Or he's trying like hell to corrupt them or bamboozle them into thinking MPAA's vision is a good idea and not a scheme that puts the utility of the internet at risk.
Monsanto is so vigorous about defending its Roundup Ready seed patents because they are in a panic about what's happening in plant biology. Here's why.
Once you reach a point that farm weeds are starting to show resistance to Roundup, the game's up for Roundup. Most crops are grown in areas where 95% of the land is under cultivation. So you have virtually all Monsanto's seed sown in large areas that are pretty uniform breeding grounds for weeds. For years, Roundup Ready was a big advantage, because there were just a few kinds of weeds that could survive Roundup spraying. But now we've reached a point where 94% of the farmland is under cultivation with Roundup Ready and it's getting sprayed every year at the weeds' peak vulnerability times with Roundup, putting massive selection pressure on the weeds.
Once you reach a level where 1% of the weeds are resistant, and 94% of them get sprayed with something like 90% mortality, you get a next generation of weed seeds that's about 5% resistant. They year after that it's about 20% resistant. At this point farmers still see some value in Roundup. It still gives them an 80% reduction in weeds. But next year it's about 57% resistant. Now the farmer is frustrated. He sprays and sprays again and curses Monsanto. His crops are OK, but he's not doing as well as the guy down the road who doesn't spray at all but uses other methods for weed reduction.
But Roundup has been his method for 15 years and he's reluctant to try something new.
The next year, 87% of the weeds are resistant to Roundup. He sprays and only a handful of weeds die. He knows he sprayed at the right time. His neighbors are all bemoaning the same problem. "It ain't the Roundup. It's the weeds," one buddy says. "I got some on my grass and it was dead as fuckall the next morning. The weeds have adapted."
Roundup sales plummet mid-year. The company rep calls the feed store. "Farmers ain't buying it no more.," the manager tells him. "They say it don't work no more." It makes headlines across the country.
The next year, Roundup sales are zero, and there's no market for Roundup Ready seeds. Farmers are looking for other seeds that give the best yield on their soil type and moisture level.
The only way Monsanto keeps a money stream on the Roundup product is selling it to city dwellers to kill dandelions and crabgrass. But by now it's adapting in the city as well.
So they either introduce a new plant killer and have a giant campaign to get farmers on board -- farmers who feel screwed by paying for two years of overpriced seeds and worthless chemicals -- or they get out of the seed business.
Unless they can enforce a patent right on every seed that has their gene in it no matter how many generations removed from their production. Because you can no longer find a pure source of seed uncontaminated by their gene. Too many farmers have grown it and it has cross-pollinated into everybody's crop.
And it all sounds richly deserved, but then you realize that the same thing is happening with bacteria that attack our bodies. Only slower, because the breeding ground for those germs isn't under as heavy a pressure.
We're at war with the Fascists. The Communists (Stalin) are our allies in this epic war. We're at war with the Communists. The Fascists (Diem), Islamic Jihadists and even Communists (Pol Pot!) are our allies in this critical struggle. We're at war with the Islamic terrorists. The Communists and Fascists are our allies in this fight for our homeland. We have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. We're at war with Saddam Hussein. He has weapons of mass destruction. He's in bed with the Jihadists! Who isn't? The Toadies are our allies in this fight to save the UN. We don't know why most UN countries think it's a bad idea, but never mind that. What, no WMD? Well he used to have some and he used them against Iranians. The Iranians are our alli... umm, give me a minute, I'll think of something.
Never mind all that. We're about to go to war with the Iranians. Fuck! there's no one left to be our allies except the Israelis.
This us an example of why I think cloud computing and in particular cloud storage is risky. At any time some government somewhere may decide to seize the servers for some reason that has nothing to do with you. Then where's your data?
Or they may go out of business-- not just the people you thought you were dealing with but possibly subs in some unknown country.
I think the idea that different people learn in different ways is highly suspect.
It's not like Sara and Tommy are different species. What works to help Sara learn will work for Tommy unless Tommy lacks some basic faculty that Sara has.
If this were not the case, schools would never have worked.
But I think already we have the important data: thousands of planets! And these are just that tiny fraction that have orbits that take them across the line between their sun and ours. Thousands of times as many planets have orbits that would not cause a transit.
The point is we now have enough data to estimate the density of planets in the galaxy. So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
Further, I think the differences make sense when you look at our countries history. Down in the US, you folks had a huge war to get your independence.. lots of inspiring speeches and acts of heroism and such. You _won_ your absolute independence and are adamant about protecting it.
Here in Canada, we hashed out our independence in a series of meetings with the British. It was a compromise solution invloving a gradual transition where we would get a constitution and all the things that really matter for the day to day running of a country, and the British would still maintain a largely symbolic involvement in our politics.
An American would of course freak out at this. Total independence or death and such but it works for us.
Total independence was the only option when the American colonies rebelled. They had been governed under their establishing charters and were fairly happy with the arrangement until the late 18th century. That's when Parliament began drastically imposing on the rights to self-government that they had had under their charters. The American colonies petitioned the King and Parliament for restoration of their rights. The Crown responded with increasingly draconian crack-downs and further restrictions. It was either give up all of their rights or fight to win them back.
Canada had something of a luxury in having had America rebel first. The successful rebellion of the American states impressed upon the british government the impossibility of maintaining such a tight grip on power in remote areas of the world. If you want to maintain an empire, you need buy in on the part of the local governing powers. If that local government is democratic as it was in the Americas that means you need most of the citizens to buy into the advantages of the empire.
Oh yeah, fine. But a small point-- it's a straw man, as nobody is drinking the sea water, but billions of plants and animals are bio-concentrating the minerals. Your basic clams end up with like 110,000 times the radioactivity of the surrounding seawater, because all they do, all day long, is filter seawater.
"The data suggests that the highest estimates of radioactive discharges are likely to be accurate, but the rapid dilution of the water has kept the levels from Fukushima's isotopes below those of the naturally occurring radioactivity. "
Below naturally occurring means that the stuff is already so diluted that you shouldn't be worrying about it if you have no problem with the amount of radiation in plain-old-seawater.
What do we do with the waste? It's mostly ( >90% ) more dangerous than ore. The biggest problem with Fuckishima (sic) is the ponds of waste. Scaremongering aside, when solar is cheaper for a country than nuclear, why go with nuclear? (as is the case in my country)
Nuclear power plants work at night and on rainy days.
I thought all they had were giant jellyfish around Japan the last couple years. People don't eat those, which may be part of why that's all that's left.
I think anything that forces my enterprise to update its clay tablets is a good thing. But this is not that thing. IT will just say, "You could just use Internet Explorer." And they'd be right. Who has the time to go on a project of updating enterprise apps every time a browser changes?
I use Internet Explorer exclusively now (when at work) because the current version works adequately with everything else I use. Firefox used to, but then they updated it and it didn't work right with some of our enterprise apps. I could get it to work by loading the right plugins. Then it mysteriously stopped working. Then it started working. Now it doesn't work.
It ain't worth the trouble. The next time I consider switching browsers it will be because IE has stopped working for some enterprise app that I must use to do my job. The only way I'll end up using two browsers in the same week is if one of them works right for one of my enterprise apps and the other works right for another indispensible app.
But they base their rankings on web searches, which is pitiably lame. The fact that a language showed up in a web search is subject to variation based on press releases and manipulation.
If you want high-quality information, survey professional and amateur programmers and ask them what languages they have used in the last month.
The X86 instruction code is the lowest level that's accessible. You can only cause actions to happen at the core level by executing machine instructions.
Slashdot Mirror
Cyborgs!
Maybe YOU'RE more engaged when you teach the kids with a tablet.
I agree with that, and that's what NASA's fixin' ta do.
Also no rentals or Netflix subscriptions.
Or he's trying like hell to corrupt them or bamboozle them into thinking MPAA's vision is a good idea and not a scheme that puts the utility of the internet at risk.
Corporations are people my friend.
Monsanto is so vigorous about defending its Roundup Ready seed patents because they are in a panic about what's happening in plant biology. Here's why.
Once you reach a point that farm weeds are starting to show resistance to Roundup, the game's up for Roundup. Most crops are grown in areas where 95% of the land is under cultivation. So you have virtually all Monsanto's seed sown in large areas that are pretty uniform breeding grounds for weeds. For years, Roundup Ready was a big advantage, because there were just a few kinds of weeds that could survive Roundup spraying. But now we've reached a point where 94% of the farmland is under cultivation with Roundup Ready and it's getting sprayed every year at the weeds' peak vulnerability times with Roundup, putting massive selection pressure on the weeds.
Once you reach a level where 1% of the weeds are resistant, and 94% of them get sprayed with something like 90% mortality, you get a next generation of weed seeds that's about 5% resistant. They year after that it's about 20% resistant. At this point farmers still see some value in Roundup. It still gives them an 80% reduction in weeds. But next year it's about 57% resistant. Now the farmer is frustrated. He sprays and sprays again and curses Monsanto. His crops are OK, but he's not doing as well as the guy down the road who doesn't spray at all but uses other methods for weed reduction.
But Roundup has been his method for 15 years and he's reluctant to try something new.
The next year, 87% of the weeds are resistant to Roundup. He sprays and only a handful of weeds die. He knows he sprayed at the right time. His neighbors are all bemoaning the same problem. "It ain't the Roundup. It's the weeds," one buddy says. "I got some on my grass and it was dead as fuckall the next morning. The weeds have adapted."
Roundup sales plummet mid-year. The company rep calls the feed store. "Farmers ain't buying it no more.," the manager tells him. "They say it don't work no more." It makes headlines across the country.
The next year, Roundup sales are zero, and there's no market for Roundup Ready seeds. Farmers are looking for other seeds that give the best yield on their soil type and moisture level.
The only way Monsanto keeps a money stream on the Roundup product is selling it to city dwellers to kill dandelions and crabgrass. But by now it's adapting in the city as well.
So they either introduce a new plant killer and have a giant campaign to get farmers on board -- farmers who feel screwed by paying for two years of overpriced seeds and worthless chemicals -- or they get out of the seed business.
Unless they can enforce a patent right on every seed that has their gene in it no matter how many generations removed from their production. Because you can no longer find a pure source of seed uncontaminated by their gene. Too many farmers have grown it and it has cross-pollinated into everybody's crop.
And it all sounds richly deserved, but then you realize that the same thing is happening with bacteria that attack our bodies. Only slower, because the breeding ground for those germs isn't under as heavy a pressure.
We're at war with the Fascists. The Communists (Stalin) are our allies in this epic war.
We're at war with the Communists. The Fascists (Diem), Islamic Jihadists and even Communists (Pol Pot!) are our allies in this critical struggle.
We're at war with the Islamic terrorists. The Communists and Fascists are our allies in this fight for our homeland. We have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.
We're at war with Saddam Hussein. He has weapons of mass destruction. He's in bed with the Jihadists! Who isn't? The Toadies are our allies in this fight to save the UN. We don't know why most UN countries think it's a bad idea, but never mind that. What, no WMD? Well he used to have some and he used them against Iranians. The Iranians are our alli... umm, give me a minute, I'll think of something.
Never mind all that. We're about to go to war with the Iranians. Fuck! there's no one left to be our allies except the Israelis.
We'll deal with them next.
AND seizing all the mail received or sent there as "evidence."
Where is the warrant describing the things seized? Does it say anything about the data I uploaded?
Does it say anything about the data of Carpathia's other customers?
This us an example of why I think cloud computing and in particular cloud storage is risky. At any time some government somewhere may decide to seize the servers for some reason that has nothing to do with you. Then where's your data?
Or they may go out of business-- not just the people you thought you were dealing with but possibly subs in some unknown country.
There IS witchcraft on them. What else could make those pictures move?
And Communist propaganda, almost certainly.
I think the idea that different people learn in different ways is highly suspect.
It's not like Sara and Tommy are different species. What works to help Sara learn will work for Tommy unless Tommy lacks some basic faculty that Sara has.
If this were not the case, schools would never have worked.
Where we differ is mostly culture.
Of course. If it's genetic, there's no reason to listen to their kookball warnings.
Well the recent sharp rise in autism diagnoses is curiously synced to the introduction of Viagra.
And Viagra had been linked to a rise in...
Never mind.
But I think already we have the important data: thousands of planets! And these are just that tiny fraction that have orbits that take them across the line between their sun and ours. Thousands of times as many planets have orbits that would not cause a transit.
The point is we now have enough data to estimate the density of planets in the galaxy. So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
Further, I think the differences make sense when you look at our countries history. Down in the US, you folks had a huge war to get your independence .. lots of inspiring speeches and acts of heroism and such. You _won_ your absolute independence and are adamant about protecting it.
Here in Canada, we hashed out our independence in a series of meetings with the British. It was a compromise solution invloving a gradual transition where we would get a constitution and all the things that really matter for the day to day running of a country, and the British would still maintain a largely symbolic involvement in our politics.
An American would of course freak out at this. Total independence or death and such but it works for us.
Total independence was the only option when the American colonies rebelled. They had been governed under their establishing charters and were fairly happy with the arrangement until the late 18th century. That's when Parliament began drastically imposing on the rights to self-government that they had had under their charters. The American colonies petitioned the King and Parliament for restoration of their rights. The Crown responded with increasingly draconian crack-downs and further restrictions. It was either give up all of their rights or fight to win them back.
Canada had something of a luxury in having had America rebel first. The successful rebellion of the American states impressed upon the british government the impossibility of maintaining such a tight grip on power in remote areas of the world. If you want to maintain an empire, you need buy in on the part of the local governing powers. If that local government is democratic as it was in the Americas that means you need most of the citizens to buy into the advantages of the empire.
Oh yeah, fine. But a small point-- it's a straw man, as nobody is drinking the sea water, but billions of plants and animals are bio-concentrating the minerals. Your basic clams end up with like 110,000 times the radioactivity of the surrounding seawater, because all they do, all day long, is filter seawater.
"The data suggests that the highest estimates of radioactive discharges are likely to be accurate, but the rapid dilution of the water has kept the levels from Fukushima's isotopes below those of the naturally occurring radioactivity. "
Below naturally occurring means that the stuff is already so diluted that you shouldn't be worrying about it if you have no problem with the amount of radiation in plain-old-seawater.
I think most of the bulk radiation in the ocean is due to the sun. (because it converts nitrogen to Carbon-14). Darn sun!
What do we do with the waste? It's mostly ( >90% ) more dangerous than ore. The biggest problem with Fuckishima (sic) is the ponds of waste. Scaremongering aside, when solar is cheaper for a country than nuclear, why go with nuclear? (as is the case in my country)
Nuclear power plants work at night and on rainy days.
Also, there's an ocean current that carries the contaminated water eastward away from Japan. That has to help.
I thought all they had were giant jellyfish around Japan the last couple years. People don't eat those, which may be part of why that's all that's left.
I do. They pay my salary and your unemployment check.
I think anything that forces my enterprise to update its clay tablets is a good thing. But this is not that thing. IT will just say, "You could just use Internet Explorer." And they'd be right. Who has the time to go on a project of updating enterprise apps every time a browser changes?
I use Internet Explorer exclusively now (when at work) because the current version works adequately with everything else I use. Firefox used to, but then they updated it and it didn't work right with some of our enterprise apps. I could get it to work by loading the right plugins. Then it mysteriously stopped working. Then it started working. Now it doesn't work.
It ain't worth the trouble. The next time I consider switching browsers it will be because IE has stopped working for some enterprise app that I must use to do my job. The only way I'll end up using two browsers in the same week is if one of them works right for one of my enterprise apps and the other works right for another indispensible app.
But they base their rankings on web searches, which is pitiably lame. The fact that a language showed up in a web search is subject to variation based on press releases and manipulation.
If you want high-quality information, survey professional and amateur programmers and ask them what languages they have used in the last month.
The X86 instruction code is the lowest level that's accessible. You can only cause actions to happen at the core level by executing machine instructions.