Several studies have showed already that monsanto has lied about for example how the herbicides are not taken up by our intenstines.

Why am I not surprised that this comes from an AC, with no links whatsoever to provide proof?

current GMO is not at all aimed at diversity.

No, it is not, THAT IS MY POINT. It cannot be when everyone is so afraid of GMO that they pile regulation on top of regulation.

In reality right now, each and every farmer could be exploring GMO in their own crops, bringing about a variety and diversity of food products the like of which the world has never seen.

The reason most farms do not avail themselves of this diversity is short-term thinking

No, it's because grafting is an incredibly slow and time consuming process that is done one plant at a time.

And for some crops there is very little diversity in natural crops to graft with, GMO opens up a far vaster range of possibilities.

Real competition, ending farm subsidies to millionaires/billionares

That is so hilarious when the regulations making GMO so hard are the reason the large companies own farming now! Only they can afford the tremendous costs to make GMO hybrids that work best in the field.

You (and the rest of the GMO alarmists) are the ones supporting Monsanto.

Right they obviously have that down to a T. But, the question is, do they pay royalties based on that information?

Based on ASCAP's info, I think the answer is no.

http://www.ascap.com/members/payment/keepingtrack.aspx

ASCAP only periodically (not continuously) polls radio stations. Then pays artists only if their songs were paid.

Yes, and they also have a vested interest in lying.

But the other companies don't have even that. Even if Apple is misleading in some respect, they are at least giving you SOMETHING. Other companies remain totally silent on worker care issues. They provide no documentation as to conditions. They impose no restrictions on companies they contract with for Assembly. Apple Does.

So even if Apple isn't doing some of it quite right, they are still vastly far ahead of other companies in trying to improve working conditions in China. Which is why if you actually cared about the Chinese, you'd be supporting Apple instead of attacking them.

Instead, you'll continue to use your non-Apple laptop and your non-Apple smartphone because you like them, totally ignoring the fact that the conditions they were made under are far worse than anything reported for Apple.

Myself, I have taken to buying some things like wireless routers from Apple that I used to purchase cheaper versions of before, because at least I have some idea of the conditions they are being manufactured under. Either you actually care or you don't, you can't just claim to care and then act as if the issue doesn't matter.

The hypocrisy here is just sickening.

Of course, those same condition would be illegal in the US

No they wouldn't. Hours worked, conditions worked in, all would be legal in the U.S. and in fact some workers here have it worse (farm workers for example).

They are still terrible condiions in china, report or no report.

But they are worse for all of the other companies except for Apple. because other companies are not even checking. That is my point. No matter how bad conditions of people working on Apple products are, they are X times worse for products from any other company.

Therefore if you actually care about chinese workers, you would buy either Apple products or no modern electronics at all (since pretty much nothing is assembled in the U.S.).

Obviously you and the original poster are not buying Apple products; therefore you do not ACTUALLY care about workers in China at all. You just hate Apple. Which is fine, but you really should admit that you actually don't care if Chinese workers live or die.

What the world needs to realize is that no pun intended, Apple is rotten to the core

Why?

Apple is the only technical company to actually provide reports on factory conditions, and impose worker limits on factories assembling for them.

If you think Apple is rotten, why are you not out complaining about EVERY other technical compan, which is far worse?

Whatever you are typing on was produced under worse conditions than Apple assembly workers face. The same is true of whatever display you are looking at, and the computer processing your words.

If you really meant what you said you would throw out everything and crawl into a forest. But you don't, you apply one standard to Apple and a far, far lower standard to every other company on earth.

Did you every stop to think that by demonizing the only company that is trying to improve worker conditions that you are actually screwing over the Chinese workers? If Apple went into a bug decline Chinese factories could go back to horrendous overtime and lower worker conditions as they pleased, because they would be back to working only for companies that did not care about how things were assembled...

"All the false reporting" was one nutjob who was confusing journalism with stage performance.

No it's not. It's tons of reports about factories in China that are talking generally about everything a factory works on, without distinguishing the parts that are actually having Apple products produced - because Apple has standards about worker treatment that few other companies have.

At Pegatron, over 10,000 underage and student workers (interns), from 16 to 20 years of age, work in crowded production rooms

Note they never claim those are places where Apple products are being worked on. It's easy to imaging that a factory would meet Apple's factory conditions in one facility but not in a building assembling products for other companies that don't impose standards for workers.

Just like with Daisy or Greenpeace or the other people that have made allegations about factories in China, they all attach the Apple name to get attention even if Apple is not involved. Daisy was not a "nutjob", he was just less careful than others doing the same thing.

From the very article in question, Apple says:

"However, Apple disputed those claims, saying that it had closely tracked working hours at all of these facilities."

Apple is in far better position to know what actual hours worked are than a third party group.

Actually, people have been claiming since the early days of unix (back in the 1970s) that root never has been "necessary". I've read a number of discussions triggered by such claims. They all reduce to the same conclusion: Yes, in a well-run computing environment, in which all vendors and users understood all the security issues and agreed on their solutions -- and implemented them all correctly -- the root id wouldn't be necessary. But we never have been anywhere near close to such an ideal. And until then, root is needed to cleanly fix the permission messes that our current practices so often produce.

I've been, uh, "discussing" an example of this on a web server where I'm the maintainer of one of the web sites. The site is actually replicated on my home machine and on another remote machine. I make changes on my home machine, then rsync the three machines when a change is working to my satisfaction. On the two remote machines, rsync has always produced a lot of bogus permission errors (while correctly copying the files). The reason is that some of the files are created by the web server, and are thus owned by the web server's id, not by mine. The code can enable world read/write permissions for everything, so the rsyncs all work. But due to the mismatch in ownership, rsync complains that it can't fix the permissions.

This is a problem for one important reason: Whenever the software gives such floods of bogus error messages, they bury the actual error messages, and teaches the users to ignore error messages (since all of them that you see are so bogus ;-). This isn't an ideal situation, if you want people to correctly spot problems and fix them.

It turns out that I can "fix" many of these problems if I spot them early enough. None of my login ids can fix them, since the logins don't match between the 3 machines and I don't have admin access to the others. But on my own machine, I can often use "sudo" to adjust permissions so that rsync won't produce so many bogus error messages. But I haven't stumbled across a way to fix them all.

I have occasionally persuaded (nicely ;-) an admin on one of the other machines to use a similar sudo to give me control of my own files, but they usually consider this a bother, and don't do it. I need to stay on good working terms with them, so I don't push it.

Anyway, I'd agree that root isn't, stricktly speaking, "necessary" right now. But it's often the least time-wasting solutions to all the annoying permission problems that typical machine setups produce. On a well-done server machine, owners of a web site would have group "www" permission, and could fix most such problems, but I don't think I've ever worked on a server that's run that way (except the servers that I run myself ;-). And so on.

I have an Android phone that at random times gives me what look like permission errors. I've investigated, but so far haven't found a solution other than rooting the gadget. I haven't actually done that, so once again, the machine's "security" setup is teaching me to ignore error messages, since they're usually sinkholes of time that I can't do anything about.

(I've never kept anything important on my phone for more than an hour or so, and treat it all as "transient" stuff that can disappear any second. I've occasionally worked on some apps, but tend to minimize testing on the phone itself due to the confusion of all the permission problems. Maybe this'll change some day. Or maybe I'll just stick with developing "apps" that run inside the browser, and continue with the mess that that "OS" is. ;-)

Its more complicated than that, from what I understand as a casual observer of the situation. Believe what I write at your own risk, this info is complied from bits of different stories covering the matter, and I may have forgotten parts, or not integrated it correctly together.

The terrestrial radio rates are higher, but they are paid out to less artists. They pay based on sampling a station during a time period, if an artists song was played, they get paid. If they were not played during the sampling time, but heavily played every other time, they wouldn't get a dime.

Pandora and the similar internet based streamers pay a lower rate per song play, but keep track of each song they pay. So they pay the lower rate, but to more people. Thus they end up paying more money, but less to popular artists.

Interested folk might want to dig up the archaeologists' writings on several events that are precedents for this story. The best documented case is the flooding of the Mediterranean basin, but that was about 5 million years ago, before humans exist. A similar event occurred about 8000 years ago, when rising sea waters broke through the Straight of Bosporus, and flooded the Black sea, which was lower due to lack of water sources during the earlier ice age. There is also some evidence for an ice-age drying up of the Red Sea, and a similar flood that filled it. There is weak evidence that this has happened multiple times in the Black and Red Seas, as the ice sheets expanded and retreated.

So the idea that this may happen again in the future is not especially radical; it's just a repeat of something that has happened repeatedly. If you live near the channel that fills the basin, it's probably pretty dramatic for the months or years that it takes. In other areas, it's just a slow rise of the sea, flooding out your homes.

So why do they want to enforce making it more expensive to have secure computers ?

Why only on computers ? why not a sales tax on for example plumbing ?
Cause everyone needs to take a dump so should be a profitable tax.

However since its only on standard software and open source is nonstandard
I'm gonna presume its just a tax on those selling Microsoft software admin services.

Just a reminder that the topic here is the possibility of backdoors being built into the hardware and/or software. So replacing something that breaks includes replacing any builtin backdoor with the latest, upgraded version. When dealing with such security issues, the operable mantra is always "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Saying that no backdoor has been demonstrated is not evidence that there is no backdoor. To satisfy even the minimally-competent security folks, they need a way of verifying that no backdoor exists.

Various people have already pointed out that "Made in USA" has slowly come to be read as a security warning in many parts of the world. This story isn't materially different from the Stuxnet story, or the Siberian pipeline explosion story. Yeah, we're talking about "Made in China" now, but the issue isn't materially different.

People are slowly waking up to the fact that computers are no longer just geek (and accountant ;-) toys; they are are now part of our infrastructure. Lives depend on the little things. If you want your electronic gadgets accepted in security-critical situations (e.g., hospitals or airplanes or autos), you will be expected to supply access to all the inner workings, down to the lowest level, so that the analysts can verify that you haven't slipped in something extra that you haven't told anyone about.

And security problems may not be the result of intentional tweaking. Remember all the fun we had reading and making up jokes about the Pentium floating-point problems? A computer processor that doesn't know how to do basic arithmetic properly is a serious "security" problem, too. If your life depends on the correct arithmetic in a hospital's equipment (or your future car's drive-by-wire controller), you should probably try to ensure that the geeks can get at it and verify that it knows how to do basic calculations correctly. We have good evidence that the manufacturers can't be relied on to get even such basic stuff right.

And how would that work, anyway? I don't have a privacy agreement with myself. I can tell the whole world all sorts of crazy stuff about myself without any recourse against me for doing it.

replace monocrop orchards with polyculture farms

The ironic thing if scare-mongerers like you were not drumming up fear of GMO foods, every orchard would probably have many different varieties of even a single crop, each with a different GMO variant to test out some new flavor or ability.

GMO fears are what is leading to monoculture, because you are blocking scientific progress on any possible changes that can be made to food crops.

"new and improperly tested food"

What the hell does that mean?

New GMO food is tested out the wazoo. Existing GMO food has been tested now by hundreds of millions of people with no ill effect.

The jury is in, has gone home, and written the tell-all book. GMO food is safe and it's madness not to support making food safer and healthier in this way.