Okay, please try to understand this. People _live_ there. There are important mining interests there. It's a desert. Knowing about rainfall in the area is important for a number of reasons. For example, if there's a heavy wet season every ten years ago in an otherwise dry area, you get mudslides. You hear about that sort of thing in the news all the time where unexpected heavy rains have just killed hundreds or thousands of people in a typically dry region. Your childish dismissal of an entire, important, field of study as an example of "the least optimally spent money" is pathetic. The people who study these things and tell people "don't build your homes there or you'll be killed by mudslide/flood/earthquake/fire/etc. within 20 years" are doing a very important job, not wasting money, and saving people's lives. They're also too frequently not listened too.
You're clearly a judgemental guy. I'm sure you've watched flood victims on TV frequently and sneered at what morons they are and told anyone who would listen that they deserved it for living in a flood plain in the first place. Given that, do you think that research into what the 100-year flood level is (and into how that level will change due to all the human construction with it's well-engineered drainage systems) is wasted?
Aside from the geological evidence, I should point out that there's also all the written records of the thousands and thousands of people who have lived and worked there. We can already compare the inferences with recorded data, we don't have to wait a few hundred years. Why is it that people think the mid-1800's were the stone age? The science of meteorology existed 150 years ago. We had the telegraph and just a few years until the telephone. We had steam engines and locomotives. Internal combustion engine automobiles already existed. We had thermometers, graduated cylinders, barometers, devices for measuring wind speed, etc. The Renaissance and Enlightenment were already considered part of history. Most people weren't dragging around clubs, speaking in grunts and interpreting all weather events as signs from the sky gods (at least, not to a considerably greater degree than they still do today).
To be fair, there are no glaciers in the Atacama desert region. You need precipitation to have glaciers... oops, we're back round to evidence of no precipitation again.
Er, yes I can. It's the Atacama desert. It made headlines worldwide for being so unusual. Taken by itself it's just a freak event. Your disbelief that it even happened is a little silly.
Yes, I can tell you what high desert area we're talking about. It's the Atacama desert. It's actually mostly in Chile, but it does touch the border of Peru. It's known as one of the driest places on Earth (_the_ driest according to many) and the snowfall made international headlines as a notable freak event. People have lived in the region for millenia, including people of European descent for centuries. Amazingly enough, people keep records. Some people keep records on a daily basis and save those records. We call those journals or diaries. Any precipitation at all in the area is an extremely unusual event that gets recorded by witnesses. Your sarcastic disbelief that records could even exist about rainfall in this region comes off, to anyone who thinks about it for even a moment, as ridiculous and ignorant.
Almost exactly except for the part saying: "Any adaptation that allows for survival in a given environmental condition is *already* there when that given environmental condition appears". That situation is unlikely most of the time.
You might want to look at this Wikipedia article. It's a timeline of meteorology. Apparently you have some severe misunderstandings about how long human beings have been taking note of the weather.
You misunderstand evolution. Well, at least your comprehension of it isn't as absolute as you seem to think. The scenario you put forth is one possible example of evolution, but not the only possible one. A more likely scenario is one in which the environmental change is fairly gradual and, during the transition, a variation occurs making some subset of organisms more able to survive in the conditions the environment is transitioning to. The case where the environment shifts overnight is almost certainly less common and, even when it does occur, it's still more likely that the mutated subset of organisms that take over the niche don't come from the affected region, but repopulate it from nearby areas unaffected by the environmental change.
In any case, the kind of changes that require rapid adaptation by a population generally aren't very pleasant for the population. They're usually mostly, or absolutely destructive to the local population. Humans, as a species, or in smaller groupings, can survive all kinds of things. That doesn't mean that big changes don't cause all kinds of suffering and death on the individual level, however. This is something that some people seem to misunderstand (or callously dismiss when it doesn't affect them directly) leading to statements like "Don't live in places without water, stupid".
I claim that any entity capable of understanding the Asimov Laws AND _interpreting_ them to apply them in complex and diverse scenarios would also be capable of choosing not to follow them.
Of course, Asimov agreed with you on this. Hence the zeroth law. Now, that "law" of robotics was still in the spirit of the other three laws, but involved robots choosing to violate the other laws. Asimov created the laws as a reasonably consistent guideline for ethical robotic behaviour. He did realize that it would be incredibly difficult if not impossible to actually implement something like that in real life. If you've actually read _I, Robot_, then you know that the book is pretty much a collection of fictional case studies of the three laws going wrong.
I don't think I have much of a chance of educating the banks at all. It's pretty clear that they're pretty much immune to any correcting influences at all.
But the increased vertical speed comes at the cost of some of your horizontal speed, along with additional mechanical losses. The decreased speed means less lift. You'd be better off raising the deck, which I'm pretty sure they already do as much as they can. I think that these things are designed by people who have some idea what they're doing.
True. Sorry if I went overboard. I just get a little worked up about how seriously banks fail at basic security. I say that they're incompetent, but that's just because I'm trying not to assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence. It does occur to me that it's quite possible that the banks actually stick with such terrible solutions on purpose because they've found ways to push the cost of fraud to their customers in a way that actually ends up profiting them.
Of course, the risk of skimming is entirely the fault of the banks. It wouldn't take technology more advanced than that found in a typical pocket calculator to replace credit and debit cards with something that uses a hidden key (possibly additionally protected by a pin, which you would type in on your own keypad). In other words, cheap technology that's been around for thirty years or more. Sure it would be a little bulkier than a typical credit card, but there's no reason you couldn't have one device that holds twenty credit card certificates on it. Instead, we're still in the stone ages with credit and debit cards that reveal pretty much all information to steal from someone on the face of the card (oh, pardon me banks, due to their super-brilliance, now you have to look at the front and back) and all of it to anyone you buy anything from. The security incompetence the banks display is mind-boggling. Considering that they're dealing with other people's money, I have no idea how they're not considered criminally negligent for perpetuating such a system.
You have to question whether the intent was necessarily just to hurt her though. It could have also been, from his perspective, a way to defend himself from what he saw as slander from her. Clearly the judge didn't think so, but judges aren't infallible.
The ultimate problem with restraining orders is that they're not some sort of magical force field. Often in order to get a restraining order, one party has to claim to be afraid of physical harm from the other. The thing is, someone truly dangerous isn't going to be stopped for a second by a restraining order. They may, however, help keep marginal situations from escalating by keeping people apart. Simply preventing people's feelings from being hurt is another matter, however. Harassment is one thing, but where does normal relationship bitterness end and harassment begin? It seems like the ex-boyfriend in this case went a little too far, but it seems like the judge went a lot too far.
And to add my own personal experience with restraining orders; once, years and years back, I went with my then girlfriend while she was babysitting a friend's children. It turned out that her friend and her husband were having relationship difficulty and she had a restraining order against him forbidding him from being within some particular distance of her. So, naturally, her big plans for the evening were to go to where she knew he would be and force him to leave and then follow him around the whole night. And that really does seem to be how restraining orders are usually used: just one more weapon in the troubled relationship arsenal. The people getting the restraining orders are quite often aggressors rather than victims, or at least are aggressors as well as victims.
Yikes. A tie rod actually breaking is pretty serious. If that happens at speed, you could be killed. For something that could kill me, I'd really like to know why it happened, why it wasn't caught before it happened when the car was inspected, and how to prevent it in future.
For me it was New Zealand, France and the US. When I first started school in the US, I was put into a remedial math class for about a week. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I think it was mostly because my math teacher thought I couldn't do long division because I didn't do it the way they expected. Overall, I agree that there weren't that many differences in math, but the experience there (and in other subjects, comma conventions, ugh) did leave a lasting impression. I learned that what one group of people considers an absolute, ironclad way of doing things isn't necessarily so absolute for everyone. That's left me always checking my assumptions on things like this.
You mention, for example, the X,Y,Z axes following the alphabet. Alphabetical order is, however, a social convention. I know the alphabetical order I was taught, but what if the last letters are , and , in that order. Or what about people with a convention of writing right to left instead of left to right. The problem is that I know enough to know that I don't know everything, so I always have a little doubt about just about anything I think I know.
Well, there are a lot of computer graphics systems where they aren't and where the positive or negative axis aren't in the direction you'd expect. I don't ever being taught a different convention in a math class, but I've learned enough different math conventions over the years that my confidence in rules like that is always a bit shaky. For example, do you use a . or a , as a decimal point? When you round numbers, do you round 7.5 to 8 or to 7? In some math classes I remember just expected to know that the professor meant natural logarithm when s/he said logarithm. It seems like the higher level math you take and the more divergent the branches, the more you're expected to infer certain things from context. So, in that context, I was only about 90% certain that the first coordinate would be a horizontal x-axis, the second a vertical y-axis, etc. If I'd gotten the question wrong, it wouldn't be the first time I've gotten a question intended for a youngster wrong because something that I was taught (probably doesn't help that I learned the basics in three completely parts of the world) as a fundamental has either changed since I was young or was just differently taught in different places.
I think I'm starting to get you Mr. Space Nutter troll. You're that kid who always claimed that martial arts was a load of *^&%$ because he didn't understand that normal people know that the martial arts depicted in most movies is fantasy. You don't understand that most "science fiction" is fantasy as well. Guess what, Westerns and cop shows are really heavy on the fantasy as well. That doesn't mean that Europeans didn't colonize the North American continent and that fights with Native Americans and stage coach, train and bank robberies didn't actually happen. The ridiculous nonsense that goes on in cop shows doesn't mean that police don't exist.
Space travel is possible. That's been conclusively demonstrated. There's no good reason to believe that mining and manufacturing can't be done in space. There's no also no good reason to believe that space installations can't be built well enough to sustain human life well enough for them to procreate and for enough of their offspring to survive to procreate that their numbers increase. We can manage radiation shielding. If humans really need 1G to survive long term, we can manage simulated gravity (if carnival engineers can manage it, space engineers can manage it, and if they can't then send the carnival engineers to space) both free floating in space or on the surface of a low gravity body like the Moon or Mars. We can manage nuclear and solar and geothermal power. We can crack water and use other chemical techniques to get oxygen to breathe. We can grow food. No-one has ever provided any convincing proof that, once bootstrapped, human civilization couldn't sustain itself and grow in space.
Travel by living humans to other stars is another question. There could turn out to be physical limits (that no-one has conclusively shown yet) preventing us from sustaining the life of the travellers for the entire trip. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.
PS, it isn't physical limits preventing supersonic passenger transport on Earth. The fact that Concorde service was terminated doesn't say anything about the fundamental possibility of space travel. The Concorde managed to stay operational and profitable for years. The factors that stopped it flying stemmed from one unfortunate air crash (caused by a part that fell off another plane) and the fact that the operators realized that, even though they could make money from the concorde, they would make more money putting those passengers in first class on sub-sonic jets.
Easy one to get tripped up on. I was wondering about how universal the conventions of x axis coming first and y axis coming second were in current grade-school math. But, if something is reflected over the y axis, then it's the x term that changes sign.
There are things in that question that you sort of need to know by heart to answer the question. First of all is the x-axis and the y-axis. Standards in math(s) aren't all that standard. For example, how many thousands is 1,125 * 8 * 250? So, how absolute is the convention of representing coordinates as (x-axis, y-axis)? I don't know for sure that they're still teaching school kids that way any more. There is some rote knowledge you need in order to make sense of the numbers.
Then there's the meaning of reflected across the y-axis. It seems obvious, but I still had to wonder if there could be some other special meaning to it that they were teaching kids today. I had to spend a little time considering all of the possibilities and comparing against the given answers to see if there was anything other than the immediately obvious that made sense.
Also, has anyone noticed that Maureen in question 5 is earning less than federal minimum wage?
I agree with you that it really serves the original purpose of patents, but I think we disagree on what the original purpose of patents was. Looking back in history a little bit before the US patent office, lettres patent were a method of granting government enforced monopolies on certain areas of business. A good example of that sort of thing is the East India Trading Company. The modern patent regime emerged from that practice. In the case of Monsanto's roundup-ready crops, the purpose of their patent is to give them an iron lock on the market segment. The reason I brought up DRM in the first place is because this really can't be protected by patent law since it replicates and spreads by itself (regardless of the terminator gene, which I'll get to in a moment). Human law doesn't trump natural law. Otherwise we could legislate against death and aging and all become immortal. Intellectual property law essentially churns out unfunded mandates constantly. Patents on self-replicating organisms which are then released into the wild by the company that made them expect everyone in the world and nature itself to bend over backwards to accommodate them. That's clearly unreasonable.
As for the terminator gene, there are a few problems. One is that it's a huge evolutionary disadvantage. Coupled with other modifications that provide a big evolutionary advantage and then spread to billions or trillions of plants, it should be really obvious to anyone with a grade school understanding of evolution exactly what will happen. The first mutation that knocks out the terminator gene takes off like wildfire. The terminator gene is obviously something that scientists who should know better came up with for MBA's who don't know better (or just don't try), just like DRM. You could probably pull it off with animals, but plants? As for removing the threat of unwanted spread of the gene... if you think about it, what would happen in the cross-pollination scenario is that the farmer not buying seed from Monsanto would have year after year of really bad growing seasons while his neighbors buying their seeds from Monsanto every year had good crop yields. Yeah, that's not a win-win. It's just a win for the gm seed manufacturer in a "that's a nice crop you've got there, it would be shame if anything happened to it" sort of way.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, you didn't complete your thought. What comes after the ellipses at the end of your post? Is it death?
The problem here is that you think that $2.50 per pound is affordable for someone poor.
Not sure if there even are any trees in the Atacama desert, except maybe in Oases, which are atypical of the region by definition.
Okay, please try to understand this. People _live_ there. There are important mining interests there. It's a desert. Knowing about rainfall in the area is important for a number of reasons. For example, if there's a heavy wet season every ten years ago in an otherwise dry area, you get mudslides. You hear about that sort of thing in the news all the time where unexpected heavy rains have just killed hundreds or thousands of people in a typically dry region. Your childish dismissal of an entire, important, field of study as an example of "the least optimally spent money" is pathetic. The people who study these things and tell people "don't build your homes there or you'll be killed by mudslide/flood/earthquake/fire/etc. within 20 years" are doing a very important job, not wasting money, and saving people's lives. They're also too frequently not listened too.
You're clearly a judgemental guy. I'm sure you've watched flood victims on TV frequently and sneered at what morons they are and told anyone who would listen that they deserved it for living in a flood plain in the first place. Given that, do you think that research into what the 100-year flood level is (and into how that level will change due to all the human construction with it's well-engineered drainage systems) is wasted?
Aside from the geological evidence, I should point out that there's also all the written records of the thousands and thousands of people who have lived and worked there. We can already compare the inferences with recorded data, we don't have to wait a few hundred years. Why is it that people think the mid-1800's were the stone age? The science of meteorology existed 150 years ago. We had the telegraph and just a few years until the telephone. We had steam engines and locomotives. Internal combustion engine automobiles already existed. We had thermometers, graduated cylinders, barometers, devices for measuring wind speed, etc. The Renaissance and Enlightenment were already considered part of history. Most people weren't dragging around clubs, speaking in grunts and interpreting all weather events as signs from the sky gods (at least, not to a considerably greater degree than they still do today).
To be fair, there are no glaciers in the Atacama desert region. You need precipitation to have glaciers... oops, we're back round to evidence of no precipitation again.
Er, yes I can. It's the Atacama desert. It made headlines worldwide for being so unusual. Taken by itself it's just a freak event. Your disbelief that it even happened is a little silly.
Yes, I can tell you what high desert area we're talking about. It's the Atacama desert. It's actually mostly in Chile, but it does touch the border of Peru. It's known as one of the driest places on Earth (_the_ driest according to many) and the snowfall made international headlines as a notable freak event. People have lived in the region for millenia, including people of European descent for centuries. Amazingly enough, people keep records. Some people keep records on a daily basis and save those records. We call those journals or diaries. Any precipitation at all in the area is an extremely unusual event that gets recorded by witnesses. Your sarcastic disbelief that records could even exist about rainfall in this region comes off, to anyone who thinks about it for even a moment, as ridiculous and ignorant.
Almost exactly except for the part saying: "Any adaptation that allows for survival in a given environmental condition is *already* there when that given environmental condition appears". That situation is unlikely most of the time.
You might want to look at this Wikipedia article. It's a timeline of meteorology. Apparently you have some severe misunderstandings about how long human beings have been taking note of the weather.
You misunderstand evolution. Well, at least your comprehension of it isn't as absolute as you seem to think. The scenario you put forth is one possible example of evolution, but not the only possible one. A more likely scenario is one in which the environmental change is fairly gradual and, during the transition, a variation occurs making some subset of organisms more able to survive in the conditions the environment is transitioning to. The case where the environment shifts overnight is almost certainly less common and, even when it does occur, it's still more likely that the mutated subset of organisms that take over the niche don't come from the affected region, but repopulate it from nearby areas unaffected by the environmental change.
In any case, the kind of changes that require rapid adaptation by a population generally aren't very pleasant for the population. They're usually mostly, or absolutely destructive to the local population. Humans, as a species, or in smaller groupings, can survive all kinds of things. That doesn't mean that big changes don't cause all kinds of suffering and death on the individual level, however. This is something that some people seem to misunderstand (or callously dismiss when it doesn't affect them directly) leading to statements like "Don't live in places without water, stupid".
TheLink wrote:
Of course, Asimov agreed with you on this. Hence the zeroth law. Now, that "law" of robotics was still in the spirit of the other three laws, but involved robots choosing to violate the other laws. Asimov created the laws as a reasonably consistent guideline for ethical robotic behaviour. He did realize that it would be incredibly difficult if not impossible to actually implement something like that in real life. If you've actually read _I, Robot_, then you know that the book is pretty much a collection of fictional case studies of the three laws going wrong.
I don't think I have much of a chance of educating the banks at all. It's pretty clear that they're pretty much immune to any correcting influences at all.
But the increased vertical speed comes at the cost of some of your horizontal speed, along with additional mechanical losses. The decreased speed means less lift. You'd be better off raising the deck, which I'm pretty sure they already do as much as they can. I think that these things are designed by people who have some idea what they're doing.
True. Sorry if I went overboard. I just get a little worked up about how seriously banks fail at basic security. I say that they're incompetent, but that's just because I'm trying not to assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence. It does occur to me that it's quite possible that the banks actually stick with such terrible solutions on purpose because they've found ways to push the cost of fraud to their customers in a way that actually ends up profiting them.
Of course, the risk of skimming is entirely the fault of the banks. It wouldn't take technology more advanced than that found in a typical pocket calculator to replace credit and debit cards with something that uses a hidden key (possibly additionally protected by a pin, which you would type in on your own keypad). In other words, cheap technology that's been around for thirty years or more. Sure it would be a little bulkier than a typical credit card, but there's no reason you couldn't have one device that holds twenty credit card certificates on it. Instead, we're still in the stone ages with credit and debit cards that reveal pretty much all information to steal from someone on the face of the card (oh, pardon me banks, due to their super-brilliance, now you have to look at the front and back) and all of it to anyone you buy anything from. The security incompetence the banks display is mind-boggling. Considering that they're dealing with other people's money, I have no idea how they're not considered criminally negligent for perpetuating such a system.
You have to question whether the intent was necessarily just to hurt her though. It could have also been, from his perspective, a way to defend himself from what he saw as slander from her. Clearly the judge didn't think so, but judges aren't infallible.
The ultimate problem with restraining orders is that they're not some sort of magical force field. Often in order to get a restraining order, one party has to claim to be afraid of physical harm from the other. The thing is, someone truly dangerous isn't going to be stopped for a second by a restraining order. They may, however, help keep marginal situations from escalating by keeping people apart. Simply preventing people's feelings from being hurt is another matter, however. Harassment is one thing, but where does normal relationship bitterness end and harassment begin? It seems like the ex-boyfriend in this case went a little too far, but it seems like the judge went a lot too far.
And to add my own personal experience with restraining orders; once, years and years back, I went with my then girlfriend while she was babysitting a friend's children. It turned out that her friend and her husband were having relationship difficulty and she had a restraining order against him forbidding him from being within some particular distance of her. So, naturally, her big plans for the evening were to go to where she knew he would be and force him to leave and then follow him around the whole night. And that really does seem to be how restraining orders are usually used: just one more weapon in the troubled relationship arsenal. The people getting the restraining orders are quite often aggressors rather than victims, or at least are aggressors as well as victims.
Yikes. A tie rod actually breaking is pretty serious. If that happens at speed, you could be killed. For something that could kill me, I'd really like to know why it happened, why it wasn't caught before it happened when the car was inspected, and how to prevent it in future.
For me it was New Zealand, France and the US. When I first started school in the US, I was put into a remedial math class for about a week. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I think it was mostly because my math teacher thought I couldn't do long division because I didn't do it the way they expected. Overall, I agree that there weren't that many differences in math, but the experience there (and in other subjects, comma conventions, ugh) did leave a lasting impression. I learned that what one group of people considers an absolute, ironclad way of doing things isn't necessarily so absolute for everyone. That's left me always checking my assumptions on things like this.
You mention, for example, the X,Y,Z axes following the alphabet. Alphabetical order is, however, a social convention. I know the alphabetical order I was taught, but what if the last letters are , and , in that order. Or what about people with a convention of writing right to left instead of left to right. The problem is that I know enough to know that I don't know everything, so I always have a little doubt about just about anything I think I know.
Well, there are a lot of computer graphics systems where they aren't and where the positive or negative axis aren't in the direction you'd expect. I don't ever being taught a different convention in a math class, but I've learned enough different math conventions over the years that my confidence in rules like that is always a bit shaky. For example, do you use a . or a , as a decimal point? When you round numbers, do you round 7.5 to 8 or to 7? In some math classes I remember just expected to know that the professor meant natural logarithm when s/he said logarithm. It seems like the higher level math you take and the more divergent the branches, the more you're expected to infer certain things from context. So, in that context, I was only about 90% certain that the first coordinate would be a horizontal x-axis, the second a vertical y-axis, etc. If I'd gotten the question wrong, it wouldn't be the first time I've gotten a question intended for a youngster wrong because something that I was taught (probably doesn't help that I learned the basics in three completely parts of the world) as a fundamental has either changed since I was young or was just differently taught in different places.
I think I'm starting to get you Mr. Space Nutter troll. You're that kid who always claimed that martial arts was a load of *^&%$ because he didn't understand that normal people know that the martial arts depicted in most movies is fantasy. You don't understand that most "science fiction" is fantasy as well. Guess what, Westerns and cop shows are really heavy on the fantasy as well. That doesn't mean that Europeans didn't colonize the North American continent and that fights with Native Americans and stage coach, train and bank robberies didn't actually happen. The ridiculous nonsense that goes on in cop shows doesn't mean that police don't exist.
Space travel is possible. That's been conclusively demonstrated. There's no good reason to believe that mining and manufacturing can't be done in space. There's no also no good reason to believe that space installations can't be built well enough to sustain human life well enough for them to procreate and for enough of their offspring to survive to procreate that their numbers increase. We can manage radiation shielding. If humans really need 1G to survive long term, we can manage simulated gravity (if carnival engineers can manage it, space engineers can manage it, and if they can't then send the carnival engineers to space) both free floating in space or on the surface of a low gravity body like the Moon or Mars. We can manage nuclear and solar and geothermal power. We can crack water and use other chemical techniques to get oxygen to breathe. We can grow food. No-one has ever provided any convincing proof that, once bootstrapped, human civilization couldn't sustain itself and grow in space.
Travel by living humans to other stars is another question. There could turn out to be physical limits (that no-one has conclusively shown yet) preventing us from sustaining the life of the travellers for the entire trip. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.
PS, it isn't physical limits preventing supersonic passenger transport on Earth. The fact that Concorde service was terminated doesn't say anything about the fundamental possibility of space travel. The Concorde managed to stay operational and profitable for years. The factors that stopped it flying stemmed from one unfortunate air crash (caused by a part that fell off another plane) and the fact that the operators realized that, even though they could make money from the concorde, they would make more money putting those passengers in first class on sub-sonic jets.
That link was all reading comprehension.
Easy one to get tripped up on. I was wondering about how universal the conventions of x axis coming first and y axis coming second were in current grade-school math. But, if something is reflected over the y axis, then it's the x term that changes sign.
There are things in that question that you sort of need to know by heart to answer the question. First of all is the x-axis and the y-axis. Standards in math(s) aren't all that standard. For example, how many thousands is 1,125 * 8 * 250? So, how absolute is the convention of representing coordinates as (x-axis, y-axis)? I don't know for sure that they're still teaching school kids that way any more. There is some rote knowledge you need in order to make sense of the numbers.
Then there's the meaning of reflected across the y-axis. It seems obvious, but I still had to wonder if there could be some other special meaning to it that they were teaching kids today. I had to spend a little time considering all of the possibilities and comparing against the given answers to see if there was anything other than the immediately obvious that made sense.
Also, has anyone noticed that Maureen in question 5 is earning less than federal minimum wage?
I agree with you that it really serves the original purpose of patents, but I think we disagree on what the original purpose of patents was. Looking back in history a little bit before the US patent office, lettres patent were a method of granting government enforced monopolies on certain areas of business. A good example of that sort of thing is the East India Trading Company. The modern patent regime emerged from that practice. In the case of Monsanto's roundup-ready crops, the purpose of their patent is to give them an iron lock on the market segment. The reason I brought up DRM in the first place is because this really can't be protected by patent law since it replicates and spreads by itself (regardless of the terminator gene, which I'll get to in a moment). Human law doesn't trump natural law. Otherwise we could legislate against death and aging and all become immortal. Intellectual property law essentially churns out unfunded mandates constantly. Patents on self-replicating organisms which are then released into the wild by the company that made them expect everyone in the world and nature itself to bend over backwards to accommodate them. That's clearly unreasonable.
As for the terminator gene, there are a few problems. One is that it's a huge evolutionary disadvantage. Coupled with other modifications that provide a big evolutionary advantage and then spread to billions or trillions of plants, it should be really obvious to anyone with a grade school understanding of evolution exactly what will happen. The first mutation that knocks out the terminator gene takes off like wildfire. The terminator gene is obviously something that scientists who should know better came up with for MBA's who don't know better (or just don't try), just like DRM. You could probably pull it off with animals, but plants? As for removing the threat of unwanted spread of the gene... if you think about it, what would happen in the cross-pollination scenario is that the farmer not buying seed from Monsanto would have year after year of really bad growing seasons while his neighbors buying their seeds from Monsanto every year had good crop yields. Yeah, that's not a win-win. It's just a win for the gm seed manufacturer in a "that's a nice crop you've got there, it would be shame if anything happened to it" sort of way.