You are possibly the least informed person...
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...that I have ever had the frustration of encountering.
The biggest problem with genetically modified rice? It can't reproduce. By DESIGN. To line corporate pockets. So people don't want to be locked into a food monopoly,
No. Because harnessing any technology involves risks. And the benefits of the technology have to outweigh the risks.
GM produce is a boon to agriculture because it offers advantages that ordinary vegetables just don't have. It grows in colder climates. Or hotter climates. Or dryer climates. Or wetter climates. Or is immune to natural pests that make for smaller crops.
GM produce has an unfair advantage to ordinary produce. What happens, then, if a GM rice plant is allowed to reproduce in nature? Wouldn't it squeeze out virtually all ordinary rice? Upset the ecosystem by being immune to the rice beetle and therefore starving them to death? No more rice beetle = no more birds eating the rice beetle... etc...
So, the risk of GM technology is primarily that it will get out of human control.
Now, if a seed for a GM rice plant gets out of human hands and grows somewhere, that one plant will live, and will be unable to reproduce, and will die out.
If it could reproduce, wouldn't it take over?
So, to say that biotech firms are doing this exclusively for profit probably stands in my personal record book as one of the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life.
I suggest you read a book and get an appreciation for how the real world works before you converse with people or, worse still, vote.
The Biggest Problem with Democracy.
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Natural Selection is an analogy of artificial selection, where certain traits are bred into the species by Nature the way that we breed the fattest cows and the fastest horses. That is, if you wish to take Darwin's word for it. It relies on a scarcity of food supply.
Yeah, you capitalize "nature", which almost for sure means that you're an environmentalist.
We can easily foil what you consider to be natural selection.
And yet, in the same breath, you also tell me that we have to enact worldwide socialist policy and thwart natural selection.
"Natural" means "of nature". Natural selection, therefore, is nature's process of ensuring that only the strong survive.
When 1,000,000 people choose to live in a place where the land can't grow enough food to support more than 900,000, who's gonna die? The weakest 100,000. That's what I call natural selection. And, in fact, I think if you asked any evolutionary biologist, he'd agree with me, not you. And it's going on throughout the developing world. Yup, it's not just what I call natural selection, it's the real thing.
And socialist concepts like feeding those who can't feed themselves flies right in the face of nature, which you love so dearly that you capitalized it.
So, you're suggesting that humanity can better control its evolution than nature?
That's insanely contradictory to Capital N - ature.
So, choose now: socialism, or environmentalism.
You have a choice that will make your brain explode: People die of starvation, or the implied statement that man is, after all, smarter than Nature.
You know, my biggest problem with democracy is that it allows people as dangerous and contradictory as you to have an equal saying in the running of a society. I really hope that you recognize your conflicted and dangerous views and refrain from voting.
Re:The Ganges: India's Sewer.
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What kills me is the fact that so many people are as blind to the impossibility of feeding the world and the stupidity of playing with the process of natural selection. Then, when you dissent and itemize good, rational and valid reasons why something that they suggest won't work, you're told that you're politically incorrect or get some other irrational and emotional response?
Why is the truth always deemed to be politically incorrect?
And, even worse, these idiots are allowed to vote.
You have corrupt governments,
How do I feel about the Indian earthquake?
Well, it's sad. But the earth will shake, that's a cost of living on a fault zone. And India is basically an island that got plowed into Asia like a Honda into the side of a semi. What would be the ripples in the hood are known as the Himilayas.
So, you live there, you expect it.
However, if I were the Indian people, I'd be uprising against the government. The Indian government is so clueless that it's a liability, and the people are sheep.
Why?
Building inspectors are so lax that contractors build new construction with too much sand in the concrete, and other poor building practice. They get away with it: no inspector ever checks up. Thousands are killed when new buildings collapse.
Sniffer-dogs were being brought in to help find survivors shortly after the quake. One would expect that the customs agents would welcome the dogs in unquestioningly; after all, these dogs and their handlers are being provided to save their fellow countrymen by friendly nations in an act of goodwill. Instead, the dogs get held up precious days while people die of dehydration in the rubble because the Indian government wasn't satisfied with their paperwork.
And despite all this sort of idiocy going on for years, the Indian government still had time to debate in Parliament, for several months, the relative merits of allowing Coca-Cola to sell their beverages in that country.
The fact that the people haven't yet risen against their woefully dangerous government is perhaps another instance of natural selection at work.
Now I'm not Catholic, but I'm not going to say they are worthless when it generates charity and goodwill towards others.
Oh no. The church does things entirely out of the goodness of its heart. For sure.
I'm sure that's what everyone right on up to the pope wants to believe. But is that really what's going on?
I'd therefore *challenge* the Roman Catholic Church to go to deepest, darkest Africa, passing out food and water, teaching the people to read and write, without ever once mentioning anything to do with religion, showing one cross, or passing out even one bible.
I don't think they could do it. They'd be too fixed on "doing unto others" by converting the "savages" into good pope-loving Catholics. I'm sure for every single person that a church member feels that they've "saved", that particular individual would be experiencing a very human and very rational sense of pride and accomplishment and power.
Which are the very things that conventional organized religion says are wrong.
And yet, I believe it to be the ulterior motive that powers them.
Natural selection is a sick and hideous process, suitable only for unenlightened beasts who don't know any better, and we should be more civilized.
Okay. Fine. Noble thought.
But I'll also bet that you consider yourself to be an environmentalist. Most people who espouse such socialist views are, of course, environmentalists.
The process of natural selection is natural. Hence the name, "natural selection". Right?
Now, by straying from natural selection, as you suggest, aren't you saying that man can take care of things better than nature?
Isn't that contradictory to your (assumed) position as an environmentalist?
Environmentalism and socialism are, in fact, mutually exclusive for that very reason.
These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC.
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
I'll bet that BasinNet is also the sort of ISP that will give you a shell account.
Love to see that at AOL. Can you imagine the average AOL user accidentally hitting the (non-existent) "Shell Prompt" button on NEW! AOL 6.0! SO EASY TO USE, NO WONDER IT'S #1!. Meltdown.
We're losing all the ISPs that don't pander to the lowest common denominator.
There is light on the horizon, however: how about a Toronto-area DSL provider that charges $34.95/mo for residential 1.2Mbps DSL, and will give you as many static IPs as you want for $5/mo more each...:)
They allow you to run whatever servers you want at home. Mail, DNS, web, etc.
Their customer service sucks, yeah, it's PPPoE, and yeah, their reliability was very poor when I started with them in June. But it's been getting gradually better.
European Beef - or GM Rice? Gee, Tough Call.
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The entire continent is afraid of the food itself, because it isn't strictly natural
Uhhh... I think, in Europe, I'd be more afraid of the beef than the genetically modified rice.
I think this should serve as some sort of proof that the European agencies controlling food are not to be emulated in any way in the rest of the world.
Also, what's this bullshit about "right to life" got to do with it? The "right to life" Catholic Church is one of the biggest charity providers in the third world.
Oh yeah, and they're just wonderfully committed to the right-to-life concept.
Uhhh... What was the death toll from the Inquisition?
Someone has to hold religion accountable for its many undeniable atrocities. History is littered with religious genocides. I'd rather have the free market economy look out for me, than government or religion.
The Ganges: India's Sewer.
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Sorry to contradict you, but this has been done already, and the genetically modified rice has met what they're calling "consumer resistance". That means the people who need it are not buying it. Because, presumably, they have no money as well as no food.
Or maybe they've been brainwashed into thinking that it'll give them three arms by all the ignorant, tree-hugging, unemployed, sociology hippies.
Three arms. I should be so lucky.
Until we start caring about world hunger
I care about world hunger. I wear a little [insert couleur du jour] ribbon to show that I care about world hunger. And that makes me a good person.
Yessir, I care that millions of people live in Bangladesh, for example, an entire nation that is, like, no more than ten feet above sea level at the delta of the Ganges River. And that the Ganges can best be described as India's sewer, and that despite the fact that these poor helpless Bangladeshis routinely get all their farmland wiped away by a wave that could have propagated from Flipper doing tricks off the sunshine state's coast in 1962, these people still breed with all the good sense towards sustainable population growth of yeast cells in grape juice. And I feel bad for them, because I'm a good person, and because I'm not emotionally mature enough to accept the fact that the world is a cold, hurtful, evil and unfair place, I'm going to hold over your head the fact that your life hasn't been ruined by the stupid choice of farmland that your ancestors made.
Because I'm a good person.
How can you all sit back and watch while the process of natural selection occurs?
And you call yourself a libertarian? Only a coward would use the government to bully someone.
Yeah, unfortunately, I've got a little streak of that Murphy Brown need-for-revenge. It causes me to stray from my philosophies occasionally; like I said, I'm a moderate Libertarian. You may treat that as my disclaimer.
Regardless, like any intelligent individual in an unpleasant situation, I use any tool at my legal disposal. Similarly, if I have to send an e-mail to someone and the only computer available is running Outlook, I'll probably do it.
I expect I'd feel a compulsive need to wash my fingers in hydrogen peroxide afterwards, though.
There's a miniumum size for a LaTeX file with one space in it, too. What's your problem, then?
Bloat.
with two spaces in it is probably 19,460 bytes
(2/19,460)*100 = 0.01027749229188% efficiency.
Hmmm... I think that's even less than I expected from a Microsoft product.
And when files like that are being passed around between.NET machines the way zone records are for today's DNS servers, I worry about the future Internet traffic.
I think I'll stick with vi for all my text editing needs.
Before all you liberals start loudly complaining (yet again) about the inadequacies of the marketplace, I'd like to remind you that if you don't like what this company is doing you can a) not work for them, and/or b) not buy their goods or services.
Woo-hoo! For sure! Oh my god, a fellow conservative Slashdotter.
No, I'm not a Republican conservative - George Double-Ya is an idiot and so are his cronies - but a Libertarian conservative, and reasonably moderate at that. We don't bring religion into politics, or believe in corporate subsidies, or in welfare. Personal freedom all the way.
I propose yet another means of dealing with unfortunate employers.
c) if your former employer is a real schmuck, you can make an anonymous call to the Department of Health saying that there's feces on the bathroom floor all the time.
(Seriously, enough complaints, and they will get investigated, and it *is* an unnerving process for the boss.)
The market is the best place to vent these frustrations, and whining incessantly about it like some fussy-headed Naderite or Democrat does no one any good whatsoever. Money has its own morality, and when you live in a society such as ours certain sacrifices must be made so that corporations can continue to thrive and grow.
Why is it that prosperity is seen as an evil?
Okay. For sake of explanation for those who think Nader is a smart man:
I'm greedy. I'm proud of it. Greed is a terrific motivator, which makes me more productive, and therefore my boss and me more prosperous.
When I am prosperous, I spend more buying stuff. This creates jobs for those who make the stuff that I buy. And I put lots of money away into savings - which are invested into ownership of companies, which also create jobs.
The only people for whom Capitalism doesn't work are the lazy, the unmotivated and the Bachelor of Arts in English Literature types who refuse to get useful skills.
However, when I am taxed because I make more that a certain income, it gives me no motivation to excel beyond that point. I may be capable of doing $250,000 a year in good to the economy, but if I'm taxed so that I only see $100,000 of that, what's the point? Instead of working, I'll sit back and watch TV. I'll take home less money, so I'll have less disposable income, which means I buy less stuff, I save less, and therefore the benefits of my brilliant mind upon the economy are reduced.
Sure, the taxes that I'm paying can go and give the unemployed sheet metal worker a nice welfare check to sit on his ass and drink beer all day. The economy falters. No one wins.
Wanna go to the next extreme? Look at Russia. Would you bother going to work every day if you knew that you could get your 300 rubles from going to work, or the same 300 rubles from their social assistance? Hence, economic collapse.
There will always be disparity between rich and poor. Some people work really hard in life. Some people have different priorities. But why should those who've worked really hard in life be dragged down to the lowest common denominator? It's simply not fair. Especially not when those who've worked the hardest in life are actually those who are producing the most opportunities for the lowest common denominator to move up the ladder. But they have to *climb*.
Your right to be free from coporate intimidation is something that is certainly desirable, but in certain situations (such as this) it is nevertheless unattainable.
Nah, the rules are in place, and I think that the company in question is pretty close to breaking those rules. So, what do you do? Shrug your shoulders, call a lawyer, and add the experience to the 100% factual (so no slander) tales of what a hell x company was.
Oh, and I'd suggest that when it's all resolved, in the immortal words of Peter Venkman, "...and I'll sue your funny face for wrongful prosecution".
We must never forget about the bottom line. As Clinton said and as Bush learned: "It's the economy, stupid."
Yeah, and it was a *Democrat* who learned it. Who'da thunk it.
Cross paths with corporations at your own -- and your nations -- peril.
Yeah. Wanna see corporate controls, government inefficiency and lunacy and a mass exodus of all their trained, educated or skilled people? Look at Canada.
This belief is faulty, however, when you consider that tomorrow's computer professionals start gaining experience in their teens, not in their twenties or thirties.
You know, the posting discusses this like it's a new thing.
I was born March 23, 1974. I got my first computer - a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A for my birthday, March 23, 1984.
I was programming in assembly language by the time I got a used PEB and disk controller for the system on March 23, 1986.
And, within a couple of months of when I got a modem with birthday money on March 23, 1988, I was on ARPANET through a local university's agreement with my computer user's group.
Yup, I was on the 'Net 5 years before Yahoo.
I remember looking, with scorn and derision, as CPU chips began to sport first heatsinks and then cooling fans, then a grudging admiration for what they could do despite being saddled down with DOS 5.0, while my aging TI basically served as a dumb terminal to Sun box on the other end of a 1200 baud modem, as the first versions of Mosaic came out and my e-mail address gained a new and bizarre form. Dot-eee-dee-yew? Dot-com? Dot-net?
And I'm only 26.
[grinning wanly] If only I'd been smart enough to see the economic potential of it back then.
Heh. Not that it would have mattered. It would have been pretty tough to build any sort of presence with a TI-99/4A and an advertising budget derived from paper route.
Almost 17 years. Heh. I still have that TI-99/4A. And, though it's been a couple of years since I last fired it up, I'm pretty sure that I could still play a good game of Parsec on it. Or dial up a BBS. Or log into a shell on my Linux box.
Okay. So, it's basically DNS that ships around Word documents instead of zone records...
Hmmm... Opening Word, hitting the space bar once, and then saving the document creates a file that is 19,456 bytes in size. (Under Word 97, Windows 95B, using the normal.dot template.) Adding a few generations of Microsoft Bloat, multiplying it by millions of proles... afraid to estimate the implications of PowerPoint...
Sounds like, through sheer volume, it might create its own DoS attacks...
No. It doesn't. In fact, Yahoo is my browser home page. I probably hit it dozens of times a day. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best all-around portal/search engine out there.
What if it was your online brokerage company that was being DOS'ed and you couldn't get through to tell you're broker to sell your RedHat stocks before they evaporated?
[sigh]
Can we be rational about this for a moment? You write like you have exactly the same sort of momentum and hysteria going as NASDAQ in general did.
Okay. Brainflash: the Internet is merely a communication tool.
A DDoS interrupts your communication. Like walking into an elevator with a cellphone.
It's an outage, an interruption, inconvenient and frustrating but not the end of the world.
On the other hand, what would the ramifications be if someone could press a button and selectively give a cellphone user a brain tumor? (Oh, think of how useful that would be when you're driving!) For one thing, it would absolutely kill the cellphone. No one would use them.
This could be a parallel to more malicious and dangerous cyber-terrorism; breaking into secure machines and disseminating private information.
The DDoS is inconvenient and makes you reconsider your reliance on the medium. Hold the fire and brimstone: give your broker a call with a telephone.
Does your above statement still work?
Unless the Internet is blown beyond all proportion, from being the (revolutionary) communications tool that it is to the realm of a lifestyle, yes, it does work.
A year ago, the Internet was basically down. The traffic from the DDoS was such that most other pages that I tried to load were unusably sluggish. At the time, I didn't know why. I pinged big sites (including Yahoo) and did traceroutes trying to figure out where the bottlenecks were. Satisfied that it wasn't on my LAN or even with my ISP, I gave up: Instead of looking up a supplier using www.four11.com, I picked up the Yellow Pages.
It sucked, it was inconvenient, I had dozens of users asking me why mail was bouncing and pages didn't load, but it wasn't the end of the world.
Please... tell me you got the zeros wrong... This stupid being I really hope I'll never meet - tell me he doesn't make 'over $150/hour' for being a lowly receptionist..
Oops. No, I'm sorry, I guess I was unclear.
Pat is the general manager of the company.
Actually, to be entirely correct, since we got sold off from Litton, he's the president and owns a sizable percentage of the business.
And while I like the guy, my respect for him is waning: though he's a take-charge kind of guy, has no idea how and when to delegate, and will instead spend hours tinkering with crap like the receptionist's computer instead of getting someone cheaper (and more qualified) to take care of the situation.
How are we to protect ourselves, and save the new economy and way of life and working we see growing for the first time?
Yeah! But if Microsoft moves all of, for example, Office 2003 to their ".NET" philosophy before DDoS has been conclusively thwarted, they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Who is going to buy into.NET when any 15-year-old with a cable modem can lock every secretary in the world out of Word? Every accountant out of Excel? Every CEO out of PowerPoint?
(Okay, not *ALL* of them, but it will be enough that almost all global business stops at the mercy of a mouseclick over a WWF desktop in a New Jersey bedroom.)
The ease of committing a DDoS is therefore, in my view, a very convincing deterrent to the mass adoption of centralized pay-per-use software subscriptions.
There are still plenty of major web/e-commerce shops out there, but perhaps the spector of DDoS just can't make news and grab eyes like it did just a few months ago.
I think you hit the nail on the head exactly.
So Yahoo is down for a few hours. It's inconvenient to users, and it costs them money in lost revenue, but it doesn't mean the end of the Internet.
Now that the dot-com bubble has burst, perhaps we're starting to see a more rational approach to the whole issue of technology and its embrace by the proles.
I mean, who on Slashdot was really freaked out when the Yahoo DDoS happened? It's the same thing as we've been used to for years, just on an incrementally larger scale. No big whup. No credit card numbers got out. No one got the number to the cellphone on Air Force One.
I'm still wondering why the attack against Microsoft the day after they fixed their DNS routing mistake made so little news.
Yeah, especially pushing their.NET concept. What happens to the users that I serve at work, when they're using Office 2003, and Microsoft makes a similar error?
Problems with software are inevitable, but I think this weakness has been glossed over in the mad frenzy for centralized software. I'd rather know that if Office blows up, I'll simply go to the computer in the next cubicle.
That way, I don't have to wait for them to get their servers back up before I can manipulate my document. Let alone my telco, my ISP, their backbone provider...
Should security officers have unrestricted access to everything on a network? A security officer with the ability to shut down servers, disable services, etc. scares the hell out of me and my coworkers.
I envy your problem. I really do. Because I have similar problems, but I think the scope may be a little different.
My boss, the General Manager of my company, has entrusted me with ensuring that we having Internet access. Mail, website, connectivity for users, etc.
We have some accounting software running on the Windows machines around the office that requires a $60 license fee every time you reinstall it. Criminal, okay. But that's the agreement that was made (by him) with the software vendor.
Most of the machines around the office are aging Dell Optiplex Pentium 133s. 1 gig hard disk drives, mass-installed Windows 95A. Flakey to begin with, downright unusable with several years of OS decay.
So, the machine that belongs to our receptionist went down. Windows has done its trademark self-corruption. And Pat's the ultimate do-it-yourselfer. Rather than calling me, he figured he'd fix her machine. Instead, he managed to make it blue screen and halt on startup. Then he spent 10 hours - I counted - playing with the machine, copying files, copying even the entire registry off another machine, back and forth until the thing started up with a minimum of accusatory dialog boxes.
Now, Pat makes over $150/hour. So, minimum, it's cost the company $1,500 to not have to pay a $60 license fee. And the machine is still running Windows 95A, it's still as unstable as all hell. And now, there are ten "Missing File" warnings when the system starts up. At this point, I flatly refuse to touch it until I'm given permission to format the drive and reinstall Windows (95B this time).
And now Pat wants root access on our Linux server. Why? Because no one should have root except him. No one should be able to read his private e-mail but him. (Like I care to read his private e-mail.)
An IT guy from our (former) head office was visiting one day as our division of the company was sold and we were being disconnected from the WAN. While we were talking, Pat decided to show me up in front of the other IT guy.
"Do you really think that the President of this fucking company has an e-mail account that can be looked at by any junior IT person?"
Steve, the corporate head office IT guy, had had enough. He didn't care, Pat was no longer his boss. He just cracked up at Pat, and told him that he'd extricated choking attachments from the president's e-mail account a couple of times. Even so, Pat remained unconvinced.
To shut him up, I gave him a shell account. Evidently, I didn't give him root, but I told him that I did. Of course, the dollar sign at the prompt wasn't a tip-off; I didn't think it would. A couple of days later, I checked his history file. The results were predictably amusing:
1 dir 2 dir c: 3 win 4 cd windows 5 scandisk c:
At approximately this time, the log files show that the filesystems were forcibly unmounted and the system rebooted. A minute after the reboot, Pat logged in again:
6 dir 7 win 8 WIN! 9 what the fuck is wrong with this piece of shit! 10 WINDOWS 11 sCANDISK
After this, the system went down again, and remained down because it was "broken", until I arrived back in the office from a meeting with some of our customers. When I walked into the office, he started screaming at me about how unreliable the computer was.
In fact, there was no problem with it at all, it had been working fine; our ISP had gone down briefly, and when our service was therefore interrupted, it was assumed that the server was at fault.
It had already been explained to Pat that this machine was neither running DOS, nor was it running Windows, and that commands for those didn't work.
Now, not knowing how your security officer is, I don't know how I'd feel about giving anyone access. If I'm the one who is gonna take the fall if the system goes down, no one gets administrator access but me. Period.
And what, pray tell, does circumcision have to do with UNIX?!
UNIX, when pronounced as a word, has a homonym that describes a person who has endured a somewhat more radical alteration of the male anatomy. Lest you be confused.
Most people seem to understand and enjoy my sig, based on the sheer volume of e-mail that it creates for me.
Fine, this is offtopic, but I think you can indulge me.
So you're referring to most men in Europe as savages, then? Or do you hold the majority of North American men in higher regard (or to be more civilized) than the majority of European men solely because the North American men in question are missing a part of their penis?
Yup.
In fact, I go so far as to avoid driving or being a passenger in any European or Asian car. It's my personal feeling that if the people of a given society can't figure out something as simple as the benefits of circumcision, they probably didn't do such a hot job with brakes and suspension, either.
Sadly, when I wrote to my Member of Parliament to protest the fact that these obviously flawed vehicles were allowed to be on the road, I was rebuffed rather summarily. Go figure - I later found out that he drives a Volvo.
Now, if you haven't taken all that with a grain of salt, I suggest you pull out the shaker and get to work.
Truth is, I was circumcised when I was 22. It was as a result of a zipper accident. I was hanging around with a bunch of University of Michigan engineering students. We'd all had way too much to drink. I went to the can. I zipped up the fly too fast and had to be rushed to the emergency room... in the weeks that followed, I was disappointed and upset. However, in the years since, I've changed my tune and have become quite the circumcision advocate.
You see, during sex, there's the "in" stroke, and there's the "out" stroke. During the "in" stroke, the foreskin rolls back, exposing the head. During the "out" stroke, however, the foreskin rolls over the head and dulls all sensation. It's therefore no exaggeration to say that sex is at least 50% better since I was circumcised.
As for missing part of my penis, I don't feel that way at all. It's a rather inconsequential roll of shaft skin that is rendered redundant - and even turned into a liability - by the human propensity towards clothing. My libido is unaffected. And I am still very much a man, thank you.
It's kinda like taking the catalytic converter off your car. All of a sudden, your gas mileage and performance increase greatly.
My only regret is that I didn't have the zipper accident sooner.
And then when you figure in the crates of KY jelly, cock rings, and "Hello Kitty" tote bags, you'd end up with a rocket that wouldn't be able to exceed the escape velocity of the moon, let alone Earth!
Yeesh. I dunno what kind of fags you hang out with.
The ones I hang out with are almost exclusively into Madonna and Men's Health magazine.
Slashdot Mirror
...that I have ever had the frustration of encountering.
The biggest problem with genetically modified rice? It can't reproduce. By DESIGN. To line corporate pockets. So people don't want to be locked into a food monopoly,
No. Because harnessing any technology involves risks. And the benefits of the technology have to outweigh the risks.
GM produce is a boon to agriculture because it offers advantages that ordinary vegetables just don't have. It grows in colder climates. Or hotter climates. Or dryer climates. Or wetter climates. Or is immune to natural pests that make for smaller crops.
GM produce has an unfair advantage to ordinary produce. What happens, then, if a GM rice plant is allowed to reproduce in nature? Wouldn't it squeeze out virtually all ordinary rice? Upset the ecosystem by being immune to the rice beetle and therefore starving them to death? No more rice beetle = no more birds eating the rice beetle... etc...
So, the risk of GM technology is primarily that it will get out of human control.
Now, if a seed for a GM rice plant gets out of human hands and grows somewhere, that one plant will live, and will be unable to reproduce, and will die out.
If it could reproduce, wouldn't it take over?
So, to say that biotech firms are doing this exclusively for profit probably stands in my personal record book as one of the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life.
I suggest you read a book and get an appreciation for how the real world works before you converse with people or, worse still, vote.
Natural Selection is an analogy of artificial selection, where certain traits are bred into the species by Nature the way that we breed the fattest cows and the fastest horses. That is, if you wish to take Darwin's word for it. It relies on a scarcity of food supply.
Yeah, you capitalize "nature", which almost for sure means that you're an environmentalist.
We can easily foil what you consider to be natural selection.
And yet, in the same breath, you also tell me that we have to enact worldwide socialist policy and thwart natural selection.
"Natural" means "of nature". Natural selection, therefore, is nature's process of ensuring that only the strong survive.
When 1,000,000 people choose to live in a place where the land can't grow enough food to support more than 900,000, who's gonna die? The weakest 100,000. That's what I call natural selection. And, in fact, I think if you asked any evolutionary biologist, he'd agree with me, not you. And it's going on throughout the developing world. Yup, it's not just what I call natural selection, it's the real thing.
And socialist concepts like feeding those who can't feed themselves flies right in the face of nature, which you love so dearly that you capitalized it.
So, you're suggesting that humanity can better control its evolution than nature?
That's insanely contradictory to Capital N - ature.
So, choose now: socialism, or environmentalism.
You have a choice that will make your brain explode: People die of starvation, or the implied statement that man is, after all, smarter than Nature.
You know, my biggest problem with democracy is that it allows people as dangerous and contradictory as you to have an equal saying in the running of a society. I really hope that you recognize your conflicted and dangerous views and refrain from voting.
What kills me is the fact that so many people are as blind to the impossibility of feeding the world and the stupidity of playing with the process of natural selection. Then, when you dissent and itemize good, rational and valid reasons why something that they suggest won't work, you're told that you're politically incorrect or get some other irrational and emotional response?
Why is the truth always deemed to be politically incorrect?
And, even worse, these idiots are allowed to vote.
You have corrupt governments,How do I feel about the Indian earthquake?
Well, it's sad. But the earth will shake, that's a cost of living on a fault zone. And India is basically an island that got plowed into Asia like a Honda into the side of a semi. What would be the ripples in the hood are known as the Himilayas.
So, you live there, you expect it.
However, if I were the Indian people, I'd be uprising against the government. The Indian government is so clueless that it's a liability, and the people are sheep.
Why?
Building inspectors are so lax that contractors build new construction with too much sand in the concrete, and other poor building practice. They get away with it: no inspector ever checks up. Thousands are killed when new buildings collapse.
Sniffer-dogs were being brought in to help find survivors shortly after the quake. One would expect that the customs agents would welcome the dogs in unquestioningly; after all, these dogs and their handlers are being provided to save their fellow countrymen by friendly nations in an act of goodwill. Instead, the dogs get held up precious days while people die of dehydration in the rubble because the Indian government wasn't satisfied with their paperwork.
And despite all this sort of idiocy going on for years, the Indian government still had time to debate in Parliament, for several months, the relative merits of allowing Coca-Cola to sell their beverages in that country.
The fact that the people haven't yet risen against their woefully dangerous government is perhaps another instance of natural selection at work.
[sigh]
I basically define the anti-communist, my friend.
Now, counterpoint:
India vs. Pakistan.
Northern vs. Southern Ireland.
Croatia vs. Serbia.
Israel vs. virtually every Muslim in the world.
Muslim vs. Muslim re: interpretation of Koran.
Rome vs. just about everyone else.
Colonists vs. North American Indians.
Colonists vs. South American Indians.
Colonists vs. Colonists re: Paganism, Salem, MA.
...
The scope of this is staggering. Yes, I'm anti-religious bigot. I admit it. But it doesn't take a terrifically open mind to see why.
Now I'm not Catholic, but I'm not going to say they are worthless when it generates charity and goodwill towards others.
Oh no. The church does things entirely out of the goodness of its heart. For sure.
I'm sure that's what everyone right on up to the pope wants to believe. But is that really what's going on?
I'd therefore *challenge* the Roman Catholic Church to go to deepest, darkest Africa, passing out food and water, teaching the people to read and write, without ever once mentioning anything to do with religion, showing one cross, or passing out even one bible.
I don't think they could do it. They'd be too fixed on "doing unto others" by converting the "savages" into good pope-loving Catholics. I'm sure for every single person that a church member feels that they've "saved", that particular individual would be experiencing a very human and very rational sense of pride and accomplishment and power.
Which are the very things that conventional organized religion says are wrong.
And yet, I believe it to be the ulterior motive that powers them.
Natural selection is a sick and hideous process, suitable only for unenlightened beasts who don't know any better, and we should be more civilized.
Okay. Fine. Noble thought.
But I'll also bet that you consider yourself to be an environmentalist. Most people who espouse such socialist views are, of course, environmentalists.
The process of natural selection is natural. Hence the name, "natural selection". Right?
Now, by straying from natural selection, as you suggest, aren't you saying that man can take care of things better than nature?
Isn't that contradictory to your (assumed) position as an environmentalist?
Environmentalism and socialism are, in fact, mutually exclusive for that very reason.
Quoted from article.
These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC.
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
I'll bet that BasinNet is also the sort of ISP that will give you a shell account.
Love to see that at AOL. Can you imagine the average AOL user accidentally hitting the (non-existent) "Shell Prompt" button on NEW! AOL 6.0! SO EASY TO USE, NO WONDER IT'S #1!. Meltdown.
We're losing all the ISPs that don't pander to the lowest common denominator.
There is light on the horizon, however: how about a Toronto-area DSL provider that charges $34.95/mo for residential 1.2Mbps DSL, and will give you as many static IPs as you want for $5/mo more each... :)
They allow you to run whatever servers you want at home. Mail, DNS, web, etc.
Their customer service sucks, yeah, it's PPPoE, and yeah, their reliability was very poor when I started with them in June. But it's been getting gradually better.
www.dsl.ca
The entire continent is afraid of the food itself, because it isn't strictly natural
Uhhh... I think, in Europe, I'd be more afraid of the beef than the genetically modified rice.
I think this should serve as some sort of proof that the European agencies controlling food are not to be emulated in any way in the rest of the world.
Also, what's this bullshit about "right to life" got to do with it? The "right to life" Catholic Church is one of the biggest charity providers in the third world.
Oh yeah, and they're just wonderfully committed to the right-to-life concept.
Uhhh... What was the death toll from the Inquisition?
Someone has to hold religion accountable for its many undeniable atrocities. History is littered with religious genocides. I'd rather have the free market economy look out for me, than government or religion.
Sorry to contradict you, but this has been done already, and the genetically modified rice has met what they're calling "consumer resistance". That means the people who need it are not buying it. Because, presumably, they have no money as well as no food.
Or maybe they've been brainwashed into thinking that it'll give them three arms by all the ignorant, tree-hugging, unemployed, sociology hippies.
Three arms. I should be so lucky.
Until we start caring about world hungerI care about world hunger. I wear a little [insert couleur du jour] ribbon to show that I care about world hunger. And that makes me a good person.
Yessir, I care that millions of people live in Bangladesh, for example, an entire nation that is, like, no more than ten feet above sea level at the delta of the Ganges River. And that the Ganges can best be described as India's sewer, and that despite the fact that these poor helpless Bangladeshis routinely get all their farmland wiped away by a wave that could have propagated from Flipper doing tricks off the sunshine state's coast in 1962, these people still breed with all the good sense towards sustainable population growth of yeast cells in grape juice. And I feel bad for them, because I'm a good person, and because I'm not emotionally mature enough to accept the fact that the world is a cold, hurtful, evil and unfair place, I'm going to hold over your head the fact that your life hasn't been ruined by the stupid choice of farmland that your ancestors made.
Because I'm a good person.
How can you all sit back and watch while the process of natural selection occurs?
And you call yourself a libertarian? Only a coward would use the government to bully someone.
Yeah, unfortunately, I've got a little streak of that Murphy Brown need-for-revenge. It causes me to stray from my philosophies occasionally; like I said, I'm a moderate Libertarian. You may treat that as my disclaimer.
Regardless, like any intelligent individual in an unpleasant situation, I use any tool at my legal disposal. Similarly, if I have to send an e-mail to someone and the only computer available is running Outlook, I'll probably do it.
I expect I'd feel a compulsive need to wash my fingers in hydrogen peroxide afterwards, though.
There's a miniumum size for a LaTeX file with one space in it, too. What's your problem, then?
Bloat.
with two spaces in it is probably 19,460 bytes
(2/19,460)*100 = 0.01027749229188% efficiency.
Hmmm... I think that's even less than I expected from a Microsoft product.
And when files like that are being passed around between .NET machines the way zone records are for today's DNS servers, I worry about the future Internet traffic.
I think I'll stick with vi for all my text editing needs.
Before all you liberals start loudly complaining (yet again) about the inadequacies of the marketplace, I'd like to remind you that if you don't like what this company is doing you can a) not work for them, and/or b) not buy their goods or services.
Woo-hoo! For sure! Oh my god, a fellow conservative Slashdotter.
No, I'm not a Republican conservative - George Double-Ya is an idiot and so are his cronies - but a Libertarian conservative, and reasonably moderate at that. We don't bring religion into politics, or believe in corporate subsidies, or in welfare. Personal freedom all the way.
I propose yet another means of dealing with unfortunate employers.
c) if your former employer is a real schmuck, you can make an anonymous call to the Department of Health saying that there's feces on the bathroom floor all the time.
(Seriously, enough complaints, and they will get investigated, and it *is* an unnerving process for the boss.)
The market is the best place to vent these frustrations, and whining incessantly about it like some fussy-headed Naderite or Democrat does no one any good whatsoever. Money has its own morality, and when you live in a society such as ours certain sacrifices must be made so that corporations can continue to thrive and grow.Why is it that prosperity is seen as an evil?
Okay. For sake of explanation for those who think Nader is a smart man:
I'm greedy. I'm proud of it. Greed is a terrific motivator, which makes me more productive, and therefore my boss and me more prosperous.
When I am prosperous, I spend more buying stuff. This creates jobs for those who make the stuff that I buy. And I put lots of money away into savings - which are invested into ownership of companies, which also create jobs.
The only people for whom Capitalism doesn't work are the lazy, the unmotivated and the Bachelor of Arts in English Literature types who refuse to get useful skills.
However, when I am taxed because I make more that a certain income, it gives me no motivation to excel beyond that point. I may be capable of doing $250,000 a year in good to the economy, but if I'm taxed so that I only see $100,000 of that, what's the point? Instead of working, I'll sit back and watch TV. I'll take home less money, so I'll have less disposable income, which means I buy less stuff, I save less, and therefore the benefits of my brilliant mind upon the economy are reduced.
Sure, the taxes that I'm paying can go and give the unemployed sheet metal worker a nice welfare check to sit on his ass and drink beer all day. The economy falters. No one wins.
Wanna go to the next extreme? Look at Russia. Would you bother going to work every day if you knew that you could get your 300 rubles from going to work, or the same 300 rubles from their social assistance? Hence, economic collapse.
There will always be disparity between rich and poor. Some people work really hard in life. Some people have different priorities. But why should those who've worked really hard in life be dragged down to the lowest common denominator? It's simply not fair. Especially not when those who've worked the hardest in life are actually those who are producing the most opportunities for the lowest common denominator to move up the ladder. But they have to *climb*.
Your right to be free from coporate intimidation is something that is certainly desirable, but in certain situations (such as this) it is nevertheless unattainable.Nah, the rules are in place, and I think that the company in question is pretty close to breaking those rules. So, what do you do? Shrug your shoulders, call a lawyer, and add the experience to the 100% factual (so no slander) tales of what a hell x company was.
Oh, and I'd suggest that when it's all resolved, in the immortal words of Peter Venkman, "...and I'll sue your funny face for wrongful prosecution".
We must never forget about the bottom line. As Clinton said and as Bush learned: "It's the economy, stupid."Yeah, and it was a *Democrat* who learned it. Who'da thunk it.
Cross paths with corporations at your own -- and your nations -- peril.Yeah. Wanna see corporate controls, government inefficiency and lunacy and a mass exodus of all their trained, educated or skilled people? Look at Canada.
The peach-fuzz wet-behind-the-ears slashdot children start moaning about how old they are. ghods, let me just find my coffin.
Ugh. I'm sorry. You must be in at least your late 30s.
This belief is faulty, however, when you consider that tomorrow's computer professionals start gaining experience in their teens, not in their twenties or thirties.
You know, the posting discusses this like it's a new thing.
I was born March 23, 1974. I got my first computer - a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A for my birthday, March 23, 1984.
I was programming in assembly language by the time I got a used PEB and disk controller for the system on March 23, 1986.
And, within a couple of months of when I got a modem with birthday money on March 23, 1988, I was on ARPANET through a local university's agreement with my computer user's group.
Yup, I was on the 'Net 5 years before Yahoo.
I remember looking, with scorn and derision, as CPU chips began to sport first heatsinks and then cooling fans, then a grudging admiration for what they could do despite being saddled down with DOS 5.0, while my aging TI basically served as a dumb terminal to Sun box on the other end of a 1200 baud modem, as the first versions of Mosaic came out and my e-mail address gained a new and bizarre form. Dot-eee-dee-yew? Dot-com? Dot-net?
And I'm only 26.
[grinning wanly] If only I'd been smart enough to see the economic potential of it back then.
Heh. Not that it would have mattered. It would have been pretty tough to build any sort of presence with a TI-99/4A and an advertising budget derived from paper route.
Almost 17 years. Heh. I still have that TI-99/4A. And, though it's been a couple of years since I last fired it up, I'm pretty sure that I could still play a good game of Parsec on it. Or dial up a BBS. Or log into a shell on my Linux box.
Has it really been that long?
Okay. So, it's basically DNS that ships around Word documents instead of zone records...
Hmmm... Opening Word, hitting the space bar once, and then saving the document creates a file that is 19,456 bytes in size. (Under Word 97, Windows 95B, using the normal.dot template.) Adding a few generations of Microsoft Bloat, multiplying it by millions of proles... afraid to estimate the implications of PowerPoint...
Sounds like, through sheer volume, it might create its own DoS attacks...
;)
Just because it was Yahoo, does that makes it ok.
No. It doesn't. In fact, Yahoo is my browser home page. I probably hit it dozens of times a day. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best all-around portal/search engine out there.
What if it was your online brokerage company that was being DOS'ed and you couldn't get through to tell you're broker to sell your RedHat stocks before they evaporated?[sigh]
Can we be rational about this for a moment? You write like you have exactly the same sort of momentum and hysteria going as NASDAQ in general did.
Okay. Brainflash: the Internet is merely a communication tool.
A DDoS interrupts your communication. Like walking into an elevator with a cellphone.
It's an outage, an interruption, inconvenient and frustrating but not the end of the world.
On the other hand, what would the ramifications be if someone could press a button and selectively give a cellphone user a brain tumor? (Oh, think of how useful that would be when you're driving!) For one thing, it would absolutely kill the cellphone. No one would use them.
This could be a parallel to more malicious and dangerous cyber-terrorism; breaking into secure machines and disseminating private information.
The DDoS is inconvenient and makes you reconsider your reliance on the medium. Hold the fire and brimstone: give your broker a call with a telephone.
Does your above statement still work?Unless the Internet is blown beyond all proportion, from being the (revolutionary) communications tool that it is to the realm of a lifestyle, yes, it does work.
A year ago, the Internet was basically down. The traffic from the DDoS was such that most other pages that I tried to load were unusably sluggish. At the time, I didn't know why. I pinged big sites (including Yahoo) and did traceroutes trying to figure out where the bottlenecks were. Satisfied that it wasn't on my LAN or even with my ISP, I gave up: Instead of looking up a supplier using www.four11.com, I picked up the Yellow Pages.
It sucked, it was inconvenient, I had dozens of users asking me why mail was bouncing and pages didn't load, but it wasn't the end of the world.
Please... tell me you got the zeros wrong... This stupid being I really hope I'll never meet - tell me he doesn't make 'over $150/hour' for being a lowly receptionist..
Oops. No, I'm sorry, I guess I was unclear.
Pat is the general manager of the company.
Actually, to be entirely correct, since we got sold off from Litton, he's the president and owns a sizable percentage of the business.
And while I like the guy, my respect for him is waning: though he's a take-charge kind of guy, has no idea how and when to delegate, and will instead spend hours tinkering with crap like the receptionist's computer instead of getting someone cheaper (and more qualified) to take care of the situation.
How are we to protect ourselves, and save the new economy and way of life and working we see growing for the first time?
Yeah! But if Microsoft moves all of, for example, Office 2003 to their ".NET" philosophy before DDoS has been conclusively thwarted, they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Who is going to buy into .NET when any 15-year-old with a cable modem can lock every secretary in the world out of Word? Every accountant out of Excel? Every CEO out of PowerPoint?
(Okay, not *ALL* of them, but it will be enough that almost all global business stops at the mercy of a mouseclick over a WWF desktop in a New Jersey bedroom.)
The ease of committing a DDoS is therefore, in my view, a very convincing deterrent to the mass adoption of centralized pay-per-use software subscriptions.
There are still plenty of major web/e-commerce shops out there, but perhaps the spector of DDoS just can't make news and grab eyes like it did just a few months ago.
I think you hit the nail on the head exactly.
So Yahoo is down for a few hours. It's inconvenient to users, and it costs them money in lost revenue, but it doesn't mean the end of the Internet.
Now that the dot-com bubble has burst, perhaps we're starting to see a more rational approach to the whole issue of technology and its embrace by the proles.
I mean, who on Slashdot was really freaked out when the Yahoo DDoS happened? It's the same thing as we've been used to for years, just on an incrementally larger scale. No big whup. No credit card numbers got out. No one got the number to the cellphone on Air Force One.
I'm still wondering why the attack against Microsoft the day after they fixed their DNS routing mistake made so little news.Yeah, especially pushing their .NET concept. What happens to the users that I serve at work, when they're using Office 2003, and Microsoft makes a similar error?
Problems with software are inevitable, but I think this weakness has been glossed over in the mad frenzy for centralized software. I'd rather know that if Office blows up, I'll simply go to the computer in the next cubicle.
That way, I don't have to wait for them to get their servers back up before I can manipulate my document. Let alone my telco, my ISP, their backbone provider...
DDoS isn't a big deal. Yet.
Should security officers have unrestricted access to everything on a network? A security officer with the ability to shut down servers, disable services, etc. scares the hell out of me and my coworkers.
I envy your problem. I really do. Because I have similar problems, but I think the scope may be a little different.
My boss, the General Manager of my company, has entrusted me with ensuring that we having Internet access. Mail, website, connectivity for users, etc.
We have some accounting software running on the Windows machines around the office that requires a $60 license fee every time you reinstall it. Criminal, okay. But that's the agreement that was made (by him) with the software vendor.
Most of the machines around the office are aging Dell Optiplex Pentium 133s. 1 gig hard disk drives, mass-installed Windows 95A. Flakey to begin with, downright unusable with several years of OS decay.
So, the machine that belongs to our receptionist went down. Windows has done its trademark self-corruption. And Pat's the ultimate do-it-yourselfer. Rather than calling me, he figured he'd fix her machine. Instead, he managed to make it blue screen and halt on startup. Then he spent 10 hours - I counted - playing with the machine, copying files, copying even the entire registry off another machine, back and forth until the thing started up with a minimum of accusatory dialog boxes.
Now, Pat makes over $150/hour. So, minimum, it's cost the company $1,500 to not have to pay a $60 license fee. And the machine is still running Windows 95A, it's still as unstable as all hell. And now, there are ten "Missing File" warnings when the system starts up. At this point, I flatly refuse to touch it until I'm given permission to format the drive and reinstall Windows (95B this time).
And now Pat wants root access on our Linux server. Why? Because no one should have root except him. No one should be able to read his private e-mail but him. (Like I care to read his private e-mail.)
An IT guy from our (former) head office was visiting one day as our division of the company was sold and we were being disconnected from the WAN. While we were talking, Pat decided to show me up in front of the other IT guy.
"Do you really think that the President of this fucking company has an e-mail account that can be looked at by any junior IT person?"
Steve, the corporate head office IT guy, had had enough. He didn't care, Pat was no longer his boss. He just cracked up at Pat, and told him that he'd extricated choking attachments from the president's e-mail account a couple of times. Even so, Pat remained unconvinced.
To shut him up, I gave him a shell account. Evidently, I didn't give him root, but I told him that I did. Of course, the dollar sign at the prompt wasn't a tip-off; I didn't think it would. A couple of days later, I checked his history file. The results were predictably amusing:
1 dir2 dir c:
3 win
4 cd windows
5 scandisk c:
At approximately this time, the log files show that the filesystems were forcibly unmounted and the system rebooted. A minute after the reboot, Pat logged in again:
6 dir7 win
8 WIN!
9 what the fuck is wrong with this piece of shit!
10 WINDOWS
11 sCANDISK
After this, the system went down again, and remained down because it was "broken", until I arrived back in the office from a meeting with some of our customers. When I walked into the office, he started screaming at me about how unreliable the computer was.
In fact, there was no problem with it at all, it had been working fine; our ISP had gone down briefly, and when our service was therefore interrupted, it was assumed that the server was at fault.
It had already been explained to Pat that this machine was neither running DOS, nor was it running Windows, and that commands for those didn't work.
Now, not knowing how your security officer is, I don't know how I'd feel about giving anyone access. If I'm the one who is gonna take the fall if the system goes down, no one gets administrator access but me. Period.
And what, pray tell, does circumcision have to do with UNIX?!
UNIX, when pronounced as a word, has a homonym that describes a person who has endured a somewhat more radical alteration of the male anatomy. Lest you be confused.
Most people seem to understand and enjoy my sig, based on the sheer volume of e-mail that it creates for me.
Fine, this is offtopic, but I think you can indulge me.
So you're referring to most men in Europe as savages, then? Or do you hold the majority of North American men in higher regard (or to be more civilized) than the majority of European men solely because the North American men in question are missing a part of their penis?Yup.
In fact, I go so far as to avoid driving or being a passenger in any European or Asian car. It's my personal feeling that if the people of a given society can't figure out something as simple as the benefits of circumcision, they probably didn't do such a hot job with brakes and suspension, either.
Sadly, when I wrote to my Member of Parliament to protest the fact that these obviously flawed vehicles were allowed to be on the road, I was rebuffed rather summarily. Go figure - I later found out that he drives a Volvo.
Now, if you haven't taken all that with a grain of salt, I suggest you pull out the shaker and get to work.
Truth is, I was circumcised when I was 22. It was as a result of a zipper accident. I was hanging around with a bunch of University of Michigan engineering students. We'd all had way too much to drink. I went to the can. I zipped up the fly too fast and had to be rushed to the emergency room... in the weeks that followed, I was disappointed and upset. However, in the years since, I've changed my tune and have become quite the circumcision advocate.
You see, during sex, there's the "in" stroke, and there's the "out" stroke. During the "in" stroke, the foreskin rolls back, exposing the head. During the "out" stroke, however, the foreskin rolls over the head and dulls all sensation. It's therefore no exaggeration to say that sex is at least 50% better since I was circumcised.
As for missing part of my penis, I don't feel that way at all. It's a rather inconsequential roll of shaft skin that is rendered redundant - and even turned into a liability - by the human propensity towards clothing. My libido is unaffected. And I am still very much a man, thank you.
It's kinda like taking the catalytic converter off your car. All of a sudden, your gas mileage and performance increase greatly.
My only regret is that I didn't have the zipper accident sooner.
Sure, its a great 'hack' in the true sense of the word, but can we truely rely on their safety assurance skills?
You rely on their skills every day, in every manufactured product you use.
And then when you figure in the crates of KY jelly, cock rings, and "Hello Kitty" tote bags, you'd end up with a rocket that wouldn't be able to exceed the escape velocity of the moon, let alone Earth!
Yeesh. I dunno what kind of fags you hang out with.
The ones I hang out with are almost exclusively into Madonna and Men's Health magazine.