Whoah, time to take a step back. I'm a little unclear on how Bush is liberal at all. You may not like his policies, but they are pretty much straight down the social conservative and neoconservative party lines. Neither of which could be called liberal by any stretch of the imagination.
Liberals (like myself!) generally want increased envronmental controls, more internationalism, lots of social safety nets, more peace, and progressive tax rates. Many of them (like myself!) also support a high degree of individual freedom. I find it hard to call the USAPATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, or the no-gay-marriage amendment liberal in the least. Liberal doesn't mean "I, as a conservative, don't like it". Bush might be accurately called a fascist, but fascism is an extreme form of conservatism.
Unless, of course, you are from any other English speaking country, in which case your confusion about how we use the labels "liberal" and "conservative" is quite understandable.
We've been making roundup-ready soybeans for years. Just hose the field down and everything else dies. The next step (still under development) is plants that automatically kill their adjacent weeds. Seem like a bad idea to me, but that's not stopping people from doing it.
Resistance to antibiotics
This was a little non-linear on my part, so I will try to explain: part of the modification process involves conferring antibiotic resistance into the things being spliced together. We shotgun a bunch of genetic material together, and then we make it so that the ones we want to make are resistant to antibiotics. Then we kill off (using antibiotics) every cell in which the modification didn't take. Leaving behind things with the properties we want, and some antibiotic resistance. Which at a gut level is bad for plants - and in many very real ways is bad for animals.
Will peanuts?...
Ah, but you see, GM foods pollinate with non-GM foods quite easily. There are known cases of fields becoming "contaminated" by their adjacent GM crops. It's not the GM corn I'm worried about, it's the effects of having my neighbor's GM corn next to my regular corn.
Lots of plants generate their own poisons
True. But they evolved to do that. Us tinkering to raise the yield of that herbi- or pesti- cide by an order of magnitude or two could have devastating effects in the long term. We don't know.
I guess it all comes down to the fact that we don't know. I'm of the opinion that the way we've been dealing with GM so far has been haphazard, barely scientific, and downright dangerous. Approval is granted to companies that do their own studies showing that the crops they want are safe to plant under certain guidelines. This approval is then rubberstamped and the crops are sent to farmers who plant them like traditional crops, thus making a risky situation worse. We DON'T KNOW what the effects of this will be. We have conducted no long term studies, and too many of the short term studies are funded by people who require a specific result.
So I think that we should stop plunging headlong into this situation, and move a lot more cautiously. Golden rice and the like has the potential to get rid of hunger - but other things have the potential to cause famine around the world. But whenever someone says "tread cautiously" they get tarred with an anti-science brush, which is an unfair characterization. The truth is that we don't know, and are going forward with it anyway.
Ah, but what will they be growing? Will it have the terminator gene built in? Will it be producing its own roundup to dump into our water table? Will it kill people with peanut allergies? Will it have a super strong resistance to antibiotics?
GM holds a lot of promise, but right now the people pushing GM foods onto the market are the ones I am the least likely to trust. Monsanto, in particular, has far too questionable a history for me to trust their products. Golden rice sounds great. Golden rice that is sterile and forces the farmers growing it to be serfs to Monsanto is not so great. Corn that produces its own pesticide is very bad - it will be laying down roundup when it isn't needed in an effort to put as much crap into the water table and promoting resistance at the same time.
I see nothign anti-science about advocating caution. Particularly after people have been lied to so much by the same people telling us to eat up.
And this was done here! They gave a certain task to a bunch of programmers in 1999 and they solved the program using many different languages and reported on how long it took them, etc. Results are really only valid for Java as it was in 1999 (but the same is true for Python as well). Check it out at: http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtT R.pdf
I could easily provide examples which demonstrate the opposite
Please do, as I have never seen any, and I have looked. It really does seem that Python requires physically less code to accomplish the same task when compared to Java or C/C++.
I did Java professionally for 2 years, and now I program python for research purposes in grad school, and I'm producing stuff more quickly than I could have with Java - and I have about 100 hours experience with Python and about 4000 hours experience with Java. So either there is a real difference, or the two languages are equivalent and I coincidentally became approximately 400% more efficient at THE EXACT SAME TIME I switched to python. (I estimate a factor of 4 improvement in my speed to goal)
Rather than assuming that I magically got 4x better, I blame at least a little of it on the language.
"they" won't police anything. But it does mean that privacy, instead of being only for cops, is for nobody. Thus, it gives interested citizens a chance to "watch the watchmen". You'll note that the link for the story goes to PRIVACY.cmu.edu.
I view this technology as a democratization of the surveillance cameras that are ubiquitous in large areas. With this, anyone can get the data from the original source - no waiting for the police to release it, no FOX-ification. So why would you want to *police* this? Nobody is required to do anything based on what they see, it just gives people the ability to see in the first place.
True, but when most people think of genetic engineering, they think of gene splicing - and gene splicing has the crappy side effects of possible allergen contamination (people allergic to peanuts becoming allergic to the new kind of corn as well) as well as antibiotic resistance (due to the method most places use for gne splicing).
It's like the word "organic". Sure, it originally meant "molecule that contains no metals", but it has gotten another meaning now, that of "no fertilizers or pesticides". So try not to be a pedant - language is an evolving beast.
Already happening, actually - TV stations are being mandated to go digital by 2006 (or maybe '07), which will make all existing non-digital TVs obsolete.
So as long as we're screwing the poor, we might as well go all out. (TWAJS)
But what about the many bugs in most JVM's? Are you sure that your java code won't tickle these bugs and bring the whole system down? What about bugs that aren't just buffer overflows? What about it dropping a fork bomb on the system? What about memory leaks (harder with Java, but still very possible)? What about running out of memory?
As far as I can tell the only way to get code that doesn't flop over in these situations is by "employing programming whizzes or spending a fortune on testing".
You're making the fallacious assumption that, in the absence of an ISS, people will be inspired (and have enough money) to go to Mars. Unfortunately, that's not how funding works at this level. They have money for the ISS, and, should they not spend that on the ISS, it goes back in the US general coffers.
Besides, it's not money that's holding us back from doing inspiring this - it's estimated to cost between 2 and 5 billion to send a person to Mars, which is peanuts with regard to the national budget. We have the ways and the means. Just not the will, and canceling big flashy space projects is not how to convince people that space exploration is a good idea.
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> liberal Republicans, like Bush
Whoah, time to take a step back. I'm a little unclear on how Bush is liberal at all. You may not like his policies, but they are pretty much straight down the social conservative and neoconservative party lines. Neither of which could be called liberal by any stretch of the imagination.
Liberals (like myself!) generally want increased envronmental controls, more internationalism, lots of social safety nets, more peace, and progressive tax rates. Many of them (like myself!) also support a high degree of individual freedom. I find it hard to call the USAPATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, or the no-gay-marriage amendment liberal in the least. Liberal doesn't mean "I, as a conservative, don't like it". Bush might be accurately called a fascist, but fascism is an extreme form of conservatism.
Unless, of course, you are from any other English speaking country, in which case your confusion about how we use the labels "liberal" and "conservative" is quite understandable.
Techno-determinism will only buy you so much, here, dude.
...
Doesn't exist. Monsanto terminated the project.
Only after public outcry from "anti-science" folks such as myself and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Why would a plant generate herbicide?
We've been making roundup-ready soybeans for years. Just hose the field down and everything else dies. The next step (still under development) is plants that automatically kill their adjacent weeds. Seem like a bad idea to me, but that's not stopping people from doing it.
Resistance to antibiotics
This was a little non-linear on my part, so I will try to explain: part of the modification process involves conferring antibiotic resistance into the things being spliced together. We shotgun a bunch of genetic material together, and then we make it so that the ones we want to make are resistant to antibiotics. Then we kill off (using antibiotics) every cell in which the modification didn't take. Leaving behind things with the properties we want, and some antibiotic resistance. Which at a gut level is bad for plants - and in many very real ways is bad for animals.
Will peanuts?
Ah, but you see, GM foods pollinate with non-GM foods quite easily. There are known cases of fields becoming "contaminated" by their adjacent GM crops. It's not the GM corn I'm worried about, it's the effects of having my neighbor's GM corn next to my regular corn.
Lots of plants generate their own poisons
True. But they evolved to do that. Us tinkering to raise the yield of that herbi- or pesti- cide by an order of magnitude or two could have devastating effects in the long term. We don't know.
I guess it all comes down to the fact that we don't know. I'm of the opinion that the way we've been dealing with GM so far has been haphazard, barely scientific, and downright dangerous. Approval is granted to companies that do their own studies showing that the crops they want are safe to plant under certain guidelines. This approval is then rubberstamped and the crops are sent to farmers who plant them like traditional crops, thus making a risky situation worse. We DON'T KNOW what the effects of this will be. We have conducted no long term studies, and too many of the short term studies are funded by people who require a specific result.
So I think that we should stop plunging headlong into this situation, and move a lot more cautiously. Golden rice and the like has the potential to get rid of hunger - but other things have the potential to cause famine around the world. But whenever someone says "tread cautiously" they get tarred with an anti-science brush, which is an unfair characterization. The truth is that we don't know, and are going forward with it anyway.
Ah, but what will they be growing? Will it have the terminator gene built in? Will it be producing its own roundup to dump into our water table? Will it kill people with peanut allergies? Will it have a super strong resistance to antibiotics?
GM holds a lot of promise, but right now the people pushing GM foods onto the market are the ones I am the least likely to trust. Monsanto, in particular, has far too questionable a history for me to trust their products. Golden rice sounds great. Golden rice that is sterile and forces the farmers growing it to be serfs to Monsanto is not so great. Corn that produces its own pesticide is very bad - it will be laying down roundup when it isn't needed in an effort to put as much crap into the water table and promoting resistance at the same time.
I see nothign anti-science about advocating caution. Particularly after people have been lied to so much by the same people telling us to eat up.
And this was done here! They gave a certain task to a bunch of programmers in 1999 and they solved the program using many different languages and reported on how long it took them, etc. Results are really only valid for Java as it was in 1999 (but the same is true for Python as well). Check it out at: http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtT R.pdf
http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
Python is the extension language for Blender.
Bittorrent is all in python.
All of the things at http://www.pygame.org/ , some of which are big.
Red Hat's installer.
I guess the best example I gave you was Bittorrent.
I could easily provide examples which demonstrate the opposite
Please do, as I have never seen any, and I have looked. It really does seem that Python requires physically less code to accomplish the same task when compared to Java or C/C++.
I did Java professionally for 2 years, and now I program python for research purposes in grad school, and I'm producing stuff more quickly than I could have with Java - and I have about 100 hours experience with Python and about 4000 hours experience with Java. So either there is a real difference, or the two languages are equivalent and I coincidentally became approximately 400% more efficient at THE EXACT SAME TIME I switched to python. (I estimate a factor of 4 improvement in my speed to goal)
Rather than assuming that I magically got 4x better, I blame at least a little of it on the language.
They hate us because we're free? We can fix that!
> A deficit of 5% of the budget is not a serious long-term concern.
Where are you from that the deficit is 5% of the budget? The deficit is 5% of our Gross Domestic Product and is definitely something to worry about.
Microsoft wants you to gent confused - please don't let it happen.
MCSE = Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
MSCE = Masters of Science in CIVIL Engineering
Note that one of these degrees is much more respectable than the others.
> I wonder how they'll police this?
"they" won't police anything. But it does mean that privacy, instead of being only for cops, is for nobody. Thus, it gives interested citizens a chance to "watch the watchmen". You'll note that the link for the story goes to PRIVACY.cmu.edu.
I view this technology as a democratization of the surveillance cameras that are ubiquitous in large areas. With this, anyone can get the data from the original source - no waiting for the police to release it, no FOX-ification. So why would you want to *police* this? Nobody is required to do anything based on what they see, it just gives people the ability to see in the first place.
Thanks.
I almost failed freshman chemistry oh those many years ago, so my memory is a little hazy.
True, but when most people think of genetic engineering, they think of gene splicing - and gene splicing has the crappy side effects of possible allergen contamination (people allergic to peanuts becoming allergic to the new kind of corn as well) as well as antibiotic resistance (due to the method most places use for gne splicing).
It's like the word "organic". Sure, it originally meant "molecule that contains no metals", but it has gotten another meaning now, that of "no fertilizers or pesticides". So try not to be a pedant - language is an evolving beast.
Already happening, actually - TV stations are being mandated to go digital by 2006 (or maybe '07), which will make all existing non-digital TVs obsolete.
So as long as we're screwing the poor, we might as well go all out. (TWAJS)
True-ish.
But what about the many bugs in most JVM's? Are you sure that your java code won't tickle these bugs and bring the whole system down? What about bugs that aren't just buffer overflows? What about it dropping a fork bomb on the system? What about memory leaks (harder with Java, but still very possible)? What about running out of memory?
As far as I can tell the only way to get code that doesn't flop over in these situations is by "employing programming whizzes or spending a fortune on testing".
You're making the fallacious assumption that, in the absence of an ISS, people will be inspired (and have enough money) to go to Mars. Unfortunately, that's not how funding works at this level. They have money for the ISS, and, should they not spend that on the ISS, it goes back in the US general coffers.
Besides, it's not money that's holding us back from doing inspiring this - it's estimated to cost between 2 and 5 billion to send a person to Mars, which is peanuts with regard to the national budget. We have the ways and the means. Just not the will, and canceling big flashy space projects is not how to convince people that space exploration is a good idea.
-Peter