10.5 is 64 bit also vista and xp 64 can use it as well.
That is true, but how many PC laptops are shipping with 64 bit processors? The article states that it's the Notebook manufacturers are the ones moving to 4 gig's not the desktops which are far more likely to be 64bit.
you need to read the NYTimes article that the Techdirt article is based on. This entire Slashdot article is based on a misrepresentation of an innocuous NYTimes article. Apple isn't the one trying to increase the prices of DVDs or media downloads, it's the studios trying to create more expensive DVD's to make >$15 downloads seem like a deal.
The slashdot article as well as the techdirt article it's based on both imply that some how Steve Jobs is trying to extort money from consumers. That's not beyond the realm of possibility, but the mechanism both use is an increase is the price of DVDs. Some how this money paid to the DVD retailers like Target, Walmart, et al. will end up in Apple's coffers? I don't see it.
By reading further and clicking the link to the NYTimes article that Techdirt based their paragraph on I discovered that the author of the Techdirt article is either retarded or intentionally inflammatory. the NYTimes article indicates that Apple may finally bring more movies to the iTunes catalog by agreeing to higher priced bulk rates for movies. The end result being a price tag of $15 for downloads in comparison to the $18 for physical DVDs. On a tangentially related note, there is talk of the movie studios trying to make more money off of DVDs and justifying it by including a compressed, non-CSS version of the movie on the DVD for use on portable media players like the iPod and iPhone. Nowhere in the NYTimes article does the author indicate that the idea or decision lay with Steve Jobs.
I'm all for calling people down for greed and anti-consumer activities when it's warranted. However, I'm even more in favor of bitch slapping web writers who intentionally misrepresent the activities of individuals and companies in an attempt to start a flame war for the sole purpose of generating massive amounts of ad revenue for their site. Baiting apple fanboys has been a favored past time for many a self proclaimed tech pundit, but I'm surprised that Slashdot managed to fall for it.
2 mouse clicks and 3-4 paragraphs and I had the original article minus the flame bait.
I think you need to RTFA! The author of the article has done a good job of dissecting microsoft's marketing claims and the number of NDP and pointing to the creative marketing that Microsoft uses to look like it's been more successful than it is.
Outside of that, the question of whether the Zune is a failure or not is stupid IMHO. If you sell products at a loss for several years it is by definition a failure. Companies are in business to make money. The fact that Microsoft makes tons of money in its other divisions is fine, but they'd be more profitable if the dumped the Zune and the Xbox divisions and focused on the software that actually makes money. I understand that with any product there is a period of spending more money than you make but I think that both have lost more money than any other company would be able to loose without the management being lynched by the stockholders.
Personally I own an Xbox (not a 360) and I enjoy playing games on it, but they never made more money on it than they spent because they didn't make enough $ from the development licenses to cover their losses. They were the 1st of the "Next Gen" game consoles to market and they're still loosing money there. Long term plans are fine and all, but you need to make money at some point and if you look closely at the data instead of blindly believing Microsoft's marketing literature you'll see that they probably won't turn a profit any time in the next decade in these divisions.
I skimmed the article and the conclusion I got was that for now this belongs with the earlier main page post about the top 10 snake oil products http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/1616248. Nothing has actually been done to prove that this procedure is actually possible. This is an example of the worst in modern science. Publish of research via press release. There has been no Peer Review, this isn't being linked to from a scientific journal, it's a theory with no evidence to support it being possible.
For all I know it is a sound theory, but until I see some experimental evidence it's just smoke and mirrors.
I think a big part of what everyone is forgetting is the slow rate at which apple made clockspeed increases during the period in which the 800MHZ machines were released. Most people will admit that while power/watt was a valid reason for the architecture change, Power itself was also an issue to consider. The late G4 and G5's didn't increase in clock all that fast so with the change to Intel and the associated jump in clock speed is going to result in a shorter half-life for those machines that were released toward the end of the PPC days. I'm not saying I'm happy about it but I'm also not going to sweat it too much. I have a 400MHZ G3, an 800MHZ powerbook and a brand new intel. I'm already supporting 2 OS's (the G3 is a B&W which doesn't have a DVD drive and cannot boot off of an external DVD drive, or in target disk mode to upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. The machines and OS's are still good enough for what I use them for. I'd rather have the speed and stability of an older OS than slower performance with bells and whistles I don't actually need.
I would be very surprised if we don't eventually get back to a 7 year life span we've enjoyed until now.
Ok, so when did an attempt at intelligent discourse and debate turn into name calling? Name calling aside, your system sound to me to be the exception rather than the rule. It is owned and maintained by an individual willing to, and possably excited at the prospect of, upgrading his own equipment. Congratualtion, I know from my own attempts that it can be a risky endeavor, and I applaud your ability. However, the vast majority of people I know (anecdotal as that is) have no interest or desire to have to open their machine to replace parts. The article is dealing with averges and trends to which your individual experiences are probably not typical.
You just agreed with me and the author of the article. Take a closer look at the preceeding posts. I think you are arguing becuase you don't like apple or anyone saying anything nice about them.
market share only matters to people hoping to sell software to the owners of the hardware. If a PC is running linux then the user probably isn't going to be purchasing any more software. That's the point he was trying to make regarding linux and not being relevant. the fact of the matter is that there isn't anything inherently wrong with PC hardware, it's the sub-par software that microsoft writes to run the PC's that is the problem. Backward compatability is important to microsoft for software, but not for hardware.
It means that you've had to replace most of the hardware in your machine to keep it functional. Your anecdotal evidence would seem to support the supposition of the article that PC hardware needs to be replaced more frequently than Mac hardware.
QED
I don't know that almost decade of mac ownership makes me a 'johnny come lately' mac user. (I indicated that one of the machines I own shipped with OS 8, which was last shipped in 1999) I understood the sugar water reference, usually refered to as "cool-aide" (I'm assuming you changed the reference just to be different). The changing the world thing was what threw me off. Apple hasn't claimed that it would change the world since the 1984 ad introducing the mac. It seems to me that you've been actively hating apple since at least the mid 80's, and can't possibly give the companies products the benefit of the doubt. Based upon your continued vehemnce, it appears to me that further discussion with you will be unfruitful, because no matter what I say you'll take it as me having "drunk the sugar-water" despite my having used PC's for the decade prior to my change to a mac. I prefer apples products, and I think that market analysts are profesional BS artists. Neither of those statements should be taken as an insult, and I wish you a good day.
DId you visit the site at all? I'll grant you that all of his articles are about apple so to someone predisposed to seeing astrotufers, his site would appear that way. My question is, "So what?" followed by "Why such hostility?" Based upon your vehemence, I get the impression that you have something invested in this debate. As long as you RTFA with a skeptical eye, you can still get some usefull information. The point of the article was't "Zune's suck" but that "Market research numbers are BS that can be, and often are, manipulated by analysts to say what every the analyst wants, and here is how!" As to the last line of your post:
Keep drinking your sugar water, you cultist freak. While you suck on pop music and network television, the rest of us will be changing the world.
How exactly are you changing the world by posting vitriolic, knee jerk responses to an article that attempts to bring clarity to a debate that probably won't be significantly effected by your post, or the article you are refering to in the first place? The dueling analysts already know how the data can be manipulated because they are the ones doing the manipulating. Also, what on EARTH does pop music and network television have to do with anything? Neither of them were mentioned in the article, the post on slashdot or any of the responses to the post that I'v read as of the time of my post.
Instead of skimming the article, try reading all of it. He indicates that they idea of 5 year useful life span for mac's vs. 2 for PC's was based on anectodal evidence, yes, but evidence. He didn't just create those numbers out of thin air.
In studying the history of PC purchases made by a client with around a hundred employees, I found the company was still using all of their original Macs dating back to 2001, with a few even older Macs still in secondary use.
In contrast, there were no PCs more than three years old still in use, and most of the older models were in poor shape. Around 80% of its machines were PCs, and nearly all of those were commercial grade Dell OptiPlex or Latitude models; the other 20% were Macs. About a third of the entire 115 machines were laptops.
Besides, I've seen several articles over the years indicating that mac's have a longer usful life than PC's. If you need more anecdotal evidence my family has 3 macs that originally shipped pre-Mac OS 10 (2 with OS 9.1 and 1 with the last version of OS 8). they are all currently running OS 10.4 and used every day. I also have one that's sitting in the closet that has 10.3 installed on it and the only reason it's in the closet is because I own more computers than there are people in my house hold.
It is if you don't support the FAITHFUL. That's the problem with this debate. We've been told all of our lives that within a decade the oceans would drown all costal cities, and NY, Miami, DC, etc. would all be under 10 feed to water. Well, I'm now almost 30 and as far as I know, the worlds oceans haven't increased to any measurable extent. If you want a really good explanation for why this debate isn't getting anywhere, and how it got as big as it did considering the lack of consistend scientific evidence check out this article http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-03-04-1 .html. At the end he gives links to the relavent books, and data. I think that considering the significant scientific leanings of the slashdot crowd, you would all appreciate the fact that for once you can actually get your hands on a data set.
Even if that isn't enough to convince you, take a look at this http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key =b_lomborg, it's a video of a talk at TED. A meeting of rich, influential, and often famous people with the intention of saving the world. One of the topics that is always huge at the meeting is global warming, or as it is now called "Climate Change" since the global temperature is actually fluctuating and has recently gone down. This won't provide evidence either way as to the validity of the belief in global warming, but it'll put the "problem" into perspective.
If you have not intentions of RTFAs just think about this point from the first link. The whole reason there is a global temperature much above that of absolute zero is the sun. The amount of radiation hitting the earth from the sun fluctuates on various cycles. What is a simpler, and more probable expalanation of changes in the global temperature. Increases in the amount of radiation stricking the earth, or human activity. Especially since the vast majority of the increase in global temperature since the 1800's occured during the middle ages, prior to industrial revolution and significant increases in "Greenhouse gasses" as a result of human activity.
I'm in a similar situation. I'm trying to help a fellow graduate student who recently accepted a postion at a univeristy set up his new office. He's decided that he wants to switch to all mac's and is looking for a way to keep his laptop and desktop in sync. I mentioned dotmac for bookmarks, addresses, mail, etc. but he's also looking for something that'll sync the files in his home directory as well. Basically he wants to use his desktop at work, press a button and have it sync everything to his laptop when he leaves, and then sync any of the work he did on the laptop back to the desktop when he gets back to the office. I've been looking through what I could find, but nothing I've found seems to be quite what he's looking for. Does anyone know of any way he could do this easily with existing software?
My friend in high school had a room in his basement where he kept his computer. The basement was divided into rooms, but there wasn't a finished ceiling.
One day the plumbing became backed up, they called a plumber, he snaked the pipes, declaired it a job well done and left.
When my friend went to use his computer the next day he discovered that the waste pipe ran over his computerdesk, and instead of clearing the blockage the plumber had accidentaly punctured the pipe right over the computer in the basement and dumped several all the backedup waste, as well as the waste created since the previous evening onto my friends computer desk.
I want to apologize for the harshness of my response. Most of that was intended for some others who had responded to your comment.
As for the possibility of resistance jumping, it is a legitimate concern. However, the gene used for roundup ready crops was discovered in the wild. Genetic researchers very rarely synthesize genes from scratch. More often they find a useful gene in one place and put it somewhere else, and since roundup had been used for a long time before roundup ready corn was introduced and the gene hadn't jumped species before there is not a strong argument for believing that it will happen now.
The reason that gene transfer is such an issue with antibiotics is due to the brevity of the generational period. some bugs can experience several generations in a single day, and microbiota transfer genetic material far more easily than plants. Each cell of bacteria is capable of becoming the progenitor of a new population. While the potential is there for plants, the likely hood of this happening isn't. The plants involved here reproduce sexually, and the only way a new gene can become the progenitor of a new population is if it is a seed. otherwise any modification to that cells genome die with that cell.
Roundup was already one of the most popular herbicide when roundup-ready corn hit the market. Prior to GM corn being available farmers were applying the herbicide 4-5 time in good years and upto 8 times in really bad years. By using roundup-ready corn and roundup together farmers apply the herbicide at most 3 times befor the corn is tall enough to kill off weeds on its own by preventing the weeds from receiving enough light.
The net result for monsanto is $ from both the pesticide and the seeds. Now most farmers, even prior to the advent of GM crops didn't save seeds because they would miss out on the genetic improvements from year to year. Seed companies practiced intensive selection for production traits prior to using GM to improve plant quality. Genes native to the plants confering resistance to mold, insect infestation, and improved growth were combined via controlled polination for decades prior to the GM revolution.
The net gain for producers is time. 1 application of roundup as opposed to 4 applications in good years and even better in bad years. As we all know time is money, and as someone who has worked on family run dairy farms, (tip: most large "Factory Farms" are family owned and operated) there are never enough hours in the day to manage animals, crops, employee's, maintenance and the ever increasing paper work needed to run a farm. saving that much time is worth the premium paid for the seeds.
Land is finite. Most farms cannot get larger with out buy land off of competitors aready using it to grow the same crops, and often the land is more valuable for urban sprawl than agriculture. The best way to make more money is to improve the efficiency of production via less input costs, or increased production from the same land.
Most of the posts i've seen on this page are from the "non scientist" members of the environmentalist movements. Being a tech person is not the same as devoting your life to understanding the problems facing agriculture and attempting to solve them. As a Scientist associated with this problem (i'm a phd student in animals science) I'm constantly frustrated by the ignorance western peopls have concerning their own food supply and the arrogance seen from people despite there admited ignorance.
the article may or may not be correct on the other points. I'm not associated with those fields but I am qualified to comment on the validity of the GM topic and they are right on the money
Slashdot Mirror
you need to read the NYTimes article that the Techdirt article is based on. This entire Slashdot article is based on a misrepresentation of an innocuous NYTimes article. Apple isn't the one trying to increase the prices of DVDs or media downloads, it's the studios trying to create more expensive DVD's to make >$15 downloads seem like a deal.
The slashdot article as well as the techdirt article it's based on both imply that some how Steve Jobs is trying to extort money from consumers. That's not beyond the realm of possibility, but the mechanism both use is an increase is the price of DVDs. Some how this money paid to the DVD retailers like Target, Walmart, et al. will end up in Apple's coffers? I don't see it.
By reading further and clicking the link to the NYTimes article that Techdirt based their paragraph on I discovered that the author of the Techdirt article is either retarded or intentionally inflammatory. the NYTimes article indicates that Apple may finally bring more movies to the iTunes catalog by agreeing to higher priced bulk rates for movies. The end result being a price tag of $15 for downloads in comparison to the $18 for physical DVDs. On a tangentially related note, there is talk of the movie studios trying to make more money off of DVDs and justifying it by including a compressed, non-CSS version of the movie on the DVD for use on portable media players like the iPod and iPhone. Nowhere in the NYTimes article does the author indicate that the idea or decision lay with Steve Jobs.
I'm all for calling people down for greed and anti-consumer activities when it's warranted. However, I'm even more in favor of bitch slapping web writers who intentionally misrepresent the activities of individuals and companies in an attempt to start a flame war for the sole purpose of generating massive amounts of ad revenue for their site. Baiting apple fanboys has been a favored past time for many a self proclaimed tech pundit, but I'm surprised that Slashdot managed to fall for it.
2 mouse clicks and 3-4 paragraphs and I had the original article minus the flame bait.
I think you need to RTFA! The author of the article has done a good job of dissecting microsoft's marketing claims and the number of NDP and pointing to the creative marketing that Microsoft uses to look like it's been more successful than it is. Outside of that, the question of whether the Zune is a failure or not is stupid IMHO. If you sell products at a loss for several years it is by definition a failure. Companies are in business to make money. The fact that Microsoft makes tons of money in its other divisions is fine, but they'd be more profitable if the dumped the Zune and the Xbox divisions and focused on the software that actually makes money. I understand that with any product there is a period of spending more money than you make but I think that both have lost more money than any other company would be able to loose without the management being lynched by the stockholders. Personally I own an Xbox (not a 360) and I enjoy playing games on it, but they never made more money on it than they spent because they didn't make enough $ from the development licenses to cover their losses. They were the 1st of the "Next Gen" game consoles to market and they're still loosing money there. Long term plans are fine and all, but you need to make money at some point and if you look closely at the data instead of blindly believing Microsoft's marketing literature you'll see that they probably won't turn a profit any time in the next decade in these divisions.
I skimmed the article and the conclusion I got was that for now this belongs with the earlier main page post about the top 10 snake oil products http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/1616248. Nothing has actually been done to prove that this procedure is actually possible. This is an example of the worst in modern science. Publish of research via press release. There has been no Peer Review, this isn't being linked to from a scientific journal, it's a theory with no evidence to support it being possible. For all I know it is a sound theory, but until I see some experimental evidence it's just smoke and mirrors.
I think a big part of what everyone is forgetting is the slow rate at which apple made clockspeed increases during the period in which the 800MHZ machines were released. Most people will admit that while power/watt was a valid reason for the architecture change, Power itself was also an issue to consider. The late G4 and G5's didn't increase in clock all that fast so with the change to Intel and the associated jump in clock speed is going to result in a shorter half-life for those machines that were released toward the end of the PPC days. I'm not saying I'm happy about it but I'm also not going to sweat it too much. I have a 400MHZ G3, an 800MHZ powerbook and a brand new intel. I'm already supporting 2 OS's (the G3 is a B&W which doesn't have a DVD drive and cannot boot off of an external DVD drive, or in target disk mode to upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. The machines and OS's are still good enough for what I use them for. I'd rather have the speed and stability of an older OS than slower performance with bells and whistles I don't actually need. I would be very surprised if we don't eventually get back to a 7 year life span we've enjoyed until now.
Ok, so when did an attempt at intelligent discourse and debate turn into name calling? Name calling aside, your system sound to me to be the exception rather than the rule. It is owned and maintained by an individual willing to, and possably excited at the prospect of, upgrading his own equipment. Congratualtion, I know from my own attempts that it can be a risky endeavor, and I applaud your ability. However, the vast majority of people I know (anecdotal as that is) have no interest or desire to have to open their machine to replace parts. The article is dealing with averges and trends to which your individual experiences are probably not typical.
I'm done.
You just agreed with me and the author of the article. Take a closer look at the preceeding posts. I think you are arguing becuase you don't like apple or anyone saying anything nice about them.
market share only matters to people hoping to sell software to the owners of the hardware. If a PC is running linux then the user probably isn't going to be purchasing any more software. That's the point he was trying to make regarding linux and not being relevant. the fact of the matter is that there isn't anything inherently wrong with PC hardware, it's the sub-par software that microsoft writes to run the PC's that is the problem. Backward compatability is important to microsoft for software, but not for hardware.
It means that you've had to replace most of the hardware in your machine to keep it functional. Your anecdotal evidence would seem to support the supposition of the article that PC hardware needs to be replaced more frequently than Mac hardware. QED
I don't know that almost decade of mac ownership makes me a 'johnny come lately' mac user. (I indicated that one of the machines I own shipped with OS 8, which was last shipped in 1999) I understood the sugar water reference, usually refered to as "cool-aide" (I'm assuming you changed the reference just to be different). The changing the world thing was what threw me off. Apple hasn't claimed that it would change the world since the 1984 ad introducing the mac. It seems to me that you've been actively hating apple since at least the mid 80's, and can't possibly give the companies products the benefit of the doubt. Based upon your continued vehemnce, it appears to me that further discussion with you will be unfruitful, because no matter what I say you'll take it as me having "drunk the sugar-water" despite my having used PC's for the decade prior to my change to a mac. I prefer apples products, and I think that market analysts are profesional BS artists. Neither of those statements should be taken as an insult, and I wish you a good day.
It is if you don't support the FAITHFUL. That's the problem with this debate. We've been told all of our lives that within a decade the oceans would drown all costal cities, and NY, Miami, DC, etc. would all be under 10 feed to water. Well, I'm now almost 30 and as far as I know, the worlds oceans haven't increased to any measurable extent. If you want a really good explanation for why this debate isn't getting anywhere, and how it got as big as it did considering the lack of consistend scientific evidence check out this article http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-03-04-1 .html. At the end he gives links to the relavent books, and data. I think that considering the significant scientific leanings of the slashdot crowd, you would all appreciate the fact that for once you can actually get your hands on a data set.
y =b_lomborg, it's a video of a talk at TED. A meeting of rich, influential, and often famous people with the intention of saving the world. One of the topics that is always huge at the meeting is global warming, or as it is now called "Climate Change" since the global temperature is actually fluctuating and has recently gone down. This won't provide evidence either way as to the validity of the belief in global warming, but it'll put the "problem" into perspective.
Even if that isn't enough to convince you, take a look at this http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?ke
If you have not intentions of RTFAs just think about this point from the first link. The whole reason there is a global temperature much above that of absolute zero is the sun. The amount of radiation hitting the earth from the sun fluctuates on various cycles. What is a simpler, and more probable expalanation of changes in the global temperature. Increases in the amount of radiation stricking the earth, or human activity. Especially since the vast majority of the increase in global temperature since the 1800's occured during the middle ages, prior to industrial revolution and significant increases in "Greenhouse gasses" as a result of human activity.
I'm in a similar situation. I'm trying to help a fellow graduate student who recently accepted a postion at a univeristy set up his new office. He's decided that he wants to switch to all mac's and is looking for a way to keep his laptop and desktop in sync. I mentioned dotmac for bookmarks, addresses, mail, etc. but he's also looking for something that'll sync the files in his home directory as well. Basically he wants to use his desktop at work, press a button and have it sync everything to his laptop when he leaves, and then sync any of the work he did on the laptop back to the desktop when he gets back to the office. I've been looking through what I could find, but nothing I've found seems to be quite what he's looking for. Does anyone know of any way he could do this easily with existing software?
My friend in high school had a room in his basement where he kept his computer. The basement was divided into rooms, but there wasn't a finished ceiling. One day the plumbing became backed up, they called a plumber, he snaked the pipes, declaired it a job well done and left. When my friend went to use his computer the next day he discovered that the waste pipe ran over his computerdesk, and instead of clearing the blockage the plumber had accidentaly punctured the pipe right over the computer in the basement and dumped several all the backedup waste, as well as the waste created since the previous evening onto my friends computer desk.
I want to apologize for the harshness of my response. Most of that was intended for some others who had responded to your comment.
As for the possibility of resistance jumping, it is a legitimate concern. However, the gene used for roundup ready crops was discovered in the wild. Genetic researchers very rarely synthesize genes from scratch. More often they find a useful gene in one place and put it somewhere else, and since roundup had been used for a long time before roundup ready corn was introduced and the gene hadn't jumped species before there is not a strong argument for believing that it will happen now.
The reason that gene transfer is such an issue with antibiotics is due to the brevity of the generational period. some bugs can experience several generations in a single day, and microbiota transfer genetic material far more easily than plants. Each cell of bacteria is capable of becoming the progenitor of a new population. While the potential is there for plants, the likely hood of this happening isn't. The plants involved here reproduce sexually, and the only way a new gene can become the progenitor of a new population is if it is a seed. otherwise any modification to that cells genome die with that cell.
Roundup was already one of the most popular herbicide when roundup-ready corn hit the market. Prior to GM corn being available farmers were applying the herbicide 4-5 time in good years and upto 8 times in really bad years. By using roundup-ready corn and roundup together farmers apply the herbicide at most 3 times befor the corn is tall enough to kill off weeds on its own by preventing the weeds from receiving enough light. The net result for monsanto is $ from both the pesticide and the seeds. Now most farmers, even prior to the advent of GM crops didn't save seeds because they would miss out on the genetic improvements from year to year. Seed companies practiced intensive selection for production traits prior to using GM to improve plant quality. Genes native to the plants confering resistance to mold, insect infestation, and improved growth were combined via controlled polination for decades prior to the GM revolution. The net gain for producers is time. 1 application of roundup as opposed to 4 applications in good years and even better in bad years. As we all know time is money, and as someone who has worked on family run dairy farms, (tip: most large "Factory Farms" are family owned and operated) there are never enough hours in the day to manage animals, crops, employee's, maintenance and the ever increasing paper work needed to run a farm. saving that much time is worth the premium paid for the seeds. Land is finite. Most farms cannot get larger with out buy land off of competitors aready using it to grow the same crops, and often the land is more valuable for urban sprawl than agriculture. The best way to make more money is to improve the efficiency of production via less input costs, or increased production from the same land. Most of the posts i've seen on this page are from the "non scientist" members of the environmentalist movements. Being a tech person is not the same as devoting your life to understanding the problems facing agriculture and attempting to solve them. As a Scientist associated with this problem (i'm a phd student in animals science) I'm constantly frustrated by the ignorance western peopls have concerning their own food supply and the arrogance seen from people despite there admited ignorance. the article may or may not be correct on the other points. I'm not associated with those fields but I am qualified to comment on the validity of the GM topic and they are right on the money