The Internet was designed to survive being broken up in parts and the parts mostly inaccessible to each other. The thinking was, in old Cold Warrior terms, 'Assume a nuclear war. How do we design a computer network that still functions in the aftermath?' The result? ARPANet, the parent of the modern internet. Being decentralised by nature it's resilient, and local networks can still function even in the face of 'great firewalls' through proxies.
The media companies were developed back in the day when duplicating media was expensive as hell. It took expensive cameras and sound recorders to create the media, expensive machines to edit that media, and expensive duplicating machines to create copies of it. Gradually, the media companies evolved to fill a niche between the content creators (the 'artists') and the consumers (the rest of us). They owned the expensive equipment to create 'modern media', to distribute and broadcast it, and dammit, they wanted paid. They got paid. Then they discovered that with all that money, they could make even more money by keeping the supply costs low (screwing the artists with 'Hollywood accounting' and such, and by guaranteeing their profits through 'campaign contributions' to maleable Congresscritters who in turn wrote legislation that helped the media companies stay in control of the artists who created content with contracts that anywhere else would be illegal as hell, and of course the 'sacred eternal copyright' that guaranteed their inaliable right to sue anybody anywhere for attempted copyright infringement.
The internet is a distribution system that's a wide open distribution chain. The media companies are a distribution system that demands heavily restricted supply chains or they go the way of the dinosaur. The equipment for producing 'content' has become dirt cheap and easily available. This scares the media companies shitless because it threatens their entire business model. Of course they're going to strike back. Even if nobody grabbed a torrent off the internet, they'd still be crying 'Pirates!! Pirates!' and they wouldn't be talking bout Johnny Depp. The media companies are scared shitless. They missed the boat to get on the ground floor of the internet because they didn't see it going anywhere. Now they're the distributors of buggy whips in a world where everybody is buying a Model T. Their only hope of survival is to legislate the clock backwards and kill the internet entirely to 'stop piracy' and turn it into cable tv 2.0. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time til they die & become oil for our Cadillacs.
If that were the case, it means these companies *know* that the consumer at large does not want their product. Exactly why they have these aversions to the GMO products is inconsequential: the public is innately biased against it, and does not want to consume that product.
Consumers in the US are 'innately biased' against GMO foods for the simple reason that they've been drowned in the 'frankenfood is death' hype. Keep in mind that if you can slap a label on something that magically makes it 'organic', you can charge a much larger price thanks to yuppies that pride themselves on 'only eating organic'. Remember the 'Baby Mozart' craze that made some people a few cool millions? Tailored towards yuppie parents, not a bit of scientific evidence to support it, and even studies showing that it was all hype. Also consider that hydroponically grown plants can be labeled as 'organic'. In all things, follow the money. Who makes money if this passes, who makes money if it doesn't, and what's the real deal without all the hype? Where's the peer-reviewed studies on both sides of this?
Keep in mind that Rodale has been at the forefront of the 'back to the land' movement since the late 60's, and makes its money selling the benefits of 'organic food'. Back in the day, their biggest seller was about organic gardening and claimed you should never ever ever THINK about using pesticides on your precious garden. They were also big on the 'heritage crops' craze where they advocated tossing away hybrid plants in favor of lesser-producing 'heritage genelines'. Bit of a conflict of interest there, doncha think? Oh, and did I mention they've always had an ax to grind when it came to GM foods? Maybe they got this one right, but they put out so much noise and bullshit over the years that their signal to noise ratio is nonexistant.
Producers are quite willing to place deceptive labels on products in their favour. (fat free lollies that are 99% sugar, 80% fat free, slim chips that contain more fat than regular chips....) If the information stops people buying your product then tough luck stop doing it (or prove that it is safe the burden of proof should be on the producer since they should have the knowledge), the free market is about meeting consumer demand, not about fooling people into buying your products. If people don't like red cars stop making them even if they are faster, or more fuel efficient.
Agreed, but the negative connotations of labeling a food as 'genetically modified' are enough to get it pulled off the market when everybody freaks out over 'eating frankenfood'. Dunno who coined that phrase, but you can be reasonably sure that that individual had an agenda of their own. Glance at this for some nifty info, relatively neutral in content.
Really? Three words for ya: horizontal gene transfer. It happens naturally. Part of the reason you are you is because of horizontal gene transfer, where, way the hell back when, about the time of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe here on Earth, some aerobic backteria, divorced from each other's evolutionary chains by a few million years, 'kissed and made up' and swapped some genes necessary for further evolution. These gave your cells the ability to burn glucose for energy, etc. Consider also the case of shingles. It's basically the chicken pox virus that's still in your cells after the infection, in a dormant state, until something wakes it up, when it mutates the nucleus of your skin cells and causes shingles. That's another example of horizontal gene transfer, and it happens naturally.
Fact is, you could make a case for genetic research and engineering in order to eliminate things like shingles, herpes, AIDs, etc. Instead of the kneejerk reaction of 'OMGOMGOMG, they're playing GAWD!!!', we need to do the research in space, away from Earth's gravity well, by remotes, no human contact once the lab is placed, so that in case of an accident, just deorbit the damned thing into the heart of the sun. Hell, let's figure out what glitches in cells to cause them to stop replacing themselves after a few dozen replications, eventually leading to death. I'm thinking, beat death back for a few hundred years, maybe us mere humans can wise up enough to quit fuckin around with the petty stuff like wars, pollution, and the like, and start working on the REAL problems that we'll be facing as a species. All it takes to start is get some reasonably smart people looking at genetics and genetic engineering and letting them get their teeth wet on it.
I'm tired of the European national programs. Why don't we go together with ESA. I know that every country want to get its money back and that ESA is a administrative mess, but let's try it.
(ok I may be one of the few people dreaming of a really unified Europe (or better, World) on every subject)
Probably because ESA will want to lay off some of the costs on NASA, and NASA will get defunded because of the ESA investment. It's happened before, it'll happen continually. Same thing with a UN-funded space program. Lotta people want it, nobody wants to fund it, so it'll never happen.
I guess we'll never build base camp on the moon. It would be so much cheaper to send some 3D printers up there to melt some rocks and build and launch the next probes
That makes too much sense. The government will never go for it.
What we need to do is, start engineering up the tech to go to Titan to take a look in person. Yeah, it's a couple decades down the road, but no reason why we can't start drawing on the cocktail napkins now to figure out what we might need...
Granted. But that still won't get you off of a murder rap when you shoot an intruder in some states. Good old Catch-22. Yer fucked if ya do, and fucked if ya don't.
Because if the police were to stop him with deadly or non-deadly force, the risk of me getting sued or going to jail is close to nil.
If I were to do it, the risk is considerably higher.
You kidding me? YOU'D get sued right along with them, as you 'facilitated' the 'police brutality' by daring to own property that the victim stood on while the police tazed him.
Welcome to the legal 'system' of the United States, where nobody goes unpunished unless they can buy their way out before it comes to trial.
Think EMC not Seagate. While the 4gb Seagate drive could probably be bought out of petty cash that much EMC storage would have blown their IT budget for the year.
Whaddaya expect when the DEA's IT budget is less than donut money at your local police station?
Yup, why fix the problem when you can fix the blame? It's certainly cheaper to do that than it is to come up with some kind of solution, in this case, fixing the goddamned copyright laws or something.
Course, I could be wrong. And severely caffiene-lacking...
Just a lil something I found on from Google. They've spent about a trillion bucks on this over the last 40 years and can't spend a few thousand on some 4 TB drives to crank up their storage space? The question is begged, wtf did they spend the money on? My money's on 'hookers & blow'...
Actually, some fools do want worthless "penny stocks.". Lots of people speculate in them for much the same reason people play the lottery. That's what all the spam about "hot tip: United Fecal Matter is set to take off!" is about.
Those spams are pretty much 'pump & dump' scams. Somebody buys an email list from a list broker, then snarfs up a few hundred thousand shares of some penny stock, spams the planet, waits for the stock to move up, and dumps them for a couple quick bucks. Hardcore daytraders used to get taken by this all the time til they wised up.
I just keep in mind the old saw about "Know how to make a small fortune in the stock market? Start with a large fortune!"
I'm just curious about one thing though... TFA mentions shareholders. Who the fuck would be crazy/stupid/naive enough to still be clinging to shares of SCOX? It's not like it's worth anything (it currently trades at $0.02, FFS)
A bunch of people who jumped on it when it was 18, 19 bucks a share just before it took the swan dive into the cesspool. Once it started down, no smart investor would touch it, and once it was delisted, even the 'pump & dump' scams couldn't move it a millimeter. I'm thinkin a lotta people tried to sell, but nobody was buying at any price; their brokers warned them off fast.
Okay then. To keep working from your examples, wake me up when Fukushima has caused 1500/3000 = 0.5 times the fuss we saw after the Twin Towers.
Well, I really don't see that happening. There were no reported terrorrorrorrists at Fukushima. It's not likely to spawn 3 & a half wars to supress terrorrorrists and force regime changes. I kinda doubt if Japan will pass anything like the PATRIOT Act or implement anything remotely like the TSA Comedy Hour. So, sleep well.
Sounds like the typical SyFy channel movie of the week, actually. And we all know they don't get their science anywhere near the neighborhood of reality.
That being said, I leave you with a paraphrased quote I remember from someplace: The universe is a strange place. Probably even more strange than you could possibly imagine. Anything is possible. There are no limits.
Except we've looked at and classified what, 2% of the asteroids in the system? I seem to recall reading an article someplace for an asteroid watchgroup saying we've only looked at something like 2% of the available sky. It's easy to miss a giant asteroid (say, 3-5 km in diameter) if you're not looking for it. Kinda like how so many motorcyclists get t-boned. The driver isn't looking for bikes, he's checking out that teenybopper chick overfilling that string bikini walking behind him in the rear view mirror.
While the author concedes that 1500 deaths will be the long term impact of this accident, I love that he maintains that Nuclear power is safe and clean.
3000 died in the Twin Towers. Something like 50000 die every year in the US due to auto accidents. There are 7 BILLION people on Earth. 1600 people of a pool of 7 billion really isn't statistically significant. Hell, you take your life in your own hands when you get out of bed in the morning. You DO get out of bed in the morning, don't you?? Do you know how many people die in bed every year???
Slashdot Mirror
Why is any of this surprising to anybody?
The Internet was designed to survive being broken up in parts and the parts mostly inaccessible to each other. The thinking was, in old Cold Warrior terms, 'Assume a nuclear war. How do we design a computer network that still functions in the aftermath?' The result? ARPANet, the parent of the modern internet. Being decentralised by nature it's resilient, and local networks can still function even in the face of 'great firewalls' through proxies.
The media companies were developed back in the day when duplicating media was expensive as hell. It took expensive cameras and sound recorders to create the media, expensive machines to edit that media, and expensive duplicating machines to create copies of it. Gradually, the media companies evolved to fill a niche between the content creators (the 'artists') and the consumers (the rest of us). They owned the expensive equipment to create 'modern media', to distribute and broadcast it, and dammit, they wanted paid. They got paid. Then they discovered that with all that money, they could make even more money by keeping the supply costs low (screwing the artists with 'Hollywood accounting' and such, and by guaranteeing their profits through 'campaign contributions' to maleable Congresscritters who in turn wrote legislation that helped the media companies stay in control of the artists who created content with contracts that anywhere else would be illegal as hell, and of course the 'sacred eternal copyright' that guaranteed their inaliable right to sue anybody anywhere for attempted copyright infringement.
The internet is a distribution system that's a wide open distribution chain. The media companies are a distribution system that demands heavily restricted supply chains or they go the way of the dinosaur. The equipment for producing 'content' has become dirt cheap and easily available. This scares the media companies shitless because it threatens their entire business model. Of course they're going to strike back. Even if nobody grabbed a torrent off the internet, they'd still be crying 'Pirates!! Pirates!' and they wouldn't be talking bout Johnny Depp. The media companies are scared shitless. They missed the boat to get on the ground floor of the internet because they didn't see it going anywhere. Now they're the distributors of buggy whips in a world where everybody is buying a Model T. Their only hope of survival is to legislate the clock backwards and kill the internet entirely to 'stop piracy' and turn it into cable tv 2.0. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time til they die & become oil for our Cadillacs.
Yup, it's just not natural, even when nature does it. Where you think a bunch of mutations come from?
If that were the case, it means these companies *know* that the consumer at large does not want their product. Exactly why they have these aversions to the GMO products is inconsequential: the public is innately biased against it, and does not want to consume that product.
Consumers in the US are 'innately biased' against GMO foods for the simple reason that they've been drowned in the 'frankenfood is death' hype. Keep in mind that if you can slap a label on something that magically makes it 'organic', you can charge a much larger price thanks to yuppies that pride themselves on 'only eating organic'. Remember the 'Baby Mozart' craze that made some people a few cool millions? Tailored towards yuppie parents, not a bit of scientific evidence to support it, and even studies showing that it was all hype. Also consider that hydroponically grown plants can be labeled as 'organic'. In all things, follow the money. Who makes money if this passes, who makes money if it doesn't, and what's the real deal without all the hype? Where's the peer-reviewed studies on both sides of this?
Keep in mind that Rodale has been at the forefront of the 'back to the land' movement since the late 60's, and makes its money selling the benefits of 'organic food'. Back in the day, their biggest seller was about organic gardening and claimed you should never ever ever THINK about using pesticides on your precious garden. They were also big on the 'heritage crops' craze where they advocated tossing away hybrid plants in favor of lesser-producing 'heritage genelines'. Bit of a conflict of interest there, doncha think? Oh, and did I mention they've always had an ax to grind when it came to GM foods? Maybe they got this one right, but they put out so much noise and bullshit over the years that their signal to noise ratio is nonexistant.
Agreed, but the negative connotations of labeling a food as 'genetically modified' are enough to get it pulled off the market when everybody freaks out over 'eating frankenfood'. Dunno who coined that phrase, but you can be reasonably sure that that individual had an agenda of their own. Glance at this for some nifty info, relatively neutral in content.
Really? Three words for ya: horizontal gene transfer. It happens naturally. Part of the reason you are you is because of horizontal gene transfer, where, way the hell back when, about the time of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe here on Earth, some aerobic backteria, divorced from each other's evolutionary chains by a few million years, 'kissed and made up' and swapped some genes necessary for further evolution. These gave your cells the ability to burn glucose for energy, etc. Consider also the case of shingles. It's basically the chicken pox virus that's still in your cells after the infection, in a dormant state, until something wakes it up, when it mutates the nucleus of your skin cells and causes shingles. That's another example of horizontal gene transfer, and it happens naturally.
Fact is, you could make a case for genetic research and engineering in order to eliminate things like shingles, herpes, AIDs, etc. Instead of the kneejerk reaction of 'OMGOMGOMG, they're playing GAWD!!!', we need to do the research in space, away from Earth's gravity well, by remotes, no human contact once the lab is placed, so that in case of an accident, just deorbit the damned thing into the heart of the sun. Hell, let's figure out what glitches in cells to cause them to stop replacing themselves after a few dozen replications, eventually leading to death. I'm thinking, beat death back for a few hundred years, maybe us mere humans can wise up enough to quit fuckin around with the petty stuff like wars, pollution, and the like, and start working on the REAL problems that we'll be facing as a species. All it takes to start is get some reasonably smart people looking at genetics and genetic engineering and letting them get their teeth wet on it.
I'm tired of the European national programs. Why don't we go together with ESA. I know that every country want to get its money back and that ESA is a administrative mess, but let's try it. (ok I may be one of the few people dreaming of a really unified Europe (or better, World) on every subject)
Probably because ESA will want to lay off some of the costs on NASA, and NASA will get defunded because of the ESA investment. It's happened before, it'll happen continually. Same thing with a UN-funded space program. Lotta people want it, nobody wants to fund it, so it'll never happen.
I guess we'll never build base camp on the moon. It would be so much cheaper to send some 3D printers up there to melt some rocks and build and launch the next probes
That makes too much sense. The government will never go for it.
Private enterprise, OTOT...
What we need to do is, start engineering up the tech to go to Titan to take a look in person. Yeah, it's a couple decades down the road, but no reason why we can't start drawing on the cocktail napkins now to figure out what we might need...
Granted. But that still won't get you off of a murder rap when you shoot an intruder in some states. Good old Catch-22. Yer fucked if ya do, and fucked if ya don't.
Because if the police were to stop him with deadly or non-deadly force, the risk of me getting sued or going to jail is close to nil.
If I were to do it, the risk is considerably higher.
You kidding me? YOU'D get sued right along with them, as you 'facilitated' the 'police brutality' by daring to own property that the victim stood on while the police tazed him.
Welcome to the legal 'system' of the United States, where nobody goes unpunished unless they can buy their way out before it comes to trial.
Think EMC not Seagate. While the 4gb Seagate drive could probably be bought out of petty cash that much EMC storage would have blown their IT budget for the year.
Whaddaya expect when the DEA's IT budget is less than donut money at your local police station?
Yup, why fix the problem when you can fix the blame? It's certainly cheaper to do that than it is to come up with some kind of solution, in this case, fixing the goddamned copyright laws or something.
Course, I could be wrong. And severely caffiene-lacking...
Just a lil something I found on from Google. They've spent about a trillion bucks on this over the last 40 years and can't spend a few thousand on some 4 TB drives to crank up their storage space? The question is begged, wtf did they spend the money on? My money's on 'hookers & blow'...
Actually, some fools do want worthless "penny stocks.". Lots of people speculate in them for much the same reason people play the lottery. That's what all the spam about "hot tip: United Fecal Matter is set to take off!" is about.
Those spams are pretty much 'pump & dump' scams. Somebody buys an email list from a list broker, then snarfs up a few hundred thousand shares of some penny stock, spams the planet, waits for the stock to move up, and dumps them for a couple quick bucks. Hardcore daytraders used to get taken by this all the time til they wised up.
I just keep in mind the old saw about "Know how to make a small fortune in the stock market? Start with a large fortune!"
I'm just curious about one thing though... TFA mentions shareholders. Who the fuck would be crazy/stupid/naive enough to still be clinging to shares of SCOX? It's not like it's worth anything (it currently trades at $0.02, FFS)
A bunch of people who jumped on it when it was 18, 19 bucks a share just before it took the swan dive into the cesspool. Once it started down, no smart investor would touch it, and once it was delisted, even the 'pump & dump' scams couldn't move it a millimeter. I'm thinkin a lotta people tried to sell, but nobody was buying at any price; their brokers warned them off fast.
Oh, be quiet and pass the Bambi-Burger(tm)
We take them to Boulder, Colorado for a rock concert?
Android zombies? Zombie androids? Which is worse?
Still, it doesn't sound too bad. What could possibly go wrong?
Okay then. To keep working from your examples, wake me up when Fukushima has caused 1500/3000 = 0.5 times the fuss we saw after the Twin Towers.
Well, I really don't see that happening. There were no reported terrorrorrorrists at Fukushima. It's not likely to spawn 3 & a half wars to supress terrorrorrists and force regime changes. I kinda doubt if Japan will pass anything like the PATRIOT Act or implement anything remotely like the TSA Comedy Hour. So, sleep well.
THIS is the dreaded Zombie Apocalypse we're constantly warned about??
Sounds like the typical SyFy channel movie of the week, actually. And we all know they don't get their science anywhere near the neighborhood of reality.
That being said, I leave you with a paraphrased quote I remember from someplace: The universe is a strange place. Probably even more strange than you could possibly imagine. Anything is possible. There are no limits.
Except we've looked at and classified what, 2% of the asteroids in the system? I seem to recall reading an article someplace for an asteroid watchgroup saying we've only looked at something like 2% of the available sky. It's easy to miss a giant asteroid (say, 3-5 km in diameter) if you're not looking for it. Kinda like how so many motorcyclists get t-boned. The driver isn't looking for bikes, he's checking out that teenybopper chick overfilling that string bikini walking behind him in the rear view mirror.
Yup.
While the author concedes that 1500 deaths will be the long term impact of this accident, I love that he maintains that Nuclear power is safe and clean.
3000 died in the Twin Towers. Something like 50000 die every year in the US due to auto accidents. There are 7 BILLION people on Earth. 1600 people of a pool of 7 billion really isn't statistically significant. Hell, you take your life in your own hands when you get out of bed in the morning. You DO get out of bed in the morning, don't you?? Do you know how many people die in bed every year???