No more so than scientists knocking out the immune systems in mice, so as to get better insight as to how the human immune system responds or doesn't respond to things like Ebola, HIV-4, etc.
Will it ever be a perfect analogue? No. But it doesn't have to be. It can simply be a bit of a bullshit filter, which directs research in areas that would appear to have a much higher probability of relevance.
We already knock out genes in fruit flies that make them grow eye cells in various parts of their bodies, and who knows what else.
Having lived in the Chicago area, I will hazard a guess that most of the Catholics in Chicago *probably* voted for the W.
Sorry, the research was done. To not use it seems to be as equally as wasteful for the unwilling sacrifice made by those prisoners.
If Japan discovered curative agents during some of the shit they pulled during WWII on American POWs, which would be more morally outrageous: disregarding whatever useful information that is in there because a few people were killed for it (thus causing even more people NOW to suffer and die when you have the solution in your hand), or cutting your losses so that others may live?
There is so much medical knowledge that we have that has been acquired over time through means that would not make it past the ethics boards of most research institutions. To single one issue out as being too tainted just seems to be even more callous than whatever crimes were committed to get the knowledge in the first place.
Otherwise, we would still be blood-letting people to let the "bad humours" out of their blood (Aristotle's "facts" about human biology persisted for over two hundred years, before a few criminals decided to actually start cutting open human corpses).
A Mouse-Person will not, cannot, by definition, have the same "experience" as a human. We can't even define a uniform meaning of what the "human experience" is in the first place. Your experience is yours, mine is mine. Ultimately, it is no more or less important, or meaningful (or relevant), than my dog's experience.
Might as well start arguing that a blastocyst is fully human. OK, if THAT is fully human, then why is an adult-derived stem cell not?
I would suggest you just bite the bullet and store the data in a real RDBMS server solution, even if it's MySQL, and use FileMaker or Access for the front-end and reporting.
Why? At least with Access, really doing data security isn't what I would call good, and I like doing Access work. If it had table and query level, programmable events, it would be fine.
You can get Postgres ODBC drivers and Postgres 8.0 for Windows now...
Then, the Access front-end has already been built using ODBC-related programming (which has some subtle and not-so-subtle differences), and that part won't have to be fixed (for example, Seek works for Jet tables, but not ODBC tables).
So, how much does it cost (in SAP developer time) to develop a custom SAP report, vs. slurping the data out and doing it with Crystal, Business Objects, Cognos, Access/Excel, or other custom stuff?
but... how many "average joes" (like me, and probably you, too) could really care less if Esther Dyson and Marc Andreeson like that electric toothbrush/gum stimulator?
This is simply a marketing excercise. At the very least, the "reviewers" get paid to do it. How many people buy products because Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve Tyler, Brad Pitt, et al. get photographed wearing/using it?
OMG, Brad Pitt photographed wearing Hanes whitey-tightey underwear? Sales boosted at Wal-Mart by 10%!!!
So what do you think about the sequencing of the Smallpox virus? But this is what academic researchers do: write and publish. No, I'm not calling these so-called theoretical virus programmers equivalent to researchers, but the mechanism is the same. Are researchers responsible for what someone else does with the things they've unlocked? Is A. Einstein morally responsible for the development of atomic bomb?
Well, a convicted check fraudster (Frank Abagnale http://abagnale.com/ (is responsible for designing and getting implemented most of the anti-fraud devices used on checks today... Hint: use a gel pen for filling out checks, because the ink can't be "lifted".
They almost never attack the users data in subtle ways. We don't seem to see viruses that, say, make small changes to numbers in spreadsheets.
If they do this, it very well could just be an unintentional side effect. For example, the FORM virus would fuck up the contents of Word documents, because it would insert a chunk of its code into the memory space of the document, usually in the body text part of the doc. Most of the time, deleting the ascii-equivalent of the code was enough to fix the doc, but not all of the time. Upon reading on the FORM virus, it was learned that this virus was only unintentionally bad.
The infamous "Morris Worm" also was unintentionally bad. Yes, it was supposed to spread, but at a much slower, easily tracked and defeated, rate. Morris still got in a shitload of trouble for it.
The person who spends years studying how to blow up bridges would be a better choice.
Maybe in a general sense, but talking to the structural engineer for a specific bridge would probably clue you in far more to how to bring a bridge down.
But it's not too hard to do anyways. Each basic bridge design has points of failure. You break the bridge at or near those points with the appropriate explosive, or you break enough easy spots so that the weak points end up getting overloaded, and it will come down. The "Ranger's Handbook" I got in ROTC had basic instructions for how to explosively demolish structures, for chrissakes.
How do you bring down a dam if you don't need to concern yourself with the water held by the dam? Well, you need to just punch a hole in it, and various water actions will do the rest. How do you best do this? Depending on the material of the dam, you just need to get enough of it it down far enough along the submerged side of the dam. The mass of the water will make sure that the force of the explosive is directed into the dam's wall. Just read about Wallis' "Dam Buster" bombs.
Otherwise, you drain the water and remove it like any other reinforced concrete structure or earthen mass.
"Who else (besides virus writers) should code antivirus programs? Who else has the experience and technical skills for fighting viruses?"
just because you can blow up a bridge doesn't mean you should be trusted to build one.
However, if you are a structural engineer, you might be interested in this guy's analysis of your bridge design to make it more robust...
it takes a completely different skillset to defend against viruses than it does to write them.
Yes, it does. But defense is almost always a step or two behind those who are attacking.
doctors don't have to know how to create a disease in order to know how to cure it. i would trust a doctor to treat disease far more than a bioweapons engineer.
Actually, they do need to synthesize continued strains of disease organisms. They need to be able to grow more of it, because that helps guide research into how to defeat it, either by vaccine or drug therapy. They need to be able to make more of the organism to help develop laboratory tests to detect it in the first place as well. And they can try to make new mutations of the organism to see what the range of possibilities are for the organism to do bad on its own. If this wasn't true, we would not need new flu shots each year.
just like i don't trust a burglar to guard a bank vault, i don't trust a virus writer to write antivirus software.
No, I wouldn't either, but the burglar could probably look at your security setup and tell you in 5 minutes or less where it's still weak or how it could be exploited/social engineered. And, if that bank was your responsibility, you would be beyond stupid to ignore that advice because it came from a thief.
But for amusement, watch a bass fishing show, and be amazed at how these good fisherment "get in the head" of a bass or steelhead.
Yes, but you would be a fool for dismissing outright anything that the guy has to say.
Just like assuming that Frank Abagnale has absolutely nothing of import to say about check fraud is pretty stupid.
While you need to take it with a grain of salt, just flatout dismissing Marek is stupid.
While understandable, wanting to just punch the guy in the face is even more childish.
For a real-world person, look at Alfred Nobel. He made a mint of money from dynamite. At least he felt guilty about all of the bad things that came about because of it or how it could be used for bad things.
The people who are responsible for the securities in our technologies may have others in their organizations whose primary considerations are not so security-related: time to market, customer "usability", sales penetration, etc. Anything that affects these is not looked at seriously. Or they have their own cocksure attitudes that get in the way.
To some extent or another, we all play both sides. If you found someone's purse or wallet, would you look into it and try to return it to the person? Would you trust the lost-and-found box at the mall or police dept? If you saw someone drop a $20 bill, would you snatch it up and give it back to him, or just quietly, anonymously, pocket it and disappear?
Having worked for awhile at an executive placement corporation (there are two main ones: Korn+Ferry and Heidrick & Struggles. I worked at one of them...), the way that C?O types get new jobs is that the recruiters at these companies keep up to date with the people in those positions. The CIO at Intel probably knows the CIOs at Sun, Hynix, AMD, et al., as well as people whom he has worked with who are well-placed at other companies. The executive placement recruiter also knows this, and keeps in contact with those people as well.
So the CIO needs a new job (voluntary or involuntary). By this time, he's already called his network to see how things might be. He also calls the exec recruiter who helped place him as well. The recruiter also starts pumping his network, both above and below, for current as well as past client companies (the company hiring pays for the executive recruiter).
The now ex-CIO of Intel does not have to stay out of work for very long, and with the level of executive severence packages, should not really need to work any sooner than a year or two out anyways.
The C?O's could care less about the pension funds. They care about when their stock options get vested.
You really don't think your internships had anything to do with it?
How many of your peers who did not intern have gotten jobs in their field of study since graduation?
Having lived with a MechE grad who did not intern, and listened to him moan and gripe about how unfair the system was because everyone kept telling him he had no experience, was interesting. Especially because the Engineering Dept. at the Univ. of Washington had a pretty active internship program, and really pushed hard to get engr students into internships.
...will ensure that IE will still be required. In fact, it still is, especiall for Windows Update.
'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
And there will always be sites that just don't work or work right in FF/Moz. But how is this any different than keeping FF/Moz, Opera, or whatever, around to do real CSS work, ala at Eric Meyer's websites, because IE is pretty much broken for some CSS things?
So FF/Moz/Opera get elevated to virtual first-tier software status, and IE relegated to second-tier status, for use with Microsoft's websites (MSDN and microsoft.com still are just a bit more usable in IE than in Moz/FF, for when one needs to go there. The Oracle HTML docs are a bit more usable in IE than in Moz/FF, too, oddly enough).
Uh.... Roundup breaks down after a few days, which is why it's popular, becuase it doesn't persist in the soil like other herbicides do.
2,4-D is pretty persistant in the soil. It's the main component in products like Crossbow (2,4-D & glyphosate).
The farmers in the Midwest have other problems besides Roundup. But perhaps more of them will be taking advantage of the current credit for no-till seed planting, too, which, among other things, encourages much less application of Roundup.
As I understand it, and I'm not an expert, the problem was returning brain matter into the feed supply. Had they simply chosen to discard the brain (and spinal cord?) material from slaughtered cattle, there would have been no chance to spread the BSE protein or whatever and thus no BSE
Ever been to a rendering plant? The animal byproduct protein used came from rendering plants.
Sure, some of it might be unsaleable meat, but the rest of it is organs, including spinal cords and brains. It all goes into big mechanical digesters, subjected to steam, etc., and eventually dried and ground up into powder which is then added either as a suppliment or replacement for grain-based feeds.
It's not really feasible at the rendering plant to divide this shit into "brains and spines" and "everything else", because it's all mixed into one big happy mess that would be impossible to differentiate. It wouldn't make the slaughterhouse/abbatoir owners happy, either, because this is one more step in the process, and one more thing for cutters to have to worry about. Not only do they have to work at pretty high rates of speed, but now they have to be careful when cracking carcasses in half to not get any CSF or accidentally cause cut spinal cord or brain material to get onto/into the carcass?
So the idea seemed to make sense at the time. It was just another byproduct someone was extracting a marginal value from, and the farmers were getting a cheap source of protein for their animals (Britain doesn't have a lot of space to grow grain, especially corn, for their livestock!), a win-win for everyone.
While it seems to be really pushing the limit, I was at the feed store the other day (in the US), and you can still get 50# bags of blood meal. The restriction is only on feeding herbivore *meat* byproduct back to herbivores. Blood meal kind of passes around this.
But it works good in the garden, I suppose.
If y'all remember things after the E. coli outbreaks in Washington, how *vehemently* the beef industry prattled about how they didn't need more stringent testing procedures, well... Sure, most of the ranchers and stock yard owners feel good to eat their own product. But they also know beforehand what animals they want to keep for themselves, and if they don't do the job themselves they know the butcher where it's getting done (and the other animals are similarly chosen by other farmers for personal or locker sales). They don't just randomly go to the auction and buy a couple of steers just to put into their freezer a couple of weeks later, because they know (but probably wouldn't directly 'fess up to) that this isn't probably the smart way to feed your family (and it's too expensive, too! an 800# steer, selling on the hoof at the auction for ~1.00/lb, just to put in your freezer? Heck no, you're gonna put away one of your own cows that have been happily eating free grass for the last year)!
But farmers spray with Roundup (glyphosate) routinely anyways! It doesn't persist in the soil like 2,4-D and many other broad-spectrum herbicides do, so they can kill off the cover crops much closer to when they need to plant seed because they don't have to worry about the persistance of the herbicide killing off the sprouts.
Who is to say that over time a naturally occuring hybrid resistant to Roundup could not be developed that does not involve any IP at all? *THEN* what is Monsanto to do, radioactively tag some of their seed or somesuch nonsense?
(Yes, I live next to several hundred acres of cropland. The farmer's spring ritual is: spray herbicide about 2 weeks before time to plant. Work dead plants into soil. Disk and roll soil. Plant new crop).
But just think, though, that Scott will be doing this soon with grass seed as well.
Scott, the big turf company, is working hard to try and get Roundup-ready bent grass seed into the market. They've had the same problems with seed getting out into the wild (i.e., into and past their buffer zone areas around the test plots and production evaluation fields in Central Oregon far more than they anticipated). Naturally, the Willamette Valley, arguably the principal grass seed growing region in the US, if not the world, is not too happy about this.
But at least plans for Roundup-Ready wheat have been shelved indefinitely.
The problem I have for it is that Monsanto essentially has pushed ALL liability for the use of its GM seed onto the farmer, as well as leaving the burden of proof of innocence on the farmer. It *should* be that Monsanto has to prove that the farmer intentionally kept the seed after production.
What it really should be is that once the seed leaves the seed warehouse and is stuck into the ground, it's out of Monsanto's control.
Or perhaps they should just then figure out how to get Roundup-ready genes to be passed into hybrids, which inherently on their own typically have less vigor the next generation or two later.
If a smart farmer has essentially developed their own localized, optimized blend of seed over 20 or 40 years, *NEVER* bought RR seed from Monsanto or worked land that had it recently and some of it has been introduced through no action of the farmer (how's he supposed to kill it off, because it's roundup-ready!), and Monsanto can essentially declare the farmer a thief and force him to destroy his life's work?
How does that explain mules, then, or the Duck-billed Platypus?
I would imagine that in the genes of the Great White Shark is the potential to unlock the development of a Megalodon, or to unlock the 30' long alligator predescesors, or 3' wingspan dragon flies. There's probably good reasons why those genes aren't expressable any more.
well, if 10^100 possible events are there, then it's going to be a LONG time indeed for enough time to have passed for all possible events to have occured.
Remember that old Tower of Hanoi puzzle, that in its classical form requires moving a stack of 32 disks from one post to another, so that they end up in the same order? Well, it ends up being 2^64-1 moves to do. Which is a long time, even on a very fast computer...
Slashdot Mirror
No more so than scientists knocking out the immune systems in mice, so as to get better insight as to how the human immune system responds or doesn't respond to things like Ebola, HIV-4, etc.
Will it ever be a perfect analogue? No. But it doesn't have to be. It can simply be a bit of a bullshit filter, which directs research in areas that would appear to have a much higher probability of relevance.
We already knock out genes in fruit flies that make them grow eye cells in various parts of their bodies, and who knows what else.
Having lived in the Chicago area, I will hazard a guess that most of the Catholics in Chicago *probably* voted for the W.
To which we will finally release all the alien-derived mutants from Area 51 to fight back.
Sorry, the research was done. To not use it seems to be as equally as wasteful for the unwilling sacrifice made by those prisoners.
If Japan discovered curative agents during some of the shit they pulled during WWII on American POWs, which would be more morally outrageous: disregarding whatever useful information that is in there because a few people were killed for it (thus causing even more people NOW to suffer and die when you have the solution in your hand), or cutting your losses so that others may live?
There is so much medical knowledge that we have that has been acquired over time through means that would not make it past the ethics boards of most research institutions. To single one issue out as being too tainted just seems to be even more callous than whatever crimes were committed to get the knowledge in the first place.
Otherwise, we would still be blood-letting people to let the "bad humours" out of their blood (Aristotle's "facts" about human biology persisted for over two hundred years, before a few criminals decided to actually start cutting open human corpses).
A Mouse-Person will not, cannot, by definition, have the same "experience" as a human. We can't even define a uniform meaning of what the "human experience" is in the first place. Your experience is yours, mine is mine. Ultimately, it is no more or less important, or meaningful (or relevant), than my dog's experience.
Might as well start arguing that a blastocyst is fully human. OK, if THAT is fully human, then why is an adult-derived stem cell not?
No, they're actually enjoying the Good Life on a year-long world cruise. Haven't you seen the commercial on TV before "Hockey Night USA" on TechTV?
We just need someone to bust into the CIA to find the cells where these three have since become mummified husks, chained to their cell beds...
Just look at Linux vs Windows. Can't get much cheaper than $0.00.
I would suggest you just bite the bullet and store the data in a real RDBMS server solution, even if it's MySQL, and use FileMaker or Access for the front-end and reporting.
Why? At least with Access, really doing data security isn't what I would call good, and I like doing Access work. If it had table and query level, programmable events, it would be fine.
You can get Postgres ODBC drivers and Postgres 8.0 for Windows now...
Then, the Access front-end has already been built using ODBC-related programming (which has some subtle and not-so-subtle differences), and that part won't have to be fixed (for example, Seek works for Jet tables, but not ODBC tables).
So, how much does it cost (in SAP developer time) to develop a custom SAP report, vs. slurping the data out and doing it with Crystal, Business Objects, Cognos, Access/Excel, or other custom stuff?
but... how many "average joes" (like me, and probably you, too) could really care less if Esther Dyson and Marc Andreeson like that electric toothbrush/gum stimulator?
This is simply a marketing excercise. At the very least, the "reviewers" get paid to do it. How many people buy products because Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve Tyler, Brad Pitt, et al. get photographed wearing/using it?
OMG, Brad Pitt photographed wearing Hanes whitey-tightey underwear? Sales boosted at Wal-Mart by 10%!!!
Hmm... a hot-swappable IDE/SATA carrier would be nice. Sure, you can sort of do it with a few USB/1394 drives, too.
The cheapest high density backup for home/SOHO is more hard drives.
So what do you think about the sequencing of the Smallpox virus? But this is what academic researchers do: write and publish. No, I'm not calling these so-called theoretical virus programmers equivalent to researchers, but the mechanism is the same. Are researchers responsible for what someone else does with the things they've unlocked? Is A. Einstein morally responsible for the development of atomic bomb?
Well, a convicted check fraudster (Frank Abagnale http://abagnale.com/ (is responsible for designing and getting implemented most of the anti-fraud devices used on checks today... Hint: use a gel pen for filling out checks, because the ink can't be "lifted".
They almost never attack the users data in subtle ways. We don't seem to see viruses that, say, make small changes to numbers in spreadsheets.
If they do this, it very well could just be an unintentional side effect. For example, the FORM virus would fuck up the contents of Word documents, because it would insert a chunk of its code into the memory space of the document, usually in the body text part of the doc. Most of the time, deleting the ascii-equivalent of the code was enough to fix the doc, but not all of the time. Upon reading on the FORM virus, it was learned that this virus was only unintentionally bad.
The infamous "Morris Worm" also was unintentionally bad. Yes, it was supposed to spread, but at a much slower, easily tracked and defeated, rate. Morris still got in a shitload of trouble for it.
The person who spends years studying how to blow up bridges would be a better choice.
Maybe in a general sense, but talking to the structural engineer for a specific bridge would probably clue you in far more to how to bring a bridge down.
But it's not too hard to do anyways. Each basic bridge design has points of failure. You break the bridge at or near those points with the appropriate explosive, or you break enough easy spots so that the weak points end up getting overloaded, and it will come down. The "Ranger's Handbook" I got in ROTC had basic instructions for how to explosively demolish structures, for chrissakes.
How do you bring down a dam if you don't need to concern yourself with the water held by the dam? Well, you need to just punch a hole in it, and various water actions will do the rest. How do you best do this? Depending on the material of the dam, you just need to get enough of it it down far enough along the submerged side of the dam. The mass of the water will make sure that the force of the explosive is directed into the dam's wall. Just read about Wallis' "Dam Buster" bombs.
Otherwise, you drain the water and remove it like any other reinforced concrete structure or earthen mass.
"Who else (besides virus writers) should code antivirus programs? Who else has the experience and technical skills for fighting viruses?"
just because you can blow up a bridge doesn't mean you should be trusted to build one.
However, if you are a structural engineer, you might be interested in this guy's analysis of your bridge design to make it more robust...
it takes a completely different skillset to defend against viruses than it does to write them.
Yes, it does. But defense is almost always a step or two behind those who are attacking.
doctors don't have to know how to create a disease in order to know how to cure it. i would trust a doctor to treat disease far more than a bioweapons engineer.
Actually, they do need to synthesize continued strains of disease organisms. They need to be able to grow more of it, because that helps guide research into how to defeat it, either by vaccine or drug therapy. They need to be able to make more of the organism to help develop laboratory tests to detect it in the first place as well. And they can try to make new mutations of the organism to see what the range of possibilities are for the organism to do bad on its own. If this wasn't true, we would not need new flu shots each year.
just like i don't trust a burglar to guard a bank vault, i don't trust a virus writer to write antivirus software.
No, I wouldn't either, but the burglar could probably look at your security setup and tell you in 5 minutes or less where it's still weak or how it could be exploited/social engineered. And, if that bank was your responsibility, you would be beyond stupid to ignore that advice because it came from a thief.
But for amusement, watch a bass fishing show, and be amazed at how these good fisherment "get in the head" of a bass or steelhead.
Yes, but you would be a fool for dismissing outright anything that the guy has to say.
Just like assuming that Frank Abagnale has absolutely nothing of import to say about check fraud is pretty stupid.
While you need to take it with a grain of salt, just flatout dismissing Marek is stupid.
While understandable, wanting to just punch the guy in the face is even more childish.
For a real-world person, look at Alfred Nobel. He made a mint of money from dynamite. At least he felt guilty about all of the bad things that came about because of it or how it could be used for bad things.
The people who are responsible for the securities in our technologies may have others in their organizations whose primary considerations are not so security-related: time to market, customer "usability", sales penetration, etc. Anything that affects these is not looked at seriously. Or they have their own cocksure attitudes that get in the way.
To some extent or another, we all play both sides. If you found someone's purse or wallet, would you look into it and try to return it to the person? Would you trust the lost-and-found box at the mall or police dept? If you saw someone drop a $20 bill, would you snatch it up and give it back to him, or just quietly, anonymously, pocket it and disappear?
Having worked for awhile at an executive placement corporation (there are two main ones: Korn+Ferry and Heidrick & Struggles. I worked at one of them...), the way that C?O types get new jobs is that the recruiters at these companies keep up to date with the people in those positions. The CIO at Intel probably knows the CIOs at Sun, Hynix, AMD, et al., as well as people whom he has worked with who are well-placed at other companies. The executive placement recruiter also knows this, and keeps in contact with those people as well.
So the CIO needs a new job (voluntary or involuntary). By this time, he's already called his network to see how things might be. He also calls the exec recruiter who helped place him as well. The recruiter also starts pumping his network, both above and below, for current as well as past client companies (the company hiring pays for the executive recruiter).
The now ex-CIO of Intel does not have to stay out of work for very long, and with the level of executive severence packages, should not really need to work any sooner than a year or two out anyways.
The C?O's could care less about the pension funds. They care about when their stock options get vested.
You really don't think your internships had anything to do with it?
How many of your peers who did not intern have gotten jobs in their field of study since graduation?
Having lived with a MechE grad who did not intern, and listened to him moan and gripe about how unfair the system was because everyone kept telling him he had no experience, was interesting. Especially because the Engineering Dept. at the Univ. of Washington had a pretty active internship program, and really pushed hard to get engr students into internships.
...will ensure that IE will still be required. In fact, it still is, especiall for Windows Update.
'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
And there will always be sites that just don't work or work right in FF/Moz. But how is this any different than keeping FF/Moz, Opera, or whatever, around to do real CSS work, ala at Eric Meyer's websites, because IE is pretty much broken for some CSS things?
So FF/Moz/Opera get elevated to virtual first-tier software status, and IE relegated to second-tier status, for use with Microsoft's websites (MSDN and microsoft.com still are just a bit more usable in IE than in Moz/FF, for when one needs to go there. The Oracle HTML docs are a bit more usable in IE than in Moz/FF, too, oddly enough).
Uh.... Roundup breaks down after a few days, which is why it's popular, becuase it doesn't persist in the soil like other herbicides do.
2,4-D is pretty persistant in the soil. It's the main component in products like Crossbow (2,4-D & glyphosate).
The farmers in the Midwest have other problems besides Roundup. But perhaps more of them will be taking advantage of the current credit for no-till seed planting, too, which, among other things, encourages much less application of Roundup.
As I understand it, and I'm not an expert, the problem was returning brain matter into the feed supply. Had they simply chosen to discard the brain (and spinal cord?) material from slaughtered cattle, there would have been no chance to spread the BSE protein or whatever and thus no BSE
Ever been to a rendering plant? The animal byproduct protein used came from rendering plants.
Sure, some of it might be unsaleable meat, but the rest of it is organs, including spinal cords and brains. It all goes into big mechanical digesters, subjected to steam, etc., and eventually dried and ground up into powder which is then added either as a suppliment or replacement for grain-based feeds.
It's not really feasible at the rendering plant to divide this shit into "brains and spines" and "everything else", because it's all mixed into one big happy mess that would be impossible to differentiate. It wouldn't make the slaughterhouse/abbatoir owners happy, either, because this is one more step in the process, and one more thing for cutters to have to worry about. Not only do they have to work at pretty high rates of speed, but now they have to be careful when cracking carcasses in half to not get any CSF or accidentally cause cut spinal cord or brain material to get onto/into the carcass?
So the idea seemed to make sense at the time. It was just another byproduct someone was extracting a marginal value from, and the farmers were getting a cheap source of protein for their animals (Britain doesn't have a lot of space to grow grain, especially corn, for their livestock!), a win-win for everyone.
While it seems to be really pushing the limit, I was at the feed store the other day (in the US), and you can still get 50# bags of blood meal. The restriction is only on feeding herbivore *meat* byproduct back to herbivores. Blood meal kind of passes around this.
But it works good in the garden, I suppose.
If y'all remember things after the E. coli outbreaks in Washington, how *vehemently* the beef industry prattled about how they didn't need more stringent testing procedures, well... Sure, most of the ranchers and stock yard owners feel good to eat their own product. But they also know beforehand what animals they want to keep for themselves, and if they don't do the job themselves they know the butcher where it's getting done (and the other animals are similarly chosen by other farmers for personal or locker sales). They don't just randomly go to the auction and buy a couple of steers just to put into their freezer a couple of weeks later, because they know (but probably wouldn't directly 'fess up to) that this isn't probably the smart way to feed your family (and it's too expensive, too! an 800# steer, selling on the hoof at the auction for ~1.00/lb, just to put in your freezer? Heck no, you're gonna put away one of your own cows that have been happily eating free grass for the last year)!
But farmers spray with Roundup (glyphosate) routinely anyways! It doesn't persist in the soil like 2,4-D and many other broad-spectrum herbicides do, so they can kill off the cover crops much closer to when they need to plant seed because they don't have to worry about the persistance of the herbicide killing off the sprouts.
Who is to say that over time a naturally occuring hybrid resistant to Roundup could not be developed that does not involve any IP at all? *THEN* what is Monsanto to do, radioactively tag some of their seed or somesuch nonsense?
(Yes, I live next to several hundred acres of cropland. The farmer's spring ritual is: spray herbicide about 2 weeks before time to plant. Work dead plants into soil. Disk and roll soil. Plant new crop).
But just think, though, that Scott will be doing this soon with grass seed as well.
Scott, the big turf company, is working hard to try and get Roundup-ready bent grass seed into the market. They've had the same problems with seed getting out into the wild (i.e., into and past their buffer zone areas around the test plots and production evaluation fields in Central Oregon far more than they anticipated). Naturally, the Willamette Valley, arguably the principal grass seed growing region in the US, if not the world, is not too happy about this.
But at least plans for Roundup-Ready wheat have been shelved indefinitely.
Read up about it more on the Capital Press website: http://capitalpress.com/
The problem I have for it is that Monsanto essentially has pushed ALL liability for the use of its GM seed onto the farmer, as well as leaving the burden of proof of innocence on the farmer. It *should* be that Monsanto has to prove that the farmer intentionally kept the seed after production.
What it really should be is that once the seed leaves the seed warehouse and is stuck into the ground, it's out of Monsanto's control.
Or perhaps they should just then figure out how to get Roundup-ready genes to be passed into hybrids, which inherently on their own typically have less vigor the next generation or two later.
If a smart farmer has essentially developed their own localized, optimized blend of seed over 20 or 40 years, *NEVER* bought RR seed from Monsanto or worked land that had it recently and some of it has been introduced through no action of the farmer (how's he supposed to kill it off, because it's roundup-ready!), and Monsanto can essentially declare the farmer a thief and force him to destroy his life's work?
That is completely fucked up.
How does that explain mules, then, or the Duck-billed Platypus?
I would imagine that in the genes of the Great White Shark is the potential to unlock the development of a Megalodon, or to unlock the 30' long alligator predescesors, or 3' wingspan dragon flies. There's probably good reasons why those genes aren't expressable any more.
...and didn't it take at least 100 years or so for the stories about Jesus' life to be written down in the first forms that we have?
And we all know how infallible humans are at preserving oral histories...
well, if 10^100 possible events are there, then it's going to be a LONG time indeed for enough time to have passed for all possible events to have occured.
Remember that old Tower of Hanoi puzzle, that in its classical form requires moving a stack of 32 disks from one post to another, so that they end up in the same order? Well, it ends up being 2^64-1 moves to do. Which is a long time, even on a very fast computer...