An interesting point. There is NO POSSIBILITY of ANYONE knowing the long-term costs or benefits of eating GMO products. In fact the entire concept is probably wrong, because it's likely that some GMO products will have positive benefits, some negative, and the majority neutral. Occasionally one can point to some specific benefit, as in golden rice, but even that may well be associated with long term costs that we don't know about.
Worse than that, the information about what the costs and benefits are is given to us selectively by groups that have biased opinions. Most of them will significantly benefit if the GMO products are deemed beneficial. So they tend to suppress studies that don't show them as beneficial, and promote studies that show them as beneficial. Given that, how much do you trust the available information? Why?
Mind you, I do understand that many of the changes LOOK as if they should be neutral for consumers. This isn't proof, and we are looking at complex systems. The only proof would be long term studies. And for most (all?) of the products there hasn't been time, even if they had been initiated at the time the GMO organism was developed.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that the wheat used in France is less likely to lead to allergic reactions than the wheat used in the US. There hasn't been a large enough study to demonstrate that this is a real phenomenon, but I've met two people who assert that it is true for them. When the visit france they can eat the local bread, but in the US bread produces an allergic reaction. (I'm not being specific as to which allergic reaction, because I'm not sure what's going on. It could be preservatives or something rather then the GMO wheat. That would require a good study, which hasn't, as far as I know, been done.)
No, it was really true, as long as the really disaffected could pull up stakes and leave. And the frontier made it relatively easy. This closed shortly after the Civil War, at the same time as various other factors acted to strengthen the centralization of the government. (Telegraph and railroad particularly come to mind, but the war itself was probably the main driver.)
P.S.: That freedom *did* carry a high cost. Small groups and individuals that left for the frontier had a much higher death rate, and also suffered many hardships that they they managed to live through. And, of course, the "Indians" who lived there had their way of life totally destroyed, and also experienced a very high death rate. Much of it inflicted upon them by the government (with the support of a racist and unsympathetic citizenry).
Yeah, but if they did detailed logging of every access they wouldn't be able to do that. Scalability. You can store detailed logging of selected events easily. And detailed means you log things like the number of milliseconds between different messages. That's not usually important, but sometimes it is. But you can't do that kind of thing on a large scale.
OTOH, I read later that they *do* have test pages. So perhaps they should have just sent him to one of them, and had him show them. I *trust* that they have *those* pages set to do detailed logging.
There are only some crimes that they can accuse you of that result in that penalty. Of course you were correct that no evidence is needed for the confiscation. I think it's called RICO, but there may be a few other such laws. The cute part is that if it ever comes up to trial, you can't hire a lawyer, because all your funds have been confiscated. So you need to depend on the honesty, integrity, and quality of the public defender.
OTOH, Lua's handling of Unicode is as piss-poor as is C's. In both cases there are historical reasons why they developed the way they did, but the result is that they are nigh to unusable for many applications. (I'm not real thrilled with Java's 16-bit chars either. Either utf-8 or utf-32 is far superior.)
In particular, for my purposes no language that makes it difficult to determine the general category of a character is usable. Obviously this needs to be a library function, but nearly as obviously it needs to be a part of the standard library.
You wonder? I was taking it for granted that Facebook was trying to suppress the story with an astroturfing campaign.
P.S.: While that action is thoroughly immoral, many companies do the same thing. Which is why when I saw the "anonymous coward" posts popping up, I just presumed an astroturfing campaing to suppress the report (or, in this case, defend their [in]actions).
Sorry, but that's wrong. You are ignoring scalability.
OTOH, they should have responded by setting up an account with good logging, etc., and asked him to demonstrate by posting to it's timeline. And THAT should give them enough information.
As a second thought, that account should be a template that they can easily and quickly run up "as needed". Because I'm sure they get many such reports, and they probably always respond to them in the same way.
Don't know about that, but I used a similar idea a couple of times to locate broken pipes. It saved a BUNCH of digging, as I had no idea where the break was. (Yeah, the place it indicated was a reasonable place, but I hadn't figured that out until AFTER I dug up the pipe..)
My guess is that it taps unconscious estimations. This doesn't mean it doesn't work better than chance.
Secret courts make things much worse, but your optimistic view of how the ordinary courts work isn't much more than theoretically accurate when dealing with anyone who isn't either extremely wealthy or politically powerful, and for some categories of accusation, merely being wealthy is no protection, as the prosecution is empowered to strip you of all your wealth before you can hire a lawyer. (See RICO, etc.)
There is also the farce known as "plea bargaining" where they fabricate charges for extremely vile crimes, that they will drop if you plead guilty to a lesser crime. They may well have no evidence of either, or any, crime, but you aren't allowed to know that. So either you gamble that you can prevail in a court where the policeman's word is usually believed over that of anyone else, or you can acquiesce. A veritable feast of injustice. (I understand that this abusive practice is not common in Britain, but I don't know the truth of that assertion...nor whether it generalizes to the other Commonwealth countries.)
That is not clear. I know many people who might vote Republican, if offered something that wasn't bat-shit crazy.
Mind you, whether they do or not won't address the problem. Party platform planks are generally used to construct outhouses...at best. Unless, of course, they are particularly odious and unconstitutional.
This actually depends on which king you are talking about. In the era just prior to the revolution, then you are correct. Barely. And then only in the sense that the people being enriched by the corruption tended to spend more of their money in the US, whereas prior to the revolution it was mainly spent in Britain.
FWIW, the current US government is more repressive than any pre-revolutionary government. This is largely because technology has made repression easier, of course. And many of the details are different. E.g., the current government doesn't favor quartering troops with the citizenry. They have more effective ways of spying on them.
A reputable company with test things for awhile before they push a patch on people who haven't been bothered by the problem the patch is supposed to fix.
OTOH, their help desk should know about what the patches in the works are supposed to fix. (Granted "should" isn't "will".)
I suspect you do not know the character Speaker-to-Animals of the novel Ringworld. A Kizin. He only spoke to animals in the sense that humans are animals, but the Kzinti were very proud, and preferred to accord humans as little consideration as they could get away with. So one of their ambasadors to humanity was titled Speaker-to-Animals. (He had not earned a real name.)
If you have to go to a source code you haven't previously looked at to find the solution, it's likely to take you quite awhile. A good support desk is likely to have already encountered the problem, and already know what the answer is. That's LOTS faster.
OTOH, there are lots of problems that they don't already understand, and in those cases, a local diagnosis has LOTS of advantages. E.g., you can run your tests quickly, and you don't need to keep repeating them everytime someone new is added to the phone line.
P.S.: One of the most frustrating problems I ever encountered, that I had worked on for DAYS before calling tech support, was solved quickly. Tech support told me to try hitting the caps-lock key.
O. Given the nature of git I had assumed the parent was a joke. (i.e., since you have a complete tree, the repository being down shouldn't keep you from working.)
I'm not sure about reason 4. I.e., while I agree that it is far cheaper to make H2 via steam reformation of natural gas than electrolysis, I'm not sure that would apply on a small sclae (i.e., home use), and any other choice implies distribution of hydrogen, which isn't cheap.
Campaign reform would help, but not in any major way. The real problem is with the plurality rules electoral system. A majority should be required. Either Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet Voting would ameliorate the problem. (Note that I did not say solve the problem. They actually make campaign finance reform more important.)
Lottery. That way it would be impossible to buy the candidates ahead of time. It's true you'd get an occasional real loser, but currently they are almost all real losers. Some adjustments would be needed to decentralize decision making, but not many. Just replace every election with a lottery among the registered voters. (If you don't think someone would make a good legislator, why are you happy with them selecting the legislator.)
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting point. There is NO POSSIBILITY of ANYONE knowing the long-term costs or benefits of eating GMO products. In fact the entire concept is probably wrong, because it's likely that some GMO products will have positive benefits, some negative, and the majority neutral. Occasionally one can point to some specific benefit, as in golden rice, but even that may well be associated with long term costs that we don't know about.
Worse than that, the information about what the costs and benefits are is given to us selectively by groups that have biased opinions. Most of them will significantly benefit if the GMO products are deemed beneficial. So they tend to suppress studies that don't show them as beneficial, and promote studies that show them as beneficial. Given that, how much do you trust the available information? Why?
Mind you, I do understand that many of the changes LOOK as if they should be neutral for consumers. This isn't proof, and we are looking at complex systems. The only proof would be long term studies. And for most (all?) of the products there hasn't been time, even if they had been initiated at the time the GMO organism was developed.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that the wheat used in France is less likely to lead to allergic reactions than the wheat used in the US. There hasn't been a large enough study to demonstrate that this is a real phenomenon, but I've met two people who assert that it is true for them. When the visit france they can eat the local bread, but in the US bread produces an allergic reaction. (I'm not being specific as to which allergic reaction, because I'm not sure what's going on. It could be preservatives or something rather then the GMO wheat. That would require a good study, which hasn't, as far as I know, been done.)
No, it was really true, as long as the really disaffected could pull up stakes and leave. And the frontier made it relatively easy. This closed shortly after the Civil War, at the same time as various other factors acted to strengthen the centralization of the government. (Telegraph and railroad particularly come to mind, but the war itself was probably the main driver.)
P.S.: That freedom *did* carry a high cost. Small groups and individuals that left for the frontier had a much higher death rate, and also suffered many hardships that they they managed to live through. And, of course, the "Indians" who lived there had their way of life totally destroyed, and also experienced a very high death rate. Much of it inflicted upon them by the government (with the support of a racist and unsympathetic citizenry).
Yeah, but if they did detailed logging of every access they wouldn't be able to do that. Scalability. You can store detailed logging of selected events easily. And detailed means you log things like the number of milliseconds between different messages. That's not usually important, but sometimes it is. But you can't do that kind of thing on a large scale.
OTOH, I read later that they *do* have test pages. So perhaps they should have just sent him to one of them, and had him show them. I *trust* that they have *those* pages set to do detailed logging.
There are only some crimes that they can accuse you of that result in that penalty. Of course you were correct that no evidence is needed for the confiscation. I think it's called RICO, but there may be a few other such laws. The cute part is that if it ever comes up to trial, you can't hire a lawyer, because all your funds have been confiscated. So you need to depend on the honesty, integrity, and quality of the public defender.
OTOH, Lua's handling of Unicode is as piss-poor as is C's. In both cases there are historical reasons why they developed the way they did, but the result is that they are nigh to unusable for many applications. (I'm not real thrilled with Java's 16-bit chars either. Either utf-8 or utf-32 is far superior.)
In particular, for my purposes no language that makes it difficult to determine the general category of a character is usable. Obviously this needs to be a library function, but nearly as obviously it needs to be a part of the standard library.
You wonder? I was taking it for granted that Facebook was trying to suppress the story with an astroturfing campaign.
P.S.: While that action is thoroughly immoral, many companies do the same thing. Which is why when I saw the "anonymous coward" posts popping up, I just presumed an astroturfing campaing to suppress the report (or, in this case, defend their [in]actions).
Sorry, but that's wrong. You are ignoring scalability.
OTOH, they should have responded by setting up an account with good logging, etc., and asked him to demonstrate by posting to it's timeline. And THAT should give them enough information.
As a second thought, that account should be a template that they can easily and quickly run up "as needed". Because I'm sure they get many such reports, and they probably always respond to them in the same way.
As first posts go, that's marvellously creative. Totally unintelligible, but still marvellously creative.
Don't know about that, but I used a similar idea a couple of times to locate broken pipes. It saved a BUNCH of digging, as I had no idea where the break was. (Yeah, the place it indicated was a reasonable place, but I hadn't figured that out until AFTER I dug up the pipe..)
My guess is that it taps unconscious estimations. This doesn't mean it doesn't work better than chance.
Secret courts make things much worse, but your optimistic view of how the ordinary courts work isn't much more than theoretically accurate when dealing with anyone who isn't either extremely wealthy or politically powerful, and for some categories of accusation, merely being wealthy is no protection, as the prosecution is empowered to strip you of all your wealth before you can hire a lawyer. (See RICO, etc.)
There is also the farce known as "plea bargaining" where they fabricate charges for extremely vile crimes, that they will drop if you plead guilty to a lesser crime. They may well have no evidence of either, or any, crime, but you aren't allowed to know that. So either you gamble that you can prevail in a court where the policeman's word is usually believed over that of anyone else, or you can acquiesce. A veritable feast of injustice. (I understand that this abusive practice is not common in Britain, but I don't know the truth of that assertion...nor whether it generalizes to the other Commonwealth countries.)
It's almost always possible to be worse off.
That is not clear. I know many people who might vote Republican, if offered something that wasn't bat-shit crazy.
Mind you, whether they do or not won't address the problem. Party platform planks are generally used to construct outhouses...at best. Unless, of course, they are particularly odious and unconstitutional.
This actually depends on which king you are talking about. In the era just prior to the revolution, then you are correct. Barely. And then only in the sense that the people being enriched by the corruption tended to spend more of their money in the US, whereas prior to the revolution it was mainly spent in Britain.
FWIW, the current US government is more repressive than any pre-revolutionary government. This is largely because technology has made repression easier, of course. And many of the details are different. E.g., the current government doesn't favor quartering troops with the citizenry. They have more effective ways of spying on them.
A reputable company with test things for awhile before they push a patch on people who haven't been bothered by the problem the patch is supposed to fix.
OTOH, their help desk should know about what the patches in the works are supposed to fix. (Granted "should" isn't "will".)
I suspect you do not know the character Speaker-to-Animals of the novel Ringworld. A Kizin. He only spoke to animals in the sense that humans are animals, but the Kzinti were very proud, and preferred to accord humans as little consideration as they could get away with. So one of their ambasadors to humanity was titled Speaker-to-Animals. (He had not earned a real name.)
If you have to go to a source code you haven't previously looked at to find the solution, it's likely to take you quite awhile. A good support desk is likely to have already encountered the problem, and already know what the answer is. That's LOTS faster.
OTOH, there are lots of problems that they don't already understand, and in those cases, a local diagnosis has LOTS of advantages. E.g., you can run your tests quickly, and you don't need to keep repeating them everytime someone new is added to the phone line.
P.S.: One of the most frustrating problems I ever encountered, that I had worked on for DAYS before calling tech support, was solved quickly. Tech support told me to try hitting the caps-lock key.
Is 451 a 40X error code then?
Larry Niven, Ringworld. First appearance of Speaker-to-Animals.
O. Given the nature of git I had assumed the parent was a joke. (i.e., since you have a complete tree, the repository being down shouldn't keep you from working.)
I thought it was supposed to be a collaboration between the US and Israel. Is it now believed to be just the US?
Hard drive? You're thinking too recently. Either that, or you worked in the glass-house with the raised floors.
I'm not sure about reason 4. I.e., while I agree that it is far cheaper to make H2 via steam reformation of natural gas than electrolysis, I'm not sure that would apply on a small sclae (i.e., home use), and any other choice implies distribution of hydrogen, which isn't cheap.
The only thing wrong with you analogy is that you should lose all the "ex"es. And it's called the panopticon.
Campaign reform would help, but not in any major way. The real problem is with the plurality rules electoral system. A majority should be required. Either Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet Voting would ameliorate the problem. (Note that I did not say solve the problem. They actually make campaign finance reform more important.)
Lottery. That way it would be impossible to buy the candidates ahead of time. It's true you'd get an occasional real loser, but currently they are almost all real losers. Some adjustments would be needed to decentralize decision making, but not many. Just replace every election with a lottery among the registered voters. (If you don't think someone would make a good legislator, why are you happy with them selecting the legislator.)