Re: OT: Nuclear Waste (Was Re-Marketing Ada)

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Vinzent 'Gadget' Hoefler wrote:

> Well. What if you can't clean them up (fast enough)?
> 
> Remember Australia's rabbit problem? Having such thing on a larger
> scale *could* be very disastrous and not be revealed by "some minimal
> amount of testing".

The zebra mussel problems in the Great Lakes and in the Mississippi 
River are probably a better example.

But what you have in Genetically Modified foods is a choice between 
products that have been developed by billions of years of blind 
evolution, including random mutations caused both by transcription 
errors and viruses, or products where a company took an existing food 
product, and the virus tools for modifying the genetic structure, and 
created a new version.  This version was then subjected to testing.

So compared to the GM foods, the "natural" foods can contain similar 
modifications.  Only in the case of the GM foods, there is design intent 
involved, and some testing.  In natural foods, the genetic splicing and 
random point mutations are just that, random.

Now of course if you are a farmer, you may buy your seeds from a company 
that does testing similar to that done on GM seeds, so the seeds you 
start with are no worse--but they are no better.

That is the reality.

-- 
                                           Robert I. Eachus

100% Ada, no bugs--the only way to create software.