I have SEVEN "sub-$100 machines" in my care. Assorted P75, 133, 200, 350 and they all run either Linux or BSD. None of them are capable of running Win 2000 or XP. Ballmer forgets that the reason people have expensive, high-spec machines is because THATS ALL XP WILL RUN ON. Good lord, Steve, get a clue!
Yep,
I have a Pentium 200 (32M/2G) BSD box running Postfix. Been down once (for scheduled maintenance) in the last 15 months. No monitor, disk on standby. Pulls 100W or so I guess. It talks to the outside world via a little 20W Zoom ADSL modem/firewall.
There are several levels you will need to go through before you are proficient. Someone with unlimited time would do this: a) Install Mandrake b) Play a bit c) get UNIX admin in a nutshell or some such d) get tuition from a master sysadmin e) learn f) understand g) gain enlightenment h) install gentoo/bsd or something more server-y
UNfortunately time limitations mean you probably will need to do it this way around: a) Install Fedora b) Point a browser at localhost:10000 (webmin) c) learn how to add/delete users d) learn how to control samba (file shares) e) learn how to control CUPS (printing) f) learn how to configure networking, esp DHCP g) learn how to run postfix and mysql
Learn how to replicate your current job functions using webmin. It's not too hard. There are other good management GUIS and such around. Once you can do your job then by all means get an old P90 and turn it into your personal plaything and gain true enlightenment via the command line.
It is always best that an engineer at any level UNDERSTANDS their systems. There is only one way to do that and it takes several years of practical experience and guidance. I think you will love Linux (and therefore *NIX) but it is fundamentally different to Windows so the UNDERSTANDING might take a while. In which case don't panic - UNIX is more logical IMHO.
Evolution came up with these clever things. Imagine a whip mounted on a panel-mounted electric motor. The whip is on the outside of the cell, the motor coils and so on are on the inside of the cell and the panel in the cell wall. Theis makes a rotor which give bacteria the ability to swim. Sort of.
Re articial hearts, something like an archimedes screw has been around for quite a few years, again powered by externally worn magnetic inductors. Researchers found that simply giving the heart muscle a rest for a few weeks in many cases restored function. The screw caused much less shear to the delicate blood cells.
"I think it's psychological defense to tell yourself how great it is"
There's a term for it - Cognitive Dissonance (which see). It's basically how a purchaser of something continually reassures themselves and others that their purchase decision was a good one.
Nope. Not evolution. This is an effect brought about by an illness. It is my guess that the illness has resulted in residual discomfort in the animal's body that is eased if the animal adopts a more upright gait. It's basically a "limp".
For this to be an evolutionary step, one would expect to see the animal trying to stand from infancy as human babies do.
In addition, since the effect has come after the animal has developed, changes (whatever they actually are) will not be passed in the animal's germ line to it's offspring.
The analysis is correct. However, managers forget the factor "n" where "n" is the number of catastrophic attempts to get the system running.
Hence "if (1) times (2) times (n) is less then (3).."
Of course a couple of your terms are arbitrary, and so is "n", but the principle is sound.
"The poor schmuck" will, in my experience, have spent the last 18 months hearing phrases like:
"Time / Quality / Functionality: Choose Two" "You can't test quality into a system" "Measure twice, cut once" "We need to parallel run the UT system" "Engineers shouldn't be testing their own code!" "I wouldn't be using NT for that, mate"
and so on.
These are the words technical people use to warn management of impending doom. Managers on the other hand have other things to worry about like delivery dates, sales, penalty ratchets and so on. When the "go" decision was made it will have been made by senior managers who get paid the big bucks to take the big decisions and the big sh*t when it all goes pear shaped.
The question is how the management handled mitigation by way of backups to manual processing, rollbacks to the old system or risk analysis during project planning. Automation of an entire printing plant is a big job and it is probable they planned for a failure as a worst case scenario and will just put the 1M loss down to experience.
Another academic seeking funding. Cue misleading/unconstructive populist press release, media coverage and so new grant in September for the good professor and his mates.
The article is of course deliberately provocative. It is possible right now to genetically engineer pathogens to be nastier and to cause more harm than before. We do it the old fashioned way every day when we release chemical mutagens, radiation, UV and selective pressures such as antibiotics into the environment. Which we have been doing for years.
In the living world virii, plasmids, transposons, patchy DNA repair apparatus, cosmic rays, free radicals and other natural bits and pieces all do their bit to keep stirring this genetic soup in the search for the next King of the Beasts. It's how life works. It is designed that way.
The hurdles that stop us trying to make the next super-pathogen in our garden sheds are: a) getting samples of nasties in the first place b) avoiding contact with said nasties Not many s'kiddies have access to goverment level 4 biocontainment facilities.
Yes, there are kits around for pulling DNA out of cells, splicing it and and generally having fun but it needs discipline, skill, training, facilities and not a small amount of luck to keep the new construct alive long enough to figure out what it is. It's not easy to do.
Dangerous new pathogens are much more likely to arise in areas of dense human habitation with poor hygeine, healthcare and education. Maybe the best move would be to regulate *that*.
It looks like good stuff, but we already have the ingredients for a passable facsimile: My network - booted, NFS'd, X-Windowed client node here does pretty much all of this. So why don't we see a lot more of it? Clearly it is not beyond the wit of man, *right now* to devise such a system. The answer as usual lies with our human frailties and our supercorporations. Our machines are our status symbols, the software they run* is licensed for limited seats and our content* is DRM'd. We hide our porn on them and share our files using them. Do we/corporations really want our stuff stored on a disk that we can't physically see, touch, and if necessary, unplug?
* = assumes conformity to the "old way" of defining software and content as "Intellectual Property".
After being carped at by "quota" I went to my directory of garbage and did the old rm -rf:
cd ~ cd garbage rm -rf
except what I actually typed was this:
cd ~ cs garbage (bash: csgarbage: command not found) rm -rf *
OOOPS! Cue one loooong call to the sysadm and much sarcasm about "bloody scientists" while the call went to the offsite storage facility.
24 hours later the data was back, but my quota was still full. So I typed...
cd ~ cs garbage (bash: csgarbage: command not found) rm -rf *
You can imagine how much I enjoyed the phone call to the sysadm. And yes, the courier with the backup tapes had just left...
Yep, I now have an alias for "rm -rf" . In my defence, it was a long time ago and it was dark and my hamster had died and, and... OK There's no excuse. I was a pillock.
MS has seen that Linux is gathering support in the far east. They have to stop that. They already know three things:
1. Leveraging an installed base WORKS 2. Embrace and extend WORKS 3. Media and compute devices are coalescing 4. TVs are more prevalent than computers in the East
This is my theory:
They have noticed that leveraging devices from the desktop has failed (by their standards) here in the West - see Windows CE, Stinger, Tablet edition and so on.
Therefore they must try something else, such as leveraging desktop products from devices.
By "working with Chinese Manufacturers" they can promote a large proprietary installed base of Windows codecs, firmware and so on.
Later, when it's time to hook these thing to computers, guess what - only works with Windows Longhorn (or whatever) ring fenced by a minefield of dodgy IP. What is easier - flashing the firmwar or the desktop OS?
I dont believe this is about inserting MS technology into devices destined for the west. I think its a strategic move towards the east.
ortholattice of course has a point although I confess I got a bit lost with the worked example.
GA and it's ilk are there to produce reasonable answers to otherwise computationally intractable problems. The approach is merely dangerous if the results are treated as gospel and not subjected to the same intellectual rigour as any other testable hypothesis.
The approach described by Darth_Cider has technical merit. There already exist screening technologies based on arrays of proteins, ligands, antibodies, biomimetic polymers and microfluidics platforms and it is easy to see how this might be extended into the field. Production of the raw materials on a grand scale is even quite cheap.
The problems arise with tooling (complicated), instrumentation (expensive) and reagents (twitchy) needed to cleanly detect signals. Oh, and a degree in biochemistry for the user would help. These challenges will require investment and lots of it in order to go away. And right now the investment scene is not ready to roll without retaining a most Un-Open-Source level of control.
All this said, such an approach is inevitable in the long run as biotech becomes more deskilled (everythings in kit form these days), key Patents fall off (eg Southern arrays - 2009?) and biotech searches for new approaches to the existing HTS dogma (which has arguably failed to deliver).
As the cash barrier to entry falls, it is possible that some of the small players might even try this "field discovery" out (they then pass leads, after some validation to the big pharma - $1M per lead - with carried interest if it wins big).
The biggest issue is one of politico-capitalistic will (Pharma and VC will want to lock the process into their discovery pipelines, and also the FDA will be looking for onerous QA in the field).
Darth's suggestion is interesting and it will be interesting if future commercial and regulatory conditions permit it to go forward.
I have myself in past lives proposed an "Open Source Drug Discovery" system that relied on a community contributing to a central ontologically based belief network. Again, the terms and conditions of researchers' contracts largely precludes such an approach. Again, the rush for riches denies us progress. Oh for another Tim Berners Lee with a molecular biology PhD!
Genetic algorithms are computational shortcuts that are used to very quickly find minima in complex multiparameter functions.
Suppose you wanted to find the lowest value of f(x)=sin(x) where x is from 0-360. (OK we all know its at x=270 but hear me out) - you can do it a couple of ways:
1. calculate sin(x) for all 360 possible values of "x" or 2. calculate sin(x) for (say) 20 values of "x".
Statistics says approach 2 will give you a couple of promising results, for only 1/18th of the effort. Now "breed" another 20 from the 6 values of x for which sin(x) were lowest, say 190, 210, 212, 260, 278, 290. This "next generation" gives sin(x) values whiach are closer to zero. Take the best 6 again. After three generations you are *close* to finding the values for "x" that give you sin(x)=0.
So systematic examination takes 360 tries and the genetic shortcut takes 60 tries - about 17% of the computational effort.
Now imagine a function a bit more complex; some mad multivariate affair like the wave equation. Each variable becomes a "gene" in the above "breeding program". All the time we are looking for parents and offspring that *tend* towards the answer we are looking for. (We also chuck in some unrelated parents too, since inbreeding can be bad - a tip stolen from Monte Carlo techniques [which see]). The computational savings from GA, GP and MC techniques are potentially huge (as in orders of magnitude) so long as you dont care that:
a) The answer is not 100% exact b) Some alternative minima are missed
Someone has a severe chip on their choulder here. This isnt about leftism, its about freedom and consistency.
Back in the eighties when my home town was getting bombed by the I.R.A. I dont remember anyone on US soil being hauled into jail for 18 months on "Terrorist Charges". Why? Because raising money for NorAid wasnt a criminal, terrorist activity. AND NEITHER IS THIS.
Too often Americans forget their recent history books. May I refer you to McCarthyism. Its right there. Between Klan and Prohibition.
Capitalism has nothing to do with it. The majority standing by in their comfortable homes and saying nothing while injustice runs riot is the issue here.
I looked into this once for a client.
Agencies charge around 5c a page but that is only to scan. Add more for OCR, manual verification and/or transfer to M$ Word or what-have you. I think I recall seeing 50c a page for such value-adds.
Agencies are good because you dont get need to buy the kit (30K and up) or watch it run (they need feeding and jam quite a lot, especially if the paper is lower quality).
Agencies also make sense for shops with nil/low expectation of producing more paper in the future.
Get some quotes, references and examples of their work and start with a short trial run.
Although Canola (aka Oil Seed Rape in the UK) is predominantly self-pollinating, it is not unknown for spread via wind and/or insect to occur at a recordable range of around 100m pa, and probably much further although obviously detection becomes harder as the radius increases.
According to Monsanto's own research, viable cross-pollination to other species is rare.
Seed dispersal is howevr another story. Canola seeds are tiny. Depending on their genetics, they could spread a long way. Kilometers, especially in open, dry prairie. The act of harvesting itself is known to move these tiny seeds around by several hundred meters.
Naturally, such seeds will have a selective advantage in their new site and inevitibly will spread.
As for sterility, its hard to economically produce a crop just for seed (so called S1 generations) that then produce dead seeds. They tried it but I think the market blew them off.
It will come down to stats. Im no expert at agriculture but some function of normal canola seed dispersion, distances, time, prevailing winds, rainfall and a few other bits and pieces should be enough to see if the accused farmer has a hotspot on his land worthy of further study.
However, in a world where downpours of frogs from far-off waterspouts is not unknown, I would think the farmer is probably in good shape. Monsanto produced a more successful organism. In time it will dominate. Thats what *happens*.
Of course all this would be moot if the world would for once get a grip and realise GM crops are a waste of time. Monsanto and their ilk shame us into condoning them by using picture of starving children. The fact is that we easily make enough food for everyone as it is, it's just a question of having the political will to move it to where its needed.
Big difference IMHO. I think I can summarise it thus: "A comp sci graduate is as comfortable in the analogue as with the digital"
What I mean by this is that (say) a web programmer deals generally with flags and conditional constructs. A comp sci on the other hand needs to know about fourier transforms, dsp, trig, calculus , rendering, algorithm efficiency and so on.
The two worlds meet at the level of large systems design where the number of records and permutations of flags and conditionals makes the population of outcomes so large as to seem analogue.
"Hi, I love this new Windows box. It's so easy to use, but now I have a slight problem."
"What's that, honoured Progenitor?"
"Well, a nice man from Russia sent me an email and now someone called Ivan owns my house, my credit card is currently being used to purchase Beluga caviar in St Petersburg, the FBI are checking my hard disk for kiddie pr0n and dirty bomb instructions and the guy from my ISP just called - something about Open Relays. Oh yeah, and my modem's lights are all on and the dial code looks a helluva lot like the Chinese mainland. But other than that, the ease of use is fantastic."
[PUNCHLINE] "OK. So what's the problem again..?" [/PUNCHLINE]
Slashdot Mirror
It is to Walmart's credit that they will be able to correlate the decline in demand for sunblock with the onset of the post-holocaust nuclear winter.
eg
;)
"kodak digital camera" -800
doesnt cure them all, but a lot of the merchants have 1-800 numbers. I also sometime append:
-search -index
enjoy
"The main thing is that people are stubborn and too timid to bother learning a new program".
Indeed.
All the more "interesting" then that IE squashed Netscape like a bug during the browser wars.
I have SEVEN "sub-$100 machines" in my care. Assorted P75, 133, 200, 350 and they all run either Linux or BSD. None of them are capable of running Win 2000 or XP.
Ballmer forgets that the reason people have expensive, high-spec machines is because THATS ALL XP WILL RUN ON.
Good lord, Steve, get a clue!
Yep, I have a Pentium 200 (32M/2G) BSD box running Postfix. Been down once (for scheduled maintenance) in the last 15 months. No monitor, disk on standby. Pulls 100W or so I guess. It talks to the outside world via a little 20W Zoom ADSL modem/firewall.
Learn how to do your job first
There are several levels you will need to go through before you are proficient. Someone with unlimited time would do this:
a) Install Mandrake
b) Play a bit
c) get UNIX admin in a nutshell or some such
d) get tuition from a master sysadmin
e) learn
f) understand
g) gain enlightenment
h) install gentoo/bsd or something more server-y
UNfortunately time limitations mean you probably will need to do it this way around:
a) Install Fedora
b) Point a browser at localhost:10000 (webmin)
c) learn how to add/delete users
d) learn how to control samba (file shares)
e) learn how to control CUPS (printing)
f) learn how to configure networking, esp DHCP
g) learn how to run postfix and mysql
Learn how to replicate your current job functions using webmin. It's not too hard. There are other good management GUIS and such around. Once you can do your job then by all means get an old P90 and turn it into your personal plaything and gain true enlightenment via the command line.
It is always best that an engineer at any level UNDERSTANDS their systems. There is only one way to do that and it takes several years of practical experience and guidance. I think you will love Linux (and therefore *NIX) but it is fundamentally different to Windows so the UNDERSTANDING might take a while. In which case don't panic - UNIX is more logical IMHO.
Good luck and welcome to the party!
Evolution came up with these clever things. Imagine a whip mounted on a panel-mounted electric motor. The whip is on the outside of the cell, the motor coils and so on are on the inside of the cell and the panel in the cell wall.
Theis makes a rotor which give bacteria the ability to swim. Sort of.
Re articial hearts, something like an archimedes screw has been around for quite a few years, again powered by externally worn magnetic inductors. Researchers found that simply giving the heart muscle a rest for a few weeks in many cases restored function. The screw caused much less shear to the delicate blood cells.
RECOMMENDED COMMENT EOL
"I think it's psychological defense to tell yourself how great it is" There's a term for it - Cognitive Dissonance (which see). It's basically how a purchaser of something continually reassures themselves and others that their purchase decision was a good one.
Nope. Not evolution. This is an effect brought about by an illness. It is my guess that the illness has resulted in residual discomfort in the animal's body that is eased if the animal adopts a more upright gait. It's basically a "limp".
For this to be an evolutionary step, one would expect to see the animal trying to stand from infancy as human babies do.
In addition, since the effect has come after the animal has developed, changes (whatever they actually are) will not be passed in the animal's germ line to it's offspring.
The analysis is correct. However, managers forget the factor "n" where "n" is the number of catastrophic attempts to get the system running. Hence "if (1) times (2) times (n) is less then (3).." Of course a couple of your terms are arbitrary, and so is "n", but the principle is sound.
Remember Occams Razor: The most likely reason is usually the right one ;)
"The poor schmuck" will, in my experience, have spent the last 18 months hearing phrases like:
"Time / Quality / Functionality: Choose Two"
"You can't test quality into a system"
"Measure twice, cut once"
"We need to parallel run the UT system"
"Engineers shouldn't be testing their own code!"
"I wouldn't be using NT for that, mate"
and so on.
These are the words technical people use to warn management of impending doom. Managers on the other hand have other things to worry about like delivery dates, sales, penalty ratchets and so on. When the "go" decision was made it will have been made by senior managers who get paid the big bucks to take the big decisions and the big sh*t when it all goes pear shaped.
The question is how the management handled mitigation by way of backups to manual processing, rollbacks to the old system or risk analysis during project planning.
Automation of an entire printing plant is a big job and it is probable they planned for a failure as a worst case scenario and will just put the 1M loss down to experience.
Another academic seeking funding.
Cue misleading/unconstructive populist press release, media coverage and so new grant in September for the good professor and his mates.
The article is of course deliberately provocative. It is possible right now to genetically engineer pathogens to be nastier and to cause more harm than before. We do it the old fashioned way every day when we release chemical mutagens, radiation, UV and selective pressures such as antibiotics into the environment. Which we have been doing for years.
In the living world virii, plasmids, transposons, patchy DNA repair apparatus, cosmic rays, free radicals and other natural bits and pieces all do their bit to keep stirring this genetic soup in the search for the next King of the Beasts.
It's how life works. It is designed that way.
The hurdles that stop us trying to make the next super-pathogen in our garden sheds are:
a) getting samples of nasties in the first place
b) avoiding contact with said nasties
Not many s'kiddies have access to goverment level 4 biocontainment facilities.
Yes, there are kits around for pulling DNA out of cells, splicing it and and generally having fun but it needs discipline, skill, training, facilities and not a small amount of luck to keep the new construct alive long enough to figure out what it is. It's not easy to do.
Dangerous new pathogens are much more likely to arise in areas of dense human habitation with poor hygeine, healthcare and education. Maybe the best move would be to regulate *that*.
It looks like good stuff, but we already have the ingredients for a passable facsimile: My network - booted, NFS'd, X-Windowed client node here does pretty much all of this.
So why don't we see a lot more of it? Clearly it is not beyond the wit of man, *right now* to devise such a system.
The answer as usual lies with our human frailties and our supercorporations. Our machines are our status symbols, the software they run* is licensed for limited seats and our content* is DRM'd. We hide our porn on them and share our files using them. Do we/corporations really want our stuff stored on a disk that we can't physically see, touch, and if necessary, unplug?
* = assumes conformity to the "old way" of defining software and content as "Intellectual Property".
After being carped at by "quota" I went to my directory of garbage and did the old rm -rf:
cd ~
cd garbage
rm -rf
except what I actually typed was this:
cd ~
cs garbage
(bash: csgarbage: command not found)
rm -rf *
OOOPS!
Cue one loooong call to the sysadm and much sarcasm about "bloody scientists" while the call went to the offsite storage facility.
24 hours later the data was back, but my quota was still full. So I typed...
cd ~
cs garbage
(bash: csgarbage: command not found)
rm -rf *
You can imagine how much I enjoyed the phone call to the sysadm. And yes, the courier with the backup tapes had just left...
Yep, I now have an alias for "rm -rf"
. In my defence, it was a long time ago and it was dark and my hamster had died and, and... OK There's no excuse. I was a pillock.
MS has seen that Linux is gathering support in the far east. They have to stop that. They already know three things:
1. Leveraging an installed base WORKS
2. Embrace and extend WORKS
3. Media and compute devices are coalescing
4. TVs are more prevalent than computers in the East
This is my theory:
They have noticed that leveraging devices from the desktop has failed (by their standards) here in the West - see Windows CE, Stinger, Tablet edition and so on.
Therefore they must try something else, such as leveraging desktop products from devices.
By "working with Chinese Manufacturers" they can promote a large proprietary installed base of Windows codecs, firmware and so on.
Later, when it's time to hook these thing to computers, guess what - only works with Windows Longhorn (or whatever) ring fenced by a minefield of dodgy IP. What is easier - flashing the firmwar or the desktop OS?
I dont believe this is about inserting MS technology into devices destined for the west. I think its a strategic move towards the east.
ortholattice of course has a point although I confess I got a bit lost with the worked example. GA and it's ilk are there to produce reasonable answers to otherwise computationally intractable problems. The approach is merely dangerous if the results are treated as gospel and not subjected to the same intellectual rigour as any other testable hypothesis.
The approach described by Darth_Cider has technical merit. There already exist screening technologies based on arrays of proteins, ligands, antibodies, biomimetic polymers and microfluidics platforms and it is easy to see how this might be extended into the field. Production of the raw materials on a grand scale is even quite cheap.
The problems arise with tooling (complicated), instrumentation (expensive) and reagents (twitchy) needed to cleanly detect signals. Oh, and a degree in biochemistry for the user would help. These challenges will require investment and lots of it in order to go away. And right now the investment scene is not ready to roll without retaining a most Un-Open-Source level of control.
All this said, such an approach is inevitable in the long run as biotech becomes more deskilled (everythings in kit form these days), key Patents fall off (eg Southern arrays - 2009?) and biotech searches for new approaches to the existing HTS dogma (which has arguably failed to deliver).
As the cash barrier to entry falls, it is possible that some of the small players might even try this "field discovery" out (they then pass leads, after some validation to the big pharma - $1M per lead - with carried interest if it wins big).
The biggest issue is one of politico-capitalistic will (Pharma and VC will want to lock the process into their discovery pipelines, and also the FDA will be looking for onerous QA in the field).
Darth's suggestion is interesting and it will be interesting if future commercial and regulatory conditions permit it to go forward.
I have myself in past lives proposed an "Open Source Drug Discovery" system that relied on a community contributing to a central ontologically based belief network. Again, the terms and conditions of researchers' contracts largely precludes such an approach. Again, the rush for riches denies us progress. Oh for another Tim Berners Lee with a molecular biology PhD!
Genetic algorithms are computational shortcuts that are used to very quickly find minima in complex multiparameter functions.
Suppose you wanted to find the lowest value of f(x)=sin(x) where x is from 0-360. (OK we all know its at x=270 but hear me out) - you can do it a couple of ways:
1. calculate sin(x) for all 360 possible values of "x" or
2. calculate sin(x) for (say) 20 values of "x".
Statistics says approach 2 will give you a couple of promising results, for only 1/18th of the effort. Now "breed" another 20 from the 6 values of x for which sin(x) were lowest, say 190, 210, 212, 260, 278, 290. This "next generation" gives sin(x) values whiach are closer to zero. Take the best 6 again. After three generations you are *close* to finding the values for "x" that give you sin(x)=0.
So systematic examination takes 360 tries and the genetic shortcut takes 60 tries - about 17% of the computational effort.
Now imagine a function a bit more complex; some mad multivariate affair like the wave equation. Each variable becomes a "gene" in the above "breeding program". All the time we are looking for parents and offspring that *tend* towards the answer we are looking for. (We also chuck in some unrelated parents too, since inbreeding can be bad - a tip stolen from Monte Carlo techniques [which see]).
The computational savings from GA, GP and MC techniques are potentially huge (as in orders of magnitude) so long as you dont care that:
a) The answer is not 100% exact
b) Some alternative minima are missed
Leftist?
Someone has a severe chip on their choulder here. This isnt about leftism, its about freedom and consistency.
Back in the eighties when my home town was getting bombed by the I.R.A. I dont remember anyone on US soil being hauled into jail for 18 months on "Terrorist Charges". Why? Because raising money for NorAid wasnt a criminal, terrorist activity. AND NEITHER IS THIS.
Too often Americans forget their recent history books. May I refer you to McCarthyism. Its right there. Between Klan and Prohibition.
Capitalism has nothing to do with it. The majority standing by in their comfortable homes and saying nothing while injustice runs riot is the issue here.
For shame.
I looked into this once for a client. Agencies charge around 5c a page but that is only to scan. Add more for OCR, manual verification and/or transfer to M$ Word or what-have you. I think I recall seeing 50c a page for such value-adds. Agencies are good because you dont get need to buy the kit (30K and up) or watch it run (they need feeding and jam quite a lot, especially if the paper is lower quality). Agencies also make sense for shops with nil/low expectation of producing more paper in the future. Get some quotes, references and examples of their work and start with a short trial run.
Although Canola (aka Oil Seed Rape in the UK) is predominantly self-pollinating, it is not unknown for spread via wind and/or insect to occur at a recordable range of around 100m pa, and probably much further although obviously detection becomes harder as the radius increases.
According to Monsanto's own research, viable cross-pollination to other species is rare.
Seed dispersal is howevr another story. Canola seeds are tiny. Depending on their genetics, they could spread a long way. Kilometers, especially in open, dry prairie. The act of harvesting itself is known to move these tiny seeds around by several hundred meters.
Naturally, such seeds will have a selective advantage in their new site and inevitibly will spread.
As for sterility, its hard to economically produce a crop just for seed (so called S1 generations) that then produce dead seeds. They tried it but I think the market blew them off.
It will come down to stats. Im no expert at agriculture but some function of normal canola seed dispersion, distances, time, prevailing winds, rainfall and a few other bits and pieces should be enough to see if the accused farmer has a hotspot on his land worthy of further study.
However, in a world where downpours of frogs from far-off waterspouts is not unknown, I would think the farmer is probably in good shape. Monsanto produced a more successful organism. In time it will dominate. Thats what *happens*.
Of course all this would be moot if the world would for once get a grip and realise GM crops are a waste of time. Monsanto and their ilk shame us into condoning them by using picture of starving children. The fact is that we easily make enough food for everyone as it is, it's just a question of having the political will to move it to where its needed.
Big difference IMHO.
I think I can summarise it thus:
"A comp sci graduate is as comfortable in the analogue as with the digital"
What I mean by this is that (say) a web programmer deals generally with flags and conditional constructs. A comp sci on the other hand needs to know about fourier transforms, dsp, trig, calculus , rendering, algorithm efficiency and so on.
The two worlds meet at the level of large systems design where the number of records and permutations of flags and conditionals makes the population of outcomes so large as to seem analogue.
Thats my view anyway, having done all three.
Phone rings in Windows Land
"Hi Dad"
"Hi, I love this new Windows box. It's so easy to use, but now I have a slight problem."
"What's that, honoured Progenitor?"
"Well, a nice man from Russia sent me an email and now someone called Ivan owns my house, my credit card is currently being used to purchase Beluga caviar in St Petersburg, the FBI are checking my hard disk for kiddie pr0n and dirty bomb instructions and the guy from my ISP just called - something about Open Relays. Oh yeah, and my modem's lights are all on and the dial code looks a helluva lot like the Chinese mainland. But other than that, the ease of use is fantastic."
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"OK. So what's the problem again..?"
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