Slashdot Mirror
Designer Seeds Thought To Be Latest Target By Chinese
An anonymous reader writes "Economic espionage is nothing new but one of the biggest areas being targeted now is agriculture. Here's a story about a FBI investigation to track down theft of seeds from research farms. 'The case of the missing corn seeds first broke in May 2011 when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field. When confronted, the man, Mo Hailong, who was with his colleague Wang Lei, appeared flushed. Mr. Mo told the manager that he worked for the University of Iowa and was traveling to a conference nearby. When the manager paused to answered his cellphone, the two men sped off in a car, racing through a ditch to get away, federal authorities said.'"
Down with Beta! Leave Classic, or we'll go to Hacker News!
It's really hard to feel all that much pity for DuPont. They have a long history of being enormous pricks.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Captcha: fuckbeta
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
The Chinese have had an open field day stealing tech and killing of Western businesses since our beloved Bill Clinton opened the doors to them. Those roks are now coming in to roost, USA is over and screwed by its own doing. Manchurian Candidate - for real.
In other news, slashdot beta sucks. More at 11.
Those Chinese spies could steal the slashdot beta code!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
User hacking my personal inf, and account
Serious question: Did the same people who developed the Beta Digg that destroyed that site develop Slashdot Beta? Because it reminds me of the exact same site-destroying arc. And when Slashdot goes down, where will I get my daily hyperbolic Bitcoin article?
The beta would be the Star Wars prequels.
a robot hand has invaded my space and now only Google searches for:
FUCK SLASHDOT BETA
sometimes in quotes, again and again!
Cool! He dresses in black but his penis is cocaine white!
(looks around)
Just one suck to see if he regains his color.
A major war between modern powers could be more effectively "won" with biological weapons than nuclear ones. Come up with something that will decimate the primary crop of the enemy nation (or even specific variations on that crop which might be planted en masse by Monsanto) and you severely weaken the country.
Which begs the question, what fuckwad insisted on doing so?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
How do I make this steaming pile of horse shit that they call a beta go away?
these gmo mofos have been making life extremely hard for average joe farmer so fantastic. let the deluge of chinese copies hit the market and drive these guys into the ground. serve them right.
Burn this pile of shit you call a beta quick. Burn baby Burn.
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
And don't forget to use a condom! Nobody wants to see the unholy offspring of that union.
Well, nobody in their right mind.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Buck Feta
Ive been visiting Slashdot since the late 90s (during the "don't get a username because of privacy"-era). The new redesign is awful and I agree with all the criticisms that have been made. I think we need a comment bounty reward to anyone who can find ONE remotely positive comment about the redesign. What is the point of asking for feedback when you are just going to do what you want anyway? Slashdot has a readership that dates back to the early days of the Internet and boasts one of the best comment communities out there, period. Tell your advertisers that Slashdot is the meeting place for people in all levels of tech companies, business and government, in other words, decision makers who purchase their products and services. This group values the site's robust discussion, not how well you can use the latest internet layouts, and the entire community will leave if you continue along this path.
And you get /. classic.
90% of my browsing is with JS off. No ads or autorun videos to slow browsing down. No JS malware attacks either.
King Louis XIV: Why has my own brother tried to do this to me?
D'Artagnan: And look what you have done to him!
1. Way too much vertical white space, which is more precious than dehydrated unicorn testciles thanks to 16:9 screens.
2. A More Button. WTF! The bandwidth for text is cheap. Give me the whole converstaion.
3. Coonversation context is lost because I can't see summarised comments nested under modded up comments.
4. Thick borders. 1 pixel is enough.
46137
Pardon me if I don't feel bad for a big company squeezing farmers everywhere to use their seeds and then not let them reuse the seeds. Go China!
This site has been something special to a number of readers and posters here, and seeing the place go down in flames like Digg did when they ignored their users' feedback is a highly suboptimal emotional experience.
Saying that turns the place into the kindergarten you wanted to avoid.
If these seeds are GMO'ed I say let them have them.
That way several years down the road when only one company in China owns all of the food supply and it is ILLEGAL to grow your own food, we won't have to worry about their industrial espionage...
Oh wait, our government does the same industrial espionage...http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/26/us-security-snowden-germany-idUSBREA0P0DE20140126
Never mind.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Somewhat surprisingly, given its land area and population, China has total shit for arable land. Obviously more than zero; and a long history of intensive, relatively high-yield agriculture; but huge parts of the country are unsuitable in various ways (and various incidents of pollution, desertification, aquifer overdraw, and other mismanagement haven't helped).
Given that, along with the nigh-universal tendency of people to eat more meat (far less efficient per calorie than stuff lower on the food chain) if they get wealthier, and to rise up in revolution like they have nothing to lose (because they don't) if food supplies are dangerously constrained, doing absolutely everything they possibly can to keep agricultural yields high, and preferably rising, is probably about the sanest policy the Chinese government could be pursuing.
Sure, hypersonic missiles and supercavitating torpedoes and fancy fighter planes and stuff are good for dick waving, keeping Americans at a distance while rattling the sabre at Taiwan, and general jingoism; but it's not as though anybody outside of China wants to start a land war in Asia and directly slug it out with the PLA on Chinese soil, so all that stuff is really pretty secondary.
1.2 billion people (including the ones who you've provided with guns, and their families and friends) who are starting to see more and more of the weekly grocery list slipping beyond their buying power? Now that is what has any sensible leader (whether of a despotism, a monarchy, a republic, a democracy, doesn't matter) wake up screaming and drenched in cold sweat night after night.
If you move me to the beta slashdot abortion i'll add this place to the block list and never visit again.
Too many other news sites regurgitate the exact same storys i see here. And all of them don't look as shitty as the beta slashdot.
Stop being stupid
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam,
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam.
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam?
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam!
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam;
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam!
Ceterum autem censeo $lashdot esse delendam
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam
Ceterum autem censeo slashdot esse delendam
If you can read this I've bypassed your "postercomment" compression filter.
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
You forgot to mention that Monsanto, DuPont, Pioneer, etc. didn't start their biotech companies with grass seeds and turn them into the fabulous(?) varieties that they have now, that they've freeloaded off of thousands of years of everyone else's hard work. So yeah, fuck 'em.
with its quoting stupid 70's TV shows instead of properly loading comments. It's not funny, it doesn't take away from the irritant that is beta.
Time for your GMOs to grow Bladerunner style identification codes to enforce your IP rights.
I'm picturing a new mall store called "Off Topic." It's filled with disgruntled employees and shoppers, with their own ideas about how a store should be run, and suggestions for merchandise without any regard to, well, the topic actually relevant to the designated sale point at the end of the day.
Here is Dice's "Contact Us" page. Everybody be sure to call them tomorrow using whatever numbers from that page you can get to ring. Tell every darn receptionist in every darn one of Dice's holdings, along with anyone you can get them to connect you to, that the Slashdot beta is terrible and you won't shut up until it goes away. Fax them a well-illustrated complaint or two or three. Send them a choice letter via snail mail, along with whatever memorabilia you wish.
They keep soliciting our feedback, they can get our feedback, right where it counts.
Spread the word by mentioning this in every article's comments.
The most obvious contact points are:
Dice Holdings Inc.
1040 Avenue of the Americas, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10018
T: 212-725-6550
F: 212-725-6559
Slashdot
594 Howard St Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: +1-877-433-5638
www.slashdot.com
I just got the "hey go check out beta" alert. I figured it would be the same with with different underhood. WOW this is shit. And sure enough, I had to enable scripting. Bro, it's fucking COMMENTS. It doesn't need java, or script, or javafuckingscript.
This could be the death of this site. Sad. Been browsing this since early college.
Have been refined by millions of years of evolution. That a few scientists with an ego problem think they can do better is laughable.
John_Chalisque
I got the nag today and went to the beta site, it's horrible. I don't like Slashdot on the Mobile phone for the same reason I dislike the Beta site. It's horrible to navigate compared to classic and wastes too much space.
If you want to push that gunk to the main page, at least leave this one as "classic.slashdot.com" so we can choose the best interface for us.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Seriously? Only in America can we start a conversation about Chinese seeds, and have the entire thread obliterated and hijacked by commentary about off topic interface. By the same audience that would decry this in any other forum. Have we devolved to a nation of mere trolls?
Get rid of beta slashdot and do not deploy it!
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This seemed like an interesting one. Even included people like me, who don't run unless they're being chased. ;-(
--- Bigger bits, softer blocks, tighter ASCII.
A person directed the Slashdot redesign.
Who is he?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Bruce Perens tried that, as well as others. None of the /. altenatives last.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
No doubt they're in the 'research and development' department.
"...on charges of stealing trade secrets in what the authorities and agriculture experts have called an unusual and brazen scheme to undercut expensive, time-consuming research."
It stops being unusual when it's industrial espionage of absolutely anything that can be reverse engineered and copied on a constant basis.
The western state departments need to get their balls out of cold storage and deal with this economic warfare against us.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
these gmo mofos have been making life extremely hard for average joe farmer
Yeah, I'm sure their utter hatred for GE seed is why they keep buying and using it.
Seriously, the faults lie with the companies that hire these ppl. Many of them will grab an opportunity to make large money while helping their nation. Chinese leaders are in a cold war with the west and will continue to steal all technology that they can. Look at Germany's transrapid. They put in a line because they were ASSURED by the gov. that the tech would not be stolen. In fact, Transrapid hired a 24x7 guard for their electronics cabinet. At the same time, transrapid quietly put in a camera to record the cabinet. What was recorded was that a known mag lev researcher showed up with 2 members of the PLA who told the security guy to step aside and to not talk about this. He did, and the camera record the researcher spending time in the cabinet looking around.
China can develop their own, but it comes at the same costs as what we in the west have. They do not want that. So, they find it cheaper to destroy the west via theft.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Here is Dice's "Contact Us" page. [diceholdingsinc.com] Everybody be sure to call them tomorrow using whatever numbers from that page you can get to ring. Tell every darn receptionist in every darn one of Dice's holdings, along with anyone you can get them to connect you to, that the Slashdot beta is terrible and you won't shut up until it goes away. Fax them a well-illustrated complaint or two or three. Send them a choice letter via snail mail, along with whatever memorabilia you wish. They keep soliciting our feedback, they can get our feedback, right where it counts. Spread the word by mentioning this in every article's comments. The most obvious contact points are: Dice Holdings Inc. 1040 Avenue of the Americas, 8th Floor New York, NY 10018 T: 212-725-6550 F: 212-725-6559 Slashdot 594 Howard St Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: +1-877-433-5638 www.slashdot.com"
Complaining about the theft of a few seeds is like complaining about someone stealing your fire.
The fact that people have been convinced that this represents 'espionage' shows how brainwashed they are with IP propaganda. At no other time in history would such an action have been regarded as wrong. If someone breeds or engineers a new strain of a crop that can feed more people, there's a moral obligation to share it - and while people starve, there's a moral justification to try and take it - it doesn't deprive the owner of their crop. We're not talking about the source code for a missile guidance system, or iPhone knock-offs. The argument, as with pharmaceuticals, is that it hurts profits and further research. Well, if I'm starving, or can't afford some new drug - I would rather steal it, and worry about compensation later.
Open source generic engineering for all! Say, would you happen to know the nucleotide sequence for an enormous prick?
Here you go: http://www.snpedia.com/index.p...
Oh wait, maybe you mean the other kind of enormous prick?
"Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert 'the genes for an elephant's trunk' into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants' talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant." -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Nonlinear Genetics
that's some well-reason advocation there...I just don't think it's relevant. Don't get me wrong, I didn't rtfa (I'm not new here), but tfs sounds racist and bullshit, so...
Also, FUCK BETA
I'm not one to curse, so all I can say is 'Fuck Slashdot Beta'.
I don't want to see which comments are insightful or funny or informative.
I have a treshold and use that to decide what to read. If I want to give extra importance to funny, I can set that up in the site preference as a +1 or +2.
Why are you breaking something that was working fine?
Also, get rid of all the images. This is a sight for adults, not teenagers.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
"childish, immature people" ?
C'mon, this is Slashdot.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
I like it already. Thanks.
You said everything I wanted to say, and posted about, regarding beta.
While many rail at it because of white space and what not, my main beef is requiring javascript.
Let me explain ...
I have been a regular visitor to Slashdot for around 15 years. For that, I get the checkbox to disable ads, though I browse with Javascript disabled so my browser does not slow down.
I come here for the discussions, and often read comments at +5, changing that only if I find a discussion interesting and warrants reading at a lower level.
The new beta uses JQuery for the comment threshold selector, and changes that on the fly. This means all the comments are loaded, but not visible, and processing any page with considerable number of comments will slow down MY computer! If I have a few tabs open to read later, my computer will be unusable.
What is worse it that they require you to click on the slider on every article to change the threshold! This is just insane!
If they insist that I enable Javascript to browse the site at the threshold I want, then they will lose me as a long time. I imagine that others long timers will hate the site too.
Dice have to remember that this site has two unmatched features, interlocked: a moderation system that is good at cutting down the trolling, spamming, and noise, and a comment section that is frequented by many people who are passionate about technology and other nerdy stuff.
If they wanted to intentionally ruin the site and drive people away, they would not have done any worse than what they are doing now.
If they manage to aggravate a lot of their users, the comment section will no longer be attractive to the audience. Perhaps we should revive kuro5hin?
I wrote the above in a feedback form that I filled a while ago, and I am emailing this comment to their feedback@slashdot.org. Please send them feedback too.
And mod this up so Dice can see what they are getting themselves into.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Nixon was a Republican. Can't criticize them, so you blame it on the first Democrat to take office after the event you hate. For reference, see current debt/recession and Obama.