Interesting perspective. Almost entirely wrong, but still interesting.
TL;DR: 1) Monsanto does not produce "sterile" seeds. They do hold a patent on that technology, but have promised not to create seeds using that technology. Yes, they could go back on that promise...but how about we wait until they actually do that before vilifying them?
2) They have never "litigated a farmer to death" over "marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows". The one lawsuit that occurred was a result of a farmer who intentionally replanted Monsanto seeds from crops adjoining his neighbors farm (who was using Monsanto seeds), after spraying those same crops with RoundUp, so he knew that was was left was pesticide resistant.
In this case, the amount the farmer (after appeal) had to pay Monsanto was: $0.
Android runs fine IFF you get a Google Nexus phone, AND don't go through Verizon or AT&T and have their malware installed.
Or if you buy any Android-compatible phone, root it and install your own OS on it. Seriously, I don't understand why anyone on Slashdot doesn't do this.
Shouldn't we collectively agree on what is needed, before we collectively decide to pay for them? Is this a democratic republic?
Yes, we should have candidates who clearly state what they intend to have the government pay for then we can collectively decide whether to vote for those candidates or not.
Do you really expect the free market to magically solve global issues where the problem domain exists in the tens to hundreds of years rather than the next fiscal quarter? Why would it?
Not in other countries that have the same level of medical resources.
For example, in the 1990's, there were more scan machines (MRI, CT, CAT) in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, than in all of Canada. Or, the recent/current stories of the UK's NIH telling the UK public that the level of care can't remain the same and will be diminished.
And yet studies show the overall quality of health care and life expectancy to be higher in Canada.
Perhaps the quality of health care shouldn't be determined by the number of MRI machines purchased?
JavaScript can also intercept the contents of the clipboard.
Not by default it can't.
True there are potentially bugs in implementation or bad configurations that allow scripts to read the external clipboard, but the same argument could be made against password managers. Poor security / configuration of the browser could allow scripts to read the password provided by the password manager.
If your definition of cross-platform is so narrow that it means the exact same binaries run under different operating systems, then there is virtually no cross-platform software.
There was no equivocation here. The original statement was:
Browser shouldn't allow scripts to interact with a password field. Period.
I thought Lastpass (to name one) uses Javascript to change the form fields, including the password field
The response never equated Lastpass to a script. It said Lastpass uses Javascript to change the form fields in contradiction to the statement that scripts should never be allowed to interact with a password field.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. For technically minded people.
Unfortunately now that the vast majority of PC's are in the hands of people who are only semi-technical and will happily disable the update service, firewall and anti-virus cause their buddy Steve said it made his PC run faster. Steve also recommends plugging the network cable directly into the cable modem as that router thing just causes parity errors.
It's almost like the should sell a "Home" version for the vast majority of people, then have some sort of "Enterprise" or "Professional" version for technical people.
The difference is Reddit is not banning people based on race, color, religion, sexual orientation etc.
They don't care who you are, they are banning certain forms of speech. Equally, from everyone.
That is entirely within their prerogative.
The equivalent would be a bakery refusing to bake a cake with a swastika on it. Or an apartment not allowing people to hang rainbow gay pride banners from their balcony.
Reddit is not "certain classes of people", they are excluding certain opinions from their site. As to this being hypocritical, perhaps, but I believe both people and organizations should be allowed to change their opinions on certain matters.
Based on the comments from their CEO, they are no longer a place that values unfettered free speech. This in itself is not an immoral thing.
Here in Alberta, our newest government is planning the same thing over 3 years (minimum wage increase to $15/hr from the current $10.20/hr)
And yes the cost of some goods will go up.
The thing is, labor cost is only a part of the cost of goods and services. So while the cost of good and services will go up, it will not go up as much as the increase in income.
Basically this narrows the gap between the very poor and the middle / upper class. This is a good thing.
"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi
The Greeks just got more debt piled on top of too much debt and its totally destroyed their economy.
A few additional interesting facts:
1) The original cause of the Greek debt was due to the fact that greek labor costs were significantly higher than other EU nations. When they joined the EU, this caused a large trade deficit...leading to lower GDP and higher debt.
2) Greece has always been somewhat left-leaning and rather than curtail spending during low income years, they actually increased spending by incurring more debt
3) The government (with the help of some banks) "hid" their massive deficit spending through the use of credit default swaps. This made Greece appear to be a better investment than they actually were when other banks provided loans.
4) Greece also historically has one of the highest rates of tax evasion
All of the above contributed to the present crisis, not just "bad greek loans".
Citations mostly from wikipedia, but plenty of similar info on the web.
Some of the greatest research ever done was done in Universities with grant money with no thought of any commercial applications.
Yes, but most of it wasn't.
Obviously commercialisation and testing is a different issue, that is where capital becomes relevant.
Commercialization and testing are almost entirely irrelevant compared to the capital required to research and develop new technologies...particularly in biology/medicine.
As with most things, this shouldn't be a black or white "patents are good" or "patents are evil". The question is how long should patent protection last and when should patent protection start. Some people think forever, others think zero years. The answer is most likely somewhere between those two:-).
I will agree that with the rate of technological change today, the current 20 year protection is ridiculous. Technologies are typically woefully outdated by the time patents expire. IMHO patents should last significantly less time than currently (say 5 years or so), and should require that the product be commercially produced within some reasonable amount of time after applying for the patent.
Knowledge should be it's own reward.
Unfortunately, you can't eat, drink, live in or wear knowledge. At some point monetary compensation is required. The question is how much and how is this compensation provided.
Stick with program managing, Justin. Actually, given you were responsible for Silverlight, find some other career entirely.
If you check Perl, Java, PHP or C++ on Indeed.com, you will see exactly the same trends.
If you perform his same terrible analysis of the TIOBE index, PHP, C++, VB.NET, Objective-C are all going to collapse. Apparently Java has been "heading for collapse" since 2004.
People who can't do statistics shouldn't report on them.
The problem does not appear to be that C# is becoming less popular (than other languages), it's appears that custom application development as a whole is becoming less popular than it was a few years ago.
This may be due to the economy, outsourcing, mobile platforms or whatever. You can't suddenly pull reasons out of your ass like this being due to "Microsoft’s ever revolving door of new technologies", despite how pissed off you are at them for shit-canning your pet project.
When doing stats on whether something is less popular, it's helpful to ask "less popular than what". Sure, it may be less popular than it used to be, but so are the competing languages. This does not indicate that the C# ecosystem is going to collapse.
Yes, I remember VB. It was the laughingstock of programming languages. I know very few developers who were anything but relieved when Microsoft put the final nail in the coffin of that abomination of a language.
Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer",
Yes, let's take terrible, proprietary, security-hole ridden technology and replace it with our terrible, proprietary, security-hole ridden technology. Netflix was utterly retarded for "betting the farm" on it. As such, it was never a particularly popular technology and was appropriately end-of-life'd when wiser minds at Microsoft realized there were much better ways to accomplish the same thing, and stopped investing in it.
BTW, Microsoft supported VB for 10 years after it's final version. Silverlight is still supported
this is why keyboards like textblade, with touch sensitive keys that actually don't send an input signal until you push down will be important for vr.
with that kind of keyboard, you can have a u.i. representation of the keyboard (e.g. like if you look down) and you can tell where your fingers are by glows that correspond to what keys you're touching... but the touch doesn't mean that you are entering any text yet. it's just to orient yourself on the keyboard. then you push down on the key as normal and send commands or whatever.
Or you could have little bumps on the F and J keys to orient yourself to the keyboard. Like almost every keyboard manufactured for the last 10 years.
Textblade appears cool and all (I reserve final judgement until they actually ship anything), but I fail to see how that solves the problem of typing in a VR environment any better than a standard keyboard.
Actually I fail to see how it's a problem at all. I just closed my eyes, put my hands by my side, then reached out and started typing to type this sentence. There was a bit of adjustment while I found the F and J keys, but only a half second or so. Of course, I can touch type, but are there really that many people who both need to look at the keyboard to type and are geeky enough to want a VR device?
PS WTF is with Textblades website?!? I get the device is intended for tablets/phones/etc, so it's kind of cute, but that is the most most godawful annoying layout to try and navigate and get info from. Really bad idea for a new tech trying to attract buyers.
I gave up and just googled for the macrumors article instead.
It shows that the engineers designing and building these reactors are still unable to correctly predict and specify the needed hardware for it to be safe
How do you figure? The valves are faulty. Not designed incorrectly, but actually malfunctioning.
This indicates possible errors in the manufacturing/supply process. It says nothing about the design.
have to rely on checks catching these faults.
Like every other manufacturing process EVER.
Surprisingly, humans aren't perfect. Inspections are done specifically to ensure that mistakes are caught.
As far as I can tell, the process is working correctly...nothing to see here.
Most people in support of drastic intervention fail to grasp that we have no real alternative to fossil fuels in the pipe.
But this guy claims we could be fossil-fuel free by 2050.
I'm not exactly sure how he plans to replace every single vehicle in the USA with a hydrogen fuel-cell powered one, or install heat pumps in every single home, but I'm certain if I pay £38 for the pdf, I'll find out how.
After all, he teaches at Stanford! And he made a computer model! He must be right!/sarcasm
Overall, I agree with you. Nuclear is the best short-term solution. As a side benefit, more fission development leads to technologies which would be benefit fusion research. It would also carry us over to a (potential) time when we could switch to an entirely renewable energy economy.
I just don't understand environmentalists who are also anti-nuclear.
It's the primary technique that teachers are encouraged to use (again, in Canada).
Yes, and IMHO, it's been working terribly. Teachers don't understand the process, children get confused as to expectations and the "answers" are typically only vague representations of the actual knowledge that is supposed to be communicated.
I agree that inquiry based learning should be included as part of the curriculum, but a heck of a lot of learning should also be done using traditional methods. Little Johnny doesn't really need to know that these are the 6 different ways we can visualize the problem of 8 groups of 4 items. He really just needs to know that 8x4=32.
Specifically in math, we've been seeing very bad results due to inquiry-based learning, and it's starting to make parents fed up
At what point do statements become so ridiculous that they should be ridiculed rather than people wasting time trying to refute them
You shouldn't be trying to refute them. You should be presenting arguments for the fence-sitters that read the post who might be swayed by your argument.
Yes, there is a set of people who will never be convinced no matter how persuasive your argument is. A much larger group of people sit somewhere towards the middle who very well may be persuaded ever so slightly by a well reasoned and well presented argument.
Unfortunately, when you degrade the discussion to mindless name-calling, that can also persuades people that your you have no valid argument to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple answer:
The plants do produce viable seed. The sterile seed BS is just FUD by the anti-GMO group.
Interesting perspective. Almost entirely wrong, but still interesting.
TL;DR:
1) Monsanto does not produce "sterile" seeds. They do hold a patent on that technology, but have promised not to create seeds using that technology. Yes, they could go back on that promise...but how about we wait until they actually do that before vilifying them?
2) They have never "litigated a farmer to death" over "marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows". The one lawsuit that occurred was a result of a farmer who intentionally replanted Monsanto seeds from crops adjoining his neighbors farm (who was using Monsanto seeds), after spraying those same crops with RoundUp, so he knew that was was left was pesticide resistant.
In this case, the amount the farmer (after appeal) had to pay Monsanto was: $0.
Or if you buy any Android-compatible phone, root it and install your own OS on it. Seriously, I don't understand why anyone on Slashdot doesn't do this.
Yes, we should have candidates who clearly state what they intend to have the government pay for then we can collectively decide whether to vote for those candidates or not.
oh, wait....
Then whose job is it to address global concerns?
You are aware of the idea of the tragedy of the commons, correct?
Do you really expect the free market to magically solve global issues where the problem domain exists in the tens to hundreds of years rather than the next fiscal quarter? Why would it?
And yet studies show the overall quality of health care and life expectancy to be higher in Canada.
Perhaps the quality of health care shouldn't be determined by the number of MRI machines purchased?
Not by default it can't.
True there are potentially bugs in implementation or bad configurations that allow scripts to read the external clipboard, but the same argument could be made against password managers. Poor security / configuration of the browser could allow scripts to read the password provided by the password manager.
So run it under mono on Windows.
If your definition of cross-platform is so narrow that it means the exact same binaries run under different operating systems, then there is virtually no cross-platform software.
There was no equivocation here. The original statement was:
I thought Lastpass (to name one) uses Javascript to change the form fields, including the password field
The response never equated Lastpass to a script. It said Lastpass uses Javascript to change the form fields in contradiction to the statement that scripts should never be allowed to interact with a password field.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. For technically minded people.
Unfortunately now that the vast majority of PC's are in the hands of people who are only semi-technical and will happily disable the update service, firewall and anti-virus cause their buddy Steve said it made his PC run faster. Steve also recommends plugging the network cable directly into the cable modem as that router thing just causes parity errors.
It's almost like the should sell a "Home" version for the vast majority of people, then have some sort of "Enterprise" or "Professional" version for technical people.
The difference is Reddit is not banning people based on race, color, religion, sexual orientation etc.
They don't care who you are, they are banning certain forms of speech. Equally, from everyone.
That is entirely within their prerogative.
The equivalent would be a bakery refusing to bake a cake with a swastika on it. Or an apartment not allowing people to hang rainbow gay pride banners from their balcony.
Reddit is not "certain classes of people", they are excluding certain opinions from their site. As to this being hypocritical, perhaps, but I believe both people and organizations should be allowed to change their opinions on certain matters.
Based on the comments from their CEO, they are no longer a place that values unfettered free speech. This in itself is not an immoral thing.
I'd mod you up, but you're AC.
So here...have a doughnut: O
Here in Alberta, our newest government is planning the same thing over 3 years (minimum wage increase to $15/hr from the current $10.20/hr)
And yes the cost of some goods will go up.
The thing is, labor cost is only a part of the cost of goods and services. So while the cost of good and services will go up, it will not go up as much as the increase in income.
Basically this narrows the gap between the very poor and the middle / upper class. This is a good thing.
"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi
A few additional interesting facts:
1) The original cause of the Greek debt was due to the fact that greek labor costs were significantly higher than other EU nations. When they joined the EU, this caused a large trade deficit...leading to lower GDP and higher debt.
2) Greece has always been somewhat left-leaning and rather than curtail spending during low income years, they actually increased spending by incurring more debt
3) The government (with the help of some banks) "hid" their massive deficit spending through the use of credit default swaps. This made Greece appear to be a better investment than they actually were when other banks provided loans.
4) Greece also historically has one of the highest rates of tax evasion
All of the above contributed to the present crisis, not just "bad greek loans".
Citations mostly from wikipedia, but plenty of similar info on the web.
Yes, but most of it wasn't.
Commercialization and testing are almost entirely irrelevant compared to the capital required to research and develop new technologies...particularly in biology/medicine.
As with most things, this shouldn't be a black or white "patents are good" or "patents are evil". The question is how long should patent protection last and when should patent protection start. Some people think forever, others think zero years. The answer is most likely somewhere between those two :-).
I will agree that with the rate of technological change today, the current 20 year protection is ridiculous. Technologies are typically woefully outdated by the time patents expire. IMHO patents should last significantly less time than currently (say 5 years or so), and should require that the product be commercially produced within some reasonable amount of time after applying for the patent.
Unfortunately, you can't eat, drink, live in or wear knowledge. At some point monetary compensation is required. The question is how much and how is this compensation provided.
Stick with program managing, Justin. Actually, given you were responsible for Silverlight, find some other career entirely.
If you check Perl, Java, PHP or C++ on Indeed.com, you will see exactly the same trends.
If you perform his same terrible analysis of the TIOBE index, PHP, C++, VB.NET, Objective-C are all going to collapse. Apparently Java has been "heading for collapse" since 2004.
People who can't do statistics shouldn't report on them.
The problem does not appear to be that C# is becoming less popular (than other languages), it's appears that custom application development as a whole is becoming less popular than it was a few years ago.
This may be due to the economy, outsourcing, mobile platforms or whatever. You can't suddenly pull reasons out of your ass like this being due to "Microsoft’s ever revolving door of new technologies", despite how pissed off you are at them for shit-canning your pet project.
When doing stats on whether something is less popular, it's helpful to ask "less popular than what". Sure, it may be less popular than it used to be, but so are the competing languages. This does not indicate that the C# ecosystem is going to collapse.
Yes, I remember VB. It was the laughingstock of programming languages. I know very few developers who were anything but relieved when Microsoft put the final nail in the coffin of that abomination of a language.
Yes, let's take terrible, proprietary, security-hole ridden technology and replace it with our terrible, proprietary, security-hole ridden technology. Netflix was utterly retarded for "betting the farm" on it. As such, it was never a particularly popular technology and was appropriately end-of-life'd when wiser minds at Microsoft realized there were much better ways to accomplish the same thing, and stopped investing in it.
BTW, Microsoft supported VB for 10 years after it's final version. Silverlight is still supported
I'm not sure what you are complaining about here
Only if you assume the cost of money for his electricity is also $0.
If you assume 6% ROI and a 2% inflation rate, his break even point is at around 12 years.
At somewhere around 12% return he never breaks even.
The above assumes that electricity prices and solar panels both increase in price commensurate with inflation. This is likely not the case.
Or you could have little bumps on the F and J keys to orient yourself to the keyboard. Like almost every keyboard manufactured for the last 10 years.
Textblade appears cool and all (I reserve final judgement until they actually ship anything), but I fail to see how that solves the problem of typing in a VR environment any better than a standard keyboard.
Actually I fail to see how it's a problem at all. I just closed my eyes, put my hands by my side, then reached out and started typing to type this sentence. There was a bit of adjustment while I found the F and J keys, but only a half second or so. Of course, I can touch type, but are there really that many people who both need to look at the keyboard to type and are geeky enough to want a VR device?
PS
WTF is with Textblades website?!? I get the device is intended for tablets/phones/etc, so it's kind of cute, but that is the most most godawful annoying layout to try and navigate and get info from. Really bad idea for a new tech trying to attract buyers.
I gave up and just googled for the macrumors article instead.
Well, he also published a paper with similar content in 2011 (while working at Microsoft Research).
Still, not news
Won't work for me! I redirect localhost to 127.0.0.1!
BTW...why are we discussing a paper from 2009? Is this really news?
How do you figure? The valves are faulty. Not designed incorrectly, but actually malfunctioning.
This indicates possible errors in the manufacturing/supply process. It says nothing about the design.
Like every other manufacturing process EVER.
Surprisingly, humans aren't perfect. Inspections are done specifically to ensure that mistakes are caught.
As far as I can tell, the process is working correctly...nothing to see here.
But this guy claims we could be fossil-fuel free by 2050.
I'm not exactly sure how he plans to replace every single vehicle in the USA with a hydrogen fuel-cell powered one, or install heat pumps in every single home, but I'm certain if I pay £38 for the pdf, I'll find out how.
After all, he teaches at Stanford! And he made a computer model! He must be right! /sarcasm
Overall, I agree with you. Nuclear is the best short-term solution. As a side benefit, more fission development leads to technologies which would be benefit fusion research. It would also carry us over to a (potential) time when we could switch to an entirely renewable energy economy.
I just don't understand environmentalists who are also anti-nuclear.
Yes, and IMHO, it's been working terribly. Teachers don't understand the process, children get confused as to expectations and the "answers" are typically only vague representations of the actual knowledge that is supposed to be communicated.
I agree that inquiry based learning should be included as part of the curriculum, but a heck of a lot of learning should also be done using traditional methods. Little Johnny doesn't really need to know that these are the 6 different ways we can visualize the problem of 8 groups of 4 items. He really just needs to know that 8x4=32.
Specifically in math, we've been seeing very bad results due to inquiry-based learning, and it's starting to make parents fed up
You shouldn't be trying to refute them. You should be presenting arguments for the fence-sitters that read the post who might be swayed by your argument.
Yes, there is a set of people who will never be convinced no matter how persuasive your argument is. A much larger group of people sit somewhere towards the middle who very well may be persuaded ever so slightly by a well reasoned and well presented argument.
Unfortunately, when you degrade the discussion to mindless name-calling, that can also persuades people that your you have no valid argument to make.