Speaking as someone that just bought the "Standard" 6.1 package I was unimpressed with the "support". Specifically I found that the Reference Guide supplied by them in this $40 (after shipping) package was not great. Half of it consists of a list of packages - a real waste of paper that. The rest of the manual is IMHO poorly laid out and made for a damned confusing install - much inferior to RH5.2 from what I remember - a change to the boot and rescue disk procedure, a reference to a non-existent rescue.img on the CD and web-site. I hope that the more expensive packages provided better documentation. I'm not too keen on having to rely on web/phone based support. I'd rather have good documentation that lets me figure it out logically myself. That said, I wish them all the success with the Govt. markets. It's nice that they're getting recognition in new markets.
Forgive me for expanding from the original subject Well, as far as I'm concerned your expansion was more to the point than most of the comments in this thread. Lucky that I browsed at 1 or I wouldn't have caught your thoughtful and informative post.....wonder why it wasn't moderated up (too "political" for the/. self-censors perhaps?)
Although right now, RedHat seems to be the best of both the server and desktop
Well, it depends what audience it is targeted at - if, as it seems the newer distros are going for the traditional desktop market then I think that RedHat is going to be the loser there. I should qualify this opinion with the admission that I have only experienced RedHat 5.2, 6.0, 6.1 and Corel.
On the basis of this I would have to express a qualified disagreement. RedHat6.1 is an appalling choice for a first-time installer. Their documentation is way out of date and very confusing. RH6.0 was much easier. They have done some very funky things with removing the rescue.img and sending out boot floppies that have the root device default set to SCSI devices with no obvious way to change this.
So, if (as seems to be the case) the new distros are chasing fresh market, then I think Corel are probably on the right track.
Well, I'm not exactly rolling on the floor in pain, it just seems a little distasteful. I suppose the fun in it would depend on whether or not you were personally affected by it. Myself, I am prepared to find it totally hilarious as no-one that I know was killed in the Korean War. (How's that for some cynicism?)
Sorry, totally offtopic, but why the hell does/. have the quote "The Korean war must have been fun" at the bottom of the page? I noticed this while scanning to the bottom of the thread. There used to be relatively amusing quotes down there, but this unattributed, deeply stupid one does not bode well for the new year on/.
every video card in the world comes with a software DVD player Presumably this is under some licensing agreement with the video-card manufacturers? Still, I take your point.
A guy that worked on studying barnacles for 8 years during which time he suppressed publication of a complete mode of explanation of life because he was afraid of the reaction. Not to mention his treatises on the movement of subsoil by earthworms;)
No regulation, with feedback from the market (including the legal system if you screw up and hurt people), beats regulation by gov any day of the week. Was the "ridiculous" part of your title intended to refer to this part of your post? What other things would you like to see deregulated? The police, the army, nuclear power stations, drug companies, prisons, hospitals? No? You didn't mean them? Or perhaps you did. Yes, I can see that the threat of being sued for exploiting consumers for profit would be a big deterrent - just look at all the bankrupt tobacco companies. By ridiculing the poster that you were replying to you got carried away in your own hyperbole. There are many "predictable" aspects to the Bt saga. Under a strong selection pressure a population will sooner or later either be destroyed or evolve a solution. There are countless examples from the application of pesticides that Monsanto is surely aware of having done the trials themselves (so what they have to do now is produce _new_ pesticides) so I think that we can reasonably guess that they decided that this would happen yet they could make money out of it. Thus, they made lots of money and destroyed the "organic farmer's" last resort. I'm not asking for certainty its trivially obvious that it's not obtainable, I'm asking for controls to prevent _obvious_ wrongs being committed. If you don't like these sorts of governmental controls, perhaps you should live in todays wonderful Russia?
one might argue you are simply accelerating natural selection Yes, but that might in itself be a worry. You are assuming, I think, that evolution is itself desirable and good, whereas it is merely a process. It's outcome may be positive or negative for the involved parties. Species evolve to dead-ends, over-specialize, fail to compete with others, become bottle-necked and lose enough genetic variation to cope with new challenges. If we were guaranteed that Monsanto was going to take a nice long-view and try to produce genetically diverse crops that used the minimum of fertilizer/pesticide etc. and sold them at a reasonable price then I wouldn't be worried. most of the "fear" seems to come from the impression that some loony in a white coat is tampering with food, in order to increase a company's profits. while i'm sure monsanto and others would be keen on this, it doesn't seem to hold much water past media sensationalisation. But, I think that the purpose of any corporation is to return high profits to its shareholders. The desirable traits that I mentioned above won't necessarily do that. Those things _could_ be achieved by Genetic Engineering possibly, but that is not the direction that the market will take it. Monsanto, Novartis and friends have nothing pushing them in that direction and they are large enough that _they_ and not _us_ can determine that the "free choice" that we will have will be between Monsanto Product One and Monsanto Product Two. So, I whole-heartedly concur with your idea that what we need is some non-commercial, open-sourcing of research into GM crops - who would fund it? We, the interested tax-payers. I'd rather my taxes went to that than to subsidies to the armaments industry. humans but genetically-modified apes? genetically modified shrews!;)
What makes it even more infuriating is that the companies trumpet liberal-sounding justifications for why they should be allowed to impose these technologies. My favorite one is that GM crops produce higher yield. This is supposed to be good because it is efficient and because there are hungry people in the world. The problem with the first claim is that while it's true that the farmer gets more foodstuff from the land he also has to take more nutrients out of the soil. That means either he depletes it so much that he can't grow on it or else he has to buy fertilizers from..... guess who! A related problem with this is that soil actually has a complicated structure of layers (there's a whole branch of study called edaphology that looks at this) which is physically destroyed when there is too much tilling, ploughing. So, after a while it erodes off. The second claim about the "poor 3rd world" is the most cynical. There is more than enough food already - Europe's subsidized agriculture leads to the production and destruction of a large amount of food. Finally, these claims were made in the '60s when traditional plant breeding was creating new hybrids; everything was supposed to be solved then (according to their propaganda) so we accepted hybrids etc. Like you say, it's nothing new, just the same attempt to fly more profitable technologies under our radar with fine-soundign rhetoric
These enhancements only stay around when there is some positive benefit Not strictly true. Even if there is no selective advantage to a particular trait there is no inevitable loss of that trait. In fact, if the trait is even negative, then it can take a long time to select that trait out of the population. There are many caveats to this: population size and reproduction mechanism being the two most obvious. Suppose that in 5 years 50% of all bacteria are resistant to penicillan then we find something incredibly new and different and start using it. The bacteria that do not have the (now useless) resistance to penicillan will suffer more than the bacteria without. I totally disagree. I see no link between having/not-having penicillin resistance and the ability to survive "something incredibly new".
I have a question then. What happens when organic compounds are placed beside a radioactive source such as one of the transition metals? Would there not be a certain percentage of the C,O,H in the (say decaying vegetable fibres and microbes) which were converted to their radioactive isotopes by this?
For some reason the Greens don't like this... nuclear accidents are far more problematic for humans than the environment in general, I have to wonder what the fuss is all about. Wild thought: suppose "Greens" are concerned for humans? Suppose the intent of many involved in environmental campaigns is to create and maintain pleasant environments for humans? I think you may be relying on a stereotype of extremist EarthFirst'ers or somethings.
If a bacteria begins as succeptible to certain antibiotics, the only way this can be changed is through the lateral gene transfer you refer to I disagree. I assume that you are thinking along some sort of teleological lines where the susceptible bacterium has to be exposed to the antibiotic _before_ it mutates. But the bacterium could easily be in an environment which does not contain the antibiotic, it would then mutate, then possibly be exposed to the antibiotic and then be found to be resistant.
With this insertion, it can also be assured that the trait is not mutatable. How? mutation like this doesn't seem to be covered in the primitive reproductive act of bacteria, only in archaea and eukarya. A mutation like what? What sort of mutations are excluded by bacterial reproduction? What about Lateral Gene Transfer?
I especially like your third point. There is a fourth one though. A lot of the "engineering" being done is , as in the case here, to make the bacterium resistant to something: herbicides, toxic metals, radioactivity, whatever. The engineered organism does something "good" with this newly acquired resistance. What happens though if it transfers the resistance to a "bad" organism? Until recently, this type of genetic exchange between different species (Horizontal Transfer) was thought to have occured infrequently. Now, however, phylogeneticists suspect that it is quite common and that there have been many instances in the evolution of life. So it is a plausible worry.
locking them into a form that was not as likely to spread I think the idea is to make it more likely to spread. The problem is that the contaminated soils are too concentrated to be considered safe and not concentrated enough that they can be locked up in a small area. Solution, diffuse the radioactive elements into the atmosphere as gases, vapours.
Yes it does. A compound can be composed of radioactive atoms. It is true that the bug does not transmute the atoms/elements, but it _does_ consume the compounds. It eats them, catabolizes them into simpler materials. These are not more tame as you suggest. They are still composed of radioactive atoms. These waste products then diffuse, as radioactive gases into the atmosphere.
It's not making radioactive elements inert. The article was confusingly worded. What it is doing is breaking down complex molecules for its foodstuffs. The waste products from its metabolism are then (for example) radioactive CO2 and H20, or more exotic gases and liquids. But in the case of the gas, it just diffuses into the atmosphere. So, it's a handy way of dealing with tons of soil in situ. The bacteria is just a nice little miniature factory for breaking up the larger, more complex molecules containing radioactive atoms and pumping it out of the soil into the air
I was under the impression that toxic/radioactive waste was often stored in solid state (ie. encased in glass, or as metals) The D.O.E. has huge tracts of contaminated soil to deal with, relatively low level in some cases, yet still not meeting the guidelines. So, as these millions of tons of soil are not realistically cleanable by a mechanical process the idea of growing a bug in the soil that blows off radioactive gas to diffuse into the atmosphere is attractive (to some people) as a waste management strategy. What worries me is that once there are technologies to deal with this gross pollution governmental bodies become more lax about not creating the pollution in the first place!
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone that just bought the "Standard" 6.1 package I was unimpressed with the "support". Specifically I found that the Reference Guide supplied by them in this $40 (after shipping) package was not great. Half of it consists of a list of packages - a real waste of paper that. The rest of the manual is IMHO poorly laid out and made for a damned confusing install - much inferior to RH5.2 from what I remember - a change to the boot and rescue disk procedure, a reference to a non-existent rescue.img on the CD and web-site. I hope that the more expensive packages provided better documentation. I'm not too keen on having to rely on web/phone based support. I'd rather have good documentation that lets me figure it out logically myself. That said, I wish them all the success with the Govt. markets. It's nice that they're getting recognition in new markets.
Forgive me for expanding from the original subject Well, as far as I'm concerned your expansion was more to the point than most of the comments in this thread. Lucky that I browsed at 1 or I wouldn't have caught your thoughtful and informative post.....wonder why it wasn't moderated up (too "political" for the /. self-censors perhaps?)
Well, it depends what audience it is targeted at - if, as it seems the newer distros are going for the traditional desktop market then I think that RedHat is going to be the loser there. I should qualify this opinion with the admission that I have only experienced RedHat 5.2, 6.0, 6.1 and Corel.
On the basis of this I would have to express a qualified disagreement. RedHat6.1 is an appalling choice for a first-time installer. Their documentation is way out of date and very confusing. RH6.0 was much easier. They have done some very funky things with removing the rescue.img and sending out boot floppies that have the root device default set to SCSI devices with no obvious way to change this.
So, if (as seems to be the case) the new distros are chasing fresh market, then I think Corel are probably on the right track.
HotBot identifies it as a Zippy the Pinhead quotation. I suppose that makes it funny. Ha.
Well, I'm not exactly rolling on the floor in pain, it just seems a little distasteful. I suppose the fun in it would depend on whether or not you were personally affected by it. Myself, I am prepared to find it totally hilarious as no-one that I know was killed in the Korean War. (How's that for some cynicism?)
Sorry, totally offtopic, but why the hell does /. have the quote "The Korean war must have been fun" at the bottom of the page? I noticed this while scanning to the bottom of the thread. There used to be relatively amusing quotes down there, but this unattributed, deeply stupid one does not bode well for the new year on /.
every video card in the world comes with a software DVD player
Presumably this is under some licensing agreement with the video-card manufacturers? Still, I take your point.
....we shouldn't forget the man that invented the net!
A guy that worked on studying barnacles for 8 years during which time he suppressed publication of a complete mode of explanation of life because he was afraid of the reaction. Not to mention his treatises on the movement of subsoil by earthworms ;)
No regulation, with feedback from the market (including the legal system if you screw up and hurt people), beats regulation by gov any day of the week. Was the "ridiculous" part of your title intended to refer to this part of your post? What other things would you like to see deregulated? The police, the army, nuclear power stations, drug companies, prisons, hospitals? No? You didn't mean them? Or perhaps you did. Yes, I can see that the threat of being sued for exploiting consumers for profit would be a big deterrent - just look at all the bankrupt tobacco companies. By ridiculing the poster that you were replying to you got carried away in your own hyperbole. There are many "predictable" aspects to the Bt saga. Under a strong selection pressure a population will sooner or later either be destroyed or evolve a solution. There are countless examples from the application of pesticides that Monsanto is surely aware of having done the trials themselves (so what they have to do now is produce _new_ pesticides) so I think that we can reasonably guess that they decided that this would happen yet they could make money out of it. Thus, they made lots of money and destroyed the "organic farmer's" last resort. I'm not asking for certainty its trivially obvious that it's not obtainable, I'm asking for controls to prevent _obvious_ wrongs being committed. If you don't like these sorts of governmental controls, perhaps you should live in todays wonderful Russia?
Isn't it Demon Haunted World?
one might argue you are simply accelerating natural selection Yes, but that might in itself be a worry. You are assuming, I think, that evolution is itself desirable and good, whereas it is merely a process. It's outcome may be positive or negative for the involved parties. Species evolve to dead-ends, over-specialize, fail to compete with others, become bottle-necked and lose enough genetic variation to cope with new challenges. If we were guaranteed that Monsanto was going to take a nice long-view and try to produce genetically diverse crops that used the minimum of fertilizer/pesticide etc. and sold them at a reasonable price then I wouldn't be worried. most of the "fear" seems to come from the impression that some loony in a white coat is tampering with food, in order to increase a company's profits. while i'm sure monsanto and others would be keen on this, it doesn't seem to hold much water past media sensationalisation. But, I think that the purpose of any corporation is to return high profits to its shareholders. The desirable traits that I mentioned above won't necessarily do that. Those things _could_ be achieved by Genetic Engineering possibly, but that is not the direction that the market will take it. Monsanto, Novartis and friends have nothing pushing them in that direction and they are large enough that _they_ and not _us_ can determine that the "free choice" that we will have will be between Monsanto Product One and Monsanto Product Two. So, I whole-heartedly concur with your idea that what we need is some non-commercial, open-sourcing of research into GM crops - who would fund it? We, the interested tax-payers. I'd rather my taxes went to that than to subsidies to the armaments industry. humans but genetically-modified apes? genetically modified shrews! ;)
What makes it even more infuriating is that the companies trumpet liberal-sounding justifications for why they should be allowed to impose these technologies. My favorite one is that GM crops produce higher yield. This is supposed to be good because it is efficient and because there are hungry people in the world. The problem with the first claim is that while it's true that the farmer gets more foodstuff from the land he also has to take more nutrients out of the soil. That means either he depletes it so much that he can't grow on it or else he has to buy fertilizers from ..... guess who! A related problem with this is that soil actually has a complicated structure of layers (there's a whole branch of study called edaphology that looks at this) which is physically destroyed when there is too much tilling, ploughing. So, after a while it erodes off. The second claim about the "poor 3rd world" is the most cynical. There is more than enough food already - Europe's subsidized agriculture leads to the production and destruction of a large amount of food. Finally, these claims were made in the '60s when traditional plant breeding was creating new hybrids; everything was supposed to be solved then (according to their propaganda) so we accepted hybrids etc. Like you say, it's nothing new, just the same attempt to fly more profitable technologies under our radar with fine-soundign rhetoric
These enhancements only stay around when there is some positive benefit Not strictly true. Even if there is no selective advantage to a particular trait there is no inevitable loss of that trait. In fact, if the trait is even negative, then it can take a long time to select that trait out of the population. There are many caveats to this: population size and reproduction mechanism being the two most obvious. Suppose that in 5 years 50% of all bacteria are resistant to penicillan then we find something incredibly new and different and start using it. The bacteria that do not have the (now useless) resistance to penicillan will suffer more than the bacteria without. I totally disagree. I see no link between having/not-having penicillin resistance and the ability to survive "something incredibly new".
I have a question then. What happens when organic compounds are placed beside a radioactive source such as one of the transition metals? Would there not be a certain percentage of the C,O,H in the (say decaying vegetable fibres and microbes) which were converted to their radioactive isotopes by this?
For some reason the Greens don't like this ... nuclear accidents are far more problematic for humans than the environment in general, I have to wonder what the fuss is all about. Wild thought: suppose "Greens" are concerned for humans? Suppose the intent of many involved in environmental campaigns is to create and maintain pleasant environments for humans? I think you may be relying on a stereotype of extremist EarthFirst'ers or somethings.
If a bacteria begins as succeptible to certain antibiotics, the only way this can be changed is through the lateral gene transfer you refer to I disagree. I assume that you are thinking along some sort of teleological lines where the susceptible bacterium has to be exposed to the antibiotic _before_ it mutates. But the bacterium could easily be in an environment which does not contain the antibiotic, it would then mutate, then possibly be exposed to the antibiotic and then be found to be resistant.
Lots of nice info there!
So, how does the iron become bonded to the contaminant? Sounds interesting.
With this insertion, it can also be assured that the trait is not mutatable. How? mutation like this doesn't seem to be covered in the primitive reproductive act of bacteria, only in archaea and eukarya. A mutation like what? What sort of mutations are excluded by bacterial reproduction? What about Lateral Gene Transfer?
I especially like your third point. There is a fourth one though. A lot of the "engineering" being done is , as in the case here, to make the bacterium resistant to something: herbicides, toxic metals, radioactivity, whatever. The engineered organism does something "good" with this newly acquired resistance. What happens though if it transfers the resistance to a "bad" organism? Until recently, this type of genetic exchange between different species (Horizontal Transfer) was thought to have occured infrequently. Now, however, phylogeneticists suspect that it is quite common and that there have been many instances in the evolution of life. So it is a plausible worry.
locking them into a form that was not as likely to spread I think the idea is to make it more likely to spread. The problem is that the contaminated soils are too concentrated to be considered safe and not concentrated enough that they can be locked up in a small area. Solution, diffuse the radioactive elements into the atmosphere as gases, vapours.
Yes it does. A compound can be composed of radioactive atoms. It is true that the bug does not transmute the atoms/elements, but it _does_ consume the compounds. It eats them, catabolizes them into simpler materials. These are not more tame as you suggest. They are still composed of radioactive atoms. These waste products then diffuse, as radioactive gases into the atmosphere.
It's not making radioactive elements inert. The article was confusingly worded. What it is doing is breaking down complex molecules for its foodstuffs. The waste products from its metabolism are then (for example) radioactive CO2 and H20, or more exotic gases and liquids. But in the case of the gas, it just diffuses into the atmosphere. So, it's a handy way of dealing with tons of soil in situ. The bacteria is just a nice little miniature factory for breaking up the larger, more complex molecules containing radioactive atoms and pumping it out of the soil into the air
I was under the impression that toxic/radioactive waste was often stored in solid state (ie. encased in glass, or as metals) The D.O.E. has huge tracts of contaminated soil to deal with, relatively low level in some cases, yet still not meeting the guidelines. So, as these millions of tons of soil are not realistically cleanable by a mechanical process the idea of growing a bug in the soil that blows off radioactive gas to diffuse into the atmosphere is attractive (to some people) as a waste management strategy. What worries me is that once there are technologies to deal with this gross pollution governmental bodies become more lax about not creating the pollution in the first place!