I did the same job for more than a year because I was faster at my job than any one else on the line and my supervisor didn't want to rotate me. So, I spent 8 hours a day doing the same job -- not just in the same factory, mind you, doing the same repetitive motion -- for more than 12 months. Eventually I couldn't even sleep for more than a few hours without waking up due to the pain in my wrists and hands.
Why didn't you slow down a bit then you stupid cunt?
I'm afraid that the numerous reproductions of the article in comments on this page can't both be "owned by the Poster" and meet the conditions of the New Statesman licence regarding redistribution. Sue each other at will.
And under normal conditions, they are able to find it, by themselves. It seems sensible to distinguish between machines which need intervention to fuel them, and machines which can harvest their own energy from the environment -- ask any nanotechnologist. A "self-sustaining" machine of this kind would not be a perpetual motion machine (which the inventor explicitly says his machine is not), but it would be bloody useful.
Get your semantics straight, btw:
Substaining means, literally, 'what causes it to run'
No, "sustenance" means "what causes it to run; sustaining is not a noun. "Sustaining" means, loosely, "providing with sustenance", and "self-sustaining" means either that it provides itself with sustenance (like a horse) or that it needs no sustenance.
self-sustaining" unit would be *a unit that sustains itself*, i.e., had no need for periodic inputs to keep running. What other definition would there be?
"Sustains itself" does not imply "needs no inputs". A "self-sustaining colony" on Mars would not be one composed of natural wonders. An equally sensible definition would be "is able to independently acquire all the inputs it needs". In this sense, a horse is "self-sustaining" and so, probably, are you.
Would you say that a horse was a "self-sustaining unit"?
If not, why not?
If you have a convincing reason why not, why do you assume that someone else shares your definition of a self-sustaining unit, based on no evidence that this is the case.
This quack from Ireland is trying to tell us he has a car that once you start it, you will never need to put gas in again.
No he isn't. He never makes the claim Sims attributes to him. He never says anything about what might or might not happen in a sealed box. That's my whole point.
On second reading, I'd note that the inventor of this machine at no point claims that it is a free energy source, or that it is a perpetual motion machine. He says that it is a "self-sustaining unti which at the same time provides surplus electrical energy".
Of course, dear old Michael Sims at slashdot, the unthinking man's James Randi comes down pretty hard on this one, saying
"This quote is simply embarassing. It parses to "Perpetual motion is impossible. This is a perpetual motion unit." The inventor must be snickering in his Guinness right now to have snuck that one past."
But in fact, it's Michael's assertion which is, well, embarrassing. If you will allow me the following unproven assertions:
Michael Sims is capable of feeding himself.
Michael Sims has a brain and nervous system.
Michael Sims' brain and nervous system function in roughly the same way as other people's
and the provable medical truth that the nervous system of a normal human being produces low-level electrical activity, then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that Michael Sims is a self supporting system (ie, he can feed himself) which at the same time produces (small amounts of) surplus electrical energy.
Of course, Sims isn't a wonder of nature; the electrical energy is produced from the chemical digestion of the food he eats. But nobody, least of all its inventor, made any specific claim that the Jaskers box was a closed system thermodynamically. For all we know, it eats flies. Or perhaps he's invented a cool way to separate out oxygen from the air to run a fuel cell.
Re:here's the news - you're an ass
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Monsanto and PCBs
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The yokels I employ for the purpose. Want a job?
Re:here's the news - you're an ass
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Monsanto and PCBs
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or, quite possibly, that I own both a successful farm and a successful legal practice.
Let you in on a secret -- John Montoya ain't my real name.
Re:here's the news - you're an ass
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Monsanto and PCBs
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Bullshit. Farmers, do not and could not carry out detailed interbreeding programs in arable crops. They are aware of the science, which is how they decide which seeds to buy from the seed companies. Agriculture is an industry, and to suggest that this means that I am in some way calling farmers ignorant is ridiculous. I can point out that General Motors do not smelt their own steel without accusing them of being ignorant of metallurgy.
And as I said to the guy above, how do you know I'm not a farmer?
And how do you know whether or not I'm a farmer, pray tell?
Re:Most of the tagged people will be innocent.
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No, fatalities per mile is a statistic rigged to favour aircraft, which only make long journeys. Fatalities per journey would be the more relevant statistic, as it answers the question that people want to know; how likely am I to die if I get into this thing? On that basis, aircraft look significantly worse than cars.
Here's a question for you; what's the other difference between livestock and arable farming?
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
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True enough, for small values of "farm" and first values of "world". But this isn't what we're talking about. The emotional rhetoric about terminator genes is all in the context of the third world, where the grain is sold much cheaper, because otherwise nobody could afford to buy it. And Monsanto only sells in the third world to large-scale farming businesses of the scale where they do buy new seed every year; this picture of subsistence farmers being drawn into a hellish spiral of terminator seed isn't right.
here's the news, you're a twit
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
By the way, how does your first point of "all hybrid seeds are infertile" tie in with your second point of "new seed comes from new healthy hybrids grown for seed"?
Read again, you comprehensive idiot. The word "infertile" in my post is contained in scare quotes and followed by the phrase "in the sense that descendants do not have the desirable properties of the hybrid". Any decent English teacher ought to be able to help you understand the significance of these facts, and their role in the meaning of the sentence. Hybrid plants are produced by hybridisation, not grown from seed.
While, yes, as a farmer I supplement my existing gene-lineages (both plant and animal) with external lines for hybrid vigor and outside traits every year; I also breed my existing plants and animals for specific traits. If I started off with one line of genes, and attempted to maintain that line forever, yes, I might have problems. But I don't. I select outside strains to enhance certain qualities that I believe my strains are deficient in.
Just one question; while you, as a farmer, personally, yourself, are carrying out this attractive Mendelian exercise, who's looking after your fucking farm? Monsanto sell their products to real farms, run to make a profit or for subsistence, not to loony thought experiments.
If I've got some sterile corn that swoops across the pasture and cross-pollinates with my good "breeding" corn, I've got a problem
No you haven't, because as we discussed earlier, you'll be buying new seed next year.
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 0, Troll
These are all excellent and serious points, and much more important than the fabricated controversy over "terminator genes".
Don't be stupid. Here's a scientific experiment for you, engineer boy. I'll set up a company that sells products but doesn't make them, you set up a company that makes products but doesn't sell them, we'll take $100m of venture capital each and see who's richest in five years time... oh yeh, VA Linux.
Of course anyone can just as easily copy and paste the text into a web browser and send it from a Hotmail account
Cut, pasted and forwarded from a Hotmail account, the text of the email is indistinguishable from anyone's hoax-of-the-day and is useless to a news organisation. In order to be interesting, it needs to preserve the Microsoft headers and arrive from the microsoft domain.
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
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· Score: 4, Informative
This is a massive red herring, and needs to be squashed because it obscures more legitimate criticisms of both Monsanto and GM technology.
In general, all hybrid seeds are "infertile", in that the seeds of the plants grown from them do not have the desirable properties of the hybrid. This is a fact about hybridisation. Of course, if you produce new kinds of seed through genetic modification rather than hybridisation, then the resulting seed will not be a hybrid and will "breed true". By putting the terminator gene into their roundup ready seeds Monstanto were actually restoring the status quo ante rather than unleashing some new horror on the world.
Second, farmers,always buy new seed every year, because retained grain is a poor and inefficient way to grow your pants. New seed comes from new healthy hybrids grown for seed, rather than second generation plants. Anyone trying to live in this hypothetical idyll of sowing the seed kept back would quickly (over about four to six growing seasons) find themselves back at the sort of yields enjoyed in the Middle Ages. Even the Third World isn't particularly interested in that kind of farming any more.
Finally, your assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting. I was not previously aware that sterility was a hereditary property. In any case, if "sterile" seeds spread, all you would have to do would be to plough the "sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed. It's done all the time with weeds.
My main problem with this is that there are huge, massive problems with Monsanto - a total disregard for safety testing, obsession with secrecy and a tendency to corrupt governments, encouragement of the overuse of pesticides, etc - and this obsession with "Terminator [wooooh!] Genes" obscures it. It implies that if only Monsanto would stop making terminator genes, there would be nothing wrong with the rest of the GM industry.
I only disagree with you because shooting's too good for people who put open CGI redirectors where anyone can get at them.
By the way, before anyone mods me down, let's get one thing straight: Randall's cool with this. As his website says, "One of my latest "stupid Randal tricks" has been to cruise the net for guest books and see if they accept raw HTML, testing it by feeding it a name or comment of Barney <IMG SRC="http://barneyonline.com/Barney/Images/Home/ic onBarney1.jpg">. It's amazing how many of them blindly accept it." So given that he's cool with defacing other people's bulletin boards, I really wouldn't feel it necessary to have a conscience about his own.
He's also a hypocrite for whinging about the time that someone found out his slashdot account had the password "slashdot"
Randal Schwartz, poster child for the "I'm a persecuted geek! It isn't my fault!" tendency.
Maybe I'm being a bit naive here, but what's in this for the VCs? Venture capitalists are in business to make money. They are not known for settling for the kind of return on capital earned in the record business as it stands at the moment. If you want to create a market in which the VCs earn even less than that, don't be surprised if they don't choose to play.
Then they make a few advertisements, perhaps using other people's money (Venture capitalist's money, that is),
How brilliant! But maybe, enjoying economies of scale, these venture capitalists should also provide the production facilities to press the CDs. They could coordinate the marketing too! I even have a name for these "venture capitalists" who put up the money behind bands... we could call them "record labels"!
Seriously, why do you think that venture capitalists will want less money than record companies. Take a look at the books of EMI some day. Sure, on one superstar band, they make out like bandits. But that's ignoring all the flop acts, on which the musicians haven't paid them back a cent. Across the whole portfolio, they are substantially less profitable than many other industries. This mythical surplus profit which "could go to the musicians" just doesn't exist.
From famous painters who cut off their own ears, to the antisocial Einstein, there has never in history been a single gifted person that wasn't 'disabled' in one way or another
Einstein wasn't antisocial. And John von Neumann, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman didn't seem to have anything wrong with their lives. Some people are just lucky so-and-sos.
Slashdot Mirror
Why didn't you slow down a bit then you stupid cunt?
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2002 OSDN.
I'm afraid that the numerous reproductions of the article in comments on this page can't both be "owned by the Poster" and meet the conditions of the New Statesman licence regarding redistribution. Sue each other at will.
And under normal conditions, they are able to find it, by themselves. It seems sensible to distinguish between machines which need intervention to fuel them, and machines which can harvest their own energy from the environment -- ask any nanotechnologist. A "self-sustaining" machine of this kind would not be a perpetual motion machine (which the inventor explicitly says his machine is not), but it would be bloody useful.
Get your semantics straight, btw:
Substaining means, literally, 'what causes it to run'
No, "sustenance" means "what causes it to run; sustaining is not a noun. "Sustaining" means, loosely, "providing with sustenance", and "self-sustaining" means either that it provides itself with sustenance (like a horse) or that it needs no sustenance.
"Sustains itself" does not imply "needs no inputs". A "self-sustaining colony" on Mars would not be one composed of natural wonders. An equally sensible definition would be "is able to independently acquire all the inputs it needs". In this sense, a horse is "self-sustaining" and so, probably, are you.
If not, why not?
If you have a convincing reason why not, why do you assume that someone else shares your definition of a self-sustaining unit, based on no evidence that this is the case.
No he isn't. He never makes the claim Sims attributes to him. He never says anything about what might or might not happen in a sealed box. That's my whole point.
Of course, dear old Michael Sims at slashdot, the unthinking man's James Randi comes down pretty hard on this one, saying
But in fact, it's Michael's assertion which is, well, embarrassing. If you will allow me the following unproven assertions:
- Michael Sims is capable of feeding himself.
- Michael Sims has a brain and nervous system.
- Michael Sims' brain and nervous system function in roughly the same way as other people's
and the provable medical truth that the nervous system of a normal human being produces low-level electrical activity, then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that Michael Sims is a self supporting system (ie, he can feed himself) which at the same time produces (small amounts of) surplus electrical energy.Of course, Sims isn't a wonder of nature; the electrical energy is produced from the chemical digestion of the food he eats. But nobody, least of all its inventor, made any specific claim that the Jaskers box was a closed system thermodynamically. For all we know, it eats flies. Or perhaps he's invented a cool way to separate out oxygen from the air to run a fuel cell.
The yokels I employ for the purpose. Want a job?
Let you in on a secret -- John Montoya ain't my real name.
And as I said to the guy above, how do you know I'm not a farmer?
And how do you know whether or not I'm a farmer, pray tell?
No, fatalities per mile is a statistic rigged to favour aircraft, which only make long journeys. Fatalities per journey would be the more relevant statistic, as it answers the question that people want to know; how likely am I to die if I get into this thing? On that basis, aircraft look significantly worse than cars.
Here's a question for you; what's the other difference between livestock and arable farming?
True enough, for small values of "farm" and first values of "world". But this isn't what we're talking about. The emotional rhetoric about terminator genes is all in the context of the third world, where the grain is sold much cheaper, because otherwise nobody could afford to buy it. And Monsanto only sells in the third world to large-scale farming businesses of the scale where they do buy new seed every year; this picture of subsistence farmers being drawn into a hellish spiral of terminator seed isn't right.
Read again, you comprehensive idiot. The word "infertile" in my post is contained in scare quotes and followed by the phrase "in the sense that descendants do not have the desirable properties of the hybrid". Any decent English teacher ought to be able to help you understand the significance of these facts, and their role in the meaning of the sentence. Hybrid plants are produced by hybridisation, not grown from seed.
While, yes, as a farmer I supplement my existing gene-lineages (both plant and animal) with external lines for hybrid vigor and outside traits every year; I also breed my existing plants and animals for specific traits. If I started off with one line of genes, and attempted to maintain that line forever, yes, I might have problems. But I don't. I select outside strains to enhance certain qualities that I believe my strains are deficient in.
Just one question; while you, as a farmer, personally, yourself, are carrying out this attractive Mendelian exercise, who's looking after your fucking farm? Monsanto sell their products to real farms, run to make a profit or for subsistence, not to loony thought experiments.
If I've got some sterile corn that swoops across the pasture and cross-pollinates with my good "breeding" corn, I've got a problem
No you haven't, because as we discussed earlier, you'll be buying new seed next year.
These are all excellent and serious points, and much more important than the fabricated controversy over "terminator genes".
Don't be stupid. Here's a scientific experiment for you, engineer boy. I'll set up a company that sells products but doesn't make them, you set up a company that makes products but doesn't sell them, we'll take $100m of venture capital each and see who's richest in five years time ... oh yeh, VA Linux.
Cut, pasted and forwarded from a Hotmail account, the text of the email is indistinguishable from anyone's hoax-of-the-day and is useless to a news organisation. In order to be interesting, it needs to preserve the Microsoft headers and arrive from the microsoft domain.
In general, all hybrid seeds are "infertile", in that the seeds of the plants grown from them do not have the desirable properties of the hybrid. This is a fact about hybridisation. Of course, if you produce new kinds of seed through genetic modification rather than hybridisation, then the resulting seed will not be a hybrid and will "breed true". By putting the terminator gene into their roundup ready seeds Monstanto were actually restoring the status quo ante rather than unleashing some new horror on the world.
Second, farmers
Finally, your assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting. I was not previously aware that sterility was a hereditary property. In any case, if "sterile" seeds spread, all you would have to do would be to plough the "sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed. It's done all the time with weeds.
My main problem with this is that there are huge, massive problems with Monsanto - a total disregard for safety testing, obsession with secrecy and a tendency to corrupt governments, encouragement of the overuse of pesticides, etc - and this obsession with "Terminator [wooooh!] Genes" obscures it. It implies that if only Monsanto would stop making terminator genes, there would be nothing wrong with the rest of the GM industry.
By the way, before anyone mods me down, let's get one thing straight: Randall's cool with this. As his website says, "One of my latest "stupid Randal tricks" has been to cruise the net for guest books and see if they accept raw HTML, testing it by feeding it a name or comment of Barney <IMG SRC="http://barneyonline.com/Barney/Images/Home/i
He's also a hypocrite for whinging about the time that someone found out his slashdot account had the password "slashdot"
Randal Schwartz, poster child for the "I'm a persecuted geek! It isn't my fault!" tendency.
Fuckhead.
Maybe I'm being a bit naive here, but what's in this for the VCs? Venture capitalists are in business to make money. They are not known for settling for the kind of return on capital earned in the record business as it stands at the moment. If you want to create a market in which the VCs earn even less than that, don't be surprised if they don't choose to play.
How brilliant! But maybe, enjoying economies of scale, these venture capitalists should also provide the production facilities to press the CDs. They could coordinate the marketing too! I even have a name for these "venture capitalists" who put up the money behind bands ... we could call them "record labels"!
Seriously, why do you think that venture capitalists will want less money than record companies. Take a look at the books of EMI some day. Sure, on one superstar band, they make out like bandits. But that's ignoring all the flop acts, on which the musicians haven't paid them back a cent. Across the whole portfolio, they are substantially less profitable than many other industries. This mythical surplus profit which "could go to the musicians" just doesn't exist.
George Michael lost his lawsuit against Sony.
Brilliant, yes, normal, no, "disabled" no, and both "Faynman" and "Fenyman", also no.
Einstein wasn't antisocial. And John von Neumann, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman didn't seem to have anything wrong with their lives. Some people are just lucky so-and-sos.