Your system of risk management is incomplete. Random mutations will occur in tiny pockets and are unlikely to propagate through a population if there's any detectable downsides (detectable being the essence of your logic). Therefore your "known risks" category applies to very few people. The "unknown risks" applies to vast swathes of the world's population as Monsanto replaces crops worldwide with their modified ones. So you also have to factor in whether someone is likely to one of the first to be subject to one of the "known risk" categories rather than the the overwhelming likelihood that the same person is going to be subject to the "unknown risk" category. Which is best? 0.001% of people being subject to a 60% risk, or 98% of people being subject to a 30% risk? Statistically, you're more likely to come to harm in the latter scenario by a very large margin.
That aside, I think your premise is flawed, anyway.
So your logic is that if you object to being pushed into one unpleasant outcome, it's okay to object, but if you're pushed into a choice of two unpleasant outcomes, one of them has to be okay? You think for some reason it is invalid to say "let's not have to choose between either bad outcome"?
I can see how the US gets away with the two party system.;)
Also, genetic tinkering can and has crossed the species barrier. We have crops now with genes in them from caterpillars. Ever tried breeding a cereal crop and a caterpillar? Good luck!
Right. And in other news, Osama Bin Laden speaks for all muslims, Rush Limbaugh speaks for all Americans, the Nation of Islam fairly represents the views of all black people and and all computer programmers are geeks who don't know one end of a football from the other. That there is a group of people who make as much fuss and try to get as much attention for themselves as possible whilst claiming to represent a group, does not mean that they actually are representative of that group. To whit, many people I know who consider themselves environmentalists (including myself) are hugely pro-Nuclear power.
Or because you worry that turning most of the world's food supplies into a genetic monoculture might possibly be a bad idea. (Another thing that just occurred to me).
Asking them to prove something can never ever in all of time and space be harmful to us? No, they can't do that. But don't take your principle to extremes. It's perfectly reasonable to ask for neutral and thorough trials before millions of people start consuming something daily.
Actually, I should have also said that ultimately, whether you agree with people or not, everyone in a democracy has a right to make informed choices. If you feel that something is not a cause for concern, then the democratic approach is to persuade people of this. Not for a government to trick them into the path they've decided is best for them.
There are a lot more reasons to boycott GM food than just a concern about its effects on your immediate health. So it's not like autism warnings on vaccines. By lobbying to prevent people being able to find out whether or not a food contains GMOs, companies like Monsanto are preventing people from making informed choices. And regarding the autism / vaccine analogy, presumably people who think an MMR vaccine will trigger autism think that all combined MMR vaccines are similar in this respect. So it's not the same at all: people who take their children for an MMR know that this is what they're doing. Buy some rice and maybe you know it's GM and maybe you don't. You're likening a redundant labelling system with one that would actually convey information.
It reminds me of how the Romans brought in lead piping for their water. They thought it was great - water pumped to your home, the ultimate sign that you'd made it. An entire ruling class slowly poisoning themselves. We don't know what affect GM crops may have. They might prove relatively harmless to us directly (who knows?) but turn out to have a devastating effect on the environment. Remember that a lot of the high yields some like to report, are not because the crop has been engineered to be super-abundant (selective breeding has already done wonders there), but because they are engineered to resist pesticides that kill pretty much everything else. What does that do for run-off into rivers? What does that do to biodiversity and the general eco-system? What happens if these traits get loose into the wild or to the farm workers and local people exposed to the increased use of pesticides. Not to mention that if some of the GM traits do get loose in the wild, it's pretty much irreversible. So they've engineered plants that secrete a poison normally found in caterpillars to make the plant poisonous to pests. Sounds like one Hell of a survival trait to me. So a little way down the line and insect populations take a tumble because of this, and the birds that depend on them. Maybe everything will be fine, but the point is that we don't know and we can't reverse this if it does go wrong.
But leaving aside the biological issues, the economic ones that we do know for sure are frightful. These crops are patented. The developing world is Monsanto's poster child for GM crops and they'll do anything they can to get everyone using these crops. But first one's always free. If a staple food is monopolised, you're going to trust who that the licence fees stay low? Monsanto? Should there even be licence fees for growing food? And enforcement? Well, the seed they sell you is sterile. Terminator crops will not reproduce so you can't save seed from last year for this year's planting. You have to buy again and again. Sure you can try and go back to planting non-Monsanto crops. If you still have seed stocks that are viable. And if you can guarantee that their inspectors wont find any traces of Monsanto crops on your land. Good luck with that.
Monsanto tout things like their "Golden Rice" (such a dream name, that one) as helping the poor third world. It's been engineered to have high levels of Vitamin D. But why do some people in the Third World have vitamin D deficiencies? Because their historical balanced diet based on their usual range of crops, has been replaced with bulk rice farming because that's what the international market demands they grow.
But what's the genetically modified strawman that gets trotted out by Monsanto every year? "You said GM might be bad for people and our scientist has failed to find evidence that it causes disease X, so shut up, because there's nothing to worry about."
Why is everyone in this thread suddenly referring to HDDs as "spinning rust". Was there a memo or something?
I just have this idea that somewhere there is an office where shadowy figures say things like "if you check your schedules for this month, we have 'spinning rust' for HDDs, 'skeptic' is to be replaced with 'denier', we want a active effort to make as many people as possible say 'loose' when they mean 'lose'. And I'm pleased to announce that our year long project to make everyone say 'I could care less' instead of 'couldn't' has been a great success, gentlmen."
This is the age of Argument By Google. You don't need to know things, you only need to type a search into Google and link to the result. This is sufficient for argument.
So the systems which would likely have a chance at wearing out an SSD are also usually the systems that cannot realistically use an SSD for data storage
What about databases? I have a project based around a PostgreSQL database and it's pretty intensive. The bottleneck on the database's performance remains the disk I/O. A good SSD, I estimate, would provide a very noticeable boost to this. Note the system is about equal parts writing to and reading from (well, about 30/70) which is the worst of all worlds for a database.
Well no, you're just posting odd-little one-liners several posts after you said you refused to continue in some bizarre attempt to have the last word as if he who speaks last therefore becomes the "winner" by default.
(The above may or may not be a one-liner depending on screen-width)
Your plan was to not address anything I said and instead make an absurd comparison of pirates to persecuted jews so that the argument ended because nobody needed to bother refuting anything you said? Good one. I fell for it.:)
Thought you said you'd terminated this argument? Still here?
I said this is a stupid argument. I will now invoke Godwin in order to terminate it. Dislike Nazis? Blame Jews. Are you fucking satisfied now?
Well I'm satisfied that's one of the dumbest arguments in favour of piracy that I've ever heard (which is impressive). You equate pirates with persecuted jews and companies trying to protect their software against people copying it with Nazis. Trivialise the Holocaust much? Create bad analogies much? Well you wanted to end the argument, I think you just succeeded.
Hmmmm. I hope someone doesn't discard the obvious meaning of my post in favour of a logically valid but preposterous interpretation for the sake of an amusing reply.
DRM is a response to piracy. If people stopped pirating software, then companies would no longer bother with the DRM arms race. Ergo, piracy is responsible for DRM, which is what I said. Anything in there that can actually be disputed? And DRM doesn't have to be 100% effective. If it merely slows down or reduces piracy, then that can still be worth while. Look at the Apple appstore. Apple's locked down bastard of a set-up really hits piracy. Maybe that's where piracy will push things - horribly locked down set ups. And as you say, it is we legitimate customers that suffer most.
Sometimes DRM is effective. It took quite some time to crack the protection on Blu-Ray. Who knows, maybe an effective method will be found. Personally I'm a big advocate of watermarking rather than DRM as this still allows prosecution without inconveniencing legitimate customers.
I say piracy makes DRM necessary. You say it doesn't because DRM can be beaten. That's talking at cross-purposes. What we both mean is I say: DRM is a response to piracy. You mean it's pointless (or self-harming) to respond in that way. You may or may not be right in each case, but the fact remains that as long as their is widespread piracy then content producers will probably respond by trying to stop them. And that's fair enough.
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Your system of risk management is incomplete. Random mutations will occur in tiny pockets and are unlikely to propagate through a population if there's any detectable downsides (detectable being the essence of your logic). Therefore your "known risks" category applies to very few people. The "unknown risks" applies to vast swathes of the world's population as Monsanto replaces crops worldwide with their modified ones. So you also have to factor in whether someone is likely to one of the first to be subject to one of the "known risk" categories rather than the the overwhelming likelihood that the same person is going to be subject to the "unknown risk" category. Which is best? 0.001% of people being subject to a 60% risk, or 98% of people being subject to a 30% risk? Statistically, you're more likely to come to harm in the latter scenario by a very large margin.
That aside, I think your premise is flawed, anyway.
So your logic is that if you object to being pushed into one unpleasant outcome, it's okay to object, but if you're pushed into a choice of two unpleasant outcomes, one of them has to be okay? You think for some reason it is invalid to say "let's not have to choose between either bad outcome"?
I can see how the US gets away with the two party system.
Thanks for the link. I'll look into this further before using that for background again.
Also, genetic tinkering can and has crossed the species barrier. We have crops now with genes in them from caterpillars. Ever tried breeding a cereal crop and a caterpillar? Good luck!
When I have time to address all of the worlds problems at once, I'll let you know.
Right. And in other news, Osama Bin Laden speaks for all muslims, Rush Limbaugh speaks for all Americans, the Nation of Islam fairly represents the views of all black people and and all computer programmers are geeks who don't know one end of a football from the other. That there is a group of people who make as much fuss and try to get as much attention for themselves as possible whilst claiming to represent a group, does not mean that they actually are representative of that group. To whit, many people I know who consider themselves environmentalists (including myself) are hugely pro-Nuclear power.
Or because you worry that turning most of the world's food supplies into a genetic monoculture might possibly be a bad idea. (Another thing that just occurred to me).
You're right. And thank you. Vitamin A is what I meant.
Asking them to prove something can never ever in all of time and space be harmful to us? No, they can't do that. But don't take your principle to extremes. It's perfectly reasonable to ask for neutral and thorough trials before millions of people start consuming something daily.
Actually, I should have also said that ultimately, whether you agree with people or not, everyone in a democracy has a right to make informed choices. If you feel that something is not a cause for concern, then the democratic approach is to persuade people of this. Not for a government to trick them into the path they've decided is best for them.
There are a lot more reasons to boycott GM food than just a concern about its effects on your immediate health. So it's not like autism warnings on vaccines. By lobbying to prevent people being able to find out whether or not a food contains GMOs, companies like Monsanto are preventing people from making informed choices. And regarding the autism / vaccine analogy, presumably people who think an MMR vaccine will trigger autism think that all combined MMR vaccines are similar in this respect. So it's not the same at all: people who take their children for an MMR know that this is what they're doing. Buy some rice and maybe you know it's GM and maybe you don't. You're likening a redundant labelling system with one that would actually convey information.
It reminds me of how the Romans brought in lead piping for their water. They thought it was great - water pumped to your home, the ultimate sign that you'd made it. An entire ruling class slowly poisoning themselves. We don't know what affect GM crops may have. They might prove relatively harmless to us directly (who knows?) but turn out to have a devastating effect on the environment. Remember that a lot of the high yields some like to report, are not because the crop has been engineered to be super-abundant (selective breeding has already done wonders there), but because they are engineered to resist pesticides that kill pretty much everything else. What does that do for run-off into rivers? What does that do to biodiversity and the general eco-system? What happens if these traits get loose into the wild or to the farm workers and local people exposed to the increased use of pesticides. Not to mention that if some of the GM traits do get loose in the wild, it's pretty much irreversible. So they've engineered plants that secrete a poison normally found in caterpillars to make the plant poisonous to pests. Sounds like one Hell of a survival trait to me. So a little way down the line and insect populations take a tumble because of this, and the birds that depend on them. Maybe everything will be fine, but the point is that we don't know and we can't reverse this if it does go wrong.
But leaving aside the biological issues, the economic ones that we do know for sure are frightful. These crops are patented. The developing world is Monsanto's poster child for GM crops and they'll do anything they can to get everyone using these crops. But first one's always free. If a staple food is monopolised, you're going to trust who that the licence fees stay low? Monsanto? Should there even be licence fees for growing food? And enforcement? Well, the seed they sell you is sterile. Terminator crops will not reproduce so you can't save seed from last year for this year's planting. You have to buy again and again. Sure you can try and go back to planting non-Monsanto crops. If you still have seed stocks that are viable. And if you can guarantee that their inspectors wont find any traces of Monsanto crops on your land. Good luck with that.
Monsanto tout things like their "Golden Rice" (such a dream name, that one) as helping the poor third world. It's been engineered to have high levels of Vitamin D. But why do some people in the Third World have vitamin D deficiencies? Because their historical balanced diet based on their usual range of crops, has been replaced with bulk rice farming because that's what the international market demands they grow.
But what's the genetically modified strawman that gets trotted out by Monsanto every year? "You said GM might be bad for people and our scientist has failed to find evidence that it causes disease X, so shut up, because there's nothing to worry about."
Sure. I just wondered if I'd missed a story about Raptors malfunctioning or something. Okay, over-analysed the funny. No problem.
Why is everyone in this thread suddenly referring to HDDs as "spinning rust". Was there a memo or something?
I just have this idea that somewhere there is an office where shadowy figures say things like "if you check your schedules for this month, we have 'spinning rust' for HDDs, 'skeptic' is to be replaced with 'denier', we want a active effort to make as many people as possible say 'loose' when they mean 'lose'. And I'm pleased to announce that our year long project to make everyone say 'I could care less' instead of 'couldn't' has been a great success, gentlmen."
This is the age of Argument By Google. You don't need to know things, you only need to type a search into Google and link to the result. This is sufficient for argument.
Serious question: The rest I get, but why is the Raptor funny? Expensive way to do things, but I would have thought quite good. No?
What about databases? I have a project based around a PostgreSQL database and it's pretty intensive. The bottleneck on the database's performance remains the disk I/O. A good SSD, I estimate, would provide a very noticeable boost to this. Note the system is about equal parts writing to and reading from (well, about 30/70) which is the worst of all worlds for a database.
Well no, you're just posting odd-little one-liners several posts after you said you refused to continue in some bizarre attempt to have the last word as if he who speaks last therefore becomes the "winner" by default.
(The above may or may not be a one-liner depending on screen-width)
Your plan was to not address anything I said and instead make an absurd comparison of pirates to persecuted jews so that the argument ended because nobody needed to bother refuting anything you said? Good one. I fell for it. :)
Thought you said you'd terminated this argument? Still here?
Well I'm satisfied that's one of the dumbest arguments in favour of piracy that I've ever heard (which is impressive). You equate pirates with persecuted jews and companies trying to protect their software against people copying it with Nazis. Trivialise the Holocaust much? Create bad analogies much? Well you wanted to end the argument, I think you just succeeded.
:)
Maybe not how you'd like to have, mind you.
And I say that if you agree that DRM is a response to piracy then you agree with my statement that piracy caused DRM. Dislike DRM? Blame piracy.
Hmmmm. I hope someone doesn't discard the obvious meaning of my post in favour of a logically valid but preposterous interpretation for the sake of an amusing reply.
DRM is a response to piracy. If people stopped pirating software, then companies would no longer bother with the DRM arms race. Ergo, piracy is responsible for DRM, which is what I said. Anything in there that can actually be disputed? And DRM doesn't have to be 100% effective. If it merely slows down or reduces piracy, then that can still be worth while. Look at the Apple appstore. Apple's locked down bastard of a set-up really hits piracy. Maybe that's where piracy will push things - horribly locked down set ups. And as you say, it is we legitimate customers that suffer most.
Sometimes DRM is effective. It took quite some time to crack the protection on Blu-Ray. Who knows, maybe an effective method will be found. Personally I'm a big advocate of watermarking rather than DRM as this still allows prosecution without inconveniencing legitimate customers.
I say piracy makes DRM necessary. You say it doesn't because DRM can be beaten. That's talking at cross-purposes. What we both mean is I say: DRM is a response to piracy. You mean it's pointless (or self-harming) to respond in that way. You may or may not be right in each case, but the fact remains that as long as their is widespread piracy then content producers will probably respond by trying to stop them. And that's fair enough.
Fixed that for you.
And as long as piracy makes it necessary.