I make the point because it places a cap on the risk. something which has been happening constantly for billions of years is less of a worry.

You could say the same about regular old breeding. We breed traits into animals which would normally have taken hundreds of thousands of years to evolve.

They could evolve anyway but conscious selection speeds the whole thing up by orders of magnitude.

I think you're laboring under a minor misapprehension.

horizontal gene transfer happens without any human directed genetic modification anyway.
Not often it happens.

Genes pass from one organism to another, from bacteria to plants or from insects to fungus.

but you don't know when it's happened. you just notice that one of your plants has some trait you really like so you breed from it more.

the difference is that one is intentional. in one case it's just happened out in a field amongst a billion corn plants. in the other someone has carefully engineered it intentionally.

I say this because many people seem to believe that it's an absolute, that it's something that never naturally happens which we inflict on the natural world. inreality it happens, just randomly.

though there are a few notable exceptions. there's a particularly cool bacteria which steals genes from those around it.

Right lets go from the start.

"The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) doesnâ(TM)t think so. The Academy reported that âoeSeveral animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food,â including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM asked physicians to advise patients to avoid GM foods."

Wow, that sounds scary. and the American Academy of Environmental Medicine sounds like a very serious organisation who's opinion should hold a lot of weight.

Wait what's this...
"Letter to the Los Angeles Unified School District regarding installation of WiFi systems in the school district."
http://aaemonline.org/images/LettertoLAUSD.pdf
"In recent years ourmembers and colleagues have reported an increase in patients
whose symptoms are reversible by eliminating wirelessradiating devicesin their
homessuch as cell phones, cordless phones and wirelessinternetsystems."

They're the wifi allergy nuts.

They're quacks.

The rest isn't much better.

They cite mostly eco-newspapers with a few papers on how high levels of pesticides or herbicides can cause problems in high doses.

Mostly it's just a list of claims with a lot of it totally uncited like the hamsters claim. But I happen to have come across that one before. there was a preliminary announcement that some russian scientist had done research that showed all these terrible evil effects of GMO's and that the paper would be published *within a few months*.

it did the rounds of all the normal anti science sites like naturalnews and facebook.

that was 3 years ago and no paper ever turned up.

it's been more than 20 years since Flavr Savr tomatoes were developed.

They're out of patent. They have other crops which are still patented. for those you'll have to wait a few more years.

it's what's technically called "time passing"

Ecology wise sterile plants are almost by definition a self limiting problem.

Unless you mean socially/economically.

GMO's have been around since before I was born yet I'm closing on 30. They're not being brought in terribly fast,the complaint that they're coming in too fast probably predates my birth as well.

Lets say they spend *another* generation doing additional testing. do you really think people like you won't just should "There's STILL not enough testing been done"

I'll worry about GMO's when people worry about house cats half as much as they do about GMO's. Cats can have and do decimate ecologies without any modifications in their genes yet because they're not new and sciency we don't care.

Try looking at the discussion on golden rice.
(rice modified to have extra vitamins so that kids eating rice as a staple don't go blind)

Subsistence farmers don't have to worry about the patents, they're free to grow it, sell it, save the seed or cross it with their own rice.

You'd think it would be an easy win: less blind children, no problems with evil corporate control.

but no. greenpeace and organisations like them blocked every attempt to get it to poor people that they could. Look up their website, one of their reasons for opposing it is literally that it's a *gateway GM*, too unobjectionable and so might make people comfortable with GM.

these evil fuckers weight things up and decide that an unobjectionable nutritious version of rice is worse than crippling kids.

Sure, the farmers who use them are just idiots who have no idea about how to run a farm profitably.

you know much more than they do about farming.

like for example... ?

I have yet to see any vaguely credible evidence of any dangers from GMO crops.

There's been lots of reports in the past like when naturalnews started crowing about the evil GMO grass which started producing cyanide gas... which turned out to be perfectly natural non GMO grass.

The people who say GMO's are dangerous seem to have about as much science on their side as the anti-vaxers.

until the patent expires.
You know patents expire right?

You're free to cross some Flavr Savr tomatoes with whatever collection of hybrid seeds you like to breed whatever hybrid you like with the addition of the GM genes. You can breed whatever diverse collection of plants you like with or without GM.

Crops don't have to be Gm to be proprietary.

plant breeders rights have been a thing for almost a hundred years now and farmers already buy such hybrids routinely across most of Europe.

If they can crack it they're totally free to use it.

imagine that there's a body buried someone in kansas. they can't force you to tell them where it is so that they can go collect evidence against you from it.

But if they find it themselves they're free to use it.

for encryption the search space is a mathematical one but otherwise it's similar.

of course if the NSA or some such can crack it there's no way that they'll admit it for something as trivial as a conviction for some petty criminal because then everyone would know it had been cracked and would use a different form of encryption and the NSA would have to do all the work of cracking that new one.

yep, sounds like your friends school was using an awful system.

however it should be noted that these systems aren't new. and there are very very good ones. they're already used for checking *teachers* work in the UK.

For exams a teacher marks a paper to give you your grade. then a program like what is described in the OP marks it. If they agree then it stops there. if they disagree much then the paper goes to a second senior human being who also marks it.

if the senior human being disagrees with the other human then they sort out why they gave different marks.

if the humans agree but disagree with the machine then the paper is added to the training set for the AI

typically the program agrees with the humans more often than another randomly selected pair of humans.

but that makes perfect sense since something sitting at the middle of the normal curve is more likely to be closer to any given element than 2 elements are to each other.

it cuts down on the work for senior teachers and allows more comprehensive double checking of teachers work.

Average. The key word there is average.

if a doctor comes across someone who genuinely has a rare condition they're almost certain to misdiagnose it.

the other cases they see are all the common case. but a chatbot which just spits out the common case could get a good "average" in the same way.

They know that the condition only shows up in 1 in 10 million people or some such. they know that the odds are that they'll never see a case. but they confuse the prior probability and the posterior probability.

my best friend with a rare condition for his age got bounced around for years with doctors insisting that he was far too young to suffer from what he was suffering from before he finally reached a specialist. doctors are often too sure they have a deeper understanding than they really do.

You're still not getting it.
R lets them work in a simply environment and works in an intuitive manner for people who are not programmers by trade and has the built in tools.

some statisticians decide it isn't good enough and dedicate the time to learning lisp. great for them. that no more proves your point than the fact that some game engine devs insist that assembly is the only true way to go. they can get some very good results but they spend more time getting them and don't have the ready made stuff to make their job easier.

yes.
You love programming and you're probably a professional programmer.

however you shouldn't be forced to be a professional programmer to write a quick script to create some files for a few thousand clients any more than you should be forced to understand all the details of being a structural engineer before building a dog house.

the whole point is that the first hurdle is a small one, you could get most people over it in an hour then they get to be experts at something else who just happen to have enough knowledge to put it into code which can have significant value.