By this, are you saying that Japan is stealing our labor and capital by manufacturing and selling cars?
No, not unless they're also stealing the materials and kidnapping the laborers in US plants to do it...
While I'm in agreement with the general trend of 'what the heck does the US think its DOING?' theme in the comments of this story, the US Government's complaint seems to have been about illegal copying and reselling of US-produced titles, not about Ukrainian software developers writing and selling their own software...
I saw first hand a huge amount of blind ignorance and arrogance when it comes to anything beyond your borders.
This is not a uniquely "American" thing by any stretch...
I recently had someone from the UK (who, as you may recall, used to be in charge of the US) ask me if anything important had happened in the US in 1776....
Sure, maybe it's referred to differently elsewhere in the world ("The uppity colony uprising?"), but really... "Did anything important happen in Russia in 1918?" "Did anything important happen in Japan in 1945?" "Did anything important happen in Britain in 1066?".....The point isn't 'Gosh, that person in the UK sure was ignorant' - just that not being real aware of what goes on outside of one's own little world is a worldwide phenomenon.
Realize also that the US is primarily big and powerful due to economic reasons. Quit giving US corporations your money and perhaps this problem will fade...(How many of your governments and other corporations buy their software from US corporations? Or license expensive US patents? Or import US goods?)
Now _this_ was news to me. I'd like to see this proven or debunked. Is this software driven, or done by drives' firmware when a burn is started? Is there any way to disable this?
I didn't know about this, either....
For that matter, is there a way for me to READ this serial number from a CD?
Re:Ahh! Monsanto! Makers of Aspertame/Nutrisweet
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
But really how much methanal is being formed? Surely it can't be that much?
Put it this way - Aspartame is a tiny bit of protein, made up of the amino acids Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid. If this produces traces of methanal as a by-product of metabolism, ANY source of protein (including 'organic beans and rice' and other such things) will do the same.
Incidentally, Nutrasweet, IN SUFFICIENTLY LARGE QUANTITIES, may very well affect brain chemistry - The essential amino acid Phenylalanine is a precursor to dopamine-related neurotransmitters. I somehow doubt that the tiny traces of Phenylalanine in normal amounts of Nutrasweet would be noticeable, but you might have a problem if you're eating a kilogram per day of the stuff....
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
There is no reason to use genetics to boost vitamin content in foods if it is grown properly (read: organic farming).
That's not automatically true - 'organic food' seems to cost significantly more than 'regular' food. If one is wealthy this price difference doesn't matter, but for poorer folks who are more in need of good nutrition, this is an issue.
In theory, it wouldn't be too difficult to splice in a gene to get a vegetable to generate 'complete' nutritional proteins (i.e. containing ALL essential amino acids in useful quantities). While living entirely off of, say, and endless array of dishes based on genetically-engineered 'complete protein' soybeans wouldn't be a lot of FUN, at least a poor family wouldn't have to worry so much about malnourishment and expensive medical problems that might arise from it...
Similar situation exists with improved vitamin content and such. Making healthy food more affordable can't (in and of itself, at least) be a bad thing...
They already do this with Bt. If that method continues to be used organic farmers will have one of the best natural pesticides no longer available.
This IS a completely legitimate concern. I think the analogous situation with frequent improper use of antibiotics and resistant populations of bacteria growing demonstrates a real problem. However, this is not specifically a GMO issue - if lazy farmers were instead installing automatic Bt sprayers that drizzled a continuous low dosage of Bt on their crops, exactly the same problem would be arising. The reason it is important to point out that this is not a GMO issue is that the passionate fear of GMO's that pops up in places tends to distract people from the ROOT of problems like this. ("Oh, the farmer's just spraying it on instead of genetically engineering it? That doesn't sound so bad..." "The farmer's have all been planting the same strain of the same crop in the same fields for the last 20 years? Are they GMO? No? Oh, well, who cares then...")...
Re:Evolution and the corporate lifeform
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 1
Corporations cannot be defined as life, because they do not reproduce.
Actually, they often DO. Spin-offs and such happen all the time, sort of like spider-plants sending out runners...
There is little practical difference between this [communistic state-run corporations] and a monopoly or cartel. Especially if the corporate entities are in a position to manipulate government.
Add that to the fact that governmental agencies are THEMSELVES corporations, whose market is really other government agencies, and the basic point can be boiled all the way down to 'choice is good, monopolies are bad', which I think is completely accurate...
Re:I already new Monsanto was evil
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Every time I see a pointer to 'Nutrasweet is a deadly poison that causes tons of illnesses' site, it seems to say nothing more than "No, really! It's a horrible icky poison!". Words like 'Neurotoxin' are sprinkled throughout. But nowhere is a decent explanation of exactly how a tiny bit of digestible protein is a 'deadly poison'...
Once again - Aspartame is nothing more than a dipeptide (two amino acids stuck together). They are the essential amino acid Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid. You can buy both of these amino acids separately by the kilo in healthfood stores. Amino acids, incidentally, are not 'wood alcohol' by any stretch of the imagination, which the allegedly knowledgeable people who wrote this site ought to know.
The FDA LOVES using its authority. If there were anything in 'Equal' besides the Aspartame and Maltodextrin listed on the label (e.g. methanol ["wood alcohol"], the FDA would be having a PR Field-day suing the crap out of deep-pocketed Monsanto (and thus reassuring the voting public that it deserves bigger budgets and more regulatory authority).
designed to make sure that farmers can't reuse their seed and are forced to buy new seeds from Monsanto every season.
No. The "terminator gene" was designed to deal with protesters' fears that the added genes might be able to spread into the wild, because any wild plants pollinated by the GM plants with the 'terminator gene' would fail to germinate. And I don't recall ever hearing of Monsanto issuing sales contracts with clauses establishing them as a farmer's exclusive source for seeds - farmers are still free to say 'screw you, Monsanto, I'm going to go buy re-usable seed...'.
Don't misunderstand - I'm not a particularly big fan of Monsanto myself (I think of them as the Microsoft of the agricultural world [i.e. a big, abusive, powerful and power-hungry corporation with policies and practices that can harm farmers and other people]), but spreading unfounded, totally WRONG rumors propagated by people with an agenda ("Bragg Live Foods - Dedicated to Bringing Super Health to the World")
serves to turn attention AWAY from the problems (by making it look as though only crackpots are worried about Monsanto's practices). What can you say about a site that claims Nutrasweet is linked to a vast array of health problems, including 'Gulf War Syndrome'??? (What, were the Iraqis spraying our troops with packets of NutraSweet?)
(From the "Beware of Deadly Aspartame Sugar Substitutes!" site you link to, I found this a rather funny comment/advertisement by the 'Bragg Live Foods' corporation: "Stevia, a herbal sweetener is a healthy alternative.[sic]". What's in it? What makes it sweet? What effects does this 'natural' chemical (strychnine is natural too, you know) have on the human body? Has the sweetening principle of this 'herbal sweetener' been investigated AT ALL by the FDA or similar authorities? I KNOW what's in Nutrasweet....)
Skepticism is good, but only works properly when applied consistently....
GM food may be safe. I don't know. You don't know.
This is the same specious argument that comes up with a LOT of new things...
Fact is, we don't know if NORMAL food is safe, either. How many times have, for example, eggs gone from being declared healthy, to unhealthy, to healthy again? Or margarine? (Low in cholesterol! High in Trans-fatty-acids! Made with healthy vegetable oil!...)
the people in charge of determining whether GM food is safe are the same people who want you to eat GM food.
Why does the Food and Drug Administration (at least, here in the US) 'want [me] to eat GM food'? The FDA would probably rather have extensive, expensive testing and regulation that would justify them getting bigger budgets and more authority rather than making 'new' foodstuff available simply. Artificially Genetically Modified foods get a lot more scrutiny than random crossbreeds or imports...
there's absolutly no accountability in the industry.
If that's so, why did so much food have to be recalled due to fear of 'StarLink(tm)' corn? If there's no accountability, the companies could simply shrug and say "Uh, no, there wasn't any in OUR food"....
Put simply, GM foods are BETTER understood than a new randomly-bred strain of 'naturally GM' food would be. We don't KNOW what varieties of proteins might be getting produced in a new hybrid, but we DO know, with quite a lot of precision, what type of new protein is being produced in 'artificially GM' food. Bt Corn produces a single, rather specific insecticidal protein (the same one that 'Organic' farmers will often spray on their crops) which can be tested for its effects on humans (none whatsoever, unless you count the miniscule amount of additional nutritive protein that it adds to the corn - humans digest the Bt protein.) 'RoundUp Ready' crops don't produce ANYTHING different - they simply have an additional version of a gene which can continue producing its natural protein while the original 'plant' version of the gene is blocked by glyphosphate.
This whole argument is simple fear-mongering. "It MIGHT cause you to grow a third arm! The plants MIGHT become intelligent and take over Washington D.C. [Note, despite the way modern US politicians behave, this has NOT already happened!:-)]! You MIGHT get a horrible plant disease and turn green!...." But probably not.
There ARE a number of legitimate concerns about artificially GM crops, but none of them relate specifically to the fact that they are GM. Problems of monoculture farming, excessive corporate control of farming practices, possible overly-casual use of herbicides, the remote but real possibility that crop plants might cross-pollinate with wild relatives and pass on the gene [the same problem would exist with 'naturally GM' plants or related plants imported from other parts of the world], the possibility that pests might become resistant to pesticides (insecticides, fungicides, etc.) produced at low levels by 'artificially GM' plants, the fact that some GM crops might (for example) be bigger and last longer but be less tasty, and so on, are all legitimate concerns, but not specific to 'artificially GM' organisms.
Perhaps the only solution is to ban most foods and force everyone to live on carefully bred, thoroughly-reviewed-by-the-FDA yeast paste...
Doesn't the DMCA's demanding that people use the products as they are defined start to sound like communism? Every time I read an article like this I keep picturing Adolf Hitler as CEO of whatever company is being written about.
Make that "Joseph Stalin" instead of Hitler and you may have a point...
Like 'real-world' communist governments, everything in the US is gravitating towards central control at a federal level, which makes the federal capitol a 'one-stop-shopping' node for nationwide influence. As long as central authority increases, this problem will only get worse, no matter what you do...
Like former Soviet Union government agencies, the MPAA and RIAA (and Disney and Adobe and...you get the idea) can use their influence to apply government pressure to increase their own power. Copyright 'dissenters' can be punished unreasonably (having to go to jail, make bail, have your movements restricted, and racking up legal fees defending your basic rights IS an unreasonable punishment!). Economic problems that hurt the country can't possibly their fault, it must be the fault of dissenters and other wrong-thinkers who must be punished, so that profit by a few corporations can somehow stimulate the economy. The State(tm) being a corporation itself, I don't see much difference between State owned 'production facilities' and having most 'productions facilities' run and controlled by a small number of 'non-State' corporations.
While I don't foresee it becoming illegal not to purchase products seen in advertisements, I find it frighteningly easy to believe that purchasing a type of product at below-average might be considered suspicious, and legislation might someday be introduced to track and investigate such things. ("He's not buying the requisite average of 2.3 new DVD's per month! He OBVIOUSLY must be PIRATING 2.3 DVD's per month! Call the FBI! This person is hurting the economy and our taxpaying corporations!")
(Don't forget that something like 97%, as I recall, of federal tax income comes from corporations and people who make more than $100,000US/year. If us normal people have our income cut in half by bad policy making, government feels a tiny pinch. If Corporations or wealthy people have their income cut in half, Government will go bankrupt at its current spending rates. This is a problem of inefficient central control, I think. It makes Government dependent on the profit of the wealthy, and since central control will tend to make 'The People' dependent on Government...well, follow the chain.)
Like totalitarian Communist governments, agencies give lip-service to 'the people' (RIAA/MPAA - 'The Artist' and 'The Consumer') but use their positions of influence and power to gain power at the expense of 'the people'. (The declining condition of 'The People' can be used to set up 'dissidents' as scapegoats who allegedly cause the problem. ["We wouldn't have to charge so much for CD's if it weren't for all the rampant piracy!"]
I wonder what the MPAA and RIAA have in store for us with their Glorious 5-year Plan(tm)...
we don't even have the funding for the legal help to get it into testers hands.
Okay, earlier you were talking about 'thinking about GPL'ing it' and having trouble 'giving it away'.....
...but you can't give it away because you can't pay lawyers to help you give it away?
Something fundamentally wrong with that....
At any rate, if you're sincere and not just fishing for investors, I'll add my metaphorical voice to those suggesting contacting the Ogg people over at xiph.org, who I'm sure would LOVE to have a " very light and highly portable [...] patent and copyright free" set of code to use with the Ogg Tarkin project...if you REALLY want to see it get out into the world...
Isnt it possible to somehow see if an email has a valid adr, and if its not, just dump it?
Not EASILY. After all, YOU can probably tell just by looking that BHSDVGB1@hotmail.com is likely to be a fake address. But how do you explain to the computer how to tell whether it's fake or not? Especially if for some strange reason you might just have a friend who refers to himself as "Bob HSimpson, Dental Victim of George Bush #1" and named his hotmail account accordingly?
They'll probably do what I've already seen at least one of them do. I'm not sure how they manage it, but for I while I had one telemarketing company sending a bogus phone# to my caller ID box. (I.e. I tried calling the number back and got the 'there is no such number' sort of message...)
I typically have been forced to resort to not bothering to pick up the phone if I don't recognize the phone#, let alone if it says 'unavailable'...
That's like me mixing red paint and blue paint together, calling it "purple" and patenting it.
Ironically, in a story rejected by Slashdot months ago, patenting of Beans that happen to be yellow has already been allowed by our friends at the USPTO.
In this case, the patent holder didn't even do any engineering - he just picked out some yellow beans from a bunch he brought over from mexico and grew them until he consistently got yellow ones. (The 'Enola Bean', as he calls them).
'Biopiracy' indeed...
The 'terminator' genes
on
Patented Seeds
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This prevents farmers from growing from their own seed, effectively forcing them to buy new seed every year.
It ALSO prevents screaming protesters from claiming that the plant in question will escape from the farms and overrun all the native plants, which is supposedly the INTENDED purpose of the genes.
Not to say that I don't think the executives at the companies in question love the 'rebuy the seeds every year' side effect...
Then again, I don't recall ever hearing of seed companies sending armed thugs around to farmers hinting that they'd better not buy 'reproducible' seeds, either...
It's actually grown beyond just web development lately. I've taken to using it for minor system administration scripts from the command line - sort of a 'Perl Lite'.
Also, PHP-GTK looks like a promising development for future client-side applications...
Eat at real locally-owned restaurants instead of fast food chains
I agree completely. I much prefer to go to a nearby small local restaurant, where I can be away from the unnecessary hype of the Lord of the Rings movie...
Except, of course, that the restaurant in question is named "Butterbur's"...(I kid you not!)
Re:OT: naming servers after LOTR caracters
on
The Hype of the Rings
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· Score: 3, Funny
That does it.
Slashdot Admins, please read!. We need two more moderation ratings!
First, we need a "-1, Bad Pun".
Second, we need a "+1, Bad Pun"....
Synopsis of the story for those who don't know:
on
The Hype of the Rings
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· Score: 5, Funny
It goes like this. A bunch of peaceful little guys are minding their own business in their village at the beginning of the first book. The mysteriously disappearing/reappearing wizard Gandalf shows up and says bad things are coming. Several of the little guys decide to head off from the village. Here's where the story gets underway.
Good guys head for some destination or other.
Good guys notice they're being chased by really mean but mysterious bad guys of some sort
Good guys flee, alternately running and hiding
Bad guys nearly catch them, but just in time, Good guys stumble on a group of other Good guys, and the Bad guys leave.
The newly-met good guys give them all magic food and they all sing songs and recite poetry.
Repeat as necessary.
Disclaimer - YES, I'm kidding, dammit! But you've got to admit, there IS a grain of truth to it...
Anyone who DOESN'T know the story (both of you), it actually IS a good, complex tale. I just couldn't help noticing this pattern in it...
As I understand it, it's not a problem with OSS being wonderfully advanced or with ALSA being buggy, but just that ripping out the core sound code and replacing it with ALSA in a stable kernel seems like more work than it's worth, especially when it's pretty easy to build the drivers as kernel modules 'outside' of the kernel.
That said, I'm STILL looking forward to seeing ALSA go into 2.5...
Slashdot Mirror
I can hear Brits gearing up for a 'Thames Coca-Cola Party' any day now :-)
(For those who don't 'get it'...)
No, not unless they're also stealing the materials and kidnapping the laborers in US plants to do it...
While I'm in agreement with the general trend of 'what the heck does the US think its DOING?' theme in the comments of this story, the US Government's complaint seems to have been about illegal copying and reselling of US-produced titles, not about Ukrainian software developers writing and selling their own software...
This is not a uniquely "American" thing by any stretch...
I recently had someone from the UK (who, as you may recall, used to be in charge of the US) ask me if anything important had happened in the US in 1776....
Sure, maybe it's referred to differently elsewhere in the world ("The uppity colony uprising?"), but really... "Did anything important happen in Russia in 1918?" "Did anything important happen in Japan in 1945?" "Did anything important happen in Britain in 1066?".....The point isn't 'Gosh, that person in the UK sure was ignorant' - just that not being real aware of what goes on outside of one's own little world is a worldwide phenomenon.
Realize also that the US is primarily big and powerful due to economic reasons. Quit giving US corporations your money and perhaps this problem will fade...(How many of your governments and other corporations buy their software from US corporations? Or license expensive US patents? Or import US goods?)
Duh...to answer my own questions (and perhaps those of a few others) I found this blurb at cdrfaq.org...
I didn't know about this, either....
For that matter, is there a way for me to READ this serial number from a CD?
Put it this way - Aspartame is a tiny bit of protein, made up of the amino acids Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid. If this produces traces of methanal as a by-product of metabolism, ANY source of protein (including 'organic beans and rice' and other such things) will do the same.
Incidentally, Nutrasweet, IN SUFFICIENTLY LARGE QUANTITIES, may very well affect brain chemistry - The essential amino acid Phenylalanine is a precursor to dopamine-related neurotransmitters. I somehow doubt that the tiny traces of Phenylalanine in normal amounts of Nutrasweet would be noticeable, but you might have a problem if you're eating a kilogram per day of the stuff....
That's not automatically true - 'organic food' seems to cost significantly more than 'regular' food. If one is wealthy this price difference doesn't matter, but for poorer folks who are more in need of good nutrition, this is an issue.
In theory, it wouldn't be too difficult to splice in a gene to get a vegetable to generate 'complete' nutritional proteins (i.e. containing ALL essential amino acids in useful quantities). While living entirely off of, say, and endless array of dishes based on genetically-engineered 'complete protein' soybeans wouldn't be a lot of FUN, at least a poor family wouldn't have to worry so much about malnourishment and expensive medical problems that might arise from it...
Similar situation exists with improved vitamin content and such. Making healthy food more affordable can't (in and of itself, at least) be a bad thing...
They already do this with Bt. If that method continues to be used organic farmers will have one of the best natural pesticides no longer available.This IS a completely legitimate concern. I think the analogous situation with frequent improper use of antibiotics and resistant populations of bacteria growing demonstrates a real problem. However, this is not specifically a GMO issue - if lazy farmers were instead installing automatic Bt sprayers that drizzled a continuous low dosage of Bt on their crops, exactly the same problem would be arising. The reason it is important to point out that this is not a GMO issue is that the passionate fear of GMO's that pops up in places tends to distract people from the ROOT of problems like this. ("Oh, the farmer's just spraying it on instead of genetically engineering it? That doesn't sound so bad..." "The farmer's have all been planting the same strain of the same crop in the same fields for the last 20 years? Are they GMO? No? Oh, well, who cares then...")...
Actually, they often DO. Spin-offs and such happen all the time, sort of like spider-plants sending out runners...
Add that to the fact that governmental agencies are THEMSELVES corporations, whose market is really other government agencies, and the basic point can be boiled all the way down to 'choice is good, monopolies are bad', which I think is completely accurate...
Every time I see a pointer to 'Nutrasweet is a deadly poison that causes tons of illnesses' site, it seems to say nothing more than "No, really! It's a horrible icky poison!". Words like 'Neurotoxin' are sprinkled throughout. But nowhere is a decent explanation of exactly how a tiny bit of digestible protein is a 'deadly poison'...
Once again - Aspartame is nothing more than a dipeptide (two amino acids stuck together). They are the essential amino acid Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid. You can buy both of these amino acids separately by the kilo in healthfood stores. Amino acids, incidentally, are not 'wood alcohol' by any stretch of the imagination, which the allegedly knowledgeable people who wrote this site ought to know.
The FDA LOVES using its authority. If there were anything in 'Equal' besides the Aspartame and Maltodextrin listed on the label (e.g. methanol ["wood alcohol"], the FDA would be having a PR Field-day suing the crap out of deep-pocketed Monsanto (and thus reassuring the voting public that it deserves bigger budgets and more regulatory authority).
designed to make sure that farmers can't reuse their seed and are forced to buy new seeds from Monsanto every season.No. The "terminator gene" was designed to deal with protesters' fears that the added genes might be able to spread into the wild, because any wild plants pollinated by the GM plants with the 'terminator gene' would fail to germinate. And I don't recall ever hearing of Monsanto issuing sales contracts with clauses establishing them as a farmer's exclusive source for seeds - farmers are still free to say 'screw you, Monsanto, I'm going to go buy re-usable seed...'.
Don't misunderstand - I'm not a particularly big fan of Monsanto myself (I think of them as the Microsoft of the agricultural world [i.e. a big, abusive, powerful and power-hungry corporation with policies and practices that can harm farmers and other people]), but spreading unfounded, totally WRONG rumors propagated by people with an agenda ("Bragg Live Foods - Dedicated to Bringing Super Health to the World") serves to turn attention AWAY from the problems (by making it look as though only crackpots are worried about Monsanto's practices). What can you say about a site that claims Nutrasweet is linked to a vast array of health problems, including 'Gulf War Syndrome'??? (What, were the Iraqis spraying our troops with packets of NutraSweet?)
(From the "Beware of Deadly Aspartame Sugar Substitutes!" site you link to, I found this a rather funny comment/advertisement by the 'Bragg Live Foods' corporation: "Stevia, a herbal sweetener is a healthy alternative.[sic]". What's in it? What makes it sweet? What effects does this 'natural' chemical (strychnine is natural too, you know) have on the human body? Has the sweetening principle of this 'herbal sweetener' been investigated AT ALL by the FDA or similar authorities? I KNOW what's in Nutrasweet....)
Skepticism is good, but only works properly when applied consistently....
Damn, where's a '+1 insightful' when I need one...
This is the same specious argument that comes up with a LOT of new things...
Fact is, we don't know if NORMAL food is safe, either. How many times have, for example, eggs gone from being declared healthy, to unhealthy, to healthy again? Or margarine? (Low in cholesterol! High in Trans-fatty-acids! Made with healthy vegetable oil!...)
the people in charge of determining whether GM food is safe are the same people who want you to eat GM food.Why does the Food and Drug Administration (at least, here in the US) 'want [me] to eat GM food'? The FDA would probably rather have extensive, expensive testing and regulation that would justify them getting bigger budgets and more authority rather than making 'new' foodstuff available simply. Artificially Genetically Modified foods get a lot more scrutiny than random crossbreeds or imports...
there's absolutly no accountability in the industry.If that's so, why did so much food have to be recalled due to fear of 'StarLink(tm)' corn? If there's no accountability, the companies could simply shrug and say "Uh, no, there wasn't any in OUR food"....
Put simply, GM foods are BETTER understood than a new randomly-bred strain of 'naturally GM' food would be. We don't KNOW what varieties of proteins might be getting produced in a new hybrid, but we DO know, with quite a lot of precision, what type of new protein is being produced in 'artificially GM' food. Bt Corn produces a single, rather specific insecticidal protein (the same one that 'Organic' farmers will often spray on their crops) which can be tested for its effects on humans (none whatsoever, unless you count the miniscule amount of additional nutritive protein that it adds to the corn - humans digest the Bt protein.) 'RoundUp Ready' crops don't produce ANYTHING different - they simply have an additional version of a gene which can continue producing its natural protein while the original 'plant' version of the gene is blocked by glyphosphate.
This whole argument is simple fear-mongering. "It MIGHT cause you to grow a third arm! The plants MIGHT become intelligent and take over Washington D.C. [Note, despite the way modern US politicians behave, this has NOT already happened! :-)]! You MIGHT get a horrible plant disease and turn green!...." But probably not.
There ARE a number of legitimate concerns about artificially GM crops, but none of them relate specifically to the fact that they are GM. Problems of monoculture farming, excessive corporate control of farming practices, possible overly-casual use of herbicides, the remote but real possibility that crop plants might cross-pollinate with wild relatives and pass on the gene [the same problem would exist with 'naturally GM' plants or related plants imported from other parts of the world], the possibility that pests might become resistant to pesticides (insecticides, fungicides, etc.) produced at low levels by 'artificially GM' plants, the fact that some GM crops might (for example) be bigger and last longer but be less tasty, and so on, are all legitimate concerns, but not specific to 'artificially GM' organisms.
Perhaps the only solution is to ban most foods and force everyone to live on carefully bred, thoroughly-reviewed-by-the-FDA yeast paste...
Quick point, that's "Used to run exchange" - i.e. used to be in charge of the Exchange department at MS....
Make that "Joseph Stalin" instead of Hitler and you may have a point...
Like 'real-world' communist governments, everything in the US is gravitating towards central control at a federal level, which makes the federal capitol a 'one-stop-shopping' node for nationwide influence. As long as central authority increases, this problem will only get worse, no matter what you do...
Like former Soviet Union government agencies, the MPAA and RIAA (and Disney and Adobe and...you get the idea) can use their influence to apply government pressure to increase their own power. Copyright 'dissenters' can be punished unreasonably (having to go to jail, make bail, have your movements restricted, and racking up legal fees defending your basic rights IS an unreasonable punishment!). Economic problems that hurt the country can't possibly their fault, it must be the fault of dissenters and other wrong-thinkers who must be punished, so that profit by a few corporations can somehow stimulate the economy. The State(tm) being a corporation itself, I don't see much difference between State owned 'production facilities' and having most 'productions facilities' run and controlled by a small number of 'non-State' corporations.
While I don't foresee it becoming illegal not to purchase products seen in advertisements, I find it frighteningly easy to believe that purchasing a type of product at below-average might be considered suspicious, and legislation might someday be introduced to track and investigate such things. ("He's not buying the requisite average of 2.3 new DVD's per month! He OBVIOUSLY must be PIRATING 2.3 DVD's per month! Call the FBI! This person is hurting the economy and our taxpaying corporations!")
(Don't forget that something like 97%, as I recall, of federal tax income comes from corporations and people who make more than $100,000US/year. If us normal people have our income cut in half by bad policy making, government feels a tiny pinch. If Corporations or wealthy people have their income cut in half, Government will go bankrupt at its current spending rates. This is a problem of inefficient central control, I think. It makes Government dependent on the profit of the wealthy, and since central control will tend to make 'The People' dependent on Government...well, follow the chain.)
Like totalitarian Communist governments, agencies give lip-service to 'the people' (RIAA/MPAA - 'The Artist' and 'The Consumer') but use their positions of influence and power to gain power at the expense of 'the people'. (The declining condition of 'The People' can be used to set up 'dissidents' as scapegoats who allegedly cause the problem. ["We wouldn't have to charge so much for CD's if it weren't for all the rampant piracy!"]
I wonder what the MPAA and RIAA have in store for us with their Glorious 5-year Plan(tm)...
Hey, just be thankful it wasn't "Klingon" or "Esperanto" or something :-)
Okay, earlier you were talking about 'thinking about GPL'ing it' and having trouble 'giving it away'.....
...but you can't give it away because you can't pay lawyers to help you give it away?
Something fundamentally wrong with that....
At any rate, if you're sincere and not just fishing for investors, I'll add my metaphorical voice to those suggesting contacting the Ogg people over at xiph.org, who I'm sure would LOVE to have a " very light and highly portable [...] patent and copyright free" set of code to use with the Ogg Tarkin project...if you REALLY want to see it get out into the world...
Not EASILY. After all, YOU can probably tell just by looking that BHSDVGB1@hotmail.com is likely to be a fake address. But how do you explain to the computer how to tell whether it's fake or not? Especially if for some strange reason you might just have a friend who refers to himself as "Bob H Simpson, Dental Victim of George Bush #1" and named his hotmail account accordingly?
They'll probably do what I've already seen at least one of them do. I'm not sure how they manage it, but for I while I had one telemarketing company sending a bogus phone# to my caller ID box. (I.e. I tried calling the number back and got the 'there is no such number' sort of message...)
I typically have been forced to resort to not bothering to pick up the phone if I don't recognize the phone#, let alone if it says 'unavailable'...
Ironically, in a story rejected by Slashdot months ago, patenting of Beans that happen to be yellow has already been allowed by our friends at the USPTO.
In this case, the patent holder didn't even do any engineering - he just picked out some yellow beans from a bunch he brought over from mexico and grew them until he consistently got yellow ones. (The 'Enola Bean', as he calls them).
'Biopiracy' indeed...
It ALSO prevents screaming protesters from claiming that the plant in question will escape from the farms and overrun all the native plants, which is supposedly the INTENDED purpose of the genes.
Not to say that I don't think the executives at the companies in question love the 'rebuy the seeds every year' side effect...
Then again, I don't recall ever hearing of seed companies sending armed thugs around to farmers hinting that they'd better not buy 'reproducible' seeds, either...
It's actually grown beyond just web development lately. I've taken to using it for minor system administration scripts from the command line - sort of a 'Perl Lite'.
Also, PHP-GTK looks like a promising development for future client-side applications...
I agree completely. I much prefer to go to a nearby small local restaurant, where I can be away from the unnecessary hype of the Lord of the Rings movie...
Except, of course, that the restaurant in question is named "Butterbur's"...(I kid you not!)
That does it.
Slashdot Admins, please read!. We need two more moderation ratings!
First, we need a "-1, Bad Pun".
Second, we need a "+1, Bad Pun"....
It goes like this. A bunch of peaceful little guys are minding their own business in their village at the beginning of the first book. The mysteriously disappearing/reappearing wizard Gandalf shows up and says bad things are coming. Several of the little guys decide to head off from the village. Here's where the story gets underway.
Disclaimer - YES, I'm kidding, dammit! But you've got to admit, there IS a grain of truth to it...
Anyone who DOESN'T know the story (both of you), it actually IS a good, complex tale. I just couldn't help noticing this pattern in it...
As I understand it, it's not a problem with OSS being wonderfully advanced or with ALSA being buggy, but just that ripping out the core sound code and replacing it with ALSA in a stable kernel seems like more work than it's worth, especially when it's pretty easy to build the drivers as kernel modules 'outside' of the kernel.
That said, I'm STILL looking forward to seeing ALSA go into 2.5...