Spacial browsers made good sense when computers were still fairly novel and hard disks were small. It related the computer experience to a physical metaphor, an office with a desktop and a file cabinet. But today, most people have loads of files, and, more importantly, because of the web, most people have more experience with browsers than they do with actual file cabinets. The browser is simply turning out to be a more versatile metaphor for traversing a file structure.
It's difficult to tell if an animal is using language in the way we understand it, because even the best "talking animals" are not so fluent that they can discuss their own understanding of language. You can readily teach a parrot to say, "Polly wants a cracker." But is this using language? In particular, does Polly understand that a cracker is a particular thing that it is asking for, or has Polly merely been trained, in a stimulus-response manner, to feel that "pollywantsacracker" is a good thing to say?
One could argue that there is not meaningful distinction, but in fact, it is possible to teach a human being both ways, and it is clear that stimulus-response learning does not imply conscious understanding. I know of a case in which a class of students, as a prank, conditioned the teacher to use the word "we" more frequently, simply by appearing more attentive whenever he used the word. Pretty soon he was peppering his lectures with the word. Yet he never had any conscious awareness that he was doing so, or any understanding that in this context, the word "we" meant "pay attention".
Just because you can teach the dog a few tricks doesn't mean that he actually has understanding of what he is doing. Humans are the only species cabable of understanding.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
There are many studies that have demonstrated simple reasoning and problem solving on the part of animals. Language is more controversial. Many animals can clearly understand words or symbols and use them to solve problems and achieve goals, but whether this behavior really has the properties of human language is debated.
I've hammered on this in several other posts - a receipt which the voter can take out of the polling area opens many doors to new abuses. Imagine the scenario of "show your voting receipt to your union foreman if you ever want another raise in your career." It would never be that obvious, but word would get around. Once there are verifiable voting receipts, your vote can be coerced after the fact.
This is a solved problem. Using various cryptographic methods, the voter can take out an encoded receipt that he, or anybody, can use to verify that his vote was correctly counted, but which cannot be used to determine who he voted for.
Except that nature is stumbling along with random mutations. As our tech progresses we'll have targeted mutations, courtesy of us. And even if developed to be "good", unforseen consequences of design being what they are....
And what those unforeseen consequences are is random mutations (relative to what was intended).
This told to the reporter during the interview about nanotech risk-mitigation. Sure, it's a perfectly rational way to choose your movie library, but it's almost too rational. Most people don't consider watching a bad movie an outcome to be avoided at all costs.
I find that the movies that I like most are not the ones where there is a critical consensus that they're good--it's the ones where half the critics say that they're great, and the other half say that they're crap.
Why is that still not particularly comforting? Just one tragically (intentional or otherwise) bad design is all it could take, theoretically. Not to turn the earth to "goo", but to seriously screw the conditions we humans deem useful to our existence.
Don't forget that we already live in a world full of self-replicating micromachines (microorganisms), many of which are already quite capable of turning us into "goo." Not only that, but they are constantly mutating, producing enormous numbers of cases of "bad design" every minute. Yet somehow, we manage to survive. Frankly, what we humans do is likely to be a drop in the bucket.
This begs the question of how important actually knowing that the characters are CG is. When I first saw some still frames of Final Flight of the Osiris, I had to be *convinced* they were CGI images.
Stills tend to be a lot more convincing than full motion. We communicate a lot with body movement. Facial expressions are also very complex, with fleeting "micro-expressions" lasting only a fraction of a second.
I think this is what killed the Final Fantasy film. The characters were so realistic that my brain accepted them as human--and then spent the rest of the film wondering, "What's wrong with them?" The problem is that we are very sensitive to the subtleties of human behavior. As long as you aren't actually fooled, you are impressed by the quality of the simulation. But if it is good enough for you to take it for human, then what would otherwise be a minor flaw in an excellent simulation suddenly seems like something pathological about another person. So beyond a certain point, if the simulation is not perfect, it starts to seem disturbingly wrong in some undefinable way.
I'd love to see a remake of the Matrix films, in which all of the "in the Matrix" sequences were done with computer animation, like the excellent "Flight of the Osiris" short by the Final Fantasy team. In that context, I think this "problem" would become an asset.
I'm saying that we are likely getting to the point where we can create diseases that are far more dangerous than influenza, bubonic plague, or ebola. We can create those through genetic engineering, through artificial evolution, and probably through other means.
More dangerous than diseases that (in the absence of effective drugs or vaccination) have documented ability to spread rapidly and kill a large fraction of the population? Seems doubtful. And even from the viewpoint of a terrorist or a rogue government, there is hardly any reason to attempt such a thing. These existing diseases are quite devastating enough for any imaginable purpose. To intentionally create a dangerous novel disease would be a difficult and hazardous process, requiring a multiyear high-level research effort involving extensive human experimentation on large populations. It would be hard to carry out and hard to keep secret. While modifying an existing disease is relatively easy, and the methods are well-understood.
That doesn't mean that the existing diseases aren't frightening enough to people (and hence usable as weapons of terror), but the existing diseases don't threaten our survival as a species.
I think the notion of a disease "threatening our survival as a species" is ridiculous. There is no example of a disease that infects everybody. The human population is quite large and genetically diverse. There are always some individuals who are resistant. And even if it were possible to do such thing, and somebody was insane enough to try, it is hard to imagine how it could be done in practice. Imagine the number of research subjects you would need to detect resistance at a level of 10e-7, which would still be quite a few people worldwide.
I don't see where you get that "certainty" from. There is no physical or biological principle that says that introducing a foreign gene makes organisms significantly less fit.
Organisms are highly optimized evolutionarily. By definition, that means that any small change will make them less fit. This is confirmed by experimental studies, which find that the overwhelming majority of mutational changes decrease fitness. Proteins do not function in isolation. They are regulated and interact in complex ways that have been optimized over many generations. So the chance that some novel protein will improve function in any particular individual organism is vanishingly small. Now if you were to introduce that protein into billions of individuals in a genetically diverse population, there might be a few that, because of their specific genetic makeup, could make use of it and thrive. But current methods do not do that.
In any case, when a virus or bacterium is not "optimized for the presence of a foreign gene", that means that it is likely to be more virulent and deadly than a disease that has been in a population for a while. For disease agents, higher virulence equals lower fitness, so by your own argument, if the introduction of foreign genes into diseases leads to lower fitness, one common way in which it may do so is through higher virulence.
This is a logical fallacy of the form, "All men are mortal. Dogs are mortal. Therefore dogs are men." There are lots of ways to lower fitness, and hardly any of them have anything to do with virulence. So fact that introducing an out of context protein will almost certainly lower fitness does not imply a greater risk of virulence.
And I don't understand why you keep talking about "geographically transposed natural species". Yes, they are a hazard. In fact, introduction of new diseases into humans by contact with exotic animals is probably a far greater risk than the accidental creation of new diseases through genetic engineering (whether it's a greater risk than the deliberate creation of biowarfare agents through genetic engineering I don't know and neither do you, I suspect--that depends on the state of the art in biowarfare research). But why do you keep repeating tha
I think that there are real risks of technology. But I'm not convinced that a "go slow" prescription is a solution. This presupposes that we actually can forecast the risks and benefits of technology if we just slow down the pace a bit. But so often, modern technologies synergize in ways that are nearly impossible to predict. And hypothetical risks often loom much larger than benefits. It was easy to foresee, for example, the risks to privacy of widespread computer connectivity. But who foresaw the many benefits of computer networks for commerce, communication, grass-roots political organization, etc., etc? Over the years, I've seen many nightmare scenarios. In early '70's, many young people were convinced that nuclear or ecological catastrophe would overtake us in just a few years. Yet somehow, the forecasted disasters always managed to stay just a few years ahead. It is worth thinking about risks--occasionally, the dangers are sufficiently obvious that they actually can be avoided. But that is the exception rather than the rule. I think the greater danger is that we will be paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.
if we are not the primary reservoir of the disease, then it probably doesn't spread that easily among humans
We are not the primary reservoir of influenza. Or bubonic plague. Contrary to your statement, ebola is highly contagious. An antibiotic-resistant strain of bubonic plague would also be quite nasty. Mortality from bubonic plague is 50-90%
In any case, there is currently no known natural disease that would be capable of eradicating the majority of the population around the globe. Smallpox probably comes closest, but even it is "only" 30% fatal and we have known preventative measures.
I don't get your point. Are you saying that this makes natural diseases such as ebola, anthrax, and bubonic plague not a concern as bioterror weapons? From all accounts, previous pandemics of these diseases were pretty terrifying. Are or you suggesting that transgenic diseases are likely to have this property? This is far less likely than the accidental evolution of an epidemic disease. Expecting some protein from a different species to create a disease capable of wiping out the majority of the population is a bit like imagining that taking the carburetor of a Toyota and bolting it under the hood of a Ford will create a car capable of winning the Le Mans. The real threat of natural diseases is their genetic diversity. Even though the chances of any one mutant or hybrid having properties of high infectivity and mortality, natural diseases will have millions of variants, and the most infectious will propagate. A transgenic variant created by man would not have this property. People have been incorporating foreign genes into bacteria for decades. It is not a high containment activity. There is not a single known case of accidental creation of a dangerous disease.
And what's the harm of being careful? It doesn't take a lot of effort to destroy waste from biologial research.
There is no harm in being careful. But an exaggerated notion of risk is an impediment to progress. There is certainly some risk that the green stuff in the back of your refrigerator could create a global epidemic, but we don't call out the CDC to clean out refrigerators.
While creating antibiotics resistant bacteria is not nice, it is not a huge threat--even if we didn't have antibiotics at all, we'd be back in the 19th century; medically unpleasant, but not incompatible with civilized life.
I suggest that you read up on the Black Death. I'd say that "unpleasant" is a bit of an understatement.
you implicitly assume that the old techniques, selection, breeding, mutagenesis, etc., are "OK" and proven harmless because people have been using them for so long.
On the contrary, my point is as far as bioterror/biowarfare are concerned, these techniques are the greatest threat: they are easy, low tech, and have been proved to work.
Furthermore, we already know that the association with domesticated animals and the creation of new kinds of plants has had serious medical and environmental consequences.
However these are breeds that have experienced many generations of selection for health and survival, taking advantage of the genetic variability of natural populations. The ecological hazards of laboratory created species--genetically identical, not optimized for the presence of a foreign gene--are certain to be much less than the hazards posed by domesticated or geographically transposed natural species.
Yes, quite right: transgenic technology is a shortcut. It's a shortcut to let humans make things happen within a span of a few years that might otherwise take millions or even hundreds of millions of years to happen in the normal course of evolution, or even through directed breeding.
Or, when talking about short generation microorganisms, a few months.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. There's no way that selective breeding could ever account for, say, genes from a pig coming up in genes for a plant. I'm not sure that would qualify as being the same kind of result. Part of the issue about GE foods is that while you can expect the plant-based gene responsible for flower colour to perform the same function across many plants, it's much more difficult to figure out what effect or chain of effects an animal-based gene for skin thickness will have on a plant.
In fact, pigs and plants have a large number of homologous genes, because most genes families originated in microorganisms that are in the common heritage of pigs and plants. So in a functional sense, a modest number of mutations can in many cases effectively transform a gene of a pig into a gene for a plant. The important thing about a gene is not where it comes from, but what the protein it codes for does in a biochemical sense.
Even straight plant-plant breeding and GE can have unforseen effects - for example, it's possible to plain-old-fashioned breed plants in the nightshade family that have the toxins normally found in the plant part (the leafy bits of tomatoes, potatoes, etc.) spread throughout the normally edible part.
Indeed. This is far more likely to happen with conventional selective breeding than with transgenic technology. The plant already is evolutionarily optimized to coordinate the expression of the multiple genes required to make the toxin, and where in the plant that that toxin is produced is likely to be controlled by a small number of regulatory factors. It would be much harder to achieve such a thing with a small number of foreign genes, even by design. To do it by accident is incredibly unlikely. Perhaps if we're very unlucky, we'll come up with a GM food as dangerous as a peanut. People worry about GM plants escaping and running wild, but the chances are overwhelming that a gene from a pig expressed in the plant will have a deleterious effect on the plant in the wild, even if it might be useful in specific circumstances, such as the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. A GM plant is far less likely to cause ecological damage than a wild-type plant released into a part of the world where it does not normally grow. There have been many such disasters with native plants. There has yet to be one with a GM plant.
The "Internet" comment was only ONE of the dumb things that Al Gore said during the 2000 campaign.
Except, of course, that he never said it. Like most of the "dumb" things that he supposedly said, it turned out to be disinformation concocted by the right wing Dirty Tricks team.
Well, this very case shows you otherwise. If it looks like it might be related to bioterrorism, the feds can and will step in.
On the contrary, it proves my point. He is not accused under any law that specifically relates to the use or release of transgenic organisms, but under a general law that almost certainly is not applicable (since the law does not actually forbid individuals from carrying out such research in their homes).
Because artificial pathogens can combine high mortality rate and high infectivity; natural pathogens don't generally have that combination because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous.
Tell it to smallpox. Or bubonic plague. There are many ways in which diseases can have this property. Many natural diseases infect multiple hosts. For example, if we are not the primary reservoir of disease, then there is not evolutionary disincentive for the disease to have a high mortality rate.
How do you think anthrax acquires antibiotics resistance? Most likely through gene transfer from some other organism.
Give me a break. It has been known for decades that microorganisms in pure cultures acquire antibiotic resistance when grown in the presence of antibiotics. The classic work of Luria and Delbruck showed that the mechanism is pre-existing mutations in the population. If you want to speed it up a bit, you can add a mutagen or irradiate the cultures. After all, how did you think the genes of different species got different to begin with? All genetic differences between species are the same kind that arise by mutation. Transgenic technology is just a convenient shortcut to achieving the same kinds of results that people have been achieving since prehistoric times by selective breeding.
That is one of the reasons why any kind of experimentation with transgenic organisms is regulated. In particular, it is necessary to regulate tightly what gets released into the environment. Reputable labs working on improved food crops have to comply with those regulations, and so does everybody else.
Most regulations only apply to recipients of federal funds or to the food safety. While a few localities may have specific regulations, I am not aware of any general regulation of private genetic experimentation. Saying "transgenic organisms are one of the primary means of constructing bioterror organisms" is a bit like saying "chemistry is one of the primary means of creating explosives," or "machining is one of the primary means of creating automatic weapons." Most uses of these technologies are entirely benign.
Moreover, it seems rather doubtful that transgenic technology is all that important for creation of bioweapons, anyway. Why go to the trouble of trying to create a novel pathogen when there are so many natural ones to work with? The most likely method of creating a bioterror weapon would be to grow a conventional pathogen such as anthrax in the presence of antibiotics to select resistant strains.
The clearest indicator of Brown's dishonesty is his repeated use of the "Al Gore slander"--a technique of character assassination successfully employed by right wing extremists to undermine Al Gore's candidacy for president. It is a classic straw man scam: falsely accuse somebody of claiming to have "invented" something. Then point out that he did not literally invent it, thereby suggesting that he is a liar. Notably, although Brown explicitly accuses Torvald of claiming to have "invented" Unix (as opposed to having "developed" or "written" it), he provides no quotes to this effect.
Whenever you install new software, you have to wait while the system "optimizes" it, which in fact means checking for applications that need their prebinding redone. On a 700MHz imac - less than 2 years old - this sometimes takes 15 minutes or more. Since I bought it, I've wasted hours, if not days, waiting for installations to complete because of this, which is far longer (and more frustrating) than the total time saved starting programs.
Why wait? Usually, I just switch to another application and work on something else while the prebinding is going on. The fact that even major installs do not monopolize the computer is one of the things I appreciate about OS X. I certainly want it deferred until the next time I'm in a hurry for that particular application to start up.
Filesystem journaling does not make the filesystem faster, and it's silly to suggest that it does.
In fact, journaled filesystems are generally noticeably (one might say significantly) slower than non-journaled ones.
As you'll see from this benchmark Apple's implementation of journaling has generally negligible effect on performance, and some operations do in fact run faster.
Microsoft tends to spend more time figuring out ways to trick their users into *thinking* that things are faster even though it's actually taking as long, if not longer than previous versions. In this case, you've been tricked. Microsoft moved more stuff after the user is logged on. In other words, your system is still doing all of the things it used to do, plus probably more, it's just that you think it's done.
Perception is what matters. I enjoy working at a computer that feels fast and responsive. If a developer can hide time consuming activities so they occur at a time when I don't notice them, that is a significant improvement.
MacOs started to get the reputation of being limited. The single button wasn't enough. To keep up Apple added the dubble click to permit additional behavure. A software hack for a second button.
I've been using Macs virtually since introduction, and to the best of my knowledge the double-click feature was always there. Or are you referring to pre-release versions of the MacOS. I don't know if Apple invented it, or merely borrowed it from some other system. Back then, such features were generally assumed not to be subject to patent or copyright protection. I don't think the MacOS ever used triple-click, although an early Mac version of MSWord did.
i dont' have a as much of a problem with alton himself as people like the submitter, who do think that by reducing the culinary arts to the most empirical values, anybody can become an alain ducasse or a masaharu morimoto.
No, anybody (with a little practice) can carry out a good recipe and produce results as good as those of a great chef. But a great chef isn't great because he can follow a recipe--he's great because he creates the recipes. It's like the difference between a lab tech and a great scientist.
i can't count how often something i've tried in the kitchen that chemically and scientifically should have worked fine, but in the end came out curdled, or tasteless, or fallen.
This sort of thing happens in a biological laboratory, too. But a scientist doesn't console himself with "it's an art." He realizes that this sort of thing means that he doesn't understand the science as well as he thought he did, and that there is an uncontrolled variable somewhere in the procedure. The only true "art" in carrying out a protocol or a recipe is reproducibility--to do the same thing the same way every time, so that at least you are unlikely to be the uncontrolled variable.
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Spacial browsers made good sense when computers were still fairly novel and hard disks were small. It related the computer experience to a physical metaphor, an office with a desktop and a file cabinet. But today, most people have loads of files, and, more importantly, because of the web, most people have more experience with browsers than they do with actual file cabinets. The browser is simply turning out to be a more versatile metaphor for traversing a file structure.
It's difficult to tell if an animal is using language in the way we understand it, because even the best "talking animals" are not so fluent that they can discuss their own understanding of language. You can readily teach a parrot to say, "Polly wants a cracker." But is this using language? In particular, does Polly understand that a cracker is a particular thing that it is asking for, or has Polly merely been trained, in a stimulus-response manner, to feel that "pollywantsacracker" is a good thing to say?
One could argue that there is not meaningful distinction, but in fact, it is possible to teach a human being both ways, and it is clear that stimulus-response learning does not imply conscious understanding. I know of a case in which a class of students, as a prank, conditioned the teacher to use the word "we" more frequently, simply by appearing more attentive whenever he used the word. Pretty soon he was peppering his lectures with the word. Yet he never had any conscious awareness that he was doing so, or any understanding that in this context, the word "we" meant "pay attention".
Just because you can teach the dog a few tricks doesn't mean that he actually has understanding of what he is doing. Humans are the only species cabable of understanding.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
There are many studies that have demonstrated simple reasoning and problem solving on the part of animals. Language is more controversial. Many animals can clearly understand words or symbols and use them to solve problems and achieve goals, but whether this behavior really has the properties of human language is debated.
I've hammered on this in several other posts - a receipt which the voter can take out of the polling area opens many doors to new abuses. Imagine the scenario of "show your voting receipt to your union foreman if you ever want another raise in your career." It would never be that obvious, but word would get around. Once there are verifiable voting receipts, your vote can be coerced after the fact.
This is a solved problem. Using various cryptographic methods, the voter can take out an encoded receipt that he, or anybody, can use to verify that his vote was correctly counted, but which cannot be used to determine who he voted for.
Except that nature is stumbling along with random mutations. As our tech progresses we'll have targeted mutations, courtesy of us. And even if developed to be "good", unforseen consequences of design being what they are....
And what those unforeseen consequences are is random mutations (relative to what was intended).
This told to the reporter during the interview about nanotech risk-mitigation. Sure, it's a perfectly rational way to choose your movie library, but it's almost too rational. Most people don't consider watching a bad movie an outcome to be avoided at all costs.
I find that the movies that I like most are not the ones where there is a critical consensus that they're good--it's the ones where half the critics say that they're great, and the other half say that they're crap.
Why is that still not particularly comforting? Just one tragically (intentional or otherwise) bad design is all it could take, theoretically. Not to turn the earth to "goo", but to seriously screw the conditions we humans deem useful to our existence.
Don't forget that we already live in a world full of self-replicating micromachines (microorganisms), many of which are already quite capable of turning us into "goo." Not only that, but they are constantly mutating, producing enormous numbers of cases of "bad design" every minute. Yet somehow, we manage to survive. Frankly, what we humans do is likely to be a drop in the bucket.
This begs the question of how important actually knowing that the characters are CG is. When I first saw some still frames of Final Flight of the Osiris, I had to be *convinced* they were CGI images.
Stills tend to be a lot more convincing than full motion. We communicate a lot with body movement. Facial expressions are also very complex, with fleeting "micro-expressions" lasting only a fraction of a second.
That, and the lousy story and dialog.
However, many action films are successful even with lousy story and dialog. And the action sequences in Final Fantasy were very good.
I think this is what killed the Final Fantasy film. The characters were so realistic that my brain accepted them as human--and then spent the rest of the film wondering, "What's wrong with them?" The problem is that we are very sensitive to the subtleties of human behavior. As long as you aren't actually fooled, you are impressed by the quality of the simulation. But if it is good enough for you to take it for human, then what would otherwise be a minor flaw in an excellent simulation suddenly seems like something pathological about another person. So beyond a certain point, if the simulation is not perfect, it starts to seem disturbingly wrong in some undefinable way.
I'd love to see a remake of the Matrix films, in which all of the "in the Matrix" sequences were done with computer animation, like the excellent "Flight of the Osiris" short by the Final Fantasy team. In that context, I think this "problem" would become an asset.
I'm saying that we are likely getting to the point where we can create diseases that are far more dangerous than influenza, bubonic plague, or ebola. We can create those through genetic engineering, through artificial evolution, and probably through other means.
More dangerous than diseases that (in the absence of effective drugs or vaccination) have documented ability to spread rapidly and kill a large fraction of the population? Seems doubtful. And even from the viewpoint of a terrorist or a rogue government, there is hardly any reason to attempt such a thing. These existing diseases are quite devastating enough for any imaginable purpose. To intentionally create a dangerous novel disease would be a difficult and hazardous process, requiring a multiyear high-level research effort involving extensive human experimentation on large populations. It would be hard to carry out and hard to keep secret. While modifying an existing disease is relatively easy, and the methods are well-understood.
That doesn't mean that the existing diseases aren't frightening enough to people (and hence usable as weapons of terror), but the existing diseases don't threaten our survival as a species.
I think the notion of a disease "threatening our survival as a species" is ridiculous. There is no example of a disease that infects everybody. The human population is quite large and genetically diverse. There are always some individuals who are resistant. And even if it were possible to do such thing, and somebody was insane enough to try, it is hard to imagine how it could be done in practice. Imagine the number of research subjects you would need to detect resistance at a level of 10e-7, which would still be quite a few people worldwide.
I don't see where you get that "certainty" from. There is no physical or biological principle that says that introducing a foreign gene makes organisms significantly less fit.
Organisms are highly optimized evolutionarily. By definition, that means that any small change will make them less fit. This is confirmed by experimental studies, which find that the overwhelming majority of mutational changes decrease fitness. Proteins do not function in isolation. They are regulated and interact in complex ways that have been optimized over many generations. So the chance that some novel protein will improve function in any particular individual organism is vanishingly small. Now if you were to introduce that protein into billions of individuals in a genetically diverse population, there might be a few that, because of their specific genetic makeup, could make use of it and thrive. But current methods do not do that.
In any case, when a virus or bacterium is not "optimized for the presence of a foreign gene", that means that it is likely to be more virulent and deadly than a disease that has been in a population for a while. For disease agents, higher virulence equals lower fitness, so by your own argument, if the introduction of foreign genes into diseases leads to lower fitness, one common way in which it may do so is through higher virulence.
This is a logical fallacy of the form, "All men are mortal. Dogs are mortal. Therefore dogs are men." There are lots of ways to lower fitness, and hardly any of them have anything to do with virulence. So fact that introducing an out of context protein will almost certainly lower fitness does not imply a greater risk of virulence.
And I don't understand why you keep talking about "geographically transposed natural species". Yes, they are a hazard. In fact, introduction of new diseases into humans by contact with exotic animals is probably a far greater risk than the accidental creation of new diseases through genetic engineering (whether it's a greater risk than the deliberate creation of biowarfare agents through genetic engineering I don't know and neither do you, I suspect--that depends on the state of the art in biowarfare research). But why do you keep repeating tha
I think that there are real risks of technology. But I'm not convinced that a "go slow" prescription is a solution. This presupposes that we actually can forecast the risks and benefits of technology if we just slow down the pace a bit. But so often, modern technologies synergize in ways that are nearly impossible to predict. And hypothetical risks often loom much larger than benefits. It was easy to foresee, for example, the risks to privacy of widespread computer connectivity. But who foresaw the many benefits of computer networks for commerce, communication, grass-roots political organization, etc., etc? Over the years, I've seen many nightmare scenarios. In early '70's, many young people were convinced that nuclear or ecological catastrophe would overtake us in just a few years. Yet somehow, the forecasted disasters always managed to stay just a few years ahead. It is worth thinking about risks--occasionally, the dangers are sufficiently obvious that they actually can be avoided. But that is the exception rather than the rule. I think the greater danger is that we will be paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.
if we are not the primary reservoir of the disease, then it probably doesn't spread that easily among humans
We are not the primary reservoir of influenza. Or bubonic plague. Contrary to your statement, ebola is highly contagious. An antibiotic-resistant strain of bubonic plague would also be quite nasty. Mortality from bubonic plague is 50-90%
In any case, there is currently no known natural disease that would be capable of eradicating the majority of the population around the globe. Smallpox probably comes closest, but even it is "only" 30% fatal and we have known preventative measures.
I don't get your point. Are you saying that this makes natural diseases such as ebola, anthrax, and bubonic plague not a concern as bioterror weapons? From all accounts, previous pandemics of these diseases were pretty terrifying. Are or you suggesting that transgenic diseases are likely to have this property? This is far less likely than the accidental evolution of an epidemic disease. Expecting some protein from a different species to create a disease capable of wiping out the majority of the population is a bit like imagining that taking the carburetor of a Toyota and bolting it under the hood of a Ford will create a car capable of winning the Le Mans. The real threat of natural diseases is their genetic diversity. Even though the chances of any one mutant or hybrid having properties of high infectivity and mortality, natural diseases will have millions of variants, and the most infectious will propagate. A transgenic variant created by man would not have this property. People have been incorporating foreign genes into bacteria for decades. It is not a high containment activity. There is not a single known case of accidental creation of a dangerous disease.
And what's the harm of being careful? It doesn't take a lot of effort to destroy waste from biologial research.
There is no harm in being careful. But an exaggerated notion of risk is an impediment to progress. There is certainly some risk that the green stuff in the back of your refrigerator could create a global epidemic, but we don't call out the CDC to clean out refrigerators.
While creating antibiotics resistant bacteria is not nice, it is not a huge threat--even if we didn't have antibiotics at all, we'd be back in the 19th century; medically unpleasant, but not incompatible with civilized life.
I suggest that you read up on the Black Death. I'd say that "unpleasant" is a bit of an understatement.
you implicitly assume that the old techniques, selection, breeding, mutagenesis, etc., are "OK" and proven harmless because people have been using them for so long.
On the contrary, my point is as far as bioterror/biowarfare are concerned, these techniques are the greatest threat: they are easy, low tech, and have been proved to work.
Furthermore, we already know that the association with domesticated animals and the creation of new kinds of plants has had serious medical and environmental consequences.
However these are breeds that have experienced many generations of selection for health and survival, taking advantage of the genetic variability of natural populations. The ecological hazards of laboratory created species--genetically identical, not optimized for the presence of a foreign gene--are certain to be much less than the hazards posed by domesticated or geographically transposed natural species.
Yes, quite right: transgenic technology is a shortcut. It's a shortcut to let humans make things happen within a span of a few years that might otherwise take millions or even hundreds of millions of years to happen in the normal course of evolution, or even through directed breeding.
Or, when talking about short generation microorganisms, a few months.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. There's no way that selective breeding could ever account for, say, genes from a pig coming up in genes for a plant. I'm not sure that would qualify as being the same kind of result. Part of the issue about GE foods is that while you can expect the plant-based gene responsible for flower colour to perform the same function across many plants, it's much more difficult to figure out what effect or chain of effects an animal-based gene for skin thickness will have on a plant.
In fact, pigs and plants have a large number of homologous genes, because most genes families originated in microorganisms that are in the common heritage of pigs and plants. So in a functional sense, a modest number of mutations can in many cases effectively transform a gene of a pig into a gene for a plant. The important thing about a gene is not where it comes from, but what the protein it codes for does in a biochemical sense.
Even straight plant-plant breeding and GE can have unforseen effects - for example, it's possible to plain-old-fashioned breed plants in the nightshade family that have the toxins normally found in the plant part (the leafy bits of tomatoes, potatoes, etc.) spread throughout the normally edible part.
Indeed. This is far more likely to happen with conventional selective breeding than with transgenic technology. The plant already is evolutionarily optimized to coordinate the expression of the multiple genes required to make the toxin, and where in the plant that that toxin is produced is likely to be controlled by a small number of regulatory factors. It would be much harder to achieve such a thing with a small number of foreign genes, even by design. To do it by accident is incredibly unlikely. Perhaps if we're very unlucky, we'll come up with a GM food as dangerous as a peanut. People worry about GM plants escaping and running wild, but the chances are overwhelming that a gene from a pig expressed in the plant will have a deleterious effect on the plant in the wild, even if it might be useful in specific circumstances, such as the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. A GM plant is far less likely to cause ecological damage than a wild-type plant released into a part of the world where it does not normally grow. There have been many such disasters with native plants. There has yet to be one with a GM plant.
The "Internet" comment was only ONE of the dumb things that Al Gore said during the 2000 campaign.
Except, of course, that he never said it. Like most of the "dumb" things that he supposedly said, it turned out to be disinformation concocted by the right wing Dirty Tricks team.
The reset button will nuke the configuration, the logs, and whatever else state is there, thus confounding debugging by the tech support.
The standard solution to this problem is to provide a hardware "soft reset" that enables a default password for the next 15 minutes or so.
Well, this very case shows you otherwise. If it looks like it might be related to bioterrorism, the feds can and will step in.
On the contrary, it proves my point. He is not accused under any law that specifically relates to the use or release of transgenic organisms, but under a general law that almost certainly is not applicable (since the law does not actually forbid individuals from carrying out such research in their homes).
Because artificial pathogens can combine high mortality rate and high infectivity; natural pathogens don't generally have that combination because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous.
Tell it to smallpox. Or bubonic plague. There are many ways in which diseases can have this property. Many natural diseases infect multiple hosts. For example, if we are not the primary reservoir of disease, then there is not evolutionary disincentive for the disease to have a high mortality rate.
How do you think anthrax acquires antibiotics resistance? Most likely through gene transfer from some other organism.
Give me a break. It has been known for decades that microorganisms in pure cultures acquire antibiotic resistance when grown in the presence of antibiotics. The classic work of Luria and Delbruck showed that the mechanism is pre-existing mutations in the population. If you want to speed it up a bit, you can add a mutagen or irradiate the cultures. After all, how did you think the genes of different species got different to begin with? All genetic differences between species are the same kind that arise by mutation. Transgenic technology is just a convenient shortcut to achieving the same kinds of results that people have been achieving since prehistoric times by selective breeding.
That is one of the reasons why any kind of experimentation with transgenic organisms is regulated. In particular, it is necessary to regulate tightly what gets released into the environment. Reputable labs working on improved food crops have to comply with those regulations, and so does everybody else.
Most regulations only apply to recipients of federal funds or to the food safety. While a few localities may have specific regulations, I am not aware of any general regulation of private genetic experimentation. Saying "transgenic organisms are one of the primary means of constructing bioterror organisms" is a bit like saying "chemistry is one of the primary means of creating explosives," or "machining is one of the primary means of creating automatic weapons." Most uses of these technologies are entirely benign.
Moreover, it seems rather doubtful that transgenic technology is all that important for creation of bioweapons, anyway. Why go to the trouble of trying to create a novel pathogen when there are so many natural ones to work with? The most likely method of creating a bioterror weapon would be to grow a conventional pathogen such as anthrax in the presence of antibiotics to select resistant strains.
The clearest indicator of Brown's dishonesty is his repeated use of the "Al Gore slander"--a technique of character assassination successfully employed by right wing extremists to undermine Al Gore's candidacy for president. It is a classic straw man scam: falsely accuse somebody of claiming to have "invented" something. Then point out that he did not literally invent it, thereby suggesting that he is a liar. Notably, although Brown explicitly accuses Torvald of claiming to have "invented" Unix (as opposed to having "developed" or "written" it), he provides no quotes to this effect.
Whenever you install new software, you have to wait while the system "optimizes" it, which in fact means checking for applications that need their prebinding redone. On a 700MHz imac - less than 2 years old - this sometimes takes 15 minutes or more. Since I bought it, I've wasted hours, if not days, waiting for installations to complete because of this, which is far longer (and more frustrating) than the total time saved starting programs.
Why wait? Usually, I just switch to another application and work on something else while the prebinding is going on. The fact that even major installs do not monopolize the computer is one of the things I appreciate about OS X. I certainly want it deferred until the next time I'm in a hurry for that particular application to start up.
As you'll see from this benchmark Apple's implementation of journaling has generally negligible effect on performance, and some operations do in fact run faster.
Microsoft tends to spend more time figuring out ways to trick their users into *thinking* that things are faster even though it's actually taking as long, if not longer than previous versions. In this case, you've been tricked. Microsoft moved more stuff after the user is logged on. In other words, your system is still doing all of the things it used to do, plus probably more, it's just that you think it's done.
Perception is what matters. I enjoy working at a computer that feels fast and responsive. If a developer can hide time consuming activities so they occur at a time when I don't notice them, that is a significant improvement.
MacOs started to get the reputation of being limited. The single button wasn't enough. To keep up Apple added the dubble click to permit additional behavure. A software hack for a second button.
I've been using Macs virtually since introduction, and to the best of my knowledge the double-click feature was always there. Or are you referring to pre-release versions of the MacOS. I don't know if Apple invented it, or merely borrowed it from some other system. Back then, such features were generally assumed not to be subject to patent or copyright protection. I don't think the MacOS ever used triple-click, although an early Mac version of MSWord did.
i dont' have a as much of a problem with alton himself as people like the submitter, who do think that by reducing the culinary arts to the most empirical values, anybody can become an alain ducasse or a masaharu morimoto.
No, anybody (with a little practice) can carry out a good recipe and produce results as good as those of a great chef. But a great chef isn't great because he can follow a recipe--he's great because he creates the recipes. It's like the difference between a lab tech and a great scientist.
i can't count how often something i've tried in the kitchen that chemically and scientifically should have worked fine, but in the end came out curdled, or tasteless, or fallen.
This sort of thing happens in a biological laboratory, too. But a scientist doesn't console himself with "it's an art." He realizes that this sort of thing means that he doesn't understand the science as well as he thought he did, and that there is an uncontrolled variable somewhere in the procedure. The only true "art" in carrying out a protocol or a recipe is reproducibility--to do the same thing the same way every time, so that at least you are unlikely to be the uncontrolled variable.