Probably not from carrot juice though... beta-carotene is often used to dye lemonade
Re:Ummm, I've got a radical idea...
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 2
People with an altruistic mindset would do better sending the 3rd world surplus things that can't be produced locally at this time. Medicines for instance.
Re:Ummm, I've got a radical idea...
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 4
Instead of shipping new GMOs to various poor countries, why doesn't the US government
stop paying farmers not to produce food, and ship the resulting excess to those self same
countries?
This wouldn't be as nice as it sounds. Doing that, you ruin the local economy there. Farmers in the 3rd world cant hope to compete with the dump prices and high quality of the goods we don't need, and are forced to give up their work, and move to the city to live off the garbage.
The problem this vitamin A enriched rice was meant to tackle wasn't a complete lack of food (in that case food aid like you suggest would be more in place), but a lack of vitamins caused by a diet of rice alone...
The reason genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled is not just
for the company's sake, but to prevent a genetically-engineered strain from
out-competing natural strains
No, the reason is that the gene tech company doesn't want the farmers to use their crop without paying royalties. If this 'golden rice' were genetically crippeled in that way, it would make sure that the 3rd world farmers will have to buy new seed every season.
Domesticated crop isn't competitive in natural conditions at all. Many can't even reproduce without the aid of man. Having to spend extra energy making a protein that it doesn't need for itself (the protein that makes beta-carotene in this case) makes it even less competitive. A plant engineered to have resistance against a herbicide is only competitive if the herbicide is present. In natural conditions, without the herbicide present, it still has to spend energy making the herbicide resistance proteins.
Genetic engineering is NOT random trial and error, testing in the field, and hoping for the best, like traditional crop improvement techniques.
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
Of the many people who have tried to explain to me that genetic engineering is dangerous, none even seemed to know what a 'gene' is. Nor will they listen if you try to explain. They only know it is dangerous, not what it is. Apparently the knowledge itself is considered dangerous.
Too much vitamin A is bad for you. In high levels it is a known teratogen (can deform a foetus)
What's wrong with an election in two stages? The primary/caucus system make it a two stage election system already in a sense.
If primaries were abolished, and instead all candidates participated in the first round, and only the two candidates with the highest national percentage of the votes participated in the second round, everyone could vote for the candidate they like most, instead of against the candidate they like least. The fear of wasting your vote wouldn't have to influence your choice.
In a system like that, McCain might even have won the elections, and in the first round too.
Trying to compete with the price/performance ratio of the x86 architecture is a lost cause. The crusoe architecture might have a bright future if it could run Java byte code instead of x86 code.
English, Dutch and German were roughly the same language about 1000 years ago. English missionaries could travel along the north west coast of Europe trying to convert the heathens in their own language. In many ways English is a highly simplified version of German, with scandinavian, french and latin influences.
Even though German, French, Italian and Russian are far more common as a first or second language inside europe, English evolved into the third language of choice, to replace latin and French for that purpose. In my view the advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages.
The disadvantages are that since English is a living language, as opposed to Latin, native speakers have a strong advantage in education, and have less trouble getting their message accross to other people. (for example: Even though I am a scientist, an american intelligence test would probably classify me as a moron, because English doesn't come naturally to me, and my knowledge of the Anglo saxon cultural framework is limited)
People don't hate 'English' as such, it is convenient to have a standard tool for communicating with people from other parts of the world.
There is a lot of resistance against the attitude predominantly associated with anglo saxon culture (American- especially). It is a rare fusion of the Island mentality of the English, the evangelical attitude of the pilgrims and the empirial mindset usually found in superpowers (the Roman empire was a good example, so was the British empire, and so is the American empire now).
Americans seem to assume by default that every sane human being would want to be an american deep down inside, and that people who don't are suspicious, enemies or freedom and security world wide. Other models of free societies are usually dismissed as primitive, contrived or indecisive. Even the posted article suggests that the USA is the only truly free society.
Strong, often violent resistance against cola and hamburgers is often dismissed as religious fanaticism, anal retentive tendencies or downright jealousy, but the fact is that arabs really like being arabs, and they don't just pretend to, out of fear that Allah may otherwise strike them down. The French like being French, the Russians are proud of being Russian etc. I feel patronised and belittled when an American tourist asks me for directions in my city, and then corrects my grammar when I give them in his native language.
We'd all get along a lot better if Americans (especially in politics and business) would stop viewing the world as made up of only two groups: flawed wannabe americans on one hand, and enemies of all that is good and holy on the other hand.
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
on
X On OSX Now Free
·
· Score: 1
Erm, that very page you link here, seem to indicate a performance inbetween the AMD duron 600 and 700, both at roughly half the price.
You misinterpreted 'repeatable'. Being able to repeat the experiment doesn't imply creating a black hole of your own or something nonsensical like that. It means if someone else repeats the measurements on the same phenomenon, or a different but similar one, he or she will find the same data.
Compare it with revalations. Moses climbs a mountain, and receives 10 commandments from God. That is not a repeatable experiment. John smith climbs the same mountain, and receives nothing. There is no way to verify this experiment, and you will have to trust the word of Moses, and of the people who wrote the story down.
Engineers build a device to measure faint sources of radiation in space. They find a more or less constant background radiation in every direction. You can build a similar, or even a completely different device, and measure the same background radiation. You can repeat the experiment a hundred billion years from now, and you will still find the same background radiation (though slightly fainter). This experiment is repeatable, and it doesn't involve creating a new big bang.
If the writer of the article is right, then a nintendo console, your VCR, the Mars surveyor, just about any electronic device that isn't a mac or a windows PC cannot possibly have an operating system. I guess they just have a 'kernel' or 'some unnamed software thingy stuff'.
The point is that all these riscs you mention equally apply to other species of Bacillus, of which you will find millions if not billions of specimens in the dirt you scrape from under your fingernail after working in the garden.
The 'we just don't know' argument is obsolete. We do know. We have a very good understanding of how a Bacillus behaves, and what could potentially make them dangerous.
You can bet your life on the absolute certainty that if these ancient bacteria have a gene that makes them unusually competitive in our normal environment, there is absolutely no way that gene just died out on the surface.
All this aside, I don't believe for one second that these cells really are 250 million years old. Even if you could stop chemical degradation, over a timespan that long, you may even have to take nuclear decay into account. Radioactive isotopes (C-13 for instance) in the DNA as well as the repair proteins decaying, leaving holes behind. The bacteria probably became entrapped much later, perhaps only a few thousand years ago.
A man was sadly killed after attempting to play an ancient celtic horn. The exertion gave him a brain haemmorhage. The dangers of archaeological finds are very real indeed.
You mustn't think of bacteria as a 'disease'. They are self sufficient, independant organisms, and they are absolutely everywhere. Only a very small fraction of them is adapted to living inside the human body.
It is extremely unlikely that a bacterium adapted to survive in high saline conditions, and survive extremely long periods of being dead and desiccated can compete under normal conditions with the organisms already there.
It is no different with possible escaping herbicide resistance genes from genetically modified crop. The 'superweed' only has a competitive edge when sprayed with herbicide, and in the absence of that factor, it loses out over the centuries, because of the tiny amount of energy it wastes on synthesising the herbicide resistance proteins.
It didn't run so extremely well. x86-win32 binaries on alpha-nt ran slower than on the equivalent x86 hardware, and stability also suffered, and not everything worked. On top of that was the fact that native alpha-nt software didn't start appearing, and NT had to pretend your alpha was a 32 bit machine to run. In other words, there wasn't really a good reason to choose for NT.
Probably more accurately: the dominant 64 bit processor will be the one that runs your $K's worth of legacy 32 bit software reliably, and faster than its 32 bit predecessor. The other architectures will have to be amazingly faster, or amazingly cheaper than whatever intel offers, in order to outperform that huge advantage.
What I mean was that windows 95 was still usable with a dodgy memory chip, while NT and linux were not. By the way, I have never seen NT (-workstation, I can't comment on NT server) blue screen on good hardware. I sever saw a signal 11 again after fixing the hardware problem either.
Linux even appears to be more vulnerable to hardware failure than windows. See the signal 11 faq (no, not the slashdot user but the error message). I even experienced it myself. Under windows, the only randomness I experienced was a random crashing of the dos box. This didn't exactly strike me as something unusal. NT frequently showed me a blue screen, but everyone assured me that that was normal behaviour. Linux gave me a lot of signal 11's, especially when compiling, which the signal 11 faq explained almost certainly indicates a dodgy memory chip.
The reason why I removed my email from the user info page several years ago, is because it turns out users with something meaningful to say post, while people like you, who like to begin a discussion with words like 'fuckwit', find it necessary to mail you things in a similar theme, and subscribe you to a few dozen mailing lists to add to the point.
As an AC no-one can look at your previous posts, your account can't be blocked if you contribute nothing but flaming and trolling.
You might really be someone who knows about the vital importance of telecommuting in the USA. I only know it plays an insignificant role here in Europe. On the other hand, you might be a teenager who has never had a job, let alone a tele-commuting one, and who uses words like 'fuck' in an attempt to hide the fact that that is something he has never done, and never will do.
Those 10 computers weren't going to cost $1000 each in their vision. ESA didn't think they would need to launch a hundred million satelites to make investment in the new Ariane profitable either.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not from carrot juice though... beta-carotene is often used to dye lemonade
People with an altruistic mindset would do better sending the 3rd world surplus things that can't be produced locally at this time. Medicines for instance.
Instead of shipping new GMOs to various poor countries, why doesn't the US government
stop paying farmers not to produce food, and ship the resulting excess to those self same
countries?
This wouldn't be as nice as it sounds. Doing that, you ruin the local economy there. Farmers in the 3rd world cant hope to compete with the dump prices and high quality of the goods we don't need, and are forced to give up their work, and move to the city to live off the garbage.
The problem this vitamin A enriched rice was meant to tackle wasn't a complete lack of food (in that case food aid like you suggest would be more in place), but a lack of vitamins caused by a diet of rice alone...
The reason genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled is not just for the company's sake, but to prevent a genetically-engineered strain from out-competing natural strains
No, the reason is that the gene tech company doesn't want the farmers to use their crop without paying royalties. If this 'golden rice' were genetically crippeled in that way, it would make sure that the 3rd world farmers will have to buy new seed every season. Domesticated crop isn't competitive in natural conditions at all. Many can't even reproduce without the aid of man. Having to spend extra energy making a protein that it doesn't need for itself (the protein that makes beta-carotene in this case) makes it even less competitive. A plant engineered to have resistance against a herbicide is only competitive if the herbicide is present. In natural conditions, without the herbicide present, it still has to spend energy making the herbicide resistance proteins. Genetic engineering is NOT random trial and error, testing in the field, and hoping for the best, like traditional crop improvement techniques.
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
Of the many people who have tried to explain to me that genetic engineering is dangerous, none even seemed to know what a 'gene' is. Nor will they listen if you try to explain. They only know it is dangerous, not what it is. Apparently the knowledge itself is considered dangerous.
Too much vitamin A is bad for you. In high levels it is a known teratogen (can deform a foetus)
What's wrong with an election in two stages? The primary/caucus system make it a two stage election system already in a sense.
If primaries were abolished, and instead all candidates participated in the first round, and only the two candidates with the highest national percentage of the votes participated in the second round, everyone could vote for the candidate they like most, instead of against the candidate they like least. The fear of wasting your vote wouldn't have to influence your choice.
In a system like that, McCain might even have won the elections, and in the first round too.
Trying to compete with the price/performance ratio of the x86 architecture is a lost cause. The crusoe architecture might have a bright future if it could run Java byte code instead of x86 code.
English, Dutch and German were roughly the same language about 1000 years ago. English missionaries could travel along the north west coast of Europe trying to convert the heathens in their own language. In many ways English is a highly simplified version of German, with scandinavian, french and latin influences.
Even though German, French, Italian and Russian are far more common as a first or second language inside europe, English evolved into the third language of choice, to replace latin and French for that purpose. In my view the advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages.
The disadvantages are that since English is a living language, as opposed to Latin, native speakers have a strong advantage in education, and have less trouble getting their message accross to other people. (for example: Even though I am a scientist, an american intelligence test would probably classify me as a moron, because English doesn't come naturally to me, and my knowledge of the Anglo saxon cultural framework is limited)
People don't hate 'English' as such, it is convenient to have a standard tool for communicating with people from other parts of the world.
There is a lot of resistance against the attitude predominantly associated with anglo saxon culture (American- especially). It is a rare fusion of the Island mentality of the English, the evangelical attitude of the pilgrims and the empirial mindset usually found in superpowers (the Roman empire was a good example, so was the British empire, and so is the American empire now).
Americans seem to assume by default that every sane human being would want to be an american deep down inside, and that people who don't are suspicious, enemies or freedom and security world wide. Other models of free societies are usually dismissed as primitive, contrived or indecisive. Even the posted article suggests that the USA is the only truly free society.
Strong, often violent resistance against cola and hamburgers is often dismissed as religious fanaticism, anal retentive tendencies or downright jealousy, but the fact is that arabs really like being arabs, and they don't just pretend to, out of fear that Allah may otherwise strike them down. The French like being French, the Russians are proud of being Russian etc. I feel patronised and belittled when an American tourist asks me for directions in my city, and then corrects my grammar when I give them in his native language.
We'd all get along a lot better if Americans (especially in politics and business) would stop viewing the world as made up of only two groups: flawed wannabe americans on one hand, and enemies of all that is good and holy on the other hand.
Erm, that very page you link here, seem to indicate a performance inbetween the AMD duron 600 and 700, both at roughly half the price.
You misinterpreted 'repeatable'. Being able to repeat the experiment doesn't imply creating a black hole of your own or something nonsensical like that. It means if someone else repeats the measurements on the same phenomenon, or a different but similar one, he or she will find the same data.
Compare it with revalations. Moses climbs a mountain, and receives 10 commandments from God. That is not a repeatable experiment. John smith climbs the same mountain, and receives nothing. There is no way to verify this experiment, and you will have to trust the word of Moses, and of the people who wrote the story down.
Engineers build a device to measure faint sources of radiation in space. They find a more or less constant background radiation in every direction. You can build a similar, or even a completely different device, and measure the same background radiation. You can repeat the experiment a hundred billion years from now, and you will still find the same background radiation (though slightly fainter). This experiment is repeatable, and it doesn't involve creating a new big bang.
Don't forget Islam, which is also based on the old testament. There are only about a billion of them :)
Not that any of this matters, you don't discover how nature works by counting votes, but by observing nature.
If the writer of the article is right, then a nintendo console, your VCR, the Mars surveyor, just about any electronic device that isn't a mac or a windows PC cannot possibly have an operating system. I guess they just have a 'kernel' or 'some unnamed software thingy stuff'.
The point is that all these riscs you mention equally apply to other species of Bacillus, of which you will find millions if not billions of specimens in the dirt you scrape from under your fingernail after working in the garden.
The 'we just don't know' argument is obsolete. We do know. We have a very good understanding of how a Bacillus behaves, and what could potentially make them dangerous.
You can bet your life on the absolute certainty that if these ancient bacteria have a gene that makes them unusually competitive in our normal environment, there is absolutely no way that gene just died out on the surface.
All this aside, I don't believe for one second that these cells really are 250 million years old. Even if you could stop chemical degradation, over a timespan that long, you may even have to take nuclear decay into account. Radioactive isotopes (C-13 for instance) in the DNA as well as the repair proteins decaying, leaving holes behind. The bacteria probably became entrapped much later, perhaps only a few thousand years ago.
I didn't say it was unquestionably without any harm, but the escaping genes themselves pose no threat.
They've grown cultures of it! Dead organisms don't reproduce or metabolise.
A man was sadly killed after attempting to play an ancient celtic horn. The exertion gave him a brain haemmorhage. The dangers of archaeological finds are very real indeed.
You mustn't think of bacteria as a 'disease'. They are self sufficient, independant organisms, and they are absolutely everywhere. Only a very small fraction of them is adapted to living inside the human body.
It is extremely unlikely that a bacterium adapted to survive in high saline conditions, and survive extremely long periods of being dead and desiccated can compete under normal conditions with the organisms already there.
It is no different with possible escaping herbicide resistance genes from genetically modified crop. The 'superweed' only has a competitive edge when sprayed with herbicide, and in the absence of that factor, it loses out over the centuries, because of the tiny amount of energy it wastes on synthesising the herbicide resistance proteins.
It didn't run so extremely well. x86-win32 binaries on alpha-nt ran slower than on the equivalent x86 hardware, and stability also suffered, and not everything worked. On top of that was the fact that native alpha-nt software didn't start appearing, and NT had to pretend your alpha was a 32 bit machine to run. In other words, there wasn't really a good reason to choose for NT.
Probably more accurately: the dominant 64 bit processor will be the one that runs your $K's worth of legacy 32 bit software reliably, and faster than its 32 bit predecessor. The other architectures will have to be amazingly faster, or amazingly cheaper than whatever intel offers, in order to outperform that huge advantage.
What I mean was that windows 95 was still usable with a dodgy memory chip, while NT and linux were not. By the way, I have never seen NT (-workstation, I can't comment on NT server) blue screen on good hardware. I sever saw a signal 11 again after fixing the hardware problem either.
Linux even appears to be more vulnerable to hardware failure than windows. See the signal 11 faq (no, not the slashdot user but the error message). I even experienced it myself. Under windows, the only randomness I experienced was a random crashing of the dos box. This didn't exactly strike me as something unusal. NT frequently showed me a blue screen, but everyone assured me that that was normal behaviour. Linux gave me a lot of signal 11's, especially when compiling, which the signal 11 faq explained almost certainly indicates a dodgy memory chip.
The reason why I removed my email from the user info page several years ago, is because it turns out users with something meaningful to say post, while people like you, who like to begin a discussion with words like 'fuckwit', find it necessary to mail you things in a similar theme, and subscribe you to a few dozen mailing lists to add to the point.
As an AC no-one can look at your previous posts, your account can't be blocked if you contribute nothing but flaming and trolling.
You might really be someone who knows about the vital importance of telecommuting in the USA. I only know it plays an insignificant role here in Europe. On the other hand, you might be a teenager who has never had a job, let alone a tele-commuting one, and who uses words like 'fuck' in an attempt to hide the fact that that is something he has never done, and never will do.
And how many people do that? One in every thousand? One in ten thousand perhaps? Or even a hundred thousand?
Why do I even bother to reply to an AC
"There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
There is still no real NEED to have one in your home. There may be plenty of reasons why you WANT one, but how many people actually work at home?
Those 10 computers weren't going to cost $1000 each in their vision. ESA didn't think they would need to launch a hundred million satelites to make investment in the new Ariane profitable either.