I remember reading somewhere that the 802.11 standard arose from efforts by the LaserWriter team to make AppleTalk go wireless in the late '80s-early '90s. Spurious? Misinformed?
That's "objectivity" for you. What I'm saying is that journalists ought to take a stand; in fact, it's impossible not to take a stand. Opinion (e.g. that the sky is blue, or that evolution occurs) is implicit in all communication. The sooner the mainstream media gets over its squeamishness at this simple fact, the better off we'll be.
Moreover, none of this is insightful. Everyone knows this intuitively.
Well, if it comes down to either spraying pesticides all over the place or having plants produce pesticides (nontoxic to humans) internally, I know which I'd rather have in my backyard. Evolved resistance is a problem in either case; I sort of have the feeling that an arms race, à la medical antibiotics, is inevitable. The best we can do is to use pesticides as sparingly and judiciously as possible, which is what genetic engineering enables farmers to do.
I'll agree that Monsanto, the company, is severely fucked in the head. I doubt there'd be so much animosity towards genetic engineering but for the irresponsible pigheadedness of this one company.
You've just clarified exactly why Linux will never be "ready for the desktop" in the same sense as OS X or even that shitpool known as Windows. Sounds to me like you made the original poster's point for him. Congratulations.
Neither misleading nor wrong, but perhaps oversimplified. Some crops are engineered to withstand heavier pesticide use, true enough, but many more are being engineered to withstand the pests themselves. These plants do not "produce their own pesticide" in the sense that they spray toxins all over everything in sight, contaminating the water table for years at once, as traditional pesticides require (assuming you're referring to Bt varieties of cotton and corn). Bt pollen does appear to harm "good" insects like butterflies, along with the cropeaters, but so would the pesticides that would otherwise need to be used--and pesticides lead to all those other nasty side effects as well.
I'm not sure why you have the idea that GM is bad for the environment. Genetic engineering is the greenest, most environmentally friendly thing to happen in agriculture since they started recycling bat guano as fertilizer. Already, countries with the greatest adoption of GM techniques, such as China, are reaping increased yields with lower strain on their natural resources. (I know China's not exactly a shining exemplar of environmental purity, but consider how much worse it would be without the help of GM crops.)
Finally, does it really require explanation that higher yields mean less land is needed per unit yield? This seems obvious to me. You could argue long-term that higher yields enable a greater population which will, in turn, require more land devoted to agriculture, but that's a separate issue, and besides, population statistics from the developed world indicate the exact opposite in practice.
Slashcode doesn't let you post with the symbol for micro (mu, the one that looks like "u") and, what's worse, doesn't warn you before stripping it out. That's why open-source code is friendly, kids!
Re:That's why we need space colonisation
on
Nanotech Gone Awry?
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· Score: 1
Hi. I was born Japanese and raised Japanese by Japanese parents. Your spurious and gratuitous use of the word baka in your silly little rant pretty much tells me all I need to know about you.
We've been genetically engineering foods (and animals) for tens of thousands of years. Do we run a greater risk of breeding poisonous strains of corn, now that we can do it so much faster? I doubt it, but I'll admit I don't have a 100% certain answer, so I'll move on to the more important point:
GM food is engineered to require less pesticides. That's good for farmers, good for the environment, good for health. Everyone wins except for Big Bad Petrochemical. Another important point:
GM food is engineered to require less land per the same yield. Again, everyone wins, especially forests that would otherwise have been subject to logging and clearing, etc.
Five? You must live in the sticks. 162 Starbucks within five miles of me right now, according to the store locator... not that there aren't other places I'd rather be.
I'm not sure it's fair to say gasoline is taxed excessively (outside America); automobile use, and indirectly gasoline consumption, is tied to a lot of negative side effects, not least the development of sprawl in the built environment. Sprawl is massively inefficient and unsustainable beyond a certain point. "Massively inefficient" not only because of the costs of transportation, but also because urban living simply conserves more energy in terms of heating and cooling (think surface area to volume ratio) and because, in general, an urban environment allows one to take advantage of efficiencies of scale and economies of agglomeration hard to find in rural areas.
And as for unsustainable, you ever try driving on an L.A. freeway at rush hour? Contrast that to New York's transportation system, which actually operates at peak efficiency during rush hour. It's true that in L.A., at least you get to sit inside your own private space while you wait... but you're still stuck. Point is, L.A. can't take any more, but New York has room to grow.
Taxing gasoline may not be "excessive" in the sense that we'd do better to discourage problems like these from developing, but as disincentives go, a gas tax is fairly roundabout. In Britain, I believe (someone please correct me), I heard they're introducing a per-mile taxation system, using GPS, based on traffic flow and the marginal costs "to society" of your one additional automobile. California's eventually going to have to implement something similar, I fear.
Who's to blame? The self-destructive modernist attitudes of early twentieth-century automobile companies and of President Eisenhower, who built the interstate freeway system, encouraging Americans to build out, is a quick answer. There's another perspective entirely--that sprawl is the American way of life, and we Americans do what we please, and if we have to bleed oil and get immobilized in traffic twice a day for the sake of our American lifestyle, then so be it, energy efficiency be damned. That's an argument I don't want to get into.
But then you'll know right away you're not the target audience of that particular newspaper. It may not be explicit, it may not be "squares keep away" (or whatever) in 100-pt. bold type, but isn't it just as efficient and simple? Otherwise, you'll waste time reading leads on the "scene" before you realize (1) you're just not interested and (2) they're not interested in you. (Assuming they're going for a niche, like L Magazine or the L.A. Weekly.)
Allusions and in-jokes in headlines do serve a purpose: to inform the reader, fast and dirty, for whom the article was written.
Dude, in the context of the article on a guy named Mark Kryder, "Kryder's Law" is not a bad headline. It's provocative, it pulls you in, it makes you ask "who's Kryder?" You can't blame Sci Am for the fact that a literalist Wikipedia editor (aren't they all?) misinterpreted a headline. This is especially true given the article's intended audience; I don't think people without enough critical thinking skills to parse a headline is part of Sci Am's target demographic.
I resent those relentless modernists, long past their expiration date, who believe that stale, beige verbiage is the key to objectivity and that the news media are therefore obligated to suck their content dry. Give me the juice, I say. Give me the sap. Cry on camera for me, engage me, and I shall reward you with my coin and readership. And I'll probably end up better informed.
Happily, in the past couple decades, I think we've seen the pendulum start swinging back towards the acceptance, even celebration, of literary style in journalism (no, you cheapshooting Slashbots, I'm not talking about Jayson Blair). For too long--if a relatively brief anomaly in the long history of news publication--readability and human interest were sacrificed to a false god of objectivity, while dryness of content, not wit, was considered the sole criterion of journalistic merit. You had your occasional Hunter Thompson, sure, but only on the fringe. Now, you see the Observer (while still bleeding money) and even frontpage stories in the Times adopting a more conversational, personal tone, and Anderson Cooper sobbing into the camera on live TV. All this perhaps in response to the mass popularity of blogs and other firsthand sources of information. It'll be interesting to see where this leads. Pardon my bloviation.
I find the Economist's headlines, subheads, and captions often to be laugh-out-loud funny. The editors there seem to be fond of dry wit and black humo(u)r. I can't be alone in appreciating their work.
Who's freaking out over a BIOS? Does anyone actually care? It's as irrelevant as the ISA on which the Mac OS happens to run. The only thing that matters is the user experience.
No one cares, at least not any Mac user. You see, a Mac isn't a Mac because of the assorted components that went into the case. It's the sum totality of all these things; it's in the blood, sweat, the engineers' tears spilled into the selection of an appropriate mix of design elements; it's the love and insight that were poured into delivering a computer that thinks the way we Mac users think. It's intuitive for us because we understand each other.
That is Apple's focus, and it hasn't changed a bit since 1976.
By your definition Open Firmware was a BIOS too. Your prediction is misaken, too, by the way--as others have pointed out, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a platform company.
Letting their customers put up with Windows would run counter to the entire Apple philosophy and the culture at One Infinite Loop. Apple's likelier to sell Linux or BSD servers as a high-end option... which is to say, not likely at all.
Actually, I totally agree. I think it's a testimonial to the creativity of Mac developers. I don't know if you'd ever see anything like this written for Windows.:-)
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I remember reading somewhere that the 802.11 standard arose from efforts by the LaserWriter team to make AppleTalk go wireless in the late '80s-early '90s. Spurious? Misinformed?
Thanks, peabrain. Maybe next time you'll want to excise the subhead before your copy-paste hackjob.
That's "objectivity" for you. What I'm saying is that journalists ought to take a stand; in fact, it's impossible not to take a stand. Opinion (e.g. that the sky is blue, or that evolution occurs) is implicit in all communication. The sooner the mainstream media gets over its squeamishness at this simple fact, the better off we'll be.
Moreover, none of this is insightful. Everyone knows this intuitively.
Well, if it comes down to either spraying pesticides all over the place or having plants produce pesticides (nontoxic to humans) internally, I know which I'd rather have in my backyard. Evolved resistance is a problem in either case; I sort of have the feeling that an arms race, à la medical antibiotics, is inevitable. The best we can do is to use pesticides as sparingly and judiciously as possible, which is what genetic engineering enables farmers to do.
I'll agree that Monsanto, the company, is severely fucked in the head. I doubt there'd be so much animosity towards genetic engineering but for the irresponsible pigheadedness of this one company.
What's "runaway" or "haywire" about Venus's climate? I thought it was in equilibrium. It's stable, is it not?
You've just clarified exactly why Linux will never be "ready for the desktop" in the same sense as OS X or even that shitpool known as Windows. Sounds to me like you made the original poster's point for him. Congratulations.
Neither misleading nor wrong, but perhaps oversimplified. Some crops are engineered to withstand heavier pesticide use, true enough, but many more are being engineered to withstand the pests themselves. These plants do not "produce their own pesticide" in the sense that they spray toxins all over everything in sight, contaminating the water table for years at once, as traditional pesticides require (assuming you're referring to Bt varieties of cotton and corn). Bt pollen does appear to harm "good" insects like butterflies, along with the cropeaters, but so would the pesticides that would otherwise need to be used--and pesticides lead to all those other nasty side effects as well.
I'm not sure why you have the idea that GM is bad for the environment. Genetic engineering is the greenest, most environmentally friendly thing to happen in agriculture since they started recycling bat guano as fertilizer. Already, countries with the greatest adoption of GM techniques, such as China, are reaping increased yields with lower strain on their natural resources. (I know China's not exactly a shining exemplar of environmental purity, but consider how much worse it would be without the help of GM crops.)
Finally, does it really require explanation that higher yields mean less land is needed per unit yield? This seems obvious to me. You could argue long-term that higher yields enable a greater population which will, in turn, require more land devoted to agriculture, but that's a separate issue, and besides, population statistics from the developed world indicate the exact opposite in practice.
L.A. is worse than the sticks: it's car country. :-)
No, I live in New York, which I'll admit has problems of its own... like having 162 Starbucks in five miles.
Slashcode doesn't let you post with the symbol for micro (mu, the one that looks like "u") and, what's worse, doesn't warn you before stripping it out. That's why open-source code is friendly, kids!
Hi. I was born Japanese and raised Japanese by Japanese parents. Your spurious and gratuitous use of the word baka in your silly little rant pretty much tells me all I need to know about you.
Baka indeed.
We've been genetically engineering foods (and animals) for tens of thousands of years. Do we run a greater risk of breeding poisonous strains of corn, now that we can do it so much faster? I doubt it, but I'll admit I don't have a 100% certain answer, so I'll move on to the more important point:
GM food is engineered to require less pesticides. That's good for farmers, good for the environment, good for health. Everyone wins except for Big Bad Petrochemical. Another important point:
GM food is engineered to require less land per the same yield. Again, everyone wins, especially forests that would otherwise have been subject to logging and clearing, etc.
Five? You must live in the sticks. 162 Starbucks within five miles of me right now, according to the store locator... not that there aren't other places I'd rather be.
I'm not sure it's fair to say gasoline is taxed excessively (outside America); automobile use, and indirectly gasoline consumption, is tied to a lot of negative side effects, not least the development of sprawl in the built environment. Sprawl is massively inefficient and unsustainable beyond a certain point. "Massively inefficient" not only because of the costs of transportation, but also because urban living simply conserves more energy in terms of heating and cooling (think surface area to volume ratio) and because, in general, an urban environment allows one to take advantage of efficiencies of scale and economies of agglomeration hard to find in rural areas.
And as for unsustainable, you ever try driving on an L.A. freeway at rush hour? Contrast that to New York's transportation system, which actually operates at peak efficiency during rush hour. It's true that in L.A., at least you get to sit inside your own private space while you wait... but you're still stuck. Point is, L.A. can't take any more, but New York has room to grow.
Taxing gasoline may not be "excessive" in the sense that we'd do better to discourage problems like these from developing, but as disincentives go, a gas tax is fairly roundabout. In Britain, I believe (someone please correct me), I heard they're introducing a per-mile taxation system, using GPS, based on traffic flow and the marginal costs "to society" of your one additional automobile. California's eventually going to have to implement something similar, I fear.
Who's to blame? The self-destructive modernist attitudes of early twentieth-century automobile companies and of President Eisenhower, who built the interstate freeway system, encouraging Americans to build out, is a quick answer. There's another perspective entirely--that sprawl is the American way of life, and we Americans do what we please, and if we have to bleed oil and get immobilized in traffic twice a day for the sake of our American lifestyle, then so be it, energy efficiency be damned. That's an argument I don't want to get into.
But then you'll know right away you're not the target audience of that particular newspaper. It may not be explicit, it may not be "squares keep away" (or whatever) in 100-pt. bold type, but isn't it just as efficient and simple? Otherwise, you'll waste time reading leads on the "scene" before you realize (1) you're just not interested and (2) they're not interested in you. (Assuming they're going for a niche, like L Magazine or the L.A. Weekly.)
Allusions and in-jokes in headlines do serve a purpose: to inform the reader, fast and dirty, for whom the article was written.
Why, not cringeworthy enough?
Dude, in the context of the article on a guy named Mark Kryder, "Kryder's Law" is not a bad headline. It's provocative, it pulls you in, it makes you ask "who's Kryder?" You can't blame Sci Am for the fact that a literalist Wikipedia editor (aren't they all?) misinterpreted a headline. This is especially true given the article's intended audience; I don't think people without enough critical thinking skills to parse a headline is part of Sci Am's target demographic.
I resent those relentless modernists, long past their expiration date, who believe that stale, beige verbiage is the key to objectivity and that the news media are therefore obligated to suck their content dry. Give me the juice, I say. Give me the sap. Cry on camera for me, engage me, and I shall reward you with my coin and readership. And I'll probably end up better informed.
Happily, in the past couple decades, I think we've seen the pendulum start swinging back towards the acceptance, even celebration, of literary style in journalism (no, you cheapshooting Slashbots, I'm not talking about Jayson Blair). For too long--if a relatively brief anomaly in the long history of news publication--readability and human interest were sacrificed to a false god of objectivity, while dryness of content, not wit, was considered the sole criterion of journalistic merit. You had your occasional Hunter Thompson, sure, but only on the fringe. Now, you see the Observer (while still bleeding money) and even frontpage stories in the Times adopting a more conversational, personal tone, and Anderson Cooper sobbing into the camera on live TV. All this perhaps in response to the mass popularity of blogs and other firsthand sources of information. It'll be interesting to see where this leads. Pardon my bloviation.
I find the Economist's headlines, subheads, and captions often to be laugh-out-loud funny. The editors there seem to be fond of dry wit and black humo(u)r. I can't be alone in appreciating their work.
Who's freaking out over a BIOS? Does anyone actually care? It's as irrelevant as the ISA on which the Mac OS happens to run. The only thing that matters is the user experience.
No one cares, at least not any Mac user. You see, a Mac isn't a Mac because of the assorted components that went into the case. It's the sum totality of all these things; it's in the blood, sweat, the engineers' tears spilled into the selection of an appropriate mix of design elements; it's the love and insight that were poured into delivering a computer that thinks the way we Mac users think. It's intuitive for us because we understand each other.
That is Apple's focus, and it hasn't changed a bit since 1976.
Twenty-one grams?
Heh heh. Well, all I have to say is that you PC types will never understand what makes us tick, and for that, I am sorry. :-)
By your definition Open Firmware was a BIOS too. Your prediction is misaken, too, by the way--as others have pointed out, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a platform company.
Letting their customers put up with Windows would run counter to the entire Apple philosophy and the culture at One Infinite Loop. Apple's likelier to sell Linux or BSD servers as a high-end option... which is to say, not likely at all.
Actually, I totally agree. I think it's a testimonial to the creativity of Mac developers. I don't know if you'd ever see anything like this written for Windows. :-)