the course of 100 years is about the same that it would cost to completely end world hunger... and that's taking changed conditions and population into account. Which is more important?
ARE we going to end world hunger if we don't spend the money preventing climate change? Because if it's just going to be frittered away on slightly cheaper electricity, shipping parts overseas to be assembled and then shipped back to be sold a few days faster, not using public transit, and slightly more hamburgers, then I'd say preventing climate change is more important.
Or if we consider it from a worldwide perspective and not, say, the coal plant owner's pocketbook.