I will state up front that I am not an economist, and so an economist can correct me if I am wrong.
This strikes me as a basic economics question. Will a reduction in profits due to a low cost disruption from essentially free second generation crops with GM traits change the incentives for companies like Monsanto?
personally, I can't see how it wouldn't. The real dollar cost of getting a new GM crop to market is going up, not down. This is due to the increasing cost of generating ever more data for regulatory filings, which is a foreseeable consequence of the tone surrounding this technology. Couple that with the highly specialized skills needed by the researchers to even develop the GM crops in the first place, and I see a textbook example of changing cost structure forcing changes in incentives.
And what, pray tell, are your qualifications? How many years have you devoted to understanding nutrition professionally? What peer-reviewed scientific sources do you use to inform yourself as to what is and isn't a healthy diet?
I notice a distinct lack of response to the meat of my post (no pun intended). Address those points or admit you are an ignorant troll who believes your gut to be better informed than the best science available.
Here is an example of being so ignorant that you can't even adequately judge your own level of ignorance (Clarification: I am not using ignorance as an insult, but as a description of your level of knowledge on a specialized topic for which you have no reasonable need to have received special education. I am ignorant of particle physics, engineering, and sports team stats, for example).
If you are going to be running an intensive crop development program, it will be paramount that you control which plants are polinating each other. Therefore you grow all of your research plants in individual pots, in a greenhouse, with paper lunch bags over the tassles to prevent accidental polination. You then select specific plants and rub the tassles from 1 plant onto another plant and replace the paper bags. Only once polination is over can you remove the bags. These seeds are then planted, again in greenhouses under controlled conditions, and their performance evaluated under conditions dicated by the trait of interest.
For example, if you are looking at natural resistance to highly saline soil you would plant the seeds from each parent plant in pots with soil of differing salinities. Or you could be looking at resistance to a pest (fungal, plant or insect) and expose all of the seeds to varying levels of the pest. Repeat ad nauseum until you have a strain with good performance all around. This is how it was done in the years prior to GM traits and is still how it is done. Only now we can pick the gene of interest and place it into a strain that already has a different trait to combine traits very quickly and efficiently, without diluting out the benefit of either parent strain as a result of having to cross in multiple unrelated genes in the process.
So, what if I were to tell you that I have a PhD in nutrition, or that it was the first time we'd eaten there in over a month? Would you then realize how stupid that comment was?
A McDonalds meal doesn't make you fat or give you health problems. An unhealthy diet (defined as what you consume on average) can do those things, and McDonalds can be part of an unhealthy diet. However, McDonalds can be part of a healthy diet. The key is to moderate your nutrient intake so that it is appropriate given your typical level of activity. Since you don't know my activiy level, what I ordered at McDonalds, what else I ate that day, the frequency with which I eat at fast food joints, or my age (or that for any of my family members) then how can you be so arrogant as to assume you know whether or not my decision to eat 1 meal at McDonalds was a poor one?
As a nutritionists, I wouldn't feel capable of making a determination with such a lack of context, and you my friend are no nutritionist.
Well, obviously it helps Monsanto as a company, and all of their employees involved in GMO product development, marketing, sales, and the relevant office staff who work in a supporting role. Those people far outnumber the numbers employeed by this particular farmer.
A local farmer is just trying to feed mouths and make ends meet yet the Big Pharma et al get to shit all over the little man once again
Or, you could look at it as one person trying to take food from the mouths of everyone working at Monsanto (who is not a pharmacutical company BTW). If this farmer had been allowed to do this legally, then Monsanto (and other seed companies that use GM technology, which is most of them) would have to take a serious look at whether they could afford to develop new GM traits. GM seed development and approval costs millions of dollars and takes about a decade. If it became legal to buy GM seeds intended for milling and then plant them, then the price for new seeds would no longer be able to support future developments. That would cost the jobs of thousands of crop geneticists, supporting staff, sales staff, etc. Even if you don't like GM on principle (which is stupid, myopic, and decidedly anti-science), those are a lot of people who depend on the current system.
What little faith I have left in humanity is quickly diminishing due to these wankers
It is people such as yourself who are far more dangerous to MY faith in humanity. You obviously have no direct connection to agriculture, and that's OK. Only about 1.2 to 1.5% of Americans are involved in any form of food production. However, you are a strong, vocal critic of a field about which you know next to nothing. In fact, it is probably safe to assume that you don't even know enough to be aware of how little you know (something mention here on/. not too long ago). I don't tell teachers how to teach, or mechanics how to fix cars. I don't tell lawyers what the law says, or engineers which rocket fuel is best to get us back into space. I'd appreciate it if you would at least talk to the professionals in the field before believeing whatever half-baked hack-job of a documentary or website it was that gave you the misguided impression that you actually understand anything about agriculture or GM crops.
Which is why farmers use seeds with GM traits. These traits reduce many of the input costs (fertilizer, fuel, time, pesticides, etc.) associated with growing soy and corn.
Farmers are professionals, and they are more than capable of making decisions about which technologies to adopt for themselves. These are not victims FORCED to buy something against their will, but reasonable people who weigh the costs and benefits of each technology and make their own determinations of the value. My group sells to many of these farmers (on the animal production side), and they are not passive sheep buying whatever our salesmen tell them is best. They do their homework, run the numbers, bargan hard and play one vendor against another just like any other procurement officer, because it is their own money on the line.
Fact is, farmers have been buying new seeds every year for far longer than GM seeds have been commercially available. I could be mistaken, but i belive that contracts prohibiting keeping seeds also pre-date GM seeds. Seed companies have made their money for decades by developing deep crop improvement research and development pipelines. Because they hire lots of PhD carrying crop geneticists, they can generate more improvement from year to year than a farmer can do on his own, with his already limited time. This enables farmers to outsource their crop improvement to specialists who are more efficient, allowing them to devote more effort on what they are best at, Growing the food. GM is just a new tool to help the seed companies, and the farmers that buy their seeds achieve the goals they have been pursuing for years.
Don't jump to conclusions. Every attempt I've ever heard of at cultured meat, or any other tissue for that matter, has been highly dependent upon nutrient solutions derived from living animals. Many are based on animal blood, some on liver or other tissue. I'd bet far FAR more animals went into this over prices burger than would have been necessary for the McDonalds my family had for lunch yesterday.
Fortunately for Monsanto the FDA refuses to label GM food in the USA
If you'd like an explanation, from University experts in the field as to WHY, check out this webinar I attended a few weeks ago. It was sponsored by the Federation of Animal Science Societies as part of their series of Science Policy Webinars.
For the tl;dw crowd... If you can't be bothered to spend 80 min learning about the why of a policy from the most qualified scientists in the field, then please shut up and stop pretending your objections are anything other than religious in nature.
As Astaines pointed out, this is still very early work. I'm sure that one of the goals is to get the blood glucose levels down to a more normal range. However, the fact that it appeared to control glucose at all is impressive.
Even if a diabetic is fitted with a pump (3 of my friends have them), you still get abnormal spikes and dips in your blood glucose level over time. Based on some epidemiological data (of which I'm always sceptical to be sure) it appears as though these large swings in blood glucose concentration may take years off of a diabetics life. If this technology can counter some of that, then it could very well be work it. Too early to tell.
As a counter to your "pheromone" argument, which I don't really buy because the only human pheromone receptors to have been discovered are non-functioning, I'd suggest an argument based on hormones.
Mothers are producing tons of prolactin which has been shown to trigger parenting instincts in people. Even fathers produce prolactin after the birth of a child. Lactating women continue to produce prolactin (sharing the same root word with lactation for a reason) until the child weans, but fathers prolactin levels drop lower (not completely though) after a few weeks. Based on this, I'd recommend giving fathers more time so that they can develop a much stronger bond with their new child since they are at a biological disadvantage here.
This is purely speculation on my part, but it might help with the absentee or emotionally distant fathers we tend to see. The more contact a man has with their child early on, the longer the high levels of prolactin will persist, and the deeper the man will bond with the newborn... Or so my theory goes.
Now that I think about it, I was making a recommendation to a friend about which iPad to get and I told him that either of the last two models would be fine for his needs, as would the mini. Never occurred to me that this could be a limiting factor on the ultimate size of the annual market once it is close to fully saturated. Phones, at
I could be wrong, but I believe that is their point. OTA TV is funded by commercials. Commercial rates are based on viewership, and the assumption that those viewers (or some percentage of them) are actually watching the commercials. I believe the objection comes from the ability to skip commercials via Aereo's restreaming technology. They get a different rate from cable companies, which I believe includes some compensation for the DVRs that the cable company rents out to customers. Since the courts have already determined that time shifting is legal, and they now have classified Aereo's approach as time shifting and not rebroadcasting, the broadcasters fear that they will lose money unless they find a way to neutralize OTA time shifting.
Not saying they are going about it the right way. Just my impression of their perspective.
That 70% for livestock may have been accurate a decade or so ago, but not anymore. Last year I had to give a presentation for a job interview, and the use of corn in the US was a component of my talk. Turns out that in more recent years, half of domestic corn production went to ethanol, at the expense of foreign exports mostly. Tones of corn used for livestock has remained mostly flat for the last 5 years or so. This is the first non-record braking year for US corn production in 4 or 5 years, and goes a long way toward explaining the current corn prices. Ethanol drove demand up and the base price up, causing fewer exports, and reduced the margin between domestic capacity to use corn, and domestic capacity to produce it.
Ethanol has some potential for the desired energy independence, and for being carbon neutral. However, NOT from corn. The energy cost vs yield is too poor. South American ethanol from sugar cane is a net positive, and cellulosic (perpetually 10 years away) are the only fermentation substrates where the math comes out to a net gain of energy. Unfortunately the US is not well situated for sugar cane production (wrong climate) and cellulosic is not yet (ever in my lifetime?) cost effective.
It is not the FDA's bailiwick to consider the legal framework under which these fish might be marketed. They can only comment and decide based on the biology. Therefore, it IS FUD, since the only concerns raised relate to policy outside of their preview or their control.
Furthermore, despite all of the hand-wringing by/. and others not directly connected to large scale agriculture, farmers have the choice of which seed to buy every year. They consistently vote with their wallets FOR Monsanto's seeds. There are alternatives, my parent company has a seed division, and Monsanto is the clear market leader because their customers (farmers) believe that Monsanto creates more value for them at the end of the year than the competition.
As I've pointed out many times before. The farmer in this case intentionally collected seeds only from the field closest to and down wind from a neighbor that he knew for certain had planted Monsanto corn. He is not as innocent as commonly portrayed. That being said, I am in full agreement that the patent system needs revision on the point. Doesn't change the fact that the OP is FUD.
I realize that it is very stylish on/. to be cunical about both big business and the government, and to some extent i agree on both counts. However, when it comes to regulatory filings, neither side wants to be liable for anything going wrong for obvious reasons. As I said, I'm involved in several regulatory filings at the moment, and I can assure you that bribery isn't in it. If it were, then they wouldn't need me. Or my more expensive coleagues (PhD biochemists carrying law degrees are not exacly a dime a dozen) The high cost of regulatory filings is due to the close scrutiny, bureaucrats fear of blame if things go wrong, and the high cost of research used in assuaging their fears.
How, pray tell, do you prove a negative? I.e. how do you prove that "GM salmon will never cause harm". If you set the bar impossibly high, then progress will never be made.
As to the labeling, the USDA guidelines for food labeling are designed to keep people honest about the differences in what are essentially commodities. If the USDA believed that there was a significant difference between GM crops and Conventional crops, then they would approve of a labeling initiative. However, one of the requirements for regulatory approval, is demonstrating that the GM crop is substantially similar to the conventional. Therefore, there is no need for a label, unless the label also makes it clear that the implied difference is insignificant. For example, Milk in the US frequently has a label indicating that no rBST was used in its production, but at the bottom of the label is a footnote indicating that their is no difference between milk produced with or without rBST. It is about battling FUD.
I'm currently involved in some FDA filings, and the hurdles for getting a new use approved for something already on the market and GRAS are prodigious, I can only imagine the hurdles that they've forced these GM salmon to jump through to show that the salmon do not appear likely to pose a threat.
I'm fairly certain their are FUD and Ethics issues with stem cells since most of what I've read indicates a preference for embryonic stem cells. This neatly dodges some FUD and Ethics issues, in favor of some that are potentially less difficult to get around.
Can't do much in science these days without confronting FUD and ethics issues, and the risk of viral contagion are pretty low, since this kind of viral manipulation has been going on in labs for a while now without incident.
The First problem with predictions about "Peak Oil", or peak anything for that matter, is that it assumes the current known reservers are all that exist. The Second problem with these predictions are that they don't take into account the ability of price and new technology to change what known quantities of a natural resource even get counted in the reserves.
The known reserves of Oil is higher today than it was during the oil shortages of the 1970's here in the US. This is becuase exploration continues to find new reserves. Furthermore, the Candian oil sands were known about in the 1970's, but excluded from the estimates of global reserves becuase, at 1970's prices and using 1970's technology, it was not possible to extract the oil and sell it for a profit. Both prices and technology changed, and now the Canadian oil sands are included in global reserves calculations. Also, wells are not pumped dry. They are frequently shut off when the costs associated with extraction are greater thant he price the oil can be sold for. As prices go down, producing fields are capped until prices go back up and the field can be operated without a loss. Steam injection and other techniques have made it possible to get more oil out of a well at a lower cost than was possible 40 years ago, and I see no reason to believe that this advance of technology is going to reach it's apex with current technology. The financial incentives to come up with new technologies are just too great.
This is all very clearly discussed in "Basic Economics, 4th edition" by Thomas Sowell. I'm currently listening to the Audiobook during my weekday commute and it is very understandable and quite convincing.
Now, this doesn't address the AGW issues associated with use of fossile fuels directly. However, by using up the cheap easily-accessible oil we will create an economic situation where alternatives that are currently not cost effective (with or without government intervention) will become cost effective at somepoint without increasing their cost per unit of energy. Furthermore, as each alternative technology gets closer to cost effective, investement capital will be injected into R&D to try and be the first to hit the market in a cost effective manner and reap the benefits that come from being first and getting the lions share of the market to start.
I and others have pointed this out that this patent was rejected before. If you are going to harp on a single patent in that case, then you should at least be aware of the verdict on that particular patent. It's not like there wasn't sufficient coverage of the details.
I'm not defending Apple, they are pursuing a strategy and will reap whatever comes, and deservedly so. Willful ignorance just irritates me.
Strawman much? I never stated, or implied they didn't. Only that of all the potentially weak patents they asserted, they lost this one. If that patent and the clock face patent are truly of similar quality, then the Swiss shouldn't expect anymore success than apple saw with the rounded rectangles patent.
Never said they were deserving or even in need of absolution. They tried and failed on that point. The post I was replying to was conflating the two for understandable reasons, but since apple lost that point I suspect that the Swiss will as well. If you want to nail apple for something, use one of the rediculous patents that actually held up in court.
As a matter of fact that most people missed in the Samsung verdict, you CAN use the rounded rectangle shape. That was one of the few point of victory for Samsung... But don't let me get in the way of your trolling.
because if you are an investor, then popularity is one sign of future success. Relative comparisons of popularity are one possible metric for picking one investment opportunity over another.
Slashdot Mirror
I will state up front that I am not an economist, and so an economist can correct me if I am wrong.
This strikes me as a basic economics question. Will a reduction in profits due to a low cost disruption from essentially free second generation crops with GM traits change the incentives for companies like Monsanto?
personally, I can't see how it wouldn't. The real dollar cost of getting a new GM crop to market is going up, not down. This is due to the increasing cost of generating ever more data for regulatory filings, which is a foreseeable consequence of the tone surrounding this technology. Couple that with the highly specialized skills needed by the researchers to even develop the GM crops in the first place, and I see a textbook example of changing cost structure forcing changes in incentives.
thoughts?
And what, pray tell, are your qualifications?
How many years have you devoted to understanding nutrition professionally?
What peer-reviewed scientific sources do you use to inform yourself as to what is and isn't a healthy diet?
I notice a distinct lack of response to the meat of my post (no pun intended). Address those points or admit you are an ignorant troll who believes your gut to be better informed than the best science available.
Here is an example of being so ignorant that you can't even adequately judge your own level of ignorance (Clarification: I am not using ignorance as an insult, but as a description of your level of knowledge on a specialized topic for which you have no reasonable need to have received special education. I am ignorant of particle physics, engineering, and sports team stats, for example).
If you are going to be running an intensive crop development program, it will be paramount that you control which plants are polinating each other. Therefore you grow all of your research plants in individual pots, in a greenhouse, with paper lunch bags over the tassles to prevent accidental polination. You then select specific plants and rub the tassles from 1 plant onto another plant and replace the paper bags. Only once polination is over can you remove the bags. These seeds are then planted, again in greenhouses under controlled conditions, and their performance evaluated under conditions dicated by the trait of interest.
For example, if you are looking at natural resistance to highly saline soil you would plant the seeds from each parent plant in pots with soil of differing salinities. Or you could be looking at resistance to a pest (fungal, plant or insect) and expose all of the seeds to varying levels of the pest. Repeat ad nauseum until you have a strain with good performance all around. This is how it was done in the years prior to GM traits and is still how it is done. Only now we can pick the gene of interest and place it into a strain that already has a different trait to combine traits very quickly and efficiently, without diluting out the benefit of either parent strain as a result of having to cross in multiple unrelated genes in the process.
So, what if I were to tell you that I have a PhD in nutrition, or that it was the first time we'd eaten there in over a month? Would you then realize how stupid that comment was?
A McDonalds meal doesn't make you fat or give you health problems. An unhealthy diet (defined as what you consume on average) can do those things, and McDonalds can be part of an unhealthy diet. However, McDonalds can be part of a healthy diet. The key is to moderate your nutrient intake so that it is appropriate given your typical level of activity. Since you don't know my activiy level, what I ordered at McDonalds, what else I ate that day, the frequency with which I eat at fast food joints, or my age (or that for any of my family members) then how can you be so arrogant as to assume you know whether or not my decision to eat 1 meal at McDonalds was a poor one?
As a nutritionists, I wouldn't feel capable of making a determination with such a lack of context, and you my friend are no nutritionist.
How does this help anyone?
Well, obviously it helps Monsanto as a company, and all of their employees involved in GMO product development, marketing, sales, and the relevant office staff who work in a supporting role. Those people far outnumber the numbers employeed by this particular farmer.
A local farmer is just trying to feed mouths and make ends meet yet the Big Pharma et al get to shit all over the little man once again
Or, you could look at it as one person trying to take food from the mouths of everyone working at Monsanto (who is not a pharmacutical company BTW). If this farmer had been allowed to do this legally, then Monsanto (and other seed companies that use GM technology, which is most of them) would have to take a serious look at whether they could afford to develop new GM traits. GM seed development and approval costs millions of dollars and takes about a decade. If it became legal to buy GM seeds intended for milling and then plant them, then the price for new seeds would no longer be able to support future developments. That would cost the jobs of thousands of crop geneticists, supporting staff, sales staff, etc. Even if you don't like GM on principle (which is stupid, myopic, and decidedly anti-science), those are a lot of people who depend on the current system.
What little faith I have left in humanity is quickly diminishing due to these wankers
It is people such as yourself who are far more dangerous to MY faith in humanity. You obviously have no direct connection to agriculture, and that's OK. Only about 1.2 to 1.5% of Americans are involved in any form of food production. However, you are a strong, vocal critic of a field about which you know next to nothing. In fact, it is probably safe to assume that you don't even know enough to be aware of how little you know (something mention here on /. not too long ago). I don't tell teachers how to teach, or mechanics how to fix cars. I don't tell lawyers what the law says, or engineers which rocket fuel is best to get us back into space. I'd appreciate it if you would at least talk to the professionals in the field before believeing whatever half-baked hack-job of a documentary or website it was that gave you the misguided impression that you actually understand anything about agriculture or GM crops.
it must be tough to be a farmer nowadays.
Which is why farmers use seeds with GM traits. These traits reduce many of the input costs (fertilizer, fuel, time, pesticides, etc.) associated with growing soy and corn.
Farmers are professionals, and they are more than capable of making decisions about which technologies to adopt for themselves. These are not victims FORCED to buy something against their will, but reasonable people who weigh the costs and benefits of each technology and make their own determinations of the value. My group sells to many of these farmers (on the animal production side), and they are not passive sheep buying whatever our salesmen tell them is best. They do their homework, run the numbers, bargan hard and play one vendor against another just like any other procurement officer, because it is their own money on the line.
Fact is, farmers have been buying new seeds every year for far longer than GM seeds have been commercially available. I could be mistaken, but i belive that contracts prohibiting keeping seeds also pre-date GM seeds. Seed companies have made their money for decades by developing deep crop improvement research and development pipelines. Because they hire lots of PhD carrying crop geneticists, they can generate more improvement from year to year than a farmer can do on his own, with his already limited time. This enables farmers to outsource their crop improvement to specialists who are more efficient, allowing them to devote more effort on what they are best at, Growing the food. GM is just a new tool to help the seed companies, and the farmers that buy their seeds achieve the goals they have been pursuing for years.
Don't jump to conclusions. Every attempt I've ever heard of at cultured meat, or any other tissue for that matter, has been highly dependent upon nutrient solutions derived from living animals. Many are based on animal blood, some on liver or other tissue. I'd bet far FAR more animals went into this over prices burger than would have been necessary for the McDonalds my family had for lunch yesterday.
Fortunately for Monsanto the FDA refuses to label GM food in the USA
If you'd like an explanation, from University experts in the field as to WHY, check out this webinar I attended a few weeks ago. It was sponsored by the Federation of Animal Science Societies as part of their series of Science Policy Webinars.
For the tl;dw crowd... If you can't be bothered to spend 80 min learning about the why of a policy from the most qualified scientists in the field, then please shut up and stop pretending your objections are anything other than religious in nature.
As Astaines pointed out, this is still very early work. I'm sure that one of the goals is to get the blood glucose levels down to a more normal range. However, the fact that it appeared to control glucose at all is impressive.
Even if a diabetic is fitted with a pump (3 of my friends have them), you still get abnormal spikes and dips in your blood glucose level over time. Based on some epidemiological data (of which I'm always sceptical to be sure) it appears as though these large swings in blood glucose concentration may take years off of a diabetics life. If this technology can counter some of that, then it could very well be work it. Too early to tell.
As a counter to your "pheromone" argument, which I don't really buy because the only human pheromone receptors to have been discovered are non-functioning, I'd suggest an argument based on hormones.
Mothers are producing tons of prolactin which has been shown to trigger parenting instincts in people. Even fathers produce prolactin after the birth of a child. Lactating women continue to produce prolactin (sharing the same root word with lactation for a reason) until the child weans, but fathers prolactin levels drop lower (not completely though) after a few weeks. Based on this, I'd recommend giving fathers more time so that they can develop a much stronger bond with their new child since they are at a biological disadvantage here.
This is purely speculation on my part, but it might help with the absentee or emotionally distant fathers we tend to see. The more contact a man has with their child early on, the longer the high levels of prolactin will persist, and the deeper the man will bond with the newborn... Or so my theory goes.
Interesting...
Now that I think about it, I was making a recommendation to a friend about which iPad to get and I told him that either of the last two models would be fine for his needs, as would the mini. Never occurred to me that this could be a limiting factor on the ultimate size of the annual market once it is close to fully saturated. Phones, at
I could be wrong, but I believe that is their point. OTA TV is funded by commercials. Commercial rates are based on viewership, and the assumption that those viewers (or some percentage of them) are actually watching the commercials. I believe the objection comes from the ability to skip commercials via Aereo's restreaming technology. They get a different rate from cable companies, which I believe includes some compensation for the DVRs that the cable company rents out to customers. Since the courts have already determined that time shifting is legal, and they now have classified Aereo's approach as time shifting and not rebroadcasting, the broadcasters fear that they will lose money unless they find a way to neutralize OTA time shifting.
Not saying they are going about it the right way. Just my impression of their perspective.
That 70% for livestock may have been accurate a decade or so ago, but not anymore. Last year I had to give a presentation for a job interview, and the use of corn in the US was a component of my talk. Turns out that in more recent years, half of domestic corn production went to ethanol, at the expense of foreign exports mostly. Tones of corn used for livestock has remained mostly flat for the last 5 years or so. This is the first non-record braking year for US corn production in 4 or 5 years, and goes a long way toward explaining the current corn prices. Ethanol drove demand up and the base price up, causing fewer exports, and reduced the margin between domestic capacity to use corn, and domestic capacity to produce it.
Ethanol has some potential for the desired energy independence, and for being carbon neutral. However, NOT from corn. The energy cost vs yield is too poor. South American ethanol from sugar cane is a net positive, and cellulosic (perpetually 10 years away) are the only fermentation substrates where the math comes out to a net gain of energy. Unfortunately the US is not well situated for sugar cane production (wrong climate) and cellulosic is not yet (ever in my lifetime?) cost effective.
It is not the FDA's bailiwick to consider the legal framework under which these fish might be marketed. They can only comment and decide based on the biology. Therefore, it IS FUD, since the only concerns raised relate to policy outside of their preview or their control.
/. and others not directly connected to large scale agriculture, farmers have the choice of which seed to buy every year. They consistently vote with their wallets FOR Monsanto's seeds. There are alternatives, my parent company has a seed division, and Monsanto is the clear market leader because their customers (farmers) believe that Monsanto creates more value for them at the end of the year than the competition.
Furthermore, despite all of the hand-wringing by
As I've pointed out many times before. The farmer in this case intentionally collected seeds only from the field closest to and down wind from a neighbor that he knew for certain had planted Monsanto corn. He is not as innocent as commonly portrayed. That being said, I am in full agreement that the patent system needs revision on the point. Doesn't change the fact that the OP is FUD.
I realize that it is very stylish on /. to be cunical about both big business and the government, and to some extent i agree on both counts. However, when it comes to regulatory filings, neither side wants to be liable for anything going wrong for obvious reasons. As I said, I'm involved in several regulatory filings at the moment, and I can assure you that bribery isn't in it. If it were, then they wouldn't need me. Or my more expensive coleagues (PhD biochemists carrying law degrees are not exacly a dime a dozen) The high cost of regulatory filings is due to the close scrutiny, bureaucrats fear of blame if things go wrong, and the high cost of research used in assuaging their fears.
How, pray tell, do you prove a negative? I.e. how do you prove that "GM salmon will never cause harm". If you set the bar impossibly high, then progress will never be made.
As to the labeling, the USDA guidelines for food labeling are designed to keep people honest about the differences in what are essentially commodities. If the USDA believed that there was a significant difference between GM crops and Conventional crops, then they would approve of a labeling initiative. However, one of the requirements for regulatory approval, is demonstrating that the GM crop is substantially similar to the conventional. Therefore, there is no need for a label, unless the label also makes it clear that the implied difference is insignificant. For example, Milk in the US frequently has a label indicating that no rBST was used in its production, but at the bottom of the label is a footnote indicating that their is no difference between milk produced with or without rBST. It is about battling FUD.
I'm currently involved in some FDA filings, and the hurdles for getting a new use approved for something already on the market and GRAS are prodigious, I can only imagine the hurdles that they've forced these GM salmon to jump through to show that the salmon do not appear likely to pose a threat.
FUD
I'm fairly certain their are FUD and Ethics issues with stem cells since most of what I've read indicates a preference for embryonic stem cells. This neatly dodges some FUD and Ethics issues, in favor of some that are potentially less difficult to get around.
Can't do much in science these days without confronting FUD and ethics issues, and the risk of viral contagion are pretty low, since this kind of viral manipulation has been going on in labs for a while now without incident.
The First problem with predictions about "Peak Oil", or peak anything for that matter, is that it assumes the current known reservers are all that exist. The Second problem with these predictions are that they don't take into account the ability of price and new technology to change what known quantities of a natural resource even get counted in the reserves.
The known reserves of Oil is higher today than it was during the oil shortages of the 1970's here in the US. This is becuase exploration continues to find new reserves. Furthermore, the Candian oil sands were known about in the 1970's, but excluded from the estimates of global reserves becuase, at 1970's prices and using 1970's technology, it was not possible to extract the oil and sell it for a profit. Both prices and technology changed, and now the Canadian oil sands are included in global reserves calculations. Also, wells are not pumped dry. They are frequently shut off when the costs associated with extraction are greater thant he price the oil can be sold for. As prices go down, producing fields are capped until prices go back up and the field can be operated without a loss. Steam injection and other techniques have made it possible to get more oil out of a well at a lower cost than was possible 40 years ago, and I see no reason to believe that this advance of technology is going to reach it's apex with current technology. The financial incentives to come up with new technologies are just too great.
This is all very clearly discussed in "Basic Economics, 4th edition" by Thomas Sowell. I'm currently listening to the Audiobook during my weekday commute and it is very understandable and quite convincing.
Now, this doesn't address the AGW issues associated with use of fossile fuels directly. However, by using up the cheap easily-accessible oil we will create an economic situation where alternatives that are currently not cost effective (with or without government intervention) will become cost effective at somepoint without increasing their cost per unit of energy. Furthermore, as each alternative technology gets closer to cost effective, investement capital will be injected into R&D to try and be the first to hit the market in a cost effective manner and reap the benefits that come from being first and getting the lions share of the market to start.
I and others have pointed this out that this patent was rejected before. If you are going to harp on a single patent in that case, then you should at least be aware of the verdict on that particular patent. It's not like there wasn't sufficient coverage of the details.
I'm not defending Apple, they are pursuing a strategy and will reap whatever comes, and deservedly so. Willful ignorance just irritates me.
Strawman much? I never stated, or implied they didn't. Only that of all the potentially weak patents they asserted, they lost this one. If that patent and the clock face patent are truly of similar quality, then the Swiss shouldn't expect anymore success than apple saw with the rounded rectangles patent.
Never said they were deserving or even in need of absolution. They tried and failed on that point. The post I was replying to was conflating the two for understandable reasons, but since apple lost that point I suspect that the Swiss will as well. If you want to nail apple for something, use one of the rediculous patents that actually held up in court.
As a matter of fact that most people missed in the Samsung verdict, you CAN use the rounded rectangle shape. That was one of the few point of victory for Samsung... But don't let me get in the way of your trolling.
because if you are an investor, then popularity is one sign of future success. Relative comparisons of popularity are one possible metric for picking one investment opportunity over another.