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Comment Re:Remove the yoke of Monsanto! (Score 2) 377

Well, technically the licensing agreement is what they like to rely on first. There are no laws that directly prohibit re-planting seeds which have a patented component nor planting seeds sold as feed. If they don't actually have privity of contract they have some other dodges, but the inconvenient truth for them is that replanting is a traditional use of seeds, the seeds aren't patented, only the specific engineered improvement (Monsanto has no IP in 99.9999% of any seeds genome, in particular the parts that allow it to reproduce), and absent an agreement to the contrary, a purchaser in the ordinary course of commerce can expect to be able to plant any seeds that he buys. Monsanto's patent rights are exhausted with the sale of the original seeds. As usual the case law is mixed, and the actual results in court will depend not on the law but on the pocketbooks of the parties, so Monsanto figures it has things all sewn up.

Comment Re:Remove the yoke of Monsanto! (Score 1) 377

Hybrids are not what people are worried about, rather it is an old Monsanto proposal called "terminator seeds", seeds which would grow into sterile harvests. Monsanto backed off on the idea after widespread outrage.

Cross-pollination can be considered pollution if it introduces undesired traits, such as GM traits, to an organic strain or pesticide resistance to weeds. It is an entirely forseeable outcome which Monsanto nevertheless claimed was unlikely.

In every one of the cases you mentioned, and more that you didn't, Monsanto abused and overreached its IP and contractual rights in order to harm farmers. Monsanto should have no right to impose any sort of licensing agreements on seed buyers which restricts the fitness or merchantability of patented products for their traditional purposes, nor in particular to prohibit the use of crops as seed rather than feed.

Comment Re:Remove the yoke of Monsanto! (Score 1) 377

Yes, really. I mean ...REALLY. Monsanto wants to be paid both for the seed, then again for the harvest (including harvests which are mostly non-GM with only a small potion of GM contamination, which may be from cross pollination) on seeds whose patents expired in Brazil in 2004. Monsanto should lose - it has collected money to which it has no right. Further, it should be fined for all the contamination of other cultivars by the pollen and stray seed from its roundup-ready variety - liability for pollution does not end with the patent term.

Those patents never should have been issued in the first place - where plants are patentable at all, they are limited to those that propagate by cuttings. This system was set up precisely because the potential abuses of seed patents were foreseen. Utility patents on living organisms should never be allowed. That's not what they are for. If it holds back progress (doubtful) or profit (also doubtful - more likely increases and diffuses it) then new forms of patents need to be legislated rather than judicially jury-rigging utility patents to do the job.

As for releasing infertile seeds being a "prudent ecological measure" - no, limiting IP protection for GM organisms to cutting-propagated plants is a prudent ecological measure. Prohibiting releases of fertile GM seeds or pollen which may have potentially adverse effects into the environment is a prudent ecological measure. Hooking poor 3rd-world farmers on infertile seeds so that the whole world's food supply is dependent on a rapacious corporation is, without exaggeration, a crime against humanity worse than any in history.

Comment Re:Really? Snow Crash? (Score 1) 256

It would have to be a 30-60 hour TV series to be close to the original, at least 12 hours even after massive cuts. It would have to have a lot of work done to make it filmable at all. The connections and deeper points of the book make Lost seem almost straightforward. It has a gazillion characters and dozens of locations. The jumping around between different storylines would be a bitch to make work on screen, too. The parts that appeal to one audience run a risk of losing the others rather than broadening the appeal. It practically requires Johnny Depp to play Jack Shaftoe, or at least someone who doesn't mind being accused of imitating him. The best choices for Eliza wouldn't be cheap either (Keira Knightly, Natalie Portman). There would be many difficult-to-cast roles, several of which would have to be cast multiple times at different ages.

I'd like to see it, but it would be a huge, expensive risky project.

Comment Re:Tagline: (Score 2) 256

Well, maybe if you're dealing with frictionless, spherical cows.
It will double the momentum of the recoil, not the velocity. The mass of the gun + boat + water moved by the boat is much, much higher than the mass of the projectiles. The drag from the water will go up steeply with velocity, at least the square. Also the damage done is related more to the impulse rather than the momentum per se. The projectile acts over perhaps a two tenths of a microsecond on the hull of the target, the recoil can be spread over perhaps 200 microseconds, and the area ratio is going to be about a factor of 10,000 between the gun mount and the projectile impact point, for a factor of around 1e7 difference in pressure, and more than that difference in damage done to to the nonlinearity in the strength of materials.

Comment Re:Cloe Moretz as YT (Score 1) 256

To be fair, it's next to impossible to find half-Black, half-Asian actors that can carry a lead role in a big-budget film. I'd go with a medium skin tone black actor and add a hint of epicanthal fold in makeup. The other option is to use an Asian lead and do skin darkening in post-production (makeup never seems to look right), but that will get you pilloried in the media.

Comment Re:Christ... (Score 1) 914

No, it's 8GB extra for $200, triple the going rate, and no option to buy it from anybody else. And if it ever goes bad you need a new motherboard. And if the camera or the Wi-Fi goes out, that's a whole new, very expensive screen assembly.

Comment Re:Christ... (Score 1) 914

The article says that the battery is permanently glued in place on top of the delicate touchpad cable. The hard drive is non-standard, no other drive will fit. Also, the memory is soldered onto the motherboard and special tools are needed to open up the machine in the first place. The computer is intentionally designed to be unfixable, non-upgradable and to become unusable shortly after the warranty runs out. It's sheer greedy dickery on Apple's part - they are setting out to screw their customers with this drastically overpriced and totally unserviceable laptop.

Comment Re:In case you were wondering (Score 1) 467

The US government can cook the books all it likes, but the employment (not unemployment) numbers have barely improved at all. We're short 10 million jobs. Income is declining in real terms for every income bracket except the top 0.1%. Even if that were not so, we actually took a less conservative approach than Europe. We gave tens of trillions of dollars in welfare to the bankers and speculators who caused the problem, Europe did far less of that and far more austerity, and where there was the most austerity there have been the worst results.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic would have been better to get equity in the big banks when they were on the ropes, in exchange for the bailout and recapitalization, effectively nationalizing all the too-big-to-exist banks. Then some real housecleaning, write-offs and mass prosecutions could take place, followed by breaking up the big banks and selling off the pieces. We also need to require them to make loans to productive enterprises as an enforced condition of their charters, rather than paying them to sit on their hands and buy treasuries as we are doing now.

Comment Re:Discredited as predictive, NOT for accuracy (Score 1) 467

You might think so, and 50 generations seems awfully high (that's 10^15 50-g-grandparents, vs. 3.2billion base pairs or 23,000 genes), but due to the cohesiveness of tribes and nations you will get most of your ancestry even 50 generations back from a few hundred thousand to a few million people, with most of those related to you in billions of different ways. With Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA there is relatively little mixing, so a few ancestors 50 generations back will have very similar Y-chromosome or mitochondrial sequences to yours.

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