Genetic engineering is like a sniper rifle, making just the required change and nothing more.
From your attachment to the gun analogy, I'm going to guess that you're an American. Good side effects in Las Vegas last night. Perhaps a better analogy would be from my background in cobbling - shoe making - bring together materials from several sources, snip out a bit here, tuck a bit there, stitch it together and you've got a jack boot to waterproof the feet of a Confederate Stormtrooper. Or a posing pouch - probably to sell as a matched set, you know what Stormtroopers are like.
There is a massive difference between being able to breed dogs into tiny pampered petting toys through decades of selective breeding and being able to edit the blueprint of life and create brand new lifeforms in a lab.
Which no-one apart from Craig Venter does - and he's careful to keep his synthetic life forms utterly dependent on several nutrients they can't make for themselves (think "vitamins", but they need considerably higher doses).
If there is an unfortunate side effect of the GM you have billions of such mosquito all over Africa, Europe and Asia in no time flat.
Which is why - if you'd RTFS - you'd know that they're wanting to do test releases into a controlled environment, to check that there aren't unintended side effects.
but are against the behaviors of the few very large players in this industry (Monsanto, Pioneer, etc.).
Who are not involved in this, because there's no profit to be made from poor, mostly black people - the people that die of malaria.
Rich white people buy prophylactic drugs and only rarely (unless they're really fucking stupid) get malaria, and that will continue with minor contributions to the advertising budget. Malaria is a nasty enough disease to suffer from (I had a family friend with recurrent malaria for years after coming back from the tropics - it's not a pretty sight) that I've never needed encouragement to take my prophylactics (I saw my "short call" stock of several weeks worth in the fridge 20 minutes ago).
Gosh darn, I guess those Mexican farmers who genetically modified the corn plant with a gene-doubling event or three shouldn't have been mucking around trying to make more food to eat. In the several thousand years since, what horrors could they have wrought?
Next time you have sex, you're potentially indulging in production of a genetically modified organism. It's what all your ancestors have done. Of course, you could plan it out rationally in a test tube, or you could just try random selection and kill off any defective offspring - the natural way.
Similar things have happened to farmers when ever a new technology for farming gets released. The large mechanical tractor allowed farmers to farm larger areas with less staff.
I don't know which country you're in, but in this country the widespread adoption of tractors and mechanised farming was nothing to do with the choices of farmers and everything to do with conscription of much of the agricultural workforce into the armed forces and the sinking of food convoys by U-boats. If the government hadn't forced farmers to change practices (non-compliance could have been charged as treason - a capital crime), to increase areas under the plough, and increase production, the country would have starved. In town, vegetable gardens and individual "allotments" of food growing ground was also instituted - my sister still runs one.
Of course, after the war, the farmers kept the tractors (food rationing didn't end until 1953 - 8 years after the apparent end of the war) which they'd been given at the start of the war, and that did change a market that had already been changed.
You're confusing Mauna Kea (dormant for some thousands of years) with Mauna Loa (last eruption March 24 to April 15, 1984) or Kilauea (presently active)
Incidentally almost 3000 years before Archimedes described the principles of flotation.
So, nobody built boats before about 500CE? That would explain how the Romans didn't besiege Syracuse in 212BCE, killing Archimedes in the process - they didn't have any boats to get to the island of Sicily.
Our ancestors knew very how to do a lot of things that they didn't have a comprehensive understanding of.
You're conflating two aspects of Stonehenge. There are two types (and styles) of stones used in the Stonehenge monument : the large, rectangular stones used in the "two up and one across" structures (trilithons) are made from "sarsen" (a calcareous sandstone remnant from various parts of the "Downs" on which Stonehenge is built. The likely source for these slabs - up to about 40 tons - is considered the Marlborough Downs, 20-odd miles to the north of the site. However there are 56 smaller stones in the site, typically 1 to 2 m tall and a half-metre or so in diameter (typically one tonne) which are described as "bluestones". These are rhyolitic tuffs and have been traced on very solid petrological grounds (also in the last few years, radiometric dating) to a quarry in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
The big difference between Stonehenge and the Pyramids is that the Pyramids had a larger workforce available in substantial chunks through the year, while the fields were flooded by the Nilotic Inundation. Though the recent excavations at Durrington Walls suggests a large seasonal occupation there, which may have been associated with the construction programme.
You'd need channels to get to the location of the pyramid, then you'd need a couple of water locks [h-cdn.co] along the way to slowly get the vessels to the starting elevation of the pyramid.
Locks require a regular supply of water to work. The photo you link to is of the Caen Hill flight, but if you look at the map, you'll see the extensive storage ponds needed for the water to operate this flight. That's in relatively moist Britain ; the engineering needed to operate a significant set of locks in Egypt would be hard to miss. The nearest land high enough to host reservoirs that would get even half-way up the Great Pyramid is over 10km away to the W
Every two years I reinstall the cats and stock intake, takes less than a day. Neener, neener!
What do you do when your insurance form asks if the vehicle is modified from the production model? Tell them and have the insurance assessor come out to examine the vehicle, or lie and drive without valid insurance?
What are you going to do when you're pulled over for a roadworthiness check? Shoot the inspectors?
Payload to LEO is 63,800 kg, so if you allow 100kg for each passenger plus baggage, around 640 passengers. A bit less since you'd need some life support - air movement, maybe CO2 scrubbing/ O2 replenishment, booze trollys.
Note those weights are passenger PLUS baggage. To reach "anywhere on Earth in an hour" (neglecting the journey to and from the launch/ landing pads), you'll cover around 2*(6371+1000)*pi = 46313 km with a burn time of 162 seconds. So the cruise will need a speed of 13.4km/sec and the average acceleration will be not less than 83.5 m/s/s (8.5g). You can play around a bit with the exact numbers (lower payloads and longer burn times), but your passengers are going to be taking in the region of 8g. That's "fighter pilot blacking out" territory, not your average business traveller.
I'm used to extensive safety training training for work travel - helicopter underwater escape, fire-fighting, etc - but I think that 90-odd percent of my colleagues would not manage repeat trips at 8g.
I think Musk is spinning a line for PR of some sort.
Doesn't Russia have its own social media and search sites?
VK (VKontakt) for social media (my wife has an account, for talking to her friends in Russia and Israel) ; mail.ru for mail (pretty much ditto, but I have an account too). Search - I dunno ; local Google maybe. As long as their Cyrillic suport is better than Slashdots'. It could hardly be worse.
A generation of Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs (approximately half of the talent pool) will probably differ with you. Trump's idea of making America a great 19th century immigrant dump again will be good.
I'm pretty dubious tht Dyson actually has 2.5 billion of any coin in investment. I smell the smell of an advertising bullshitter.
I've seen lots of Dyson-X on store shelves. I can't recall having seen one in real life. 2.5 billion is around one top-end vacuum cleaner in every 5th household with no manufacturing, distribution or advertising costs. My vacuum cleaner is approaching 20 years old and show no sign of stopping working.
Idaho has its own way of minimizing crime - shoot back.
Idaho has a much more effective strategy for minimizing crime - reducing the number of human beings there. Having a little under 8 people per sq.km, you'd be able to see your neighbours (unless they're behind a tree), and might just be able to hit one with a sniper rifle (358m, if you do the sums - not a competition-winning shot, but you need to be at least competent.)
What - the hurricanes? Shrug - so what? Only a few dozens dead. A few hundred billion dollars damages, and most of that is high property prices, not actual value. Nothing major - at least not compared with the land war that your government is stoking up the propaganda for.
What's the current body count in the equally nearby floods south of the Himalayas? 1600 and still climbing?
People who share houses with South Park fans, and are probably bored to tears by the (implicitly computer-savvy) South Park fans warning them of the intrusiveness of this type of technology. And maybe now, they realise there's a problem.
I, myself, hold a music degree and am working my way up an IT career.
Important distinction emphasised.
Your CV - what of it you publish to places like LinkedIn, which is a separate question - will end up different from hers because you'll have a significant amount of security experience.
So... you're going to blame the next hurricane on Mexico, make them pay for it?
That's the route to a land war on your border. I'm just listening to some lectures on the way that turned out for the Romans when they started to fuck with the Visigoths. Didn't end well.
While it sometimes feels like we do all of our shopping on the internet
Do we? So far this year, I've brought 3 sets of train tickets on the Internet and... nope, that's it. No, sorry, one foreign book, which I bundled with a couple of other to optimise the use of the delivery charge. The train tickets you collect at the station.
I've checked and compared prices on goods using websites, but when a â70 bit of furniture attracts a £25 delivery charge and a choice of delivery dates between 10 days and 14 days in the future, I'll damned well walk up to the store, pick it off the shelf and carry it home myself this evening.
You need to revise the meaning of the verb "to vend".
Yes, they're impressive compact vehicle-storage systems. But they're not vending machines. We've got automated carousels on the boat for loading, storing and dispensing 30m long pipe lengths to two destinations, but that's not a vending machine either.
they also own their own refineries and keep their gas prices pretty low.
They might keep their gas prices low, but it's pretty unlikely to be by owning their own refineries. Even small refineries are multi-billion dollar investments with payback times in the decade-plus range.
In the British market, there was a major change in the early 1990s with the rise of supermarkets attaching fuel stations under their own brand to their stores, and undercutting - substantially - the prices at conventional fuel stations branded by oil companies. But the supermarket-branded tankers still came out of the same gates of the same refineries (making the refineries targets for blocking during the fuel price protests of the early 2000s).
There are a small number of distribution centres linked to nearby refineries by pipelines, but the logistic problems and hazards of running refined (or unrefined) fuels through underground pipelines on land you don't own makes that rare. q.v. Buncefield.
Slashdot Mirror
It may manage to slip out from the noose, in large part thanks to religious fundamentalists and their cock-eyed fear of science.
From your attachment to the gun analogy, I'm going to guess that you're an American. Good side effects in Las Vegas last night. Perhaps a better analogy would be from my background in cobbling - shoe making - bring together materials from several sources, snip out a bit here, tuck a bit there, stitch it together and you've got a jack boot to waterproof the feet of a Confederate Stormtrooper. Or a posing pouch - probably to sell as a matched set, you know what Stormtroopers are like.
Which no-one apart from Craig Venter does - and he's careful to keep his synthetic life forms utterly dependent on several nutrients they can't make for themselves (think "vitamins", but they need considerably higher doses).
Which is why - if you'd RTFS - you'd know that they're wanting to do test releases into a controlled environment, to check that there aren't unintended side effects.
Who are not involved in this, because there's no profit to be made from poor, mostly black people - the people that die of malaria.
Rich white people buy prophylactic drugs and only rarely (unless they're really fucking stupid) get malaria, and that will continue with minor contributions to the advertising budget. Malaria is a nasty enough disease to suffer from (I had a family friend with recurrent malaria for years after coming back from the tropics - it's not a pretty sight) that I've never needed encouragement to take my prophylactics (I saw my "short call" stock of several weeks worth in the fridge 20 minutes ago).
Next time you have sex, you're potentially indulging in production of a genetically modified organism. It's what all your ancestors have done. Of course, you could plan it out rationally in a test tube, or you could just try random selection and kill off any defective offspring - the natural way.
I don't know which country you're in, but in this country the widespread adoption of tractors and mechanised farming was nothing to do with the choices of farmers and everything to do with conscription of much of the agricultural workforce into the armed forces and the sinking of food convoys by U-boats. If the government hadn't forced farmers to change practices (non-compliance could have been charged as treason - a capital crime), to increase areas under the plough, and increase production, the country would have starved. In town, vegetable gardens and individual "allotments" of food growing ground was also instituted - my sister still runs one.
Of course, after the war, the farmers kept the tractors (food rationing didn't end until 1953 - 8 years after the apparent end of the war) which they'd been given at the start of the war, and that did change a market that had already been changed.
You're confusing Mauna Kea (dormant for some thousands of years) with Mauna Loa (last eruption March 24 to April 15, 1984) or Kilauea (presently active)
So, nobody built boats before about 500CE? That would explain how the Romans didn't besiege Syracuse in 212BCE, killing Archimedes in the process - they didn't have any boats to get to the island of Sicily.
Our ancestors knew very how to do a lot of things that they didn't have a comprehensive understanding of.
The big difference between Stonehenge and the Pyramids is that the Pyramids had a larger workforce available in substantial chunks through the year, while the fields were flooded by the Nilotic Inundation. Though the recent excavations at Durrington Walls suggests a large seasonal occupation there, which may have been associated with the construction programme.
Locks require a regular supply of water to work. The photo you link to is of the Caen Hill flight, but if you look at the map, you'll see the extensive storage ponds needed for the water to operate this flight. That's in relatively moist Britain ; the engineering needed to operate a significant set of locks in Egypt would be hard to miss. The nearest land high enough to host reservoirs that would get even half-way up the Great Pyramid is over 10km away to the W
What do you do when your insurance form asks if the vehicle is modified from the production model? Tell them and have the insurance assessor come out to examine the vehicle, or lie and drive without valid insurance?
What are you going to do when you're pulled over for a roadworthiness check? Shoot the inspectors?
Payload to LEO is 63,800 kg, so if you allow 100kg for each passenger plus baggage, around 640 passengers. A bit less since you'd need some life support - air movement, maybe CO2 scrubbing/ O2 replenishment, booze trollys.
Note those weights are passenger PLUS baggage. To reach "anywhere on Earth in an hour" (neglecting the journey to and from the launch/ landing pads), you'll cover around 2*(6371+1000)*pi = 46313 km with a burn time of 162 seconds. So the cruise will need a speed of 13.4km/sec and the average acceleration will be not less than 83.5 m/s/s (8.5g). You can play around a bit with the exact numbers (lower payloads and longer burn times), but your passengers are going to be taking in the region of 8g. That's "fighter pilot blacking out" territory, not your average business traveller.
I'm used to extensive safety training training for work travel - helicopter underwater escape, fire-fighting, etc - but I think that 90-odd percent of my colleagues would not manage repeat trips at 8g.
I think Musk is spinning a line for PR of some sort.
VK (VKontakt) for social media (my wife has an account, for talking to her friends in Russia and Israel) ; mail.ru for mail (pretty much ditto, but I have an account too). Search - I dunno ; local Google maybe. As long as their Cyrillic suport is better than Slashdots'. It could hardly be worse.
A generation of Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs (approximately half of the talent pool) will probably differ with you. Trump's idea of making America a great 19th century immigrant dump again will be good.
I've seen lots of Dyson-X on store shelves. I can't recall having seen one in real life. 2.5 billion is around one top-end vacuum cleaner in every 5th household with no manufacturing, distribution or advertising costs. My vacuum cleaner is approaching 20 years old and show no sign of stopping working.
That's their problem, not ours.
Yes, I am dichotomising the world. No, I'm not apologetic about it.
Idaho has a much more effective strategy for minimizing crime - reducing the number of human beings there. Having a little under 8 people per sq.km, you'd be able to see your neighbours (unless they're behind a tree), and might just be able to hit one with a sniper rifle (358m, if you do the sums - not a competition-winning shot, but you need to be at least competent.)
What's the current body count in the equally nearby floods south of the Himalayas? 1600 and still climbing?
People who share houses with South Park fans, and are probably bored to tears by the (implicitly computer-savvy) South Park fans warning them of the intrusiveness of this type of technology. And maybe now, they realise there's a problem.
Important distinction emphasised. Your CV - what of it you publish to places like LinkedIn, which is a separate question - will end up different from hers because you'll have a significant amount of security experience.
And it's impossible to put a fingerprint scanner on one edge of the machine, symmetrically so it's equally inconvenient for left- and right- handers?
There's a distinct smell of dead rodent over this. Over and above the dead rodent sell that comes as standard with Apple products.
That's the route to a land war on your border. I'm just listening to some lectures on the way that turned out for the Romans when they started to fuck with the Visigoths. Didn't end well.
Do we? So far this year, I've brought 3 sets of train tickets on the Internet and ... nope, that's it. No, sorry, one foreign book, which I bundled with a couple of other to optimise the use of the delivery charge. The train tickets you collect at the station.
I've checked and compared prices on goods using websites, but when a â70 bit of furniture attracts a £25 delivery charge and a choice of delivery dates between 10 days and 14 days in the future, I'll damned well walk up to the store, pick it off the shelf and carry it home myself this evening.
Yes, they're impressive compact vehicle-storage systems. But they're not vending machines. We've got automated carousels on the boat for loading, storing and dispensing 30m long pipe lengths to two destinations, but that's not a vending machine either.
They might keep their gas prices low, but it's pretty unlikely to be by owning their own refineries. Even small refineries are multi-billion dollar investments with payback times in the decade-plus range.
In the British market, there was a major change in the early 1990s with the rise of supermarkets attaching fuel stations under their own brand to their stores, and undercutting - substantially - the prices at conventional fuel stations branded by oil companies. But the supermarket-branded tankers still came out of the same gates of the same refineries (making the refineries targets for blocking during the fuel price protests of the early 2000s). There are a small number of distribution centres linked to nearby refineries by pipelines, but the logistic problems and hazards of running refined (or unrefined) fuels through underground pipelines on land you don't own makes that rare. q.v. Buncefield.