good post, I think it's time for me to back you up.
Might I point out that every revolution has its robber barons. The industrial revolution produced those bastards who ruined the environment, but then people woke up and stopped them. We are on track to having the cleanest environment in the last 100 years. If we can stop urban sprawl and save enough land in pristine condition the world is well on it's way to being an absolutely beautiful place to live. We seem to have gotten a handle on this problem.
Then the internet revolution, companies like Microsoft ruined a lot of others and wasted a huge ammount of our money and time (crashes, bloatware). But now they are more or less under control. It is only a matter of time before opensource pushes them out. If there is a borg in the software industry opensource is it. If everyone throws in their two cents no corporation can take on their creation, especially when it's free. Open source will tame the wiles of the likes of Microsoft.
Now genetic engineering. First of all might I point out that patents do expire (I think it is 14 years or so?) so even if Monsanto does make all these changes and add the terminator gene to it's crops there is nothing to prevent someone else from "stealing" these crops and adding them to our arsenal. Keep in mind that after these patents expire they cannot be panted again, so this stuff becomes public domain. Granted we will screw up a few times, but there are pesticides on your food now. Wouldn't you at least have those pesticides only on the plants and not all over the place (as happens when we spray them on).
I might also add that although organisims can become resistant to almost anything they can not keep up with us for long. Every one of those immunities exacts a price on it's bearer. We can always rotate our chemicals and design new ones to work in new ways or to attack the organisims resistance it's self. That would be the best of all possible worlds. Various organisims become resistant and then we design a chemical that only attacks resistant organisims by exploiting their resistance mechanism. Although an organisim can be resistant to many things there are limits. Can it be resistant to 100 things? How about 1,000. Can it counter our counters, and our counters to it's counters. If it can do all this it will probably not be a threat to us because it will be so full of resistance machinery that it will get out competed by the non resistant strains, or be an easy mark for it's natural predators (or our immune system). We haven't won the arms race with our pests yet, but they can't stay with us forever. Eventually we will beat them all into obscurity. Resistance, while it shouldn't be allowed to come easily isn't the end of the line. If we retired penicillin right now for a decade or two then we could use it again later and nothing would be resistant to it because they would have been out competed by the non resistant varieties due to the overhead of the resistance mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
good post, I think it's time for me to back you up.
Might I point out that every revolution has its robber barons. The industrial revolution produced those bastards who ruined the environment, but then people woke up and stopped them. We are on track to having the cleanest environment in the last 100 years. If we can stop urban sprawl and save enough land in pristine condition the world is well on it's way to being an absolutely beautiful place to live. We seem to have gotten a handle on this problem.
Then the internet revolution, companies like Microsoft ruined a lot of others and wasted a huge ammount of our money and time (crashes, bloatware). But now they are more or less under control. It is only a matter of time before opensource pushes them out. If there is a borg in the software industry opensource is it. If everyone throws in their two cents no corporation can take on their creation, especially when it's free. Open source will tame the wiles of the likes of Microsoft.
Now genetic engineering. First of all might I point out that patents do expire (I think it is 14 years or so?) so even if Monsanto does make all these changes and add the terminator gene to it's crops there is nothing to prevent someone else from "stealing" these crops and adding them to our arsenal. Keep in mind that after these patents expire they cannot be panted again, so this stuff becomes public domain. Granted we will screw up a few times, but there are pesticides on your food now. Wouldn't you at least have those pesticides only on the plants and not all over the place (as happens when we spray them on).
I might also add that although organisims can become resistant to almost anything they can not keep up with us for long. Every one of those immunities exacts a price on it's bearer. We can always rotate our chemicals and design new ones to work in new ways or to attack the organisims resistance it's self. That would be the best of all possible worlds. Various organisims become resistant and then we design a chemical that only attacks resistant organisims by exploiting their resistance mechanism. Although an organisim can be resistant to many things there are limits. Can it be resistant to 100 things? How about 1,000. Can it counter our counters, and our counters to it's counters. If it can do all this it will probably not be a threat to us because it will be so full of resistance machinery that it will get out competed by the non resistant strains, or be an easy mark for it's natural predators (or our immune system). We haven't won the arms race with our pests yet, but they can't stay with us forever. Eventually we will beat them all into obscurity. Resistance, while it shouldn't be allowed to come easily isn't the end of the line. If we retired penicillin right now for a decade or two then we could use it again later and nothing would be resistant to it because they would have been out competed by the non resistant varieties due to the overhead of the resistance mechanism.
Just my two cents.
Tyler Ward
tjw19@columbia.edu