My post was pointing out the absurdity of the statement that socialism always causes economic decline. You make no counterargument, but suggest that Norway can have the prosperity of socialism because of US military protection? I'm don't follow the connection. I do agree that Norway is a small country with a small military, but what does that have to do with socialism? If you are suggesting that a strong military in the US protects Norway, then you contradict your point: the military is among the most socialized American institutions. We are forced to pay for it for the common protection, and it is controlled by bureaucracy rather than private industry.
I have mixed feelings about the Affordable Healthcare Act. My goal was to try to focus on facts instead of tangential falsehoods.
"Socialism has always resulted in a lower standard of living for the people it's purported to help."
You don't do credit to your position when you state outright falsehoods. For a clear counterexample, check out Norway. By a number of indicators, they have the highest standard of living in the world, and are also one of the more socialist nations on Earth, and their prosperity has come in parallel with their switch from a monarchy to a socialist democracy. All of Scandinavia and Western Europe in general have followed this pattern. Extreme, tyrannical socialism certainly fails, just like extreme, tyrannical capitalism does, but nations that respect civil liberties tend to do well economically, regardless of whether they have a more cooperative or independent economic governance. There may be facts to bolster your cause, but baseless talking points are not facts.
Way, way off.
The numbers are more like a 30% decrease in yields, based on current farming methods. Considering that we haven't applied science to organic farming like we have to chemical farming, due to easy postwar chemical availability, the gap could probably be closed even more. Yes, conventional farms have marginally higher productivity. But you are off by an order of magnitude with your "5x" claim.
As a homeschooling parent, I can back this up. Luckily, the internet opens up a world of information beyond creepy textbooks that say that you will to go to a lake of fire if you think that the earth is more than 6000 years old (I am not making that up).
Looks like I didn't catch the newer research. Looks like the monarch threat turns out to be missing. I might point out, though, that the primary concern with genetically modified crops is the threat to biodiversity within those crops. Just because it doesn't kill pretty butterflies doesn't mean it's good.
Milkweed grows in weedy areas, such as fencerows around farms. Monsanto engineered corn to be toxic to insects by splicing in DNA for a toxin from a bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis. The pollen in the corn also happens to be toxic, and since corn is wind-pollinated, that pollen ends up all over everything around, including said milkweeds in fencerows. It's been doing a number on butterfly populations.
The grandparent is correct, and the parent is just ignorant of the cause of the problem.
Lots of posters have been talking about "scaling." I've done a lot of work in Java, PHP, and RoR, including scaling each of them up to millions of hits per day.
The thing is, scaling hardware isn't trivial, and requires very different expertise than building web applications. That's just the nature of it. Rails can scale great; so can PHP, Java, or whatever. Find an expert and they can make it work.
What is much more difficult is to make the code itself scalable. Without a fairly rigid adherence to good design principles, projects that grow larger and larger soon become an unmanageable spaghetti nightmare.
This code scaling is where Rails shines like the sun. It religiously follows good design principles, to the point that you have to try to end up with a mess. For those who have worked in large projects, having that kind of structure is a great joy.
I have never once, nor has anyone I have spoken with, seen a large PHP project that did not turn into spaghetti. The language itself presents huge problems that way: all functions are in the global namespace, as are all variables by default. On the other hand, PHP is very fast, efficient, and effective for little one-page sites.
In short, if your application is going to be very small, and will never, ever grow, use PHP. Otherwise use something else. Rails isn't the only good framework in a good language out there: Django would be a good candidate; even Perl can work for you. Using a decent framework with a language that is well designed will save you all sorts of headache as your project grows.
Ouch. It's not technically possible for us to decrypt (that's the beauty of it)... so under such a court order we'll either fold or move overseas. (We're already looking at the overseas option.)
I've actually thought about submitting an article on this, but now I feel like I ought to say something ASAP. I recently worked on a new service: https://messages.xchangey.com. The service anonymously stores messages that are encrypted on the client end using javascript, then sent over https. It's easier than getting all of your friends to use PGP, it's free (ad-supported), and requires no setup. Works fine with Tor. You just need a pre-shared key (passphrase) that you and the recipient know.
Hope this can be helpful. We actually intended this mostly for China, but looks like the USA is getting ever closer to needing it just as much.
This corn is -not- something that is likely to have occurred in nature: they spliced in genes for a toxin from a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. This bacterium does occur naturally, and there are natural process (such as retroviral activity) that in rare circumstances could cause genes from the bacterium to be inserted into the genome of a plant.
What Monsanto has done, however, is to engineer corn to produce the B. thuringiensis toxin, in quantity sufficient to kill insects. Calling this comparable to selective breeding is really in no way accurate.
Monsanto has made a plant produce poison that is only found in the wild in an unrelated bacterium. Eating these crops is going to give you much higher levels of this toxin than you would ever be able to consume otherwise.
I think the biggest concern with genetically engineered crops is the corresponding drop in genetic diversity, but there are side issues like this that are also very messy.
Billions of years of evolution to hone our reproductive skills, and somehow we get... requests for a ban on children?
Humans have evolved to be very nurturing of children: an extremely long formative period as a child allows for high adaptibility. The results of this are that kids act like, well, kids. There's nothing upsetting about this unless you are scared to address their needs. That discomfort is the voice in your head saying "that kid needs help, and I'm sitting here drinking a beer." If a child is crying painfully in a restaurant, ask them/their parents if they need some help! That's what the kid is crying for.
A deep love for kids is instinctive, and I think you are missing the reason for your strong reaction.
There's been all sorts of argument here on science versus faith, which completely misses the point. ALL belief frameworks, including science, rest on certain axiomatic, dogmatic beliefs.
I have faith in each step that gravity will keep working for me to allow my walk to continue. This faith has worked out admirably for me so far. Works out well for my two-year-old, too.
In science there are underlying assumptions, for instance:
The universe can be observed reasonably accurately. Human observation of the universe will lead to practical applications.
The universe is not absurd; that is, the rules that apply today will apply tomorrow, and will not change randomly.
Science is worth pursuing because the results are desirable.
While these ideas are sound in most cases, they too fail sometimes. Science has arguably accomplished some very heinous things (think of the Nazi scientists killing concentration camp victims, or more mildly, genetically modified corn pollen decimating monarch butterfly populations.)
Likewise, religion can be used, with caution, to great benefit. I will strongly claim that the tolerance that is advocated by most faiths is worth learning.
The enemy is unchallenged assumptions, not the philosophical frameworks built on the assumptions. Faith is a practical principle, that, like others, can be abused. We need to choose what to have faith in based on values we choose to hold as important, regardless of the pursuit.
It's like pac-man. You just come in the other side. (And the funny thing is... that is probably true. The universe is curved, so if you travel the age of the universe in a single direction... you end up where you started.)
Yes, there are crazy nuts who will abuse the science.
There are crazy nuts who will ignore the science: "Weather is hard to measure! Anyone who researches it is in on the conspiracy against the 'polluters!'"
That's why we respect people who quietly do scientific research. And they say, in no uncertain terms, that there is global warming. That's the point of the article.
In a couple of months, I am actually moving to an orphange in Africa. (Note to other telecommuters out there: get out there and make a difference!) Some people have questioned whether or not the computers are really a good idea for the kids. Well, the director of the orphanage has asked for only two things besides the volunteer work we offered: clothing and used computers. Suppose you're 10 years old and you have food. What else do you need? Well, shelter. Next, education. I think this is great.
What is actually most surprising is that anyone voted for it at all. The LDS ("Mormon") church has no stance on evolution (or any other scientific theory), and, differently from many christian churches, teaches as doctrine that the universe and everything in it was "organized" over an undefined period of time rather than called out of nothing in an instant. In fact, I read a few years ago that Utah produces more scientists per-capita than any other state. This was reported, favorably, in the LDS Church News! Church leaders have taught that the "days" mentioned in Genesis were just a way the ancients tried to express long periods of time. BYU, the church-owned university, has had multiple papers on evolution published in Science magazine (along with Nature, the premier peer-reviewed science journal.)
As a member of the LDS church myself and lover of all things biology-related, this is personally signifiant to me. I wouldn't be part of a chuch that rejected science based on oppresive dogma. Are there "Mormon" whacko fanatics? Sure. Do the rural areas of Utah, like rural areas everywhere, have more than their fair share? Yes. Are they encouraged by the church? No.
Well, the parent is just wrong. I'm a former botany student with an emphasis in molecular biology and genetics. With animals, you can't usually get unrelated species to crossbreed (but even that's not absolute). With less specialized organisms, well, the rules are a lot less strict. Bacteria, for instance, swap genetic material across species lines all of the time, and often will have specialized "sex organs" for that purpose. Plants aren't quite so loose as that, but they can, and do, regularly cross species boundaries to some degree, and even manage to pull off viable reproduction when a cell division fails at the growing tip (doubling the chromosome count, and in effect generating a new species.) In addition, many weeds are crucifers, related to the rape (canola) plant, making that particular crossover especially likely. This is a real problem, recognized by real scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
My post was pointing out the absurdity of the statement that socialism always causes economic decline. You make no counterargument, but suggest that Norway can have the prosperity of socialism because of US military protection? I'm don't follow the connection. I do agree that Norway is a small country with a small military, but what does that have to do with socialism? If you are suggesting that a strong military in the US protects Norway, then you contradict your point: the military is among the most socialized American institutions. We are forced to pay for it for the common protection, and it is controlled by bureaucracy rather than private industry. I have mixed feelings about the Affordable Healthcare Act. My goal was to try to focus on facts instead of tangential falsehoods.
"Socialism has always resulted in a lower standard of living for the people it's purported to help." You don't do credit to your position when you state outright falsehoods. For a clear counterexample, check out Norway. By a number of indicators, they have the highest standard of living in the world, and are also one of the more socialist nations on Earth, and their prosperity has come in parallel with their switch from a monarchy to a socialist democracy. All of Scandinavia and Western Europe in general have followed this pattern. Extreme, tyrannical socialism certainly fails, just like extreme, tyrannical capitalism does, but nations that respect civil liberties tend to do well economically, regardless of whether they have a more cooperative or independent economic governance. There may be facts to bolster your cause, but baseless talking points are not facts.
Way, way off. The numbers are more like a 30% decrease in yields, based on current farming methods. Considering that we haven't applied science to organic farming like we have to chemical farming, due to easy postwar chemical availability, the gap could probably be closed even more. Yes, conventional farms have marginally higher productivity. But you are off by an order of magnitude with your "5x" claim.
As a homeschooling parent, I can back this up. Luckily, the internet opens up a world of information beyond creepy textbooks that say that you will to go to a lake of fire if you think that the earth is more than 6000 years old (I am not making that up).
Looks like I didn't catch the newer research. Looks like the monarch threat turns out to be missing. I might point out, though, that the primary concern with genetically modified crops is the threat to biodiversity within those crops. Just because it doesn't kill pretty butterflies doesn't mean it's good.
My info was out of date, and I missed the new news. So... I was wrong.
Sorry, but your "urban legend" was published in Nature by Cornell University
Milkweed grows in weedy areas, such as fencerows around farms. Monsanto engineered corn to be toxic to insects by splicing in DNA for a toxin from a bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis. The pollen in the corn also happens to be toxic, and since corn is wind-pollinated, that pollen ends up all over everything around, including said milkweeds in fencerows. It's been doing a number on butterfly populations. The grandparent is correct, and the parent is just ignorant of the cause of the problem.
Lots of posters have been talking about "scaling." I've done a lot of work in Java, PHP, and RoR, including scaling each of them up to millions of hits per day.
The thing is, scaling hardware isn't trivial, and requires very different expertise than building web applications. That's just the nature of it. Rails can scale great; so can PHP, Java, or whatever. Find an expert and they can make it work.
What is much more difficult is to make the code itself scalable. Without a fairly rigid adherence to good design principles, projects that grow larger and larger soon become an unmanageable spaghetti nightmare.
This code scaling is where Rails shines like the sun. It religiously follows good design principles, to the point that you have to try to end up with a mess. For those who have worked in large projects, having that kind of structure is a great joy.
I have never once, nor has anyone I have spoken with, seen a large PHP project that did not turn into spaghetti. The language itself presents huge problems that way: all functions are in the global namespace, as are all variables by default. On the other hand, PHP is very fast, efficient, and effective for little one-page sites.
In short, if your application is going to be very small, and will never, ever grow, use PHP. Otherwise use something else. Rails isn't the only good framework in a good language out there: Django would be a good candidate; even Perl can work for you. Using a decent framework with a language that is well designed will save you all sorts of headache as your project grows.
Ouch. It's not technically possible for us to decrypt (that's the beauty of it)... so under such a court order we'll either fold or move overseas. (We're already looking at the overseas option.)
I've actually thought about submitting an article on this, but now I feel like I ought to say something ASAP. I recently worked on a new service: https://messages.xchangey.com. The service anonymously stores messages that are encrypted on the client end using javascript, then sent over https. It's easier than getting all of your friends to use PGP, it's free (ad-supported), and requires no setup. Works fine with Tor. You just need a pre-shared key (passphrase) that you and the recipient know.
Hope this can be helpful. We actually intended this mostly for China, but looks like the USA is getting ever closer to needing it just as much.
This corn is -not- something that is likely to have occurred in nature: they spliced in genes for a toxin from a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. This bacterium does occur naturally, and there are natural process (such as retroviral activity) that in rare circumstances could cause genes from the bacterium to be inserted into the genome of a plant.
What Monsanto has done, however, is to engineer corn to produce the B. thuringiensis toxin, in quantity sufficient to kill insects. Calling this comparable to selective breeding is really in no way accurate.
Monsanto has made a plant produce poison that is only found in the wild in an unrelated bacterium. Eating these crops is going to give you much higher levels of this toxin than you would ever be able to consume otherwise.
I think the biggest concern with genetically engineered crops is the corresponding drop in genetic diversity, but there are side issues like this that are also very messy.
Billions of years of evolution to hone our reproductive skills, and somehow we get... requests for a ban on children?
Humans have evolved to be very nurturing of children: an extremely long formative period as a child allows for high adaptibility. The results of this are that kids act like, well, kids. There's nothing upsetting about this unless you are scared to address their needs. That discomfort is the voice in your head saying "that kid needs help, and I'm sitting here drinking a beer." If a child is crying painfully in a restaurant, ask them/their parents if they need some help! That's what the kid is crying for.
A deep love for kids is instinctive, and I think you are missing the reason for your strong reaction.
I have faith in each step that gravity will keep working for me to allow my walk to continue. This faith has worked out admirably for me so far. Works out well for my two-year-old, too.
In science there are underlying assumptions, for instance:
- The universe can be observed reasonably accurately. Human observation of the universe will lead to practical applications.
- The universe is not absurd; that is, the rules that apply today will apply tomorrow, and will not change randomly.
- Science is worth pursuing because the results are desirable.
While these ideas are sound in most cases, they too fail sometimes. Science has arguably accomplished some very heinous things (think of the Nazi scientists killing concentration camp victims, or more mildly, genetically modified corn pollen decimating monarch butterfly populations.)Likewise, religion can be used, with caution, to great benefit. I will strongly claim that the tolerance that is advocated by most faiths is worth learning.
The enemy is unchallenged assumptions, not the philosophical frameworks built on the assumptions. Faith is a practical principle, that, like others, can be abused. We need to choose what to have faith in based on values we choose to hold as important, regardless of the pursuit.
It's like pac-man. You just come in the other side. (And the funny thing is... that is probably true. The universe is curved, so if you travel the age of the universe in a single direction... you end up where you started.)
Yes, there are crazy nuts who will abuse the science.
There are crazy nuts who will ignore the science: "Weather is hard to measure! Anyone who researches it is in on the conspiracy against the 'polluters!'"
That's why we respect people who quietly do scientific research. And they say, in no uncertain terms, that there is global warming. That's the point of the article.
In a couple of months, I am actually moving to an orphange in Africa. (Note to other telecommuters out there: get out there and make a difference!) Some people have questioned whether or not the computers are really a good idea for the kids. Well, the director of the orphanage has asked for only two things besides the volunteer work we offered: clothing and used computers. Suppose you're 10 years old and you have food. What else do you need? Well, shelter. Next, education. I think this is great.
What is actually most surprising is that anyone voted for it at all. The LDS ("Mormon") church has no stance on evolution (or any other scientific theory), and, differently from many christian churches, teaches as doctrine that the universe and everything in it was "organized" over an undefined period of time rather than called out of nothing in an instant. In fact, I read a few years ago that Utah produces more scientists per-capita than any other state. This was reported, favorably, in the LDS Church News! Church leaders have taught that the "days" mentioned in Genesis were just a way the ancients tried to express long periods of time. BYU, the church-owned university, has had multiple papers on evolution published in Science magazine (along with Nature, the premier peer-reviewed science journal.) As a member of the LDS church myself and lover of all things biology-related, this is personally signifiant to me. I wouldn't be part of a chuch that rejected science based on oppresive dogma. Are there "Mormon" whacko fanatics? Sure. Do the rural areas of Utah, like rural areas everywhere, have more than their fair share? Yes. Are they encouraged by the church? No.
Well, the parent is just wrong. I'm a former botany student with an emphasis in molecular biology and genetics. With animals, you can't usually get unrelated species to crossbreed (but even that's not absolute). With less specialized organisms, well, the rules are a lot less strict. Bacteria, for instance, swap genetic material across species lines all of the time, and often will have specialized "sex organs" for that purpose. Plants aren't quite so loose as that, but they can, and do, regularly cross species boundaries to some degree, and even manage to pull off viable reproduction when a cell division fails at the growing tip (doubling the chromosome count, and in effect generating a new species.) In addition, many weeds are crucifers, related to the rape (canola) plant, making that particular crossover especially likely. This is a real problem, recognized by real scientists.