Surely you're not suggesting that the government and corporate interests are completely unrelated, and no money ever goes back and forth for good or services?
Wasn't it Google that optimized the NSA datacenters as early as 2005? I think its safe to assume that many of Google analytics' bigger customers are not corporate. Not to mention, of course, Google Earth which was developed with CIA money... but also needed some optimization (read, better developers). I am pretty sure that Google Earth was not a loss leader for the company ;)
I think that, amazingly in these times, you're sucking down your naivety cool aid a little too plaicidly to think that advertising cookies are not the optimal tracking method for both corp and govt.
"...large groups of people can work on unknown projects without the public finding out" I completely agree. I have heard the opposite line of reasoning used to "refute" actual evidence many too many times.
I cannot agree more. There will be a lot of so-so, but... there will be some stunners as well. Not sure where all these people end up, but there are some amazingly talented young artists out there... many of whom can and do produce better art than most of what you will purchase at an art auction. They just don't have the name or the history yet!
Often a single collector or gallery will make all the difference for a young artist. One single person that buys enough of their art for them to make it on that part-time coffee house job and still pursue their art.
I have thought many times of moving to another country (India being high on my list) just so that I could learn and practice medicine outside of the US Money/Chemical game called "healthcare."
Yeah, I have two friends who were both long term cigarette smokers quit after using e-cigs for a short period of time.
My understanding is that without the free-based nicotine in most (all?) commercial tobaccos, the addictive nature of smoking is significantly reduced.
Interestingly, one of those friends is now able to smoke socially at will. Flipped some addiction trigger or something. I would love to see a study on this.
IMO the very nature of the centralization of power works against individual rights, one of which is (arguably) privacy. As corporations grow they tend to lose a sense of the customer as a means, and instead choose which type of customer they need in order to maximize profits (or other goals).
Corporations (or any large centralized power base) will optimize for the most exploitable customer or user base, culturing this base if possible. To help broaden a target user base corporations need strong centralized governments more than they need even sizable (but less "culturable") segments of their market base.
Upshot: mature corporations (political parties / religions / etc) will not typically stand up to a centralized government on behalf of a rights-demanding fraction of their market... indeed, typically, they will do the opposite.
And let's face it, it's not like corporate America needs the government's help to abuse you based on your private information. Not in a day and age where you can be denied a job because of your credit history or kicked off your insurance because of your health records. People throw off tons of data, and companies have been working for decades to figure out how to use it to screw you.
Can you recommend a public repo which demonstrates use of the HttpLuaModule? [Edited to add:] Another comment mentions the Lapis framework which gives [me] a good starting point.
In Russia, it's actually super important since foreigners need to register at the local police station with their passport in any town/city where they state more than a few days. Not registering within the allotted time period, based on dates of transportation tickets like a train ticket or flight stub, makes you the target of police extortion.
Russia is definitely one of those "Ihre papiere bitte" countries.
Unless you're in transit between countries, it doesn't affect you as much as you might think. I lived in Japan for a year and pretty much only used my passport when I entered and left the country. Same goes with my sisters who moved overseas. They take out their US passport about once every 4 years, when they come back to the USA to visit.
No, I believe that we do not understand how far nature has taken us. We assume that genetic material moving around is accidental. I assume that most of the movement is intentional within the evolved system. I assume that we should not move it around without first at least considering that nature could be more advanced that we think it is. We should quarantine our changes.
Also, while reading these, take the time to watch "Kingdom of Men" again to get a feel for what the real issue actually looks like. Living organisms appear (IMO, and subtly in other research) to be able to detect code base tampering, and reject it. How do they reject it? Infertility.
I am a farmer and it is difficult as hell to create a non-GMO farm (non-GMO contaminated mulch and compost, non-GMO animal feeds, non-GMO source animals, non-GMO seed). The OP is correct in all points about Monsanto's power over seed production, but misses what SciAm (and almost everyone else) misses:
Genetic material is code being used in a production environment!
As such it needs to be protected. Code contamination (forks) need to be registered publicly and isolated with extreme prejudice from the production environment. We didn't write the code, and as far as I am concerned, I feel that Monsanto as a policy maker (by default or by lobbing) and any of the most advanced geneticists are script kiddies on a Galactic scale. We will get to adequate understanding it time, but that time is not now. Who gives a fk if you or your grandmother can live a longer or more pain-free life if the result is a global genetic seg-fault? I don't.
My answer is to set up my own isolated farm, as free of GM as I can make it. As I see it, existing organisms do have a genetic conversation (via viruses and other single cell organisms) and will resist and correct some amount of genetic contamination. Honestly I have my doubts that even this will work, but its the most I can do.
I'm not sure I follow, you say "Genetic material is code being used in a production environment!" as far as I understand it we have been researching for decades and haven't found real problems, at least not more then with older alternatives like radiation and chemicals to speed up the production of genetic changes.
It confuses me that people are ok with, like the article calls it, the shotgun approach (radiation, chemicals) but not with the surgeon approach (using a scalpel and replacing only the genes we want to), I honestly don't understand why.
I am not saying that we should eliminate genetic research. I am saying that we need to isolate genetic modification from the general genetic pool until we understand what we are doing. Until half a year ago "we" (geneticists) thought that upwards of 80% of the genome was junk DNA... oops, I guess not. I think that we have to be a little more cautious. A lot more cautious.
If (as I feel is the case) genetic material is code, and we (all Earth based life) is a production environment... I just cannot express how sloppy I feel we have been in the last 20 years. Policy, research, implementation... its not like we don't know how to run a clean software environment, how to do safe development... but in the genetic world? Hack, reverse engineer, install trap doors, holy fuck, we brought down a root level dns server? Cool! We are awesome! We must be geniuses!
I just wanted to say that we do far more dangerous stuff with the radiation and nobody demands we should isolate those until we understand what is going on. But when it comes to GMO people suddenly are terrified, that is what confuses me.
To amply on jeena's point, we used to do this by exposing seeds to e.g. cobalt 60 gamma rays, and breeding the surviving mutants that seemed promising. If you eat all but I assume the very best sushi in the US, the rice is probably a Calrose, do a search on calrose radiation (funny, the Wikipedia article doesn't mention this at all, then again I'm not 100% sure current day Calrose is derived from those earlier varieties).
Look into the Green Revolution, e.g. start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution ; if you're growing or using a cereal that's from a dwarf/semi-dwarf plant variety, before modern genetic engineering it probably had untold horrors committed on it to achieve higher yields.
"Until half a year ago "we" (geneticists) thought that upwards of 80% of the genome was junk DNA... oops, I guess not."
That wasn't my impression when I left this field for chemistry in 1989. Back then "we" were saying "this doesn't code for specific proteins, is it junk, or does it have function?" The consensus then was "junk", and the recent claim otherwise is speculative as I read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Junk_DNA
The flip side is by then we were realizing that DNA moves around a lot more than we'd though, and transgenic organisms were common in nature ... or at least tries, Nature is much more a script-kiddie than us and most of those "attempts" fail.
The point I am trying to make is that we assume too much. I would say that this statement, "Nature is much more a script-kiddie than us" is just such an assumption. How much of transgenic communication is accidental and how much is necessary with the design (sorry, probably political phrasing here...) parameters. I would assert that we just don't know yet.
In any case, to use, "Nature is the bigger ignorant hacker, we can be ignorant hackers too if it lines our pockets" is a terrible argument IMO.
Ah, but I was a budding geneticist from 1977-1989 (even "practicing" in the summer of 1977), and based on what I observed of the field then you are seriously overstating your case. My comment about Nature is not based on an "assumption" but on what people in the field learned during that period. Very conveniently the period started just after the Asilomar Conference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_conference_on_recombin...), and I studied all this in detail before finances forced me into a sordid, initially on and off career of programming.
Or at least as view your "accidental" vs. "necessary with the design" concept; I don't give much credence to the latter, and I think it doesn't affect the argument that Nature has proved this to be generally safe.
Final note: if I and the others who believe this are correct, it's not merely a "lines our pockets", it's also a "X fewer people stave to death or suffer from malnutrition".
Forgive me, I did not meant to imply that "geneticists" as a group do it solely for money... that quip was aimed at Monsanto and typical public policy.
As concerns "necessary within the design" I would argue that you do. I am trying to say that as scientists, we like to say, "evolution has taken us [this far] (whatever [this far] is)". But we don't say, "How far could evolution have taken us?" How broad is the existing code base? Is it individual code bases branching into species, or is it all interleaved in some more subtle way?
I tend to believe it is the latter, and the evolution has taken us much farther than we realize.
This is why I believe our current handling of genetic modification is extremely bad practice and can (?) result in a "genetic seg-fault".
If you could develop that thesis I'd give it a hearing, but ... well, perhaps start with proposing a mechanism that "interleaves it in some subtle way" or some observations that suggest that's the case.
Me, I hope we're a lot more "modular" and that "genetic seg-faults" will continue to be by definition rare ("by definition" unless they happen after an organism breeds and is otherwise not responsible for its children). What makes you think evolution would go in the non-robust path you think might be the case?
Yeah, I would love to have time to develop this thesis as well. Let me think about it a bit, and I'll try to post a five sentence postulate.
As concerns nature, my observation is that (if I can personify nature, and grant it intention for the argument), it does not mind eliminating large groups of children if some (at least one, I guess) viable children remain. As a matter of fact, eliminating a lot of less viable children in favor of few more viable children is kind of the rule for selection.
So we take a group of strongly viable lines, contaminate them, and (in nature's much longer perspective) make them less viable. Marked for elimination.
We usually think this elimination comes from direct competition, and I would agree that in our experience so far this is the observed case. But what is observable in much GM research is that after three or so generations, animals consuming the GM product stop reproducing. The "why" here is still being researched and is at best poorly understood.
So, I argue that nature in this case is taking the robust path. Eliminating contamination.
Wasn't it Google that optimized the NSA datacenters as early as 2005? I think its safe to assume that many of Google analytics' bigger customers are not corporate. Not to mention, of course, Google Earth which was developed with CIA money... but also needed some optimization (read, better developers). I am pretty sure that Google Earth was not a loss leader for the company ;)
I think that, amazingly in these times, you're sucking down your naivety cool aid a little too plaicidly to think that advertising cookies are not the optimal tracking method for both corp and govt.