RAM isn't cheap. Take the cheapest hard drive you can find. See how much memory you can get for the same price. Is that amount of memory enough to store, say, a few hunderd 1200 dpi full color A4/letter sized scans? I bet it isn't, so you'll need to spend more if you want to use RAM, for no observable benefit (except privacy of course).
HD is cheaper, plenty fast enough (sequential access), and even the cheapest $40 HD has so much capacity it's not worth even calculating how many pages it can store... But if that isn't enough, spend like $5 more to about quadruple the capacity, then it should be enough for anybody... It's not like an existing photocopier will be upgraded to use x-ray scanning, continuous spectrum, nanoscale printing technologies later, so there's no worry the capacity of an existing machine will not be enough in the future.
Possible cheapish privacy solution: generate random "session key" in RAM for every new job, and use it to strongly encrypt everything written to HD. Once the key is forgotten, encrypted data in HD becomes unrecoverable random noise.
With that said I question their motives it seems to me like they're using this release as an excuse to not have to provide support for their old games.
I think their motive is to increase their businesses revenues (which is just fine of course, they are a business after all, and that's what businesses are supposed to do). Cheap (not free, because open sourcing requires a bit of extra work, which isn't free) PR is probably the main motive.
You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
No problem, just cover your head with tin foil, and stop worrying about UV light causing brain cancer.
And if you replace top of your skull with a transparent glass dome, don't be a cheapskate like I was, invest in glass with proper certified UV filtering! I mean, what's the point of transparent dome if you have to cover it with tin foil when going outside...
Depends on what you mean by "Linux". It runs a (custom) Linux kernel, but it's not a Linux Operating System in the sense that it can't run what most people would consider "regular Linux applications".
Or to put it another way, If it doesn't quack like a penguin, it's not a penguin, not even if it has a transplanted penguin heart.
So this is how the robot apocalypse is to start eh? Well, I for one...you get the idea.
Indeed... Self-replicating DNA-based nanobots. It's got planet-scale disaster written all over it. It's not hard to imagine what a planet infested with such things might soon look like... A total mess covered in DNA-nanobot-goo.
Yes, it's probably BS. But it isn't BS until it is disproven. And yes, there isn't anything there to disprove right now.
Uh, there are cases, where it's BS until proven beyond reasonable doubt. If NK announced the Sun is going to rise tomorrow, then I'd be very worried, 'cos it's likely to be BS.
Whenever there is no accountability, BS starts to come out. Though it has to be said, at least their BS is often funny.
Clearly the solution is to both develop advanced cheap energy and work to "live within our means."
The nice thing about that "live within our means" is, that we don't really have to work for it if we don't want to. We can just wait until it happens automatically, and avoid the pain of making the necessary difficult choices ourselves! Let's just let nature take it's course!
This is exactly why Apple doesn't want third-party UI systems on the iPad.
Because the only website I visit that might give the iPhone issues are those with Flash... all other websites work perfectly?
I'm asking because I really don't know, and I'm interested: Do Google Documents and Google Wave work perfectly on iPhone?
And yes, you're talking about websites you visit, and you might not be visiting Google Docs or Wave, no need to point that out, I'm not disputing that, but those are websites I visit regularly so I'm interested:-)
the idea that penicillin, malathion, roundup, etc., are permanent tools against mother nature is a false one. but it is a false idea whether we used the products never, sparingly, intelligent, or stupidly. simple use of these tools will induce resistance. the arms race goes on forever, and the only thing we have to learn is to lose the naivete that these chemicals would be useful forever
we need to cook up more antibiotics, weed killers, and bug killers. but this is true no matter how we used the first generation of chemicals. we haven't learned anything, nor did we have anything to learn, unless it is the more eternal lesson that some people are naive
every advance is only a temporary advance, and the arms race exists, forever. we had a brief period when our weapons were effective, and now we have to find new weapons, and this is simply inevitable, unless you choose not to use any chemical weapons at all
in other words, i'm not quite sure what you think we are supposed to learn. don't fight?
In an arms race, you generally want to avoid the enemy learning to overcome your current technologies, and use them in such a way that their weaknesses don't become common knowledge to the enemy. And sometimes our use of antibiotics and pesticides and whatnot is closer to trying to actively train the enemy to overcome our current methods...
Or to put it the other way, do you want a new antibiotic to be useful for 20 years, or for 50 years?
Well, if you're in the pharmaceutical industry, it sure is 20 years, after that the patents expire and profits plummet... Much better than 50 years, who cares if it kills a few more people, those people would die anyway at some point so no loss really!
I'm sure it doesn't help that the plants that are resistant to roundup will cross-pollinate with the weeds that are supposed to be killed with roundup,
The definition of species is the inability to reproduce outside a given genetic group. Corn doesn't reproduce with ragweed. Nice try though.
Plants are a bit less fussy about that kind of stuff than animals (incidentally, they can also get pretty wild with chromosome numbers, and are often really simple to clone, and other wacky stuff). Also, with plants who's pollen is spread by wind, that pollen will get into the flowers and every other crevice of all other plants in the area, which probably helps in horizontal gene transfer.
With unemployment increasing every day, I would say that we are not lacking in manpower to pull the weeds by hand.
Yeah, but unless you're paying those weed-pullers with bad food and worse housing, it's not economically possible. If you paid them enough money to live on, you couldn't sell your produce with profit and you'd go bankrupt. And it'll be hard to find qualified (ie. not too drunk or high, not too anti-social, not too crazy, and especially not too lazy) weed-pullers who'd settle for food and housing.
Well, I guess it does depend if it's the weed you're really producing and the corn or whatever is just a cover...;-)
I was told this by our patent lawyer once, I don't know how true it is but, don't you have to defend your trademark in order to make it valid? Meaning that they have to prosecute everyone (including fan sites like this) even if they settle on a 1 dollar license agreement in order to make sure that a real threat can't take the trademark freely.
In this case, the name is used to refer to the franchise specifically and not as a generic word. This also seems to be "fair use". This means it does not dilute the trademark, and nothing needs to be done.
Furthermore, if something needed to be done, simply giving a $0 license (with specific conditions) to use the trademark would have been sufficient to "defend" it.
Of course, writing the free license only earns a lawyer... $1000-$10000 or so maybe? If the same lawyer manages to convince those that decide that suing is really the best course of action, he'll make 100x more, so you can guess what he's going to recommend...
Hard to believe there's not someplace on Earth where the same nucleotide variations would have been advantageous.
Yeah, and it's quite plausible that at the dawn of primitive life, there were several variations, but only this one survived. Life probably got nearly wiped out many times back then, considering all the meteorities, volcanic activity, probably not-yet-quite-stable sun... So our current encoding is probably the one that was best in an environment that didn't get sterilized when everything else got sterilized at some point.
But once the encoding sets in, once there's actual xNA with information, changing encoding is apparently very hard. Any mutation in the basic encoding mechanism would cause every protein to be encoded differently, effectively breaking almost all of them. Now I'm sure there are paths allowing changes (something like first add "support" for new encoding without creating any disadvantage with old encoding still being used for everything, then have it replace old version when environment changes to favor it, then break "support" for old version when it's no longer used). Looking at the evidence (eg. urasil, and whatever we might not have found yet), it seems to be possible but very rare.
Dude, I was trying to eat! Neat concept but super gross:P
Serious question, what's so gross about hair?
Maybe you don't, but I bet most people do find cleaning shower drain of long hair and all the attached goo rather gross. Just think of digging that glob of slimy hair out of very unclean looking hole(*). Now imagine a glob of oil-slimy hair mat used for oil spill cleanup. If you don't think that's gross, well, more power to you:-).
(*) Even if you clean your shower drain daily with brush and chlorine detergent, I'm sure you can imagine cleaning one that hasn't been opened in this millenium, while it's been used by long-haired greasy geeks who don't shower often and don't use too much shampoo when they do...
The ratio is rather miserable if you want to reach even LEO. Tricks (like White Knight - SpaceShipOne or using scramjets) may help, but they add complexity too. We're not there yet, and won't be any time soon.
No, we're not there yet. Nor will we ever be by not flying reusables because we aren't there yet. You don't make progress by throwing the baby out with the bathwater, nor do you make progress by sitting around waiting for magic to happen.
But progress is happening. And I agree it could be happening faster if more money were put into it. But it's happening in technology research. It's not yet time to start designing a big man-rated reusable space vehicle. A few rounds of small scramjet "spacedrones", and we may have enough knowledge to start designing a bigger one.
Yet reusables have proven to be the way to go with every other form of transport. Or, to put it another way, it's a really bad idea to draw sweeping universal conclusions based on a first generation system.
I think it's a question of mass and cost of expendable stuff (one-way payload, un-reusable parts, FUEL) vs. mass of potentially reusable stuff.
The ratio is rather miserable if you want to reach even LEO. Tricks (like White Knight - SpaceShipOne or using scramjets) may help, but they add complexity too. We're not there yet, and won't be any time soon. For now, the best we can hope for is "reusable return capsule" type vehicles that just don't look like classic return capsules.
I think the primary complaint (at least for me) for most flash games is the on hover effect. How do you replicate that with a touch interface? Now we have all sorts of wild gestures, so it reduces the simplicity.
If you can resolve that, I might reconsider my personal stance.
Nokia N900 solves that quite interestingly. Dragging your finger to the screen from one side creates an actual visible mouse cursor you can use pretty much like a normal mouse. Haven't used it much, but seemed to work pretty well with Flash stuff, as well as with Google Maps.
If the U.S. went into oblivion suddenly, the entire world's technological infrastructure would fail. Not just because of the loss of the U.S., but because of the turmoil and disorder that would result (or have been the cause). 50 years ago, the collapse would have been much less, 50 years from now such a collapse would be much worse (assuming the U.S. maintains its current position of dominance for the next 50 years).
If the U.S. does not maintain its current position of dominance for at least the next 20 years, we will all get to see what a collapse of civilization looks like.
Nah. Just think of WW2. None of the civilisations involved got annihilated, not even those that lost completely. US suddenly getting annihilated would be even less severe than WW2 was. Or think of something like the Black Death in middle ages. Something like third of Europeans killed in a short time-frame. Yet Europe did not collapse.
We may hit shitty times, as bad as WW2 or the Black Death, and that may happen within our lifetime, but I don't think that'll cause any modern civilisation to collapse. There might be starvation, rioting, revolutions, wars, inquisition, you name it, but historically that's perfectly normal. Most of us have just lived so shielded lives that it sounds like collapse of civilisation. But really, it's just "interesting times".
Selective breeding techniques for plants used most of the last hundred years involve breaking up chromosomes with radiation to create new and completely untested genes, then taking any of the mutants that seem to have benefited from this and spreading their randomly-created genes far and wide throughout the species.
Genetic engineering takes long-existing genes of known function and carefully inserts them into a species to create a predictable effect.
The crucial difference can be read between the lines even in your text. Speed. Being able to engineer the genetic changes allows churning out new, functional genetic variations at far faster pace. I'd expect our capability to double per two years or so (as calculated in man-years to engineer a new genetic functionality, or amount of functional changes engineered per generation, or number of interacting genes possible to handle, or whatever is relevant to the field).
Also our ability to put these rapidly developed functionalities out as products will grow fast. I'm talking about stuff like every kennel and stable having cheap artificial-insemination-with-gene-splicing capability, initially needing an off-site lab, eventually using something like a semi-automatic on-site device.
And also, creating changes randomly will likely create changes that interoperate with other genes of the same species, and are less likely to be efficient or even work on different species. Individual genes introduced by genetic engineering are by necessity independent and work well on different species, and thus always have high potential to get fixed in a "contaminated" wild population.
And yet people who do the second are the ones who get portrayed as having "vastly more potential to do damage to the environment".
Well, indeed it does. For a less hyperbolic example than the nuclear power plant one, compare a shovel and a backhoe (digging machine). They do pretty much the same thing in principle, yet power outages are rarely caused by shovels, regularly by backhoes.
The fact is, we know to a fairly high probability what, say, a Vitamin A producing gene spliced into rice from a bacterium could do if accidentally spread; it would, no matter where it wound up, create Vitamin A. That might have an accidental secondary effect if some species has a Vitamin A-bound process, of course. On the other hand, we do not know, to any degree of significance, what a new, radiation-created gene that seemed to increase maize yield will do in the wild. Yet it is the former, not the latter, which we have all the regulatory control upon, which the European Union bans, and you are comparing to atomic power plants.
Indeed, and as far as I can see, there are good technical reasons for it. They are different thing. One is known, one is unknown. Though the EU ban was on political level of course mostly based on irrational fear and protectionism, not technical details, but IMHO in this case they lead to the same conclusion.
And then there's the whole intellectual property mess (farmers getting sued, gene patenting in general, question of responsibility in case of economic or ecological damage caused by patented genes leaking into the wild or into the neighbouring farm), but let's not go there.
Would you dare to make a claim, that ubiquitous use of genetic engineering does not lead to spreading of new genes (especially between plants) orders of magnitude faster than occurs naturally?
I thought we were comparing genetic engineering to selective breeding techniques in common use, not nature. It's provably true that genetic engineering does not spread new genes any faster than the methods of mutation and selective breeding used during the bulk of the last century. All that changes with genetic engineering is we can select existing genes of known function deliberately instead of creating new genes of unknown effects r
People act as if there is a rift between genetic engineering and breeding techniques. There's not, they're just different tools for different situations, and each have their uses.
I'd say the difference is pretty much like the difference between traditional windmill and an atomic power plant. There certainly is a rift, one has vastly more potential to do damage to the environment. (Of course, if you take into account population growth and all that, relying on old "safe" methods, may indirectly end up doing more damage than using newer, potentially more dangerous but otherwise superior methods, but that's beside the point when assessing the direct damage potential.)
The key thing with genetic engineering, as with all changes in environment, is how fast it can change the environment. And genetic engineering taken to the extreme can change it very rapidly, changing ecological niches of species very rapidly (because of acquired genes that give competitive advantages). And a very rapid change pretty much equates mass extinctions, when natural mechanisms of evolution can't keep up with the change.
If there were no restrictions on use of genetically engineered plants, probably thousands or millions of new genes would be brought to the market (engineered into plants and animals), then to the field, and unavoidably some of them would get horizontally transferred into wild species. And some of millions is quite a lot. And it's not even restricted to plants. If non-neutered genetically engineered pets were legal (I don't know if they are), it takes just one escaping or getting lost to potentially get that gene into the feral/wild population. Also, there (almost by definition) can't be any genetic "failsafe" that a mutation can't disable (either mutation in that failsafe gene, or mutation in other gene making the failsafe ineffective). I'd be especially worried about genetically engineered pet rodents getting those novelty genes into the wild. For example imagine a seemingly benign set of genes allowing different diet than normal, nice for pet owner and/or for the pet's health, but probably also nice for vermin control businesses profits after a few generations of recombining in wild vermin population.
Would you dare to make a claim, that ubiquitous use of genetic engineering does not lead to spreading of new genes (especially between plants) orders of magnitude faster than occurs naturally? Or would you deny that this inflow of new genes will change ecosystems radically? Or would you deny that radical changes in ecosystems won't be any problem?
The fact that this type of finding actually refutes most current hypotheses of evolution,
Could you be more specific? Ie. which part of the theory of evolution does this refute?
Or you want a more specific question, in the context of the Theory of Evolution, how is getting new genes by horizontal gene transfer different from getting new genes by mutation?
It's more like horizontal gene transfer mechanisms save theory of evolution in the face of genes shared by different families. If eg. aphids and fungus had same gene, but horizontal gene transfer can be disproved, then it means that they got the same gene independently. That is so mind-bogglingly unlikely it couldn't happen by chance. So if a gene didn't appear by mutation, and didn't come via horizontal gene transfer, what have you left?
For example, transfer of same gene in two separate occasions sounds pretty unlikely. Not totally impossible, as if a virus acquired that gene and then transferred it to the same species, the same virus could have transferred it to several species, at least if they're related. But if same gene is shared by three or more otherwise "unrelated" (ie. very distantly related, as everything is related if you go back far enough) species, where it's very unlikely that same virus could infect them all, probability of natural transfer starts to go down fast.
Creationists and ID proponents should be fighting any research into horizontal gene transfer, and try to maintain that it doesn't take place. But I guess that would require they'd actually understood the concept, which they rarely do, as understanding tends to lead to acceptance of evolution (and possibly belief in theistic evolution or some such thing).
Civil engineers on occasion still dig trenches. (in German, I'd say "let a trench be dug," and it sounds fine, but in English it sounds like I'm being a pompous bitch.)
Just because it's not the "high brow" version, or bleeding edge version, doesn't mean it doesn't qualify.
Artificial selection is simply a tool of genetic engineering. And considering the differences between Maize and its closest cousin Teosintes; round-up ready crops are insignificantly different.
The results don't really matter, what matters is the methodology. Without the idea of genes and knowledge that genotype and phenotype are different, there can be no genetic engineering. Even with that knowledge, it won't be genetic engineering unless the knowledge is actively applied.
So I'll give you that genetic engineering pre-dates discovery of DNA. In Europe I guess genetic engineering was first practised when Mendelian genetics was applied into practical breeding. But I bet most artificial selection (if you count 3rd world and hobbyist breeding) even today isn't genetic engineering, because it's not based on genes, but on phenotype alone. And artificial selection pre-dates genetics by many millennia...
Or, digging with a shovel can be used in civil engineering, but more often it's used in gardening.
Like Corn/Maize... which can't propagate without human intervention.
I've always felt that artificial selection should be considered genetic engineering. I don't know why it isn't.
Because genetic engineering means manipulating the genes directly. Artificial selection doesn't do that, it let's the "normal" natural processes to do al the actual gene manipulation. I guess the borderline case is analyzing the DNA and performing artificial selection based on genotype. On the "traditional" side of that is artifical selection based on phenotype, and on the genetic engineering side is manipulating the genome directly (as opposed to let any DNA altering things happen in the "natural" way).
Or to put it the other way, "genetic engineering" means engineering based on genes. If you're not dealing with genes directly (be it just sequencing or actively altering), you're not doing genetic engineering.
If artificial selection is like an illiterate selecting books from a pile somebody else carried out of the library (of the Congress) based on how nice they look, genetic engineering is like actually going into the library and opening and reading books it before selecting, and making footnotes, and actually replaceing pieces of text and (eventually) writing entire new chapters, even writing new books (even farther into the future).
So if you want to call plain old artificial selection "genetic engineering", then "genetic engineering" needs a new name.
This is an example of why I don't worry about man-made genetically modified organisms. It you have studied biology, you realize that nature is constantly shuffling DNA from one organism to another across species, genera, phyla and here across kingdoms.
Nature is constantly performing billions of genetic engineering experiments, most of which don't work out. Sometimes there is a small evolutionary advantage. I don't worry about the "frankenfoods" taking over the world. Nature is constantly performing these experiments and the result is the the current highly optimized system we call "life on earth". Anything man creates just goes into the universal gene pool and has to compete with an already highly evolved system.
Yes, but if this "natural experimentation" hits something extraordinary, it may be a disaster for the current ecosystem. It doesn't happen much in nature, in fact it's very rare on human time-scales. But when we start to do it, it suddenly happens much more frequently, and therefore also changes that may ravage ecosystems happen much more frequently. Also, in nature, every change is "out there", even if they actually do nothing. Humans purposefully design changes that do something, and only "working" changes are released into the nature. So humans are much more, let's say, efficient than nature at messing with ecosystem gene pools.
It's pretty much the same argument as this: Since animals shit in the nature, it's ok for humans dump their sewage into the nature as well, just like has happened throughout the history. Clearly a wrong conclusion, if you're worried about well-being of people.
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RAM isn't cheap. Take the cheapest hard drive you can find. See how much memory you can get for the same price. Is that amount of memory enough to store, say, a few hunderd 1200 dpi full color A4/letter sized scans? I bet it isn't, so you'll need to spend more if you want to use RAM, for no observable benefit (except privacy of course).
HD is cheaper, plenty fast enough (sequential access), and even the cheapest $40 HD has so much capacity it's not worth even calculating how many pages it can store... But if that isn't enough, spend like $5 more to about quadruple the capacity, then it should be enough for anybody... It's not like an existing photocopier will be upgraded to use x-ray scanning, continuous spectrum, nanoscale printing technologies later, so there's no worry the capacity of an existing machine will not be enough in the future.
Possible cheapish privacy solution: generate random "session key" in RAM for every new job, and use it to strongly encrypt everything written to HD. Once the key is forgotten, encrypted data in HD becomes unrecoverable random noise.
With that said I question their motives it seems to me like they're using this release as an excuse to not have to provide support for their old games.
I think their motive is to increase their businesses revenues (which is just fine of course, they are a business after all, and that's what businesses are supposed to do). Cheap (not free, because open sourcing requires a bit of extra work, which isn't free) PR is probably the main motive.
You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
No problem, just cover your head with tin foil, and stop worrying about UV light causing brain cancer.
And if you replace top of your skull with a transparent glass dome, don't be a cheapskate like I was, invest in glass with proper certified UV filtering! I mean, what's the point of transparent dome if you have to cover it with tin foil when going outside...
My iPhone disrupts my sleep every day. It's my alarm clock.
Yeah, and I think Steve wouldn't even allow an app to fix that...
I thought Android IS a custom Linux, no?
Depends on what you mean by "Linux". It runs a (custom) Linux kernel, but it's not a Linux Operating System in the sense that it can't run what most people would consider "regular Linux applications".
Or to put it another way, If it doesn't quack like a penguin, it's not a penguin, not even if it has a transplanted penguin heart.
So this is how the robot apocalypse is to start eh? Well, I for one...you get the idea.
Indeed... Self-replicating DNA-based nanobots. It's got planet-scale disaster written all over it. It's not hard to imagine what a planet infested with such things might soon look like... A total mess covered in DNA-nanobot-goo.
Yes, it's probably BS. But it isn't BS until it is disproven. And yes, there isn't anything there to disprove right now.
Uh, there are cases, where it's BS until proven beyond reasonable doubt. If NK announced the Sun is going to rise tomorrow, then I'd be very worried, 'cos it's likely to be BS.
Whenever there is no accountability, BS starts to come out. Though it has to be said, at least their BS is often funny.
Clearly the solution is to both develop advanced cheap energy and work to "live within our means."
The nice thing about that "live within our means" is, that we don't really have to work for it if we don't want to. We can just wait until it happens automatically, and avoid the pain of making the necessary difficult choices ourselves! Let's just let nature take it's course!
This is exactly why Apple doesn't want third-party UI systems on the iPad.
Because the only website I visit that might give the iPhone issues are those with Flash... all other websites work perfectly?
I'm asking because I really don't know, and I'm interested: Do Google Documents and Google Wave work perfectly on iPhone?
And yes, you're talking about websites you visit, and you might not be visiting Google Docs or Wave, no need to point that out, I'm not disputing that, but those are websites I visit regularly so I'm interested :-)
the idea that penicillin, malathion, roundup, etc., are permanent tools against mother nature is a false one. but it is a false idea whether we used the products never, sparingly, intelligent, or stupidly. simple use of these tools will induce resistance. the arms race goes on forever, and the only thing we have to learn is to lose the naivete that these chemicals would be useful forever
we need to cook up more antibiotics, weed killers, and bug killers. but this is true no matter how we used the first generation of chemicals. we haven't learned anything, nor did we have anything to learn, unless it is the more eternal lesson that some people are naive
every advance is only a temporary advance, and the arms race exists, forever. we had a brief period when our weapons were effective, and now we have to find new weapons, and this is simply inevitable, unless you choose not to use any chemical weapons at all
in other words, i'm not quite sure what you think we are supposed to learn. don't fight?
In an arms race, you generally want to avoid the enemy learning to overcome your current technologies, and use them in such a way that their weaknesses don't become common knowledge to the enemy. And sometimes our use of antibiotics and pesticides and whatnot is closer to trying to actively train the enemy to overcome our current methods...
Or to put it the other way, do you want a new antibiotic to be useful for 20 years, or for 50 years?
Well, if you're in the pharmaceutical industry, it sure is 20 years, after that the patents expire and profits plummet... Much better than 50 years, who cares if it kills a few more people, those people would die anyway at some point so no loss really!
I'm sure it doesn't help that the plants that are resistant to roundup will cross-pollinate with the weeds that are supposed to be killed with roundup,
The definition of species is the inability to reproduce outside a given genetic group. Corn doesn't reproduce with ragweed. Nice try though.
Plants are a bit less fussy about that kind of stuff than animals (incidentally, they can also get pretty wild with chromosome numbers, and are often really simple to clone, and other wacky stuff). Also, with plants who's pollen is spread by wind, that pollen will get into the flowers and every other crevice of all other plants in the area, which probably helps in horizontal gene transfer.
With unemployment increasing every day, I would say that we are not lacking in manpower to pull the weeds by hand.
Yeah, but unless you're paying those weed-pullers with bad food and worse housing, it's not economically possible. If you paid them enough money to live on, you couldn't sell your produce with profit and you'd go bankrupt. And it'll be hard to find qualified (ie. not too drunk or high, not too anti-social, not too crazy, and especially not too lazy) weed-pullers who'd settle for food and housing.
Well, I guess it does depend if it's the weed you're really producing and the corn or whatever is just a cover... ;-)
I was told this by our patent lawyer once, I don't know how true it is but, don't you have to defend your trademark in order to make it valid? Meaning that they have to prosecute everyone (including fan sites like this) even if they settle on a 1 dollar license agreement in order to make sure that a real threat can't take the trademark freely.
In this case, the name is used to refer to the franchise specifically and not as a generic word. This also seems to be "fair use". This means it does not dilute the trademark, and nothing needs to be done.
Furthermore, if something needed to be done, simply giving a $0 license (with specific conditions) to use the trademark would have been sufficient to "defend" it.
Of course, writing the free license only earns a lawyer... $1000-$10000 or so maybe? If the same lawyer manages to convince those that decide that suing is really the best course of action, he'll make 100x more, so you can guess what he's going to recommend...
Hard to believe there's not someplace on Earth where the same nucleotide variations would have been advantageous.
Yeah, and it's quite plausible that at the dawn of primitive life, there were several variations, but only this one survived. Life probably got nearly wiped out many times back then, considering all the meteorities, volcanic activity, probably not-yet-quite-stable sun... So our current encoding is probably the one that was best in an environment that didn't get sterilized when everything else got sterilized at some point.
But once the encoding sets in, once there's actual xNA with information, changing encoding is apparently very hard. Any mutation in the basic encoding mechanism would cause every protein to be encoded differently, effectively breaking almost all of them. Now I'm sure there are paths allowing changes (something like first add "support" for new encoding without creating any disadvantage with old encoding still being used for everything, then have it replace old version when environment changes to favor it, then break "support" for old version when it's no longer used). Looking at the evidence (eg. urasil, and whatever we might not have found yet), it seems to be possible but very rare.
Dude, I was trying to eat! Neat concept but super gross :P
Serious question, what's so gross about hair?
Maybe you don't, but I bet most people do find cleaning shower drain of long hair and all the attached goo rather gross. Just think of digging that glob of slimy hair out of very unclean looking hole(*). Now imagine a glob of oil-slimy hair mat used for oil spill cleanup. If you don't think that's gross, well, more power to you :-).
(*) Even if you clean your shower drain daily with brush and chlorine detergent, I'm sure you can imagine cleaning one that hasn't been opened in this millenium, while it's been used by long-haired greasy geeks who don't shower often and don't use too much shampoo when they do...
No, we're not there yet. Nor will we ever be by not flying reusables because we aren't there yet. You don't make progress by throwing the baby out with the bathwater, nor do you make progress by sitting around waiting for magic to happen.
But progress is happening. And I agree it could be happening faster if more money were put into it. But it's happening in technology research. It's not yet time to start designing a big man-rated reusable space vehicle. A few rounds of small scramjet "spacedrones", and we may have enough knowledge to start designing a bigger one.
Yet reusables have proven to be the way to go with every other form of transport. Or, to put it another way, it's a really bad idea to draw sweeping universal conclusions based on a first generation system.
I think it's a question of mass and cost of expendable stuff (one-way payload, un-reusable parts, FUEL) vs. mass of potentially reusable stuff.
The ratio is rather miserable if you want to reach even LEO. Tricks (like White Knight - SpaceShipOne or using scramjets) may help, but they add complexity too. We're not there yet, and won't be any time soon. For now, the best we can hope for is "reusable return capsule" type vehicles that just don't look like classic return capsules.
I think the primary complaint (at least for me) for most flash games is the on hover effect. How do you replicate that with a touch interface? Now we have all sorts of wild gestures, so it reduces the simplicity.
If you can resolve that, I might reconsider my personal stance.
Nokia N900 solves that quite interestingly. Dragging your finger to the screen from one side creates an actual visible mouse cursor you can use pretty much like a normal mouse. Haven't used it much, but seemed to work pretty well with Flash stuff, as well as with Google Maps.
If the U.S. went into oblivion suddenly, the entire world's technological infrastructure would fail. Not just because of the loss of the U.S., but because of the turmoil and disorder that would result (or have been the cause). 50 years ago, the collapse would have been much less, 50 years from now such a collapse would be much worse (assuming the U.S. maintains its current position of dominance for the next 50 years).
If the U.S. does not maintain its current position of dominance for at least the next 20 years, we will all get to see what a collapse of civilization looks like.
Nah. Just think of WW2. None of the civilisations involved got annihilated, not even those that lost completely. US suddenly getting annihilated would be even less severe than WW2 was. Or think of something like the Black Death in middle ages. Something like third of Europeans killed in a short time-frame. Yet Europe did not collapse.
We may hit shitty times, as bad as WW2 or the Black Death, and that may happen within our lifetime, but I don't think that'll cause any modern civilisation to collapse. There might be starvation, rioting, revolutions, wars, inquisition, you name it, but historically that's perfectly normal. Most of us have just lived so shielded lives that it sounds like collapse of civilisation. But really, it's just "interesting times".
Selective breeding techniques for plants used most of the last hundred years involve breaking up chromosomes with radiation to create new and completely untested genes, then taking any of the mutants that seem to have benefited from this and spreading their randomly-created genes far and wide throughout the species.
Genetic engineering takes long-existing genes of known function and carefully inserts them into a species to create a predictable effect.
The crucial difference can be read between the lines even in your text. Speed. Being able to engineer the genetic changes allows churning out new, functional genetic variations at far faster pace. I'd expect our capability to double per two years or so (as calculated in man-years to engineer a new genetic functionality, or amount of functional changes engineered per generation, or number of interacting genes possible to handle, or whatever is relevant to the field).
Also our ability to put these rapidly developed functionalities out as products will grow fast. I'm talking about stuff like every kennel and stable having cheap artificial-insemination-with-gene-splicing capability, initially needing an off-site lab, eventually using something like a semi-automatic on-site device.
And also, creating changes randomly will likely create changes that interoperate with other genes of the same species, and are less likely to be efficient or even work on different species. Individual genes introduced by genetic engineering are by necessity independent and work well on different species, and thus always have high potential to get fixed in a "contaminated" wild population.
And yet people who do the second are the ones who get portrayed as having "vastly more potential to do damage to the environment".
Well, indeed it does. For a less hyperbolic example than the nuclear power plant one, compare a shovel and a backhoe (digging machine). They do pretty much the same thing in principle, yet power outages are rarely caused by shovels, regularly by backhoes.
The fact is, we know to a fairly high probability what, say, a Vitamin A producing gene spliced into rice from a bacterium could do if accidentally spread; it would, no matter where it wound up, create Vitamin A. That might have an accidental secondary effect if some species has a Vitamin A-bound process, of course. On the other hand, we do not know, to any degree of significance, what a new, radiation-created gene that seemed to increase maize yield will do in the wild. Yet it is the former, not the latter, which we have all the regulatory control upon, which the European Union bans, and you are comparing to atomic power plants.
Indeed, and as far as I can see, there are good technical reasons for it. They are different thing. One is known, one is unknown. Though the EU ban was on political level of course mostly based on irrational fear and protectionism, not technical details, but IMHO in this case they lead to the same conclusion.
And then there's the whole intellectual property mess (farmers getting sued, gene patenting in general, question of responsibility in case of economic or ecological damage caused by patented genes leaking into the wild or into the neighbouring farm), but let's not go there.
Would you dare to make a claim, that ubiquitous use of genetic engineering does not lead to spreading of new genes (especially between plants) orders of magnitude faster than occurs naturally?
I thought we were comparing genetic engineering to selective breeding techniques in common use, not nature. It's provably true that genetic engineering does not spread new genes any faster than the methods of mutation and selective breeding used during the bulk of the last century. All that changes with genetic engineering is we can select existing genes of known function deliberately instead of creating new genes of unknown effects r
People act as if there is a rift between genetic engineering and breeding techniques. There's not, they're just different tools for different situations, and each have their uses.
I'd say the difference is pretty much like the difference between traditional windmill and an atomic power plant. There certainly is a rift, one has vastly more potential to do damage to the environment. (Of course, if you take into account population growth and all that, relying on old "safe" methods, may indirectly end up doing more damage than using newer, potentially more dangerous but otherwise superior methods, but that's beside the point when assessing the direct damage potential.)
The key thing with genetic engineering, as with all changes in environment, is how fast it can change the environment. And genetic engineering taken to the extreme can change it very rapidly, changing ecological niches of species very rapidly (because of acquired genes that give competitive advantages). And a very rapid change pretty much equates mass extinctions, when natural mechanisms of evolution can't keep up with the change.
If there were no restrictions on use of genetically engineered plants, probably thousands or millions of new genes would be brought to the market (engineered into plants and animals), then to the field, and unavoidably some of them would get horizontally transferred into wild species. And some of millions is quite a lot. And it's not even restricted to plants. If non-neutered genetically engineered pets were legal (I don't know if they are), it takes just one escaping or getting lost to potentially get that gene into the feral/wild population. Also, there (almost by definition) can't be any genetic "failsafe" that a mutation can't disable (either mutation in that failsafe gene, or mutation in other gene making the failsafe ineffective). I'd be especially worried about genetically engineered pet rodents getting those novelty genes into the wild. For example imagine a seemingly benign set of genes allowing different diet than normal, nice for pet owner and/or for the pet's health, but probably also nice for vermin control businesses profits after a few generations of recombining in wild vermin population.
Would you dare to make a claim, that ubiquitous use of genetic engineering does not lead to spreading of new genes (especially between plants) orders of magnitude faster than occurs naturally? Or would you deny that this inflow of new genes will change ecosystems radically? Or would you deny that radical changes in ecosystems won't be any problem?
The fact that this type of finding actually refutes most current hypotheses of evolution,
Could you be more specific? Ie. which part of the theory of evolution does this refute?
Or you want a more specific question, in the context of the Theory of Evolution, how is getting new genes by horizontal gene transfer different from getting new genes by mutation?
It's more like horizontal gene transfer mechanisms save theory of evolution in the face of genes shared by different families. If eg. aphids and fungus had same gene, but horizontal gene transfer can be disproved, then it means that they got the same gene independently. That is so mind-bogglingly unlikely it couldn't happen by chance. So if a gene didn't appear by mutation, and didn't come via horizontal gene transfer, what have you left?
For example, transfer of same gene in two separate occasions sounds pretty unlikely. Not totally impossible, as if a virus acquired that gene and then transferred it to the same species, the same virus could have transferred it to several species, at least if they're related. But if same gene is shared by three or more otherwise "unrelated" (ie. very distantly related, as everything is related if you go back far enough) species, where it's very unlikely that same virus could infect them all, probability of natural transfer starts to go down fast.
Creationists and ID proponents should be fighting any research into horizontal gene transfer, and try to maintain that it doesn't take place. But I guess that would require they'd actually understood the concept, which they rarely do, as understanding tends to lead to acceptance of evolution (and possibly belief in theistic evolution or some such thing).
Civil engineers on occasion still dig trenches. (in German, I'd say "let a trench be dug," and it sounds fine, but in English it sounds like I'm being a pompous bitch.)
Just because it's not the "high brow" version, or bleeding edge version, doesn't mean it doesn't qualify.
Artificial selection is simply a tool of genetic engineering. And considering the differences between Maize and its closest cousin Teosintes; round-up ready crops are insignificantly different.
The results don't really matter, what matters is the methodology. Without the idea of genes and knowledge that genotype and phenotype are different, there can be no genetic engineering. Even with that knowledge, it won't be genetic engineering unless the knowledge is actively applied.
So I'll give you that genetic engineering pre-dates discovery of DNA. In Europe I guess genetic engineering was first practised when Mendelian genetics was applied into practical breeding. But I bet most artificial selection (if you count 3rd world and hobbyist breeding) even today isn't genetic engineering, because it's not based on genes, but on phenotype alone. And artificial selection pre-dates genetics by many millennia...
Or, digging with a shovel can be used in civil engineering, but more often it's used in gardening.
Like Corn/Maize... which can't propagate without human intervention.
I've always felt that artificial selection should be considered genetic engineering. I don't know why it isn't.
Because genetic engineering means manipulating the genes directly. Artificial selection doesn't do that, it let's the "normal" natural processes to do al the actual gene manipulation. I guess the borderline case is analyzing the DNA and performing artificial selection based on genotype. On the "traditional" side of that is artifical selection based on phenotype, and on the genetic engineering side is manipulating the genome directly (as opposed to let any DNA altering things happen in the "natural" way).
Or to put it the other way, "genetic engineering" means engineering based on genes. If you're not dealing with genes directly (be it just sequencing or actively altering), you're not doing genetic engineering.
If artificial selection is like an illiterate selecting books from a pile somebody else carried out of the library (of the Congress) based on how nice they look, genetic engineering is like actually going into the library and opening and reading books it before selecting, and making footnotes, and actually replaceing pieces of text and (eventually) writing entire new chapters, even writing new books (even farther into the future).
So if you want to call plain old artificial selection "genetic engineering", then "genetic engineering" needs a new name.
This is an example of why I don't worry about man-made genetically modified organisms. It you have studied biology, you realize that nature is constantly shuffling DNA from one organism to another across species, genera, phyla and here across kingdoms.
Nature is constantly performing billions of genetic engineering experiments, most of which don't work out. Sometimes there is a small evolutionary advantage. I don't worry about the "frankenfoods" taking over the world. Nature is constantly performing these experiments and the result is the the current highly optimized system we call "life on earth". Anything man creates just goes into the universal gene pool and has to compete with an already highly evolved system.
Yes, but if this "natural experimentation" hits something extraordinary, it may be a disaster for the current ecosystem. It doesn't happen much in nature, in fact it's very rare on human time-scales. But when we start to do it, it suddenly happens much more frequently, and therefore also changes that may ravage ecosystems happen much more frequently. Also, in nature, every change is "out there", even if they actually do nothing. Humans purposefully design changes that do something, and only "working" changes are released into the nature. So humans are much more, let's say, efficient than nature at messing with ecosystem gene pools.
It's pretty much the same argument as this: Since animals shit in the nature, it's ok for humans dump their sewage into the nature as well, just like has happened throughout the history. Clearly a wrong conclusion, if you're worried about well-being of people.