I believe that your "troll" mod is probably deserved. But since I currently live in Indiana, one of the "fly-over states" I feel the need to point out that the majority of the most recent fights over teaching evolution occur in Florida. A state where everyone lives within 100 miles of the ocean. There was a post on this web site yesterday about a bill in florida to allow teachers to teach whatever they want in class, even to contravene the standards for the state with the goal of allowing them to teach creationism at the expense of evolution. Now I'll not argue that it appears to be the more rural individuals that buy into this, but don't go turning this into a rural v. urban, or red state/blue state thing. Ignorance is found everywhere. Also, while I currently live in Indiana I'm originally from Massachusetts and I know more "creationists" there then I do here.
Casual discovery by accident with out further access is completely different from the volumes and types of smut available online. I've got no problem with the girl having an account and a password, but the idea of my daughter having access to the internet without me being able to monitor what she does scares the crap out of me. I didn't tell my parents anything but when they got concerned they were able to toss my room and find anything they didn't think I was mature enough for. It's much harder to toss a computer account that you don't have the password for. It's akin to giving you 7 year old a solid door and deadbolt system to their room without keeping a copy of the key for your self. It's just plain stupid.
I fail to see how the previous post is insightful. The first sentence is partially correct
...the President's job...is to keep Congress in check by using the veto pen more often than not.
but the rest of the post is pure fiction. Congress and the President are both supposed to follow the constitution, but that means that it's the president's job to lead. Have you ever tried to run an organization of any size without nominating one person to be the leader. Even if that persons authority is minimal, by virtue of the fact that they are the leader they will set the tone for any conversation. By your definition of the president he should be an idiot savant, pulled out when we need a piano concerto but ignored the rest of the time. The founding fathers realized that a committee (congress) will never be able to run the country with out having someone to give a little guidance. They don't have to do what the president says since both branches have separate spheres of influence, but by the virtue of the pulpit that comes with the presidency the president can influence the conversation, and by virtue of the Checks & Balances of the constitution he has some ability to obstruct them when he thinks it's important enough. You may not like the president, that's completely fine, Vote for someone that will do a better job in your opinion. However, you shouldn't attempt to rewrite the office of the president because when you do get a president you approve of you'll be pulling your hair out trying to get the old definition reinstated. A perfect example of this is the Republicans getting a 2 term limit instated on the presidency after 4 terms of FDR and then trying to get it repealed when Reagen was in office.
The point is many consumers feel no loyalty to carriers and resent being forced to choose one
I hate to be pedantic, but isn't this statement fundamentally contradictory? If they have no carrier loyalty, then why should it be a problem to switch networks if they really want to use an iPhone? If the desire to use an iPhone is greater than the desire to stick with your network then it could be argued that you lack (sufficient great) carrier loyalty. If the desire to stay with your current carrier is greater than the desire to use the iPhone then it could be argued that you have loyalty to your current carrier. I fail to see how not liking your carrier would make you less likely to switch to AT&T so that you can (legally) use an iPhone.
I've read a lot of articles, and at least seen mention of a lot more, that spout off about how Apple screwed up it's iPhone licensing deal by tying themselves to a single carrier. However, a lot of the time within the same article, or another article on the same site will often rave about how it is an example of one of the greatest product launches of all time. If Apple screwed up so bad, how did they do so well? It all strikes me as fanboy baiting. Write an article praising Apple, their products, or their tactics to bring in the apple hater, then write one denigrating Apple, their products, or their tactics (often implying that Apple is the new Microsoft) to bring in the Apple fanboy's (of which I'm arguably one). Each article is carefully crafted to miss obvious points and make glaring mistakes so as to ensure that it's attacked in the message boards driving up the hit counters and making more ad revenue than any other article that day.
I'm not so naive as to think it couldn't be the US, it's just that the default assumption seems to be that it is hostile action and that it's the US. I find it hard to believe that the US is the only government that is at odds with Iran.
I thank you for explaining how such a thing could work. I informed all who read my posts that I lacked the qualifications to say what was and wasn't possible. I didnot include that information so that someone could be completely dismissive of my opinions. I wasn't trying to push any logic on anyone. I was expressing my opinion and looking for explanation. You gave that to me and I thank you but you could have done it without attacking me. No one had proved me wrong because no one had bothered to give a rudimentary explanation of how things worked.
Not being a windows user it hasn't come to my attention before. Like i said, it may be great, it just doesn't sound like the benefits would outweigh the costs to me, a non-programer. Besides, it's not like MS hasn't talked up some technology as the greatest thing ever and then had it fall far short before.::grin::
Most of my family's computers are limited to what came on their mac and MS office for mac. My sisters problems is mp3's she's ripped for her ipod and recording of interviews that she performed for her undergraduate thesis. My mothers is a combination of a handful of CD's, a bunch of largish power point presentations with associated files, and a ton of pictures. She's started getting a CD when any film is developed and owns a decent digital camera. Since she has been to 6 weddings in the last 2 years and has a granddaughter that comes by several times a week, she has lots of pictures. My main storage problem is from data files related to my MS and PHD work and audio book files from audible. I have almost 30GB in audiobooks alone. My cousin that lives with my family has a huge collection of less mainstream music that he gets from bands websites that he spends a lot of time organizing and playing around with in itunes. My wife has all sorts of suff for playing around in garageband because she's a MS/HS music teacher, and all sorts of files for her lesson plans including recordings of her students that she uses for grading purposes.
I'm not going to try and guess how typical we are, it could be that by virtue of our comfort level with the iLife suite of applications we tend to collect more large media files than the average PC user, but if that were the case I would be a little surprised. Everyone is always point to iLife alternatives for the PC that are supposed to be at least competitive.
Actually, I haven't used windows unless forced since 1998. I made the switch then to Mac OS 9.1 and I'm currently using 10.5.1. If I launch Activity Monitor and look at system memory usage I've got ~ 429 MB free and ~590 MB used out of 1 GB RAM. I'm currently running iCal, Mail, Safari, Preview, Activity Monitor, and the Finder. I do at times have a lot of data for it to grind (I was running XP inside parallels about an hour ago), but I don't force it to run at maximum just for the sake of using all available memory. Like I said before I'm not a CS guy, but I'm not sure how the OS is supposed to know what to cache other than what the running applications tell it to. I don't know if I'm going to launch excel today, how would my computer?
That unused memory could be holding prefetched application data.
I'm not familiar with prefetching application data. I was not aware that any OS kept track of my application usage for this sort of thing. I would expect it to be resource expensive to tabulate the information needed to make predictions concerning my work habits, I'm no CS person, so maybe this is a better idea than it sounds like to me.
Most people don't have any need for that amount of space
I have to disagree with you here. I may or may not be typical of Slashdotters in general but my immediate family has half a dozen laptops between them and all have had to resort to external storage and/or HD upgrades within a year and a half of buying there laptop. The laptops are all owned by people who wouldn't be considered tech savy. These are not the kind of people that have tons of unused audio or video on their machines. They just slowly accumulate files and programs until they don't have enough space and start deleting things that they aren't using. It's anecdotal to be sure, but I've not run across any other people to make me think that their experiences are abnormal.
is anyone going to ever realize that unused RAM is wasted RAM?
Of course unused RAM isn't wasted if you're not doing anything. I want my OS to use some ram, but most I want to be used by the applications I'm running on top of the OS. Most people don't do most of their work inside the OS itself. They do their work inside the applications running on top of the OS and if the OS is hogging all of the RAM then their work will take longer as RAM constraints get tight and everything slows down. No OS in this day in age should require 4GB RAM just to make the OS run "snappier"
I'll give you hard drive space, not that it really matters these days with half a terabyte at under $100.
This may be fine for desktops, but not for Laptops which make up > 50% of machines sold to individuals these days. The drives available for a reasonably sized laptop don't reach that much storage, and are a lot more expensive at any size. I bought my laptop less than a year ago and the most storage offered was 120GB, I don't want >10% of my drive, or more than half of my installed ram devoted just to the OS.
You're right, my parents did screen the books they gave me. The first 20-30 were all either books they'd already read or were by authors they knew and were comfortable with. However, after a certain point I'd worked my way through their library and started picking out my own reading material. By that time I'd already established a pattern of communication with my parents where anything I came across that I didn't understand or made me uncomfortable was brought up and discussed. I know that no parent can sit down and play every game that their children want to play, all of the way through to make sure that there isn't something in there that they don't think their child can handle. It takes me long enough now to work thorough my games and I don't have children to worry about (yet). I was just reading an interview over at ARS with a parental advocacy group that's trying to bully politicians into passing laws concerning games and they make an interesting point at the bottom of the page being that, groups that try to push this "games are bad and we should think of the children" political agenda seem to gloss over the role parents are supposed to play in the process. The communication that my parents had developed with me about my reading made it so that they no longer had to screen everything I read and i think that too many parents today want someone else to do all of the hard work for them. Any problems with their child are never their fault, it's always the fault of movies/music/video games/internet/teachers/etc.
I'm not naive enough to believe that I'm going to have an easy time raising my children, or that the exposure to the undesirable hasn't gotten harder to avoid. I just believe that my wife and I will take full responsibility for the rearing of our children from the start.
I don't believe there is a lower boundary to gaming, only lower limits for specific types of games - and those limits depend on the child.
You are completely right. Video games should be approached in the same way books are. My parents were huge fans of reading. In an attempt to push us all into reading they canceled cable for about 6 years. That forced us all to take up reading as a way to pass the time that didn't involve physical exertion. Each one of us (6) were given access to books with progressively more mature content at different ages based on their assessment of our ability to handle the material. Video games should be treated the same way. Simple, possibly legacy games when they are young and eventually letting them move to more complicated and potentially violent or explicit games as they reach a point where the violence/story line will promote conversations with us about what they are seeing instead of desensitizing them to violence.
There is no problem in existence that is so bad that it can not be made worse by direct government control. The government inevitably moves toward a bureaucracy that stifles innovation because a bureaucracy is, by it's very nature, biased toward the status quo. However, the competition between companies for money and talent lead to an attitude of "what have you done for me lately?" If a vein of research hasn't produced anything of value within a certain amount of time it will be killed in favor of avenues with greater potential. As a PhD student who speaks with industry folk whenever I can in hopes of understanding how things work outside of the Ivory Tower, that is one of the biggest differences highlighted by those who have done research in both academia and in industry.
these days its the smaller gene- or bio-labs that come up with new ways to kill the most common threat to out bodies, not big pharma.
This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Smaller labs may make interesting discoveries, but how do they get those discoveries to market considering the cost of FDA approval. Smaller labs may on occasion make breakthroughs, but they usually end up either selling the idea/technology to big pharma or end up getting bought up themselves so that it can be further developed. No small independent lab can afford to perform the various levels of animal and human testing required for approval without already having a product that is bringing in money. This is where Big Pharma comes in. They have a portfolio of products actively bringing in revenue that can be used to pay the R&D bills. Now, I'm not saying that Big Pharma doesn't gouge american consumers because of the way our health care industry is set up, but that doesn't mean they aren't necessary. It's the fact that they are absolutely required that they are able to demand we all bend over and take it like a man.
Simply because a fanboi doesn't see the need for full dtrace functionality doesn't mean it's a Good Thing to disable it.
Just because someone doesn't see the same writing on the wall you do, or doesn't care that doesn't make them a fanboi. It's a little like calling someone a biggot of some kind (racist, fascist, etc.) if they happen to fall into a different social classification and happen to not like you. He apparently isn't a developer or doesn't use that tool. Instead of insulting him you could either ignore his perceived ignorance or if you can't leave it alone, try educating him. Insults just start flamewars that get way off topic.
I agree that sugar is better than High-fructose corn syrup, but that's based on fact that fructose is capable of bypassing the primary rate limiting step in carbohydrate metabolism. The result of which being that you don't feel as satiated and your body is more likely to push the fructose into fat synthesis for energy storage that it would if the fructose had been replaced with glucose or sucrose. I'm an animal scientist not a plant geneticist so I can't speak authoritatively on the subject but from what I do know each grain company has it's own portfolio of corn strains. There may only be a handful that each one markets but if there is an increase in a disease against a given strain, there is nothing to indicate that all of that companies strains will be effected or line from a different company will have the same susceptibility. Most of the advances in disease resistance are based on taking 2 strains that show some resistance and crossing them to get strains with even greater resistance than either of their parent strains. The diversity exists behind the scenes
In Cows the process to breed a new useful breed takes decades.
As far as I know, no one is trying to create new breeds. Instead they are trying to improve the current breeds, or create productive crosses. The idea that traditional breeding takes decades is a little disingenuous. there is a huge market for selling heifers to larger farms that only use a cow for 1 or 2 lactations before selling her because they want to take advantage of the genetic improvements in the newest generation. This is a little short sighted because of the increased difficulty in managing 1st calf heifers and older more mature cows that are less likely to have reproductive or metabolic issues, but it is done. The smart farms use their cows for more lactations, maintain herd size and sell more of the extra heifers to the larger, more aggressive farms at a substantial profit.
If you breed a cow and have a calf on the interval of every 3 years
As someone who has worked on over a dozen dairy farms I can tell you that this a weird assumption. Heifers are usually breed around 24 months old, So a 3 year investment to the 1st calf. The next calf will be born, ideally 12 months later. The target for a dairy farmer is a 12 month calving interval with the cow lactating for 10 months followed by a 2 month dry period. For exceptionally well producing cows this may be extended to a 14 month interval but this is not advised since the greatest production (# of milk/day) occur early in the lactation and the rate tends to drop over the intervening months.
This process has had to be stopped by law because it spread BSE...
Chickens do not have any form of spongiform encephalopoathy. As a result they cannot transmit it to cattle that eat their feces. In fact the biggest question about BSE istransmission. We don't know how it is transmitted. Fear about this being a possible route may have been why the law was passed but that doesn't mean that it really was a route of transmission, just that politicians wanted to look like they were doing something.
That's right, most cows with calf now are virgins.
I fail to see what the sex life of a cow has to do with food safety. If anything artificial insemination has helped by preventing the transmission of STD's in most livestock species.
The main argument for cloning is actually very similar to that for artificial insemination and embryo transfer. I know several dairy farms that are based entirely off of the progeny of a single cow. The story goes that they had a farm and managed by luck to breed a cow that was a step above the rest. The farmer then breeds her to as many top bulls as possible and hyper ovulates her for embryo transfer to maximize the number of calves she can produce in a short period of time. This leads to a dramatic improvement in their genetics and possibly giving them a competitive advantage. Cloning is simply another technique used to preserve those good traits and distribute them as widely as possible through out their herd.
there won't be massive farms where every cow is an exact genetic duplicate of each other. However, there will be increased improvement in herd genetics, production, and efficiency with this new tool available to those that see it's value.
It's a shame that the farming lobby has more of a pull on what happens in this country than the greater numbers who consume those products.
That's a common fallacy. Consumers do have incredible power, and the way they vote is with their wallet. Why do you think that so-called "natural" food has become such a huge industry. The argument about genetic diversity has some weight, but you whether you realize it or not you are exaggerating. Modern livestock breeding is far more complex than your realize. If you are a swine producer you most likely participate in some sort of terminal cross where you take a sow with good mothering skills and decent meat quality of one breed and cross her with a Boar with excellent meat quality and growth performance traits but from a breed with less than stellar mothering traits (milk production, piglets/litter, etc). The resulting piglets are, due to hybrid vigor, greater than the sum or average of their parents. the resulting offspring are then sold for their meat and the cycle repeats. In order to prevent dilution of these individual breeds there are a smaller number of farms that maintain purebred stock that they sell to the other farms.
There was a lot more diversity 50 years ago, but there were also a lot greater range in quality.
Where is the panic though? It seems like any time that somebody raises any questions about the safety of GMO, nanotechnology, or nuclear whatever it is labeled as hysteria and dismissed.
No, it's not the questioning that's the problem. It's the unwillingness to believe that the USDA/FDA/Relevant Regulating Agency has done enough research to say that the risks are acceptable given the results of exhaustive research. I don't want a GM crop grown, marketed, and consumed by the general population unless it's been vetted by a regulatory agency capable of looking at the science, interpreting the results and making a decision based on the data. However, I also don't want genuinely useful advances denied to everyone because some people are so afraid of that which they don't understand that no amount of research and data will convince them.
As a research scientist myself I know some of the hurdles that are involved in bringing any new product to market, the kind of money that's involved, and the time required. The people at the USDA and FDA usually proceed from the point of view that new things are dangerous until their is a massive data set indicating that dangerous side effects are either non-existent or acceptably low. That's not to say that there haven't been errors, products that came to market only to be recalled later due to unforeseen problems. That a statistical certainty based on the number of products under review each year, the vast majority of which never make it to level of our awareness because the products are pulled as a result of the data being against it. It's not like these agencies rubber stamp every product that comes down the pipeline. If they did there would still be a lot of charlatans selling snake oil and cocaine derivatives as cure-alls.
And increased prices for corn which in turn increases the price of all food products from animals currently fed cheap corn (Pigs, chickens, dairy cattle, beef cattle, ducks, turkey's, etc.) 3 ton of corn becomes 1 ton of Dried Distillers Grains (DDG) and there isn't enough usable acres in the US to produce enough corn to meet more than a fraction of the US demand for fuel assuming we plant only corn and it all goes to ethanol production.
I'm a grad student working in animal nutrition and I can tell you that DDG is arguably the biggest problem faced by modern animal nutrition by far. Any variability in the nutrient profile of corn in magnified 3 fold. For example, if the Protein content of corn is between 7 and 9% normally, the protein content will vary between 21 and 27% in DDG made from that same pool of corn.
This is an even bigger problem when we are talking about toxins that can turn up in corn. Mycotoxins occur in low enough levels in a lot of corn that feeding them has negligible effects on animal performance, however by concentrating then in DDG the problem becomes much bigger.
The combination of HUGE variability in nutrient profile from plant to plant and even within the product coming from the same plant make diet formulation incredibly difficult. Most nutritionists are of the opinion that "I can formulate a decent ration using just about any feedstuff as long as I know what's in it", however know what is in DDG is the main problem with it and the reason a lot of farms don't touch the stuff. There is also the issue with most livestock species refusing to eat it if it's supplied at more than 10-20% of the diet, and a huge problem in the swine industry where pigs fed DDG in their diet end up with very soft flexible yellow fat that makes for very poor quality meat with bacon being virtually impossible to slice.
Never forget that the federal government is still subsidizing ethanol production to the tune of $1.05-1.38/gallon. If that subsidy were to be taken away any cost/gal advantage that ethanol has would vanish. Not to mention the fact that 1 gal of E85 doesn't get anywhere close to giving you the same number of miles as traditional gasoline (Energy density of Ethanol is andlower fuel economy!
Don't get me wrong, I live in the corn belt (Indiana) and see how great things are for farmers right now. I love to see producers get paid more for their crops I just know that using corn to make ethanol is a HUGE mistake. Use of cellulosic fermenters to produce ethanol is the future of ethanol production in my mind, it's just not ready yet and politicians have never been able to wait for technology to mature. They just assume that throwing money at the situation will make the problems with the current model go away.
Growing hemp gets you fuel, food, and fiber.
Not really, if you use hemp for fuel or food then it can't be used for fiber and the only livestock that might be able to use hemp distillers byproduct for food would be cattle an I doubt very much that it would be a quality nutrient for many of the same reasons that DDG from corn are such a headache.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that your "troll" mod is probably deserved. But since I currently live in Indiana, one of the "fly-over states" I feel the need to point out that the majority of the most recent fights over teaching evolution occur in Florida. A state where everyone lives within 100 miles of the ocean. There was a post on this web site yesterday about a bill in florida to allow teachers to teach whatever they want in class, even to contravene the standards for the state with the goal of allowing them to teach creationism at the expense of evolution. Now I'll not argue that it appears to be the more rural individuals that buy into this, but don't go turning this into a rural v. urban, or red state/blue state thing. Ignorance is found everywhere. Also, while I currently live in Indiana I'm originally from Massachusetts and I know more "creationists" there then I do here.
Casual discovery by accident with out further access is completely different from the volumes and types of smut available online. I've got no problem with the girl having an account and a password, but the idea of my daughter having access to the internet without me being able to monitor what she does scares the crap out of me. I didn't tell my parents anything but when they got concerned they were able to toss my room and find anything they didn't think I was mature enough for. It's much harder to toss a computer account that you don't have the password for. It's akin to giving you 7 year old a solid door and deadbolt system to their room without keeping a copy of the key for your self. It's just plain stupid.
I've read a lot of articles, and at least seen mention of a lot more, that spout off about how Apple screwed up it's iPhone licensing deal by tying themselves to a single carrier. However, a lot of the time within the same article, or another article on the same site will often rave about how it is an example of one of the greatest product launches of all time. If Apple screwed up so bad, how did they do so well? It all strikes me as fanboy baiting. Write an article praising Apple, their products, or their tactics to bring in the apple hater, then write one denigrating Apple, their products, or their tactics (often implying that Apple is the new Microsoft) to bring in the Apple fanboy's (of which I'm arguably one). Each article is carefully crafted to miss obvious points and make glaring mistakes so as to ensure that it's attacked in the message boards driving up the hit counters and making more ad revenue than any other article that day.
I'm not so naive as to think it couldn't be the US, it's just that the default assumption seems to be that it is hostile action and that it's the US. I find it hard to believe that the US is the only government that is at odds with Iran.
I thank you for explaining how such a thing could work. I informed all who read my posts that I lacked the qualifications to say what was and wasn't possible. I didnot include that information so that someone could be completely dismissive of my opinions. I wasn't trying to push any logic on anyone. I was expressing my opinion and looking for explanation. You gave that to me and I thank you but you could have done it without attacking me. No one had proved me wrong because no one had bothered to give a rudimentary explanation of how things worked.
Not being a windows user it hasn't come to my attention before. Like i said, it may be great, it just doesn't sound like the benefits would outweigh the costs to me, a non-programer. Besides, it's not like MS hasn't talked up some technology as the greatest thing ever and then had it fall far short before. ::grin::
Most of my family's computers are limited to what came on their mac and MS office for mac. My sisters problems is mp3's she's ripped for her ipod and recording of interviews that she performed for her undergraduate thesis. My mothers is a combination of a handful of CD's, a bunch of largish power point presentations with associated files, and a ton of pictures. She's started getting a CD when any film is developed and owns a decent digital camera. Since she has been to 6 weddings in the last 2 years and has a granddaughter that comes by several times a week, she has lots of pictures. My main storage problem is from data files related to my MS and PHD work and audio book files from audible. I have almost 30GB in audiobooks alone. My cousin that lives with my family has a huge collection of less mainstream music that he gets from bands websites that he spends a lot of time organizing and playing around with in itunes. My wife has all sorts of suff for playing around in garageband because she's a MS/HS music teacher, and all sorts of files for her lesson plans including recordings of her students that she uses for grading purposes. I'm not going to try and guess how typical we are, it could be that by virtue of our comfort level with the iLife suite of applications we tend to collect more large media files than the average PC user, but if that were the case I would be a little surprised. Everyone is always point to iLife alternatives for the PC that are supposed to be at least competitive.
Actually, I haven't used windows unless forced since 1998. I made the switch then to Mac OS 9.1 and I'm currently using 10.5.1. If I launch Activity Monitor and look at system memory usage I've got ~ 429 MB free and ~590 MB used out of 1 GB RAM. I'm currently running iCal, Mail, Safari, Preview, Activity Monitor, and the Finder. I do at times have a lot of data for it to grind (I was running XP inside parallels about an hour ago), but I don't force it to run at maximum just for the sake of using all available memory. Like I said before I'm not a CS guy, but I'm not sure how the OS is supposed to know what to cache other than what the running applications tell it to. I don't know if I'm going to launch excel today, how would my computer?
You're right, my parents did screen the books they gave me. The first 20-30 were all either books they'd already read or were by authors they knew and were comfortable with. However, after a certain point I'd worked my way through their library and started picking out my own reading material. By that time I'd already established a pattern of communication with my parents where anything I came across that I didn't understand or made me uncomfortable was brought up and discussed. I know that no parent can sit down and play every game that their children want to play, all of the way through to make sure that there isn't something in there that they don't think their child can handle. It takes me long enough now to work thorough my games and I don't have children to worry about (yet). I was just reading an interview over at ARS with a parental advocacy group that's trying to bully politicians into passing laws concerning games and they make an interesting point at the bottom of the page being that, groups that try to push this "games are bad and we should think of the children" political agenda seem to gloss over the role parents are supposed to play in the process. The communication that my parents had developed with me about my reading made it so that they no longer had to screen everything I read and i think that too many parents today want someone else to do all of the hard work for them. Any problems with their child are never their fault, it's always the fault of movies/music/video games/internet/teachers/etc.
I'm not naive enough to believe that I'm going to have an easy time raising my children, or that the exposure to the undesirable hasn't gotten harder to avoid. I just believe that my wife and I will take full responsibility for the rearing of our children from the start.
There is no problem in existence that is so bad that it can not be made worse by direct government control. The government inevitably moves toward a bureaucracy that stifles innovation because a bureaucracy is, by it's very nature, biased toward the status quo. However, the competition between companies for money and talent lead to an attitude of "what have you done for me lately?" If a vein of research hasn't produced anything of value within a certain amount of time it will be killed in favor of avenues with greater potential. As a PhD student who speaks with industry folk whenever I can in hopes of understanding how things work outside of the Ivory Tower, that is one of the biggest differences highlighted by those who have done research in both academia and in industry.
I agree that sugar is better than High-fructose corn syrup, but that's based on fact that fructose is capable of bypassing the primary rate limiting step in carbohydrate metabolism. The result of which being that you don't feel as satiated and your body is more likely to push the fructose into fat synthesis for energy storage that it would if the fructose had been replaced with glucose or sucrose. I'm an animal scientist not a plant geneticist so I can't speak authoritatively on the subject but from what I do know each grain company has it's own portfolio of corn strains. There may only be a handful that each one markets but if there is an increase in a disease against a given strain, there is nothing to indicate that all of that companies strains will be effected or line from a different company will have the same susceptibility. Most of the advances in disease resistance are based on taking 2 strains that show some resistance and crossing them to get strains with even greater resistance than either of their parent strains. The diversity exists behind the scenes
The main argument for cloning is actually very similar to that for artificial insemination and embryo transfer. I know several dairy farms that are based entirely off of the progeny of a single cow. The story goes that they had a farm and managed by luck to breed a cow that was a step above the rest. The farmer then breeds her to as many top bulls as possible and hyper ovulates her for embryo transfer to maximize the number of calves she can produce in a short period of time. This leads to a dramatic improvement in their genetics and possibly giving them a competitive advantage. Cloning is simply another technique used to preserve those good traits and distribute them as widely as possible through out their herd.
there won't be massive farms where every cow is an exact genetic duplicate of each other. However, there will be increased improvement in herd genetics, production, and efficiency with this new tool available to those that see it's value.
There was a lot more diversity 50 years ago, but there were also a lot greater range in quality.
Here here!!
What I wouldn't give for some Moderator points right now!
As a research scientist myself I know some of the hurdles that are involved in bringing any new product to market, the kind of money that's involved, and the time required. The people at the USDA and FDA usually proceed from the point of view that new things are dangerous until their is a massive data set indicating that dangerous side effects are either non-existent or acceptably low. That's not to say that there haven't been errors, products that came to market only to be recalled later due to unforeseen problems. That a statistical certainty based on the number of products under review each year, the vast majority of which never make it to level of our awareness because the products are pulled as a result of the data being against it. It's not like these agencies rubber stamp every product that comes down the pipeline. If they did there would still be a lot of charlatans selling snake oil and cocaine derivatives as cure-alls.
I'm a grad student working in animal nutrition and I can tell you that DDG is arguably the biggest problem faced by modern animal nutrition by far. Any variability in the nutrient profile of corn in magnified 3 fold. For example, if the Protein content of corn is between 7 and 9% normally, the protein content will vary between 21 and 27% in DDG made from that same pool of corn.
This is an even bigger problem when we are talking about toxins that can turn up in corn. Mycotoxins occur in low enough levels in a lot of corn that feeding them has negligible effects on animal performance, however by concentrating then in DDG the problem becomes much bigger.
The combination of HUGE variability in nutrient profile from plant to plant and even within the product coming from the same plant make diet formulation incredibly difficult. Most nutritionists are of the opinion that "I can formulate a decent ration using just about any feedstuff as long as I know what's in it", however know what is in DDG is the main problem with it and the reason a lot of farms don't touch the stuff. There is also the issue with most livestock species refusing to eat it if it's supplied at more than 10-20% of the diet, and a huge problem in the swine industry where pigs fed DDG in their diet end up with very soft flexible yellow fat that makes for very poor quality meat with bacon being virtually impossible to slice.
Never forget that the federal government is still subsidizing ethanol production to the tune of $1.05-1.38/gallon. If that subsidy were to be taken away any cost/gal advantage that ethanol has would vanish. Not to mention the fact that 1 gal of E85 doesn't get anywhere close to giving you the same number of miles as traditional gasoline (Energy density of Ethanol is andlower fuel economy!
Don't get me wrong, I live in the corn belt (Indiana) and see how great things are for farmers right now. I love to see producers get paid more for their crops I just know that using corn to make ethanol is a HUGE mistake. Use of cellulosic fermenters to produce ethanol is the future of ethanol production in my mind, it's just not ready yet and politicians have never been able to wait for technology to mature. They just assume that throwing money at the situation will make the problems with the current model go away. Not really, if you use hemp for fuel or food then it can't be used for fiber and the only livestock that might be able to use hemp distillers byproduct for food would be cattle an I doubt very much that it would be a quality nutrient for many of the same reasons that DDG from corn are such a headache.
I stand corrected!
I thought that the less than a grand laptops were still shipping with 32 bit but with a little research it turns out I'm wrong