Almost all commercial crops are monocultures that are not allowed to reproduce. Many non-engineered crops (like navel oranges and seedless) are in fact sterile clones.
Granted. And it is also true that these sterile variants have not displaced their breeding counterparts. The possibility only exists in the extreme case that a single supplier's seeds are used in preference to all others. There is also no shortage of wild plant individuals not maintained by farmers whose environments will not be infringed upon by non-breeding plants whose growth is restricted by human design. The danger exists only in the case of staple crops (like wheat, corn, rice, etc.) whose growers tend to buy *large* amounts of identical seed. In oranges, you have too much human preference involved [what's best for juicing, and so forth] to have only one type available. Not so of feed corn.
I remember hearing a series of radio reports some time ago on Europeans' collective dislike of genetically modified foodstuffs. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the more it keeps popping up, the stranger is seems to me that Americans are rather ignorant of the concerns inherent to such mucking about...
A scenario above talks about the possibility that a commercial sterile variant outcompetes the natural variant. [i.e. more farmers use it, as it can't reproduce for itself.] The natural variant is thus eliminated. Big deal, right? We have superior crops. But the natural evolutions ends. New genetic development grinds to a halt, since the plants never reproduce. So?
1. New diseases and pests will be devastating. All individual plants will have the same vulnerabilities. Entire crops in an infected region will be lost.
2. The standard genome of a Monsanto WheatPlant(tm) 4.2 will be known to all the world. Wanna guaranteed way to wipe out your traditional ethnic/political/religious/economic enemy? Hit their food supply where it hurts, with 100% success ratio.
The fact that they're confident enough in their product to actually allow people who need performance machinery to test the potential capacity of a Beowulf/Linux/Alpha cluster before they buy has got to go a long way with people who make purchasing decisions for large systems.
Taken along with their previous test drive offers for other [Alpha based, of course] systems and their recent comparison of the Alpha and Itanium architectures, they seem ready to go for Intel's throat when traditionally Intel-centric systems make the plunge into the 64 bit world. If nothing else, their willingness to make public offers like this shows a growing commitment to open-source *nixes.
As a US taxpayer, I resent the fact that you would recommend overpriced Apple hardware to a federally funded entity. The simple fact of the matter is that they could build two Intel SMP boxes to the specifications above for the price of a single high-end G4 machine, especially if they buy a quantity of them at once.
I try *really* hard to like Apple, I truly do... but then economic reality sets in. Why pay more for a [cute] logo?
To put it rather bluntly, this article didn't have enough thought behind it to merit mention here. The author fails to address the fact that ideology was (and continues to be) more a driving factor in the development of and for Linux than simple economics. From the GNU toolset, whose developers take issue with existing ideas about intellectual property, to the assorted GUIs developed by those who feel that currently available user interfaces are fundamentally flawed, most Linux projects and components have more to do with doing things one's own way, unbeholden to anyone else's, and little or nothing to do with saving the odd dollar or two.
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Almost all commercial crops are monocultures that are not allowed to reproduce. Many non-engineered
crops (like navel oranges and seedless) are in fact sterile clones.
Granted. And it is also true that these sterile variants have not displaced their breeding counterparts. The possibility only exists in the extreme case that a single supplier's seeds are used in preference to all others. There is also no shortage of wild plant individuals not maintained by farmers whose environments will not be infringed upon by non-breeding plants whose growth is restricted by human design. The danger exists only in the case of staple crops (like wheat, corn, rice, etc.) whose growers tend to buy *large* amounts of identical seed. In oranges, you have too much human preference involved [what's best for juicing, and so forth] to have only one type available. Not so of feed corn.
Likely? Maybe not. Just scary.
I remember hearing a series of radio reports some time ago on Europeans' collective dislike of genetically modified foodstuffs. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the more it keeps popping up, the stranger is seems to me that Americans are rather ignorant of the concerns inherent to such mucking about...
A scenario above talks about the possibility that a commercial sterile variant outcompetes the natural variant. [i.e. more farmers use it, as it can't reproduce for itself.] The natural variant is thus eliminated. Big deal, right? We have superior crops. But the natural evolutions ends. New genetic development grinds to a halt, since the plants never reproduce. So?
1. New diseases and pests will be devastating. All individual plants will have the same vulnerabilities. Entire crops in an infected region will be lost.
2. The standard genome of a Monsanto WheatPlant(tm) 4.2 will be known to all the world. Wanna guaranteed way to wipe out your traditional ethnic/political/religious/economic enemy? Hit their food supply where it hurts, with 100% success ratio.
The fact that they're confident enough in their product to actually allow people who need performance machinery to test the potential capacity of a Beowulf/Linux/Alpha cluster before they buy has got to go a long way with people who make purchasing decisions for large systems.
Taken along with their previous test drive offers for other [Alpha based, of course] systems and their recent comparison of the Alpha and Itanium architectures, they seem ready to go for Intel's throat when traditionally Intel-centric systems make the plunge into the 64 bit world. If nothing else, their willingness to make public offers like this shows a growing commitment to open-source *nixes.
As a US taxpayer, I resent the fact that you would recommend overpriced Apple hardware to a federally funded entity. The simple fact of the matter is that they could build two Intel SMP boxes to the specifications above for the price of a single high-end G4 machine, especially if they buy a quantity of them at once.
I try *really* hard to like Apple, I truly do... but then economic reality sets in. Why pay more for a [cute] logo?
To put it rather bluntly, this article didn't have enough thought behind it to merit mention here. The author fails to address the fact that ideology was (and continues to be) more a driving factor in the development of and for Linux than simple economics. From the GNU toolset, whose developers take issue with existing ideas about intellectual property, to the assorted GUIs developed by those who feel that currently available user interfaces are fundamentally flawed, most Linux projects and components have more to do with doing things one's own way, unbeholden to anyone else's, and little or nothing to do with saving the odd dollar or two.
Janet Reno, the Third Horse(wo)man of the Apocalypse, is heading the 'Working Group'.
Crypto may well be target #1...