Did you even look at the web site I posted a link to? IRRI is a third world run organization. It has nothing to do with Monsanto or large agribusiness. It has a long history of delivering new hybrid rices to sustinance level farmers. There are VERY few if any organizations in the world today that have done so much to alleviate human suffering - right now their hydbrids are feeding something like 3 BILLION people per day; it has been estimated that their work has already saved 1.5 billion people from starvation.
They know how to get around the political and distribution problems, and how to develop products that third world farmers can effectively use. They have done it for many years, and very successfully.
They are embracing GM in a big way because of it's potential to further eliminate human suffering.
In actuality English is perhaps the most complex language in modern use, for a number of reasons. It has by far the largest vocabulary; it takes root words from many many other laguages; it's rules of grammer are highly irregular; because of the introduction of printing before the great vowel shift the spoken form of English does not agree at all with the written from; the geographic spread is so large that several dialects pigdins and patois forms of English now exist. If you propose that we adopt English as the base language you are going to have to be very specific about WHAT English using what local idioms and rules.
The richness and complexity of English is perhaps best exemplified by the richness of it's body of great literature and poetry where expression and level of meaning are best brought to form by a language that has a great richness of vocabulary and ability to express multiple levels of ideas in a single word. Of all the languages of the world there are three that clearly have great bodies of literature - Sanskrit, Greek, and yes, English.
I'd suspect it would be hard to collect seeds from your harvest of seedless grapes to replant.
Hahahaha you are joking, right? Grapes have been propagated by cuttings (a form of cloning) for at least the past 4000 years or so. Grape vines are perennials - they last a very long time, perhaps 50 years or so, if properly cared for. It takes 3-5 years for them to mature enough to get a good harvest. Most grapes grown now are actually grafts - a hardy rootstock with the desirable fruit producing variety grafted at the stem.
Seedless watermelon seeds (invented in Korea) are obtained by hybridizing two other varieties that result in a sterile cross (no seeds).
Absolute crap. Your ignorance of this issue is breathtaking.
Take a look at the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines and tell me that GM won't have a HUGE impact on feeding the starving millions (840 million at last estimate).
GM foods are one of the most important scientific developments of this century. Ultimately their impact will affect third world nations that must import food from the developed world FAR more than any other new technology developed this century.
What the hell is pure food? No such thing. Even 100% organically grown food varies tremendously in chemical composition depending on where and how it was grown, what the rainfall was, whether or not a particular plant was attacked by beetles on xyz day, when it was harvested, what fungus was growing on it that day and so on.
Let's give an interesting example. Here in the East part of the US this year we had a bad drought. Some farmers where however able to get perhaps 25% production of corn. This corn however turns out to be completely usesless for animal feed because the concentration of nitrates in the corn is so high that it is toxic to cattle. On the other hand, this was a GREAT year for grapes. The hot dry weather led to usually high concentration fo sugar in the fruit making them tasty and very potent for wine making.
If they are unsafe, wouldn't they be forced to cease and desist selling the GM seeds? Or worse, the government might consider them safe and ignore the other consequences, such as the environment.
There has been all kinds of debate on this topic, and many of the techniques used in making the GM foods have been worked out specifically to address these concerns. There are trials going too, before each type of food is introduced.
I just don't understand the ruckus about this. Conventional hydridized crops don't breed true; if you want to replant the same hybrid you must buy new seeds anyway.
People would still invent and improve technology without the protections provided by patent law.
Yes, but could you get $200 million from a venture capital firm for a biotech startup if you could not patent the results? I think not.
There's no reason to patent anything unless it means you can make money exclusively off it.
Your point being? A patent is essentially a contract between you and the government. You get exclusive rights to an invention for 20 years in exchange for publishing a complete description of the invention that allows anyone else to duplicate it.
Slashdotters don't seem to understand at all the parallel between the patent system and the Open Source movement. The only way you get a patent is by publishing your work. This allows anyone to examine your technology, and work on ways to improve it. After a fixed length of time everyone else is allowed free use of the technology. If it weren't for the patent system everyone would try to keep as much technology as possible secret. Patent systems were in fact put into place to fight the practice of keeping secrets within companies and guilds. The great industrial revolution of the 19th century may well have been triggered by the institution of a patent system in England.
Obviously, the system is not working. Just as copyright and trade secrets are used to hamper the development of knowledge by a society in today's modern world, so do patents nowadays serve only to lessen the march of science.
I disagree. Patents are extremely important to companies funding real research and development in many fields. We would not have the $1x10^9 investments needed to develop modern pharmaceuticals without patents. The patent system is in fact working to the great advantage of the US and its citizens. The fact is that the only countries that don't have patent systems are the same countries that don't develop any technology and have no real scientific infrastructure.
What is being done in the software industry today with patents is irrelavent to the march of science. The advances in computer science that are occurring now have nothing to do with one-click shopping.
In fact patents stimulate the advancement of science and technology because they increase the size of the pot of gold; they require that the inventor publish his results to insure wide dissemination of technology (i.e. you only get a patent if you open source your idea) and they encourage comapnies to develop their own ideas rather than just copying the competition.
Are there problems? Sure. Many of the patents that are described here never should have been issued. Someday somebody will win a test in court, and the system will be revised, or the patent owners will realize the futility of their patents and let the maintenance fees lapse.
But you should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Systems of laws are always and constantly evolving to keep up with the changes in society that occur with time.
Seems to me that PC Week is leaving holes in their article large enough to drive a truck through. For example, their server CERTAINLY should not be running all the services that there are patches for on RedHat. So when you run autorpm or whatever your should even have an upgrade option associated with these services, right? How many patches are really needed for an http server? 4? 5? And look at all the configuration changes they made for NT! It's HUGE compared to what they did for Linux. It seems to me that admining all of these is far worse than admining 21 patches FOR WHICH YOU HAVE THE SOURCE CODE.
In 1984 MacOS sure was superior technology to MS-DOS. And it remained that way until Win NT was introduced. I think MacOS is still better than Win 9x which is the biggest seller in the market by far.
DB2 has a big advantage over Oracle - the documentation is human readable. It is also a mature product, which is very important ofr a large scale mission critical application. IMHO, I would choose between DB2 and Oracle if I really cared about my data.
I think you can take Intel's statement at face value - they want Linux to run best on Intel processors. Thus Linux users will buy Intel boxen and make Intel happy. It also allows them to control their fate a bit - not totally relaint on the EVIL EMPIRE for an OS.
It's long been a practiced for lesser developed nations to try to bootstrap themselves into the modern world by acquiring technology hook or crook from more developed nations. This can take the form of pirating, industrial and governmental espionage (anyone who thinks the Chinese haven't been spying here is badly mistaken), getting licenses to manufacture XYZ and then reneging on terms limiting the disclosure to third parties etc.
Software piracy, GPL violations etc. are only the tip of the iceberg.
Nor is China the first, nor will they be the last to do this. They may in fact be the WORST though by virtue of their size and their represive government.
The only way to deal with the issue is by hitting them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. If GPL is being violated we need to complain to the same trade organizations that put pressue on China for all their other acts of international piracy, and complain to senators/congressmen about the favorable trade agreements that are being pushed through. Make no mistake about it. The current Chinese government is not your friend.
The water has an infinite shelf life; the problem is that if it sits in those plastic bottles too long it will become laden with carcinogens and other toxins by leaching.
These will cause your gonads to shrivel up and fall off or alternatively massive brain tumors like Roblimo.
AS opposed to Linux where a stray pointer in kernel space or a power failure can lead to serious disk corruption? THe disk repair utilities for Linux are so crude that I have more problems with losing ext2fs partitions than I ever have had with losing HFS partitions.
Although I believe the motherboards are jumperless in the Sawtooth 450's to begin with
It doesn't matter. The G3 upgrades don't require changing the jumpers - upgrade manufacturers came up with their own way to reclock the CPU. I am sure that the same techniques would work with G4's.
I don't think delaying release until it's fixed indicates a relaxed attitude. It's not like other CPUs from Intel etc are bug free, either. Look at the RAMBUS debacle, Xeon teething problems, etc.
Sounds to me like a recipie for dissatisfaction when you are 35. Get a good balanced education. Learn to write and communicate with other people. Take lots of math courses. As you go along in your career you will find that at some level you will be judged not only on your technical skills, but also your ability to communicate and manage other people. Engineers that hit 50 and find themselves unemployable generally have failed in building these skills; experience and knowledge are useless unless you caqn spread it around to the other people you work with.
I would suggest going to a school that offers both a good CS department as well as good liberal arts.
There is a certain level that you cannot go above without a good understanding of math. If, for example you are going to go into cryptography, or try to write video encoding software you had better be a 'math person'.
Did a little research on this - Apple has halted delivery of G3 server orders pending, and is in the process of building G4 servers with Mac OS X installed. Expected delivery is 1-2 weeks. I imagine when they catch up with the G3 orders they will open up the Apple Store for G4 server orders.
I think that anyone that is comptemplating a G4 server should nose around a bit. These things are *not* far off.
The G4 servers are listed in the Apple store as unfortunately 'not yet available'. The hardware bundle looks really sweet, too. 18 GB Ultra2 SCSI (dual channel controller), 4 port 100 MB Ethernet, 256 MB RAM, 500 MHz G4 cpu. It would be a great box for this application.
If I was doing this I would check out the availability targets first before saddling myself with some sort of frankenclone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry but this is rubbish
Did you even look at the web site I posted a link to? IRRI is a third world run organization. It has nothing to do with Monsanto or large agribusiness. It has a long history of delivering new hybrid rices to sustinance level farmers. There are VERY few if any organizations in the world today that have done so much to alleviate human suffering - right now their hydbrids are feeding something like 3 BILLION people per day; it has been estimated that their work has already saved 1.5 billion people from starvation.
They know how to get around the political and distribution problems, and how to develop products that third world farmers can effectively use. They have done it for many years, and very successfully.
They are embracing GM in a big way because of it's potential to further eliminate human suffering.
Perhaps there is a universal grammer that is innate to humans. But what makes you think that you can implement it in a Turing Machine?
AN Whitehead was obviosly not a linguist at all.
In actuality English is perhaps the most complex language in modern use, for a number of reasons. It has by far the largest vocabulary; it takes root words from many many other laguages; it's rules of grammer are highly irregular; because of the introduction of printing before the great vowel shift the spoken form of English does not agree at all with the written from; the geographic spread is so large that several dialects pigdins and patois forms of English now exist. If you propose that we adopt English as the base language you are going to have to be very specific about WHAT English using what local idioms and rules.
The richness and complexity of English is perhaps best exemplified by the richness of it's body of great literature and poetry where expression and level of meaning are best brought to form by a language that has a great richness of vocabulary and ability to express multiple levels of ideas in a single word. Of all the languages of the world there are three that clearly have great bodies of literature - Sanskrit, Greek, and yes, English.
I'd suspect it would be hard to collect seeds from your harvest of seedless grapes to replant.
Hahahaha you are joking, right? Grapes have been propagated by cuttings (a form of cloning) for at least the past 4000 years or so. Grape vines are perennials - they last a very long time, perhaps 50 years or so, if properly cared for. It takes 3-5 years for them to mature enough to get a good harvest. Most grapes grown now are actually grafts - a hardy rootstock with the desirable fruit producing variety grafted at the stem.
Seedless watermelon seeds (invented in Korea) are obtained by hybridizing two other varieties that result in a sterile cross (no seeds).
Don't people take high school biology?
GM won't feed the starving millions
Absolute crap. Your ignorance of this issue is breathtaking.
Take a look at the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines and tell me that GM won't have a HUGE impact on feeding the starving millions (840 million at last estimate).
GM foods are one of the most important scientific developments of this century. Ultimately their impact will affect third world nations that must import food from the developed world FAR more than any other new technology developed this century.
Anyway, what ever did happen to 100% pure food?
What the hell is pure food? No such thing. Even 100% organically grown food varies tremendously in chemical composition depending on where and how it was grown, what the rainfall was, whether or not a particular plant was attacked by beetles on xyz day, when it was harvested, what fungus was growing on it that day and so on.
Let's give an interesting example. Here in the East part of the US this year we had a bad drought. Some farmers where however able to get perhaps 25% production of corn. This corn however turns out to be completely usesless for animal feed because the concentration of nitrates in the corn is so high that it is toxic to cattle. On the other hand, this was a GREAT year for grapes. The hot dry weather led to usually high concentration fo sugar in the fruit making them tasty and very potent for wine making.
If they are unsafe, wouldn't they be forced to cease and desist selling the GM seeds? Or worse, the government might consider them safe and ignore the other consequences, such as the environment.
There has been all kinds of debate on this topic, and many of the techniques used in making the GM foods have been worked out specifically to address these concerns. There are trials going too, before each type of food is introduced.
I just don't understand the ruckus about this. Conventional hydridized crops don't breed true; if you want to replant the same hybrid you must buy new seeds anyway.
People would still invent and improve technology without the protections provided by patent law.
Yes, but could you get $200 million from a venture capital firm for a biotech startup if you could not patent the results? I think not.
There's no reason to patent anything unless it means you can make money exclusively off it.
Your point being? A patent is essentially a contract between you and the government. You get exclusive rights to an invention for 20 years in exchange for publishing a complete description of the invention that allows anyone else to duplicate it.
Slashdotters don't seem to understand at all the parallel between the patent system and the Open Source movement. The only way you get a patent is by publishing your work. This allows anyone to examine your technology, and work on ways to improve it. After a fixed length of time everyone else is allowed free use of the technology. If it weren't for the patent system everyone would try to keep as much technology as possible secret. Patent systems were in fact put into place to fight the practice of keeping secrets within companies and guilds. The great industrial revolution of the 19th century may well have been triggered by the institution of a patent system in England.
Obviously, the system is not working. Just as copyright and trade secrets are used to hamper the development of knowledge by a society in today's modern world, so do patents nowadays serve only to lessen the march of science.
I disagree. Patents are extremely important to companies funding real research and development in many fields. We would not have the $1x10^9 investments needed to develop modern pharmaceuticals without patents. The patent system is in fact working to the great advantage of the US and its citizens. The fact is that the only countries that don't have patent systems are the same countries that don't develop any technology and have no real scientific infrastructure.
What is being done in the software industry today with patents is irrelavent to the march of science. The advances in computer science that are occurring now have nothing to do with one-click shopping.
In fact patents stimulate the advancement of science and technology because they increase the size of the pot of gold; they require that the inventor publish his results to insure wide dissemination of technology (i.e. you only get a patent if you open source your idea) and they encourage comapnies to develop their own ideas rather than just copying the competition.
Are there problems? Sure. Many of the patents that are described here never should have been issued. Someday somebody will win a test in court, and the system will be revised, or the patent owners will realize the futility of their patents and let the maintenance fees lapse.
But you should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Systems of laws are always and constantly evolving to keep up with the changes in society that occur with time.
Seems to me that PC Week is leaving holes in their article large enough to drive a truck through. For example, their server CERTAINLY should not be running all the services that there are patches for on RedHat. So when you run autorpm or whatever your should even have an upgrade option associated with these services, right? How many patches are really needed for an http server? 4? 5? And look at all the configuration changes they made for NT! It's HUGE compared to what they did for Linux. It seems to me that admining all of these is far worse than admining 21 patches FOR WHICH YOU HAVE THE SOURCE CODE.
These guys are a bunch of bozos. Sigh.
In 1984 MacOS sure was superior technology to MS-DOS. And it remained that way until Win NT was introduced. I think MacOS is still better than Win 9x which is the biggest seller in the market by far.
DB2 has a big advantage over Oracle - the documentation is human readable. It is also a mature product, which is very important ofr a large scale mission critical application. IMHO, I would choose between DB2 and Oracle if I really cared about my data.
I think you can take Intel's statement at face value - they want Linux to run best on Intel processors. Thus Linux users will buy Intel boxen and make Intel happy. It also allows them to control their fate a bit - not totally relaint on the EVIL EMPIRE for an OS.
It's long been a practiced for lesser developed nations to try to bootstrap themselves into the modern world by acquiring technology hook or crook from more developed nations. This can take the form of pirating, industrial and governmental espionage (anyone who thinks the Chinese haven't been spying here is badly mistaken), getting licenses to manufacture XYZ and then reneging on terms limiting the disclosure to third parties etc.
Software piracy, GPL violations etc. are only the tip of the iceberg.
Nor is China the first, nor will they be the last to do this. They may in fact be the WORST though by virtue of their size and their represive government.
The only way to deal with the issue is by hitting them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. If GPL is being violated we need to complain to the same trade organizations that put pressue on China for all their other acts of international piracy, and complain to senators/congressmen about the favorable trade agreements that are being pushed through. Make no mistake about it. The current Chinese government is not your friend.
Shouldn't water have an infinite shelf life?
The water has an infinite shelf life; the problem is that if it sits in those plastic bottles too long it will become laden with carcinogens and other toxins by leaching.
These will cause your gonads to shrivel up and fall off or alternatively massive brain tumors like Roblimo.
Please Note:
Some quantum theories suggest that when the consumer is not directly observing this product, it may cease to exist.
Now I know why my socks disappear when I put them in the dryer
AS opposed to Linux where a stray pointer in kernel space or a power failure can lead to serious disk corruption? THe disk repair utilities for Linux are so crude that I have more problems with losing ext2fs partitions than I ever have had with losing HFS partitions.
Although I believe the motherboards are jumperless in the Sawtooth 450's to begin with
It doesn't matter. The G3 upgrades don't require changing the jumpers - upgrade manufacturers came up with their own way to reclock the CPU. I am sure that the same techniques would work with G4's.
I'm really sick of Apple apologists...
I am really sick of PC bigots jumping the gun without reading the article.
first of all, the processor is soldered down
First of all you are wrong. These things are on Zif sockets.
This is not better than Intel
Secondly this bug is affecting nobody because Motorola is delaying release. Unlike Intel which releases stuff then does field replacements.
I don't think delaying release until it's fixed indicates a relaxed attitude. It's not like other CPUs from Intel etc are bug free, either. Look at the RAMBUS debacle, Xeon teething problems, etc.
Sounds to me like a recipie for dissatisfaction when you are 35. Get a good balanced education. Learn to write and communicate with other people. Take lots of math courses. As you go along in your career you will find that at some level you will be judged not only on your technical skills, but also your ability to communicate and manage other people. Engineers that hit 50 and find themselves unemployable generally have failed in building these skills; experience and knowledge are useless unless you caqn spread it around to the other people you work with.
I would suggest going to a school that offers both a good CS department as well as good liberal arts.
There is a certain level that you cannot go above without a good understanding of math. If, for example you are going to go into cryptography, or try to write video encoding software you had better be a 'math person'.
Did a little research on this - Apple has halted delivery of G3 server orders pending, and is in the process of building G4 servers with Mac OS X installed. Expected delivery is 1-2 weeks. I imagine when they catch up with the G3 orders they will open up the Apple Store for G4 server orders.
I think that anyone that is comptemplating a G4 server should nose around a bit. These things are *not* far off.
Macintouch reported people started receiving Apple Store orders of Sawtooth 450 MHz G4's around Sept 24.
The older Yosemite based 400 MHz systems were showing up even earlier.
The G4 servers are listed in the Apple store as unfortunately 'not yet available'. The hardware bundle looks really sweet, too. 18 GB Ultra2 SCSI (dual channel controller), 4 port 100 MB Ethernet, 256 MB RAM, 500 MHz G4 cpu. It would be a great box for this application.
If I was doing this I would check out the availability targets first before saddling myself with some sort of frankenclone.