That is a problem with MyISAM tables, which only do table-level locking. PostgreSQL will do row-level locking with concurrent write transactions, so you would only 'deadlock' if both transactions modified the same row.
If you'll be writing to the same tables with concurrent write transactions and you have to use MySQL, you should consider using InnoDB tables instead, which do allow row-level locking, but also come with their own quirks, so a bit of research is advised before committing to that solution.
For concurrent read and write transactions, PostgreSQL has Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), as do InnoDB tables, so there should theoretically be no locking of read-only transactions due to write transactions in progress. That being said, InnoDB MVCC will only work if all your tables are controlled by the InnoDB table handler, which, due to the quirks alluded to above (including severe performance penalties in some situations) may make that requirement a deal-breaker.
As always, you have to have a good understanding of both your application's requirements and the tools available in order to make the right decision.
Yes, they absolutely own the copyright if the terms of your employment make the software you write on the job a work for hire (almost certainly the case unless you have an explicit exception in your employment contract).
They also cannot legally violate the GPL, but they will not even if they keep the source unpublished as long as they provide the source code with any binary distribution to another party.
The key here is that the GPL does not force you to distribute the source unless you distribute the binaries--and even then, you only need to provide the source to the people to whom you distributed the binaries.
On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Sorry for the delay between posts, but I only get to check/. infrequently these days.
Lappe and Baily are not technically wrong because they qualified their argument with 'could', not 'will'.
The canonical basis for their argument is something like the Flavr Savr tomato. What happened in that case was a biotech company with no traditional plant breeding experience employed a very early and expensive GM transformation process to a single variety of tomato (which, incidentally, happened to suck). Because of the development expenses and lack of understanding of the market, they only developed that one variety, hence a lack of genetic diversity of flavr savr tomatoes.
Taking a step back to explain, I'll start with the fact that all transgenes on the market in field crops today do not actually impact the quality of the product to the consumer at all. They don't make them taste better, look better, more nutritious, etc. This is actually largely due to regulatory reasons, as the FDA has much more stringent testing requirements if a product is actually supposed to impact the consumer as opposed to lighter restrictions if you can prove that there is no interaction intended or in practice (e.g., BT transgenic crops produce a protein that does not interact with animal digestive systems at all (and that organic farmers actually spray on their crops, incidentally)). All current field crop transgenes make the production process cheaper, more energy efficient, etc.
Anyway, in effect, transgenes basically add on a feature to an existing variety, leaving all other traits of that variety unmodified. If you added the round-up ready transgene to the red delicious apple variety, they would taste exactly like normal red delicious apples. As far as the consumer was concerned, there would be no discernable difference (unless you had a genetic or protein analysis lab at your disposal).
If you're a developer of apple varieties, and you wanted to offer your full lineup with transgenics, you would have to add the genes to every single variety of apple separately.
Development of varieties of a crop, and development and integration of transgenes into a crop, are basically two separate processes.
Due to current technological limitations, market pressures, regulatory requirements, and other business factors, transgenes are used for single-gene qualitative traits (e.g., herbicide/insect resistance) rather than quantitative ones (e.g., yield).
As if this post weren't long enough, let me use a car analogy:
Traditional breeding is like developing new cars. You use better manufacturing techniques, materials, and refined aesthetic focus to improve model lines or even come out with new line altogether.
Transgenics are like developing accessories that will fit a wide variety of vehicles, such as stereos, A/C systems, power steering, etc.
The Flavr Savr guys made the mistake of thinking that their transgene would singlehandedly ensure success despite the fact that they used a crap variety as the base of their product. It was comparable to OnStar thinking their system is so awesome that they could throw it into a Pinto and it'd sell like hotcakes even though it would be competing with similarly priced BMWs.
Lappe and Baily's argument is essentially based on the premise that all companies offering transgenes will ignore Calgene's mistake and repeat it blindly. Companies have done many stupid things, so this is not entirely unthinkable, but it is hardly likely and has not happened in practice.
Compared to transgenics, the advent of hybrids and commercial production farming have caused a decline in genetic diversity to a much larger extent. They have also caused orders of magnitude greater production, without which we would have been suffering global famine since the 60s, so it is something to weigh against the potential risks: narrowing the genetic diversity of production field crops is actually preventing global famine right now, but could also potentially contribute to widespread crop failure in the future.
Genetically modified corn isn't any different than non-GM corn except for the presence of the transgene, and contains the same minor genetic variations you'd find in any field of hybrid corn. The seed is propagated the same way as other corn, as cloning is simply too expensive for production use.
Other methods, like doubling haploids, can be used to create genetically identical populations, but those methods are not specific to transgenic material at all.
I personally think that the PVPA and related enforcement laws are messed up, and that Monsanto are a bunch of assholes, but you are conflating issues here.
A small amount of contamination in plants will not result in RR plants dominating the population as they did on Schmeiser's farm. Had he simply indiscriminately saved seed, the gene would have only been present at trace levels, or possibly been eliminated from the population without continued selection pressure favoring the gene.
In short, the only way his farm could come to be dominated by RR plants in that time frame was for him to deliberately select for RR plants.
Had he been honest he might have said 'yeah, I took those plants but I disagree with the laws that allow the patenting of plant varieties, so I don't recognize their legitimacy, especially because I was not responsible for the initial plants contaminating my farm'.
Instead he lied.
Is the law unjust? In my opinion, yes. Was Schmeiser guilty of deliberately propagating unlicensed seed? Yes. The two are not mutually exclusive.
The problem with this statement is that we can't keep some of that Monsanto corn to plant next year, the same way we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
It's the law (look up the PVPA of 1970) that prevents'you from re-planting, not the fact that it's GM.
Speaking as someone working in the industry, I would say that your argument is based on an impossible premise. There can be no 'one perfect set of corn' world-wide because there is too much environmental diversity. The 'perfect' variety is specific to a given environment, so you will see as many varieties as there are environmental conditions.
In fact, as the market matures, genetic diversity of GM crops continues to increase.
Essentially, in the early stages of commercialization of GM crops, the transformation and development process was far too expensive relative to the projected market size to apply to all but a few of the prize lines of corn, soya, etc. Now that competition has increased and the development processes have been refined and costs reduced, instead of 2 or 3 lines with a given GM trait, you get thousands, and that number is just getting larger.
1) Depends on orbital altitude over the theatre of operations. Low (enough) latency links can be accomplished with sats if you're willing to spend money on a satellite constellation of sufficient density to allow for full coverage of the area with low altitude sats. Considerably lower latency than a Hawaiian quake player would experience on a west coast server is possible.
2) Yes, but that is neither an unsolvable nor unsolved problem.
I would also look at Scala. Shares Groovy's strength of transparent Java interoperability, but opts for a radical departure in language design and concepts (for the better, IMHO).
Since you seem genuinely interested, I'll continue replying even though this article is dead.
That's quite the assumption you're making. Millions of acres go fallow every year in the US. Why do you suppose it's necessary to achieve comparable yields versus simply activating more cropland? Not to mention taking advantage of things like hydroponic techniques.
If lower densities and expansion of production land are both acceptable, conventional methods will also be runoff-free. All other things being equal, nutrient runoff issues are mainly a function of application density, regardless of source.
As for hydroponics and the fallowed farmland in the US, the reason they're both not used as complete replacement is economics, which is a good indicator of sustainability in this instance. Neither of the above is a significant value-add for a consumer, so the only significant differences between current practices and those are production costs.
Hydroponics is extremely resource-intensive, but can support unparalleled production density.
The fallowed ground in the US that you refer to is considered marginal, which means that while it is within the means of modern agronomics to grow a crop on the land, the resource cost would be too great. I.e., mineral issues, such as ultra-high magnesium content require very expensive amendments, or water accessibility issues (e.g., nearest source is a 700' deep well to an unreliable aquifer), etc.
we're talking about sustainable, here, not necessarily cheap.
The issue here is that when you talk about sustainability, you first have to define your resource constraints. Exactly what do you mean by 'sustainable'? Under what conditions, and given what assumptions?
Hydroponics is more sustainable on something like a space station, or in the middle of an urban center, because space is at a much higher premium than energy.
If, on the other hand, you live in someplace like the midwest, land is far, far cheaper than the power and facilities required for hydroponics, so conventional farming is the most sustainable.
With respect to sustainability, the choice between conventional agriculture and organic implies enormous differences between resource constraint models. In most cases, we have a choice as to which model to follow, rather than having one imposed on us by nature or the laws of physics, and that choice reflects differences in ideological values and priorities.
In the extreme, hunting and gathering is sustainable if we are willing to accept the constraint of ultra low population density and reversion to a very low-tech society.
Interestingly, I see you didn't really address the fertilizer issue. Do you know if "organic" farming tends to use the same volume of fertilizers as traditional farming? One of the big problems with traditional farming is the runoff of large volumes of fertilizer into lakes and river, which causes all sorts of damage due to algae blooms, etc. It'd be interesting to know if "organic" farms are any more sustainable in that regard.
In order to get yields comparable to conventional methods using organic methods you'd need to amend the soil with the same amount of nutrients. The differences are only in the sources of those nutrients. Typical organic sources like manure will still result in runoff under the same conditions as non-organic fertilizers. Also, as I mentioned in a separate branch of the thread, cheap manure fertilizer is often a byproduct of non-organic production.
And, if you do buy from a particular farmer, they are the ones getting your money, not say, Cargill.
Even if you don't buy from the farmer directly, the farmer is still paid (very well in today's market, unless they mismanage their operation).
I could go on to attack the rest of your points, but as far as I can tell, your running theme is that what's happening today is not only OK, but actually the best it can actually be. Which seems pretty far fetched.
That is most definitely not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that 'organic' != 'sustainable' in any literal sense unless you:
Massively and continually expand the geographical extent of farm production lands. Hopefully we'll have enough land that we haven't used up the entire surface of the earth before previously depleted areas have been replenished by natural phosphorus deposition etc. Relatively cheap organic sources of fertilizer like dung are mostly byproducts of non-organic production, and are only readily available in sufficient quantities while organic farming is a very small percentage of total production.
Get rid of a couple billion or more people and subsequently cap the population
Either bear a massive increase in the resource cost of food production or create a class of slave laborers with a much lower standard of living (and per capita resource cost) than the rest of society in order to do the farming
There are many ways we can improve farming methods, and we're actively researching drought tolerance, nitrogen deficiency tolerance, etc., to lower input requirements on the plant side, as well as refining precision Ag technology and advances in mechanical engineering to make the processing/production side more efficient.
Saying you want to be 'sustainable', therefore you want to only use organic production methods is like saying you want energy independence, except you don't want to use solar (PV cell manufacture has toxic byproducts), windmills (think of the birds!), hydro-electric (think of the fish!), nuclear (think of the waste!--because we won't allow reprocessing (think of the terrorists!)), or geothermal (think ofour heritage!). You have to prioritize. If terrorists scare you more than nuclear waste, or nuclear energy scares you more than energy dependence, that's perfectly fine, but it is crucial to realize that you're making a choice about the ordering of your priorities. So it is with organic farming and sustainability.
Many of the proponents of the former feel that their cause is justified in deliberately conflating it with other causes (health, sustainability, religion (this one is big in the genetic modification debate), class warfare and anti-corporatism, IP law, etc.) because they think that it will advance their own, so confusion on this is common.
If you study the issue of sustainability, you will quickly see that there are no simple or easy answers. It is hard enough to get people to agree on a definition. E.g., 'Sustainable means we can support population growth until all societies advance socio-economically and presumably reach voluntary population peak' vs. 'The definition of sustainability must include an internationally-enforced limit on global population levels dictated by production and distribution capacity as restricted by a hard cap on Ag land expansion and maximum total carbon output to preserve the environment'. Any given definition reflects a different set of priorities.
The bottom line is that with respect to sustainability, it is not at all obvious or necessarily likely that organic farming is even a step in the right direction.
Organic means natural, sustainable methods and growing and harvesting crops in the right seasons. In fact, it is not a luxury when it comes to convenience. Organic produce means you can only have right crop in the right months.
Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong. There are two points in particular that are mistaken.
The first is that the conflation of geographic location with organic production. Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce. Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production.
In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain.
In addition to non-optimal local growing conditions requiring more energy, smaller, local food producers almost always burn more energy per unit of produce than larger operations even in the same geographic region because large producers lower the marginal energy cost of production with economies of scale. Japan is an excellent case study of exactly this effect, as its market regulations strongly bias the market to smaller less efficient regional producers, causing the price of food to be significantly higher than it otherwise would be due to higher production costs.
Geographic proximity is absolutely not a reliable indicator of relative energy consumption
As for organic farming being 'sustainable', all it is is substituting human labor, land (production densities must be much lower to avoid pest population buildup), and excess energy (e.g., using a propane torch to kill weeds by application of heat, or more tillage passes to mechanically weed fields) for chemical and fertilizer use. Human labor is anything but cheap energy-wise, unless you're talking about basically slaves who were raised from childhood on an extremely low energy budget, and who are not afforded any of the luxuries of the society for whom they are producing the food.
You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?
Before we had those things, population centers around the world (e.g., Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, etc.) were on the verge of an epic famine and the most extensive die-off of humanity this side of WWIII. A larger portion of agricultural lands were then also comprised of regularly cleared slash-n-burn fields fertilized by the ashes of the forest for a few years before the soil was depleted and more land needed to be cleared.
The only argument that can have merit is the health issue, but that varies significantly by specific grower practice. Proper use of pesticides as per the label is proven to be safe, but it's unfortunately not unheard of for growers to misuse them, both knowingly and unknowingly. Likewise, many organic farmers improperly compost their organic fertilizers and put consumers at higher risk of bacterial contamination. In both cases we have government regulatory agencies watching for infractions, and they generally do a good job of keeping us remarkably safe compared to pre-green revolution days.
I've traveled through the Kansai area, including Osaka and Kyoto, with large backpacks and roll-away luggage with a much bigger combined footprint than the largest winglet, let alone the two smaller models.
Granted you said Shinjuku, but I doubt that the size would be a major impediment in almost any area except the busiest parts of the largest cities during rush hours.
With its aging population and far more emphasis on walking than driving, Japan is the perfect market for this device.
The lower speed makes it less likely to be a nuisance/danger on the ubiquitous and heavily trafficked sidewalks and walking paths.
Also, even the largest model will fit comfortably on most trains and subway lines, making it useful for shopping/errand runs that include a segment on a mass transit system.
Those two features alone give it a fighting chance.
PageRank is either an algorithm or heuristic, and thus as firmly grounded in math as LZW, software FFT implementations, etc.
One-Click is a business process which should be patented as such, completely separate from software. I.e., a means of signaling intent to purchase a specified item and execute the purchase using previously supplied information with a single action. It is easily (if not exactly cost-effectively) implemented as a system where you point at any item you want in a store, and a clerk runs up and bags it for you and charges it against your previously established credit account. No software in sight. In fact, this was how some of the earlier stores were run way back in the day.
The problem with many (not all, but many) software patents is that they are 'old thing with 100+ year prior art... + software!'. No innovation, or even minor evolution/refinement of the core principle.
Also, probably because software engineering is a relatively new/esoteric field, people have managed to confuse patent clerks enough to get away with patenting ends rather than means. This is basically the difference between patenting the physical characteristics and operating principles of a wheel vs patenting 'reducing the energy required to transport mass'. The former is patentable (prior art notwithstanding) while the latter is not. The problem is that patent clerks seem to have more trouble than usual distinguishing between the two when software is involved.
You're completely misunderstanding Sun Tzu's point. The point is not that the military should be involved in all aspects of society (in this case, 'influence operations'), but that wars are begun and the outcome largely determined before armies get involved. I.e., the importance of the recognition that politics, economics, etc., are not only legitimate, but critical 'theaters' for 'war by other means'.
This won't really help you out, but the problem you have here is that the pre-existing class hierarchy is screwed up in the first place (granted, I'm only working with your very brief description here).
What you should have instead are classes implementing: table view, table data model, selection model. They are orthogonal concepts that do not belong in the same class. Want pagination? use a paginating view. Row-level instead of cell-level selection? Use a difference selection model. Etc.
Mashing orthogonal concepts together means that soon you'll need a row_select_paginating_db_cursor_backed_table, a cell_select_vector_table, a row_select_paginating_arraylist_table, etc.
Essentially, your situation is a poster child for anti-MI arguments. The usual suspect for a design like the one you've described is that the original author leaned on MI as a crutch that either prevented him from (or allowed him to avoid) learning better OO design practice. It's a catch 22. You need MI to mitigate the damage of a bad design most probably caused by reliance on MI.
The fact is that if you give a report on the status of a project, and even *suggest* that something cannot be outlined.....it only shows that you are incompetent. Whether you actually are incompetent is irrelevant.
Maybe if you were the PM. Absolutely not if you are a consultant in the author's position. Upper management is not interested in semantic nitpicking. If no one has on hand an accurate, up-to-date comprehensive status report, or the ability and data on hand to immediately produce such a report, then for the intents and purposes of an external audit, project cannot be outlined.
The quoted statement, as well as all of your other posts in this thread have consistently demonstrated that you have a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of the article's author. He is not there to fix the project. Not even necessarily to suggest potential solutions. Consultants in that position are hired purely to look at things and 'tell it like it is'. If 'political considerations'[1] are a significant roadblock to progress or success, the report should reflect that in plain language.
Consultants in such a position can and will say things that would get normal employees fired or blacklisted because the people they are evaluating have no immediate power over their careers, which is exactly why they are valuable and why the function cannot be effectively performed in-house in most organizations.
[1] - In the context of these types of reports, 'political considerations' is a commonly-used and well-understood term that is used to express the fact that the goals of the people in question are both generally out of alignment with and given precedence over the goals of the organization. Any given instance may be more specifically categorized as nepotism, sexism, racism, personality conflict, personal ambition, etc., but they all fall under the general umbrella of political considerations. Upper management just wants a broad overview of the project, with greater precision only if the added information will lead to a substantially improved and more useful understanding of the current state of affairs for someone at their level.
Note that the same phrase can be seen as irresponsible for an any given employee to use for several reasons. E.g., the employee does not (or is not believed to) have access to enough information to understand the larger goals of the organization, let alone evaluate his division/department/team's direction in relation to the aforementioned goals, or that comment may be suspect as being politically motivated itself (e.g., to knock down a rival for a promotion/raise). In fact, unless the employee has established trust with the recipient(s) of the report, then the recipient has no way to responsibly utilize it. Is it valid, or simply the work of someone with a personal vendetta? Thus, even if the report is factually correct and well-researched, it may still be a waste of both the employee's and the recipient's time.
In short, the fact that producing such a report might have dire and unproductive consequences for an employee has no bearing on the usefulness or value of such a report produced by a qualified consultant hired specifically to do so. Evaluating a report produced by the latter against the standards that apply to the former is pointless.
looks like you never ate one banana that got ripen on the tree. It is much sweeter and tastes much better.
What variety are you referring to? The opposite is true for all 3 varieties that I've had growing in my yard for over a decade. The bananas are less sweet and much more tart if left to ripen on the tree.
What you say about the birds, however, is sadly all too true.
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That is a problem with MyISAM tables, which only do table-level locking. PostgreSQL will do row-level locking with concurrent write transactions, so you would only 'deadlock' if both transactions modified the same row.
If you'll be writing to the same tables with concurrent write transactions and you have to use MySQL, you should consider using InnoDB tables instead, which do allow row-level locking, but also come with their own quirks, so a bit of research is advised before committing to that solution.
For concurrent read and write transactions, PostgreSQL has Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), as do InnoDB tables, so there should theoretically be no locking of read-only transactions due to write transactions in progress. That being said, InnoDB MVCC will only work if all your tables are controlled by the InnoDB table handler, which, due to the quirks alluded to above (including severe performance penalties in some situations) may make that requirement a deal-breaker.
As always, you have to have a good understanding of both your application's requirements and the tools available in order to make the right decision.
Yes, they absolutely own the copyright if the terms of your employment make the software you write on the job a work for hire (almost certainly the case unless you have an explicit exception in your employment contract).
They also cannot legally violate the GPL, but they will not even if they keep the source unpublished as long as they provide the source code with any binary distribution to another party.
The key here is that the GPL does not force you to distribute the source unless you distribute the binaries--and even then, you only need to provide the source to the people to whom you distributed the binaries.
On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
--Charles Babbage
Sorry for the delay between posts, but I only get to check /. infrequently these days.
Lappe and Baily are not technically wrong because they qualified their argument with 'could', not 'will'.
The canonical basis for their argument is something like the Flavr Savr tomato. What happened in that case was a biotech company with no traditional plant breeding experience employed a very early and expensive GM transformation process to a single variety of tomato (which, incidentally, happened to suck). Because of the development expenses and lack of understanding of the market, they only developed that one variety, hence a lack of genetic diversity of flavr savr tomatoes.
Taking a step back to explain, I'll start with the fact that all transgenes on the market in field crops today do not actually impact the quality of the product to the consumer at all. They don't make them taste better, look better, more nutritious, etc. This is actually largely due to regulatory reasons, as the FDA has much more stringent testing requirements if a product is actually supposed to impact the consumer as opposed to lighter restrictions if you can prove that there is no interaction intended or in practice (e.g., BT transgenic crops produce a protein that does not interact with animal digestive systems at all (and that organic farmers actually spray on their crops, incidentally)). All current field crop transgenes make the production process cheaper, more energy efficient, etc.
Anyway, in effect, transgenes basically add on a feature to an existing variety, leaving all other traits of that variety unmodified. If you added the round-up ready transgene to the red delicious apple variety, they would taste exactly like normal red delicious apples. As far as the consumer was concerned, there would be no discernable difference (unless you had a genetic or protein analysis lab at your disposal).
If you're a developer of apple varieties, and you wanted to offer your full lineup with transgenics, you would have to add the genes to every single variety of apple separately.
Development of varieties of a crop, and development and integration of transgenes into a crop, are basically two separate processes.
Due to current technological limitations, market pressures, regulatory requirements, and other business factors, transgenes are used for single-gene qualitative traits (e.g., herbicide/insect resistance) rather than quantitative ones (e.g., yield).
As if this post weren't long enough, let me use a car analogy:
Traditional breeding is like developing new cars. You use better manufacturing techniques, materials, and refined aesthetic focus to improve model lines or even come out with new line altogether.
Transgenics are like developing accessories that will fit a wide variety of vehicles, such as stereos, A/C systems, power steering, etc.
The Flavr Savr guys made the mistake of thinking that their transgene would singlehandedly ensure success despite the fact that they used a crap variety as the base of their product. It was comparable to OnStar thinking their system is so awesome that they could throw it into a Pinto and it'd sell like hotcakes even though it would be competing with similarly priced BMWs.
Lappe and Baily's argument is essentially based on the premise that all companies offering transgenes will ignore Calgene's mistake and repeat it blindly. Companies have done many stupid things, so this is not entirely unthinkable, but it is hardly likely and has not happened in practice.
Compared to transgenics, the advent of hybrids and commercial production farming have caused a decline in genetic diversity to a much larger extent. They have also caused orders of magnitude greater production, without which we would have been suffering global famine since the 60s, so it is something to weigh against the potential risks: narrowing the genetic diversity of production field crops is actually preventing global famine right now, but could also potentially contribute to widespread crop failure in the future.
Genetically modified corn isn't any different than non-GM corn except for the presence of the transgene, and contains the same minor genetic variations you'd find in any field of hybrid corn. The seed is propagated the same way as other corn, as cloning is simply too expensive for production use.
Other methods, like doubling haploids, can be used to create genetically identical populations, but those methods are not specific to transgenic material at all.
I personally think that the PVPA and related enforcement laws are messed up, and that Monsanto are a bunch of assholes, but you are conflating issues here.
A small amount of contamination in plants will not result in RR plants dominating the population as they did on Schmeiser's farm. Had he simply indiscriminately saved seed, the gene would have only been present at trace levels, or possibly been eliminated from the population without continued selection pressure favoring the gene.
In short, the only way his farm could come to be dominated by RR plants in that time frame was for him to deliberately select for RR plants.
Had he been honest he might have said 'yeah, I took those plants but I disagree with the laws that allow the patenting of plant varieties, so I don't recognize their legitimacy, especially because I was not responsible for the initial plants contaminating my farm'.
Instead he lied.
Is the law unjust? In my opinion, yes. Was Schmeiser guilty of deliberately propagating unlicensed seed? Yes. The two are not mutually exclusive.
None of those have anything to do with farmers' crops being contaminated with the terminator gene (hint: because it never happened).
The problem with this statement is that we can't keep some of that Monsanto corn to plant next year, the same way we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
It's the law (look up the PVPA of 1970) that prevents'you from re-planting, not the fact that it's GM.
Speaking as someone working in the industry, I would say that your argument is based on an impossible premise. There can be no 'one perfect set of corn' world-wide because there is too much environmental diversity. The 'perfect' variety is specific to a given environment, so you will see as many varieties as there are environmental conditions.
In fact, as the market matures, genetic diversity of GM crops continues to increase.
Essentially, in the early stages of commercialization of GM crops, the transformation and development process was far too expensive relative to the projected market size to apply to all but a few of the prize lines of corn, soya, etc. Now that competition has increased and the development processes have been refined and costs reduced, instead of 2 or 3 lines with a given GM trait, you get thousands, and that number is just getting larger.
Not. There are numerous non-GM techniques to induce sterility.
1) Depends on orbital altitude over the theatre of operations. Low (enough) latency links can be accomplished with sats if you're willing to spend money on a satellite constellation of sufficient density to allow for full coverage of the area with low altitude sats. Considerably lower latency than a Hawaiian quake player would experience on a west coast server is possible.
2) Yes, but that is neither an unsolvable nor unsolved problem.
I would also look at Scala. Shares Groovy's strength of transparent Java interoperability, but opts for a radical departure in language design and concepts (for the better, IMHO).
Since you seem genuinely interested, I'll continue replying even though this article is dead.
That's quite the assumption you're making. Millions of acres go fallow every year in the US. Why do you suppose it's necessary to achieve comparable yields versus simply activating more cropland? Not to mention taking advantage of things like hydroponic techniques.
If lower densities and expansion of production land are both acceptable, conventional methods will also be runoff-free. All other things being equal, nutrient runoff issues are mainly a function of application density, regardless of source.
As for hydroponics and the fallowed farmland in the US, the reason they're both not used as complete replacement is economics, which is a good indicator of sustainability in this instance. Neither of the above is a significant value-add for a consumer, so the only significant differences between current practices and those are production costs.
Hydroponics is extremely resource-intensive, but can support unparalleled production density.
The fallowed ground in the US that you refer to is considered marginal, which means that while it is within the means of modern agronomics to grow a crop on the land, the resource cost would be too great. I.e., mineral issues, such as ultra-high magnesium content require very expensive amendments, or water accessibility issues (e.g., nearest source is a 700' deep well to an unreliable aquifer), etc.
we're talking about sustainable, here, not necessarily cheap.
The issue here is that when you talk about sustainability, you first have to define your resource constraints. Exactly what do you mean by 'sustainable'? Under what conditions, and given what assumptions?
Hydroponics is more sustainable on something like a space station, or in the middle of an urban center, because space is at a much higher premium than energy.
If, on the other hand, you live in someplace like the midwest, land is far, far cheaper than the power and facilities required for hydroponics, so conventional farming is the most sustainable.
With respect to sustainability, the choice between conventional agriculture and organic implies enormous differences between resource constraint models. In most cases, we have a choice as to which model to follow, rather than having one imposed on us by nature or the laws of physics, and that choice reflects differences in ideological values and priorities.
In the extreme, hunting and gathering is sustainable if we are willing to accept the constraint of ultra low population density and reversion to a very low-tech society.
Interestingly, I see you didn't really address the fertilizer issue. Do you know if "organic" farming tends to use the same volume of fertilizers as traditional farming? One of the big problems with traditional farming is the runoff of large volumes of fertilizer into lakes and river, which causes all sorts of damage due to algae blooms, etc. It'd be interesting to know if "organic" farms are any more sustainable in that regard.
In order to get yields comparable to conventional methods using organic methods you'd need to amend the soil with the same amount of nutrients. The differences are only in the sources of those nutrients. Typical organic sources like manure will still result in runoff under the same conditions as non-organic fertilizers. Also, as I mentioned in a separate branch of the thread, cheap manure fertilizer is often a byproduct of non-organic production.
do you work for ... Monstanto?
Hell. No.
And, if you do buy from a particular farmer, they are the ones getting your money, not say, Cargill.
Even if you don't buy from the farmer directly, the farmer is still paid (very well in today's market, unless they mismanage their operation).
I could go on to attack the rest of your points, but as far as I can tell, your running theme is that what's happening today is not only OK, but actually the best it can actually be. Which seems pretty far fetched.
That is most definitely not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that 'organic' != 'sustainable' in any literal sense unless you:
There are many ways we can improve farming methods, and we're actively researching drought tolerance, nitrogen deficiency tolerance, etc., to lower input requirements on the plant side, as well as refining precision Ag technology and advances in mechanical engineering to make the processing/production side more efficient.
Saying you want to be 'sustainable', therefore you want to only use organic production methods is like saying you want energy independence, except you don't want to use solar (PV cell manufacture has toxic byproducts), windmills (think of the birds!), hydro-electric (think of the fish!), nuclear (think of the waste!--because we won't allow reprocessing (think of the terrorists!)), or geothermal (think of our heritage!). You have to prioritize. If terrorists scare you more than nuclear waste, or nuclear energy scares you more than energy dependence, that's perfectly fine, but it is crucial to realize that you're making a choice about the ordering of your priorities. So it is with organic farming and sustainability.
Many of the proponents of the former feel that their cause is justified in deliberately conflating it with other causes (health, sustainability, religion (this one is big in the genetic modification debate), class warfare and anti-corporatism, IP law, etc.) because they think that it will advance their own, so confusion on this is common.
If you study the issue of sustainability, you will quickly see that there are no simple or easy answers. It is hard enough to get people to agree on a definition. E.g., 'Sustainable means we can support population growth until all societies advance socio-economically and presumably reach voluntary population peak' vs. 'The definition of sustainability must include an internationally-enforced limit on global population levels dictated by production and distribution capacity as restricted by a hard cap on Ag land expansion and maximum total carbon output to preserve the environment'. Any given definition reflects a different set of priorities.
The bottom line is that with respect to sustainability, it is not at all obvious or necessarily likely that organic farming is even a step in the right direction.
Organic means natural, sustainable methods and growing and harvesting crops in the right seasons. In fact, it is not a luxury when it comes to convenience. Organic produce means you can only have right crop in the right months.
Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong. There are two points in particular that are mistaken.
The first is that the conflation of geographic location with organic production. Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce. Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production.
In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain.
In addition to non-optimal local growing conditions requiring more energy, smaller, local food producers almost always burn more energy per unit of produce than larger operations even in the same geographic region because large producers lower the marginal energy cost of production with economies of scale. Japan is an excellent case study of exactly this effect, as its market regulations strongly bias the market to smaller less efficient regional producers, causing the price of food to be significantly higher than it otherwise would be due to higher production costs.
Geographic proximity is absolutely not a reliable indicator of relative energy consumption
As for organic farming being 'sustainable', all it is is substituting human labor, land (production densities must be much lower to avoid pest population buildup), and excess energy (e.g., using a propane torch to kill weeds by application of heat, or more tillage passes to mechanically weed fields) for chemical and fertilizer use. Human labor is anything but cheap energy-wise, unless you're talking about basically slaves who were raised from childhood on an extremely low energy budget, and who are not afforded any of the luxuries of the society for whom they are producing the food.
You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?
Before we had those things, population centers around the world (e.g., Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, etc.) were on the verge of an epic famine and the most extensive die-off of humanity this side of WWIII. A larger portion of agricultural lands were then also comprised of regularly cleared slash-n-burn fields fertilized by the ashes of the forest for a few years before the soil was depleted and more land needed to be cleared.
The only argument that can have merit is the health issue, but that varies significantly by specific grower practice. Proper use of pesticides as per the label is proven to be safe, but it's unfortunately not unheard of for growers to misuse them, both knowingly and unknowingly. Likewise, many organic farmers improperly compost their organic fertilizers and put consumers at higher risk of bacterial contamination. In both cases we have government regulatory agencies watching for infractions, and they generally do a good job of keeping us remarkably safe compared to pre-green revolution days.
I've traveled through the Kansai area, including Osaka and Kyoto, with large backpacks and roll-away luggage with a much bigger combined footprint than the largest winglet, let alone the two smaller models.
Granted you said Shinjuku, but I doubt that the size would be a major impediment in almost any area except the busiest parts of the largest cities during rush hours.
With its aging population and far more emphasis on walking than driving, Japan is the perfect market for this device.
The lower speed makes it less likely to be a nuisance/danger on the ubiquitous and heavily trafficked sidewalks and walking paths.
Also, even the largest model will fit comfortably on most trains and subway lines, making it useful for shopping/errand runs that include a segment on a mass transit system.
Those two features alone give it a fighting chance.
PageRank is either an algorithm or heuristic, and thus as firmly grounded in math as LZW, software FFT implementations, etc.
... + software!'. No innovation, or even minor evolution/refinement of the core principle.
One-Click is a business process which should be patented as such, completely separate from software. I.e., a means of signaling intent to purchase a specified item and execute the purchase using previously supplied information with a single action. It is easily (if not exactly cost-effectively) implemented as a system where you point at any item you want in a store, and a clerk runs up and bags it for you and charges it against your previously established credit account. No software in sight. In fact, this was how some of the earlier stores were run way back in the day.
The problem with many (not all, but many) software patents is that they are 'old thing with 100+ year prior art
Also, probably because software engineering is a relatively new/esoteric field, people have managed to confuse patent clerks enough to get away with patenting ends rather than means. This is basically the difference between patenting the physical characteristics and operating principles of a wheel vs patenting 'reducing the energy required to transport mass'. The former is patentable (prior art notwithstanding) while the latter is not. The problem is that patent clerks seem to have more trouble than usual distinguishing between the two when software is involved.
Another one to look at is Scala. Learned from Java's mistakes and still manages basically seamless integration with Java, which is a huge win.
You make compromises to achieve your goals, not compromise your goals in order to make them achievable.
You're completely misunderstanding Sun Tzu's point. The point is not that the military should be involved in all aspects of society (in this case, 'influence operations'), but that wars are begun and the outcome largely determined before armies get involved. I.e., the importance of the recognition that politics, economics, etc., are not only legitimate, but critical 'theaters' for 'war by other means'.
This won't really help you out, but the problem you have here is that the pre-existing class hierarchy is screwed up in the first place (granted, I'm only working with your very brief description here).
What you should have instead are classes implementing: table view, table data model, selection model. They are orthogonal concepts that do not belong in the same class. Want pagination? use a paginating view. Row-level instead of cell-level selection? Use a difference selection model. Etc.
Mashing orthogonal concepts together means that soon you'll need a row_select_paginating_db_cursor_backed_table, a cell_select_vector_table, a row_select_paginating_arraylist_table, etc.
Essentially, your situation is a poster child for anti-MI arguments. The usual suspect for a design like the one you've described is that the original author leaned on MI as a crutch that either prevented him from (or allowed him to avoid) learning better OO design practice. It's a catch 22. You need MI to mitigate the damage of a bad design most probably caused by reliance on MI.
Maybe if you were the PM. Absolutely not if you are a consultant in the author's position. Upper management is not interested in semantic nitpicking. If no one has on hand an accurate, up-to-date comprehensive status report, or the ability and data on hand to immediately produce such a report, then for the intents and purposes of an external audit, project cannot be outlined.
The quoted statement, as well as all of your other posts in this thread have consistently demonstrated that you have a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of the article's author. He is not there to fix the project. Not even necessarily to suggest potential solutions. Consultants in that position are hired purely to look at things and 'tell it like it is'. If 'political considerations'[1] are a significant roadblock to progress or success, the report should reflect that in plain language.
Consultants in such a position can and will say things that would get normal employees fired or blacklisted because the people they are evaluating have no immediate power over their careers, which is exactly why they are valuable and why the function cannot be effectively performed in-house in most organizations.
[1] - In the context of these types of reports, 'political considerations' is a commonly-used and well-understood term that is used to express the fact that the goals of the people in question are both generally out of alignment with and given precedence over the goals of the organization. Any given instance may be more specifically categorized as nepotism, sexism, racism, personality conflict, personal ambition, etc., but they all fall under the general umbrella of political considerations. Upper management just wants a broad overview of the project, with greater precision only if the added information will lead to a substantially improved and more useful understanding of the current state of affairs for someone at their level.
Note that the same phrase can be seen as irresponsible for an any given employee to use for several reasons. E.g., the employee does not (or is not believed to) have access to enough information to understand the larger goals of the organization, let alone evaluate his division/department/team's direction in relation to the aforementioned goals, or that comment may be suspect as being politically motivated itself (e.g., to knock down a rival for a promotion/raise). In fact, unless the employee has established trust with the recipient(s) of the report, then the recipient has no way to responsibly utilize it. Is it valid, or simply the work of someone with a personal vendetta? Thus, even if the report is factually correct and well-researched, it may still be a waste of both the employee's and the recipient's time.
In short, the fact that producing such a report might have dire and unproductive consequences for an employee has no bearing on the usefulness or value of such a report produced by a qualified consultant hired specifically to do so. Evaluating a report produced by the latter against the standards that apply to the former is pointless.
What variety are you referring to? The opposite is true for all 3 varieties that I've had growing in my yard for over a decade. The bananas are less sweet and much more tart if left to ripen on the tree.
What you say about the birds, however, is sadly all too true.