Howdy. Page mine. Server looks fine to me. Site hosted in USA, not here in Australia. So if you can't see it, not my fault. And I can get my mail just fine, thanks:-).
On a more interesting note, I put that review up on the 30th of August, which was while motherboard manufacturers were still getting busted for even saying that they'd shipped i845 boards, because the chipset hadn't officially been launched yet.
But here in Australia, for some reason, the boards were already being sold retail. I just grabbed those two from m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market.
I should probably update the review; I bet Abit and Asus have product pages for those boards, now:-).
Aww. There's me thinking "I should probably pimp one of my R/C tank reviews now", and wouldn't you know it, someone goes and does it for me. Whadda guy.
What the heck; I'll pimp another one of 'em anyway:
Much bigger than the little Plantacro critter, much more powerful than the Marui Airsoft tank, though of course also much more expensive than both of them put together. Tamiya even have a version with turret control, flashing guns and sampled sound effects now (see it here), for people who just can't spend money fast enough.
There are also some nice Russian gentlemen who'll sell you a model tank big enough to ride around on, for $US2500 or so.
Apart from the fact that, as other posters have noted, there's no information given on the bit rates or encoders used, the article straight-out admits that "the test sessions were done in a home environment with an ordinary stereo system".
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching. Probably not even single blinding (where the testers know what's being listened to, but the testees don't). Level matching is essential; different encoding methods may play back at slightly different levels, and just turning up the volume a tad will convince a large proportion of casual or professional listeners that something's improved in the sound.
Without a proper scientific test, psychoacoustic effects can swamp even quite large real differences in sound, and can cause people to hear quite large differences that they wouldn't hear if they didn't know when they were listening to what.
As can trivially be demonstrated, when you look at the number of golden-eared but scientifically ignorant audiophiles who are utterly convinced that marble plinths for solid state equipment, little discs made of Mpingo ebony that you sit on top of your components, incredibly expensive special power cables and CD "demagnetisers" all make a clear and definite difference to the sound of their hi-fi system.
If you do a proper scientific test and find an audible difference between an amplifier whose transistors have had voodoo incantations spoken over them and another otherwise identical amplifier that has not been so treated, then I'll give you my rapt attention, despite the fundamental ridiculousness of the concept. If the evidence supports your contention, then your contention has value, by definition.
But if you don't do a proper test, your results are going to be random. From what little this article says about the test's methodology, I see no reason to believe a word of it.
Big media outfits are congenitally incapable of doing anything in a small way, which means that although sites like ExtremeTech are sure to make a lot more money than sites like, say, mine (Dan's Data), they're going to have to spend a lot more for every dollar they make, and may not manage to break even. Not that I've seen their business plan, or anything. It just seems to be the way to bet.
This could be a good moment for me to plug my own piece on the subject, which was a column I wrote for AustralianIT.com.au (a Murdoch property; big media organisations don't come much bigger than News Limited...), after they told me that I and a large percentage of the rest of the Australian News Interactive staff were getting the sack. For some reason, they didn't want to publish it, so I published it myself:-).
The Register's piece on ExtremeTech says the new site has a staff of 30. If that's accurate, then they've got themselves a big fat tab to cover just for salaries, let alone all of the multiplicitous overheads that big media organisations can't avoid.
Dan's Data, on the other hand, has a staff of one and premises which also contain my bed (I know it's behind all of those motherboard boxes, somewhere). I'll betcha ten bucks I'll still be reviewing Flash memory gadgets, CPU coolers, really expensive video cameras and LED flashlights when ExtremeTech's, um, refocussed its core paradigm into, er, a more reprinting-Ziff-stuff-we-can-get-for-free, uh, dynamic.
I don't know why people couldn't get to my site for a while (it's fine now); I presume the server just decided to have a depressive episode at that moment. It's on a Hostpro (used to be VServers) box, and I've had Slashdot mentions a few times before (who remembers Pornsweeper?:-) and never had an overload problem.
So get it straight - the server's unreliable, not underpowered:-).
> The problem is that the batteries need maintaining.
If they're non-sealed super-long-life units, yes. If they're sealed lead acid (SLA) disposables, no. Even cheap and nasty SLAs manage a five year lifespan; ones with ten or better year spans (as long as they don't get more than a few hundred full cycles in that time - many hundreds of partial cycles are fine) are also widely available. Lead acid has unexciting energy density, but it's an evolved technology, folks:-).
> Also if the idea of the UPS is to supply power whilst a generator is brought on line
> then being able to run for 7 hours isn't really relevant.
OK, no problem. Go for little dinky SLAs that any schmuck can hump around in a backpack then, if you only want a one hour run time.
The specs page for this thing quotes only a two kilowatt-hour capacity, and a one kilowatt maximum output, with a two hour recharge time (the flywheel's still spinning pretty fast when it's "discharged"; the spin-up time from a dead stop is higher than the recharge time).
High capacity deep-cycle lead acid batteries trample all over those figures. A quality lead acid 12V battery that can deliver 25 amps (300 watts) for more than seven straight hours (more than 175Ah, at that discharge rate) costs maybe $US400, and weighs maybe 60 kilos. That price might be high; I'm not an expert on the pricing of any battery I can't carry up stairs:-).
Four of those suckers in parallel feeding your inverter and you've got the flywheel system's sustained output, with more than three times the capacity.
A plain 1.5kW inverter with output at least somewhat like a sine wave is $US350 or so, for a basic model - more, no doubt, for a fancy standby-power-control pure-sine-wave thingummy. But since Beacon Power don't even quote pricing for their buried half-ton humming monster, you can bet that traditional systems are FAR cheaper.
OK, I suppose you pay for reliability, and if the thing really does last 20 years with zero maintenance then that's something. But properly treated high-grade lead acid batteries have ten year service lives. And the lead's recyclable; dedicated recycling places will pay you by weight for dead wet lead acid batteries.
Model tanks are cheaper
on
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Like this one, if you've got some money. Or this one, if you've got little space. Or this one, if you want to shoot people. Get your track fix the easy way!
Mouthpiece for: Tom Van Flandern, big-time Cydonia-face, um, "enthusiast".
Have yourself a browse through metaresearch.org and you'll find out all sorts of interesting things. Like, apparently the speed of gravity is "not less than 2 x 10^10 c", and therefore probably infinite.
I've got a couple of recent pieces on water cooling on my site. This one's a mix-and-match test of a few pieces of cheap(ish) commercially available hardware, with much rambling on the subject of what's doing what to whom; this one covers throwing a Peltier device into the mix, and how to tell if it'll do you any good (executive summary: if you're overclocking a current Athlon, one Peltier, even with a very high rating, probably won't cut it).
> These are 1100mAh high-capacity batteries! In case you don't know...
> That puts it at the same power point as Alkaline batteries
No it doesn't. Alkaline AAs are good for about 2200mAh at least, maybe 2800, depending on type. That's for low drain applications, though; NiCds and NiMH cells have lower internal resistance and can deliver all of their rated capacity into quite high loads, while alkalines crap out rapidly in things like digital cameras that draw a lot of current. For those applications, high capacity rechargeables (you can easily get NiMH AAs with 1600mAh capacity!) last better than alkalines.
But NiCd and NiMH also have lousy self-discharge (they lose charge relatively rapidly just sitting there), so they're unsuitable for standby applications. Put a set of alkalines and a set of 1600mAh rechargeable AAs in identical digital cameras and put them on the shelf for six months before you use them, and the alkalines will be the less useless of the two:-).
...if you ask me. Light weight, lots of ventilation, nice looks, easy to work on. Expensive, but so's this Coolerguys thing. You you can retrofit fans easily enough yourself, like I did with this monstrosity.
If you want a small case, the Lian Li PC-31 (review here) is pretty funky. The PC-60 (review here) is still highly portable and has lots of space, and the new PC-70 (review here) is, um, an ideal case for people who really want to impress their fellow gamers. The darn thing still weighs bugger-all, at least until you put an actual computer inside it:-).
I reviewed a cheap alternative to "serious" SSDs like this a while ago - the review's here. It's just an adapter that takes a CompactFlash card; CompactFlash cards can do ATA natively. It's cheap, and so are smaller capacity CF cards - all you need for a lot of SSD applications is 8Mb or 16Mb, after all. No battery backup or external PSU needed, plenty fast enough for most purposes, fine for everything but swap file use.
...are, of course, the choice of connoisseurs, provided you live somewhere where you can buy their nifty aluminium cases.
I reviewed the mid-sized PC-60 (silver) a while ago. It's got full-tower drive capacity in a much smaller form factor, it's pretty, it's light, it's easy to work on. Review here. A few days ago, I got a PC-31 (black) to play with, as well. Smaller, but still with plenty of room, and a front panel design that means you can use beige-bezel drives without them looking too ghastly. Review here.
I bought a microscope via Ebay (here in Australia, where there aren't many such items up for online auction from local sellers - you don't want to pay shipping from the USA for a cast iron 'scope...).
Or, to put it another way, I _didn't_ buy it via Ebay, because I bid on that 'scope in more than one auction. Each time, I was the winning bidder - at a price well below my maximum bid - but nobody else had a maximum bid very close to mine, so the bid didn't make reserve, and the seller opted not to sell.
So I e-mailed the seller, asked how much they actually WANTED for it, because I actually wanted to buy a microscope and they seemed to be pretty close to the only game in town for the kind of 'scope I wanted, and could afford. They told me the price, it was OK with me, I bought it, Ebay didn't get their cut.
Take me away, officer.
If Ebay want to crack down on fraud then, by all means, they should crack down on fraud. Great idea. But the offline selling rule is not one about fraud, it's one about side-stepping Ebay's revenue-gathering mechanism; various people who sell outside Ebay channels just happen to also be defrauding buyers.
I don't think it's all that likely that offline selling of the sort I participated in really hurts Ebay much, when you _don't_ take fraudulent operators into account. Because, it seems to me, deliberately posting items for sale with unrealistically high reserve prices in order to get off-line buy offers will only let you sell stuff for about as much as the market will bear anyway, but it will greatly cut down the number of people who will actually offer to buy. So I think, overall, it would have to seriously _reduce_ your profits. It's just something that happens now and then when the secret-reserve-price system allows a patient seller to frustrate less patient buyers who just want to BUY the darn thing, but can't, because no other bidder pushed the bid up past reserve for them.
Enforcing some rule against not-bad behaviour because the set of people who are breaking that rule significantly overlaps some other sets of people whose behaviour _is_ bad is the same sort of superficially mathematically sensible but socially unacceptable policy as choosing to arrest black people purely on the grounds of their blackness, because you live somewhere where black people are more likely to have committed crimes than whites.
This may work, for sufficiently small values of "work", but it's still the wrong strategy.
Ah, another golden opportunity for me to plug my most recent review of a KeyGhost gadget, at www.dansdata.com/keyghost2.htm. If you've not read about this thing, and people who might want to spy on you for whatever reason have physical access to a workstation you use, you should. It's the most elegant mass-market hardware keylogger in existence at the moment. Takes a few seconds to install or remove, on anything with a PC-compatible keyboard.
No remote monitoring (they're working on that...), but it's simple, relatively cheap, and comes in various inconspicuous form factors. Distilled evil, in a small beige box.
> if this little number of a genetically modified
> rice kernel is extremely harmful (similar
> things have happened before with frankenfoods)
Or, to put it another way, no they haven't. Unless you know something everyone else doesn't. Citation, please.
> The whole 'grow once and never again' isn't
> just a good business model for the corporations
> that make this stuff, it's a safety precaution.
Actually, it's an unavoidable side effect for most of the world's sterile or functionally sterile crops, IIRC. Hybrid grain, as grown by just about everyone that grows grain commercially, isn't gene-spliced or franken-anythinged. It's just very highly engineered by essentially old-fashioned methods (super-repeated crossing of different strains of durum, rye, et cetera) to have gigantic yield. A side effect is that it can't reproduce - or, at least, it can't breed true.
This isn't to say that deliberately engineered sterility can't be a useful feature, commercially speaking, and safety-wise; if you make a transgenic plant with some bad-ass drug in its leaves, you want to make as sure as possible that it cannot cross-breed with other strains.
But all the misinformed hysteria about Terminator Technology ("it'll get out in the pollen, and EVERYTHING will become sterile!!!") seems to me to be at least a hundred years too late. Someone out there probably knows when triticale was first created; I don't remember my high school agriculture classes that well:-).
Of course it's possible that genetically engineered organisms pose a risk not posed by the old-fashioned kind of GE (where you mix genes by crossing different strains). "Real" GE lets you introduce genetic material that does not exist in anything you could cross with any possible normal biological ancestor of the resultant organism.
But that, in itself, does not create a risk sufficient to outweigh the demonstrable advantages of GE in reducing other risks - like the risk of starvation, or the risk of environmental damage from pesticide and fertiliser run-off and overspray, or the risk of mass extinctions caused by people practising slash and burn agriculture in ways unchanged for 25,000 years. GE offers solutions to these sorts of problems.
It's an analogous situation to the first nuclear fission experiments, in which the possibility of an uncontrollable chain reaction destroying the entire planet could not be ruled out. Indeed, logically, NO possibility can EVER be completely ruled out. Real scientists don't make absolute statements.
But the world-bomb downside seemed very, VERY unlikely, and the upside seemed very large. The same situation pertains today, but GE isn't being done in secret at Los Alamos. So, today, the uninformed mobs can storm in and smash scientists' greenhouses and rip up their fields.
> If you think for a minute that the people
> making this crap aren't spinning the "Look how
> many people are dying because we can't
> distribute our product' angle out of pure
> greed, you're got another thing coming.
That'd explain why Dr. Potrykus, who invented golden rice, wants so desperately to GIVE IT AWAY, now wouldn't it?
Read the article before posting, please.
If you do that, and then form the opinion that it is a good idea to take up pitchforks and flaming torches and march on the castle on the hill, go right ahead. But if you join the lynch mob just because, as Dr. Potrykus says, "...the genetic engineer is in the public opinion the devil", then you are in my opinion a damn fool.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be this page...
> I think I found you from something to do with about 300 (1000?) sparklers being wired together to create a huge bomb sort of thing...
That'd be this page (and this one)...
> (Please tell me I'm not going crazy!)
You aren't. Well, not any crazier than an artist with a top hat habit is already likely to be.
On a more interesting note, I put that review up on the 30th of August, which was while motherboard manufacturers were still getting busted for even saying that they'd shipped i845 boards, because the chipset hadn't officially been launched yet.
But here in Australia, for some reason, the boards were already being sold retail. I just grabbed those two from m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market.
I should probably update the review; I bet Abit and Asus have product pages for those boards, now :-).
Aww. There's me thinking "I should probably pimp one of my R/C tank reviews now", and wouldn't you know it, someone goes and does it for me. Whadda guy.
What the heck; I'll pimp another one of 'em anyway:
Tamiya 1/10th scale R/C Sherman tank
Much bigger than the little Plantacro critter, much more powerful than the Marui Airsoft tank, though of course also much more expensive than both of them put together. Tamiya even have a version with turret control, flashing guns and sampled sound effects now (see it here), for people who just can't spend money fast enough.
There are also some nice Russian gentlemen who'll sell you a model tank big enough to ride around on, for $US2500 or so.
Ooh! Ooh! A chance to troll for site traffic :-)!
My review of the Keyghost II Professional is here. It links to my older review of their Security Keyboard, which has a hardware logger built in.
They're a bit expensive, but they're very nifty gadgets, if you feel like being Big Brother for a change.
Apart from the fact that, as other posters have noted, there's no information given on the bit rates or encoders used, the article straight-out admits that "the test sessions were done in a home environment with an ordinary stereo system".
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching. Probably not even single blinding (where the testers know what's being listened to, but the testees don't). Level matching is essential; different encoding methods may play back at slightly different levels, and just turning up the volume a tad will convince a large proportion of casual or professional listeners that something's improved in the sound.
Without a proper scientific test, psychoacoustic effects can swamp even quite large real differences in sound, and can cause people to hear quite large differences that they wouldn't hear if they didn't know when they were listening to what.
As can trivially be demonstrated, when you look at the number of golden-eared but scientifically ignorant audiophiles who are utterly convinced that marble plinths for solid state equipment, little discs made of Mpingo ebony that you sit on top of your components, incredibly expensive special power cables and CD "demagnetisers" all make a clear and definite difference to the sound of their hi-fi system.
If you do a proper scientific test and find an audible difference between an amplifier whose transistors have had voodoo incantations spoken over them and another otherwise identical amplifier that has not been so treated, then I'll give you my rapt attention, despite the fundamental ridiculousness of the concept. If the evidence supports your contention, then your contention has value, by definition.
But if you don't do a proper test, your results are going to be random. From what little this article says about the test's methodology, I see no reason to believe a word of it.
Absolutely. After all, I am a registered charity, and so...
Ads pay money. Ads that pay no money, me not run. Me like money. Me run ads.
Ug.
Big media outfits are congenitally incapable of doing anything in a small way, which means that although sites like ExtremeTech are sure to make a lot more money than sites like, say, mine (Dan's Data), they're going to have to spend a lot more for every dollar they make, and may not manage to break even. Not that I've seen their business plan, or anything. It just seems to be the way to bet.
This could be a good moment for me to plug my own piece on the subject, which was a column I wrote for AustralianIT.com.au (a Murdoch property; big media organisations don't come much bigger than News Limited...), after they told me that I and a large percentage of the rest of the Australian News Interactive staff were getting the sack. For some reason, they didn't want to publish it, so I published it myself :-).
The Register's piece on ExtremeTech says the new site has a staff of 30. If that's accurate, then they've got themselves a big fat tab to cover just for salaries, let alone all of the multiplicitous overheads that big media organisations can't avoid.
Dan's Data, on the other hand, has a staff of one and premises which also contain my bed (I know it's behind all of those motherboard boxes, somewhere). I'll betcha ten bucks I'll still be reviewing Flash memory gadgets, CPU coolers, really expensive video cameras and LED flashlights when ExtremeTech's, um, refocussed its core paradigm into, er, a more reprinting-Ziff-stuff-we-can-get-for-free, uh, dynamic.
So get it straight - the server's unreliable, not underpowered :-).
If they're non-sealed super-long-life units, yes. If they're sealed lead acid (SLA) disposables, no. Even cheap and nasty SLAs manage a five year lifespan; ones with ten or better year spans (as long as they don't get more than a few hundred full cycles in that time - many hundreds of partial cycles are fine) are also widely available. Lead acid has unexciting energy density, but it's an evolved technology, folks :-).
> Also if the idea of the UPS is to supply power whilst a generator is brought on line
> then being able to run for 7 hours isn't really relevant.
OK, no problem. Go for little dinky SLAs that any schmuck can hump around in a backpack then, if you only want a one hour run time.
High capacity deep-cycle lead acid batteries trample all over those figures. A quality lead acid 12V battery that can deliver 25 amps (300 watts) for more than seven straight hours (more than 175Ah, at that discharge rate) costs maybe $US400, and weighs maybe 60 kilos. That price might be high; I'm not an expert on the pricing of any battery I can't carry up stairs :-).
Four of those suckers in parallel feeding your inverter and you've got the flywheel system's sustained output, with more than three times the capacity.
A plain 1.5kW inverter with output at least somewhat like a sine wave is $US350 or so, for a basic model - more, no doubt, for a fancy standby-power-control pure-sine-wave thingummy. But since Beacon Power don't even quote pricing for their buried half-ton humming monster, you can bet that traditional systems are FAR cheaper.
OK, I suppose you pay for reliability, and if the thing really does last 20 years with zero maintenance then that's something. But properly treated high-grade lead acid batteries have ten year service lives. And the lead's recyclable; dedicated recycling places will pay you by weight for dead wet lead acid batteries.
(Yes, I _am_ trolling for site traffic. Sue me :-)
Administrative contact: Michael Van Flandern
Technical contact: Kevin Van Flandern
Mouthpiece for: Tom Van Flandern, big-time Cydonia-face, um, "enthusiast".
Have yourself a browse through metaresearch.org and you'll find out all sorts of interesting things. Like, apparently the speed of gravity is "not less than 2 x 10^10 c", and therefore probably infinite.
Feel free to read some stuff on Jerry Pournelle's site about this guy.
Here's another URL that directly addresses the gravity-speed thing Tom Van Flandern loves so dearly.
If he were a bit more dedicated, he'd qualify as a real, quality, Usenet kook. I don't think he quite makes the grade, though.
I've got a couple of recent pieces on water cooling on my site. This one's a mix-and-match test of a few pieces of cheap(ish) commercially available hardware, with much rambling on the subject of what's doing what to whom; this one covers throwing a Peltier device into the mix, and how to tell if it'll do you any good (executive summary: if you're overclocking a current Athlon, one Peltier, even with a very high rating, probably won't cut it).
This is a popular myth.
Check out http://www.repairfaq.org/ELE/F_NiCd_Memory.html and the full NiCd Battery Frequently Asked Questions file at http://www.repairfaq.org/ELE/F_NiCd_Battery.html before you flame me about this.
So if you buy one, don't buy one from there :-).
> These are 1100mAh high-capacity batteries! In case you don't know...
:-).
> That puts it at the same power point as Alkaline batteries
No it doesn't. Alkaline AAs are good for about 2200mAh at least, maybe 2800, depending on type. That's for low drain applications, though; NiCds and NiMH cells have lower internal resistance and can deliver all of their rated capacity into quite high loads, while alkalines crap out rapidly in things like digital cameras that draw a lot of current. For those applications, high capacity rechargeables (you can easily get NiMH AAs with 1600mAh capacity!) last better than alkalines.
But NiCd and NiMH also have lousy self-discharge (they lose charge relatively rapidly just sitting there), so they're unsuitable for standby applications. Put a set of alkalines and a set of 1600mAh rechargeable AAs in identical digital cameras and put them on the shelf for six months before you use them, and the alkalines will be the less useless of the two
My review of the goofy PC neon kit also includes a frickin' plasma ball.
If Slashdot has to send tons of traffic to reviews of non-new products, why can't they send it to my reviews of non-new products :-)?
> Just curious though, how loud is it exactly?
:-)?
As loud as a 120mm mains fan - do you want A or B-weighted sound-meter readings
Seriously, it's not like you can't talk over it. It just makes a little case sound like a server box.
If you want a small case, the Lian Li PC-31 (review here) is pretty funky. The PC-60 (review here) is still highly portable and has lots of space, and the new PC-70 (review here) is, um, an ideal case for people who really want to impress their fellow gamers. The darn thing still weighs bugger-all, at least until you put an actual computer inside it :-).
That link again :-): www.dansdata.com/cfide.htm.
I reviewed the mid-sized PC-60 (silver) a while ago. It's got full-tower drive capacity in a much smaller form factor, it's pretty, it's light, it's easy to work on. Review here. A few days ago, I got a PC-31 (black) to play with, as well. Smaller, but still with plenty of room, and a front panel design that means you can use beige-bezel drives without them looking too ghastly. Review here.
I bought a microscope via Ebay (here in Australia, where there aren't many such items up for online auction from local sellers - you don't want to pay shipping from the USA for a cast iron 'scope...).
Or, to put it another way, I _didn't_ buy it via Ebay, because I bid on that 'scope in more than one auction. Each time, I was the winning bidder - at a price well below my maximum bid - but nobody else had a maximum bid very close to mine, so the bid didn't make reserve, and the seller opted not to sell.
So I e-mailed the seller, asked how much they actually WANTED for it, because I actually wanted to buy a microscope and they seemed to be pretty close to the only game in town for the kind of 'scope I wanted, and could afford. They told me the price, it was OK with me, I bought it, Ebay didn't get their cut.
Take me away, officer.
If Ebay want to crack down on fraud then, by all means, they should crack down on fraud. Great idea. But the offline selling rule is not one about fraud, it's one about side-stepping Ebay's revenue-gathering mechanism; various people who sell outside Ebay channels just happen to also be defrauding buyers.
I don't think it's all that likely that offline selling of the sort I participated in really hurts Ebay much, when you _don't_ take fraudulent operators into account. Because, it seems to me, deliberately posting items for sale with unrealistically high reserve prices in order to get off-line buy offers will only let you sell stuff for about as much as the market will bear anyway, but it will greatly cut down the number of people who will actually offer to buy. So I think, overall, it would have to seriously _reduce_ your profits. It's just something that happens now and then when the secret-reserve-price system allows a patient seller to frustrate less patient buyers who just want to BUY the darn thing, but can't, because no other bidder pushed the bid up past reserve for them.
Enforcing some rule against not-bad behaviour because the set of people who are breaking that rule significantly overlaps some other sets of people whose behaviour _is_ bad is the same sort of superficially mathematically sensible but socially unacceptable policy as choosing to arrest black people purely on the grounds of their blackness, because you live somewhere where black people are more likely to have committed crimes than whites.
This may work, for sufficiently small values of "work", but it's still the wrong strategy.
No remote monitoring (they're working on that...), but it's simple, relatively cheap, and comes in various inconspicuous form factors. Distilled evil, in a small beige box.
> if this little number of a genetically modified
:-).
> rice kernel is extremely harmful (similar
> things have happened before with frankenfoods)
Or, to put it another way, no they haven't. Unless you know something everyone else doesn't. Citation, please.
> The whole 'grow once and never again' isn't
> just a good business model for the corporations
> that make this stuff, it's a safety precaution.
Actually, it's an unavoidable side effect for most of the world's sterile or functionally sterile crops, IIRC. Hybrid grain, as grown by just about everyone that grows grain commercially, isn't gene-spliced or franken-anythinged. It's just very highly engineered by essentially old-fashioned methods (super-repeated crossing of different strains of durum, rye, et cetera) to have gigantic yield. A side effect is that it can't reproduce - or, at least, it can't breed true.
This isn't to say that deliberately engineered sterility can't be a useful feature, commercially speaking, and safety-wise; if you make a transgenic plant with some bad-ass drug in its leaves, you want to make as sure as possible that it cannot cross-breed with other strains.
But all the misinformed hysteria about Terminator Technology ("it'll get out in the pollen, and EVERYTHING will become sterile!!!") seems to me to be at least a hundred years too late. Someone out there probably knows when triticale was first created; I don't remember my high school agriculture classes that well
Of course it's possible that genetically engineered organisms pose a risk not posed by the old-fashioned kind of GE (where you mix genes by crossing different strains). "Real" GE lets you introduce genetic material that does not exist in anything you could cross with any possible normal biological ancestor of the resultant organism.
But that, in itself, does not create a risk sufficient to outweigh the demonstrable advantages of GE in reducing other risks - like the risk of starvation, or the risk of environmental damage from pesticide and fertiliser run-off and overspray, or the risk of mass extinctions caused by people practising slash and burn agriculture in ways unchanged for 25,000 years. GE offers solutions to these sorts of problems.
It's an analogous situation to the first nuclear fission experiments, in which the possibility of an uncontrollable chain reaction destroying the entire planet could not be ruled out. Indeed, logically, NO possibility can EVER be completely ruled out. Real scientists don't make absolute statements.
But the world-bomb downside seemed very, VERY unlikely, and the upside seemed very large. The same situation pertains today, but GE isn't being done in secret at Los Alamos. So, today, the uninformed mobs can storm in and smash scientists' greenhouses and rip up their fields.
> If you think for a minute that the people
> making this crap aren't spinning the "Look how
> many people are dying because we can't
> distribute our product' angle out of pure
> greed, you're got another thing coming.
That'd explain why Dr. Potrykus, who invented golden rice, wants so desperately to GIVE IT AWAY, now wouldn't it?
Read the article before posting, please.
If you do that, and then form the opinion that it is a good idea to take up pitchforks and flaming torches and march on the castle on the hill, go right ahead. But if you join the lynch mob just because, as Dr. Potrykus says, "...the genetic engineer is in the public opinion the devil", then you are in my opinion a damn fool.