None of what you state is any reason why not to come up with a different way to create better crops.
But it does prove that you don't need a special incentive to come up with better crops. The notion that no improvements would be made without monopoly protection is simply ahistorical nonsense. Your original question was: What would be the incentive? The answer is: The same as always. Better crops. It has worked for millenium. It will work now.
If that isn't incentive enough for this "different way", then so be it, that way sucks.
Why not? Just like the developer of any new and novel product, they should have a reasonable amount of time to have exclusivity to their invention, to have the opportunity to recoup their investment?
No, not like any product. Most products, even those new and novel, receive no patent protection at all. And are still able to be successfull. We don't hand patents out on everything. We should not hand out patents on living things.
But all this is moot. I'm not debating whether or not patents are ethical. I'm debating whether or not it is ethical to make a plant that self-terminates. Once could argue that with a self-terminating organism, you don't need a patent, so long as you can keep the way you made the organism a secret.
Yes, you could argue that pretty well, because the organism has built-in properties that enforce the same monopoly a patent gives. Only it does it by crippling the plant, and without the eventual transition out of monopoly protection. So it's basically a permanent biologically enforced patent. That's way, way more unethical than merely patenting the plant. At least with a patent it eventually becomes part of common knowledge.
> If they can't profit under those circumstances, then we don't need them.
Then people won't buy it.
Which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned, and further convinces me that we should not grant them extra incentives above and beyond what every other farmer gets. If that makes them unprofitable, then good, the market has worked for once.
Wow, I can think of an easy example. Let's say I develop a genetically altered corn plant that produces corn that can cure cancer. Since I spent a few billion dollars developing it, I don't want to give it away for free, I would like to recoup my investment and make some profit off of it, too. Rather than risk someone stealing some of my seeds and starting a new crop for free off of my investment, and then undercutting my sales, I'll also genetically alter it so that it can't reproduce.
And again, is it clear that the non-crippled version is a vastly superior plant? The self-destructive part is completely unecessary to its functioning, it is there only to enforce the monopoly of the creator. So your incentive has created a great plant with a terrible, unecessary weakness. I'd say something about this model is broken. Millions of AIDS sufferers in Africa who can't afford patented drugs say something about this model is broken.
And as if they would stop at only recouping their billion dollars + reasonable return on investment before making the corn non-terminating. It's just like with the phramas. They argue that they need the monopoly to cover their R&D costs. But the most basic look at their balance sheets show that they cover their R&D in the first few weeks of the quarter, spend the next month or so covering their marketing costs which are 2-3x R&D, and the rest of the quarter is pure profit. They aren't struggling to recoup their investment, they're making ludicrous amounts of profit with margins that few industries outside of oil can enjoy. And now I'm supposed to believe that Monsanto is going to invent anti-cancer corn, and is only going to be interested in recouping their R&D costs? No way. They're going to use exploitive pricing for as long as they possibly can. If by making it self-terminating they can avoid even the limited t
Why should any scientist hope that standard model will or will not turn out to be true? Nature doesn't care how many billions was spent on a new particle accelerator. Just be happy that we may have discovered something new and move on to a million things that we still don't understand, including much of what's happening on our own planet.
Because that affects what science is done in the future. Just like when the first experiments were done to verify relativity, when shown to make accurate predictions further testing was done on other aspects of relativity, and as time went on science branched out in directions that assumed a relativistic universe then asked what new questions arise from that assumption? If relativity had turned out to be incorrect, then we would not have continued down that path and would have investigated other avenues of science.
Really, I don't understand how you can question the usefulness of verifying or disproving our models.
No, that was only Syler's mutant ability. And it isn't even clear that he needs to eat brains; it might just be his psychotic way of expressing his ability.
So don't worry, Heroes is still a 100% accurate documentary.
So what's wrong with the incentive of having superior crops, only doing it in less time? Instead of taking millenia, perhaps something much better could be made in a few years?
Humans have been creating better crops for millenia, I didn't say it took a millenium for them to invent the better crop. We have been doing it continuously, making many advancements. There is no need for some special incentive to want to do it quickly -- the incentive to do it quickly is having better crops sooner. Technology, especially in ancient times, always progressed slowly in part because technology builds upon itself so the more you have the faster you can develop new tech. Also because humans were few in number, isolated, and largely concerned with survival. Issues that the invention of agriculture changed, allowing large stationary populations, full time non-food-producers like soldiers, architects, and scientists, and eventually allowed the development of the Internet with which we are speaking.
I'm not debating the effectiveness of selective breeding and such that has happened in the past. But this is no reason to disallow more modern means of doing the same thing.
Selective breeding still goes on today. In fact, a Canadian farmer had 40 years of selective breeding experiments destroyed when his crop was cross-pollinated by Monsanto seeds. Why does Monsanto get to destroy his incentive, just because their method is "more modern"?
Don't get me wrong, it should be wrong and illegal to produce self-terminating plants that contaminate "natural" strains of plants. You shouldn't be able to make a thing that wipes out the natural fauna.
But there shouldn't be anything wrong with someone who produces a self-terminating plant. If it does something special, and people want to buy it, they will. If not, they won't.
Sure. But they also should not get any special incentives in the form of patents either. Let them compete on a level playing field with the farmers, give them the same incentive -- make a better plant. If they can't profit under those circumstances, then we don't need them. Besides, any plant that cannot reproduce is so inherently not better than a plant that can that I fail to see how incentivizing them to make more self-destructing plants is beneficial.
But this adds a new dimension. You have genetically modified crops that now nuke the other crops that it cross-pollinates with in a generation. Something like this seems to be an obvious point of attack for a possible terrorist. What happens if Monsanto's main grain supplies are attacked? Suddenly you have an entire *year* without several crops???
The only way this would work in its current form is with the help of the farmers over many years, as each failed crop would have to be replaced with a newly purchased Monsanto crop in order for further non-Monsanto fields to be pollinated. This is what Monsanto wants to happen, as it maximizes their profits. If farmers reject it, though, it won't happen.
If you really wanted to turn it into a sci-fi bio-weapon, you would create a version that only produces non-viable seeds after N generations, where N is sufficient to ensure the exponential growth would cause the majority of plants to be covered. Then suddenly and without warning there are massive crop shortages, followed by more the next year as those reach the Nth generation mark, and then testing reveals that nearly all crops contain the gene and there aren't any non-terminators left to grow. This doesn't maximize Monsanto's profits, and hell I have no idea if it's possible, so it doesn't worry me as much.
Either way, we would end up dependent on Monsanto, and yes, then what happens if they are attacked, or a disease evolves that ravishes their plants specifically. Having a single source of food -- whether a single strain of grain, or a single supplier of seeds -- is a horrible, horrible idea.
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
If my profit increases due to decreased loss by more than the cost of annual purchases, I buy the annual purchase option. If my profit increases less than the cost of annual purchases, I keep doing it the old way.
This is the reasoning that arises if your fundamental assumption is that cost == money. This is the assumption many -- especially business -- make, and it makes sense for them because first you can count money, and second anything that you can avoid paying for ceases to be a cost. For example, pollution is a common "cost" that a business doesn't have to see because unless they get fined it never turns into a dollar amount.
It's the same thing with engineers, who say "who cares about the license, use the best tool for the job". So they pick some piece of software with a per-seat license model because it has some nice feature or whatever in preference to some free software tool... Then the license server goes down, the software won't run, and where's the 'best tool for the job' now? The license -- what you are allowed to do with the product -- necessarily impacts which tool is "best".
Same here. You can't just look at the price of buying seeds from Monsanto compared to the benefit of increased yields. You also have to consider what happens down the road, when over-use of Monsanto seeds has made the natural option even less viable (e.g. increasingly resistant weeds), and then you don't -have- Option A. What will happen to the prices of Monsanto seeds then? What happens when the majority of farmers are using one of only a couple strains of crop and a disease wipes them all out? These are the costs -- that cannot be marked in red or black ink on a quarterly balance sheet -- that are truly important.
Still, in terms of the "poor farmers" - unless there's some kind of monopoly I'm missing, why can't they just not buy the product if they don't like the terms?
Economic incentive, mostly. Most farmers that aren't huge corporations are struggling already, and the short-term gains are very attractive -- especially when one is concerned with survival in the short term. Right now they may have the choice to not buy the product if they don't like the terms, but the more farmers that buy in the less viable that choice becomes.
I'll note that many African countries have flat out rejected US offers of agricultural aid, because it came in the form of Monsanto-engineered crops complete with all the legal restrictions. They are able to see the cost, even if accountants can't.
Yes, sinister. Systematic steps taken to destroy the very concept of the independent farmer, to make them all dependent on Monsanto. Suing farmers when nature happens and Monsanto plants pollinate non-Monsanto fields for patent violation.
The ability of a farmer to save seeds for next years crop has ALREADY been challenged, and this occured almost a CENTURY ago by the advent of hybrid crops!
The hybrid crops provide an incentive for farmers to purchase new seeds each year. It does not destroy the ability for them to replant seeds -- the hybrids are viable, even if their offspring don't have all the same advantages. Many farmers still breed crops in the traditional way to create better breeds. Monsanto is trying to make this not just disadvantageous, but impossible.
Terminator technology can vary, and in this case, this form of the tech is called V-GURT. There may be other forms of 'terminator' tech that DON'T reduce seed viability that can be developed! Your liberal use of the term 'terminator' scares me; it makes it seem as if all incarnations of it (present and future!) MUST have a sinister evil goal.
Okay, so what do these other hypothetical forms of 'terminator' reduce the viability of? This is basically DRM for plants -- don't tell me they aren't crippled in some way, because if they weren't there would be no reason for the tech to exist.
And yes, I absolutely do consider any technology that is designed to prevent farmers from breeding their own crops without the permission of Monsanto to be inherently sinister and evil. It scares me that you think locking away the freaking foundation of civilization is something that might not be evil.
If there is pollination on some plants then those plants are unable to germinate on the other generation so... they won't propagate anymore.
Right. In other words, it effectively kills any plant strains it cross pollinates with. If terminator crops continue to be planted, then they will pollinate and kill more crops, until eventually there are no non-terminator crops left.
Obviously as the terminators cannot reproduce on their own, this is only a problem if farmers continue buying terminator seeds from Monsanto and plant them.
Human beings have been "innovating" by breeding and grafting crops to produce better crops for millenia. Domesticated plants are completely different from their wild cousins, in the case of crops like corn so different that it took us a long time to determine for sure what their ancestors were. We've spent thousands and thousands of years developing better crops, and why?
For the purpose of having superior crops! That's all the incentive humanity has ever needed!
So some multination might not find it worth it to spend a billion dollars developing a new super crop. Who cares? Why should I allow them to completely reverse the foundation of all of those millenia of argiculture just because they fell that foundation hurts their profit margin? Who the hell cares?! We never needed Monsanto before, we don't need them now, and we shouldn't bow to them just because they are greedy and want to destroy independent farming. That ten thousand years history of innovation that led to modern crops is both Monsanto's base because they use those same plants to modify, and their enemy because the idea of independent innovation cuts into their profit margin.
And we're letting them do it. They are hurting farming, not helping, their crops are "better" in the shortest term thinking possible (1 harvest) but terrible over time as they cross-pollinate free crops and destroy them, reducing biodiversity and reducing the incentive of anyone not Monsanto to innovate -- like the Canadian farmer who had 40 years of selective breeding undone by a terminator-strain field nearby. What about his incentive, huh? That's the real cost of what you're suggesting. Do you think it's worth it?
Besides, other companies have made a good profit selling seeds that didn't come with fucking genetic DRM. Monsanto is the only one who thinks they need to have plants that self destruct (after contaminating non-Monsanto plants which then also self destruct). These are people so greedy they're not happy only with profit, but only with ludicrous profit, forever. At the cost of independent farming. No way should we incentivize them in the way they wish.
This is really one case where what is good for the people and what is good for the corporations can be drawn in black and white. There is absolutely no other reason for the terminator gene to exist.
Exactly. The 'terminator' gene exists for one greedy, selfish, sinister reason: To destroy the foundation of millenia of agriculture. The right of the farmer to use this year's seeds to plant next year's crop. The ability to pick and choose the seeds to plant, which is what lead to our modern domesticated crops.
They want this to go by the wayside. The ultimate goal of things like the terminator gene is to destroy the concept of the independent farmer so that there is no farming without Monsanto.
So the fact that their crops can pollinate someone else's field so that the seeds have the terminator gene is, to them, a feature. Sure they scream and holler and sue for someone "stealing" their IP as a product of natural reproduction, but they must in reality be very pleased every time it happens. Because every field that is contaminated with the terminator gene is another field that can't be re-planted, another field that becomes dependent on Monsanto. They won't be satisfied until there are no "natural" domestic crops, only Monsanto crops, and every year every farmers must come to them to get the seeds they need. And once there are only Monsanto crops, it doesn't take much imagination to imagine there being no crops at all.
Hmm... sounds like a limited notion of file caching, only saving the code pages from binaries and some private data. I meant real file system caching. Oh well, I'll call that close enough. Maybe they did file system caching in a separate process or something where it didn't show up as 'available'.
First off, I've never slammed an article headline in all the time I've been here at Slashdot, but I'm doing it now.
You must be new here. We have a headline like this -- quantum entaglement is like Star Trek transporters!!!! -- every few months.
And every time it's the same: No, this isn't anything like transporters. It can't be used for transporters. In fact it can't even be used for FTL communication, no "sub-space communication" ala Star Trek either.
Anyway, I doubt the researchers really think they're on the trail of a transporter.
I have a quantumly-entangled scale model of him on my desk, and it's rolling like a bastard right now. Just knocked my coffee into the middle of next week. But that's a different problem all together.
I guess how you feel when the coffee shows up next week depends on whether or not its still in its cup or if it suddenly spills out of nowhere onto your lap.
There was technically only 36MB "free" if you included the cache.
It's the "free" number that most people complain about when they first use Unix, and this appears to have happened too with Vista. That's what made me wonder whether XP had file caching or not.
As far as your particular case, the actual used ram is quite hefty. I would hesitate to believe that could be a real number... but then again, I hesitate to think any real MS OS since NT hasn't had file caching. Could I honestly have too high an opinion of Microsoft?
OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.
I know that part of the "problem" is Vista using large swaths of RAM as a file cache, meaning that just like with Unix people see all that RAM being used and think it's the system but it's just a cache that will be dropped on the floor as soon as an application needs that memory.
The part that bothers me is that this "problem" only started showing up with Vista. Maybe they just changed how the counted 'free' RAM. Or maybe, and this is the worrying part, Vista is the first Microsoft OS with built-in file caching?! I had just assumed that XP had this feature. I mean, I may knock Microsoft, but I also granted NT and progeny "modern OS" status and figured file caching was part of the package.
It seems to me that this comment is based on some antiquated winner-takes-all type election system. If so, then that is your problem, not the distribution of the votes.
Well that's what we have, yes, and it is in fact the system that I am calling the problem. Also I assumed you meant non-proportional as the opposite of how the UK Parliament works. If Labour Party gets 40% of the votes, they get 40% of the seats, and so on. Here in the states, for Presidential elections then whoever gets the most votes in a state wins the entire state, but also Senators which are elected by state-wide popular vote, and Representatives which run to represent individual districts within a state. In no case are seats/electoral votes given out on the basis of percentage of the votes, i.e. what I was calling proportional.
I bolded the part of your comment that made no sense to me, as in I really don't know what you were trying to say.
A non-proportional voting system means that even if your ethnic group constitutes only 1% of the population, their political voting power is larger than that - say 2%. By the same token, then another ethnic group that constitutes 20% of the population may only have 19% of the political voting power. (The fine tuning is left as an exercise for parliament:-)
That sounds like you are describing the current state of a system, not a system itself. How do you grant the 1% ethnic minority 2% political power? What does Parliament decide exactly? Explain how this non-proportional voting system works.
You probably need to move a lot of power from the president over to congress. It then becomes less of a winner-takes-all situation and even smaller parties can jockey for power within the committees and whatnot.
Eh... Congress is somewhat better, and we actually have a few Independent representatives. But like I was saying, the same problem exists with winner-take-all voting and districting. Politicians understand demographics, and like to screw around with the borders of the districts to split up concentrations of minorities into multiple districts such that within each district they remain a minority. It's called "gerrymandering". My state, Texas, is particularly bad where they have some districts that are a couple miles wide and a hundred miles long so that the tip of the district in traditionally liberal Austin is diluted by 90 miles of traditionally conservative rural Texas.
Even without that, it is still fundamentally difficult for a politician from outside the two major parties to get elected. If 10% of the population votes for an independent, that won't be enough to win even a single seat in that state. So 3rd parties are marginalizd. They can't win, so nobody votes for them, and the two main parties become even more deeply entrenched.
I would argue that the definitions you've cited are just examples of the cognitive battle already having been lost on this one. It doesn't make the word any more precise or actually meaningful.
The definition of "renewable" given by the dictionaries is quite meaningful and useful. It makes a clear and significant distinction between itself and non-renewable energy sources. It's just not sufficiently precise for you. Well it's not meant to be, it's meant to cover a wide range of natural resources that are by their nature refillable or inexhaustable. You can use more precise words for specific technologies if you want to, but more specific terms also do not serve the same purpose as "renewable" in language so it still serves a purpose. Besides if your goal is pedantry why stop with mere imprecise words to describe a broad class of significantly different facilities when you should be using full blueprints to represent what exact tech you are talking about. Otherwise I can't understand what exactly you mean by "gravity-powered".
I agree with your criticism of saying "renewable" with regard to waste heat from fossil fuel electricity generation. It could be argued that being the universal waste product heat itself is a "renewable resource" but that's a stretch since the whole point is attaching the device to an existing waste-heat-from-electricity-generating device.
Uh unless you can take advantage of more efficient conversions resulting in an overall reduction in waste of course. You know, if the efficiency of heat->sound times sound->electricity is more efficient than heat->electricity, then you win. A single conversion of 1% efficiency is worse than a hundred consecutive conversions of 99% efficiency.
All the Second Law tells you is that no stage of conversion can be 100% efficient. It does not say that any particular conversion path is more or less efficient than any other.
I can't pretend to have that much optimism. Would we ever have been able to build a beachhead and invade Europe if Hitler had an additional 4 million fresh troops in well-trained cohesive units? Remember too that in this hypothetical scenario Hitler would have been focused on the taking of Britain, so we may not have even had that safe haven to launch from.
I'm certainly not going to say it would have been impossible. I just see the outcome as being very, very tenuous. If anything, Europe may have been decided by The Bomb, and we may not have been able to use it to simply ensure complete surrender, but may have had to produce enough to win militarily. I think I'll end with a statement that is hopefully easier to agree with completely: Thank goodness Hitler was dumb.:)
A lot of fuel cells work just fine in the lab. Where you have several PhD's carefully tweaking up the chemical inputs over a period of hours or days. Where they hourly titrate the input chemicals to ensure they're at 99.99% purity.
Hmm... Having several PhDs around to tweak my fuel cell day in and day out sure does sound expensive. But most of those things you decribe sound like they could be done by grad students, which should lower the maintenance cost to next to nothing. Pizza, coffee, and a promise to put their name somewhere on the paper that you may or may not eventually publish should do it.
If we can design the fuel cells to use waste heat to warm the pizzas and coffee the system would be nearly perfect.
You're joking right? Ill hand it to the Brits for holding out but they could not get a boot onto the continant soil without the help of the US. Hitler being stupid enough to engage Russia did not hurt either. If the US and/or Russia did not become involved the *best* outcome for Europe is England suing for piece, and Vici France pretending to be a real nation.
Let's just call a spade a spade: It was Hitler's foolish decision to invade Russia, and the defeat of his army on the Eastern Front, that saved England. He only forestalled an actual invasion across the channel because he felt England would surrender after he defeated Russia -- he could have conquered England first, then fought a single-front war against Russia which he still might have lost.
The Eastern Front is what decided the war. It is where the most casualties occured, it is where Hitler committed the strength of the Wermacht and saw it bleed and bleed and bleed millions of soldiers until its former glory was destroyed. The forces the U.S. and Britain and Canada fought in Western Europe were the dredged up remains of survivors of the Eastern Front, cobbled together units often made from soldiers in completely different unit types (e.g. paratroopers in bunker machine gun posts) just because there weren't enough properly trained men left. It was no longer the same Wermacht.
I'm not trying to diminish what the Allies accomplished on the Western Front, or Britain's defense. I'm just saying it was the Eastern Front that was the fulcrum on which the tide of war turned. It is a painful lesson to have to hear, but the fact is that the only reason "evil" lost WWII was that evil was monumentally stupid, and the deciding fight in the war was "evil" vs another equally bad "evil".
That may be a reasonable interpretation, as it does not suffer from overflow problems. Efficiency is a 0-1 scale, with 100% efficiency an impossible to reach goal that you suffer severe diminishing returns from. E.g. a power plant going from 59% to 85% efficiency means that over 60% of the energy that was being wasted is now being used (more or less directly in this case, under the requirement that you need heating). Going from 85% to 93% would require reclaiming halve of the remaining waste heat and would be a significant achievement by itself. That's a halving of inneficiency, but only a 10% improvement in efficiency.
Who knows what they really mean, it's a marketing release. It may mean nothing at all.
And while the batteries are full of not-so-healthy stuff you wouldn't want to drink, they are recycled in their entirety at the end of their useful lives.
This is a big thing for me. I was concerned since reports of the hybrids' battery lives weren't that great. But with closed-loop recycling the environmental cost is minimized, and as usual the primary cost is the energy required to recycle, meaning it's as bad as whatever your electricity source is. We must improve our electricity generation.
It's a lot like buying a computer. You could make the argument that you should wait, since you know that things will be much, much faster at the same price in two years-- but in two years, the same thing will still be true.
In an algorithms course I took we considered situations where your processing time would be so long that you could in fact be better off waiting. For example, if it took a year for your simulation to finish, you might be able to wait six months before starting, buy a computer that is a little over twice as fast, and still end up getting the answer sooner. This means knowing what is coming out in the future, and beyond the near term you can't do much more than use Moore's Law to guesstimate.
I'd look at hybrid cars or other new tech the same way I do computer upgrades -- just try to find the best combination of price/performance, something near the top but without paying the hefty premiums for the truly top end, to get as much longevity as possible out of a reasonably priced product. Which... means that when I was shopping for a car in 2003 I skipped the hybrid and went with an economy car. I still get over 40mpg highway!:)
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None of what you state is any reason why not to come up with a different way to create better crops.
But it does prove that you don't need a special incentive to come up with better crops. The notion that no improvements would be made without monopoly protection is simply ahistorical nonsense. Your original question was: What would be the incentive? The answer is: The same as always. Better crops. It has worked for millenium. It will work now.
If that isn't incentive enough for this "different way", then so be it, that way sucks.
Why not? Just like the developer of any new and novel product, they should have a reasonable amount of time to have exclusivity to their invention, to have the opportunity to recoup their investment?
No, not like any product. Most products, even those new and novel, receive no patent protection at all. And are still able to be successfull. We don't hand patents out on everything. We should not hand out patents on living things.
But all this is moot. I'm not debating whether or not patents are ethical. I'm debating whether or not it is ethical to make a plant that self-terminates. Once could argue that with a self-terminating organism, you don't need a patent, so long as you can keep the way you made the organism a secret.
Yes, you could argue that pretty well, because the organism has built-in properties that enforce the same monopoly a patent gives. Only it does it by crippling the plant, and without the eventual transition out of monopoly protection. So it's basically a permanent biologically enforced patent. That's way, way more unethical than merely patenting the plant. At least with a patent it eventually becomes part of common knowledge.
> If they can't profit under those circumstances, then we don't need them.
Then people won't buy it.
Which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned, and further convinces me that we should not grant them extra incentives above and beyond what every other farmer gets. If that makes them unprofitable, then good, the market has worked for once.
Wow, I can think of an easy example. Let's say I develop a genetically altered corn plant that produces corn that can cure cancer. Since I spent a few billion dollars developing it, I don't want to give it away for free, I would like to recoup my investment and make some profit off of it, too. Rather than risk someone stealing some of my seeds and starting a new crop for free off of my investment, and then undercutting my sales, I'll also genetically alter it so that it can't reproduce.
And again, is it clear that the non-crippled version is a vastly superior plant? The self-destructive part is completely unecessary to its functioning, it is there only to enforce the monopoly of the creator. So your incentive has created a great plant with a terrible, unecessary weakness. I'd say something about this model is broken. Millions of AIDS sufferers in Africa who can't afford patented drugs say something about this model is broken.
And as if they would stop at only recouping their billion dollars + reasonable return on investment before making the corn non-terminating. It's just like with the phramas. They argue that they need the monopoly to cover their R&D costs. But the most basic look at their balance sheets show that they cover their R&D in the first few weeks of the quarter, spend the next month or so covering their marketing costs which are 2-3x R&D, and the rest of the quarter is pure profit. They aren't struggling to recoup their investment, they're making ludicrous amounts of profit with margins that few industries outside of oil can enjoy. And now I'm supposed to believe that Monsanto is going to invent anti-cancer corn, and is only going to be interested in recouping their R&D costs? No way. They're going to use exploitive pricing for as long as they possibly can. If by making it self-terminating they can avoid even the limited t
The gov't is supposed to give us health care, social security, welfare, and now stem cells? Just what we need.
You're right, I see no relationship whatsoever.
Why should any scientist hope that standard model will or will not turn out to be true? Nature doesn't care how many billions was spent on a new particle accelerator. Just be happy that we may have discovered something new and move on to a million things that we still don't understand, including much of what's happening on our own planet.
Because that affects what science is done in the future. Just like when the first experiments were done to verify relativity, when shown to make accurate predictions further testing was done on other aspects of relativity, and as time went on science branched out in directions that assumed a relativistic universe then asked what new questions arise from that assumption? If relativity had turned out to be incorrect, then we would not have continued down that path and would have investigated other avenues of science.
Really, I don't understand how you can question the usefulness of verifying or disproving our models.
You mean Heroes lied to me?
No, that was only Syler's mutant ability. And it isn't even clear that he needs to eat brains; it might just be his psychotic way of expressing his ability.
So don't worry, Heroes is still a 100% accurate documentary.
So what's wrong with the incentive of having superior crops, only doing it in less time? Instead of taking millenia, perhaps something much better could be made in a few years?
Humans have been creating better crops for millenia, I didn't say it took a millenium for them to invent the better crop. We have been doing it continuously, making many advancements. There is no need for some special incentive to want to do it quickly -- the incentive to do it quickly is having better crops sooner. Technology, especially in ancient times, always progressed slowly in part because technology builds upon itself so the more you have the faster you can develop new tech. Also because humans were few in number, isolated, and largely concerned with survival. Issues that the invention of agriculture changed, allowing large stationary populations, full time non-food-producers like soldiers, architects, and scientists, and eventually allowed the development of the Internet with which we are speaking.
I'm not debating the effectiveness of selective breeding and such that has happened in the past. But this is no reason to disallow more modern means of doing the same thing.
Selective breeding still goes on today. In fact, a Canadian farmer had 40 years of selective breeding experiments destroyed when his crop was cross-pollinated by Monsanto seeds. Why does Monsanto get to destroy his incentive, just because their method is "more modern"?
Don't get me wrong, it should be wrong and illegal to produce self-terminating plants that contaminate "natural" strains of plants. You shouldn't be able to make a thing that wipes out the natural fauna.
But there shouldn't be anything wrong with someone who produces a self-terminating plant. If it does something special, and people want to buy it, they will. If not, they won't.
Sure. But they also should not get any special incentives in the form of patents either. Let them compete on a level playing field with the farmers, give them the same incentive -- make a better plant. If they can't profit under those circumstances, then we don't need them. Besides, any plant that cannot reproduce is so inherently not better than a plant that can that I fail to see how incentivizing them to make more self-destructing plants is beneficial.
But this adds a new dimension. You have genetically modified crops that now nuke the other crops that it cross-pollinates with in a generation. Something like this seems to be an obvious point of attack for a possible terrorist. What happens if Monsanto's main grain supplies are attacked? Suddenly you have an entire *year* without several crops???
The only way this would work in its current form is with the help of the farmers over many years, as each failed crop would have to be replaced with a newly purchased Monsanto crop in order for further non-Monsanto fields to be pollinated. This is what Monsanto wants to happen, as it maximizes their profits. If farmers reject it, though, it won't happen.
If you really wanted to turn it into a sci-fi bio-weapon, you would create a version that only produces non-viable seeds after N generations, where N is sufficient to ensure the exponential growth would cause the majority of plants to be covered. Then suddenly and without warning there are massive crop shortages, followed by more the next year as those reach the Nth generation mark, and then testing reveals that nearly all crops contain the gene and there aren't any non-terminators left to grow. This doesn't maximize Monsanto's profits, and hell I have no idea if it's possible, so it doesn't worry me as much.
Either way, we would end up dependent on Monsanto, and yes, then what happens if they are attacked, or a disease evolves that ravishes their plants specifically. Having a single source of food -- whether a single strain of grain, or a single supplier of seeds -- is a horrible, horrible idea.
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
If my profit increases due to decreased loss by more than the cost of annual purchases, I buy the annual purchase option. If my profit increases less than the cost of annual purchases, I keep doing it the old way.
This is the reasoning that arises if your fundamental assumption is that cost == money. This is the assumption many -- especially business -- make, and it makes sense for them because first you can count money, and second anything that you can avoid paying for ceases to be a cost. For example, pollution is a common "cost" that a business doesn't have to see because unless they get fined it never turns into a dollar amount.
It's the same thing with engineers, who say "who cares about the license, use the best tool for the job". So they pick some piece of software with a per-seat license model because it has some nice feature or whatever in preference to some free software tool... Then the license server goes down, the software won't run, and where's the 'best tool for the job' now? The license -- what you are allowed to do with the product -- necessarily impacts which tool is "best".
Same here. You can't just look at the price of buying seeds from Monsanto compared to the benefit of increased yields. You also have to consider what happens down the road, when over-use of Monsanto seeds has made the natural option even less viable (e.g. increasingly resistant weeds), and then you don't -have- Option A. What will happen to the prices of Monsanto seeds then? What happens when the majority of farmers are using one of only a couple strains of crop and a disease wipes them all out? These are the costs -- that cannot be marked in red or black ink on a quarterly balance sheet -- that are truly important.
Still, in terms of the "poor farmers" - unless there's some kind of monopoly I'm missing, why can't they just not buy the product if they don't like the terms?
Economic incentive, mostly. Most farmers that aren't huge corporations are struggling already, and the short-term gains are very attractive -- especially when one is concerned with survival in the short term. Right now they may have the choice to not buy the product if they don't like the terms, but the more farmers that buy in the less viable that choice becomes.
I'll note that many African countries have flat out rejected US offers of agricultural aid, because it came in the form of Monsanto-engineered crops complete with all the legal restrictions. They are able to see the cost, even if accountants can't.
Sinister?
Yes, sinister. Systematic steps taken to destroy the very concept of the independent farmer, to make them all dependent on Monsanto. Suing farmers when nature happens and Monsanto plants pollinate non-Monsanto fields for patent violation.
The ability of a farmer to save seeds for next years crop has ALREADY been challenged, and this occured almost a CENTURY ago by the advent of hybrid crops!
The hybrid crops provide an incentive for farmers to purchase new seeds each year. It does not destroy the ability for them to replant seeds -- the hybrids are viable, even if their offspring don't have all the same advantages. Many farmers still breed crops in the traditional way to create better breeds. Monsanto is trying to make this not just disadvantageous, but impossible.
Terminator technology can vary, and in this case, this form of the tech is called V-GURT. There may be other forms of 'terminator' tech that DON'T reduce seed viability that can be developed! Your liberal use of the term 'terminator' scares me; it makes it seem as if all incarnations of it (present and future!) MUST have a sinister evil goal.
Okay, so what do these other hypothetical forms of 'terminator' reduce the viability of? This is basically DRM for plants -- don't tell me they aren't crippled in some way, because if they weren't there would be no reason for the tech to exist.
And yes, I absolutely do consider any technology that is designed to prevent farmers from breeding their own crops without the permission of Monsanto to be inherently sinister and evil. It scares me that you think locking away the freaking foundation of civilization is something that might not be evil.
If there is pollination on some plants then those plants are unable to germinate on the other generation so... they won't propagate anymore.
Right. In other words, it effectively kills any plant strains it cross pollinates with. If terminator crops continue to be planted, then they will pollinate and kill more crops, until eventually there are no non-terminator crops left.
Obviously as the terminators cannot reproduce on their own, this is only a problem if farmers continue buying terminator seeds from Monsanto and plant them.
Which is why they should stop immediately.
Human beings have been "innovating" by breeding and grafting crops to produce better crops for millenia. Domesticated plants are completely different from their wild cousins, in the case of crops like corn so different that it took us a long time to determine for sure what their ancestors were. We've spent thousands and thousands of years developing better crops, and why?
For the purpose of having superior crops! That's all the incentive humanity has ever needed!
So some multination might not find it worth it to spend a billion dollars developing a new super crop. Who cares? Why should I allow them to completely reverse the foundation of all of those millenia of argiculture just because they fell that foundation hurts their profit margin? Who the hell cares?! We never needed Monsanto before, we don't need them now, and we shouldn't bow to them just because they are greedy and want to destroy independent farming. That ten thousand years history of innovation that led to modern crops is both Monsanto's base because they use those same plants to modify, and their enemy because the idea of independent innovation cuts into their profit margin.
And we're letting them do it. They are hurting farming, not helping, their crops are "better" in the shortest term thinking possible (1 harvest) but terrible over time as they cross-pollinate free crops and destroy them, reducing biodiversity and reducing the incentive of anyone not Monsanto to innovate -- like the Canadian farmer who had 40 years of selective breeding undone by a terminator-strain field nearby. What about his incentive, huh? That's the real cost of what you're suggesting. Do you think it's worth it?
Besides, other companies have made a good profit selling seeds that didn't come with fucking genetic DRM. Monsanto is the only one who thinks they need to have plants that self destruct (after contaminating non-Monsanto plants which then also self destruct). These are people so greedy they're not happy only with profit, but only with ludicrous profit, forever. At the cost of independent farming. No way should we incentivize them in the way they wish.
This is really one case where what is good for the people and what is good for the corporations can be drawn in black and white. There is absolutely no other reason for the terminator gene to exist.
Exactly. The 'terminator' gene exists for one greedy, selfish, sinister reason: To destroy the foundation of millenia of agriculture. The right of the farmer to use this year's seeds to plant next year's crop. The ability to pick and choose the seeds to plant, which is what lead to our modern domesticated crops.
They want this to go by the wayside. The ultimate goal of things like the terminator gene is to destroy the concept of the independent farmer so that there is no farming without Monsanto.
So the fact that their crops can pollinate someone else's field so that the seeds have the terminator gene is, to them, a feature. Sure they scream and holler and sue for someone "stealing" their IP as a product of natural reproduction, but they must in reality be very pleased every time it happens. Because every field that is contaminated with the terminator gene is another field that can't be re-planted, another field that becomes dependent on Monsanto. They won't be satisfied until there are no "natural" domestic crops, only Monsanto crops, and every year every farmers must come to them to get the seeds they need. And once there are only Monsanto crops, it doesn't take much imagination to imagine there being no crops at all.
Hmm... sounds like a limited notion of file caching, only saving the code pages from binaries and some private data. I meant real file system caching. Oh well, I'll call that close enough. Maybe they did file system caching in a separate process or something where it didn't show up as 'available'.
First off, I've never slammed an article headline in all the time I've been here at Slashdot, but I'm doing it now.
You must be new here. We have a headline like this -- quantum entaglement is like Star Trek transporters!!!! -- every few months.
And every time it's the same: No, this isn't anything like transporters. It can't be used for transporters. In fact it can't even be used for FTL communication, no "sub-space communication" ala Star Trek either.
Anyway, I doubt the researchers really think they're on the trail of a transporter.
I have a quantumly-entangled scale model of him on my desk, and it's rolling like a bastard right now. Just knocked my coffee into the middle of next week. But that's a different problem all together.
I guess how you feel when the coffee shows up next week depends on whether or not its still in its cup or if it suddenly spills out of nowhere onto your lap.
There was technically only 36MB "free" if you included the cache.
It's the "free" number that most people complain about when they first use Unix, and this appears to have happened too with Vista. That's what made me wonder whether XP had file caching or not.
As far as your particular case, the actual used ram is quite hefty. I would hesitate to believe that could be a real number... but then again, I hesitate to think any real MS OS since NT hasn't had file caching. Could I honestly have too high an opinion of Microsoft?
OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.
I know that part of the "problem" is Vista using large swaths of RAM as a file cache, meaning that just like with Unix people see all that RAM being used and think it's the system but it's just a cache that will be dropped on the floor as soon as an application needs that memory.
The part that bothers me is that this "problem" only started showing up with Vista. Maybe they just changed how the counted 'free' RAM. Or maybe, and this is the worrying part, Vista is the first Microsoft OS with built-in file caching?! I had just assumed that XP had this feature. I mean, I may knock Microsoft, but I also granted NT and progeny "modern OS" status and figured file caching was part of the package.
It seems to me that this comment is based on some antiquated winner-takes-all type election system. If so, then that is your problem, not the distribution of the votes.
:-)
Well that's what we have, yes, and it is in fact the system that I am calling the problem. Also I assumed you meant non-proportional as the opposite of how the UK Parliament works. If Labour Party gets 40% of the votes, they get 40% of the seats, and so on. Here in the states, for Presidential elections then whoever gets the most votes in a state wins the entire state, but also Senators which are elected by state-wide popular vote, and Representatives which run to represent individual districts within a state. In no case are seats/electoral votes given out on the basis of percentage of the votes, i.e. what I was calling proportional.
I bolded the part of your comment that made no sense to me, as in I really don't know what you were trying to say.
A non-proportional voting system means that even if your ethnic group constitutes only 1% of the population, their political voting power is larger than that - say 2%. By the same token, then another ethnic group that constitutes 20% of the population may only have 19% of the political voting power. (The fine tuning is left as an exercise for parliament
That sounds like you are describing the current state of a system, not a system itself. How do you grant the 1% ethnic minority 2% political power? What does Parliament decide exactly? Explain how this non-proportional voting system works.
You probably need to move a lot of power from the president over to congress. It then becomes less of a winner-takes-all situation and even smaller parties can jockey for power within the committees and whatnot.
Eh... Congress is somewhat better, and we actually have a few Independent representatives. But like I was saying, the same problem exists with winner-take-all voting and districting. Politicians understand demographics, and like to screw around with the borders of the districts to split up concentrations of minorities into multiple districts such that within each district they remain a minority. It's called "gerrymandering". My state, Texas, is particularly bad where they have some districts that are a couple miles wide and a hundred miles long so that the tip of the district in traditionally liberal Austin is diluted by 90 miles of traditionally conservative rural Texas.
Even without that, it is still fundamentally difficult for a politician from outside the two major parties to get elected. If 10% of the population votes for an independent, that won't be enough to win even a single seat in that state. So 3rd parties are marginalizd. They can't win, so nobody votes for them, and the two main parties become even more deeply entrenched.
I would argue that the definitions you've cited are just examples of the cognitive battle already having been lost on this one. It doesn't make the word any more precise or actually meaningful.
The definition of "renewable" given by the dictionaries is quite meaningful and useful. It makes a clear and significant distinction between itself and non-renewable energy sources. It's just not sufficiently precise for you. Well it's not meant to be, it's meant to cover a wide range of natural resources that are by their nature refillable or inexhaustable. You can use more precise words for specific technologies if you want to, but more specific terms also do not serve the same purpose as "renewable" in language so it still serves a purpose. Besides if your goal is pedantry why stop with mere imprecise words to describe a broad class of significantly different facilities when you should be using full blueprints to represent what exact tech you are talking about. Otherwise I can't understand what exactly you mean by "gravity-powered".
I agree with your criticism of saying "renewable" with regard to waste heat from fossil fuel electricity generation. It could be argued that being the universal waste product heat itself is a "renewable resource" but that's a stretch since the whole point is attaching the device to an existing waste-heat-from-electricity-generating device.
Uh unless you can take advantage of more efficient conversions resulting in an overall reduction in waste of course. You know, if the efficiency of heat->sound times sound->electricity is more efficient than heat->electricity, then you win. A single conversion of 1% efficiency is worse than a hundred consecutive conversions of 99% efficiency.
All the Second Law tells you is that no stage of conversion can be 100% efficient. It does not say that any particular conversion path is more or less efficient than any other.
I heard the "Heisenberg Compensator" was really just a setting on the "Plot Hole Compensator", right next to "Inertial Dampener" on the dial.
I can't pretend to have that much optimism. Would we ever have been able to build a beachhead and invade Europe if Hitler had an additional 4 million fresh troops in well-trained cohesive units? Remember too that in this hypothetical scenario Hitler would have been focused on the taking of Britain, so we may not have even had that safe haven to launch from.
:)
I'm certainly not going to say it would have been impossible. I just see the outcome as being very, very tenuous. If anything, Europe may have been decided by The Bomb, and we may not have been able to use it to simply ensure complete surrender, but may have had to produce enough to win militarily. I think I'll end with a statement that is hopefully easier to agree with completely: Thank goodness Hitler was dumb.
A lot of fuel cells work just fine in the lab. Where you have several PhD's carefully tweaking up the chemical inputs over a period of hours or days. Where they hourly titrate the input chemicals to ensure they're at 99.99% purity.
Hmm... Having several PhDs around to tweak my fuel cell day in and day out sure does sound expensive. But most of those things you decribe sound like they could be done by grad students, which should lower the maintenance cost to next to nothing. Pizza, coffee, and a promise to put their name somewhere on the paper that you may or may not eventually publish should do it.
If we can design the fuel cells to use waste heat to warm the pizzas and coffee the system would be nearly perfect.
You're joking right? Ill hand it to the Brits for holding out but they could not get a boot onto the continant soil without the help of the US. Hitler being stupid enough to engage Russia did not hurt either. If the US and/or Russia did not become involved the *best* outcome for Europe is England suing for piece, and Vici France pretending to be a real nation.
Let's just call a spade a spade: It was Hitler's foolish decision to invade Russia, and the defeat of his army on the Eastern Front, that saved England. He only forestalled an actual invasion across the channel because he felt England would surrender after he defeated Russia -- he could have conquered England first, then fought a single-front war against Russia which he still might have lost.
The Eastern Front is what decided the war. It is where the most casualties occured, it is where Hitler committed the strength of the Wermacht and saw it bleed and bleed and bleed millions of soldiers until its former glory was destroyed. The forces the U.S. and Britain and Canada fought in Western Europe were the dredged up remains of survivors of the Eastern Front, cobbled together units often made from soldiers in completely different unit types (e.g. paratroopers in bunker machine gun posts) just because there weren't enough properly trained men left. It was no longer the same Wermacht.
I'm not trying to diminish what the Allies accomplished on the Western Front, or Britain's defense. I'm just saying it was the Eastern Front that was the fulcrum on which the tide of war turned. It is a painful lesson to have to hear, but the fact is that the only reason "evil" lost WWII was that evil was monumentally stupid, and the deciding fight in the war was "evil" vs another equally bad "evil".
That may be a reasonable interpretation, as it does not suffer from overflow problems. Efficiency is a 0-1 scale, with 100% efficiency an impossible to reach goal that you suffer severe diminishing returns from. E.g. a power plant going from 59% to 85% efficiency means that over 60% of the energy that was being wasted is now being used (more or less directly in this case, under the requirement that you need heating). Going from 85% to 93% would require reclaiming halve of the remaining waste heat and would be a significant achievement by itself. That's a halving of inneficiency, but only a 10% improvement in efficiency.
Who knows what they really mean, it's a marketing release. It may mean nothing at all.
And while the batteries are full of not-so-healthy stuff you wouldn't want to drink, they are recycled in their entirety at the end of their useful lives.
:)
This is a big thing for me. I was concerned since reports of the hybrids' battery lives weren't that great. But with closed-loop recycling the environmental cost is minimized, and as usual the primary cost is the energy required to recycle, meaning it's as bad as whatever your electricity source is. We must improve our electricity generation.
It's a lot like buying a computer. You could make the argument that you should wait, since you know that things will be much, much faster at the same price in two years-- but in two years, the same thing will still be true.
In an algorithms course I took we considered situations where your processing time would be so long that you could in fact be better off waiting. For example, if it took a year for your simulation to finish, you might be able to wait six months before starting, buy a computer that is a little over twice as fast, and still end up getting the answer sooner. This means knowing what is coming out in the future, and beyond the near term you can't do much more than use Moore's Law to guesstimate.
I'd look at hybrid cars or other new tech the same way I do computer upgrades -- just try to find the best combination of price/performance, something near the top but without paying the hefty premiums for the truly top end, to get as much longevity as possible out of a reasonably priced product. Which... means that when I was shopping for a car in 2003 I skipped the hybrid and went with an economy car. I still get over 40mpg highway!