But eventually it will get there (barring global disasters, etc., which is why I qualified it as only perhaps in the better futures). We, however, might not live long enough to see it, so I don't think you should really worry about it on a personal level.
The reality is that people who argue against genetically modified food do so from a complete lack of understanding of the fundamental science involved. When you do understand the science they just look like a bunch of ignorant crazed loons.
Even if the vast majority of people who argue against genetically modified food are idiots, your argument is stupid.
You're wrong on two very fundamental points.
Even if your claim that direct genetic engineering is no different than selective breeding were correct, GMO food would only be automatically safe if it would be impossible to use selective breeding to create food plants which would be bad to eat. That's obviously wrong. The only reason we accept that the food developed by selective breeding is generally safe is that in most cases selective breeding only causes gradual changes in phenotype and so we have already been eating similar food for a very long time.
Direct genetic engineering is different than selective breeding. For example, explain how to use selective breeding to produce GURT plants. Kind of hard, considering that the trait you want to enhance is sterility, eh?
> Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way > we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
OK, now explain how Monsanto could develop GURT by using selection. That would be kind of hard, considering that the trait they want to enhance is sterility? So, yes, all our food is genetically modified, and no, direct genetic engineering isn't just a stronger form of cross-breeding and selection.
> Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's > genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
I agree that the unwashed masses are hysterical, but my feeling is that the judge is right. Monsanto have already sued their victim(s) (and won!) in the past when their unwanted technology was passed to neighboring farms via pollen, through no fault of the neighboring farmer. That, at least, has to stop. It's similar to having RIAA sue you for downloading music which a computer worm transferred to your computer.
The post you replied to didn't claim that direct gene splicing isn't "natural" (whatever that really means), it claimed it wasn't comparable to cross-breeding and selection.
And you have to admit that the rate of (significant) horizontal gene transfer in nature in food crops, over the period of the recent past, is small compared to the rate of intentional gene transfers of genetic engineering in the same period.
If you actually knew what Monsanto has been doing in the legal arena, you'd know that you don't have to be a botanist to smell a fish.... Read the rest of the posts and do some research about Monsanto's litigation history.
> apparently some layman judge type just wants to make noise.
Perhaps he is instead more familiar than you with Monsanto's legal history?
> I can almost guarantee this case will change nothing and do nothing but waste > the time of quite a few attorneys.
You might be right about that, except the part where you forgot about Monsanto pouring enormous $$$'s into those lawyers' pockets to try to get this precedent overturned, erased, or forgotten. I'm sure those lawyers don't view it as a "waste of time".
What Google are doing wrong depends largely on your viewpoint.
If you are a pedant for copyright, it could offend you that this agreement might affect someone's ability to profit from their copyright, even if it was highly unlikely, and you might even believe it would make it less interesting for people to write books.
If you are for "freedom of information", it may offend you that Google ends up with a monopoly on use and maintenance of the orphaned works, since they might abuse this position of power and in the end the information doesn't become as free as you would like (even though they have already said they would have allowed others to use/sell the works, also).
If you are a publisher or author, you might find the sudden influx of orphaned works into the book market as threatening to your current pricing schemes.
> Are we to suppose this website got the rights from NASCAR and other related property holders to use these images?
Are we to suppose guilt without proof now, just because it has to do with crimes which are easy to commit, even unintentionally?
Just a thought, that maybe we all should be trying to champion "constitutional rights"? (Instead of jumping down each other's throats for no good reason whatsoever? You're going to tell me that you've never forwarded an email you got from someone else to a third party, without proper licensing from the author of the message, for example?)
Personally, I understand your position, but I lean more to preferring a half-bad workaround to the current bad law, as opposed to waiting for it to be changed for the better, when the direction of recent changes are all in the opposite direction.
Frankly, I'd have been OK for the DoJ to have come out with a few recommended changes which remove Google from a monopoly position, while maintaining the orphaned works workaround.
> primarily because of the actions of a single corporation.
"Single"? How exactly does your post jive with the reality of the Kindle's DRM? Or am I missing something?
And with regard to the main point of your post, I hate to tell you, but in most of the better futures we could have, dead-tree books are eventually going to be "quaint collector's items", no matter what your personal opinion about is. And yes, this may take a generation, or two....
> Unfortunately this machine ended up on the losing side of the war, so a lot of the > knowledge will have been lost thanks to that.
Er, the German guy who invented the Enigma was killed in a horse carriage accident in 1929. So, no, the war had no direct effect on cryptographic knowledge in the way you imply. Considering the enormous number of casualties on both sides, however, I'm sure it affected it in a general way.
By the time that happens, you'll be able to jump ship to some open-source BSD-based OS, Haiku, Plan 9, or maybe even (gasp!) GNU Hurd.
Really, for the next April 4, someone should make a parody of Slashdot where everyone is running these way-out OSs and getting down on all the clueless, zombied, Linux-using grandmothers and Joe Sixpacks....
The GGP, at least, was talking about using Windows 98 (at least in part). My remembered experience with that is that it locked up several times every day, on a good day....
And yes, you are right that some (most?) evangelists (of all sorts) are asshats....
You guys should try to concentrate on things like:
exposing sham treatments which are actually harmful (including those which are blatantly overpriced)
making sure the public doesn't ignore a better conventional medical treatment in lieu of placebo
making sure the public realizes the limits of such treatments, so it can better decide how much they should be willing to pay for such treatments
If you were a doctor, and you diagnosed a patient, who feels relatively good, with an incurable malady (I am assuming that this is not a progressive problem which is known to worsen, nor is it fatal) which you knew that caused most of the sufferers enormous pain and other ill effects, would you have no qualms in telling the patient "Wow, I'm impressed. Most people with this problem have much more pain than you." and continuing in giving really detailed information about all kinds of bad things which the patient could possibly experience (assuming that the patient didn't ask for the information himself)?
IANAD, but personally, I'd try to say something like "This problem usually causes a lot of ill effects [and here I would give the absolute minimum of details about the significant risks], but you might have an atypical case, so you should continue to do whatever you're doing and your condition might remain stable". Frankly, nowadays once he has a diagnosis, anyway the first thing the patient is most likely to do is check the net for more information, and he can decide by himself if he wants to wallow in the gory details about the bad possibilities of his situation.
We used to say "Engage brain before opening mouth" but nowadays the equivalent is "Check Google (or equivalent) before posting". P2P botnets have been around for a long time, and the recent Conficker worm uses P2P technology in quite an advanced way.
> and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it
Yes, sure, this is why my company has to offer (grunt) courses on how to use things like Outlook, Word, etc. Especially after every major version update (i.e., GUI "improvement").
Personally, I've never found a GUI which is automatically "easy" to use. On every platform, the designer(s) almost always assume something about my usage model which is simply wrong.
Yes, Symantec, I'm really going to activate Javascript and run Flash just to look at, judging from what others have posted here, is idiotic advertising....
Anyone who has ever tried to uninstall their products already knows enough to run away from this idiocy...
> Recording contracts supposedly often include language to this effect:...
That clause reads as if it was inserted around 1999 when the content industry managed to slip through an amendment which made musical recordings "works for hire" (said amendment being retracted retroactively in 2000 by later legislation after the extent of outrage over the change started to be expressed to a greater degree --- as documented in the paper to which I linked).
Seems pretty logical to me. Somehow I think Bigjeff5 is just pulling stuff directly from, well, you know where...
I have a feeling that after his contract with Universal is finished, this artist will become independent. And I'm not thinking that it'll be because he prefers it. My guess is that he'll be treated as persona non grata by all the major labels.
Musical recordings, at least up to now, haven't been accepted as belonging to the enumerated list of types of works which are automatically works for hire if produced for compensation.
Lessig is a lawyer, and the legal difference between the public domain and something licensed under a Creative Commons Zero License is interesting to him. To most of the rest of us, as far as I can tell, it's really not.
The beam control system acquired the ground target and guided the laser beam to the target.
"Guided" the laser beam to the target? The journalist makes it sound like a cross between phasers and A. E. Van Vogt's "psychology" of elementary particles....
He then goes on to totally mix this up with signal carrying lasers and photonic integrated circuits:
The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today said last month they want to develop a laser system the goes way beyond today's opto-mechanical, acousto-optical or electro-optical systems to establish photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology that will provide video frame rate beam steering speeds, and emit multiple beams with a total output power of 10 W.
"today said last month"??? What does that mean?
"extreme scientists"? (Makes me laugh thinking about images mixing most of my scientist friends with extreme sports)...
The mix-up seems intentional, to make the uninformed reading public think that soon these laser planes will be zapping tens or hundreds of targets simultaneously...
The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) program is a US military program to mount a high energy laser damage weapon on an aircraft, initially the AC-130 gunship, for use against ground targets in urban or other areas where minimizing collateral damage is important. The laser will be a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). It is expected to have a tactical range of approximately twenty kilometers and weigh about 5,000â"7,000 kg. This program is distinct from the Airborne Laser, which is a much larger system designed to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.
Given what we know about biology, every living thing, including viruses, are mutants (or at least descendants of mutants).
The article title has to be one of the more braindead ones I've seen here on Slashdot, and I've been around for a while. (And somehow I don't understand how it's connected with the information in the summary.)
Slashdot Mirror
> The technology is no where near that.
But eventually it will get there (barring global disasters, etc., which is why I qualified it as only perhaps in the better futures). We, however, might not live long enough to see it, so I don't think you should really worry about it on a personal level.
Even if the vast majority of people who argue against genetically modified food are idiots, your argument is stupid.
You're wrong on two very fundamental points.
> Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way
> we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
OK, now explain how Monsanto could develop GURT by using selection. That would be kind of hard, considering that the trait they want to enhance is sterility? So, yes, all our food is genetically modified, and no, direct genetic engineering isn't just a stronger form of cross-breeding and selection.
> Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's
> genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
I agree that the unwashed masses are hysterical, but my feeling is that the judge is right. Monsanto have already sued their victim(s) (and won!) in the past when their unwanted technology was passed to neighboring farms via pollen, through no fault of the neighboring farmer. That, at least, has to stop. It's similar to having RIAA sue you for downloading music which a computer worm transferred to your computer.
The post you replied to didn't claim that direct gene splicing isn't "natural" (whatever that really means), it claimed it wasn't comparable to cross-breeding and selection.
And you have to admit that the rate of (significant) horizontal gene transfer in nature in food crops, over the period of the recent past, is small compared to the rate of intentional gene transfers of genetic engineering in the same period.
If you actually knew what Monsanto has been doing in the legal arena, you'd know that you don't have to be a botanist to smell a fish.... Read the rest of the posts and do some research about Monsanto's litigation history.
> apparently some layman judge type just wants to make noise.
Perhaps he is instead more familiar than you with Monsanto's legal history?
> I can almost guarantee this case will change nothing and do nothing but waste
> the time of quite a few attorneys.
You might be right about that, except the part where you forgot about Monsanto pouring enormous $$$'s into those lawyers' pockets to try to get this precedent overturned, erased, or forgotten. I'm sure those lawyers don't view it as a "waste of time".
What Google are doing wrong depends largely on your viewpoint.
> Are we to suppose this website got the rights from NASCAR and other related property holders to use these images?
Are we to suppose guilt without proof now, just because it has to do with crimes which are easy to commit, even unintentionally?
Just a thought, that maybe we all should be trying to champion "constitutional rights"? (Instead of jumping down each other's throats for no good reason whatsoever? You're going to tell me that you've never forwarded an email you got from someone else to a third party, without proper licensing from the author of the message, for example?)
Personally, I understand your position, but I lean more to preferring a half-bad workaround to the current bad law, as opposed to waiting for it to be changed for the better, when the direction of recent changes are all in the opposite direction.
Frankly, I'd have been OK for the DoJ to have come out with a few recommended changes which remove Google from a monopoly position, while maintaining the orphaned works workaround.
> primarily because of the actions of a single corporation.
"Single"? How exactly does your post jive with the reality of the Kindle's DRM? Or am I missing something?
And with regard to the main point of your post, I hate to tell you, but in most of the better futures we could have, dead-tree books are eventually going to be "quaint collector's items", no matter what your personal opinion about is. And yes, this may take a generation, or two....
> Unfortunately this machine ended up on the losing side of the war, so a lot of the
> knowledge will have been lost thanks to that.
Er, the German guy who invented the Enigma was killed in a horse carriage accident in 1929. So, no, the war had no direct effect on cryptographic knowledge in the way you imply. Considering the enormous number of casualties on both sides, however, I'm sure it affected it in a general way.
> sooner or later I'm going to need an anti-virus
By the time that happens, you'll be able to jump ship to some open-source BSD-based OS, Haiku, Plan 9, or maybe even (gasp!) GNU Hurd.
Really, for the next April 4, someone should make a parody of Slashdot where everyone is running these way-out OSs and getting down on all the clueless, zombied, Linux-using grandmothers and Joe Sixpacks....
The GGP, at least, was talking about using Windows 98 (at least in part). My remembered experience with that is that it locked up several times every day, on a good day....
And yes, you are right that some (most?) evangelists (of all sorts) are asshats....
> with Win98+ME (some vxd/exe/and dll's replaced with ME versions)
You obviously aren't the typical Joe using Windows, so your anecdotal reliability reports don't really add much to this discussion.
And no, I don't think that the typical Joe trying to use Linux is necessarily going to be happier with it, or find it more reliable.
Nothing is totally harmless to everyone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylene_blue#Adverse_reactions
Why do people continually try to debunk a well-known, scientifically proven, response of the body to sham treatments?
You guys should try to concentrate on things like:
If you were a doctor, and you diagnosed a patient, who feels relatively good, with an incurable malady (I am assuming that this is not a progressive problem which is known to worsen, nor is it fatal) which you knew that caused most of the sufferers enormous pain and other ill effects, would you have no qualms in telling the patient "Wow, I'm impressed. Most people with this problem have much more pain than you." and continuing in giving really detailed information about all kinds of bad things which the patient could possibly experience (assuming that the patient didn't ask for the information himself)?
IANAD, but personally, I'd try to say something like "This problem usually causes a lot of ill effects [and here I would give the absolute minimum of details about the significant risks], but you might have an atypical case, so you should continue to do whatever you're doing and your condition might remain stable". Frankly, nowadays once he has a diagnosis, anyway the first thing the patient is most likely to do is check the net for more information, and he can decide by himself if he wants to wallow in the gory details about the bad possibilities of his situation.
We used to say "Engage brain before opening mouth" but nowadays the equivalent is "Check Google (or equivalent) before posting". P2P botnets have been around for a long time, and the recent Conficker worm uses P2P technology in quite an advanced way.
> and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it
Yes, sure, this is why my company has to offer (grunt) courses on how to use things like Outlook, Word, etc. Especially after every major version update (i.e., GUI "improvement").
Personally, I've never found a GUI which is automatically "easy" to use. On every platform, the designer(s) almost always assume something about my usage model which is simply wrong.
Yes, Symantec, I'm really going to activate Javascript and run Flash just to look at, judging from what others have posted here, is idiotic advertising....
Anyone who has ever tried to uninstall their products already knows enough to run away from this idiocy...
> Recording contracts supposedly often include language to this effect: ...
That clause reads as if it was inserted around 1999 when the content industry managed to slip through an amendment which made musical recordings "works for hire" (said amendment being retracted retroactively in 2000 by later legislation after the extent of outrage over the change started to be expressed to a greater degree --- as documented in the paper to which I linked).
Seems pretty logical to me. Somehow I think Bigjeff5 is just pulling stuff directly from, well, you know where...
I have a feeling that after his contract with Universal is finished, this artist will become independent. And I'm not thinking that it'll be because he prefers it. My guess is that he'll be treated as persona non grata by all the major labels.
Anyone know if his music is any good?
Musical recordings, at least up to now, haven't been accepted as belonging to the enumerated list of types of works which are automatically works for hire if produced for compensation.
In most cases the artist(s) assign their copyrights to the labels, and this means that soon, starting around 2013, there will be an interesting battle in the Federal courts whether or not the artists can terminate these assignments as stipulated in the 1976 Copyright Act.
Lessig is a lawyer, and the legal difference between the public domain and something licensed under a Creative Commons Zero License is interesting to him. To most of the rest of us, as far as I can tell, it's really not.
FTA:
"Guided" the laser beam to the target? The journalist makes it sound like a cross between phasers and A. E. Van Vogt's "psychology" of elementary particles....
He then goes on to totally mix this up with signal carrying lasers and photonic integrated circuits:
"today said last month"??? What does that mean?
"extreme scientists"? (Makes me laugh thinking about images mixing most of my scientist friends with extreme sports)...
The mix-up seems intentional, to make the uninformed reading public think that soon these laser planes will be zapping tens or hundreds of targets simultaneously...
From WP:
The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) program is a US military program to mount a high energy laser damage weapon on an aircraft, initially the AC-130 gunship, for use against ground targets in urban or other areas where minimizing collateral damage is important. The laser will be a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). It is expected to have a tactical range of approximately twenty kilometers and weigh about 5,000â"7,000 kg. This program is distinct from the Airborne Laser, which is a much larger system designed to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.
Given what we know about biology, every living thing, including viruses, are mutants (or at least descendants of mutants).
The article title has to be one of the more braindead ones I've seen here on Slashdot, and I've been around for a while. (And somehow I don't understand how it's connected with the information in the summary.)
OTOH, I'm real tired....