what about folks like Mike Okuda? The man behind the TNG techincal manual and the Star Trek Encyclopedia? Who is reported to have the entire continuity in his head?
People like that should be the first against the wall.
insurance companies either require deductables on the order of thousands of dollars per procedure (where every tiny thing is it's own procedure) or they simply don't cover very much.
I think the second part here is more correct. Deductibles typically cover the entire year, not every procedure. If you have a $5,000 deductible and you amass $100,000 in medical bills, you will have to pay the $5,000, but you won't owe any more on that for the rest of the year.
Like you say, though, insurance companies typically don't pay all that much. They have set amounts that they have unilaterally decided each procedure is "worth." So your doctor might bill you $500 for a CT scan and the insurance company says, "No, sorry, we only pay $350 for a CT scan." My mom worked for many years in an office that did medical billing, and she explained to me that a doctor never, ever sees the full amount of any procedure billed to an insurance company. (This, incidentally, is why doctors and dentists of all stripes are desperate to get into cosmetic procedures -- insurance doesn't cover these, so the patient pays out of pocket, the full amount.)
For small procedures on an individual basis, doctors often "eat" the difference. You can see it on your medical bills when they show up: CT Scan, $500, Insurance contribution, $350, Balance remaining, $150, patient owes $0. But when your medical bills for multiple procedures start to add up -- especially if you spent any time in a hospital -- the institution kicks in and goes after you. In many cases they will have no qualms about sueing you for the balance, especially if the unpaid amount is adding up into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. As you point out, even hundreds of thousands of dollars isn't out of the question -- one nasty car accident might cost that much to the uninsured. It's a real shame, but the hospitals have a fair point -- what's a private medical group supposed to do when nobody's paying their bills?
Gollum was believable because of Andy Serkis; Jar-Jar just looked fake, as did many other CG characters in Star Wars.
Your analogy is flawed. You assume Gollum was a person and Jar-Jar was just computer generated. In fact, Jackson originally planned to do Gollum as entirely CG (check out his one scene in "Fellowship" to see what that would have looked like) but later changed his mind when he started working with Serkis. Jar-Jar's motion, on the other hand, was always referenced to a real person.
Also, I have found that when I do revise -- true of programming also, and thank God for CVS and friends -- it's entirely possible for my first couple of revisions to be good, but my tenth revision can make it much worse than the original.
Really? I am totally curious to hear at what point you discover that this has happened -- that you've made it worse. With me, the process of making revisions involves reading the draft and getting stuck at some point: "Uhhhhhh... something about this isn't working." If I change it and it still doesn't work then that's too bad... but the first version probably still sucked. But then, I'm not really talking about adding whole sections (midichlorians) the way you describe. In fact, I'm mostly talking about nonfiction... I'd have to think about how I'd approach it with fiction, where, like you say, it can be more treacherous.
I don't work on grammar, vocabulary, or sentence structure. Not consciously, anyway.
A lot of programmer types find it interesting when I tell them I have done this. But, yeah... at some point in my life I found myself in a position where I was using the written word for a living. And I said to myself, wait a minute -- I've probably read a dozen O'Reilly books, etc. That's what I did every time I wanted to learn Perl, or C, or whatever. Why not do the same thing with English? There are a number of books out there that really are full of good advice about how to write well. Strunk and White is the classic (though they seem to keep making it longer and adding stuff in later editions, which I think defeats the purpose somewhat), and another good one is "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. And still other books are good when you want to finally answer some of those weird questions once and for all, like when it's appropriate to use a semicolon. In truth, there aren't as many real, actual rules to writing as there are for programming. Most "rules" are really more like guidelines. But maybe it's just that if you can honestly say that you read it in a book that you're supposed to do it a certain way, it lets you proceed with more confidence and spend less time thinking how to write?
In the USA, a $300 phone is probably subsidized by your upwards of %50. That's why they lock you into multi-year contracts and sell you the first 10 seconds of a Blink-182 song for $2.50 a pop.
Uh, no. A BlackBerry 8100, brand new, retails for about $400, maybe a little less. Subsidized upwards of 50 percent (like mine was, because I signed the contract), it goes for $200. No contract, it's list price.
The reason I don't do second drafts is not out of shame. It's directly related to my writing style. I give myself a good keyboard, maybe some caffeine (or maybe not), and a half hour or an hour of time to kill, and I just write. Stream of consciousness. Brain to text file.
Well, sure, it depends on what you're writing. Long e-mail? I'll do it that way too. Something for publication? It wouldn't make any sense to do it that way -- except maybe for fiction, but probably not even then.
I suspect this is either because of some subtle and psychological fear of screwing up my work
Possibly. The point is, if you can get over that, you'll do better work.
If I could write the way I program, I might have two or three drafts, but that's it.
So who said you should have more? I don't really know how many "drafts" I go through. I'm usually on deadline, so I probably only do one second draft.
I suddenly have this urge to prove the grandparent wrong by publishing a first draft.
Nah, nah, you're not getting me. You're assuming that I must be a bad writer and that my revisions are all about fixing it so it's readable. It's not true. I'm willing to bet I write better than you do on the first draft. Why? No other reason than the fact that I've studied how to do it and you probably haven't (outside English class, where you probably didn't pay too much attention), and I've worked on things like grammar and vocabulary and sentence structure and composition every day for five years or more. You learn a thing or two in all that time. But I still do the editing pass. Seriously, next time you want to write something try putting it aside overnight and giving it a serious, critical read the next day. If you find anything that you feel like changing, you'll begin to see what I mean.
Re:My Grandfather the watchmaker...
on
Caller ID Watches
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
BUT PLEASE OMIT THe function requireing me to PRESS A GODDAM BUTTON !
Um... so... you don't push the button to send the call to voicemail. So your watch buzzes for a while and... the call goes to voicemail. Happy now? Wait -- even better. With your method, you don't even need to buy the watch.
There seems to be a belief that the first draft of anything should be perfect.
Speaking as a professional writer and magazine editor, I suspect that this is one of the things that holds more people back from becoming good writers. They look at their "finished" product -- their first draft -- and they think it's pretty much OK, maybe has a few flaws, and they plan to do better next time. They don't stop to think that they might be able to do better this time if they would just put the manuscript on a shelf for a day or two, give it a rest, then revisit it with a nice big blue Pilot G2 pen and start self-editing and rewriting. And that, most importantly, there is absolutely no shame in not doing it "perfect" ths first time around. Many professional writers will tell you that the process of rewriting actually takes longer than the process of writing, especially on longer manuscripts. My recommendation is, whatever it is you plan to write, give yourself an artificial deadline a little before you have to turn it in and plan to do some self-editing and rewriting during that time. I find that just sleeping on it for a night usually gives you enough time to revisit your work with fresh eyes.
It's not like Gartner is the only company in the industry telling companies to explore sourcing (offshore and otherwise). Pretty much every venture capital firm out there today has a policy in place that requires the companies they invest in to have an offshoring/sourcing strategy. There are many reasons why offshoring, when applied correctly, makes great business sense. So to suggest that it's big, bad Gartner whispering in the ears of corporate America that's causing the outsourcing trend is overreacting a little bit.
It seems like most of the advice Gartner dishes out, with its "magic quadrants" and what-not, is about which products to buy.
It's always easy to be a naysayer. If you draw up a totally arbitrary list of achievements, then obviously you can decide that the list stops where you want it to stop, and includes only what you want it to include.
You seem to like aerospace. What about the International Space Station? The Hubble Telescope? And most scientists would probably disagree with you that the recent Mars missions were about doing a "Viking rehash."
Similarly, why dismiss what's been done in the computing fields? Is incremental research bad? Is it indicative of "no progress"?
What about data storage? The demand for storage for digital media of all kinds have skyrocketed beyond all imaginable proportion since 1986, and yet we've pretty much managed to meet that demand. SAN networks, Fibre channel, the DVD, cheap flash memory -- all new.
There were no LCD televisions in 1986. I don't even remember seeing a color LCD screen of any kind. A 32 inch one would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Much of the innovation in recent years has been in the life sciences. What about sequencing the human genome? What about stem cell research?
For that matter, what about the ongoing search for a cure for AIDS? Sure, we still don't have one. But in 1986, when you say "stagnation starts," contracting HIV meant a rapid decline into ill health and an unpleasant death. Today, HIV positive people can live more-or-less normal lives, if they receive ongoing treatment. That treatment might allow them to live long enough to see a true cure.
I could go on and on. Read some science magazines from time to time, instead of only paying attention to what hits the nightly news.
Seconded. If you make a standard open (PDF) you should expect people to integrate it with other apps.
Microsoft is not integrating its own PDF creation software into Vista. Microsoft is building software into Vista that reads and writes a Microsoft-created file format called XML Paper Specification (XPS). This is what Adobe is protesting. Adobe would prefer that it was PDF.
Adobe made PDF a standard because it was counting on people integrating it into their apps. What Adobe wasn't counting on is Microsoft coming along and saying, "Screw that, we don't want your standard."
Either way, it still sounds like sour grapes to me.
It's an incredible waste of screen space (not to mention scrolling time) to display each and every page with its headers&footers, not to mention the blank background between pages.
Office 2003 has an additional feature in "Print Mode" where you can opt to just eliminate the extra space. So you see all the formatting and the bubble-style comments, but you don't see headers and footers where there are none. I'd settle for something similar.
Nostalgia will do wonderfull things to your memories:-\
I just watched a couple last week. Anyone who's looking forward to these as "new episodes of the original series" needs to do themselves a favor and get on BitTorrent. Some of the writing is ambitious, but even by the standards of Saturday-morning cartoons of the era, these are pretty lame.
It makes me cringe that there are so many Trekkies who have seemed to have lost hold of the concept. It's actually one of the few things I truly give Shatner real credit for; his ability to laugh at how absurd a majority of the Trek Nation has gotten about a TV show.
The funny thing is, Shatner seems to agree with me about Star Trek. He doesn't claim to be a big fan of the show, but I've never heard him say "oh ho ho, people love it because it's such high camp. Oh ho ho, what a stupid joke it all is." He, like me, believes the longevity of the show is due to the relationship between Kirk and Spock -- either that, or nobody really knows what makes it so popular.
I'm not an idiot. When I was a kid, I thought the Horta (the monster that burrows through solid rock) looked like a piece of slightly burnt lasagna. That didn't make me say, "Hee hee hee, I want to watch that stupid lasagna show." I bought the premise anyway, despite the fact that it obviously wasn't "real." It was a sci-fi show. Obviously it was about your imagination.
Forty years after TOS aired and they're still making rehashes of the same ideas... they're still making TV shows about spaceships that travel faster than the speed of light and beams that can transport people from one place to the other. And you're telling me the original is camp??
Bottom line, if the only way you can enjoy a dated TV series is by laughing at it, well... I kinda feel sorry for you. You keep trying to imply that I'm some kind of rabid Trekkie. Unfortunately, it's you who sound like one. You seem to have a lot more invested in your "ho ho ho" than I do in just enjoying the reruns. Maybe it's you who needs to get over yourself. Maybe if you weren't so self-conscious about whether people are going to think you're a Trekkie or not, you could enjoy the show for what it is. As it stands, I'd say your insecurities are getting in the way of enjoying some fine old television.
I hear this argument about Doctor Who all the time and I call bullshit either way.
You like to think that you like Star Trek (or Doctor Who) because of the cheese, but you didn't. If you saw these shows as a kid, you fell in love with them because of the memorable characters, engaging plots, the strong moral messages, and (yes) a sense of wonder at the imaginative settings, creatures, and situations. Seriously. You fell in love with these shows because you liked them -- don't try to intellectualize your way out of it now that you're all growed up.
When you're looking to buy a startup, do you go for one that's just had a massive lawsuit filed against it by the entertainment industry?
Maybe not, but I wonder... if you're looking to buy a startup, is it easier to pay money for them or to sue them for so much that you end up owning them without any money changing hands?
Hell yeah! That's why, when I want to share my tunes with the people around me, I just bring my boombox with me on the bus. I don't even have to turn it up all the way and they can hear it all the way to the front seats.
Bingo. My sister had to endure the same thing as part of a rape self-defense class -- although I don't think it was a full blast to the face, and I think this was still "mace," back before pepper spray became popular. But anyway, in her case the idea is that you're using the pepper spray as a way of getting away from an attacker. You don't control the environment when you're getting attacked, and because of wind, room dimensions, etc., it's very likely that some of the stuff is going to get into your own eyes. If you stop, freak out, and think you're going blind, you'll fail to escape the attacker, which defeats the purpose. My sister was taught to assume it was going to hurt her every time she pulled the trigger, but to pull it anyway.
I'm not arguing against either one. I'm recommending a book. The grandparent was wondering whether all the worry about GM crops is based on bullshit. I suggest that it is not, but that the more legitimate worries have less to do with evil "Frankenfoods" and more to do with a trend toward industrialized agriculture. Your reasonable points continue to explain how complex an issue this is.
This is a really good question. It's also a really complex one. The best book on the topic that I know of is called Lords of the Harvest, by Daniel Charles. Its a comprehensive and mostly unbiased look at the history of biotech and what it means for society and the future of food.
Charles really manages to sum up both sides of the argument pretty well. For one thing, he explains pretty much what you say Penn & Teller have said: that this stuff just ain't the demonic conspiracy a lot of people want to believe it is. A lot of genetically modified foods are produced by bombarding cells with radiation, or bathing them in chemicals that cause genes to replicate in random ways. In other words, scientists are just forcing the natural process of random mutation that occurs any time life reproduces. Very few GM organisms are created by piecing together bits of this or that -- it's too hard to do successfully.
There is something to be said for "feeding the starving," too, as you say. In certain parts of the world, certain plant diseases are so rampant that you just can't grow a lot of crops. They will grow poorly and not yield what they could in order to feed people. A lot of GM crops aim to solve this problem.
But there are more troubling aspects as well. Here at home, the reasons for using GM crops seem less cut and dried. To give one fairly benign example, a ton of work has been put into genetically modifying tomatoes -- but not to make them taste better, or to be more nutritious. No, scientists modify tomatoes so that they will have more cellulose in them, which makes them take longer to ripen and go soft. That way they can be transported farther without spoilage. Of course, it also makes them sort of taste like a piece of celery. The modifications are done solely for the business of agriculture, not for the customer's benefit.
More troubling is that many of the stated aims of biotech have not come to fruition. At one time, scientists promised that GM crops would be resilient to pests and diseases. If a boll weevil couldn't eat a certain crop, you'd no longer have to dump pesticides all over it, which would make farming more environmentally friendly! Well, that sort of happened. But the most popular GM crops of all, as it turns out, are these herbicide resistant crops like TFA talks about. These are plants that can't be killed by modern herbicides. The reason you want that is because weeds can be killed by modern herbicides. So instead of hiring people to go and painstakingly remove all the weeds from your fields, you just repeatedly spray your fields with herbicides. In other words, with GM farming you're actually using more chemicals than traditional farming. And why not? Because the same company is selling you both the GM crops and the chemicals.
And then you have the intellectual property issues. Most of these GM crops are patented. If you are a farmer and you want to plant GM corn, you have to buy it under a license from Monsanto (for example). Typically, that license will include a clause that says you can never plant corn that you grow. Got that? You have a whole field full of ears of corn, and you are forbidden to take any of that corn and put it in the soil to grow next year's crop. You must buy all your seed directly from Monsanto, year after year. And Monsanto sends people out to test your crops, too! If you're not licensed to be growing GM corn this year, and they pick an ear off one of your plants and they determine that it's GM corn, they will actually sue you. (And yes, there have been "false positives" -- false, because the farmer did not knowingly do anything wrong, because his crops were cross-pollinated through the air with GM crops.) To many people, this move toward farming as a new kind of industrial complex controlled by gigantic, multinational corporations is very troubling. To what extent is it appropriate for these corporations to control our food supply?
Slashdot Mirror
People like that should be the first against the wall.
Seriously.
I dunno, man. I really enjoy Barry Lyndon, but Master and Commander might have it beat.
I think the second part here is more correct. Deductibles typically cover the entire year, not every procedure. If you have a $5,000 deductible and you amass $100,000 in medical bills, you will have to pay the $5,000, but you won't owe any more on that for the rest of the year.
Like you say, though, insurance companies typically don't pay all that much. They have set amounts that they have unilaterally decided each procedure is "worth." So your doctor might bill you $500 for a CT scan and the insurance company says, "No, sorry, we only pay $350 for a CT scan." My mom worked for many years in an office that did medical billing, and she explained to me that a doctor never, ever sees the full amount of any procedure billed to an insurance company. (This, incidentally, is why doctors and dentists of all stripes are desperate to get into cosmetic procedures -- insurance doesn't cover these, so the patient pays out of pocket, the full amount.)
For small procedures on an individual basis, doctors often "eat" the difference. You can see it on your medical bills when they show up: CT Scan, $500, Insurance contribution, $350, Balance remaining, $150, patient owes $0. But when your medical bills for multiple procedures start to add up -- especially if you spent any time in a hospital -- the institution kicks in and goes after you. In many cases they will have no qualms about sueing you for the balance, especially if the unpaid amount is adding up into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. As you point out, even hundreds of thousands of dollars isn't out of the question -- one nasty car accident might cost that much to the uninsured. It's a real shame, but the hospitals have a fair point -- what's a private medical group supposed to do when nobody's paying their bills?
Your analogy is flawed. You assume Gollum was a person and Jar-Jar was just computer generated. In fact, Jackson originally planned to do Gollum as entirely CG (check out his one scene in "Fellowship" to see what that would have looked like) but later changed his mind when he started working with Serkis. Jar-Jar's motion, on the other hand, was always referenced to a real person.
Really? I am totally curious to hear at what point you discover that this has happened -- that you've made it worse. With me, the process of making revisions involves reading the draft and getting stuck at some point: "Uhhhhhh... something about this isn't working." If I change it and it still doesn't work then that's too bad... but the first version probably still sucked. But then, I'm not really talking about adding whole sections (midichlorians) the way you describe. In fact, I'm mostly talking about nonfiction ... I'd have to think about how I'd approach it with fiction, where, like you say, it can be more treacherous.
A lot of programmer types find it interesting when I tell them I have done this. But, yeah... at some point in my life I found myself in a position where I was using the written word for a living. And I said to myself, wait a minute -- I've probably read a dozen O'Reilly books, etc. That's what I did every time I wanted to learn Perl, or C, or whatever. Why not do the same thing with English? There are a number of books out there that really are full of good advice about how to write well. Strunk and White is the classic (though they seem to keep making it longer and adding stuff in later editions, which I think defeats the purpose somewhat), and another good one is "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. And still other books are good when you want to finally answer some of those weird questions once and for all, like when it's appropriate to use a semicolon. In truth, there aren't as many real, actual rules to writing as there are for programming. Most "rules" are really more like guidelines. But maybe it's just that if you can honestly say that you read it in a book that you're supposed to do it a certain way, it lets you proceed with more confidence and spend less time thinking how to write?Uh, no. A BlackBerry 8100, brand new, retails for about $400, maybe a little less. Subsidized upwards of 50 percent (like mine was, because I signed the contract), it goes for $200. No contract, it's list price.
$600 is expensive for a phone.
Well, sure, it depends on what you're writing. Long e-mail? I'll do it that way too. Something for publication? It wouldn't make any sense to do it that way -- except maybe for fiction, but probably not even then.
Possibly. The point is, if you can get over that, you'll do better work.
So who said you should have more? I don't really know how many "drafts" I go through. I'm usually on deadline, so I probably only do one second draft.
Nah, nah, you're not getting me. You're assuming that I must be a bad writer and that my revisions are all about fixing it so it's readable. It's not true. I'm willing to bet I write better than you do on the first draft. Why? No other reason than the fact that I've studied how to do it and you probably haven't (outside English class, where you probably didn't pay too much attention), and I've worked on things like grammar and vocabulary and sentence structure and composition every day for five years or more. You learn a thing or two in all that time. But I still do the editing pass. Seriously, next time you want to write something try putting it aside overnight and giving it a serious, critical read the next day. If you find anything that you feel like changing, you'll begin to see what I mean.
Um ... so ... you don't push the button to send the call to voicemail. So your watch buzzes for a while and ... the call goes to voicemail. Happy now? Wait -- even better. With your method, you don't even need to buy the watch.
Speaking as a professional writer and magazine editor, I suspect that this is one of the things that holds more people back from becoming good writers. They look at their "finished" product -- their first draft -- and they think it's pretty much OK, maybe has a few flaws, and they plan to do better next time. They don't stop to think that they might be able to do better this time if they would just put the manuscript on a shelf for a day or two, give it a rest, then revisit it with a nice big blue Pilot G2 pen and start self-editing and rewriting. And that, most importantly, there is absolutely no shame in not doing it "perfect" ths first time around. Many professional writers will tell you that the process of rewriting actually takes longer than the process of writing, especially on longer manuscripts. My recommendation is, whatever it is you plan to write, give yourself an artificial deadline a little before you have to turn it in and plan to do some self-editing and rewriting during that time. I find that just sleeping on it for a night usually gives you enough time to revisit your work with fresh eyes.
Uh... yeah. Not too terrible. You made $15 an hour.
It's not like Gartner is the only company in the industry telling companies to explore sourcing (offshore and otherwise). Pretty much every venture capital firm out there today has a policy in place that requires the companies they invest in to have an offshoring/sourcing strategy. There are many reasons why offshoring, when applied correctly, makes great business sense. So to suggest that it's big, bad Gartner whispering in the ears of corporate America that's causing the outsourcing trend is overreacting a little bit.
It seems like most of the advice Gartner dishes out, with its "magic quadrants" and what-not, is about which products to buy.
It's always easy to be a naysayer. If you draw up a totally arbitrary list of achievements, then obviously you can decide that the list stops where you want it to stop, and includes only what you want it to include.
You seem to like aerospace. What about the International Space Station? The Hubble Telescope? And most scientists would probably disagree with you that the recent Mars missions were about doing a "Viking rehash."
Similarly, why dismiss what's been done in the computing fields? Is incremental research bad? Is it indicative of "no progress"?
What about data storage? The demand for storage for digital media of all kinds have skyrocketed beyond all imaginable proportion since 1986, and yet we've pretty much managed to meet that demand. SAN networks, Fibre channel, the DVD, cheap flash memory -- all new.
There were no LCD televisions in 1986. I don't even remember seeing a color LCD screen of any kind. A 32 inch one would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Much of the innovation in recent years has been in the life sciences. What about sequencing the human genome? What about stem cell research?
For that matter, what about the ongoing search for a cure for AIDS? Sure, we still don't have one. But in 1986, when you say "stagnation starts," contracting HIV meant a rapid decline into ill health and an unpleasant death. Today, HIV positive people can live more-or-less normal lives, if they receive ongoing treatment. That treatment might allow them to live long enough to see a true cure.
I could go on and on. Read some science magazines from time to time, instead of only paying attention to what hits the nightly news.
Microsoft is not integrating its own PDF creation software into Vista. Microsoft is building software into Vista that reads and writes a Microsoft-created file format called XML Paper Specification (XPS). This is what Adobe is protesting. Adobe would prefer that it was PDF.
Adobe made PDF a standard because it was counting on people integrating it into their apps. What Adobe wasn't counting on is Microsoft coming along and saying, "Screw that, we don't want your standard."
Either way, it still sounds like sour grapes to me.
Office 2003 has an additional feature in "Print Mode" where you can opt to just eliminate the extra space. So you see all the formatting and the bubble-style comments, but you don't see headers and footers where there are none. I'd settle for something similar.
I just watched a couple last week. Anyone who's looking forward to these as "new episodes of the original series" needs to do themselves a favor and get on BitTorrent. Some of the writing is ambitious, but even by the standards of Saturday-morning cartoons of the era, these are pretty lame.
The funny thing is, Shatner seems to agree with me about Star Trek. He doesn't claim to be a big fan of the show, but I've never heard him say "oh ho ho, people love it because it's such high camp. Oh ho ho, what a stupid joke it all is." He, like me, believes the longevity of the show is due to the relationship between Kirk and Spock -- either that, or nobody really knows what makes it so popular.
I'm not an idiot. When I was a kid, I thought the Horta (the monster that burrows through solid rock) looked like a piece of slightly burnt lasagna. That didn't make me say, "Hee hee hee, I want to watch that stupid lasagna show." I bought the premise anyway, despite the fact that it obviously wasn't "real." It was a sci-fi show. Obviously it was about your imagination.
Forty years after TOS aired and they're still making rehashes of the same ideas... they're still making TV shows about spaceships that travel faster than the speed of light and beams that can transport people from one place to the other. And you're telling me the original is camp??
Bottom line, if the only way you can enjoy a dated TV series is by laughing at it, well ... I kinda feel sorry for you. You keep trying to imply that I'm some kind of rabid Trekkie. Unfortunately, it's you who sound like one. You seem to have a lot more invested in your "ho ho ho" than I do in just enjoying the reruns. Maybe it's you who needs to get over yourself. Maybe if you weren't so self-conscious about whether people are going to think you're a Trekkie or not, you could enjoy the show for what it is. As it stands, I'd say your insecurities are getting in the way of enjoying some fine old television.
CBS bought Desilu.
I hear this argument about Doctor Who all the time and I call bullshit either way.
You like to think that you like Star Trek (or Doctor Who) because of the cheese, but you didn't. If you saw these shows as a kid, you fell in love with them because of the memorable characters, engaging plots, the strong moral messages, and (yes) a sense of wonder at the imaginative settings, creatures, and situations. Seriously. You fell in love with these shows because you liked them -- don't try to intellectualize your way out of it now that you're all growed up.
Maybe not, but I wonder ... if you're looking to buy a startup, is it easier to pay money for them or to sue them for so much that you end up owning them without any money changing hands?
Hell yeah! That's why, when I want to share my tunes with the people around me, I just bring my boombox with me on the bus. I don't even have to turn it up all the way and they can hear it all the way to the front seats.
Where's the evidence of this?
Then it won't sell real well to people who want an MP3 player, will it?
Bingo. My sister had to endure the same thing as part of a rape self-defense class -- although I don't think it was a full blast to the face, and I think this was still "mace," back before pepper spray became popular. But anyway, in her case the idea is that you're using the pepper spray as a way of getting away from an attacker. You don't control the environment when you're getting attacked, and because of wind, room dimensions, etc., it's very likely that some of the stuff is going to get into your own eyes. If you stop, freak out, and think you're going blind, you'll fail to escape the attacker, which defeats the purpose. My sister was taught to assume it was going to hurt her every time she pulled the trigger, but to pull it anyway.
I'm not arguing against either one. I'm recommending a book. The grandparent was wondering whether all the worry about GM crops is based on bullshit. I suggest that it is not, but that the more legitimate worries have less to do with evil "Frankenfoods" and more to do with a trend toward industrialized agriculture. Your reasonable points continue to explain how complex an issue this is.
Did you not resd the part where I said I recommended the book because it presents both sides of the argument?
This is a really good question. It's also a really complex one. The best book on the topic that I know of is called Lords of the Harvest, by Daniel Charles. Its a comprehensive and mostly unbiased look at the history of biotech and what it means for society and the future of food.
Charles really manages to sum up both sides of the argument pretty well. For one thing, he explains pretty much what you say Penn & Teller have said: that this stuff just ain't the demonic conspiracy a lot of people want to believe it is. A lot of genetically modified foods are produced by bombarding cells with radiation, or bathing them in chemicals that cause genes to replicate in random ways. In other words, scientists are just forcing the natural process of random mutation that occurs any time life reproduces. Very few GM organisms are created by piecing together bits of this or that -- it's too hard to do successfully.
There is something to be said for "feeding the starving," too, as you say. In certain parts of the world, certain plant diseases are so rampant that you just can't grow a lot of crops. They will grow poorly and not yield what they could in order to feed people. A lot of GM crops aim to solve this problem.
But there are more troubling aspects as well. Here at home, the reasons for using GM crops seem less cut and dried. To give one fairly benign example, a ton of work has been put into genetically modifying tomatoes -- but not to make them taste better, or to be more nutritious. No, scientists modify tomatoes so that they will have more cellulose in them, which makes them take longer to ripen and go soft. That way they can be transported farther without spoilage. Of course, it also makes them sort of taste like a piece of celery. The modifications are done solely for the business of agriculture, not for the customer's benefit.
More troubling is that many of the stated aims of biotech have not come to fruition. At one time, scientists promised that GM crops would be resilient to pests and diseases. If a boll weevil couldn't eat a certain crop, you'd no longer have to dump pesticides all over it, which would make farming more environmentally friendly! Well, that sort of happened. But the most popular GM crops of all, as it turns out, are these herbicide resistant crops like TFA talks about. These are plants that can't be killed by modern herbicides. The reason you want that is because weeds can be killed by modern herbicides. So instead of hiring people to go and painstakingly remove all the weeds from your fields, you just repeatedly spray your fields with herbicides. In other words, with GM farming you're actually using more chemicals than traditional farming. And why not? Because the same company is selling you both the GM crops and the chemicals.
And then you have the intellectual property issues. Most of these GM crops are patented. If you are a farmer and you want to plant GM corn, you have to buy it under a license from Monsanto (for example). Typically, that license will include a clause that says you can never plant corn that you grow. Got that? You have a whole field full of ears of corn, and you are forbidden to take any of that corn and put it in the soil to grow next year's crop. You must buy all your seed directly from Monsanto, year after year. And Monsanto sends people out to test your crops, too! If you're not licensed to be growing GM corn this year, and they pick an ear off one of your plants and they determine that it's GM corn, they will actually sue you. (And yes, there have been "false positives" -- false, because the farmer did not knowingly do anything wrong, because his crops were cross-pollinated through the air with GM crops.) To many people, this move toward farming as a new kind of industrial complex controlled by gigantic, multinational corporations is very troubling. To what extent is it appropriate for these corporations to control our food supply?
Anyway, that's just a snapshot