That's an interesting example. Reading up on it (and bridges) it's not a very big difference, but it's there.
I still get away though, as I said my personal actions, and even though I'm an engineer, I'm not a civil engineer. The largest thing I've designed (playing a mechanical engineer at work) would fit comfortably in your trunk. So even though the holes didn't line up in the end, I can't blame the curvature of the earth.:-)
It is very wrong to say the earth is flat. There are many, many ways of demonstrating its wrongness and assuming the earth is flat will lead you to wildly incorrect conclusions for many problems.
Even that isn't that wrong. The earth being flat is actually a very good model for the overwhelming majority of human day-to-day activities. I can't think of a single instance where my personal actions have been directed by anything but a flat earth model.
That's of course not to say that I don't depend on satellites, have flown in aircraft that used great circle navigation etc. etc. but on a personal level, I can't think of a single instance where my actions would have been different given the flat earth model and another one.
Why? Developing a new theorem in mathematics is just as hard. And other people stand to benefit just as much. And that was your main point, was it not? What makes engineering special? (And note that I used FEM as my example, which is as far from "pure" mathematics as you can come. A concept that is fraught with peril anyway.)
No, your arguments are ill thought through. You need to get back to the drawing board. "Because it was difficult to come up with" isn't even internally consistent. Especially as you seem to agree with maths not being worthy of "protection". (Hint: Economics works better for your purposes than effort).
Another thing unrelated to disabled people, why do shopping centres reserve spots right next to disabled people for parents with prams? If a mother can spend 3 hours pushing a pram through the shopping centre she can spend the extra 1 minute pushing it to her car. In this country though the parents with prams reservation isn't legally enforceable.
Because it's convenient with extra space to load them (the children that is). It scratches up fewer other cars. And being able to tell the older children to go to the front of the car and stand on the pavement is a lot better (as in safer) than having them in the parking lot proper.
But don't worry. This is something you'll understand when you have kids yourself. You'll look back to the days before when you were ignorant and laugh. On the good days. Most days you'll look back and cry... (But don't despair, it'll get better. Pushing prams doesn't last that long.)
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I'm trying to make sure I'm clear, because I don't understand why you didn't get this. There are lots of aspects of what I said that may not be obvious, but this one seems simple.
No, it was I that wasn't clear. US patent law (and many others) specifically exclude mathematics from patentable inventions. It has nothing to do with who funded the research. (While the US govt. can't claim copyright, etc. my govt. can, for instance.)
So if your argument boils down to: "If it was hard to come up with, users should pay." Then why the exception for mathematics? Or physics? Wasn't that equally hard to come up with? Why shouldn't users pay? Why couldn't e.g. FEM (finite element method) as an idea be patented? Why shouldn't other researchers that build on it pay?
I'm talking about difficult, complex ideas that took significant effort, ingenuity, creativity, and resources to develop. Millions of dollars can be spent just to yield one page worth of information. Does the fact that the answers fit on one page obviate the fact that you may have needed an expensive particle accelerator, had to crash 1000 cars, or had to pay 10000 test subjects in order to get it correct? Even if all you had to do was spend a few months doing calculus and differential equations to solve the problem, that's still a significant expenditure of time and energy by someone who had already invested years in developing the necessary expertise. In order to justify that kind of effort, whose results could be of great benefit to society, investors require assurance that their investment will yield a profit. Without IP protection, they would not have that assurance, so they would not invest, and the invention would never happen.
OK. I have an example for you. E=mc2. That certainly meets your requirements. The US govt. spent a significant fraction of your BNP to build bombs based on that very result. (Science is of course littered with similar results). They are certainly worthy of the kind of protection you're talking about. And yet, they are unpatentable, uncopyrightable and untrademarkable.
Paradoxically, the dearest results that humankind has produced (i.e. the scientific results that tells us about the order of the universe, from the atom to the cosmos) can not benefit from any such protection, even though they certainly sometimes have been very costly (LHC...), and have had profound impact on our lives and economies.
Why should they be any different? They certainly meet your criteria?
But to get to your point, the greatest energy use occurs on.....
Hot.
Sunny.
Days.
Not here (Sweden). Cold days in the middle of the winter trumps summer by a long shot. Solar you can forget (Sun barely rises), and the coldest days are without wind (clear skies).
So does that mean we get to keep our nuclear plants? And you don't?
Why do nuclear fanboys try to pass the blame on to coal?
Because that's the only realistic alternative when one considers the scale needed. The only other technology that can realistically produce that amount of power cheaply and efficiently is hydro, and that's of course limited by geography and not available to everyone. So when e.g. Germany decides to shut down their nuclear power plants that means they'll be burning that much more coal instead. (It's even the nasty, peaty, brown stuff they have that's even worse.)
Why do you try to compare the polution levels between the two without ever mentioning that nuclear waste will be around for thousands of years or the disparity in the number of power plants? 1436 coal vs 104 nuclear in the U.S.
Why would number of plants be a useful measure? You get approx 1/5 of your electricity from nuclear and 1/2 from coal. Why would having fewer plants produce a larger proportion affect safety, security etc? But by all means, more smaller nuclear plants is something that should be looked into.
In either case, both "clean coal" and fourth gen. nuclear are pretty much a done deal. There are no major technical obstacles. It wouldn't be hard to do either, but the economic incentive is not there. Burning the nuclear "waste" (something we should do to not make plutonium mines in the future) is not a problem and has been demonstrated on smaller scales. However, it cost more than just using approx 1% of the energy value that we use today. We need regulation to solve that one.
It's not that nuclear is problem free, or ideal or anything even remotely like that. But it's one of the few realistic options available. Sure, we'd all like a magic unicorn farting rainbows, but barring that, nuclear/hydro/coal are the only large scale, economical options available. Of these three, I prefer hydro and nuclear from an environmental standpoint, with nuclear first, hydro second and coal a distant, distant third.
We're talking about changing the name, and have father christmas (Jultomten) actually show up and hand out the presents on the evening of the 24:th. That's about the extent of it.
Slavery was actually abolished here in 1350, no-one's suggesting a come back. Of either that, or the Vikings.
Which is of course, a pagan holiday, so distinctly not atheist.
How about a real atheist name?
Midwinterfest?
Well you could just continue the "Yule" tradition, as that's what's it still called up here in the cold north (i.e. the nordic countries); Jul. Pronounced pretty much like "Yule".
So, even if your(?) ancestors had to resort to exporting Christianity all the way up here to solve the Viking problem, they couldn't dethrone the name for the seasonal festivities. It's time for us Viking ancestors to export it right back I say.:-)
Not a fan of the TSA, but not a fan of allowing knives on planes either.
You already do. Plenty of rather big knives in the galley. Just ask your friend the flight attendant. (Not while flying obviously, that'd make them nervous. And that's bad for you.) They're just told to not show them to you and keep them put away so that passengers can't see them.
So no need to carry your own knife on board. Just pull away the curtain to the first class galley and tackle the 150lbs flight attendant and you're in business. (Yes, it's already happened in the history of aviation. Several times. Not recently though. There just aren't that many would be terrorists/hi-jackers.)
Now, if you want to keep machetes from commercial passenger aircraft I'm with you all the way. But confiscating nail scissors while allowing bottles and ball point pens that's just useless.
OK, that's not what I was told in the one study I took part in. (Which covered just this scenario, i.e. old drug - new use). But I claim no further expertise.
Still don't think it warrants a new patent. Smells too much of "business method" patent for my taste. And we don't allow those here. You can patent the drug and that's it.
And there's absolutely no reason you couldn't select successive generations of mutations until you had a gene that also happened to be found in a fish. It would probably take a long time -- a very long time -- but if you were determined enough, you could probably do it. Like I said, GM is simply a more efficient technique than relying on chance
That's like saying cryptography is inherently unworkable since you could always brute force the key. Scale and work factor matters in life. Here as well. Throwing e.g. fish at tomatoes in the vain hope that something will stick is a fools errand. GMO makes the practical difference between success in short order or intractabiltiy.
But it's not reasonable to say that GMO is inherently more dangerous or unhealthy just because the genes were modified by a different method.
Yes it is. First; like I said, we'd like to throw out Belgian Blue as well, even though that was genetically engineered the god-old-fashioned way. Second, and more important, the kind of experimentation that GMO allows gives whole new degrees of freedom for the likes of Monsanto. Ways and means they didn't have before, or were even close to having.
Again work factor counts. In fact, it's the "it's just genes modified another way" that is the straw man here. (A slogan invented by the GMO industry, no doubt.) It's no different from saying; "Hey, an M240 GPMG is just as dangerous as a bow and arrow. After all, all they do is make holes in something. If you allow the bow and arrow there's no reason to forbid the M240. Saying there is a difference is just a reactionary knee-jerk."
I've made a bow and have had fun shooting it with my 8-year old. Haven't seen an M240 since the army took it back (actually my brother was the asst. machine gunner, but you get the gist). And you know, I'm fine with them making that distinction. And I agree with it. Work factor counts!
Finally, you're creating a strawman with regards to Monsanto: Just because they're a producer of GMO doesn't mean I'm defending their business practices. I'm not. I'm saying that making blanket statements about products based solely on the fact that they're genetically altered is reactionary, alarmist, and unproductive
Yeah, and I'm saying that we'd like to see proof of some actual tangible benefit from these products (other than lining the pockets of Monsanto and the FDA) before we consider them. We don't let them inject beef-to-be with growth hormones either.
Now, the potential for harm is clearly there. Technology in and of itself is not necessarily value neutral/morally neutral. But even so, we're willing to reconsider if we saw one product with a tangible benefit that didn't also have a drawback/risks that were insufficiently studied. Making "blanket statements" about something based on your unequivocal observation of each instance you've come across is called "experience".
If you want to call that "conservative" then by all means, go ahead. "Reactionary" it's not. We don't have any (or at least nearly) the debate when it comes to medicine research/production using GMO. It's the people in the food industry using the technology we don't trust. Not the technology. We're just sceptical about that. We haven't got any good reason to be otherwise.
The major cost of testing a new compound is to prove the drug is safe, i.e doesn't kill the patient, or has any other nasty side effects. Whether it actually does any good is almost left as an afterthought. Since (almost) all of that should be well established by the time someone comes up with an idea for a second use, then no, they should't be able to get a God damned patent for using the same drug for something new. They can got a patent for the drug, that's it.
Which is, frankly, stupid. ALL living things are Genetically Modified Organisms, it's just that the mechanism of modification is usually either more random (natural evolution), or takes longer (breeding and hybridization, AKA ranching and farming). Manipulating genes directly is both more efficient and more effective.
Say I'm allergic to fish. Say the corporations insert genes from fish in tomatoes. Say those genes now code for proteins I'm allergic to. Do I now have to read the "labeling" on tomatoes hoping that it's safe for me?This and many many more scenarios are ones I can be pretty damn certain will not occur as a result of either accelerated mutation (whether from radiation or chemically induced), or regular old fashioned cross fertilization. You're never going to successfully cross breed a cod and a carrot. (If you want to fuck up a species the old fashioned way you can still have a Belgian Blue to your hearts content).
So you're right. We don't know exactly how the geneticists at Monsanto will manage to screw up next and call it the greatest thing since sliced bread. Their efforts so far; e.g. making crops that tolerate even more herbicides than previous so that even more can be poured into the environment, rather than take a (minuscule) hit to the agricorporations bottom line, tells us all we need to know for the moment, thank you very much. Herbicides that Monsanto patented and sold at a markup. Makes you really trust their motives. Pure as the driven snow, no doubt.
In Europe we pay our farmers enough subsidies already to *not* want to have to put up with that particular crap (i.e. race to the bottom) as well as all the other crap we have to put up with. It's not that we're luddites. It's just that we don't trust Monsanto, or rather, we trust them to put their greed above all else, and we certainly don't trust the FDA (bought and paid for by the very same corporations) to tell *us* that it's OK. We have our own governmental agencies, not quite as deep in the pockets of big business to keep us in the dark quite adequately, thank you.
And we're not exclusively against the kind of bizarre monstrosities that result from gene splicing. You won't find any Belgian blue meat in the Nordic countries either. Even though that genetic aberration was "manufactured" the old fashioned way. We think that line of genes should be taken out of circulation as well. Splicing or not.
I think the point is more like "in 20 years, there won't be any men left in the STEM fields."
Joke or not it's an interesting question. When it comes to fields like chemistry, biology etc. females have been the clear majority for some time (although not at the highest levels), medicin they are now the majority (something like 60% here in Sweden); some fields are holdouts, surgery being one, but I think that's going. The vetrinarians have been slapped on the wrist for trying to accept male students on a quota (otherwise there would be none) so that trend is pretty clear as well.
When it comes to the "TEM" though the picture is bleaker. Even though I had a record 20% females in my (comp. sci./eng.) masters programme this year, the levels have been discouraging for the past 20 years. We might be seeing a small encouraging trend in maths, but it's not much to write home about.
So, that's the billion dollar question. What could/should we do to even out the gender inequality in these fields? In Sweden we've had the debate of not enough women at the highest rungs of corporate leadership for quite some time, but my experience from places like Ericsson, with maybe 20%-30% women, many of them (as much as 80%) in management is that the "problem" isn't necessarily that women don't advance up the corporate leadership ladder (yes there's a "glass ceiling" effect, I'm not denying that), but rather that they don't become technical specialists. The lack of female CEOs isn't nearly as striking as the lack of female nerds when you think about it. I've had ten or so female bosses/project managers/whatnot, but only one socially awkward technically adept female colleague...
I can't help but think that in the "beaker intensive" fields, the picture must be different. There the specialists can't be an all male club, in fact I'd expect the opposite, but don't really have any experiences or facts to base that on.
Indeed. No less than Doug McIlroy thinks so. (Google his name + Linux). He should know. And even if he didn't, he has the credentials to proclaim it so.:-)
I don't think they were particularly sophisticated either; otherwise they would have put more effort into the delivery system. True, they were better than your typical Islamic terrorist organization, but that's not really saying much...
Yes, with "sophisticated" I was more referring to the fact that they managed to make Sarin in the first place. This compared to your typical Islamic terrorist organisation that can't even mix proper explosives (or just steal some dynamite for crying out loud). So yes, that's indeed not saying much...
But speaking of the Sarin gas attack. I've always wondered about that. Given that it was the second time they tried it, and given that they were sophisticated enough to make it in the first place one has to wonder about the inept delivery system. I mean it would take someone five minutes to come up with a spray nozzle, tank and a CO2 cartridge. (Add a drop of acid or two to eat through the cartridge and you have a coarse time delay.)
So I can't help but wondering whether the delivery system was designed to be sub optimal, and whether that was an organisational goal or someone working within the organisation against it's goal? Or if they just were that screwed up? (Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything). When I last checked the public sources available to me I didn't find anything hard, apart from similar speculation.
A more real threat is chemical and biological (especially biological) warfare, though even there we've seen no serious attempts by any of the major players.
Well, maybe not a major player, but it's been tried. If they only had had a usable delivery system (other than just puncturing the canisters and leaving vapour pressure alone to do it's thing) it might have gotten much uglier than it did.
Many people in the west seem to forget this particular incident. Now, granted they were very sophisticated as terrorist organisations go, but what used to take a nation state is now within reach of a much smaller outfit.
If the end users knew better, they would be doing IT.
We did. Back in the day. But then we got our PhDs, our associate professorships, and are managing our own research groups. And make more money, and have a more interesting and rewarding job. In short we moved on. We've *been* you. And then we grew up.
We're not particularly impressed when we meet the umpteenth young whippersnapper with that very same attitude, thinking thery're all that and then some. Telling us what we can and can't do, why it's impossible, how expensive it would be if we managed our own Linux computers instead of buying the wonderful overpriced incompetent service from the IT dept.
In fact: we're quite weary of it. And we think what we think about "IT" accordingly.
Linus is a native speaker of Swedish. In fact, one of the nice things about Linux back in the day was that I didn't have to fiddle with keyboard settings, it came with the Swedish layout as a default.:-) And Sweden is very much part of Scandinavia.
(For the humour impared, for these purposes I think it's OK to include Finland in "Scandinavia" as USians often confuse it with "Norden" of which Finland is definately a part. And it's fitting here since socio-economically/politically and structurally Finland is very much part of the Nordic tradition.)
Take it from a Swede, the Finns may be many things, and called many things, but "Scandinavian" isn't usually something we accuse them of being.:-)
I think you mean "nordic", as that usually is how "norden" is translated. As for explaining our relationship I like the old soc.culture.nordic statement: "We're like one big family. Not one big *happy* family mind you, no more like any old family.":-)
As for "Eastern europe" we'll just have to agree to disagree. After all, quoting wikipedia "Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term is highly context-dependent and even volatile, as there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"[1]."
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That's an interesting example. Reading up on it (and bridges) it's not a very big difference, but it's there.
I still get away though, as I said my personal actions, and even though I'm an engineer, I'm not a civil engineer. The largest thing I've designed (playing a mechanical engineer at work) would fit comfortably in your trunk. So even though the holes didn't line up in the end, I can't blame the curvature of the earth. :-)
It is very wrong to say the earth is flat. There are many, many ways of demonstrating its wrongness and assuming the earth is flat will lead you to wildly incorrect conclusions for many problems.
Even that isn't that wrong. The earth being flat is actually a very good model for the overwhelming majority of human day-to-day activities. I can't think of a single instance where my personal actions have been directed by anything but a flat earth model.
That's of course not to say that I don't depend on satellites, have flown in aircraft that used great circle navigation etc. etc. but on a personal level, I can't think of a single instance where my actions would have been different given the flat earth model and another one.
Why? Developing a new theorem in mathematics is just as hard. And other people stand to benefit just as much. And that was your main point, was it not? What makes engineering special? (And note that I used FEM as my example, which is as far from "pure" mathematics as you can come. A concept that is fraught with peril anyway.)
And of course today with the advent of computers, the distinction between "mathematics" and "solving difficult engineering problems" is a very fleeting one. The XOR-cursor, should that have been patentable? Or the RSA algorithm? Or to make it more interesting, why not take a few of my own, such as SECURE LOAD BALANCING IN A NETWORK or Secure file transfer or Charging Of GPRS Traffic For Roaming Mobiles By Performing Traffic Counting What about these are not, more or less, "mathematics"?
No, your arguments are ill thought through. You need to get back to the drawing board. "Because it was difficult to come up with" isn't even internally consistent. Especially as you seem to agree with maths not being worthy of "protection". (Hint: Economics works better for your purposes than effort).
Another thing unrelated to disabled people, why do shopping centres reserve spots right next to disabled people for parents with prams? If a mother can spend 3 hours pushing a pram through the shopping centre she can spend the extra 1 minute pushing it to her car. In this country though the parents with prams reservation isn't legally enforceable.
Because it's convenient with extra space to load them (the children that is). It scratches up fewer other cars. And being able to tell the older children to go to the front of the car and stand on the pavement is a lot better (as in safer) than having them in the parking lot proper.
But don't worry. This is something you'll understand when you have kids yourself. You'll look back to the days before when you were ignorant and laugh. On the good days. Most days you'll look back and cry... (But don't despair, it'll get better. Pushing prams doesn't last that long.)
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I'm trying to make sure I'm clear, because I don't understand why you didn't get this. There are lots of aspects of what I said that may not be obvious, but this one seems simple.
No, it was I that wasn't clear. US patent law (and many others) specifically exclude mathematics from patentable inventions. It has nothing to do with who funded the research. (While the US govt. can't claim copyright, etc. my govt. can, for instance.)
So if your argument boils down to: "If it was hard to come up with, users should pay." Then why the exception for mathematics? Or physics? Wasn't that equally hard to come up with? Why shouldn't users pay? Why couldn't e.g. FEM (finite element method) as an idea be patented? Why shouldn't other researchers that build on it pay?
I'm talking about difficult, complex ideas that took significant effort, ingenuity, creativity, and resources to develop. Millions of dollars can be spent just to yield one page worth of information. Does the fact that the answers fit on one page obviate the fact that you may have needed an expensive particle accelerator, had to crash 1000 cars, or had to pay 10000 test subjects in order to get it correct? Even if all you had to do was spend a few months doing calculus and differential equations to solve the problem, that's still a significant expenditure of time and energy by someone who had already invested years in developing the necessary expertise. In order to justify that kind of effort, whose results could be of great benefit to society, investors require assurance that their investment will yield a profit. Without IP protection, they would not have that assurance, so they would not invest, and the invention would never happen.
OK. I have an example for you. E=mc2. That certainly meets your requirements. The US govt. spent a significant fraction of your BNP to build bombs based on that very result. (Science is of course littered with similar results). They are certainly worthy of the kind of protection you're talking about. And yet, they are unpatentable, uncopyrightable and untrademarkable.
Paradoxically, the dearest results that humankind has produced (i.e. the scientific results that tells us about the order of the universe, from the atom to the cosmos) can not benefit from any such protection, even though they certainly sometimes have been very costly (LHC...), and have had profound impact on our lives and economies.
Why should they be any different? They certainly meet your criteria?
That's a whole lot of "coulds" and "what ifs" and "on papers"
Well, we were running a thorium cycle reactor for several years already in the sixties, so we left the "paper" stage some time ago.
But to get to your point, the greatest energy use occurs on..... Hot. Sunny. Days.
Not here (Sweden). Cold days in the middle of the winter trumps summer by a long shot. Solar you can forget (Sun barely rises), and the coldest days are without wind (clear skies).
So does that mean we get to keep our nuclear plants? And you don't?
Why do nuclear fanboys try to pass the blame on to coal?
Because that's the only realistic alternative when one considers the scale needed. The only other technology that can realistically produce that amount of power cheaply and efficiently is hydro, and that's of course limited by geography and not available to everyone. So when e.g. Germany decides to shut down their nuclear power plants that means they'll be burning that much more coal instead. (It's even the nasty, peaty, brown stuff they have that's even worse.)
Why do you try to compare the polution levels between the two without ever mentioning that nuclear waste will be around for thousands of years or the disparity in the number of power plants? 1436 coal vs 104 nuclear in the U.S.
Why would number of plants be a useful measure? You get approx 1/5 of your electricity from nuclear and 1/2 from coal. Why would having fewer plants produce a larger proportion affect safety, security etc? But by all means, more smaller nuclear plants is something that should be looked into.
In either case, both "clean coal" and fourth gen. nuclear are pretty much a done deal. There are no major technical obstacles. It wouldn't be hard to do either, but the economic incentive is not there. Burning the nuclear "waste" (something we should do to not make plutonium mines in the future) is not a problem and has been demonstrated on smaller scales. However, it cost more than just using approx 1% of the energy value that we use today. We need regulation to solve that one.
It's not that nuclear is problem free, or ideal or anything even remotely like that. But it's one of the few realistic options available. Sure, we'd all like a magic unicorn farting rainbows, but barring that, nuclear/hydro/coal are the only large scale, economical options available. Of these three, I prefer hydro and nuclear from an environmental standpoint, with nuclear first, hydro second and coal a distant, distant third.
No problem. And happy holidays to you to! And BTW you're right; "Man blir trött av att gå omkring och göra ingenting". :-)
Man blir trött av att gå och gora ingenting.
You might want to spell that "göra" instead of "gora" if you want it to make sense.
Just realised that technically counts as a "spelling/grammar" flame, but I hope I'll be forgiven this once. :-)
We're talking about changing the name, and have father christmas (Jultomten) actually show up and hand out the presents on the evening of the 24:th. That's about the extent of it.
Slavery was actually abolished here in 1350, no-one's suggesting a come back. Of either that, or the Vikings.
Which is of course, a pagan holiday, so distinctly not atheist. How about a real atheist name? Midwinterfest?
Well you could just continue the "Yule" tradition, as that's what's it still called up here in the cold north (i.e. the nordic countries); Jul. Pronounced pretty much like "Yule".
So, even if your(?) ancestors had to resort to exporting Christianity all the way up here to solve the Viking problem, they couldn't dethrone the name for the seasonal festivities. It's time for us Viking ancestors to export it right back I say. :-)
Not a fan of the TSA, but not a fan of allowing knives on planes either.
You already do. Plenty of rather big knives in the galley. Just ask your friend the flight attendant. (Not while flying obviously, that'd make them nervous. And that's bad for you.) They're just told to not show them to you and keep them put away so that passengers can't see them.
So no need to carry your own knife on board. Just pull away the curtain to the first class galley and tackle the 150lbs flight attendant and you're in business. (Yes, it's already happened in the history of aviation. Several times. Not recently though. There just aren't that many would be terrorists/hi-jackers.)
Now, if you want to keep machetes from commercial passenger aircraft I'm with you all the way. But confiscating nail scissors while allowing bottles and ball point pens that's just useless.
OK, that's not what I was told in the one study I took part in. (Which covered just this scenario, i.e. old drug - new use). But I claim no further expertise.
Still don't think it warrants a new patent. Smells too much of "business method" patent for my taste. And we don't allow those here. You can patent the drug and that's it.
And there's absolutely no reason you couldn't select successive generations of mutations until you had a gene that also happened to be found in a fish. It would probably take a long time -- a very long time -- but if you were determined enough, you could probably do it. Like I said, GM is simply a more efficient technique than relying on chance
That's like saying cryptography is inherently unworkable since you could always brute force the key. Scale and work factor matters in life. Here as well. Throwing e.g. fish at tomatoes in the vain hope that something will stick is a fools errand. GMO makes the practical difference between success in short order or intractabiltiy.
But it's not reasonable to say that GMO is inherently more dangerous or unhealthy just because the genes were modified by a different method.
Yes it is. First; like I said, we'd like to throw out Belgian Blue as well, even though that was genetically engineered the god-old-fashioned way. Second, and more important, the kind of experimentation that GMO allows gives whole new degrees of freedom for the likes of Monsanto. Ways and means they didn't have before, or were even close to having.
Again work factor counts. In fact, it's the "it's just genes modified another way" that is the straw man here. (A slogan invented by the GMO industry, no doubt.) It's no different from saying; "Hey, an M240 GPMG is just as dangerous as a bow and arrow. After all, all they do is make holes in something. If you allow the bow and arrow there's no reason to forbid the M240. Saying there is a difference is just a reactionary knee-jerk."
I've made a bow and have had fun shooting it with my 8-year old. Haven't seen an M240 since the army took it back (actually my brother was the asst. machine gunner, but you get the gist). And you know, I'm fine with them making that distinction. And I agree with it. Work factor counts!
Finally, you're creating a strawman with regards to Monsanto: Just because they're a producer of GMO doesn't mean I'm defending their business practices. I'm not. I'm saying that making blanket statements about products based solely on the fact that they're genetically altered is reactionary, alarmist, and unproductive
Yeah, and I'm saying that we'd like to see proof of some actual tangible benefit from these products (other than lining the pockets of Monsanto and the FDA) before we consider them. We don't let them inject beef-to-be with growth hormones either.
Now, the potential for harm is clearly there. Technology in and of itself is not necessarily value neutral/morally neutral. But even so, we're willing to reconsider if we saw one product with a tangible benefit that didn't also have a drawback/risks that were insufficiently studied. Making "blanket statements" about something based on your unequivocal observation of each instance you've come across is called "experience".
If you want to call that "conservative" then by all means, go ahead. "Reactionary" it's not. We don't have any (or at least nearly) the debate when it comes to medicine research/production using GMO. It's the people in the food industry using the technology we don't trust. Not the technology. We're just sceptical about that. We haven't got any good reason to be otherwise.
The major cost of testing a new compound is to prove the drug is safe, i.e doesn't kill the patient, or has any other nasty side effects. Whether it actually does any good is almost left as an afterthought. Since (almost) all of that should be well established by the time someone comes up with an idea for a second use, then no, they should't be able to get a God damned patent for using the same drug for something new. They can got a patent for the drug, that's it.
Which is, frankly, stupid. ALL living things are Genetically Modified Organisms, it's just that the mechanism of modification is usually either more random (natural evolution), or takes longer (breeding and hybridization, AKA ranching and farming). Manipulating genes directly is both more efficient and more effective.
Say I'm allergic to fish. Say the corporations insert genes from fish in tomatoes. Say those genes now code for proteins I'm allergic to. Do I now have to read the "labeling" on tomatoes hoping that it's safe for me?This and many many more scenarios are ones I can be pretty damn certain will not occur as a result of either accelerated mutation (whether from radiation or chemically induced), or regular old fashioned cross fertilization. You're never going to successfully cross breed a cod and a carrot. (If you want to fuck up a species the old fashioned way you can still have a Belgian Blue to your hearts content).
So you're right. We don't know exactly how the geneticists at Monsanto will manage to screw up next and call it the greatest thing since sliced bread. Their efforts so far; e.g. making crops that tolerate even more herbicides than previous so that even more can be poured into the environment, rather than take a (minuscule) hit to the agricorporations bottom line, tells us all we need to know for the moment, thank you very much. Herbicides that Monsanto patented and sold at a markup. Makes you really trust their motives. Pure as the driven snow, no doubt.
In Europe we pay our farmers enough subsidies already to *not* want to have to put up with that particular crap (i.e. race to the bottom) as well as all the other crap we have to put up with. It's not that we're luddites. It's just that we don't trust Monsanto, or rather, we trust them to put their greed above all else, and we certainly don't trust the FDA (bought and paid for by the very same corporations) to tell *us* that it's OK. We have our own governmental agencies, not quite as deep in the pockets of big business to keep us in the dark quite adequately, thank you.
And we're not exclusively against the kind of bizarre monstrosities that result from gene splicing. You won't find any Belgian blue meat in the Nordic countries either. Even though that genetic aberration was "manufactured" the old fashioned way. We think that line of genes should be taken out of circulation as well. Splicing or not.
I think the point is more like "in 20 years, there won't be any men left in the STEM fields."
Joke or not it's an interesting question. When it comes to fields like chemistry, biology etc. females have been the clear majority for some time (although not at the highest levels), medicin they are now the majority (something like 60% here in Sweden); some fields are holdouts, surgery being one, but I think that's going. The vetrinarians have been slapped on the wrist for trying to accept male students on a quota (otherwise there would be none) so that trend is pretty clear as well.
When it comes to the "TEM" though the picture is bleaker. Even though I had a record 20% females in my (comp. sci./eng.) masters programme this year, the levels have been discouraging for the past 20 years. We might be seeing a small encouraging trend in maths, but it's not much to write home about.
So, that's the billion dollar question. What could/should we do to even out the gender inequality in these fields? In Sweden we've had the debate of not enough women at the highest rungs of corporate leadership for quite some time, but my experience from places like Ericsson, with maybe 20%-30% women, many of them (as much as 80%) in management is that the "problem" isn't necessarily that women don't advance up the corporate leadership ladder (yes there's a "glass ceiling" effect, I'm not denying that), but rather that they don't become technical specialists. The lack of female CEOs isn't nearly as striking as the lack of female nerds when you think about it. I've had ten or so female bosses/project managers/whatnot, but only one socially awkward technically adept female colleague...
I can't help but think that in the "beaker intensive" fields, the picture must be different. There the specialists can't be an all male club, in fact I'd expect the opposite, but don't really have any experiences or facts to base that on.
Linux is Unix
Indeed. No less than Doug McIlroy thinks so. (Google his name + Linux). He should know. And even if he didn't, he has the credentials to proclaim it so. :-)
I don't think they were particularly sophisticated either; otherwise they would have put more effort into the delivery system. True, they were better than your typical Islamic terrorist organization, but that's not really saying much ...
Yes, with "sophisticated" I was more referring to the fact that they managed to make Sarin in the first place. This compared to your typical Islamic terrorist organisation that can't even mix proper explosives (or just steal some dynamite for crying out loud). So yes, that's indeed not saying much...
But speaking of the Sarin gas attack. I've always wondered about that. Given that it was the second time they tried it, and given that they were sophisticated enough to make it in the first place one has to wonder about the inept delivery system. I mean it would take someone five minutes to come up with a spray nozzle, tank and a CO2 cartridge. (Add a drop of acid or two to eat through the cartridge and you have a coarse time delay.)
So I can't help but wondering whether the delivery system was designed to be sub optimal, and whether that was an organisational goal or someone working within the organisation against it's goal? Or if they just were that screwed up? (Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything). When I last checked the public sources available to me I didn't find anything hard, apart from similar speculation.
A more real threat is chemical and biological (especially biological) warfare, though even there we've seen no serious attempts by any of the major players.
Well, maybe not a major player, but it's been tried. If they only had had a usable delivery system (other than just puncturing the canisters and leaving vapour pressure alone to do it's thing) it might have gotten much uglier than it did.
Many people in the west seem to forget this particular incident. Now, granted they were very sophisticated as terrorist organisations go, but what used to take a nation state is now within reach of a much smaller outfit.
If the end users knew better, they would be doing IT.
We did. Back in the day. But then we got our PhDs, our associate professorships, and are managing our own research groups. And make more money, and have a more interesting and rewarding job. In short we moved on. We've *been* you. And then we grew up.
We're not particularly impressed when we meet the umpteenth young whippersnapper with that very same attitude, thinking thery're all that and then some. Telling us what we can and can't do, why it's impossible, how expensive it would be if we managed our own Linux computers instead of buying the wonderful overpriced incompetent service from the IT dept.
In fact: we're quite weary of it. And we think what we think about "IT" accordingly.
What has Scandinavia got to do with Linux?
Linus is a native speaker of Swedish. In fact, one of the nice things about Linux back in the day was that I didn't have to fiddle with keyboard settings, it came with the Swedish layout as a default. :-) And Sweden is very much part of Scandinavia.
(For the humour impared, for these purposes I think it's OK to include Finland in "Scandinavia" as USians often confuse it with "Norden" of which Finland is definately a part. And it's fitting here since socio-economically/politically and structurally Finland is very much part of the Nordic tradition.)
whether Finlanders are really Scandinavian
Take it from a Swede, the Finns may be many things, and called many things, but "Scandinavian" isn't usually something we accuse them of being. :-)
I think you mean "nordic", as that usually is how "norden" is translated. As for explaining our relationship I like the old soc.culture.nordic statement: "We're like one big family. Not one big *happy* family mind you, no more like any old family." :-)
As for "Eastern europe" we'll just have to agree to disagree. After all, quoting wikipedia "Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term is highly context-dependent and even volatile, as there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"[1]."