There comes a point where quantitative increases in an activity qualitatively change that activity. The USA has gone well beyond that point in its spying and snooping.
The NSA database is an open invitation to abuse. Sooner or later, lists will be compiled from these databases to be sold to corporations or used by political action groups, or vigilantes, next year's equivalent of the KKK, some "church" like the Scientologists to harrass their foes, or the highly moral Catholic Church to smother their latest child abuse scandal. It does not matter what the intentions of those who have set up the NSA database might be. What matters is that no human institution, not even churches with their emphasis on moral principles, is secure against the abuses that those without ethical constraints will inflict on the innocent given the opportunity and the possibility of some kind of profit, or some way to avoid a disturbance in the smooth pleasures of their lives.
The NSA database provides the opportunity for all kinds of abuse to be made by those with no moral encumbrances. The NSA has less capability of screening its database operatives for moral integrity than the Catholic Church has always had in screening its Bishops. That database is going to be abused.
Consider this: If Snowden at his low level of access could have garnered so much data, then how likely is it that someone with an even lower level of clearance could build a list of individuals who have had email contacts with cancer clinics? And how much would that list be worth to an insurance broker who wanted to exclude higher risk customers?
The NSA and any other rogue instruments of the USA government need to reigned in. Those civil servants who do not understand the commitment to upholding the USA Constitution need to be drummed out of office, if not sent to prison for violation of their oaths of office. Mechanisms may need to be created to prevent anything like this dangerous situation from happening again.
There is no excuse for creating this kind of terrible situation. The USA can survive any amount of terrorist activity: it is a strong country even though at times it seems like it is more concerned with safety than it is with liberty. But the USA cannot survive the corruption of its Constitution by elements within its Civil Service.
It seems the Europeans see a difference between the ancient and honorable spying of one government on another and wholesale invasion of every citizen's privacy. The USA has gone way beyond what has always been considered accepted practice.
If the EU does stop the PNR, I doubt it will affect air travel to the USA for very long. Too much of USA financial activities are tied up in airlines, and the airlines will not be profitable without the European routes. If the EU takes this step, it will force a conflict in the USA between profit mongers and security mongers. And in the USA, profit always trumps everything else.
The author of grandparent post got his words mixed up. There were other problems in that post as well. It was really a bit too shrill to be effective. His employer should spend a bit more, and hire a more competent shill next time.
Bullshit on that. If Snowden had not "fled", his story would have made the evening news and then been buried the next day. Before any of the messy details hit the press.
He did not "flee". He is running, like a clever fox rousing the countryside with the baying of the hounds that are chasing him. Whether he finds a safe haven or is torn apart by those hounds, he is doing the most he could do right now to keep the story alive, and get people to wake up and smell the stench of corruption in the USA permanent government.
Apparently the powers that be did not assess him correctly when they put him in Hawaii with that hooker they bought for him. It seems like he just was not interested in their kind of candy.
It definitely puts career civil servants at risk, and quite probably puts some politicians at risk. Hence the push to STFU Snowden.
If Snowden or Assange ever stumble into a situation where the USA would be able to bring them to trial, they are more likely to end up dead than in a USA courtroom. There are rogue elements within the USA government who would want that to happen, and they may well have the means to make it so.
It seems like an easy way to assure the steg could not be identified (let alone extracted) would be to apply a steganographic mask first: using Method A for selecting pixels to alter, encode an entirely random text onto the image, then use Method B to encode the payload on the result.
I'm thinking that you would still want to use some form of encryption on the payload first.
Makes me wonder to what extent steg techniques are being used today.
Agree with parent: this is just silly, unless what is being sent is an image of the text. Not ASCII or any other binary encoding.
And if one was going to send images of secret messages, what would make more sense is to use steganography: put the message in image. Like probably millions of Internet users are doing already. How else can you explain the plethora of cute kitten pictures?
A point on which I'd like to see serious discussion by persons who know what they are talking about: How hard is it to determine whether any given image contains a steg message? Assuming the message is also encoded with something simple, like Playfair?
You have a very simplistic view of manufacture if you think Monsanto is using exactly the same equipment and processes as those they developed 40 years ago, and has never patented any part of their improved processing as they upgraded.
But then there have been other indications that your world is so much a simpler and happier place than the world I live in. I do not know how to make my fantasies as real as you have managed to do.
In any case, the information value of this thread has been exhausted. Thank you for playing.
While language is a medium of communication, jargons are media of highly specific communications between persons trained in the jargon. Jargons are not necessarily understandable by persons without the training, nor should they be. They are artificially constructed languages that say more with fewer words than could be done in the parent natural language.
Lawyer speak is one of the oldest jargons. At a guess, "tried to conclusion bid litigation" means something different to a lawyer than the meaning it suggests to a lay person. Perhaps it means he was the trial lawyer from the first filing on the case until the last appeal was exhausted.
So why would farmers buy it if it's not "as good a solution"?
Because Monsanto can offer marketplace incentives that can offset the poorer crop economics of their seed.
Farmers that hedge against possible drought by planting a portion of their acreage in a lower yield drought resistant corn while putting the rest in Roundup Ready corn can benefit from bulk discounts if they buy all their seed from Monsanto. Monsanto can also offer other incentives to buying their seed over regionally developed alternatives, in the same way that Walmart can drive smaller, more specialized stores out of business. Regional seed producers are by nature too small to compete with a global producer like Monsanto, and the non-Monsanto strains of drought resistant corn will gradually disappear as those seed farmers turn to raising crops that have a broader market.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the Roundup herbicides are complex mixtures of glyphosphates with adjuvants that are sometimes more poisonous than the glyphosphates themselves. The farmer cannot buy a pure glyphosphate, a pure surfactant, and the various other agents and mix his own blend in a corner of the cow barn. He can only do limited research on the various pre-mixed combination products that he can find on the Internet. And he has limited time to spend on this research: he has to be out working his fields. So Monsanto's large advertising budget can carry the day.
Yes, the principle ingredient in Roundup went off-patent more than 10 years ago. Monsanto holds patents on the mechanisms, processes, and specific formulations used to produce the various Roundup poisons. I understand that Monsanto says about half of its revenues come from Roundup and associated products (I think that includes the Roundup Ready seeds, too.)
The literature Monsanto provides on using Roundup on Roundup Ready fields is specific to Monsanto products. That is, you plant with Roundup Ready corn, then you can either buy the right type of Roundup to use on that field or you can try to figure out what concentrations, surfactants, other additives you could use if you buy your poison from one of Monsanto's competitors. In some cases the use of specific Roundup poisons is apparently specified in the licensing contract on the seed (the same contract that states that the farmer cannot harvest seed for another year's crop from his Roundup Ready fields).
Monsanto is developing drought resistant rice through selective breeding, which will compete with 4 or 5 other drought resistant strains of rice already developed in other countries. There are no stories about Monsanto doing any drought resistant GM rice. If it was happening, Monsanto would be blowing its horn about it. So parent post is factually wrong on this one.
Monsanto has gained approval to market a drought resistant GMO corn. The only thing is, it is not any better than strains of drought resistant corn already on the market, developed at agricultural colleges to meet the specific conditions of various areas. The Monsanto GMO corn is not as good a solution as the strains that have been bred for each region. Monsanto's long term goal is to probably combine "Round Up Ready" GMO corn with GMO drought resistant corn and drive all other strains out of the market. That will ensure an increase in the flow of Round Up, which is one of Monsanto's biggest revenue streams. (What Round Up can do to a trout streams is something else again.)
There has been a noticeable increase in Bt resistant pests in areas where Monsanto GM Bt crops have been grown. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that not much research on this "aberration" is being funded.
Aren't you the little Monsanto fanboi. But your post does provide a convenient place to air some of the other problems that are associated with Monsanto's exploitive business practices.
It's all about selling more Round Up. Since the GMO plants are resistant to it. That it involves plant sales is only a logistical device; the strategy is to get everyone everywhere to put Round Up on all their acreage.
Later on, Monsanto will buy the rights to the Miracle Grow trade name. And develop a line of chemicals that can be sprayed on all the ecosystems to help them recover from the mysterious global ecosystem diseases.
Monsanto Round Up, and Monsanto Miracle Grow. The stuff our surviving grandkids will be able to rely on to help them get to the 22nd century.
Those "highly favorable traits" are resistance to the herbicides that Monsanto also sells. For every USA acre sown with their GMO corn they can be sure of selling an appropriate amount of Round Up to treat that acreage at least a couple of times.
The foreign markets will be more lucrative, though. Many countries in South America, Africa, and elsewhere do not have the regulatory mechanisms to assure that no more than a certain amount of Round Up is applied, and that it is only applied when the weather is good for keeping it on the cultivated fields. That means that Monsanto will be able to sell much more Round Up per acre to these foreign users, who can splash it around like holy water. If the morning's dose gets washed into the streams by the afternoon's rains, what the heck, it doesn't cost that much to just spray the fields again the next day.
Of course the ecosystem does not have the genes to protect itself from Round Up. But since the effects of poisoning it will not show up until after the fatter end of year bonuses to the Monsanto's executives, there is no reason for this company not to push their GMO products AND their wonderful herbicides.
There is a whiff of corruption about the USA State Department now. I am really surprised and disappointed that John Kerry is involved in this. I thought he had more sense.
Why would you want to introduce new errors? Wouldn't that just give your corrected pirated copy it's own unique fingerprint?
Precisely right! Copies with unique fingerprints that do not match any of the publisher's records! Should help drive them further 'round the bend.
On a more pragmatic note, it is likely that the proofreading pirate would miss some of the errors of the publisher's fingerprint, perhaps enough that the publisher's sniffer would still be able to identify who bought the copy that was copied. By introducing some more errors, the pirate introduces false leads that end up going nowhere. The sniffer will have a harder time identifying which copy was copied.
End result: rather than a prosecutor being able to say "the fingerprint is conclusive evidence that the copy bought by J. Doe is the one the pirate used", all he would be able to say is "there is a 70% match between the pirated version and the copy that was sold to J. Doe", whereupon the Court would have to decide how much of an imperfect matchup was sufficient evidence?
Thanks for clarifying. I was misremembering the Quebec Route 366 / Banfield Expressway goof and confusing it with another goof (not Google) of a photo caption that had put an approach to the Fremont Bridge (in Portland) on Soldiers Field Road (in Boston). Silly me.
I never thought about how errors needed to be inserted into maps so they could be copyrighted. Wow.
I wonder if this is the reason why Google maps of Portland Oregon sometimes label the Banfield Expressway as "Soldiers Field Drive", which is in Boston Massachusetts. The errors seem to come and go, and seem to be limited to road names that are also identified by route numbers.
There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type would be enough to confound any attempt to make a positive identification of the source.
This approach has an incredibly high bogosity factor. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry with half a brain who would spend any money on its implementation... Oh wait. We are talking about the partially brain dead idjits who thought DRM was the best thing since sliced bread....
If I was going to do this, I would probably also play with the kerning to force some repagination, add some space characters before the newline at the end of some paragraphs, and so on. This approach to DRM is about as simple to get around as using a black magic marker on the edge of an "uncopyable" CD disk.
If this is medical school is in the USA, you and your fellow students are undergoing a very thorough indoctrination in the appropriate use of clinical detachment. Those who cannot handle that skill set rarely finish the course.
Actually I'm trolling. I'm trying to get some members of the biologic research community to do a little self-examination. I don't know much about the subject, but here is what I do know (now that I have been pushed into articulating it):
1. We are doing more biological research with what are basically 19th century approaches involving the death, pain, and mutilation of animals than we need to be doing. We do not know how much more (which is covered in greater detail in point 3)
2. To do this, we are training grad students, lab techs, and sometimes undergrads who need a biology credit in the intensive use of the ego defense mechanisms of "clinical objectivity" or "clinical detachment." Which is also the conscious suppression of normal human empathy. There is little to no screening done beforehand to determine if these persons have the emotional maturity and self-insight to limit the use of these mechanisms to the biology lab. There is no follow-up of these individuals; not even the ones who are given their walking papers because they are too unbalanced to do the work properly. Yet the clinical detachment that is needed to handle lab animals creates serious problems when it is used inappropriately in relationships, with children, in an office setting, among colleagues, etc.
3. No one in the biology research field is even seeing this as a problem. Despite the mass murders of the last few years, where the mechanisms of "clinical detachment" are taken to the pathological extreme. There is no discussion of whether it is time to start limiting training in these techniques, no discussion about how to reduce the number of individuals affected, there is not even an attempt to determine the scope of the problem. The closest is the USDA figures on the number of selected lab animals in active use in the USA: that is 1.3 million. But it excludes rats and mice and animals being bred for scientific use but not yet put to that use. The number of lab animals that lab techs and grad students are exposed to in this country has been estimated at between 10 and 50 million. But even with the 1.3 million figure, that is a large pool of persons being trained in the skills of clinical objectivity (with nothing being done to assure that they are capable of appropriately using those skills, or prevented from maybe obtaining a fully automatic rifle if they are not capable of policing their own psyches).
What seems to be necessary is to push the individuals in the biology research community into confronting the absurdity of their rationales and deliberate blindnesses, and get them looking for ways to move the research animal labs out of the 19th century and into the 21st century. Agitating for laws that would enforce limits upon the research communities seems to be necessary, just to get their attention.
Whether such laws are needed is a topic that is open for discussion. That the research community must be pushed into doing a scientific study on the effects of its practices on the psyches of its minions is definitely necessary.
Then these laws will not affect your research, or that of all the other biologists who have kept pace with technology, huh? They would probably only affect that small percentage of repetitious experimental work that is done by corporations seeking approval for new cosmetics, food additives, clothing treatments, and so on. What would that be? Only 90% of all the research that is being done today?
According to USDA, there were 1.1 million animals used in research in 2010 (the latest year of data). However although it breaks out dogs, cats, hamsters, and guinea pigs separately, it excludes the most common lab animals: rats and mice. It most certainly under reports in other areas, since the data are acquired only on the research that the USDA has responsibility for. Research on testing the efficacy of a possible drug that might eventually go on sale is definitely included, but screening studies to exclude candidate drugs that prove to be toxic probably is not. I have seen estimates that the actual number of animals used in all research is 10 to 50 times what the USDA reports, but these are from anti-vivesection groups, etc, so they have even less authority than the USDA numbers.
More significantly, the USDA numbers do not include animals that are involved in producing lab animals but are not directly used themselves. For instance when a strain of mice is developed for a specific trait, the young that do not exhibit that trait are destroyed, but that is not reflected in the USDA numbers. Cats, dogs, primates, and other subjects that are destroyed in developing techniques for implanting brain monitoring devices are not included.
The numbers of lab technicians and interns who are taught to disengage and suppress their normal emotional involvement with the animals they are handling significant. That "clinical detachment" is definitely an aberration from a healthy human psyche, and for that reason alone the use of animals in research needs to be as limited as possible. There are significant numbers of students who do not complete their training/education but who do learn how to turn off the normal human empathetic response when it gets in their way: that ability is part of the basis of terrorism and the kinds of mass shootings we have seen lately. We really don't need any more persons trained in that kind of "clinical detachment"; we need to curtail the number of persons we are exposing to this kind of training.
Are you and your colleagues actively involved in monitoring the use of laboratory animals? Can you provide more substantive data on how many are being used in the USA every year? If that is not the case, are you not a part of an ongoing problem?
Laws that encourage rethinking the research process are a good thing right now, as it is definitely the case that a lot of unnecessary and costly research is being done on animals when it could be done better using advanced technology. A key part of the problem is that too many of today's researchers are only trained in the techniques that were made elegant 100 years ago and naturally see the increasing use of newer technology as a threat to their way of life. It is much more than a threat to their livelihood: being able to work with the same animals for weeks or months or years while maintaining the necessary emotional distance ("clinical attitude") is an abnormal trait for human beings which at the very least limits the researcher's ability to actualize all of his potential. At worst, it provides him access to a pathological defense mechanism where he becomes capable of screwing the people around by adopting a clinical attitude toward them. These persons are not the ones most capable of properly shaping the future of research departments. External direction is going to be needed for a while.
Perhaps just agitating for laws that guide research labs will be enough pressure to get things moving in an appropriate direction. But without some kind of external pressure, the necessary changes will not happen as fast as they could, and should. We would end up continuing to move into the 21st century while dragging along the baggage of 18th and 19th century research methods.
No matter how you look at that, ethically, morally, or pragmatically, that is not good.
Slashdot Mirror
There comes a point where quantitative increases in an activity qualitatively change that activity. The USA has gone well beyond that point in its spying and snooping.
The NSA database is an open invitation to abuse. Sooner or later, lists will be compiled from these databases to be sold to corporations or used by political action groups, or vigilantes, next year's equivalent of the KKK, some "church" like the Scientologists to harrass their foes, or the highly moral Catholic Church to smother their latest child abuse scandal. It does not matter what the intentions of those who have set up the NSA database might be. What matters is that no human institution, not even churches with their emphasis on moral principles, is secure against the abuses that those without ethical constraints will inflict on the innocent given the opportunity and the possibility of some kind of profit, or some way to avoid a disturbance in the smooth pleasures of their lives.
The NSA database provides the opportunity for all kinds of abuse to be made by those with no moral encumbrances. The NSA has less capability of screening its database operatives for moral integrity than the Catholic Church has always had in screening its Bishops. That database is going to be abused.
Consider this: If Snowden at his low level of access could have garnered so much data, then how likely is it that someone with an even lower level of clearance could build a list of individuals who have had email contacts with cancer clinics? And how much would that list be worth to an insurance broker who wanted to exclude higher risk customers?
The NSA and any other rogue instruments of the USA government need to reigned in. Those civil servants who do not understand the commitment to upholding the USA Constitution need to be drummed out of office, if not sent to prison for violation of their oaths of office. Mechanisms may need to be created to prevent anything like this dangerous situation from happening again.
There is no excuse for creating this kind of terrible situation. The USA can survive any amount of terrorist activity: it is a strong country even though at times it seems like it is more concerned with safety than it is with liberty. But the USA cannot survive the corruption of its Constitution by elements within its Civil Service.
It seems the Europeans see a difference between the ancient and honorable spying of one government on another and wholesale invasion of every citizen's privacy. The USA has gone way beyond what has always been considered accepted practice.
If the EU does stop the PNR, I doubt it will affect air travel to the USA for very long. Too much of USA financial activities are tied up in airlines, and the airlines will not be profitable without the European routes. If the EU takes this step, it will force a conflict in the USA between profit mongers and security mongers. And in the USA, profit always trumps everything else.
s/consciousness objector /conscientious objector/
The author of grandparent post got his words mixed up. There were other problems in that post as well. It was really a bit too shrill to be effective. His employer should spend a bit more, and hire a more competent shill next time.
Bullshit on that. If Snowden had not "fled", his story would have made the evening news and then been buried the next day. Before any of the messy details hit the press.
He did not "flee". He is running, like a clever fox rousing the countryside with the baying of the hounds that are chasing him. Whether he finds a safe haven or is torn apart by those hounds, he is doing the most he could do right now to keep the story alive, and get people to wake up and smell the stench of corruption in the USA permanent government.
Apparently the powers that be did not assess him correctly when they put him in Hawaii with that hooker they bought for him. It seems like he just was not interested in their kind of candy.
It definitely puts career civil servants at risk, and quite probably puts some politicians at risk. Hence the push to STFU Snowden.
If Snowden or Assange ever stumble into a situation where the USA would be able to bring them to trial, they are more likely to end up dead than in a USA courtroom. There are rogue elements within the USA government who would want that to happen, and they may well have the means to make it so.
I think that the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights are a good package, and that the USA should use them.
It seems like an easy way to assure the steg could not be identified (let alone extracted) would be to apply a steganographic mask first: using Method A for selecting pixels to alter, encode an entirely random text onto the image, then use Method B to encode the payload on the result.
I'm thinking that you would still want to use some form of encryption on the payload first.
Makes me wonder to what extent steg techniques are being used today.
Agree with parent: this is just silly, unless what is being sent is an image of the text. Not ASCII or any other binary encoding.
And if one was going to send images of secret messages, what would make more sense is to use steganography: put the message in image. Like probably millions of Internet users are doing already. How else can you explain the plethora of cute kitten pictures?
A point on which I'd like to see serious discussion by persons who know what they are talking about: How hard is it to determine whether any given image contains a steg message? Assuming the message is also encoded with something simple, like Playfair?
You have a very simplistic view of manufacture if you think Monsanto is using exactly the same equipment and processes as those they developed 40 years ago, and has never patented any part of their improved processing as they upgraded.
But then there have been other indications that your world is so much a simpler and happier place than the world I live in. I do not know how to make my fantasies as real as you have managed to do.
In any case, the information value of this thread has been exhausted. Thank you for playing.
The information quotient in this thread is now bouncing on zero.
Thanks for playing.
It was lacking in cromulence, So it was not perfect. But it was understandable.
While language is a medium of communication, jargons are media of highly specific communications between persons trained in the jargon. Jargons are not necessarily understandable by persons without the training, nor should they be. They are artificially constructed languages that say more with fewer words than could be done in the parent natural language.
Lawyer speak is one of the oldest jargons. At a guess, "tried to conclusion bid litigation" means something different to a lawyer than the meaning it suggests to a lay person. Perhaps it means he was the trial lawyer from the first filing on the case until the last appeal was exhausted.
So why would farmers buy it if it's not "as good a solution"?
Because Monsanto can offer marketplace incentives that can offset the poorer crop economics of their seed.
Farmers that hedge against possible drought by planting a portion of their acreage in a lower yield drought resistant corn while putting the rest in Roundup Ready corn can benefit from bulk discounts if they buy all their seed from Monsanto. Monsanto can also offer other incentives to buying their seed over regionally developed alternatives, in the same way that Walmart can drive smaller, more specialized stores out of business. Regional seed producers are by nature too small to compete with a global producer like Monsanto, and the non-Monsanto strains of drought resistant corn will gradually disappear as those seed farmers turn to raising crops that have a broader market.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the Roundup herbicides are complex mixtures of glyphosphates with adjuvants that are sometimes more poisonous than the glyphosphates themselves. The farmer cannot buy a pure glyphosphate, a pure surfactant, and the various other agents and mix his own blend in a corner of the cow barn. He can only do limited research on the various pre-mixed combination products that he can find on the Internet. And he has limited time to spend on this research: he has to be out working his fields. So Monsanto's large advertising budget can carry the day.
Yes, the principle ingredient in Roundup went off-patent more than 10 years ago. Monsanto holds patents on the mechanisms, processes, and specific formulations used to produce the various Roundup poisons. I understand that Monsanto says about half of its revenues come from Roundup and associated products (I think that includes the Roundup Ready seeds, too.)
The literature Monsanto provides on using Roundup on Roundup Ready fields is specific to Monsanto products. That is, you plant with Roundup Ready corn, then you can either buy the right type of Roundup to use on that field or you can try to figure out what concentrations, surfactants, other additives you could use if you buy your poison from one of Monsanto's competitors. In some cases the use of specific Roundup poisons is apparently specified in the licensing contract on the seed (the same contract that states that the farmer cannot harvest seed for another year's crop from his Roundup Ready fields).
Monsanto is developing drought resistant rice through selective breeding, which will compete with 4 or 5 other drought resistant strains of rice already developed in other countries. There are no stories about Monsanto doing any drought resistant GM rice. If it was happening, Monsanto would be blowing its horn about it. So parent post is factually wrong on this one.
Monsanto has gained approval to market a drought resistant GMO corn. The only thing is, it is not any better than strains of drought resistant corn already on the market, developed at agricultural colleges to meet the specific conditions of various areas. The Monsanto GMO corn is not as good a solution as the strains that have been bred for each region. Monsanto's long term goal is to probably combine "Round Up Ready" GMO corn with GMO drought resistant corn and drive all other strains out of the market. That will ensure an increase in the flow of Round Up, which is one of Monsanto's biggest revenue streams. (What Round Up can do to a trout streams is something else again.)
There has been a noticeable increase in Bt resistant pests in areas where Monsanto GM Bt crops have been grown. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that not much research on this "aberration" is being funded.
Aren't you the little Monsanto fanboi. But your post does provide a convenient place to air some of the other problems that are associated with Monsanto's exploitive business practices.
It's all about selling more Round Up. Since the GMO plants are resistant to it. That it involves plant sales is only a logistical device; the strategy is to get everyone everywhere to put Round Up on all their acreage.
Later on, Monsanto will buy the rights to the Miracle Grow trade name. And develop a line of chemicals that can be sprayed on all the ecosystems to help them recover from the mysterious global ecosystem diseases.
Monsanto Round Up, and Monsanto Miracle Grow. The stuff our surviving grandkids will be able to rely on to help them get to the 22nd century.
Those "highly favorable traits" are resistance to the herbicides that Monsanto also sells. For every USA acre sown with their GMO corn they can be sure of selling an appropriate amount of Round Up to treat that acreage at least a couple of times.
The foreign markets will be more lucrative, though. Many countries in South America, Africa, and elsewhere do not have the regulatory mechanisms to assure that no more than a certain amount of Round Up is applied, and that it is only applied when the weather is good for keeping it on the cultivated fields. That means that Monsanto will be able to sell much more Round Up per acre to these foreign users, who can splash it around like holy water. If the morning's dose gets washed into the streams by the afternoon's rains, what the heck, it doesn't cost that much to just spray the fields again the next day.
Of course the ecosystem does not have the genes to protect itself from Round Up. But since the effects of poisoning it will not show up until after the fatter end of year bonuses to the Monsanto's executives, there is no reason for this company not to push their GMO products AND their wonderful herbicides.
There is a whiff of corruption about the USA State Department now. I am really surprised and disappointed that John Kerry is involved in this. I thought he had more sense.
Why would you want to introduce new errors? Wouldn't that just give your corrected pirated copy it's own unique fingerprint?
Precisely right! Copies with unique fingerprints that do not match any of the publisher's records! Should help drive them further 'round the bend.
On a more pragmatic note, it is likely that the proofreading pirate would miss some of the errors of the publisher's fingerprint, perhaps enough that the publisher's sniffer would still be able to identify who bought the copy that was copied. By introducing some more errors, the pirate introduces false leads that end up going nowhere. The sniffer will have a harder time identifying which copy was copied.
End result: rather than a prosecutor being able to say "the fingerprint is conclusive evidence that the copy bought by J. Doe is the one the pirate used", all he would be able to say is "there is a 70% match between the pirated version and the copy that was sold to J. Doe", whereupon the Court would have to decide how much of an imperfect matchup was sufficient evidence?
Thanks for clarifying. I was misremembering the Quebec Route 366 / Banfield Expressway goof and confusing it with another goof (not Google) of a photo caption that had put an approach to the Fremont Bridge (in Portland) on Soldiers Field Road (in Boston). Silly me.
I never thought about how errors needed to be inserted into maps so they could be copyrighted. Wow.
I wonder if this is the reason why Google maps of Portland Oregon sometimes label the Banfield Expressway as "Soldiers Field Drive", which is in Boston Massachusetts. The errors seem to come and go, and seem to be limited to road names that are also identified by route numbers.
There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type would be enough to confound any attempt to make a positive identification of the source.
This approach has an incredibly high bogosity factor. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry with half a brain who would spend any money on its implementation... Oh wait. We are talking about the partially brain dead idjits who thought DRM was the best thing since sliced bread....
If I was going to do this, I would probably also play with the kerning to force some repagination, add some space characters before the newline at the end of some paragraphs, and so on. This approach to DRM is about as simple to get around as using a black magic marker on the edge of an "uncopyable" CD disk.
If this is medical school is in the USA, you and your fellow students are undergoing a very thorough indoctrination in the appropriate use of clinical detachment. Those who cannot handle that skill set rarely finish the course.
Actually I'm trolling. I'm trying to get some members of the biologic research community to do a little self-examination. I don't know much about the subject, but here is what I do know (now that I have been pushed into articulating it):
1. We are doing more biological research with what are basically 19th century approaches involving the death, pain, and mutilation of animals than we need to be doing. We do not know how much more (which is covered in greater detail in point 3)
2. To do this, we are training grad students, lab techs, and sometimes undergrads who need a biology credit in the intensive use of the ego defense mechanisms of "clinical objectivity" or "clinical detachment." Which is also the conscious suppression of normal human empathy. There is little to no screening done beforehand to determine if these persons have the emotional maturity and self-insight to limit the use of these mechanisms to the biology lab. There is no follow-up of these individuals; not even the ones who are given their walking papers because they are too unbalanced to do the work properly. Yet the clinical detachment that is needed to handle lab animals creates serious problems when it is used inappropriately in relationships, with children, in an office setting, among colleagues, etc.
3. No one in the biology research field is even seeing this as a problem. Despite the mass murders of the last few years, where the mechanisms of "clinical detachment" are taken to the pathological extreme. There is no discussion of whether it is time to start limiting training in these techniques, no discussion about how to reduce the number of individuals affected, there is not even an attempt to determine the scope of the problem. The closest is the USDA figures on the number of selected lab animals in active use in the USA: that is 1.3 million. But it excludes rats and mice and animals being bred for scientific use but not yet put to that use. The number of lab animals that lab techs and grad students are exposed to in this country has been estimated at between 10 and 50 million. But even with the 1.3 million figure, that is a large pool of persons being trained in the skills of clinical objectivity (with nothing being done to assure that they are capable of appropriately using those skills, or prevented from maybe obtaining a fully automatic rifle if they are not capable of policing their own psyches).
What seems to be necessary is to push the individuals in the biology research community into confronting the absurdity of their rationales and deliberate blindnesses, and get them looking for ways to move the research animal labs out of the 19th century and into the 21st century. Agitating for laws that would enforce limits upon the research communities seems to be necessary, just to get their attention.
Whether such laws are needed is a topic that is open for discussion. That the research community must be pushed into doing a scientific study on the effects of its practices on the psyches of its minions is definitely necessary.
Good for you!
Then these laws will not affect your research, or that of all the other biologists who have kept pace with technology, huh? They would probably only affect that small percentage of repetitious experimental work that is done by corporations seeking approval for new cosmetics, food additives, clothing treatments, and so on. What would that be? Only 90% of all the research that is being done today?
According to USDA, there were 1.1 million animals used in research in 2010 (the latest year of data). However although it breaks out dogs, cats, hamsters, and guinea pigs separately, it excludes the most common lab animals: rats and mice. It most certainly under reports in other areas, since the data are acquired only on the research that the USDA has responsibility for. Research on testing the efficacy of a possible drug that might eventually go on sale is definitely included, but screening studies to exclude candidate drugs that prove to be toxic probably is not. I have seen estimates that the actual number of animals used in all research is 10 to 50 times what the USDA reports, but these are from anti-vivesection groups, etc, so they have even less authority than the USDA numbers.
More significantly, the USDA numbers do not include animals that are involved in producing lab animals but are not directly used themselves. For instance when a strain of mice is developed for a specific trait, the young that do not exhibit that trait are destroyed, but that is not reflected in the USDA numbers. Cats, dogs, primates, and other subjects that are destroyed in developing techniques for implanting brain monitoring devices are not included.
The numbers of lab technicians and interns who are taught to disengage and suppress their normal emotional involvement with the animals they are handling significant. That "clinical detachment" is definitely an aberration from a healthy human psyche, and for that reason alone the use of animals in research needs to be as limited as possible. There are significant numbers of students who do not complete their training/education but who do learn how to turn off the normal human empathetic response when it gets in their way: that ability is part of the basis of terrorism and the kinds of mass shootings we have seen lately. We really don't need any more persons trained in that kind of "clinical detachment"; we need to curtail the number of persons we are exposing to this kind of training.
Are you and your colleagues actively involved in monitoring the use of laboratory animals? Can you provide more substantive data on how many are being used in the USA every year? If that is not the case, are you not a part of an ongoing problem?
Laws that encourage rethinking the research process are a good thing right now, as it is definitely the case that a lot of unnecessary and costly research is being done on animals when it could be done better using advanced technology. A key part of the problem is that too many of today's researchers are only trained in the techniques that were made elegant 100 years ago and naturally see the increasing use of newer technology as a threat to their way of life. It is much more than a threat to their livelihood: being able to work with the same animals for weeks or months or years while maintaining the necessary emotional distance ("clinical attitude") is an abnormal trait for human beings which at the very least limits the researcher's ability to actualize all of his potential. At worst, it provides him access to a pathological defense mechanism where he becomes capable of screwing the people around by adopting a clinical attitude toward them. These persons are not the ones most capable of properly shaping the future of research departments. External direction is going to be needed for a while.
Perhaps just agitating for laws that guide research labs will be enough pressure to get things moving in an appropriate direction. But without some kind of external pressure, the necessary changes will not happen as fast as they could, and should. We would end up continuing to move into the 21st century while dragging along the baggage of 18th and 19th century research methods.
No matter how you look at that, ethically, morally, or pragmatically, that is not good.