Actually, science doesn't tell us which information we should want to have.
The argument isn't that there is a provable science-y difference, that is just a straw man you erected. The argument is that people want to have this information. That is it. There are lots of reasons, including ones related to land management.
Yes, you can blame the Round-Up Ready crops, because that isn't applied to non-GMO crops. It would kill them. On the GMO crop, they spray it over the whole field. You really can't separate the problem, because that is the only time that it is being frequently applied broadly like that.
For example, they use it on Giant Knotweed around here, but they have to use a hand sprayer and spray individual plants.
And there currently is an epidemic of resistant weeds in GMO fields. Maybe you don't read enough ag news to know about it? And the GMO farmers are getting really whiny, because they thought science cured weeds. LOL And they are really resistant to the idea of going back to old weed control methods. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling." The sky isn't falling, but if the weeds come back they should switch back to normal seed because the GMO plants are less robust. (the resistance has a metabolic cost)
And then people find out it's not as tasty, and stop buying the product. It happened to Dutch grown tomatoes.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
OK. Go to a supermarket. Buy a nice looking tomato.
Now, go to a farmers market. Buy a nice looking tomato.
The one from the store is flavorless crap. Very few people stop buying it. Lots of produce has changed in this way. A lot of people buy organics because they are higher quality heirloom strains, not the watery flavorless crap from the monofarm. They simply taste better, not because they're "organic" but because they're a traditional variety grown in a traditional way.
Or, just that you don't want to redesign your labels and leave other useful information off to make space for a 'contains GMO' label
The only label in the whole store that has no room for extra words isn't even food, it is Dr. Bronners soap. And it probably already says non-GMO.;)
Have you ever actually shopped before? I mean, obviously you don't shop for groceries every year, but you've at least been in a store once or twice, maybe while on vacation without your mo^H^Hstaff there to wait on you? You do know that labels are not filled with information... right? Or do you just eat fast food every meal if nobody is there to cook for you?
If all products grown in light had to be labeled that they were grown in "radiation" then why would you even be talking about organics? That would still be a different part of the label.
If there is demand for products grown only with light in the 400-500nm range, then it would make sense to add it to the standardized labels. Presumably nobody cares.
Nobody is asking you or anybody to agree if you should care about that part of the label. The purpose is because people want the information, not because it is believed to be "different." In the same way that one brand might command a different price than another that you consider the same. Maybe one has a nicer logo. That is a difference in the product. Just like having the country of origin. Maybe you don't believe there is any difference in a product if it came from one side of a political line, or the other. But people want the information, so it is on the label.
Saying we shouldn't be allowed to have the information because we might make illogical purchasing decisions is like trying to ban logos because people might irrationally prefer one logo to the other.
Horseshit. You don't think 99% of consumers can look at a product and decide if they want to consume it? You drove your talking points right off the cliff.
It is really easy. Hand them the product. See if they put it in their mouth. If they do, then their knowledge informed them to eat it. If not, then it didn't. The vast majority off them will not read the label details, and yet they have all the knowledge that they need to either put it in their mouth, or not. And others read every word on the label, and then either put it in their mouth, or not.
Where have you been for the past two decades? Have you really missed the controversy, fearmongering, lies, and generally unscientific bollocks that lead up to this?
Except that intelligent people also accuse the food industry of these things.
This push for labeling is not coming from plant & agricultural scientists, and for good reason.
Yeah, the good reason is that scientists are not politicians or legislators. Lots of people who are scientists support food labeling, of whatever things people want to know about the product. Why do you just assert that scientists are anti-information, anti-choice? That is insane.
A lot of people are against the labeling even though they understand there are real issues of choice, so they promote ignorance as a counter to the opinion that it is bad. To prevent you from choosing. It "stigmatizes" simply because some people don't want it; I guess the same is true of stigmata.;)
Well, anybody that engages in as much feature thrash as those guys, no. I think they would make worse mistakes the second time, but clean them up faster. It would come out exactly the same, because they're engaging in so much feature thrash that they are rewriting the whole thing continuously.
I don't think you realize how little versatility is actually required for those jobs, or how versatile software can be.
The example above of climbing ladders, that doesn't happen very often if the store is designed not to need ladders.
There is not much about a fast food order that is different than a factory production line. Currently, it would require the same sort of expensive equipment and so doesn't happen. Humans are cheaper. That is their only advantage for 99% of the job.
Yes. If you don't update... you don't have code trash.:)
IMO the goal should be to stop needing to make changes, except for bugs or to interface with new protocols and formats.
Why should a user application have more code updates than a C compiler, or an OS kernel? It seems like they should just "get there" at some point.
Emacs isn't getting constant code changes; neither are most other programming environments. They're already stable. Gimp doesn't experience code thrash. If I had a user shell that was 10 years old, I wouldn't even notice. Most of my media viewer applications are over a decade old, with new codecs and formats added. I could run a window manager from the 90s, and it would still work.
Of course in the context of the story, they're just re-forking to avoid backporting code thrash. So, they get to skip a bunch of versions. They'll have to do it again in the future, because firefox isn't going to stop thrashing.
I'd prefer a finished interface, and a new rendering engine version every 5-10 years.
And yet, the alternative would be to use the same thing forever. Was it a mistake for Netscape at that time? Arguably. Does that example apply to open source? Probably not, open source often doesn't (can't) "go out of business" the way a company like Netscape can.
Any time there are 2 software products that solve the same type of problem, one of them could have just not been written because there was already something else. Is writing something new any different than re-writing something from scratch? Not if it is open source and you don't really care about user numbers.
If everybody believed that, we'd still be using sendmail. I used to configure sendmail, because nobody else on teams would ever be willing to. I don't really want to go back to that.
Joel was right about a few things over the years. But he was wrong about a few things, too.
This will reduce the amount of work needed, not increase it.
Firefox has a lot of constant code thrash, with a bunch more already scheduled in the future. This is a great move, because they'll be selecting a single interface and feature set and then they can target that directly, without code thrash. Also then the code structure has enough stability to really improve over time, something that doesn't happen if new code is replacing all the old code, instead of just adding to it or fixing bugs.
Your complaint seems a bit hand-wavy. What is your point regarding apache? You seem to have some idea about it, but you didn't actually say it. Why would "IIS", a product, be on the hook for tax delinquency? You seem to have left out the hypothetical scenario that you wish to discuss.
So Malthus will always be wrong? The world can sustain an infinite number of people forever?
Malthus will always be wrong/a>
Um huh. Seems like the famines in China around 1960 were an example of running past sustainability.
And while it's fun to point out the below replacement birth rates in some countries, I hope you aren't arguing that there isn't any population increase.
Oh - wait, I know - the famines like in China were a natural adjustment that proves Malthus wrong. After all, people dying of starvation is a completely natural thing.
China's population recovered and grew, and since population has continued to increase since then, yeah, the idea that the Chinese famines were from reaching some sort of carrying limit is both silly and absurd.
Especially when you understand that there is a food surplus today, and there was a food surplus during the famines.
Why would automation not increase the available amount of food? I can build a greenhouse next to a equal-sized outdoor garden plot and prove that one pretty easy.;)
Why can't food be grown in space on artificial stations? Why can't those ag stations be built from raw materials elsewhere in the solar system? Seems hard to find a physical limit. The more pedestrian thing of just using the ocean surface to float farm boats could double, triple, or more the arable "land" just here on Earth.
As to the general question of Malthus being wrong, lets consider some of his words:
The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity. The great law of necessity which prevents population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can either produce or acquire, is a law so open to our view...that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to prevent or repress a redundant population do not appear, indeed, to us so certain and regular, but though we cannot always predict the mode we may with certainty predict the fact. —Thomas Malthus, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population
We know in modern times that it is not that simple; educated people have less offspring, for example. And yet, they do not have less sexual passion. So we have learned that while passion may be fixed for these purposes, reproductive behavior is not. There are a lot of things about Malthus' ideas that ensure he will always be wrong, not least of which is that his ideas were mostly conjecture and hundreds of years of data have come between then and now. Disease is less limiting on population now than it was in 1798, and it gets less limiting all the time. Maybe that will reverse, but there is no pattern of reversal to point to, no limit that can be identified. Nor is there a strong basis for a theoretical limit on the future capabilities of medical technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, science doesn't tell us which information we should want to have.
The argument isn't that there is a provable science-y difference, that is just a straw man you erected. The argument is that people want to have this information. That is it. There are lots of reasons, including ones related to land management.
you should understand enough not to be scared of getting mutations if you ingest DNA.
Is that the only area of concern that people raise? Or are there even non-health-related differences that people are interested in?
Yes, you can blame the Round-Up Ready crops, because that isn't applied to non-GMO crops. It would kill them. On the GMO crop, they spray it over the whole field. You really can't separate the problem, because that is the only time that it is being frequently applied broadly like that.
For example, they use it on Giant Knotweed around here, but they have to use a hand sprayer and spray individual plants.
And there currently is an epidemic of resistant weeds in GMO fields. Maybe you don't read enough ag news to know about it? And the GMO farmers are getting really whiny, because they thought science cured weeds. LOL And they are really resistant to the idea of going back to old weed control methods. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling." The sky isn't falling, but if the weeds come back they should switch back to normal seed because the GMO plants are less robust. (the resistance has a metabolic cost)
And then people find out it's not as tasty, and stop buying the product. It happened to Dutch grown tomatoes.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
OK. Go to a supermarket. Buy a nice looking tomato.
Now, go to a farmers market. Buy a nice looking tomato.
The one from the store is flavorless crap. Very few people stop buying it. Lots of produce has changed in this way. A lot of people buy organics because they are higher quality heirloom strains, not the watery flavorless crap from the monofarm. They simply taste better, not because they're "organic" but because they're a traditional variety grown in a traditional way.
Or, just that you don't want to redesign your labels and leave other useful information off to make space for a 'contains GMO' label
The only label in the whole store that has no room for extra words isn't even food, it is Dr. Bronners soap. And it probably already says non-GMO. ;)
Have you ever actually shopped before? I mean, obviously you don't shop for groceries every year, but you've at least been in a store once or twice, maybe while on vacation without your mo^H^Hstaff there to wait on you? You do know that labels are not filled with information... right? Or do you just eat fast food every meal if nobody is there to cook for you?
If all products grown in light had to be labeled that they were grown in "radiation" then why would you even be talking about organics? That would still be a different part of the label.
If there is demand for products grown only with light in the 400-500nm range, then it would make sense to add it to the standardized labels. Presumably nobody cares.
Nobody is asking you or anybody to agree if you should care about that part of the label. The purpose is because people want the information, not because it is believed to be "different." In the same way that one brand might command a different price than another that you consider the same. Maybe one has a nicer logo. That is a difference in the product. Just like having the country of origin. Maybe you don't believe there is any difference in a product if it came from one side of a political line, or the other. But people want the information, so it is on the label.
Saying we shouldn't be allowed to have the information because we might make illogical purchasing decisions is like trying to ban logos because people might irrationally prefer one logo to the other.
The label isn't less accurate if it's omitted.
Perhaps not, but it is unquestionably less precise.
Regardless, if you'd rather pull the product than relabel it then you know in advance that your product can't survive with an accurate label.
It certainly doesn't advertise confidence in the product safety when they make clear that they'd rather not even sell it than tell you what it is.
People who read labels already know that there are a lot of products with strange ingredients.
Horseshit. You don't think 99% of consumers can look at a product and decide if they want to consume it? You drove your talking points right off the cliff.
It is really easy. Hand them the product. See if they put it in their mouth. If they do, then their knowledge informed them to eat it. If not, then it didn't. The vast majority off them will not read the label details, and yet they have all the knowledge that they need to either put it in their mouth, or not. And others read every word on the label, and then either put it in their mouth, or not.
Where have you been for the past two decades? Have you really missed the controversy, fearmongering, lies, and generally unscientific bollocks that lead up to this?
Except that intelligent people also accuse the food industry of these things.
This push for labeling is not coming from plant & agricultural scientists, and for good reason.
Yeah, the good reason is that scientists are not politicians or legislators. Lots of people who are scientists support food labeling, of whatever things people want to know about the product. Why do you just assert that scientists are anti-information, anti-choice? That is insane.
Why do you think it stigmatizes anything?
A lot of people are against the labeling even though they understand there are real issues of choice, so they promote ignorance as a counter to the opinion that it is bad. To prevent you from choosing. It "stigmatizes" simply because some people don't want it; I guess the same is true of stigmata. ;)
Well, anybody that engages in as much feature thrash as those guys, no. I think they would make worse mistakes the second time, but clean them up faster. It would come out exactly the same, because they're engaging in so much feature thrash that they are rewriting the whole thing continuously.
That's because the store is designed with human workers in mind. Of course you have to use ladders.
You don't think robots can stack neatly, or drive to the store and make purchases, that is where you just aren't even trying to picture it.
I don't think you realize how little versatility is actually required for those jobs, or how versatile software can be.
The example above of climbing ladders, that doesn't happen very often if the store is designed not to need ladders.
There is not much about a fast food order that is different than a factory production line. Currently, it would require the same sort of expensive equipment and so doesn't happen. Humans are cheaper. That is their only advantage for 99% of the job.
Yes. If you don't update... you don't have code trash. :)
IMO the goal should be to stop needing to make changes, except for bugs or to interface with new protocols and formats.
Why should a user application have more code updates than a C compiler, or an OS kernel? It seems like they should just "get there" at some point.
Emacs isn't getting constant code changes; neither are most other programming environments. They're already stable. Gimp doesn't experience code thrash. If I had a user shell that was 10 years old, I wouldn't even notice. Most of my media viewer applications are over a decade old, with new codecs and formats added. I could run a window manager from the 90s, and it would still work.
Of course in the context of the story, they're just re-forking to avoid backporting code thrash. So, they get to skip a bunch of versions. They'll have to do it again in the future, because firefox isn't going to stop thrashing.
I'd prefer a finished interface, and a new rendering engine version every 5-10 years.
You wouldn't expect a burger flipper to ever need to climb a ladder, but guess what...
Right, so each geographic area will still need one human employee per fast-food chain. Instead of a whole crew of humans at each location.
It doesn't sound like you really wrapped your head around the math needed here.
No problem, maybe her job is to kill pests.
Even going back to the 90s, the major customers had the source, including India.
Writing drivers was a PITA, major device vendors had the source.
It isn't secret, only proprietary and not available for general distribution.
And yet, the alternative would be to use the same thing forever. Was it a mistake for Netscape at that time? Arguably. Does that example apply to open source? Probably not, open source often doesn't (can't) "go out of business" the way a company like Netscape can.
Any time there are 2 software products that solve the same type of problem, one of them could have just not been written because there was already something else. Is writing something new any different than re-writing something from scratch? Not if it is open source and you don't really care about user numbers.
If everybody believed that, we'd still be using sendmail. I used to configure sendmail, because nobody else on teams would ever be willing to. I don't really want to go back to that.
Joel was right about a few things over the years. But he was wrong about a few things, too.
It isn't a "hole" because they can just walk away and re-fork, something they're doing.
If they were a company with a bunch of version-locked support contracts, then you'd have a point. But they're not.
This will reduce the amount of work needed, not increase it.
Firefox has a lot of constant code thrash, with a bunch more already scheduled in the future. This is a great move, because they'll be selecting a single interface and feature set and then they can target that directly, without code thrash. Also then the code structure has enough stability to really improve over time, something that doesn't happen if new code is replacing all the old code, instead of just adding to it or fixing bugs.
If you like pi pie, check out https://github.com/rubypanther...
Then in your Ruby code you can say PiPie.[unicode pi symbol not shown]
More pie in your pi! And more PI, too. (1m digits)
It also has PiPie.Feynman if you only need up to the Feynman Point.
just to avoid needless differences in results on standard hardware.
That might not be a value that NASA shares. :) They might only care about results on explicitly defined hardware.
Automation technology that replaces humans.
Your complaint seems a bit hand-wavy. What is your point regarding apache? You seem to have some idea about it, but you didn't actually say it. Why would "IIS", a product, be on the hook for tax delinquency? You seem to have left out the hypothetical scenario that you wish to discuss.
So Malthus will always be wrong? The world can sustain an infinite number of people forever?
Malthus will always be wrong /a>
Um huh. Seems like the famines in China around 1960 were an example of running past sustainability.
And while it's fun to point out the below replacement birth rates in some countries, I hope you aren't arguing that there isn't any population increase.
Oh - wait, I know - the famines like in China were a natural adjustment that proves Malthus wrong. After all, people dying of starvation is a completely natural thing.
China's population recovered and grew, and since population has continued to increase since then, yeah, the idea that the Chinese famines were from reaching some sort of carrying limit is both silly and absurd.
Especially when you understand that there is a food surplus today, and there was a food surplus during the famines.
Why would automation not increase the available amount of food? I can build a greenhouse next to a equal-sized outdoor garden plot and prove that one pretty easy. ;)
Why can't food be grown in space on artificial stations? Why can't those ag stations be built from raw materials elsewhere in the solar system? Seems hard to find a physical limit. The more pedestrian thing of just using the ocean surface to float farm boats could double, triple, or more the arable "land" just here on Earth.
As to the general question of Malthus being wrong, lets consider some of his words:
We know in modern times that it is not that simple; educated people have less offspring, for example. And yet, they do not have less sexual passion. So we have learned that while passion may be fixed for these purposes, reproductive behavior is not. There are a lot of things about Malthus' ideas that ensure he will always be wrong, not least of which is that his ideas were mostly conjecture and hundreds of years of data have come between then and now. Disease is less limiting on population now than it was in 1798, and it gets less limiting all the time. Maybe that will reverse, but there is no pattern of reversal to point to, no limit that can be identified. Nor is there a strong basis for a theoretical limit on the future capabilities of medical technology.