I use virtualbox over vmware player for one main reason: nested VMs. one of the companies I worked for used nested vms (sigh) and vmware player would not work. kvm/qemu would, but its mgmt interface is 'difficult' to say the least.

btw, virtualbox is broken with 3.17 kernels and beyond. still no fix in sight that I've been able to find ;(

why don't you teach them how to do something fun like write a script that will make the computer play a tune of their own composition, or draw a picture.

neither of these are job skills... but it will open their imaginations to the concept of computer programming and representing sounds or geometric co-ordinates in numbers (which is the language of computers).

My point was all about what happens when the mosquitos are not as infertile as planned.

If some offspring survive that means that they didn't get the gene to kill them for some reason. Aka, they're just like wild populations. So.....?

If chemical companies are going to dump something into my backyard, I will scream and shout just as loud

Your back yard is full of the intentional products of chemical companies. Here we're talking about the intentional products of genetic engineering. You're trying to change the situation by comparing waste products with intentional products.

You seem to claim that people should just trust experts. I claim that experts should attempt to inform the public better, thereby earning their trust...

Sorry, but Joe Blow GED is never going to become an expert on genetic engineering. Ever. Period. And the same goes for the vast majority of the public.

So, rabbits that got released in Australia are the top predator? The Pampas grass in California is the top predator? I can make a long list of invasive species that are not the top predator and still influenced their ecosystem a lot

.

Got any examples that aren't introduced species? We're talking about reducing or eliminating species within an ecosystem, not adding new ones from totally different ecosystem. And part of the reason rabbits were so uncontrolled in Australia anyway was because settlers had killed off almost all of the top predators. One could easily imagine that, for example, tasmanian tigers would have quite enjoyed a rabbit feast. Dingo numbers were also shaply culled in the areas with the highest rabbit populations.

What happens if a small percentage don't?

Then they didn't get the gene to kill them. Your point?

That's because most physics and chemistry experiments don't breed and multiply.

Neither do infertile mosquitoes; your point?

They are talking about something that happens literally in their own backyard.

Really, you think there's no products of modern chemistry in your backyard?

They are right to do a risk assessment.

And there have been risk assessments done, by regulators, taking into account the scientific data. Risk assessments are not something for Joe Bloe and his GED who reads NaturalNews and thinks that "GMO mosquitoes" means that they're going to bite his children and spread a zombie plague.

Changing the balance in an ecosystem can have huge consequences.

Contrary to popular belief, changing the bottom of a food chain rarely has major consequences; it's the changing of the top of a food chain that tends to have the biggest consequences. The higher up the food chain you go, not only do you have more of a profound impact on the landscape (look at how radically, say, deer overpopulation transforms a whole ecosystem), but also the more species tend to be generalists rather than specialists. Generalists means the ability to switch more readily between food sources, meaning changes further down have little impact on them. But if you eliminate a top predator from an area, the consequences further down can be profound.

average user wont be able to, but many hobbiest users will.

once the code is done and an example circuit is created, its just copy and paste. hell, I'd do a sample just for grins. I find the whole idea WRONG to put limits in the code like this, so I'd be happy to write some sample code that will remap gps data on a serial line. but seriously, its not at all hard.

Guess what, you're that Joe Sixpack. They've successfully convinced you that it's not worth the effort of trying.

gps modules almost always use low speed serial (ttl) comms.

it would be trivial (50 lines of C code, maybe much much less) to have a cpu (even attiny) in the middle between the gps module and the rest of the brain. when the x,y values come back and its inside a 'nfz' it could easily be remapped (in simple ascii) to NOT be in nfz. perhaps if you are near a nfz, it would go into auto-offset mode and add a fixed x,y value so that it thinks its miles away. then you compensate for it at the ground level when you program its course.

would not be hard at all.

waste of time to try to disallow x,y values for things like this. anyone here who spent a few weeks on even a simple arduino could do this remapping in an afternoon.

*secure* is my big issue, these days. without security being well thought out, iot stuff can be a disaster. and I'm not seeing a lot of thought (not really) being put into the whole iot stuff, which worries me a lot.

snmp is a red herring. it won't ever be used for iot and doesn't make sense there, other than to manage the systems that hold the sensors. (speaking as a seasoned snmp guy who spent 25+ yrs doing snmp for lots of big co's).

one data point for you: in the Eiot stuff that I worked on (e = enterprise) we used 'usb sensors' (analog and digital sensors that went to an a/d dongle, then into usb, then into a usb-ip bridge of sorts). this feed power (poe) to the sensors using existing poe infra at big companies and you only have to have cat5 cables to get power and ip connectivity to your sensors.

iot is a superset and includes low-end stuff (for us consumers) and high-end stuff for industry; and when its for industry, its 'eiot'.

(ob disc: I spent some 25+ yrs in the SNMP field; now working in IoT, at least I was until my last gig finished)

snmp has absolutely zero to do with IoT. snmp is a good (...) netmgt protocol that is very lightweight, standard (well...) and has been around for a few decades. as you know, its poller-based, mostly, with traps there as accelerants to help pollers zoom in, faster, to any events worth knowing about. snmp sucks for streaming loads of data upwards and really has no mechanism for that. has no mechanism for filtering at its source or data compression for transport.

what you want for IoT is to have, essentially, endless streams of source data going thru 'smart filters' along the way (last place I was at, we used 'hacked routers' to do our smart filtering) and then getting to some analysis node. the node may just collect data or it may run some rules and decide if a 'talk back' is needed or some control/feedback loop to change something in the real world.

the 2 cases are really different. snmp is 'slow' and never EVER realtime (not even traps, technically) and is mostly poller based (req/response). IoT is 'transmit continuously' based and MUST have low latency and a reliable (tcp) transport for all its crucial data points.

sorry, but IoT is nothing - NOTHING - about cellphones or mobile data. those come from USERS. this is not about USER data. its about DEVICE data.

think 'sensors' and you will be headed in the right direction.