Bitstream's release is very much appreciated by the OSS community, as it did a tremendous deal to help typography on open source systems.
That being said, use of Vera probably isn't a good idea. It has no equivalent in the standard Adobe fontset. It has not been distributed nearly as widely as even the standard Microsoft webfonts.
I agree that it would have been nice, but remember that it probably took a committee years to decide on which proportional font to use. Vera is new...
I know it's not as simple as 2x 2Ghz = 4Ghz, but generally it's a fair indicator of performance.
You might be correct for general applications, but you are incorrect for CPU emulation. It is extremely difficult to parallelize CPU emulation to the degree required to use multiple CPUs for emulation. It'd be essentially a single processor doing all the work.
Virtual PC gets somewhere in the ballpark of 3 PowerPC cycles per 1 x86 cycle, average case. That would make the 733Ghz XB1 CPU roughly just *barely* runnable on the system you describe. However, Microsoft can't use the average case -- games are real-time systems, and they have to handle the worst case. I doubt they're going to manage emulation of the thing.
Have you ever seen VirtualPC run on a Mac? I've seen instances where VPC is able to emulate code pretty close to the x86 equivalent speed. Now if we're talking about a multi-way PPC, (tri? dual?) 970 class processor, even if you penalize one of the 1GHz processors 50%, it should be able to handle the 700MHz P3 that's in the XBox.
It depends a lot on what's being done, but a very rough rule of thumb is that it requires about three PowerPC cycles for Virtual PC to emulate one x86 cycle. That would make a 1GHz 970 very roughly equal to a 300Mhz x86 chip. Keep in mind that this is not a process that can be parallelized easily, and that Microsoft is constrained to handle the worst-case scenerio, not just the average case, since games are (soft) real-time. Based on this, unless this PPC chip being shipped is notably faster than is being estimated, I strongly doubt that Microsoft will be capable of shipping an X-Box 1 x86 emulator for the XB2.
My guess as to why Microsoft wants to use a PPC chip has more to do with piracy prevention. Most potential pirates and emulator users are using an x86. It's impossible to emulate a PowerPC at any kind of a sane speed on an x86 processor. Thus, all those Windows-using folks have neatly been eliminated as potential pirates -- if they want an XB2 game, they have to buy it, not emulate the system.
I have to disagree. It's not because Quicktime on anything other than the Mac eats ass, it's because Quicktime just plain eats ass.
At one point, up until the final version 2 release (I believe 2.5.x), QuickTime was a pretty solid software suite. The player had an extremely compact GUI, a good featureset for the time, and was stable. It wasn't commercial, and didn't constantly beg for money. It even had MIDI support.
Then came the dark, dark days of version 3. At some point, presumably buoyed by the fact that their System 7.5+ CD player interface had used a custom WDEF and other widgets, some "UI designer" on the Apple media team was given free rein. As far as I can guess, said designer was from the hardware team, because that was the beginning of The Great Apple Interface Starting To Suck. QuickTime 3 had nonstandard widgets, and used an ugly, less functional brushed metal interface. Version 4 was worse, and the downward trend continued. QuickTime eventually required idiotic contortions to get the controls to work ("He he...knobs are cool, and all those amateur WinAMP skinners do them -- we should add a volume knob!") I don't even need to mention the ridiculous idea of the Favorites drawer. The Windows interface was truly appalling. For a company that is clearly capable (or at least once was) of designing Very Good Interfaces and got violently pissy about Microsoft producing poor UIs on their Mac releases (think Word 6), Apple did a stupendously poor job of implementing their Windows media player client. There was little excuse for the floating menu bar other than pure arrogance -- simply refusing to recognize another platform's interface standards. At first, they could get away with this, because Microsoft's own Video for Windows blew chunks. However, Microsoft steadily improved, and Apple managed to convince itself that nobody could ever challenge QuickTime dominance.
Now, QuickTime is reduced to extremely annoying nagware/shareware with an interface that has only marginally improved since the Bad Days after version 2.x. Aside from Apple-hosted movie trailers, most end users don't run into it a heck of a lot. This is, for once, absolutely not an area where Apple lost due to Microsoft playing dirty. Apple lost because Apple did a poor job of serving users. Now,.avi and.wmv files are much, much more common than.mov files.
(I'd also like to repeat my personal irritation with Apple actively pulling another QuickTime with its insistance on the single mouse button. Once again, they have people at the company who are arrogant enough to think that they can dictate to the user what the user will use and can ignore user complaints. They've still refused to accept the fact that they can do this only in the short run.)
It may just be because Apple is a big company, and big companies tend to do this, but it seems like Apple tries overly hard to leverage anything it produces ("this is really nice, but you have to use it on *our* terms"), and ends up killing it off. The few really impressive, new things that Apple has produced that haven't been leveraged to death seem to be suffering abandonment -- Speech Manager development sure isn't what it used to be, and OpenDoc got put into maintenance mode.
The last time I can remember Apple listening to popular demand was with standardizing windoids, and they took forever to do so, waiting until everyone else was using them. If poor reliability is Microsoft's Achilles' heel, arrogance is Apple's. (And disinterest in implementing boring features and maintaining backwards compatibility Linux's -- only on Linux does one hear "hey, we're doing a new minor kernel release soon -- let's require every vendor with a USB device driver to rewrite it!".)
If you have seven fans in your computer, you aren't going to have a silent PC.
Actually, why *do* you need seven?
I can think of a couple required: one for the PSU, one for the CPU. On some motherboards for a short period, you needed a northbridge fan. Finally, if you demand a high-end gaming card, you may be in a for a fan on-card. That's still only four.
I've yet to see a (non-overclocked) system that required a case fan. Perhaps if you have a hell of a lot of plastic in the thing, rather than a metal case, it might be necessary. Some high-end drives come with fans in-case. I never saw the point -- more slower hard drives == better than one hot drive.
I suppose a multi-processor system might have higher cooling requirements...
I believe that PSU fans were necessary in even PII days. Your power supply will fail from heat otherwise. I have two friends that tried running without a fan. Good way to kill a PSU.
I personally find it dificult to work with someone whispering 1 meter away.
Agreed, and I like quiet PCs a lot as well -- but keep in mind that it's a lot easier to learn to filter out white noise than whispering.
I *do* have to say that people that get a fancy sound system and then have a regular PC have got to be crazy -- nobody can hear "external vs internal DAC" differences as more significant than the fans in the PC.
Note that Microsoft did not add this because of some heartfelt desire to improve security. It is a specific bullet point required to get the C2 security rating that NT 4 recieved.
Okay, that doesn't make any sense. Exchange rates are irrelevant for this. If you did peg the rupee to the dollar, there'd be a sudden and highly disruptive shift in wages in India, and proportional wages would still remain the same -- a programmer would earn a lot, and a maid a little. And the dollar value would be about the same.
On a side note, I'm just amazed by IBM's social conscience. It's plain how few companies there are that recognize opportunities to invest in community for the benefit of the company and the community.
IBM doesn't necessarily (well, as a company) have a social conscience. IBM, however, is smart enough to realize that dealing with the OSS community can be phenomenally profitable -- that acting as if it *does* have one is marvelously beneficial. There are, very many differences in dealing with OSS versus traditional software. Here are some of my guesses as to what to do differently:
* A feeling of good will matters. Goodwill only matters normally as far as wining and dining a negotiator to try and get him to sell out his company a little. The OSS community is *extremely* sensitive to companies, treating them like people, whom are either friendly or unfriendly to OSS. A cohesive positive-sounding OSS company policy does a tremendous amount to keep a company in the good graces of the OSS folks. Press releases about how said company uses OSS, and thinks it's a good idea. Periodically releasing some code as OSS is a nice icing. (Take OpenAFS -- IBM only benefits from having that around, and it generates lots of good will.)
* Legal issues need to be minimized. Dealing with a company, you have lawyers who can hammer things out. The OSS community likes things pretty simple and clear.
* The OSS community doesn't demand masses of money. It's appreciated, like IBM's ongoing investment in open source development (which was probably done for strategic reasons, improving software that they needed worked on, as much as PR value), but a positive attitude toward OSS can count more than donating masses of money toward OSS.
* You don't need to worry about getting screwed over legally, in general. OSS folks are not generally out to shaft people over licenses. Legally, things are simple and nice.
* The OSS community can jump to conclusions quickly, and needs to be spoken to publically when misconceptions start going around. You have a lot of people with individual opinions. If a major Linux Ethernet player, like Donald Becker, writes a letter to, LKML saying that some chipset made by a company is lousy, said company needs an official, public response quickly. If there's a Slashdot story out about how your company is discontinuing production of Mindstorms (and the story is wrong), you should probably have a press release out within the day.
* The OSS community values specs. Take a page from Matrox, who decided what they could and couldn't release (couldn't release source to some on-card microcode, which had to be distributed in binary, but *could* release specs to much of the rest of the card.) Matrox's older G200-G450 series are still among the best supported of video cards under Linux and X.
* Maintain an official presence on relevant public forums, since so much OSS-related stuff takes place in the open. You might just have a mail filter that drops any email on major mailing lists containing your company name or product names into your PR department's inbox.
* Little of the OSS community accepts legal liability. This should be noted -- however, problems like illegal code copying do not seem to be prevalant, simply because of the high visibility of doing so. There are times when you may want indemnification of code you use -- the OSS community doesn't do that.
* Giving gifts can be inexpensive and valuable. In healthy Linux tradition, if someone runs out and implements a driver for your chipset, send 'em something nice in the mail. In rich Linux tradition, a case of beer seems to work well. It also costs you about a ten thousandth of what it would to implement the thing commercially, and ensures future good will. For driver writers, it's frequently a really, really good idea to just send along a few other products that you make (ones without drivers). This encourages people who have already demonstrated willingness to produce, wi
SCO has shown that it is willing to use every tool at their disposal (bogus lawsuits, attacking public image to damage stock prices, etc). They are acting decidedly unethically.
Google has a very simple, easy way to impact SCO -- simply make it difficult for people using their service to access SCO.
As far as morality goes, SCO is pretty much in the wrong. I mean, if you were supposed to be in a bare-knuckle fight, and someone pulled out a sword and started going at you, and you had a knife, wouldn't you consider it justified to use that?
Google isn't the government. Ultimately, I don't consider them bound by guarantees of non-censorship -- the only thing I demand from them is search results that give me what I'm looking for. They do a pretty good job of that, despite a sizeable industry that does nothing but try to subvert their searches 24/7. If SCO's using dirty tricks on them, and in return they want to stop playing ball with SCO -- heck, let 'em. If you decide that you want to try to terrorize the New York Times, don't be surprised if the NYT decides to stop running positive articles about you.
No, it makes sense in logic, though it's an awful way to put it. He's just stating the final step before the introduction of an inverse proof rule in proving the SCO is wrong. "If you assume that SCO is right then one can still demonstrate that they are wrong."
Remember that if SCO is right about its claims (which include Linux not being legal to distribute and them being able to legally distribute Linux), then they themselves are in violation of many copyrights?
So, let SCORight represent the truth of all of SCO's claims. Then:
He's just talking about step 5. Even if SCO was right, they'd still be wrong. All this means is that the truth of "SCORight" is self-inconconsistent -- Darl has made self-inconsistent claims.
That's just conflict for you. Having your head bashed in, getting stuck through the stomach so that your intestines fall out, getting stabbed in the eye, having bamboo shoots jammed under your fingernails for information, or being interrogated with branding irons...none of these are nice either, and none require much technology.
However, some of us like cheaper, jucier, bigger, plumper, and not possessing of parasites.
I don't have a problem with marking GM food. There are people that won't eat meat. There are people that won't eat beef. If somebody wants to avoid GM food, heck, they're welcome to do so (though AFAI can tell, the main people avoiding it are Europeans suckered by protectionist marketing). I agree that GM food should be marked. However, banning it, as some people try to do, is annoying and ridiculous.
They do say the plants are modified to be genetically infertile and unable to spread their own seeds.
Note that this is not done to be nice to the environment.
It is done so that anyone using this must pay for each flower seed, rather than simply scattering a bunch of seeds and letting them grow and reproduce.
People like Windows. If they didn't, they wouldn't buy it.
A couple of points:
* Few people buy windows. They buy a pre-built system, and it comes with windows.
* Because of some of the things Microsoft has done (like keeping the Office format secret to avoid compatible software), they have *produced* a situation where the easiest short term thing to do is to buy their products.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitstream's release is very much appreciated by the OSS community, as it did a tremendous deal to help typography on open source systems.
That being said, use of Vera probably isn't a good idea. It has no equivalent in the standard Adobe fontset. It has not been distributed nearly as widely as even the standard Microsoft webfonts.
I agree that it would have been nice, but remember that it probably took a committee years to decide on which proportional font to use. Vera is new...
I know it's not as simple as 2x 2Ghz = 4Ghz, but generally it's a fair indicator of performance.
You might be correct for general applications, but you are incorrect for CPU emulation. It is extremely difficult to parallelize CPU emulation to the degree required to use multiple CPUs for emulation. It'd be essentially a single processor doing all the work.
Virtual PC gets somewhere in the ballpark of 3 PowerPC cycles per 1 x86 cycle, average case. That would make the 733Ghz XB1 CPU roughly just *barely* runnable on the system you describe. However, Microsoft can't use the average case -- games are real-time systems, and they have to handle the worst case. I doubt they're going to manage emulation of the thing.
Have you ever seen VirtualPC run on a Mac? I've seen instances where VPC is able to emulate code pretty close to the x86 equivalent speed. Now if we're talking about a multi-way PPC, (tri? dual?) 970 class processor, even if you penalize one of the 1GHz processors 50%, it should be able to handle the 700MHz P3 that's in the XBox.
It depends a lot on what's being done, but a very rough rule of thumb is that it requires about three PowerPC cycles for Virtual PC to emulate one x86 cycle. That would make a 1GHz 970 very roughly equal to a 300Mhz x86 chip. Keep in mind that this is not a process that can be parallelized easily, and that Microsoft is constrained to handle the worst-case scenerio, not just the average case, since games are (soft) real-time. Based on this, unless this PPC chip being shipped is notably faster than is being estimated, I strongly doubt that Microsoft will be capable of shipping an X-Box 1 x86 emulator for the XB2.
My guess as to why Microsoft wants to use a PPC chip has more to do with piracy prevention. Most potential pirates and emulator users are using an x86. It's impossible to emulate a PowerPC at any kind of a sane speed on an x86 processor. Thus, all those Windows-using folks have neatly been eliminated as potential pirates -- if they want an XB2 game, they have to buy it, not emulate the system.
You know, India's president is an engineering PhD. We have George Bush, a C student who had his wealthy family get him his position.
India puts a good deal of emphasis on producing engineers. Surprise -- India is improving its lot at a stunning rate.
Plenty of things are wrong with India, but we could take a lesson from it as well.
I have to disagree. It's not because Quicktime on anything other than the Mac eats ass, it's because Quicktime just plain eats ass.
.avi and .wmv files are much, much more common than .mov files.
At one point, up until the final version 2 release (I believe 2.5.x), QuickTime was a pretty solid software suite. The player had an extremely compact GUI, a good featureset for the time, and was stable. It wasn't commercial, and didn't constantly beg for money. It even had MIDI support.
Then came the dark, dark days of version 3. At some point, presumably buoyed by the fact that their System 7.5+ CD player interface had used a custom WDEF and other widgets, some "UI designer" on the Apple media team was given free rein. As far as I can guess, said designer was from the hardware team, because that was the beginning of The Great Apple Interface Starting To Suck. QuickTime 3 had nonstandard widgets, and used an ugly, less functional brushed metal interface. Version 4 was worse, and the downward trend continued. QuickTime eventually required idiotic contortions to get the controls to work ("He he...knobs are cool, and all those amateur WinAMP skinners do them -- we should add a volume knob!") I don't even need to mention the ridiculous idea of the Favorites drawer. The Windows interface was truly appalling. For a company that is clearly capable (or at least once was) of designing Very Good Interfaces and got violently pissy about Microsoft producing poor UIs on their Mac releases (think Word 6), Apple did a stupendously poor job of implementing their Windows media player client. There was little excuse for the floating menu bar other than pure arrogance -- simply refusing to recognize another platform's interface standards. At first, they could get away with this, because Microsoft's own Video for Windows blew chunks. However, Microsoft steadily improved, and Apple managed to convince itself that nobody could ever challenge QuickTime dominance.
Now, QuickTime is reduced to extremely annoying nagware/shareware with an interface that has only marginally improved since the Bad Days after version 2.x. Aside from Apple-hosted movie trailers, most end users don't run into it a heck of a lot. This is, for once, absolutely not an area where Apple lost due to Microsoft playing dirty. Apple lost because Apple did a poor job of serving users. Now,
(I'd also like to repeat my personal irritation with Apple actively pulling another QuickTime with its insistance on the single mouse button. Once again, they have people at the company who are arrogant enough to think that they can dictate to the user what the user will use and can ignore user complaints. They've still refused to accept the fact that they can do this only in the short run.)
It may just be because Apple is a big company, and big companies tend to do this, but it seems like Apple tries overly hard to leverage anything it produces ("this is really nice, but you have to use it on *our* terms"), and ends up killing it off. The few really impressive, new things that Apple has produced that haven't been leveraged to death seem to be suffering abandonment -- Speech Manager development sure isn't what it used to be, and OpenDoc got put into maintenance mode.
The last time I can remember Apple listening to popular demand was with standardizing windoids, and they took forever to do so, waiting until everyone else was using them. If poor reliability is Microsoft's Achilles' heel, arrogance is Apple's. (And disinterest in implementing boring features and maintaining backwards compatibility Linux's -- only on Linux does one hear "hey, we're doing a new minor kernel release soon -- let's require every vendor with a USB device driver to rewrite it!".)
If you have seven fans in your computer, you aren't going to have a silent PC.
Actually, why *do* you need seven?
I can think of a couple required: one for the PSU, one for the CPU. On some motherboards for a short period, you needed a northbridge fan. Finally, if you demand a high-end gaming card, you may be in a for a fan on-card. That's still only four.
I've yet to see a (non-overclocked) system that required a case fan. Perhaps if you have a hell of a lot of plastic in the thing, rather than a metal case, it might be necessary. Some high-end drives come with fans in-case. I never saw the point -- more slower hard drives == better than one hot drive.
I suppose a multi-processor system might have higher cooling requirements...
I believe that PSU fans were necessary in even PII days. Your power supply will fail from heat otherwise. I have two friends that tried running without a fan. Good way to kill a PSU.
I personally find it dificult to work with someone whispering 1 meter away.
Agreed, and I like quiet PCs a lot as well -- but keep in mind that it's a lot easier to learn to filter out white noise than whispering.
I *do* have to say that people that get a fancy sound system and then have a regular PC have got to be crazy -- nobody can hear "external vs internal DAC" differences as more significant than the fans in the PC.
...of who is using SPARC instead of x86 if they're worried about a 5% performance difference.
Scheduling optimization based on profiles from previous runs (rarely used)
gcc supports this.
I've seen Mac UI people say that 30% is the minimum threshold.
The point I was most interested in is that gcc and Sun's compiler are about the same speed on 32 bit code, and Sun pulls ahead on 64 bit code.
Note that Microsoft did not add this because of some heartfelt desire to improve security. It is a specific bullet point required to get the C2 security rating that NT 4 recieved.
If you only need someone for a while, for a project, there's no point in making them a permanent employee. It's expensive to get rid of people.
Okay, that doesn't make any sense. Exchange rates are irrelevant for this. If you did peg the rupee to the dollar, there'd be a sudden and highly disruptive shift in wages in India, and proportional wages would still remain the same -- a programmer would earn a lot, and a maid a little. And the dollar value would be about the same.
So stealing is only wrong if you get caught?
No -- trying to make moral arguments is tough. It's probably only *profitable*, however, if you don't get caught.
On a side note, I'm just amazed by IBM's social conscience. It's plain how few companies there are that recognize opportunities to invest in community for the benefit of the company and the community.
IBM doesn't necessarily (well, as a company) have a social conscience. IBM, however, is smart enough to realize that dealing with the OSS community can be phenomenally profitable -- that acting as if it *does* have one is marvelously beneficial. There are, very many differences in dealing with OSS versus traditional software. Here are some of my guesses as to what to do differently:
* A feeling of good will matters. Goodwill only matters normally as far as wining and dining a negotiator to try and get him to sell out his company a little. The OSS community is *extremely* sensitive to companies, treating them like people, whom are either friendly or unfriendly to OSS. A cohesive positive-sounding OSS company policy does a tremendous amount to keep a company in the good graces of the OSS folks. Press releases about how said company uses OSS, and thinks it's a good idea. Periodically releasing some code as OSS is a nice icing. (Take OpenAFS -- IBM only benefits from having that around, and it generates lots of good will.)
* Legal issues need to be minimized. Dealing with a company, you have lawyers who can hammer things out. The OSS community likes things pretty simple and clear.
* The OSS community doesn't demand masses of money. It's appreciated, like IBM's ongoing investment in open source development (which was probably done for strategic reasons, improving software that they needed worked on, as much as PR value), but a positive attitude toward OSS can count more than donating masses of money toward OSS.
* You don't need to worry about getting screwed over legally, in general. OSS folks are not generally out to shaft people over licenses. Legally, things are simple and nice.
* The OSS community can jump to conclusions quickly, and needs to be spoken to publically when misconceptions start going around. You have a lot of people with individual opinions. If a major Linux Ethernet player, like Donald Becker, writes a letter to, LKML saying that some chipset made by a company is lousy, said company needs an official, public response quickly. If there's a Slashdot story out about how your company is discontinuing production of Mindstorms (and the story is wrong), you should probably have a press release out within the day.
* The OSS community values specs. Take a page from Matrox, who decided what they could and couldn't release (couldn't release source to some on-card microcode, which had to be distributed in binary, but *could* release specs to much of the rest of the card.) Matrox's older G200-G450 series are still among the best supported of video cards under Linux and X.
* Maintain an official presence on relevant public forums, since so much OSS-related stuff takes place in the open. You might just have a mail filter that drops any email on major mailing lists containing your company name or product names into your PR department's inbox.
* Little of the OSS community accepts legal liability. This should be noted -- however, problems like illegal code copying do not seem to be prevalant, simply because of the high visibility of doing so. There are times when you may want indemnification of code you use -- the OSS community doesn't do that.
* Giving gifts can be inexpensive and valuable. In healthy Linux tradition, if someone runs out and implements a driver for your chipset, send 'em something nice in the mail. In rich Linux tradition, a case of beer seems to work well. It also costs you about a ten thousandth of what it would to implement the thing commercially, and ensures future good will. For driver writers, it's frequently a really, really good idea to just send along a few other products that you make (ones without drivers). This encourages people who have already demonstrated willingness to produce, wi
shame on google blocking the www.sco.com site.
Why?
SCO has shown that it is willing to use every tool at their disposal (bogus lawsuits, attacking public image to damage stock prices, etc). They are acting decidedly unethically.
Google has a very simple, easy way to impact SCO -- simply make it difficult for people using their service to access SCO.
As far as morality goes, SCO is pretty much in the wrong. I mean, if you were supposed to be in a bare-knuckle fight, and someone pulled out a sword and started going at you, and you had a knife, wouldn't you consider it justified to use that?
Google isn't the government. Ultimately, I don't consider them bound by guarantees of non-censorship -- the only thing I demand from them is search results that give me what I'm looking for. They do a pretty good job of that, despite a sizeable industry that does nothing but try to subvert their searches 24/7. If SCO's using dirty tricks on them, and in return they want to stop playing ball with SCO -- heck, let 'em. If you decide that you want to try to terrorize the New York Times, don't be surprised if the NYT decides to stop running positive articles about you.
Even if x were true, it'd still be false.
No, it makes sense in logic, though it's an awful way to put it. He's just stating the final step before the introduction of an inverse proof rule in proving the SCO is wrong. "If you assume that SCO is right then one can still demonstrate that they are wrong."
Remember that if SCO is right about its claims (which include Linux not being legal to distribute and them being able to legally distribute Linux), then they themselves are in violation of many copyrights?
So, let SCORight represent the truth of all of SCO's claims. Then:
1. SCORight => SCOViolatesCopyright. Given
2. SCOViolatesCopyright => ~SCORight. Given
3. SCORight. Assumed.
4. SCOViolatesCopyright. Transitivity(1, 3) | 3
5. ~SCORight. Transitivity(2, 4) | 3
6. ~SCORight. Inverse Proof (3, 5)
He's just talking about step 5. Even if SCO was right, they'd still be wrong. All this means is that the truth of "SCORight" is self-inconconsistent -- Darl has made self-inconsistent claims.
Submit a bug to Bugzilla.
:-)
.7 (part of Fedora Core) doesn't seem to have any problem, so the issue may be fixed...
If you don't do it, the developers aren't going to know about and aren't going to fix the problem.
If you do, they will.
Mozilla Firebird
That's just conflict for you. Having your head bashed in, getting stuck through the stomach so that your intestines fall out, getting stabbed in the eye, having bamboo shoots jammed under your fingernails for information, or being interrogated with branding irons...none of these are nice either, and none require much technology.
However, some of us like cheaper, jucier, bigger, plumper, and not possessing of parasites.
I don't have a problem with marking GM food. There are people that won't eat meat. There are people that won't eat beef. If somebody wants to avoid GM food, heck, they're welcome to do so (though AFAI can tell, the main people avoiding it are Europeans suckered by protectionist marketing). I agree that GM food should be marked. However, banning it, as some people try to do, is annoying and ridiculous.
Can you back this up with proof? I'm quite dubious that the US sends more soldiers out after wars to clean up its old mine fields.
They do say the plants are modified to be genetically infertile and unable to spread their own seeds.
Note that this is not done to be nice to the environment.
It is done so that anyone using this must pay for each flower seed, rather than simply scattering a bunch of seeds and letting them grow and reproduce.
People like Windows. If they didn't, they wouldn't buy it.
A couple of points:
* Few people buy windows. They buy a pre-built system, and it comes with windows.
* Because of some of the things Microsoft has done (like keeping the Office format secret to avoid compatible software), they have *produced* a situation where the easiest short term thing to do is to buy their products.
I think you might be surprised how much better at learning new things kids are than adults.