Who would have thought that evolution would be developing it's own roundup resistance.
It's not developing roundup resistance. The roundup resistance was there before the roundup.
Developing roundup resistance would imply a feature which was not previously there.
Such a feature would in many circumstances be enough to differentiate a species. The touchstone there used to be interbreeding ability, but since many beasties long regarded as separate species can in practice interbreed, science as a corpus has fallen back on distinguishing features. What Monsanto are bringing about by wiping out a subset of the available weeds is not a new, distinguishing feature.
We are, hah, weeding out those not resistant to Roundup, of which there will always be some. The Roundup resistance comes with a price: some loss of genetic complexity - or to put it another way, some loss of flexibility. It might be that the resistant weeds survive in a narrower temperature, acidity, humidity or other band, or a specific new weakness might not have an obvious manifestation.
What this means is that if you throw enough nasty chemicals at the weeds, you will eventually wind up with weeds which are too weak or inflexible to survive.
Unfortunately, you might also wind up with crops which are too weak or inflexible to survive. And of course, weaker crops are more susceptible to other kinds of pests and failures - insects, a dry season, whatever.
Either way, you are not witnessing the development of new species, you are seeing the exposure of existing species through the decimation of their closest competitors.
The original article title brings us to another key point: why was it called "junk DNA" in the first place? The difference between a flower and a weed is a judgement:
A weed is just a flower growing
where it isn't supposed to be. And a flower is just a weed with sense, To grow in a flower bed you see!
The people who named "junk DNA" expected to see junk, or to put it another way, needed to see junk in support of their pet theory of the day. Because of this, research into this vast area of DNA has been effectively held up for years, probably a decade or two. Such is the fruit of an aconational philosophy, which operates to constantly hobble science.
WRT the LEDs, you use 1- or 2-watt models and make them in strips. A lot of the delivered cost is in individual handling and installation, the price plummets if you make, ship and install them en masse. More of the cost of ordinary flouros is in the wiring and installation than the batten, too.
Yes it does. If you manufacture your LEDs to be used that way in the first place, they scale better than flouros.
The problem with LEDs is that they are typically run at the edge of their performance envelope, and at that point, they are guaranteed to wear out faster than your average flouro. Replacing the LEDs costs a lot more than replacing the flouros because you're replacing the whole monty, not just an easily manufactured tube. On the, hah, bright side they typically don't drop dead (just fade slowly) and the wear-rate is very predictable.
German vehicles getting 40mpg?
Dad's Peugeot is rated at something like 65mpg and regularly got closer to 80 on the highway cycle. It runs on ULP, not diesel. The diesel equivalent is rated at 85mpg and typically gets over 100, highway cycle. That's a family sedan, and only marginally more expensive (in Australia) than a crappy Commodore or Falcon. He's replaced it with a smaller car since Mum died, and hasn't reported the economy from that yet, except to mention in passing that it's "better".
If our stupid government didn't tax the life out of diesel, everyone would buy diesel cars. It costs more than ULP over here, but in Europe it's much cheaper, relatively, in some places close to half the price.
Between them, they've already killed off more people than all of the Christian derivatives combined. Think Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, or take a trip back to the French Revolution. Reduce the population, solve the energy crisis, give the Roman/Islamic/Talmudic zealots one less thing to react against.
...if the Western powers don't start building nice, safe and efficient reactors so that the technology can be developed, up to speed and widely available before the crunch comes and we no longer have any choice, then Russia will build more Chernobyls.
However, even as-constructed Chernobyl would not have failed if the staff had not deliberately (as per instructions from their bosses) deliberately operated the reactor out of spec almost constantly.
"Nice" reactors can probably only reduce the human-idiocy factor rather than eliminate it, but they are straightforward to build so that if they do manage to fail completely, or more accurately be managed into failing completely (as in core meltdown) there is no risk of even a chemical or steam explosion. The reactor just stops, and after a few days even the reactor bed is safe to pick up, cart away and grind up for reprocessing leaving no radioactives on site at all.
Otherwise, good post, I'm sure Pavel's used to getting his name misspelled, and SlashDot won't let anyone put a cedilla on top of the C anyway. It's a nice blue.
Bruce Sterling needs to learn a lot more about nuclear power than he evidently knows. He seems to be stuck in a Chernobyl culture.
My own answer would be to go off-planet in search of energy, but we can't break that down into small enough pieces to sell to anyone with enough resources to actually do it.
In the absence of that sensible but grandiose solution, I'll quite happily swap the local coal-fired power station (Muja) that burns 12 tonnes of Uranium every year for one that reacts maybe half a tonne of the stuff every year, less than a tenth as much radioactive material involved and the results carefully captured and rationally stored for reprocessing instead of being spewed into the atmosphere.
This says nothing about the Radon and other radioactives released in the mining and processing of the coal, nor about the miners killed and injured in extracting it, nor about the huge amounts of diesel burned in mining and transporting it, nor about the enormous tracts of bush turned over so the miners can whip the coal out from underneath it.
Not sure how you specify "most recent project" and guessed at how you specify the network drives, but that does most of what you want, on one (long) line. BASH and GNU grep. If it turns out that you, Jane, Joe and John have a unique common group, we could refine it by group ownership instead of scanning for names.
It would take a bit longer with a mouse. It would be much easier in Ruby or even Python or PERL.
AdTI seems to be pretty much diametrically opposed to the principles most highly praised by Alexis himself.
For example, they advocate removing the power to invent from the hands of random individuals and placing it in the hands of selected colossal corporations, and vigorously oppose any attempt to intervene on behalf of said individuals. This makes them pretty much the sworn enemies of Open Source, whereas Open Source is an industrial principle which de Tocqueville himself would have enthusiastically supported.
The newer MuVo comes in a blister pack instead of a tube and includes a sticker warning you that the drive will not work in cameras. The newer MuVo player's drive has had CF capability excised, but it works fine as an IDE hard drive. This means that many of the "unloaders" can use it, but a typical camera can't.
I wonder which Creative marketing mor^H^H^Hgenius thought up this response? And how long before we see these?
camera firmware which can use the drives in IDE mode; and
Creative selling "spare" MuVo drives at 90% of the price of a player
Yeah? How do you put a corporation in jail? Can you rape a corporation? Can you make it laugh or cry? Can a corporation worship or hate? What goes in the "cause of death" field for a company?
Drug possession is an indication that you're willing to turn yourself into a partial lunatic, a menace to others and also to anyone dependent on you. The injustice here is that alcohol, an addictive drug responsible both directly (85,000, third most frequent "actual" CoD and twice as frequent as MVAs) and indirectly for many thousands of deaths every year, is legal to possess and use in any amount.
Sodomy spreads disease rapidly (for example, there's a reason that far more homosexual men die of AIDS than any other group), so it needs regulation as a disease vector. It is also likely to be directly physically damaging, so if we regulate any form of self-abuse, then we must also regulate sodomy if we are to aim for fairness.
Note that on the above table, "sexual behaviour" (which would include heterosexual promiscuity, AKA "sleeping around") kills more people than illicit drug use, and MVAs kill more than both combined, so the statistics say we should be spending our efforts on condemning alcohol first, then qualifying our drivers better. But even alcohol accounts for only 20% as many deaths as smoking - and those deaths are lingering.
Just in case you don't get the point, the drugs which are already legal and regarded as "mostly harmless" are killing more than half a million Yanks a year. Do we want to make this worse, or better?
Cigarettes are also the leading cause of death by fire.
There are so many ramifications which you've glossed over to claim "victimless" for your two examples that it's hard to know where to start picking your assertion apart.
I wouldn't be surprised if M$ sees this region as rather "safe" since Linux is kind of a "hardcore" "server" "alternative" solution.
A reasonably prominent Penguinista here in Oz reports that the company he works for - a dedicated MS shop flogging seeHash-on-dotNyet solutions - is having great trouble selling into Asia because while the Asians like what their software does, they keep asking, "and does it have a Linux version?"
They're way too heavy, and it's far too easy to accidentally middle-click while you're scroll-wheeling.
I use an AOpen O-35G, which has two scroll wheels (one of which clicks) and four other buttons, costs about half as much, and weighs about half as much - far easier for the kids to manage too. For my laptop, and for the kids' screen when I get time to plug it all together, I buy a little (matchbox-sized) AUD$23 USB optical scroll mouse from Big W's stationery section.
By treating people as human beings instead of targets to be hit everyone benefits.
I can tell you right now that this won't go over well in the gaming community. (-:
Keep thinking, you'll get there evertually
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
When trouble hits, I can drop my cushy design job ( or whatever I'm doing ) and become a bricklayer or some other physical job. I'm adaptable. I'm already a capable machinist, I can adapt to other lines of work.
Could you?
Yes, although probably not as well as you. I already grow veggies, but I have a shonky back (car accident 15 years ago) and a few other health issues.
Remember also that you're competing with people who already live much closer to the veggies, many of which are grown from commercial seed and so won't self-sow.
We get exposed to large American markets... dominated by large American players who now have exposure to our Australian markets and who are quite happy to bully their way in and let the grey areas sort themselves out afterwards. We get to suborn our already inadequate legal system to the badly scrod US "sue at the drop of a hat" legal system. We probably get even more Americans trying to pick effective shades of red and yellow for our fast-"food" outlets to wear.
..I'd like to ask if you could please fix the US justice system rather than depending on us as a lifeboat.
While you're at it, shutting down the major US TV networks would be another good step forward, and would reduce the amount of utter drivel which escapes from there onto our own TV networks.
I have a few other suggestions, too, but they can wait until you've set your own house in order, starting with no longer telling everyone else what to do, although I will admit that this one started with "please". (-:
Slashdot Mirror
You originally said...
It's not developing roundup resistance. The roundup resistance was there before the roundup.
Developing roundup resistance would imply a feature which was not previously there.
Such a feature would in many circumstances be enough to differentiate a species. The touchstone there used to be interbreeding ability, but since many beasties long regarded as separate species can in practice interbreed, science as a corpus has fallen back on distinguishing features. What Monsanto are bringing about by wiping out a subset of the available weeds is not a new, distinguishing feature.
Are you always so cheerful?
What this means is that if you throw enough nasty chemicals at the weeds, you will eventually wind up with weeds which are too weak or inflexible to survive.
Unfortunately, you might also wind up with crops which are too weak or inflexible to survive. And of course, weaker crops are more susceptible to other kinds of pests and failures - insects, a dry season, whatever.
Either way, you are not witnessing the development of new species, you are seeing the exposure of existing species through the decimation of their closest competitors.
The original article title brings us to another key point: why was it called "junk DNA" in the first place? The difference between a flower and a weed is a judgement:
The people who named "junk DNA" expected to see junk, or to put it another way, needed to see junk in support of their pet theory of the day. Because of this, research into this vast area of DNA has been effectively held up for years, probably a decade or two. Such is the fruit of an aconational philosophy, which operates to constantly hobble science.
It's been a while since I looked
WRT the LEDs, you use 1- or 2-watt models and make them in strips. A lot of the delivered cost is in individual handling and installation, the price plummets if you make, ship and install them en masse. More of the cost of ordinary flouros is in the wiring and installation than the batten, too.
Yes it does. If you manufacture your LEDs to be used that way in the first place, they scale better than flouros.
The problem with LEDs is that they are typically run at the edge of their performance envelope, and at that point, they are guaranteed to wear out faster than your average flouro. Replacing the LEDs costs a lot more than replacing the flouros because you're replacing the whole monty, not just an easily manufactured tube. On the, hah, bright side they typically don't drop dead (just fade slowly) and the wear-rate is very predictable.
Dad's Peugeot is rated at something like 65mpg and regularly got closer to 80 on the highway cycle. It runs on ULP, not diesel. The diesel equivalent is rated at 85mpg and typically gets over 100, highway cycle. That's a family sedan, and only marginally more expensive (in Australia) than a crappy Commodore or Falcon. He's replaced it with a smaller car since Mum died, and hasn't reported the economy from that yet, except to mention in passing that it's "better".
If our stupid government didn't tax the life out of diesel, everyone would buy diesel cars. It costs more than ULP over here, but in Europe it's much cheaper, relatively, in some places close to half the price.
Between them, they've already killed off more people than all of the Christian derivatives combined. Think Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, or take a trip back to the French Revolution. Reduce the population, solve the energy crisis, give the Roman/Islamic/Talmudic zealots one less thing to react against.
Where's my mod points when I need them?
...if the Western powers don't start building nice, safe and efficient reactors so that the technology can be developed, up to speed and widely available before the crunch comes and we no longer have any choice, then Russia will build more Chernobyls.
However, even as-constructed Chernobyl would not have failed if the staff had not deliberately (as per instructions from their bosses) deliberately operated the reactor out of spec almost constantly.
"Nice" reactors can probably only reduce the human-idiocy factor rather than eliminate it, but they are straightforward to build so that if they do manage to fail completely, or more accurately be managed into failing completely (as in core meltdown) there is no risk of even a chemical or steam explosion. The reactor just stops, and after a few days even the reactor bed is safe to pick up, cart away and grind up for reprocessing leaving no radioactives on site at all.
Your call.
Otherwise, good post, I'm sure Pavel's used to getting his name misspelled, and SlashDot won't let anyone put a cedilla on top of the C anyway. It's a nice blue.
Bruce Sterling needs to learn a lot more about nuclear power than he evidently knows. He seems to be stuck in a Chernobyl culture.
My own answer would be to go off-planet in search of energy, but we can't break that down into small enough pieces to sell to anyone with enough resources to actually do it.
In the absence of that sensible but grandiose solution, I'll quite happily swap the local coal-fired power station (Muja) that burns 12 tonnes of Uranium every year for one that reacts maybe half a tonne of the stuff every year, less than a tenth as much radioactive material involved and the results carefully captured and rationally stored for reprocessing instead of being spewed into the atmosphere.
This says nothing about the Radon and other radioactives released in the mining and processing of the coal, nor about the miners killed and injured in extracting it, nor about the huge amounts of diesel burned in mining and transporting it, nor about the enormous tracts of bush turned over so the miners can whip the coal out from underneath it.
Not sure how you specify "most recent project" and guessed at how you specify the network drives, but that does most of what you want, on one (long) line. BASH and GNU grep. If it turns out that you, Jane, Joe and John have a unique common group, we could refine it by group ownership instead of scanning for names.
It would take a bit longer with a mouse. It would be much easier in Ruby or even Python or PERL.
AdTI seems to be pretty much diametrically opposed to the principles most highly praised by Alexis himself.
For example, they advocate removing the power to invent from the hands of random individuals and placing it in the hands of selected colossal corporations, and vigorously oppose any attempt to intervene on behalf of said individuals. This makes them pretty much the sworn enemies of Open Source, whereas Open Source is an industrial principle which de Tocqueville himself would have enthusiastically supported.
I wonder which Creative marketing mor^H^H^Hgenius thought up this response? And how long before we see these?
Yeah? How do you put a corporation in jail? Can you rape a corporation? Can you make it laugh or cry? Can a corporation worship or hate? What goes in the "cause of death" field for a company?
...for tools-of-trade, fuel bought for the getaway car, things like that.
Drug possession is an indication that you're willing to turn yourself into a partial lunatic, a menace to others and also to anyone dependent on you. The injustice here is that alcohol, an addictive drug responsible both directly (85,000, third most frequent "actual" CoD and twice as frequent as MVAs) and indirectly for many thousands of deaths every year, is legal to possess and use in any amount.
Sodomy spreads disease rapidly (for example, there's a reason that far more homosexual men die of AIDS than any other group), so it needs regulation as a disease vector. It is also likely to be directly physically damaging, so if we regulate any form of self-abuse, then we must also regulate sodomy if we are to aim for fairness.
Note that on the above table, "sexual behaviour" (which would include heterosexual promiscuity, AKA "sleeping around") kills more people than illicit drug use, and MVAs kill more than both combined, so the statistics say we should be spending our efforts on condemning alcohol first, then qualifying our drivers better. But even alcohol accounts for only 20% as many deaths as smoking - and those deaths are lingering.
Just in case you don't get the point, the drugs which are already legal and regarded as "mostly harmless" are killing more than half a million Yanks a year. Do we want to make this worse, or better?
Cigarettes are also the leading cause of death by fire.
There are so many ramifications which you've glossed over to claim "victimless" for your two examples that it's hard to know where to start picking your assertion apart.
Colin programs for OS/2. Used to be Fido ZC for Zone 3, too.
What a pity.
I use an AOpen O-35G, which has two scroll wheels (one of which clicks) and four other buttons, costs about half as much, and weighs about half as much - far easier for the kids to manage too. For my laptop, and for the kids' screen when I get time to plug it all together, I buy a little (matchbox-sized) AUD$23 USB optical scroll mouse from Big W's stationery section.
I can tell you right now that this won't go over well in the gaming community. (-:
Yes, although probably not as well as you. I already grow veggies, but I have a shonky back (car accident 15 years ago) and a few other health issues.
Remember also that you're competing with people who already live much closer to the veggies, many of which are grown from commercial seed and so won't self-sow.
...but we are responsible for Alan Bond and a few others.
We get exposed to large American markets... dominated by large American players who now have exposure to our Australian markets and who are quite happy to bully their way in and let the grey areas sort themselves out afterwards. We get to suborn our already inadequate legal system to the badly scrod US "sue at the drop of a hat" legal system. We probably get even more Americans trying to pick effective shades of red and yellow for our fast-"food" outlets to wear.
Yay.
Just asking! (-:
..I'd like to ask if you could please fix the US justice system rather than depending on us as a lifeboat.
While you're at it, shutting down the major US TV networks would be another good step forward, and would reduce the amount of utter drivel which escapes from there onto our own TV networks.
I have a few other suggestions, too, but they can wait until you've set your own house in order, starting with no longer telling everyone else what to do, although I will admit that this one started with "please". (-:
Not in front of the children! You should say, "the nation's gone Bursar! [16th quote] Completely librarian poo".
It's worked so far for other litigious bastards, why not them?