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Comment Wha? (Score 4, Informative) 32

The summary seems to think that Alibaba filing for an IPO in the US means that it must be opening operations in the US...actually it just filed in IPO in the US because it's a very large company and China's stock markets are sort of a joke, not really set up for a company of Alibaba's size...

You're already easily able to use alibaba.com in the US. It's kind of cool especially if you want to open your own stall at a flea market. I used taobao.com in China, it's like eBay with better consumer protection. Competing with eBay would take a massive marketing push to build up an entirely new business, basically. What makes taobao.com interesting is all the smaller specialty shops, there's a million logistical reasons why them selling directly from these Chinese shops to US customers would be a total nightmare, the language barrier being the most obvious.

Comment Re:Shame this happened (Score 5, Informative) 136

It doesn't *have* to be done. There's a gigantic number of seeds which are commercially available already, there's many government and private organizations safeguarding these seeds, and the amount of patented seeds is comparatively insignificant. In addition, modern farming operations don't save seeds for future crops.

In fact, the basic idea behind Monsanto controlling the seed supply has been standard industry practice for 50+ years. Most vegetables commercially grown are F1 hybrids. In 1960, 99% of corn grown was an F1 hybrid. If you buy a Better Boy Tomato, an F1 hybrid also popular for home gardening, there will be little variation between the plants grown. However, the seed from these plants will be unusable. Peas and beans pollinate their own flowers, so for these plants such a strategy isn't practical. However, that doesn't mean the death of the species - even if most commercially grown tomatoes are F1 hybrids where the seeds are unusable, of course there's still a million variety of tomatoes which may be planted from seed (with a little care) and are easily available.

This is a symbolic marketing/propaganda move against Monsanto. Monsanto developed a soybean that is invulnerable to the safe, cheap, and environmentally benign herbicide Round-Up. They sell seeds with a contract stipulation that the seeds not be re-sown (again, normal farming practice is to buy all seed anyway), and won a lawsuit against a farmer who intentionally grow a Monsanto crop without paying Monsanto- he would buy the Monsanto crop for the first planting of the year, and use saved seed for the second planting of the year.

This group imagines that it's hard to find seeds that aren't patented, or at least that it will be in the future, to make some point that you shouldn't be allowed to patent seeds because think of how horrible it would be if you needed to deal with Monsanto to plant a carrot. However, if that future does come to pass, this wouldn't really help - you'd need something with the infrastructure to supply huge amounts of seeds, not just supply fun little seed packets to home gardeners.

Comment Re:Partial statistics (Score 1) 118

Right now, the three most pirated games on piratebay are goatsimulator, Minecraft, and Sims 3. Goat Simulator is $10 off steam (very easy), Sims3 is $20 off steam (very easy) Minecraft is any easy purchase as well. What do you want, it's $1 and they mail the DVD to your house on a silk pillowcase?

Comment Re:Partial statistics (Score 1) 118

People are willing to spend $2000 on a gaming PC and then will pirate a $30 piece of software, so obviously these are people who are willing to pay for games on some level...the idea that nobody pirates as an alternative to buying strikes me as ludicrous, because the people who are most into piracy today are the sort of people who spent all their money on computer games a decade ago.

And it's believable to me that if all "Game of Thrones" torrents became unavailable, more than a few people would be motivated to subscribe to HBO.

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