Sorry to reply to myself, but here is the patent abstract, from the WIPO site linked in the posting:
This invention provides methods and devices for reconstructing muscular responses in patients with paralysis. Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators power implants attached to tissues in the patients. When the actuators are energized, the implants move the tissues appropriately to provide improved body functions to patients experiencing a paralysis or paresis.
So it sure sounds like they're patenting the *procedure*, not just the artificial muscles. This strikes me as of extremely dubious ethical merit, and appears to be a prime example of why method patents are a bad idea.
As in the subject line, just imagine if someone had patented the procedure for performing an appendectomy. Talk about extortion -- "License my patent, or die!"
Admittedly, facial reconstruction surgery, the bailiwick of this particular patent, is not so vital an application of medical technologies, but the simple fact that such procedures *can* apparently be patented is itself deeply troubling.
Since when are surgical procedures patentable? And what are the ethics of patenting this anyway, and likely thereby preventing some people from receiving such treatment, even if it is somehow legal to do so?
Or is the patent specific to the artificial muscles?
Hammers do have R&D costs. Making a better hammer doesn't often happen by accident. There's also the money for developing the metal that is in the hammer.
Fair enough about R&D to a point, but I must admit that I haven't seen any "better" hammers in my local hardware store, and I rather suspect that the grand-grand-grandparent poster wasn't referring to "better" hammers either, but rather the garden-variety ones available just about anywhere. For most hammers, it should be fair to point out that any R&D costs were borne back in the mists of forgotten history.
And about the material costs of producing a hammer, that again simply emphasizes the differences between physical tools like hammers and purely software tools -- with software, the costs to reproduce are so marginal as to not be meaningfully calculable.
Interesting anecdote. The linked article (and what else I dimly remember) suggests that babies actually *are* congnitively aware enough to identify spider and snake shapes as somehow more interesting (or at least worth spending more time looking at), which suggests that something is going on in visual processing at the pre-learned stage that flags spider and snake shapes for special consideration. Where the fear fits into the picture, I do not pretend to know.
This might be something like what zappepcs was remembering. I dimly recall reading similar research several years ago -- basically, the findings are that babies appear to be more aware of or interested in snake and spider shapes, but do not fear them until they've seen an adult express fear at them. A choice excerpt (emphasis mine):
Even though the babies pay special attention to spiders and snakes, they do not innately fear them, Dr. Rakison said.
"If you put a baby in a tank with a snake," he said, "they would show no fear whatsoever."
Instead, babies seem to have a "perceptual template" for the creatures that primes them to be scared of them once they see an adult showing such fear.
All of this could be rooted in our evolutionary history, Dr. Rakison said, and could even explain why we might fear spiders and snakes more than lions and cheetahs, for instance.
"It's thought our ancestors spent a great deal of time on the savannas in Africa, so you could see lions coming from a distance," he said.
"Spiders and snakes tend to be hidden from view, though, and you tend to see them close up. Our ancestors, particularly the women, spent a lot of time gathering food, on their knees with their infant close by, so you can imagine you're picking plants out of the ground and all of a sudden there's a snake or a spider right there."
Dr. Rakison's baby studies build on earlier work with monkeys done by Susan Mineka at Northwestern University.
Apologies then, binford2k -- I had read the AC's comment as talking about software tools, and more specifically about OSS. In that context, I interpreted your hammer and screwdriver comment as somehow equating software tools with meatspace tools. Upon clarification, I agree with your point here that not all tools should perforce be free simply because they're tools.
I definitely hope you don't include Pope Urban II in that. (Hint - he started the Crusades.) Helping wholeheartedly to transform a religion of "turn the other cheek" into "sure, kill your neighbor, and we'll even forgive cannibalism provided you're not eating Christians" is certainly something that merits a bit more than just "oops, sorry."
No, he's right. You don't just pay for the hammer's cost of creation, you pay for it's advertising, it's R&D costs, etc. It's exactly like software. There's far more to the cost of software than just the disc it is distributed on.
Precisely -- it sounds like you're ultimately making the same argument I am, that software is *not* like hammers, and that therefore the analogy is not apt. Hammers don't entail R&D costs (costs to develop the underlying IP), nor do they really entail advertising costs (costs to make a sale, unrelated to IP).
the thinking is that the tools to get work done should be freely available to all,
Because things like hammers and screwdrivers and all that are free.
No, but there the cost you're paying is the cost of producing the physical good -- you're not paying extra for the IP of a hammer or a screwdriver. And since there is no cost of producing the physical good with software (since there really isn't a physical good, unless it's burned to disc or something), all you're paying for is the IP.
How much of a price to put on that IP is the question. Making analogies to hammers and screwdrivers goes off on the wrong tangent.:)
I'm curious if you read the linked posting? I personally agree with most of what you describe: old-school conservative thinking, entailing limited government, along with fiscal responsibility, together with the idea that when people get that old, they should be retired, and younger people should be doing the work. That said, I don't think the linked posting is attempting to explain old-school conservativism, but rather this weird present-day political mess that passes itself off as conservativism.
For instance, I have zero problem with the idea of retirement. I *do* have problems with golden parachutes for CEOs that have driven companies into the ground, and have paid for their executive bonuses by cutting pensions and other benefits. A number of my relatives are self-described "conservatives", not of the old-school variety but of this newer, oblivious, emotional sort, who blindly hew to whatever talking points are being relayed by other self-described "conservative" media outlets. They are hard-working, but it would be a real stretch to describe them as deep thinkers. I'm not confused by my relatives wanting smaller government; I am confused by their insistence that social welfare programs (which ultimately include the unemployment benefits that have helped them through tough times after being laid off) are somehow depleting the nation's coffers, and should therefore be abolished, while they blithely ignore much more expensive corporate welfare. It is this conundrum that makes no sense to me. And I might be reading it wrong, but it is this conundrum that the linked posting seems to explain.
Regarding copyright, I'm by no means a copyright abolitionist -- I honestly think that would be swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. In my view, the original terms made plenty of sense -- 7 years to start, renewable for another 7. The current terms are unconscionable.
There's another wrinkle to this that occurred to me recently. Some time ago, I ran across this online essay about conservativism in the US. The piece comes at the question of "what is conservativism" from a different angle than others I've seen. Read it through; it's a very interesting bit of writing. I've often been very puzzled by why various members of my family espouse politics and policies that have been plainly ruinous to them. This essay finally sets forth a convincing and understandable argument for their behaviour.
The basic premise of the linked posting is that conservativism starts from the idea that aristocracy is a good thing -- not necessarily kings and queens and dukes and duchesses, but rather an upper class, the rich, those that have enough money and power to not have to work. People further down the social ladder that ascribe to this philosophy, despite possibly being actively harmed by it, do so in the hopes that they too might some day climb high enough to be able to sit back and rely on other people to do the work.
Copyright-forever comes out of this same thinking.
So yes, certainly, current copyright law is prima facie unconstitutional, and the SCOTUS's "justification" of it as still somehow "limited", despite being retroactively extended every single time something deemed important gets close to falling into the public domain ("Steamboat Willie", anyone?), is nothing more than a bald power grab by the upper classes, the moneyed elite who are very intent on remaining the moneyed elite.
I can already hear some folks claiming I'm some sort of Commie pinko. This couldn't be further from the truth. I'm very fond of freedom, of not being told what to do, and of many aspects of a freer market. As far as I'm concerned, part of the problem in the US right now is that the market is anything but free in the places where it matters -- we have far too many state-sanctioned monopolies and oligopolies, and far too much protection of the robber-barons at the top (financial bailout packages, anyone?). Let alone all the issues that come of a locked-down information market, preventing the healthy functioning of anything resembling a real democratic republic -- a mass media that is increasingly owned by a small group of ultra-rich, that is free in name only, beholden to the same moneyed interests that already run the show...
Meh. I grew up in DC -- I only pray my inside-the-Beltway cynicism be proven unjustified.
Oo, sorry, *double* fail there. Properly spelled (as it is in the OP), nativity is indeed a word in the English language, as evidenced by entries in dictionaries such as, say, Wiktionary, or Merriam-Webster. However, given that it means "birth" (and usually Jesus' birth at that, c.f. Christmas dioramas), you're probably right that the OP meant naïveté instead.:)
Cheers, then. I guess it's a sad commentary on society in general (myself included) when a plainly knuckleheaded comment like yours is automatically taken seriously as a comment by a knucklehead, instead of simply as a patently exaggerated overstatement. Thanks at least for making things clearer.:)
Um, whuh? No, that's not what I'm saying, not in the least. I *am* saying that the sheer number of glyphs prevented widespread computer use until software was developed that could allow for input using keyboards smaller than a piano (not smaller than the piano keyboard, smaller than the *piano* -- sampleimages).
Korean actually uses relatively few characters when written purely in Hangul, but composites them into syllable groupings, requiring complicated kerning algorithms. There was a short-lived movement to write out Hangul sequentially, as the Latin alphabet is used, but it really didn't catch on. Some linguists theorize that the syllable grouping of Hangul actually makes for faster reading than when written sequentially, as it better capitalizes upon pattern matching in the brain. Whatever the reason, folks decided they liked Hangul grouped in syllables, thank you very much. Thus the need for an IME or similar software, to ensure that the Hangul letters are properly composited.
If you're trolling, I apologize to others for feeding you. If you're not, and not flame-baiting either, re-read my previous post, and please pay closer attention to what I've actually written. To add to that, I have great respect for the written traditions of all three CJK languages, and would view any serious push to Latinize their writing as a hare-brained scheme at best, and an absolute travesty at worst.
...plus a second keyboard with all 50,000 kanji characters
Minor quibble -- kanji is the Japanese word for Chinese characters, and Japanese really only makes use of ~2,500 kanji or so on a regular basis, with a total lexicon of maybe ~5,500. If you mean Chinese characters as used in Korean, say hanja. If you mean Chinese characters as used in Chinese, say hanzi. (Naturally, all three words are 'spelled' the same way when using Chinese characters.)
That aside, if you're at all interested about typing in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or various other non-Latin-based scripts, look up "input method editor" or "IME" on Google. I'm a Japanese-English translator by trade, and I've also studied some Chinese and Korean. I routinely have to type in at least one of these non-Latin scripts, using my stock-standard US keyboard. The IME is programmed to read in certain Latin character combinations and convert these into the appropriate script, offering alternates when these exist.
So say I activate the Japanese IME here in MS Word and type in "seikou" and hit the space bar -- I get a drop-down showing 23 different possible kanji renderings for this reading, together with hiragana and katakana. Well-programmed IMEs also allow for new renderings to be added in addition to the built-in dictionaries.
The sheer number of characters required, and the ridiculously huge keyboards needed to input these in any hardware-based solution, is precisely why computers took so much longer to gain market penetration in China, Korea, and Japan (among other countries). It wasn't until the software capabilities caught up to the linguistic and practical realities that widespread local-language computer usage was feasible.
Oo, do tell -- I've got it on Windows and the Wii, but I'd like to be able to pull it up on Linux too (and hey, I've already paid for it, since they charge a single fee for all three of the Win / Mac / Lin versions).
... Except Brighter Minds never developed World of Goo in the first place -- that distinction belongs to the tiny 2D Boy dev house. They note on their blog that the Linux version is coming along. Sure, it's been slow as molasses, but I'd say that it might actually be "likely to happen some time soon".:)
Seconded. I've got an ATI GPU in my Dell Dimension 5150, and the drivers haven't caused me any grief yet, either under Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8.10 -- in fact, the generic non-ATI driver will cause random hard lockups, whereas the driver supplied by ATI does just fine.
While I can sympathize with Risen888, in that these things *should* "just work", a little research into what's going on should clarify that the problem is indeed that NVidia's drivers are closed. And the fault there lies, ultimately, with NVidia's management -- even if they are barred from opening due to inclusion of patent-protected code or whatnot, it would still have been their decision to use any such problematic modules.
It's not very well known among non-spud-farming types, but most potato varieties *already* produce fruit very much like a tomato -- only too rich in toxic solanine to be edible. Have a look here for a picture.
The pomato graft uses a potato rootstock with a tomato top, so yes, the idea is to get both tomatoes and potatoes from one plant. The pomato genetic hybrid was ostensibly a weird attempt at producing a tomato with a thicker skin and longer shelf-life. Pomato grafts work, but apparently don't taste too good. However, genetic hybrids don't work -- they don't live long enough to grow very big before their genetic oddities produce too many mistakes, and the plant dies -- assuming it even germinates.
Cheers plasmacutter, but the key term here is "*radical* hybridization". The donkey and the horse are quite closely related, both belonging to the genus Equus. (I'm a bit surprised to learn that they aren't regarded as taxonomically closer, to be honest.:) Consequently, your comment misses the mark WRT my problem with the article -- that the failed hybridization of widely distanced species should come as no surprise.
I have a one-word answer for why this won't happen any time soon:
Monsanto.
Seriously. This company (along with a few others) is doing everything within its capabilities, legal, ethical, or otherwise (mostly otherwise), to monopolize food production. Talk about power! There's simply *no way* they would support the development of any technology that would allow humans to avoid having to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet the patent brief itself seems to lay claim to the process as well:
Or am I reading too much into this use of the word "methods"? I rather hope I am.
Cheers,
Sorry to reply to myself, but here is the patent abstract, from the WIPO site linked in the posting:
So it sure sounds like they're patenting the *procedure*, not just the artificial muscles. This strikes me as of extremely dubious ethical merit, and appears to be a prime example of why method patents are a bad idea.
As in the subject line, just imagine if someone had patented the procedure for performing an appendectomy. Talk about extortion -- "License my patent, or die!"
Admittedly, facial reconstruction surgery, the bailiwick of this particular patent, is not so vital an application of medical technologies, but the simple fact that such procedures *can* apparently be patented is itself deeply troubling.
Since when are surgical procedures patentable? And what are the ethics of patenting this anyway, and likely thereby preventing some people from receiving such treatment, even if it is somehow legal to do so?
Or is the patent specific to the artificial muscles?
Fair enough about R&D to a point, but I must admit that I haven't seen any "better" hammers in my local hardware store, and I rather suspect that the grand-grand-grandparent poster wasn't referring to "better" hammers either, but rather the garden-variety ones available just about anywhere. For most hammers, it should be fair to point out that any R&D costs were borne back in the mists of forgotten history.
And about the material costs of producing a hammer, that again simply emphasizes the differences between physical tools like hammers and purely software tools -- with software, the costs to reproduce are so marginal as to not be meaningfully calculable.
Cheers,
Interesting anecdote. The linked article (and what else I dimly remember) suggests that babies actually *are* congnitively aware enough to identify spider and snake shapes as somehow more interesting (or at least worth spending more time looking at), which suggests that something is going on in visual processing at the pre-learned stage that flags spider and snake shapes for special consideration. Where the fear fits into the picture, I do not pretend to know.
Cheers,
This might be something like what zappepcs was remembering. I dimly recall reading similar research several years ago -- basically, the findings are that babies appear to be more aware of or interested in snake and spider shapes, but do not fear them until they've seen an adult express fear at them. A choice excerpt (emphasis mine):
Cheers,
Apologies then, binford2k -- I had read the AC's comment as talking about software tools, and more specifically about OSS. In that context, I interpreted your hammer and screwdriver comment as somehow equating software tools with meatspace tools. Upon clarification, I agree with your point here that not all tools should perforce be free simply because they're tools.
Cheers,
I definitely hope you don't include Pope Urban II in that. (Hint - he started the Crusades.) Helping wholeheartedly to transform a religion of "turn the other cheek" into "sure, kill your neighbor, and we'll even forgive cannibalism provided you're not eating Christians" is certainly something that merits a bit more than just "oops, sorry."
Precisely -- it sounds like you're ultimately making the same argument I am, that software is *not* like hammers, and that therefore the analogy is not apt. Hammers don't entail R&D costs (costs to develop the underlying IP), nor do they really entail advertising costs (costs to make a sale, unrelated to IP).
Cheers,
No, but there the cost you're paying is the cost of producing the physical good -- you're not paying extra for the IP of a hammer or a screwdriver. And since there is no cost of producing the physical good with software (since there really isn't a physical good, unless it's burned to disc or something), all you're paying for is the IP.
How much of a price to put on that IP is the question. Making analogies to hammers and screwdrivers goes off on the wrong tangent. :)
Cheers,
Hello Grishnakh --
I'm curious if you read the linked posting? I personally agree with most of what you describe: old-school conservative thinking, entailing limited government, along with fiscal responsibility, together with the idea that when people get that old, they should be retired, and younger people should be doing the work. That said, I don't think the linked posting is attempting to explain old-school conservativism, but rather this weird present-day political mess that passes itself off as conservativism.
For instance, I have zero problem with the idea of retirement. I *do* have problems with golden parachutes for CEOs that have driven companies into the ground, and have paid for their executive bonuses by cutting pensions and other benefits. A number of my relatives are self-described "conservatives", not of the old-school variety but of this newer, oblivious, emotional sort, who blindly hew to whatever talking points are being relayed by other self-described "conservative" media outlets. They are hard-working, but it would be a real stretch to describe them as deep thinkers. I'm not confused by my relatives wanting smaller government; I am confused by their insistence that social welfare programs (which ultimately include the unemployment benefits that have helped them through tough times after being laid off) are somehow depleting the nation's coffers, and should therefore be abolished, while they blithely ignore much more expensive corporate welfare. It is this conundrum that makes no sense to me. And I might be reading it wrong, but it is this conundrum that the linked posting seems to explain.
Regarding copyright, I'm by no means a copyright abolitionist -- I honestly think that would be swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. In my view, the original terms made plenty of sense -- 7 years to start, renewable for another 7. The current terms are unconscionable.
Cheers,
There's another wrinkle to this that occurred to me recently. Some time ago, I ran across this online essay about conservativism in the US. The piece comes at the question of "what is conservativism" from a different angle than others I've seen. Read it through; it's a very interesting bit of writing. I've often been very puzzled by why various members of my family espouse politics and policies that have been plainly ruinous to them. This essay finally sets forth a convincing and understandable argument for their behaviour.
The basic premise of the linked posting is that conservativism starts from the idea that aristocracy is a good thing -- not necessarily kings and queens and dukes and duchesses, but rather an upper class, the rich, those that have enough money and power to not have to work. People further down the social ladder that ascribe to this philosophy, despite possibly being actively harmed by it, do so in the hopes that they too might some day climb high enough to be able to sit back and rely on other people to do the work.
Copyright-forever comes out of this same thinking.
So yes, certainly, current copyright law is prima facie unconstitutional, and the SCOTUS's "justification" of it as still somehow "limited", despite being retroactively extended every single time something deemed important gets close to falling into the public domain ("Steamboat Willie", anyone?), is nothing more than a bald power grab by the upper classes, the moneyed elite who are very intent on remaining the moneyed elite.
I can already hear some folks claiming I'm some sort of Commie pinko. This couldn't be further from the truth. I'm very fond of freedom, of not being told what to do, and of many aspects of a freer market. As far as I'm concerned, part of the problem in the US right now is that the market is anything but free in the places where it matters -- we have far too many state-sanctioned monopolies and oligopolies, and far too much protection of the robber-barons at the top (financial bailout packages, anyone?). Let alone all the issues that come of a locked-down information market, preventing the healthy functioning of anything resembling a real democratic republic -- a mass media that is increasingly owned by a small group of ultra-rich, that is free in name only, beholden to the same moneyed interests that already run the show...
Meh. I grew up in DC -- I only pray my inside-the-Beltway cynicism be proven unjustified.
Cheers,
Oo, sorry, *double* fail there. Properly spelled (as it is in the OP), nativity is indeed a word in the English language, as evidenced by entries in dictionaries such as, say, Wiktionary, or Merriam-Webster. However, given that it means "birth" (and usually Jesus' birth at that, c.f. Christmas dioramas), you're probably right that the OP meant naïveté instead. :)
Cheers,
That's the thing about the fringe -- it's just like the fringe on a jacket hem. Left or right, it doesn't matter: it goes all the way around.
Cheers,
Cheers, then. I guess it's a sad commentary on society in general (myself included) when a plainly knuckleheaded comment like yours is automatically taken seriously as a comment by a knucklehead, instead of simply as a patently exaggerated overstatement. Thanks at least for making things clearer. :)
Cheers,
But I thought "horked" meant, y'know, horked, eh? Meaning, like, "stolen" --
Doug: Hey - somebody horked our clothes!
Bob: Geez, who'd want to hork our clothes, eh?
Cheers,
Um, whuh? No, that's not what I'm saying, not in the least. I *am* saying that the sheer number of glyphs prevented widespread computer use until software was developed that could allow for input using keyboards smaller than a piano (not smaller than the piano keyboard, smaller than the *piano* -- sample images).
Korean actually uses relatively few characters when written purely in Hangul, but composites them into syllable groupings, requiring complicated kerning algorithms. There was a short-lived movement to write out Hangul sequentially, as the Latin alphabet is used, but it really didn't catch on. Some linguists theorize that the syllable grouping of Hangul actually makes for faster reading than when written sequentially, as it better capitalizes upon pattern matching in the brain. Whatever the reason, folks decided they liked Hangul grouped in syllables, thank you very much. Thus the need for an IME or similar software, to ensure that the Hangul letters are properly composited.
If you're trolling, I apologize to others for feeding you. If you're not, and not flame-baiting either, re-read my previous post, and please pay closer attention to what I've actually written. To add to that, I have great respect for the written traditions of all three CJK languages, and would view any serious push to Latinize their writing as a hare-brained scheme at best, and an absolute travesty at worst.
Cheers,
Ah well, thanks for posting anyway.
Cheers,
Minor quibble -- kanji is the Japanese word for Chinese characters, and Japanese really only makes use of ~2,500 kanji or so on a regular basis, with a total lexicon of maybe ~5,500. If you mean Chinese characters as used in Korean, say hanja. If you mean Chinese characters as used in Chinese, say hanzi. (Naturally, all three words are 'spelled' the same way when using Chinese characters.)
That aside, if you're at all interested about typing in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or various other non-Latin-based scripts, look up "input method editor" or "IME" on Google. I'm a Japanese-English translator by trade, and I've also studied some Chinese and Korean. I routinely have to type in at least one of these non-Latin scripts, using my stock-standard US keyboard. The IME is programmed to read in certain Latin character combinations and convert these into the appropriate script, offering alternates when these exist.
So say I activate the Japanese IME here in MS Word and type in "seikou" and hit the space bar -- I get a drop-down showing 23 different possible kanji renderings for this reading, together with hiragana and katakana. Well-programmed IMEs also allow for new renderings to be added in addition to the built-in dictionaries.
The sheer number of characters required, and the ridiculously huge keyboards needed to input these in any hardware-based solution, is precisely why computers took so much longer to gain market penetration in China, Korea, and Japan (among other countries). It wasn't until the software capabilities caught up to the linguistic and practical realities that widespread local-language computer usage was feasible.
Cheers,
Oo, do tell -- I've got it on Windows and the Wii, but I'd like to be able to pull it up on Linux too (and hey, I've already paid for it, since they charge a single fee for all three of the Win / Mac / Lin versions).
Cheers,
... Except Brighter Minds never developed World of Goo in the first place -- that distinction belongs to the tiny 2D Boy dev house. They note on their blog that the Linux version is coming along. Sure, it's been slow as molasses, but I'd say that it might actually be "likely to happen some time soon". :)
Cheers,
Seconded. I've got an ATI GPU in my Dell Dimension 5150, and the drivers haven't caused me any grief yet, either under Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8.10 -- in fact, the generic non-ATI driver will cause random hard lockups, whereas the driver supplied by ATI does just fine.
While I can sympathize with Risen888, in that these things *should* "just work", a little research into what's going on should clarify that the problem is indeed that NVidia's drivers are closed. And the fault there lies, ultimately, with NVidia's management -- even if they are barred from opening due to inclusion of patent-protected code or whatnot, it would still have been their decision to use any such problematic modules.
Cheers,
It's not very well known among non-spud-farming types, but most potato varieties *already* produce fruit very much like a tomato -- only too rich in toxic solanine to be edible. Have a look here for a picture.
The pomato graft uses a potato rootstock with a tomato top, so yes, the idea is to get both tomatoes and potatoes from one plant. The pomato genetic hybrid was ostensibly a weird attempt at producing a tomato with a thicker skin and longer shelf-life. Pomato grafts work, but apparently don't taste too good. However, genetic hybrids don't work -- they don't live long enough to grow very big before their genetic oddities produce too many mistakes, and the plant dies -- assuming it even germinates.
Cheers,
Cheers plasmacutter, but the key term here is "*radical* hybridization". The donkey and the horse are quite closely related, both belonging to the genus Equus. (I'm a bit surprised to learn that they aren't regarded as taxonomically closer, to be honest. :) Consequently, your comment misses the mark WRT my problem with the article -- that the failed hybridization of widely distanced species should come as no surprise.
That said, your comment here would make a good rejoinder to part of my other post in this thread.
Cheers,
I have a one-word answer for why this won't happen any time soon:
Monsanto.
Seriously. This company (along with a few others) is doing everything within its capabilities, legal, ethical, or otherwise (mostly otherwise), to monopolize food production. Talk about power! There's simply *no way* they would support the development of any technology that would allow humans to avoid having to eat.
Cheers,