Of course they're all missing something! No One Language can be all things to all people. In particular, "intuitive and easy-to-use IDE" and "simplified GUI" is a hard mix. (I'm not going to call Visual Studio intuitive.)
You probably ought to try to weasel more requirements out of your boss.
That said, the closest match to your problem is almost certain Python. The only "bullet point" missing is "abstract classes", but in Python, the term "abstract class" is nearly meaningless; they aren't necessary. But if it makes you feel better to create them, do so. Some people do for stylistic reasons.
Functions are overloadable, you just have to do it by checking types. For paying that price, you also get some cute stuff with *args and **kwargs (look at the docs for those things until you understand them), which can be lifesavers when you want them.
As for the "simplified GUI coding", you get *many* choices: Tk ships by default, and while ugly, is fast and effective for many uses. wxWindows is well-supported (in all senses of the word), looks native on all supported platforms, and is extremely flexible. (I'd rather program in wxWindows then MFC, even if I were doing a Windows only program! And it's a rare MFC program that couldn't be done in wxWindows.) Various IDEs are available for these things; you often don't need them. And there are many other choices as well.
If Python lacks the Hype Veneer and you think your boss cares about that, then you've probably got to go Java, along with the purchase of an IDE. You don't get simplified GUI programming, but I don't know of *any* hyped language that has simplified GUI coding.
"and load it on the web." The CD at the end of the course is a bonus. The rest of my point concerns getting the file size down to the point where this is feasible, even for modem users.
The fact that creating all of these CDs is difficult suggests that a different approach is probably called for; no matter HOW little is spent on this duplication scheme, the money is probably better spent elsewhere. Work smarter, not harder.
Why CDs? 30 minutes of mono audio, encoded in 32Kb/s MP3, is (30 * 60 * 32 / 8) = 7200 KB (with the last "/ 8" to get us to kiloBYTES instead of kiloBITS). There are MUCH better codecs then MP3 for this at this bitrate, I just use MP3 as a convenient and easily obtained example. Record the lecture, convert to (lossily-compressed-audio-format-of-your-choice), and load it on the web.
At the end of the semester, give each student ONE CD with the entire course on it!
Nowadays, if your student can use a CD, they can play an MP3. And even a 7MB download is doable over a modem connection. (And you might cut that down to perhaps 1 or 2 MB or less by using a codec designed to do voice-only, but you'll probably have to pay for it.)
One thing that kind of gets me scatching my head (I'm sure its my intellectual shortcomings, not those who initate these projects) is the idea that "I'll finish this then release it as open source".
I've been considering doing this very thing. Here's what I've come up with. Most of these apply equally well to books and programming projects.
Vision: If you have a specific vision driving the creation, it may be easier to finish the project (to at least a first approximation) then to try to convey that vision to a loosely-knit bunch of developers/writers who may or may not care about or even understand your vision. Once you have code/copy, people can judge whether they like the direction of a project, rather then attempting to steer it early on into what they want. (Team management is not free.)
Reputation: I know I don't have to release The World's Most Beautiful Code/Book to impress people... but open source or not, crap is crap, and most, if not all, early drafts/programs are crap, unless VERY carefully designed from the get-go. (Not something Open Source as a whole is famous for; design tends to be either the exception, or something you consider at version 3. This is not all bad, but one might not want to put one's name on what is essentially pre-alpha code.)
Attacting others: Related to but distinct from reputation, early crap code will probably not attract any one to work on your code/book. (Remember, there's no magic to Open Source; the destiny of your average FreshMeat.net project is probably to attract not a single developer who will stick around in even the medium term.)
Commitment: By putting my project out in the open, it implies a certain level of commitment to it, even if that commitment is replying to numerous emails with "I totally refuse to support that program/correct the book at this time." The "Open Source" culture supports the idea of dumping code into the world in theory, but in fact you can't completely dump something content onto the world without some measure of responsibility for it. I like the fact that if I abandon my project for any reason, NOBODY will give me flack for it; nobody even knows it exists, and that's liberating.
For my project (estimated odds of EVER being released publically: 10%), "Vision" is my primary reason. I don't want to explain myself any more then I have to. Peer review is likely as not to be crap, both because it's unlikely I'd attract the 'good' reviewers (since they are on bigger name projects), and the reviewers are unlikely to understand where I'm going. I'd only ruffle potential contributors feathers when I tell them that their nifty-snazzy idea completely fails to fit within my framework, and I'm quite uninterested in it. (No matter how you candy coat that, people will still take it quite badly.)
Personally, I'd recommend having some sort of functional product before releasing anything as open source. The exception (which totally doesn't apply to me!) is if you have a big enough name or big enough project to put something together on the strength of that alone. Imagine one of the big KDE/GNOME developers starting a new component system from scratch, in public. It works; they get all kinds of developers willing to work with them before even a single line of code is written. Now imagine me, "Jerf from Slashdot", making the same (kind of) announcement. The silence is deafening.
Katz is clearly out of ideas. He should stop writing for Slashdot anytime now! He's been wrong before, but I've never seen an article so full of nothing from him before!
..... oh no.... my calculations indicate a 85% probably that he'll decide to start rehashing his old essays. Damn. Well, that only ought to provide enough grist for another half-essay, so maybe we're still out of the woods!
Microsoft is not attacking Lindows because of name similarity, they are attacking it because of the product.
But with trademark law, not only is that acceptable, it's nearly required.
A point I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it is likely that a large number of those other "Win-" programs are named that *with the consent of Microsoft*, which means they are defending their trademark adequately. (How many of them have the "Compatible with Windows" certification marks?)
Re:What constitutes intelligence (artificial or no
on
True Names
·
· Score: 2
The entire point is that if the Singularity occurs, it will be like being hit across the head with a 2x4... while not a one of us could come up with a precise definition of "hit" (versus "tap", versus "nudge", etc.) in numeric terms of Newtons and radians, you know it when it happens to you.
Similarly, when dealing with an intelligence that can meaningfully modify itself to its own improvement, academic questions over whether it's "ten times smarter then an unassisted human" or "elevent times smarter then an unassisted human" aren't even academic; they're just meaningless. The point is that that level of intelligence is entirely unlike anything experience we have in the past with which to judge the future.
If the Singularity occurs, the "common man's" (which will be in short supply by then) problem will not be figuring out whether the machine intelligence is a billion or a trillion times more intelligent then him; it will be trivially obvious that the intelligence is orders of magnitude greater by ANY measurement. The problem will be avoiding being left behind, or, alternatively, trying to be left behind. (Either way the choices could well be constrained.)
(I personally don't think it will happen, for multiple reasons not worth going into, but those who understand the concept and its proponents IMHO do have a clearer understanding of what the future implies then those of us who think that life will largely continue as it has; frankly, it hasn't been working THAT way for a couple hundred years already, so why we persist in that notion is beyond me. Well, actually it's not beyond me, I understand it well, but the rhetoric stands.)
Step back a second and consider what is being proposed. *Every home* in Belgium would have a machine, which by default runs OS N. (I'd use "X" as my variable but that's taken.:-) )
Under these circumstances, damn near every objection raised to every OS I've seen mentioned are meaningless. If this went through, it would be a different world.
So OS N has some rough spots. So what? You neighbors all have OS N too. Every kid on the block has been exposed to OS N. A country full of people are working on helping each other learn the OS and "making it go".
Frankly, the discussion boils down to ONLY one issue, and that's "Proprietary or open?" And the answer is clear: Open.
A proprietary OS puts an entire country at the mercy of the vendor. While the country will certainly have a lot of "pull", you can bet that the marketing department of the company is going to get more and more brazen over time, and they DON'T have your best interests at heart.
An Open OS, be it Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever, imposes nothing on Belgium. Certainly if Belgium is going to put a computer in every home, they can afford to make their own distro, which can be as easy or as hard to use as they want, even to the TiVo extreme.
Everything changes when you're talking about a country in which every person you meet on the street has had experience with the OS you're using. (God knows Windows isn't the dream it's being portrayed as... or haven't you helped a new person learn Windows lately?)
Upshot: A proprietary OS will meet the needs of the developing company. An open OS meets the needs of Belgium. The choice is clear. Old arguments are irrelevant. Willingly selling an entire country into vendor-lockin is analogous to selling Manhatten Island for the proverbial handful of glass beads.
Your clarification was helpful. (High praise from me, esp. while wearing my Slashdot hat.)
I poked around a bit on the net and HVT is still up for debate in some physicist circles. It's not well respected, but I don't know that we could call the case closed.
I'd still stick with my gut, that even if hidden variables exist that explain this stuff, we're not going to be able to access them, but when it comes to physics, I'm not into dogma.
Your post was stimulating. (And of course the "Intrusion Detection" bit I think is general, not aimed specifically at you... yes, technically thats in the cryptography domain but most people read too much into the word "cryptography".)
Regrettably, quantum intrusion detection (as this isn't really encryption) and quantum entanglement correspond to "states can't be undetectably read (and subsequently re-created and sent onward)" and "states can change at a distance, but not meaningfully at FTL speeds".
When stated more properly, it can be seen that there are no conflicts, and one isn't going to "save" us from the other. Quantum intrusion detection depends on the uncopyability of certain states (else the intruder could recreate the photon and send it along undetectably). Quantum entanglement has other significant limitations, which ban any form of communication whatsoever at FTL speeds, and make it impracticably difficult to use it in any significant way otherwise.
Keep on kookin'. Reading the Slashdot headline takes on particle physics will definately assist in that endeavor.
Don't forget to use "nice" while recompiling the kernel, or your ABS braking and power steering will get really laggy, which can cause fatal "oops"es.
Re:Interesting, the GM reaction, a little PR pleas
on
GM DNA Spreading...
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Fish genes can get into tomatoes naturally? How exactly does that happen?
Viruses. For the details, you'll have to look it up. And yes, that particular combination is unlikely, but any two species that can be infected by the same virus could potentially directly share DNA that way.
Plus that's a massive oversimplification. In reality, the genes will be creating one variety per plant that uses them, as all plants are unique. Not all of them die.
Re:Adding to the pool threatens diversity?
on
GM DNA Spreading...
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You miss the point. I'm not talking about GM'ed crops, I'm talking about these GM'ed-genes-in-the-wild which are in fact the subject of the story. I know the arguments against GM'ing crops.
BTW, your argument is not one of them. You are arguing against genetic uniformity. Genetic uniformity is caused by the perceived need to maximize short term production at all costs, leading to the use of a small selection of current "best" gene lines at the expense of all others. GM can in fact only increase the diversity of the gene pool by adding genes to the pool that were not there previously.
(Note that I have not made the claim that therefore GM is good; if you thought that, I suggest you read more carefully in the future. Some people have naunced views. This comment not directed at the original poster necessarily.)
Would somebody please name names, and maybe get moderated up?
Until that happens, this whole story is as pointless as the whole "It" fiasco, which I note reared it's ugly and decidedly non-pointed head on Wired again today.
These changes are not dramatic is exactly what I mean. Not that there are none, but that they don't exhibit the dichotomy between the Nintendo and the Super Nintendo. DC->PS2 isn't a full generation jump on that scale.
Also, I know the capabilities haven't been tapped. That's why I put a time limit on my statement, about a year. Assuming the GC or the XBox are still around then, the games will look much better then the DC. But not now.
Adding to the pool threatens diversity?
on
GM DNA Spreading...
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Somebody help me. Adding genes to the pool threatens diversity?
We're all computer people here. Genes are genes, there's no magical "man-made" marker that makes them evil. (Some protesters think there is. I consider them idiots. Other protesters have better reasoned opions. I listen to them.) The gene won't spread to the whole population unless it enhances survivability, and even then, it probably won't get to ALL the plants.
Massive dieoffs of particular genes happen all the time, and is part of "evolution".
I don't understand the panic, unless you have the unfounded "man made genes are somehow automatically evil" idea. Genes have been transferring amongst life forms since the invention of viruses at least.
Then again, I'm a rational environmentalist, not a reactionary one. I've never understood the reactionaries.
Just what we need, another Dreamcast fanboy/cocksucker trying to feel better about the sorry excuse for a gaming console he has.
What really pisses off fanboys like you is everything you've ever said is wrong. The DC rocked, and measured objectively, is currently the best console on the market by any measure except hype, and potential graphics capability.
It's got the best games, the most games, the cheapest games, the cheapest hardware, the cheapest console by a factor of six, and the widest selection of games. The graphics simply aren't that inferior to anything else on the market right now, because one of the dirty secrets of the graphics industry is that it take about an order of magnitude improvement in graphics technology to really be noticable, and not get lost in non-optimized graphics engines.
The only hard part is that scavenging the games is hard now. But I'll put my DC collection up against your fanboy console choice anyday. I've got more Class A games in my collection then the XBox or the Gamecube has total games, period. You can almost combine the two.
And guess what? I can still buy one of the new ones if I want! What have you been doing the last few years?
Dirty secret: The DC was the best console in the late nineties. If you can find the games (try used shops), it's still the best for another year or so. If jackasses like you hadn't dissed it, Sega would have been rewarded for innovation, instead of penalized by a market dominated by fanboy idiots.
I think we learned that many problems that we're facing in terms of Perl implementation right now have already been thoroughly researched and dealt with as many as 30 years ago; but we also learned that if we want to get at this research, then we need to do a lot of digging. The academic community is good at solving tricky problems like threading, continuations, despatch and the like, but not very interested in working out all the implications.... So the impetus is on us as serious language implementors to take the time to look into and understand the current state of the art in VM research to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
I think that's the coolest part of probably the whole conference. If perl/Parrot/Python can manage to take the best of both the academic and the practical worlds, they'll be unstoppable. Heck, it might even be a first! The two seem allergic to talking to each other, as if they'll become contaiminated, rather then treating each other as a chance to learn, grow, and test.
To everyone rushing to disagree with the parent of this post: Remember that the parent is the perfectly logical conclusion of moral relativism. If you think that you believe all morality is relative, yet you can't stomach the parent of this post, then I'd suggest a serious re-examination of your personal philosophy, because you aren't the moral relativist you thought you were.
Do you have any idea how fucking insignificant "millions of tons" is? The mass of the Earth and the Moon are measured in sextillions of tons! 6 sextillion, 587 quintillion tons to be precise. "One million tons" is less then one trillionth of a percent, and it would take a lot of hard work just to move that much!
Do the math on the energy requirements to move one billion tons of mass from the Moon to the Earth. Then compare to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You will quickly realize there is no way in hell we're moving gravitationally significant pieces of the moon onto the earth. Instead, we'll move us to the moon, and stay there.
You have an amazingly naive view of the capabilities of mankind and the capabilities of the universe. If mere millions of tons could harm us, then they would have, because that much stuff falls into the Earth all the time!
This kind of post epitomizes why I can't call myself an environmentalist, because too many of them simply shut off their brain and turn on their whine machines. By the time we possibly could change the moon, we will not need to. There are easier ways to do just about anything that advanced a species could want to do.
Re:they shouldn't be able to do this
on
Mining On The Moon
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What exactly are they "destroying"? Rocks? A dust layer? Undistinguished landscapes?
There's no life on the moon. None. Not even algae to get upset about dying. The only thing that even remotely affects life is the appearance of the moon, specifically the aldebo, and mining is unlikely to change THAT for a long time.
The universe routinely "destroys" entire galaxies for no (known) good reason. Who cares if we pull some stuff out of the moon?
*snort* "destroy the moon"... jeez... come on! Engage that brain!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they're all missing something! No One Language can be all things to all people. In particular, "intuitive and easy-to-use IDE" and "simplified GUI" is a hard mix. (I'm not going to call Visual Studio intuitive.)
You probably ought to try to weasel more requirements out of your boss.
That said, the closest match to your problem is almost certain Python. The only "bullet point" missing is "abstract classes", but in Python, the term "abstract class" is nearly meaningless; they aren't necessary. But if it makes you feel better to create them, do so. Some people do for stylistic reasons.
Functions are overloadable, you just have to do it by checking types. For paying that price, you also get some cute stuff with *args and **kwargs (look at the docs for those things until you understand them), which can be lifesavers when you want them.
As for the "simplified GUI coding", you get *many* choices: Tk ships by default, and while ugly, is fast and effective for many uses. wxWindows is well-supported (in all senses of the word), looks native on all supported platforms, and is extremely flexible. (I'd rather program in wxWindows then MFC, even if I were doing a Windows only program! And it's a rare MFC program that couldn't be done in wxWindows.) Various IDEs are available for these things; you often don't need them. And there are many other choices as well.
If Python lacks the Hype Veneer and you think your boss cares about that, then you've probably got to go Java, along with the purchase of an IDE. You don't get simplified GUI programming, but I don't know of *any* hyped language that has simplified GUI coding.
"and load it on the web." The CD at the end of the course is a bonus. The rest of my point concerns getting the file size down to the point where this is feasible, even for modem users.
The fact that creating all of these CDs is difficult suggests that a different approach is probably called for; no matter HOW little is spent on this duplication scheme, the money is probably better spent elsewhere. Work smarter, not harder.
Why CDs? 30 minutes of mono audio, encoded in 32Kb/s MP3, is (30 * 60 * 32 / 8) = 7200 KB (with the last "/ 8" to get us to kiloBYTES instead of kiloBITS). There are MUCH better codecs then MP3 for this at this bitrate, I just use MP3 as a convenient and easily obtained example. Record the lecture, convert to (lossily-compressed-audio-format-of-your-choice), and load it on the web.
At the end of the semester, give each student ONE CD with the entire course on it!
Nowadays, if your student can use a CD, they can play an MP3. And even a 7MB download is doable over a modem connection. (And you might cut that down to perhaps 1 or 2 MB or less by using a codec designed to do voice-only, but you'll probably have to pay for it.)
I've been considering doing this very thing. Here's what I've come up with. Most of these apply equally well to books and programming projects.
- Vision: If you have a specific vision driving the creation, it may be easier to finish the project (to at least a first approximation) then to try to convey that vision to a loosely-knit bunch of developers/writers who may or may not care about or even understand your vision. Once you have code/copy, people can judge whether they like the direction of a project, rather then attempting to steer it early on into what they want. (Team management is not free.)
- Reputation: I know I don't have to release The World's Most Beautiful Code/Book to impress people... but open source or not, crap is crap, and most, if not all, early drafts/programs are crap, unless VERY carefully designed from the get-go. (Not something Open Source as a whole is famous for; design tends to be either the exception, or something you consider at version 3. This is not all bad, but one might not want to put one's name on what is essentially pre-alpha code.)
- Attacting others: Related to but distinct from reputation, early crap code will probably not attract any one to work on your code/book. (Remember, there's no magic to Open Source; the destiny of your average FreshMeat.net project is probably to attract not a single developer who will stick around in even the medium term.)
- Commitment: By putting my project out in the open, it implies a certain level of commitment to it, even if that commitment is replying to numerous emails with "I totally refuse to support that program/correct the book at this time." The "Open Source" culture supports the idea of dumping code into the world in theory, but in fact you can't completely dump something content onto the world without some measure of responsibility for it. I like the fact that if I abandon my project for any reason, NOBODY will give me flack for it; nobody even knows it exists, and that's liberating.
For my project (estimated odds of EVER being released publically: 10%), "Vision" is my primary reason. I don't want to explain myself any more then I have to. Peer review is likely as not to be crap, both because it's unlikely I'd attract the 'good' reviewers (since they are on bigger name projects), and the reviewers are unlikely to understand where I'm going. I'd only ruffle potential contributors feathers when I tell them that their nifty-snazzy idea completely fails to fit within my framework, and I'm quite uninterested in it. (No matter how you candy coat that, people will still take it quite badly.)Personally, I'd recommend having some sort of functional product before releasing anything as open source. The exception (which totally doesn't apply to me!) is if you have a big enough name or big enough project to put something together on the strength of that alone. Imagine one of the big KDE/GNOME developers starting a new component system from scratch, in public. It works; they get all kinds of developers willing to work with them before even a single line of code is written. Now imagine me, "Jerf from Slashdot", making the same (kind of) announcement. The silence is deafening.
Katz is clearly out of ideas. He should stop writing for Slashdot anytime now! He's been wrong before, but I've never seen an article so full of nothing from him before!
.... my calculations indicate a 85% probably that he'll decide to start rehashing his old essays. Damn. Well, that only ought to provide enough grist for another half-essay, so maybe we're still out of the woods!
..... oh no
Here's hoping!
Microsoft is not attacking Lindows because of name similarity, they are attacking it because of the product.
But with trademark law, not only is that acceptable, it's nearly required.
A point I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it is likely that a large number of those other "Win-" programs are named that *with the consent of Microsoft*, which means they are defending their trademark adequately. (How many of them have the "Compatible with Windows" certification marks?)
Similarly, when dealing with an intelligence that can meaningfully modify itself to its own improvement, academic questions over whether it's "ten times smarter then an unassisted human" or "elevent times smarter then an unassisted human" aren't even academic; they're just meaningless. The point is that that level of intelligence is entirely unlike anything experience we have in the past with which to judge the future.
If the Singularity occurs, the "common man's" (which will be in short supply by then) problem will not be figuring out whether the machine intelligence is a billion or a trillion times more intelligent then him; it will be trivially obvious that the intelligence is orders of magnitude greater by ANY measurement. The problem will be avoiding being left behind, or, alternatively, trying to be left behind. (Either way the choices could well be constrained.)
(I personally don't think it will happen, for multiple reasons not worth going into, but those who understand the concept and its proponents IMHO do have a clearer understanding of what the future implies then those of us who think that life will largely continue as it has; frankly, it hasn't been working THAT way for a couple hundred years already, so why we persist in that notion is beyond me. Well, actually it's not beyond me, I understand it well, but the rhetoric stands.)
Wrong binding; babelfish (probably) === babelfish.altavista.com
>You watch too much TV..
>wait..zzz.zzzzz...zzzzz... there, the lameness filter will now accept this post
Pity you didn't take it's advice.
Step back a second and consider what is being proposed. *Every home* in Belgium would have a machine, which by default runs OS N. (I'd use "X" as my variable but that's taken. :-) )
Under these circumstances, damn near every objection raised to every OS I've seen mentioned are meaningless. If this went through, it would be a different world.
So OS N has some rough spots. So what? You neighbors all have OS N too. Every kid on the block has been exposed to OS N. A country full of people are working on helping each other learn the OS and "making it go".
Frankly, the discussion boils down to ONLY one issue, and that's "Proprietary or open?" And the answer is clear: Open.
A proprietary OS puts an entire country at the mercy of the vendor. While the country will certainly have a lot of "pull", you can bet that the marketing department of the company is going to get more and more brazen over time, and they DON'T have your best interests at heart.
An Open OS, be it Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever, imposes nothing on Belgium. Certainly if Belgium is going to put a computer in every home, they can afford to make their own distro, which can be as easy or as hard to use as they want, even to the TiVo extreme.
Everything changes when you're talking about a country in which every person you meet on the street has had experience with the OS you're using. (God knows Windows isn't the dream it's being portrayed as... or haven't you helped a new person learn Windows lately?)
Upshot: A proprietary OS will meet the needs of the developing company. An open OS meets the needs of Belgium. The choice is clear. Old arguments are irrelevant. Willingly selling an entire country into vendor-lockin is analogous to selling Manhatten Island for the proverbial handful of glass beads.
Your clarification was helpful. (High praise from me, esp. while wearing my Slashdot hat.)
I poked around a bit on the net and HVT is still up for debate in some physicist circles. It's not well respected, but I don't know that we could call the case closed.
I'd still stick with my gut, that even if hidden variables exist that explain this stuff, we're not going to be able to access them, but when it comes to physics, I'm not into dogma.
Your post was stimulating. (And of course the "Intrusion Detection" bit I think is general, not aimed specifically at you... yes, technically thats in the cryptography domain but most people read too much into the word "cryptography".)
Regrettably, quantum intrusion detection (as this isn't really encryption) and quantum entanglement correspond to "states can't be undetectably read (and subsequently re-created and sent onward)" and "states can change at a distance, but not meaningfully at FTL speeds".
When stated more properly, it can be seen that there are no conflicts, and one isn't going to "save" us from the other. Quantum intrusion detection depends on the uncopyability of certain states (else the intruder could recreate the photon and send it along undetectably). Quantum entanglement has other significant limitations, which ban any form of communication whatsoever at FTL speeds, and make it impracticably difficult to use it in any significant way otherwise.
Keep on kookin'. Reading the Slashdot headline takes on particle physics will definately assist in that endeavor.
Don't forget to use "nice" while recompiling the kernel, or your ABS braking and power steering will get really laggy, which can cause fatal "oops"es.
Fish genes can get into tomatoes naturally? How exactly does that happen?
Viruses. For the details, you'll have to look it up. And yes, that particular combination is unlikely, but any two species that can be infected by the same virus could potentially directly share DNA that way.
GM gene infects crop -> variety count + 1
GM gene crop dies -> variety count - 1
Net change: 0
The deaths are normal.
Plus that's a massive oversimplification. In reality, the genes will be creating one variety per plant that uses them, as all plants are unique. Not all of them die.
You miss the point. I'm not talking about GM'ed crops, I'm talking about these GM'ed-genes-in-the-wild which are in fact the subject of the story. I know the arguments against GM'ing crops.
BTW, your argument is not one of them. You are arguing against genetic uniformity. Genetic uniformity is caused by the perceived need to maximize short term production at all costs, leading to the use of a small selection of current "best" gene lines at the expense of all others. GM can in fact only increase the diversity of the gene pool by adding genes to the pool that were not there previously.
(Note that I have not made the claim that therefore GM is good; if you thought that, I suggest you read more carefully in the future. Some people have naunced views. This comment not directed at the original poster necessarily.)
Would somebody please name names, and maybe get moderated up?
Until that happens, this whole story is as pointless as the whole "It" fiasco, which I note reared it's ugly and decidedly non-pointed head on Wired again today.
These changes are not dramatic is exactly what I mean. Not that there are none, but that they don't exhibit the dichotomy between the Nintendo and the Super Nintendo. DC->PS2 isn't a full generation jump on that scale.
Also, I know the capabilities haven't been tapped. That's why I put a time limit on my statement, about a year. Assuming the GC or the XBox are still around then, the games will look much better then the DC. But not now.
Somebody help me. Adding genes to the pool threatens diversity?
We're all computer people here. Genes are genes, there's no magical "man-made" marker that makes them evil. (Some protesters think there is. I consider them idiots. Other protesters have better reasoned opions. I listen to them.) The gene won't spread to the whole population unless it enhances survivability, and even then, it probably won't get to ALL the plants.
Massive dieoffs of particular genes happen all the time, and is part of "evolution".
I don't understand the panic, unless you have the unfounded "man made genes are somehow automatically evil" idea. Genes have been transferring amongst life forms since the invention of viruses at least.
Then again, I'm a rational environmentalist, not a reactionary one. I've never understood the reactionaries.
Just what we need, another Dreamcast fanboy/cocksucker trying to feel better about the sorry excuse for a gaming console he has.
What really pisses off fanboys like you is everything you've ever said is wrong. The DC rocked, and measured objectively, is currently the best console on the market by any measure except hype, and potential graphics capability.
It's got the best games, the most games, the cheapest games, the cheapest hardware, the cheapest console by a factor of six, and the widest selection of games. The graphics simply aren't that inferior to anything else on the market right now, because one of the dirty secrets of the graphics industry is that it take about an order of magnitude improvement in graphics technology to really be noticable, and not get lost in non-optimized graphics engines.
The only hard part is that scavenging the games is hard now. But I'll put my DC collection up against your fanboy console choice anyday. I've got more Class A games in my collection then the XBox or the Gamecube has total games, period. You can almost combine the two.
And guess what? I can still buy one of the new ones if I want! What have you been doing the last few years?
Dirty secret: The DC was the best console in the late nineties. If you can find the games (try used shops), it's still the best for another year or so. If jackasses like you hadn't dissed it, Sega would have been rewarded for innovation, instead of penalized by a market dominated by fanboy idiots.
I think we learned that many problems that we're facing in terms of Perl implementation right now have already been thoroughly researched and dealt with as many as 30 years ago; but we also learned that if we want to get at this research, then we need to do a lot of digging. The academic community is good at solving tricky problems like threading, continuations, despatch and the like, but not very interested in working out all the implications.... So the impetus is on us as serious language implementors to take the time to look into and understand the current state of the art in VM research to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
I think that's the coolest part of probably the whole conference. If perl/Parrot/Python can manage to take the best of both the academic and the practical worlds, they'll be unstoppable. Heck, it might even be a first! The two seem allergic to talking to each other, as if they'll become contaiminated, rather then treating each other as a chance to learn, grow, and test.
To everyone rushing to disagree with the parent of this post: Remember that the parent is the perfectly logical conclusion of moral relativism. If you think that you believe all morality is relative, yet you can't stomach the parent of this post, then I'd suggest a serious re-examination of your personal philosophy, because you aren't the moral relativist you thought you were.
Let me check my copy of "Slashdot Answers to Microsoft Questions For Dummys". Here it is!
What was the question?
Does it matter? The answer to all of them is "Microsoft sucks!"
Really, the book has a good deal more pages then it needs to. The whole thing rates a -1, Redundant.
Do you have any idea how fucking insignificant "millions of tons" is? The mass of the Earth and the Moon are measured in sextillions of tons! 6 sextillion, 587 quintillion tons to be precise. "One million tons" is less then one trillionth of a percent, and it would take a lot of hard work just to move that much!
Do the math on the energy requirements to move one billion tons of mass from the Moon to the Earth. Then compare to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You will quickly realize there is no way in hell we're moving gravitationally significant pieces of the moon onto the earth. Instead, we'll move us to the moon, and stay there.
You have an amazingly naive view of the capabilities of mankind and the capabilities of the universe. If mere millions of tons could harm us, then they would have, because that much stuff falls into the Earth all the time!
This kind of post epitomizes why I can't call myself an environmentalist, because too many of them simply shut off their brain and turn on their whine machines. By the time we possibly could change the moon, we will not need to. There are easier ways to do just about anything that advanced a species could want to do.
What exactly are they "destroying"? Rocks? A dust layer? Undistinguished landscapes?
... jeez... come on! Engage that brain!
There's no life on the moon. None. Not even algae to get upset about dying. The only thing that even remotely affects life is the appearance of the moon, specifically the aldebo, and mining is unlikely to change THAT for a long time.
The universe routinely "destroys" entire galaxies for no (known) good reason. Who cares if we pull some stuff out of the moon?
*snort* "destroy the moon"