If the spectrum used by 802.11b gets flooded by ISPs, cell phone companies, and other commercial users, it will become useless for its primary purpose: networking and communications within an organization or home.
If you make money by selling services using some chunk of spectrum, I think you should have to pay for that chunk of spectrum, or at the very least convince the government to give it to you for free.
I was pointing out that others had already done all of Bill's "gutsy" and innovative stuff [...] if I'm looking to prove that MS was not the first to do something, I look first to Apple. It's usually a good place to start.
Well, if you think that Apple was "gutsy and innovative" in these areas, think again. Apple research worked in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and GUIs long after other places had done all the legwork and invested enormous sums of money into those areas. And Apple's investment in research only lasted a few years; they stopped as soon as they hit hard times.
The truth is that MS didn't work on any of those things until others had proved them. The risks he touts were minimal.
Why do you speak in the past tense? Microsoft doesn't have usable speech recognition, they don't have good ink integration, and they don't have usable connected handwriting recognition. The risk of investing in each of those technologies is still the same as it has always been: after spending millions of dollars on each of them per year, either they don't work well enough at all, or nobody wants to use them.
I'm really getting tired of people holding up Apple as an example of a company that creates innovation. If they are creating all those wonderful new technologies, where are they being created and who is creating them? Apple doesn't have a research lab and they aren't investing much in research. Their jobs page doesn't even have a "Research" category. Apple is an upscale computer design shop, and a good one at that, but nothing more. They were flirting briefly with the idea of becoming a research powerhouse, but they just didn't have the money to keep it up.
For better or for worse, Microsoft is one of the few companies that still invests big in computer science research in the private sector. Which only goes to show that investment in research isn't well-correlated with product quality, at least in the short term. But Microsoft still has to do it because their only hope of selling more software in the future is to constantly change what people expect from software.
My Performa 6200CD had decent speech recognition for commands (not dictation) in 1994. Apple was working on speech recognition since at least the the beginning of PPC use.
Yes, that's when Apple still had a research lab. Now, they don't anymore.
MS might be doing good work in speech recognition, but they aren't the only company with the "guts" to do it.
Nor did I make any comment about Gates's comment whether other companies have "the guts" or not. But MS is one of the few companies that has the resources to actually work on connected speech recognition. Apple doesn't anymore.
Gate's arrogance at claiming that only MS can do this is astounding.
It's not arrogance, it's reality. It costs a company millions of dollars a year to maintain a speech research group and the number of commercial research labs that still do this kind of work is dwindling. Apple isn't making that kind of investment; in fact, Apple gutted their entire research lab.
It will probably be Microsoft vs. open source in the speech recognition area, where the open source effort will be carried out largely under government grants and at academic institutions, and be partially sponsored by companies like Intel (if Microsoft doesn't blackmail them into stopping their support for open source).
You are just another one of those mindless Apple zealots. Handwriting recognition goes back to the 1960's. Of course, Apple had a decent handwriting recognizer. That was developed in their ATG. The ATG doesn't exist anymore. Whatever advanced technology Apple now puts into their products is either left-over code from their glory days, or it is licensed from third parties.
Apple doesn't hire the kind of people anymore who develop this kind of technology, Apple is mostly about design and software development these days. If you don't believe me, show me some job postings for computer science research, or show me some recent publications from Apple on handwriting recognition, speech recognition, or other advanced technologies.
But, hey, don't let reality stop you. To you, anybody who doesn't glorify Apple must be a "Troll", reality be damned.
No, Gates is right in that regard: Microsoft has one of the best speech recognizers around. Apple doesn't have the resources to come even close; Apple has almost completely gutted their research labs. Where Gates is wrong is in thinking that having the best speech recognizer matters.
That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies.
Yes, and that's the problem: Microsoft keeps pushing technologies, whether customers want them or not. But because of Microsoft's dominant market position, customers don't have a say in the matter.
Ink, speech, virtual machines, database-like file systems, etc., are all old ideas. Gates apparently doesn't understand either the history or the the problems with those technologies, otherwise he wouldn't make large bets on them.
Microsoft has become an old, lazy, gigantic corporation with way too much disposable money, and their market power means there are few competitive pressures to keep them in check. In short, Microsoft has become what IBM used to be. In fact, the projects Gates likes so much are just the same kinds of projects IBM used to invest in heavily, and that's no coincidence.
When I pick up some Python code that's space-indented and edit it in my text editor with 3-space tabs, the Python compiler's going to magically guess that my tab-tab is equivalent to 6 spaces, is it?
If you use tabs consistently for indentation, then it doesn't matter what you set them to, the Python code will remain valid and its meaning won't be affected.
If you mix tabs and spaces, you need to use the same tab setting as the original author anyway or the code will look like garbage.
The flip side of your problem is: what if changing the tab setting makes you misinterpret your code by changing the indentation to be inconsistent with your actual block structure?
The short answer is: you shouldn't change the meaning of hard tabs--it causes lots of other problems. Just use a decent text editor that indents correctly with spaces and standard tabs. Almost all of them do these days.
And, no, this just isn't a problem with Python. Space-based block structure may seem weird, but it works quite well.
I can help you with this. In computer terms, it's called an application,
More precisely, it's called a badly designed application.
It has options, thingees that allow you to defeat some of the widgets you see on the screen to provide more screen space.
The real estate taken up by the OS in that picture is the wee stripe to one end, less than ten percent, and it's called the taskbar.
The OS (Linux) isn't taking up any space in that picture at all. You have two applications operating in that image: one is a graphical environment and one is a terminal application. Together, they take up way too much screen real estate with useless buttons, tabs, menus, and task bars.
Look at the Palm to see how much can be done with much less screen real estate. That's the kind of UI Linux needs in order to succeed on handhelds.
For that terminal application, almost half the screen is taken up by useless junk (buttons, tabs, etc.). With a GUI like that, Linux won't stand much of a chance competing against Palm or even PPC. Unfortunately, the same is true of many of the applications on my Zaurus.
The notion of tightly integrated servers and clients strikes me as stupid. I'd much rather use a high-quality web-based groupware suite. If you really must have a GUI for some operations (e.g., calendar maintenance), it can be implemented as Java applets or through SOAP, but with the web based interface being the primary interface.
Re:Why is Firebird that wonderful?
on
Mozilla 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Breaking up Mozilla isn't primarily about making it smaller, it's about making it more maintainable. The way it is, bugs in the mail component may hold up release of the browser component. Separating them into separate programs means they can be released independently. Besides, many people don't want to use one or the other Mozilla component.
Functionally, Firebird is as full-featured as the Mozilla browser, and there are more extensions and skins available for it (most of the Mozilla extensions just work).
You probably have neither the server software nor the X extensions to be able to do this the X11 way. My point was simply that, in principle, it's quite feasible to use X11 for video streaming through the X11 protocol. In fact, it's a shame that people haven't built more software to do this because it would be much cleaner and nicer than the DRI hacks and viewers people are kludging together right now.
In any case, the simple answer to your question is: use VideoLAN.
it introduces latency for which you'd have to compensate
There is no need to "compensate for latency" if all you are doing is watching video.
Note also that there are a number of X-extensions supporting image and video decompression on the display. So, sending a video stream through the X protocol to the display can actually be quite reasonable.
It's not "pirating". People pay for getting the signal in Japan (actually, it's probably public television and they pay television taxes for it) and then they privately access it through a broadband connection.
Then I went looking for a 6 in 1 adapter for it. As I was browsing through the store and on the net, I was thinking to myself "If just *one* of these dang things said it supported Linux, I'd buy it!".
They are pretty much all USB mass storage compliant and they will pretty much all work. If it says "doesn't require driver installation under Windows XP or MacOS X", that's a giveaway.
Your other choice is to check the compatibility lists on the web (there are databases for USB, FireWire, video, etc.), or to shop at a dedicated Linux store (e.g., LinuxVoodoo).
There's a market for vendors for people who don't want to compile major parts of an operating system like the kernel, X etc.
The need to recompile the kernel is a major nuisance, but it isn't a fault with vendors; it's a design problem with the Linux kernel.
The existence of closed source X11 drivers results simply from the fact that there is a lot of money to be made with 3D graphics (gaming, etc.) and that vendors are being unnecessarily posessive. 3D graphics isn't rocket science, but stupidity and greed keep the drivers closed. That won't change until we get some open standards for 3D graphics cards. Your best bet for now is to avoid cards with proprietary drivers as much as possible.
The difference is that NVidia's drivers WORK. And they work WELL.
No, they don't work "WELL". I have several nVidia cards. Yes, the 3D portion is fast. That's nice, and it's the reason I bought them. But the non-gaming aspects of their cards are buggy and non-compliant with XFree86 conventions (I have experienced regular crashes, messed up graphics, broken Xinerama support, and the configuration is non-standard).
I would rather have drivers that work than drivers that are open source and suck. NVidia is pretty much the only game in town for high-end gaming graphics under Linux.
nVidia may be pretty much the only game in town for high-end gaming graphics under Linux, but it's an uncomfortable compromise.
There is no reason for the kind of secrecy surrounding nVidia or ATI's cards; 3D graphics isn't rocket science. We should look for non-proprietary, open source solutions to this problem.
Let's use SCO's strategy of being a legal nuisance against them. SCO has admitted that there is code that has been duplicated between the Linux kernel and the SCO kernel. The most logical explanation is that SCO copied the code from widely-available GPL-licensed code. Linux kernel developers could file lawsuits against SCO and go through their own discovery processes, one by one. McBride would have to spend a lot of his time and money on defending against those lawsuits and have no time left for preparing for the IBM lawsuit.
All this proprietary driver stuff is nonsense. There is little more reason for a 3D graphics card to have a proprietary architecture and closed source drivers than there is for the entire PC. Graphics hardware has gotten powerful enough that we should be able to afford the slight loss in performance associated with having a standardized, general-purpose architecture in place of all these proprietary cards.
I suppose given the utter failure of nanotechnology to achieve anything to date, it's not surprising that people are retreating on their claims. Even the staunchest proponents are weakening the requirement for self-assembly, but to call iridescent paints "nanotechnology" is going too far for even the weakest definition.
Float point is a well-defined and easy to understand representation. Of course, that doesn't mean it's easy to use--mathematically, it can be pretty complicated to deal with at times. Perhaps the biggest sin is to think of floating point numbers as "real numbers"--they aren't.
Unfortunately, IEEE 754, the most widely used floating point standard, fixes none of the complexities of using floating point but creates many completely unnecessary complexities of its own. Many CPUs just give up and throw any kind of specialized IEEE features into software, making them nominally compliant but unusable. And many programming languages refuse to implement the inane and broken semantics specified for IEEE comparison operators.
The only good thing that can be said about IEEE 754 is that even a lousy standard is better than nothing at all. And, on the bright side, you can usually put CPUs and compilers into modes where they behave somewhat sanely (no denormalized numbers, sane comparisons, no NaNs).
The principle applies just as much in Europe. The main difference is that in Europe, penalties usually go to the state, not to the individual. So, in this case, the woman might have ended up with medical bills plus a few thousand dollars for pain and suffering, and MacDonalds might have ended up paying a $100m penalty to the state.
We have software patents in the US and have had it for many years.
For most of its history, the US software industry developed in the virtual absence of patents. Widespread use of software patents is largely a phenomenon of the late 1990s.
I'm not aware of any case where Microsoft or any other big company is trying to shutdown an Open Source project using patent laws.
People usually don't even start open source software projects that might infringe software patents. If they do, they usually do so in nations where the patents don't apply, and as a consequence will have a hard time reaching critical mass in the US.
Software patents also have had a chilling effect on commercial development. And they are a drag on research, costing enormous amounts of money to obtain and having little commercial benefit.
As for Microsoft, they didn't use to have a patent portfolio. But, in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction, they have been catching up fast. Expect direct or indirect Microsoft claims against open source projects soon.
I agree with the sentiment, but I would put two things first:
Education
More favorable trade practices
An end to US agricultural subsidies
US agricultural policies, including food donations, extensive domestic subsidies, free trade, and GM, are bad for developing nations because they depress prices and keep nations from developing their own agricultural base. GM foods only worsen this dependence.
If the US wants to help developing nations, it should unilaterally and unconditionally drop import duties on agricultural products from developing nations, stop its own agricultural policies, and prohibit US companies from exporting GM seeds that require annual purchases or licensing fees. But, of course, the US is not interested in helping developing nations, at least not if it actually costs anything.
What about the 1 million metric tons [reliefweb.int] of food that we just... give away for free?
I see. So, when Korean chip manufacturers give us low-cost memory chips, it's "dumping" and an "attack on US industries", but when we give away surplus, heavily subsidized food, then it supposedly is foreign aid?
US subsidies and food dumping are keeping world prices for food crops artificially low, preventing African farmers from selling their own crops at a decent price and modernizing their production methods.
If the US wants to help, it should stop farm subsidies domestically and unilaterally and unconditionally remove import duties on food from developing nations.
Slashdot Mirror
If the spectrum used by 802.11b gets flooded by ISPs, cell phone companies, and other commercial users, it will become useless for its primary purpose: networking and communications within an organization or home.
If you make money by selling services using some chunk of spectrum, I think you should have to pay for that chunk of spectrum, or at the very least convince the government to give it to you for free.
I was pointing out that others had already done all of Bill's "gutsy" and innovative stuff [...] if I'm looking to prove that MS was not the first to do something, I look first to Apple. It's usually a good place to start.
Well, if you think that Apple was "gutsy and innovative" in these areas, think again. Apple research worked in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and GUIs long after other places had done all the legwork and invested enormous sums of money into those areas. And Apple's investment in research only lasted a few years; they stopped as soon as they hit hard times.
The truth is that MS didn't work on any of those things until others had proved them. The risks he touts were minimal.
Why do you speak in the past tense? Microsoft doesn't have usable speech recognition, they don't have good ink integration, and they don't have usable connected handwriting recognition. The risk of investing in each of those technologies is still the same as it has always been: after spending millions of dollars on each of them per year, either they don't work well enough at all, or nobody wants to use them.
I'm really getting tired of people holding up Apple as an example of a company that creates innovation. If they are creating all those wonderful new technologies, where are they being created and who is creating them? Apple doesn't have a research lab and they aren't investing much in research. Their jobs page doesn't even have a "Research" category. Apple is an upscale computer design shop, and a good one at that, but nothing more. They were flirting briefly with the idea of becoming a research powerhouse, but they just didn't have the money to keep it up.
For better or for worse, Microsoft is one of the few companies that still invests big in computer science research in the private sector. Which only goes to show that investment in research isn't well-correlated with product quality, at least in the short term. But Microsoft still has to do it because their only hope of selling more software in the future is to constantly change what people expect from software.
My Performa 6200CD had decent speech recognition for commands (not dictation) in 1994. Apple was working on speech recognition since at least the the beginning of PPC use.
Yes, that's when Apple still had a research lab. Now, they don't anymore.
MS might be doing good work in speech recognition, but they aren't the only company with the "guts" to do it.
Nor did I make any comment about Gates's comment whether other companies have "the guts" or not. But MS is one of the few companies that has the resources to actually work on connected speech recognition. Apple doesn't anymore.
Gate's arrogance at claiming that only MS can do this is astounding.
It's not arrogance, it's reality. It costs a company millions of dollars a year to maintain a speech research group and the number of commercial research labs that still do this kind of work is dwindling. Apple isn't making that kind of investment; in fact, Apple gutted their entire research lab.
It will probably be Microsoft vs. open source in the speech recognition area, where the open source effort will be carried out largely under government grants and at academic institutions, and be partially sponsored by companies like Intel (if Microsoft doesn't blackmail them into stopping their support for open source).
You are just another one of those mindless Apple zealots. Handwriting recognition goes back to the 1960's. Of course, Apple had a decent handwriting recognizer. That was developed in their ATG. The ATG doesn't exist anymore. Whatever advanced technology Apple now puts into their products is either left-over code from their glory days, or it is licensed from third parties.
Apple doesn't hire the kind of people anymore who develop this kind of technology, Apple is mostly about design and software development these days. If you don't believe me, show me some job postings for computer science research, or show me some recent publications from Apple on handwriting recognition, speech recognition, or other advanced technologies.
But, hey, don't let reality stop you. To you, anybody who doesn't glorify Apple must be a "Troll", reality be damned.
No, Gates is right in that regard: Microsoft has one of the best speech recognizers around. Apple doesn't have the resources to come even close; Apple has almost completely gutted their research labs. Where Gates is wrong is in thinking that having the best speech recognizer matters.
That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies.
Yes, and that's the problem: Microsoft keeps pushing technologies, whether customers want them or not. But because of Microsoft's dominant market position, customers don't have a say in the matter.
Ink, speech, virtual machines, database-like file systems, etc., are all old ideas. Gates apparently doesn't understand either the history or the the problems with those technologies, otherwise he wouldn't make large bets on them.
Microsoft has become an old, lazy, gigantic corporation with way too much disposable money, and their market power means there are few competitive pressures to keep them in check. In short, Microsoft has become what IBM used to be. In fact, the projects Gates likes so much are just the same kinds of projects IBM used to invest in heavily, and that's no coincidence.
When I pick up some Python code that's space-indented and edit it in my text editor with 3-space tabs, the Python compiler's going to magically guess that my tab-tab is equivalent to 6 spaces, is it?
If you use tabs consistently for indentation, then it doesn't matter what you set them to, the Python code will remain valid and its meaning won't be affected.
If you mix tabs and spaces, you need to use the same tab setting as the original author anyway or the code will look like garbage.
The flip side of your problem is: what if changing the tab setting makes you misinterpret your code by changing the indentation to be inconsistent with your actual block structure?
The short answer is: you shouldn't change the meaning of hard tabs--it causes lots of other problems. Just use a decent text editor that indents correctly with spaces and standard tabs. Almost all of them do these days.
And, no, this just isn't a problem with Python. Space-based block structure may seem weird, but it works quite well.
I can help you with this. In computer terms, it's called an application,
More precisely, it's called a badly designed application.
It has options, thingees that allow you to defeat some of the widgets you see on the screen to provide more screen space.
The real estate taken up by the OS in that picture is the wee stripe to one end, less than ten percent, and it's called the taskbar.
The OS (Linux) isn't taking up any space in that picture at all. You have two applications operating in that image: one is a graphical environment and one is a terminal application. Together, they take up way too much screen real estate with useless buttons, tabs, menus, and task bars.
Look at the Palm to see how much can be done with much less screen real estate. That's the kind of UI Linux needs in order to succeed on handhelds.
For that terminal application, almost half the screen is taken up by useless junk (buttons, tabs, etc.). With a GUI like that, Linux won't stand much of a chance competing against Palm or even PPC. Unfortunately, the same is true of many of the applications on my Zaurus.
The notion of tightly integrated servers and clients strikes me as stupid. I'd much rather use a high-quality web-based groupware suite. If you really must have a GUI for some operations (e.g., calendar maintenance), it can be implemented as Java applets or through SOAP, but with the web based interface being the primary interface.
Breaking up Mozilla isn't primarily about making it smaller, it's about making it more maintainable. The way it is, bugs in the mail component may hold up release of the browser component. Separating them into separate programs means they can be released independently. Besides, many people don't want to use one or the other Mozilla component.
Functionally, Firebird is as full-featured as the Mozilla browser, and there are more extensions and skins available for it (most of the Mozilla extensions just work).
Actually, that's what I was saying: that's how people pay television taxes in many countries.
You probably have neither the server software nor the X extensions to be able to do this the X11 way. My point was simply that, in principle, it's quite feasible to use X11 for video streaming through the X11 protocol. In fact, it's a shame that people haven't built more software to do this because it would be much cleaner and nicer than the DRI hacks and viewers people are kludging together right now.
In any case, the simple answer to your question is: use VideoLAN.
it introduces latency for which you'd have to compensate
There is no need to "compensate for latency" if all you are doing is watching video.
Note also that there are a number of X-extensions supporting image and video decompression on the display. So, sending a video stream through the X protocol to the display can actually be quite reasonable.
It's not "pirating". People pay for getting the signal in Japan (actually, it's probably public television and they pay television taxes for it) and then they privately access it through a broadband connection.
Then I went looking for a 6 in 1 adapter for it. As I was browsing through the store and on the net, I was thinking to myself "If just *one* of these dang things said it supported Linux, I'd buy it!".
They are pretty much all USB mass storage compliant and they will pretty much all work. If it says "doesn't require driver installation under Windows XP or MacOS X", that's a giveaway.
Your other choice is to check the compatibility lists on the web (there are databases for USB, FireWire, video, etc.), or to shop at a dedicated Linux store (e.g., LinuxVoodoo).
There's a market for vendors for people who don't want to compile major parts of an operating system like the kernel, X etc.
The need to recompile the kernel is a major nuisance, but it isn't a fault with vendors; it's a design problem with the Linux kernel.
The existence of closed source X11 drivers results simply from the fact that there is a lot of money to be made with 3D graphics (gaming, etc.) and that vendors are being unnecessarily posessive. 3D graphics isn't rocket science, but stupidity and greed keep the drivers closed. That won't change until we get some open standards for 3D graphics cards. Your best bet for now is to avoid cards with proprietary drivers as much as possible.
The difference is that NVidia's drivers WORK. And they work WELL.
No, they don't work "WELL". I have several nVidia cards. Yes, the 3D portion is fast. That's nice, and it's the reason I bought them. But the non-gaming aspects of their cards are buggy and non-compliant with XFree86 conventions (I have experienced regular crashes, messed up graphics, broken Xinerama support, and the configuration is non-standard).
I would rather have drivers that work than drivers that are open source and suck. NVidia is pretty much the only game in town for high-end gaming graphics under Linux.
nVidia may be pretty much the only game in town for high-end gaming graphics under Linux, but it's an uncomfortable compromise.
There is no reason for the kind of secrecy surrounding nVidia or ATI's cards; 3D graphics isn't rocket science. We should look for non-proprietary, open source solutions to this problem.
Let's use SCO's strategy of being a legal nuisance against them. SCO has admitted that there is code that has been duplicated between the Linux kernel and the SCO kernel. The most logical explanation is that SCO copied the code from widely-available GPL-licensed code. Linux kernel developers could file lawsuits against SCO and go through their own discovery processes, one by one. McBride would have to spend a lot of his time and money on defending against those lawsuits and have no time left for preparing for the IBM lawsuit.
All this proprietary driver stuff is nonsense. There is little more reason for a 3D graphics card to have a proprietary architecture and closed source drivers than there is for the entire PC. Graphics hardware has gotten powerful enough that we should be able to afford the slight loss in performance associated with having a standardized, general-purpose architecture in place of all these proprietary cards.
Sorry, but that's not "nanotechnology". Nanotechnology mean atomically precise, self-assembling, nano-scale machines.
I suppose given the utter failure of nanotechnology to achieve anything to date, it's not surprising that people are retreating on their claims. Even the staunchest proponents are weakening the requirement for self-assembly, but to call iridescent paints "nanotechnology" is going too far for even the weakest definition.
Float point is a well-defined and easy to understand representation. Of course, that doesn't mean it's easy to use--mathematically, it can be pretty complicated to deal with at times. Perhaps the biggest sin is to think of floating point numbers as "real numbers"--they aren't.
Unfortunately, IEEE 754, the most widely used floating point standard, fixes none of the complexities of using floating point but creates many completely unnecessary complexities of its own. Many CPUs just give up and throw any kind of specialized IEEE features into software, making them nominally compliant but unusable. And many programming languages refuse to implement the inane and broken semantics specified for IEEE comparison operators.
The only good thing that can be said about IEEE 754 is that even a lousy standard is better than nothing at all. And, on the bright side, you can usually put CPUs and compilers into modes where they behave somewhat sanely (no denormalized numbers, sane comparisons, no NaNs).
The principle applies just as much in Europe. The main difference is that in Europe, penalties usually go to the state, not to the individual. So, in this case, the woman might have ended up with medical bills plus a few thousand dollars for pain and suffering, and MacDonalds might have ended up paying a $100m penalty to the state.
We have software patents in the US and have had it for many years.
For most of its history, the US software industry developed in the virtual absence of patents. Widespread use of software patents is largely a phenomenon of the late 1990s.
I'm not aware of any case where Microsoft or any other big company is trying to shutdown an Open Source project using patent laws.
People usually don't even start open source software projects that might infringe software patents. If they do, they usually do so in nations where the patents don't apply, and as a consequence will have a hard time reaching critical mass in the US.
Software patents also have had a chilling effect on commercial development. And they are a drag on research, costing enormous amounts of money to obtain and having little commercial benefit.
As for Microsoft, they didn't use to have a patent portfolio. But, in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction, they have been catching up fast. Expect direct or indirect Microsoft claims against open source projects soon.
US agricultural policies, including food donations, extensive domestic subsidies, free trade, and GM, are bad for developing nations because they depress prices and keep nations from developing their own agricultural base. GM foods only worsen this dependence.
If the US wants to help developing nations, it should unilaterally and unconditionally drop import duties on agricultural products from developing nations, stop its own agricultural policies, and prohibit US companies from exporting GM seeds that require annual purchases or licensing fees. But, of course, the US is not interested in helping developing nations, at least not if it actually costs anything.
What about the 1 million metric tons [reliefweb.int] of food that we just... give away for free?
I see. So, when Korean chip manufacturers give us low-cost memory chips, it's "dumping" and an "attack on US industries", but when we give away surplus, heavily subsidized food, then it supposedly is foreign aid?
US subsidies and food dumping are keeping world prices for food crops artificially low, preventing African farmers from selling their own crops at a decent price and modernizing their production methods.
If the US wants to help, it should stop farm subsidies domestically and unilaterally and unconditionally remove import duties on food from developing nations.