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| Authored by: Gringo_ on Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 07:22 PM EDT |
Pestilence has been a scourge since the dawn of the
agrarian revolution.
Rats in your corn silo? Now a thing of
the past thanks to Monsanto's new biological rat
control product. It rounds them up
and "kills them dead"
as the old Raid(*tm) commercials used to say, which I
suppose
means it deals them a double-death. Here are some photos of
rats that have been killed by
Monsanto's wonderful new
pestilence control. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Monsanto develop revolutionary new biological pest control - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 09:04 PM EDT
- OGM - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 10:16 PM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 09:10 AM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 09:50 AM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: albert on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 11:36 AM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: PJ on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 12:11 PM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 12:12 PM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 12:57 PM EDT
- Looking ahead... - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 01:04 PM EDT
- Looking ahead... - Authored by: PJ on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 02:25 PM EDT
- no - Authored by: designerfx on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 04:36 PM EDT
- Deceptive title masking anti-GM (genetically modified) crops agenda. - Authored by: albert on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 01:30 PM EDT
- I sense cynicism. Is that based on chemistry? Or perhaps religion? - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 01:33 PM EDT
- Mad Cow. - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 06:42 PM EDT
- Mad Cow. - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 23 2012 @ 02:25 PM EDT
- Mad Cow. - Authored by: Wol on Sunday, September 23 2012 @ 05:48 PM EDT
- Good use of GM - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 01:32 PM EDT
- not this again :( monsanto is bad but the evidence here is too - Authored by: designerfx on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 04:34 PM EDT
- Control of pests and vermin.... - Authored by: tiger99 on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 08:47 AM EDT
- Monsanto develop revolutionary new PURPLE HAIR COLOR - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 23 2012 @ 08:23 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 08:41 PM EDT |
| The Swiss Federal Railway (SBB) told one of the country's newspapers,
Tages-Anzeiger, that the new clock icon within iOS 6 on the iPad (left) violates
the railway's clock trademark.
Apple Accused of
Ripping Off Swiss Clock Design in iOS [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 09:10 PM EDT |
CIRA Election Opens Today: I Need Your Support to Help Bring the
Public Interest Back to CIRA
The Canadian Internet Registration
Authority, which manages the dot-ca domain, opens its board of directors
election at noon ET today. CIRA members are eligible to vote from September
19th until September 26th, with five seats at stake - two member-nominated seats
and three nominating-committee seats.
Michael Geist[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 11:57 PM EDT |
There are a couple of newspicks stories about the US Patent Office planning
to "crowd source" prior art patent reviews.
Patent Office tries "Stack Overflow for
patents" to find prior art.
Thanks to Cool New Crowd-Sourcing
Website, Now You Can Help Prevent Bogus Patents.
Personally, I don't see
this as necessarily a positive development. I have brought it up here as "off
topic" as what I have to say is somewhat peripheral to the stories themselves.
I've looked at "Stack Overflow" (or "Stack Exchange") to research
programming problems, but I'm not very impressed with it. One problem is that
there seems to be a lot of misinformation. Fairly often, poor or simply wrong
answers get voted up, while the correct (or at least better) answer gets voted
down. What seems to happen is that the "mob" follows the popular answer rather
than the correct one.
The bigger problem though is that Stack
Overflow/Exchange seems to depend quite heavily on editors or moderators who
know nothing, but wield their power to ban posters, delete posts, or close
questions that they don't personally agree with. Being right about something is
no help, indeed it can simply make matters worse as the moderator may feel the
need to assert his power to avoid losing face. A "good" moderator can help keep
the site on focus, but a bad one can simply be obstructive. The software itself
isn't magic, a lot of what the site really does revolves around what the
moderators do behind the scenes.
So what does this have to do with the
US Patent Office? Well, they place to use the same (or similar) software to try
to manage public comment on patents. However, as I said above the software isn't
self managing. People need to make inputs. What I see as the potential problems
are:
Sock Puppets
Every popular public forum has
a problem with sock puppets. People will register multiple accounts to vote
their own posts up or vote posts they don't like down. For example Slashdot has
a serious sock puppet problem now with PR companies who use multiple accounts to
kill discussions they don't like. They'll also do things like have first post
with prepared statements on any topic their customers pay them to monitor. A
story on Microsoft will get a first post extolling the virtues of Microsoft,
while one on Google will have a virulent attack on Google. The post will be
carefully written, spell and grammar checked, and posted withing milli-seconds
of the story going live. If the discussion doesn't go well for the sock puppets,
then "coincidentally" loads of racial abuse will appear which will simply drive
people away from that thread.
So, we can expect PR consultants to
register hundreds of sock puppet accounts with the US Patent Office's site,
which they will use to try to dominate any discussion. They can afford to do
this, as it would be a full time job for them, while "normal" people can only do
this in their spare time.
Control the
Moderators
As I mentioned above, the Stack Overflow/Exchange
system depends heavily on the moderators/editors. If they don't like you, your
answers or questions get binned as being "off topic" (or some other reason).
We've also seen how Wikipedia can be highjacked by paid PR consultants. If a
moderator has an agenda, then dissenting voices are simply removed or
"acceptable" answers are heavily constricted as to what they can say.
If a company or group of companies can control the moderation, or at
least set the rules of the moderation, they can control the discussion. It's
just like getting your opponent's evidence excluded from a court case. You don't
have to disprove a point of you can simply get the point banned from the
discussion. You don't even have to directly control the moderator if you can get
a set of rules imposed on them which allows you to mercilessly complain to their
boss about "unfairness" until they get the message and go along with you in
order to have an easy life and meet their work quotas.
Worse
than Useless?
If the "crowd sourcing" effort were to be simply
useless, it wouldn't be much of a problem (aside from the expense). If instead
it gets highjacked, then it could be positively harmful. The patent trolls could
take control of it and use the manufactured answers as "proof" of their point of
view. Keep in mind that what for you might be an occasional hobby is for them a
full time career.
I don't know that this new crowd sourcing effort
will turn out badly. But I think it would be foolish to leap in assuming that it
won't. Patent trolls aren't going to go away as long as their is loads of money
at stake. They'll simply view this as a new forum in which to do battle.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 04:02 AM EDT |
Swartz is accused of writing a program that
began
automatically
scraping JSTOR’s 38 million pages of text, one
at a time, and dumping them onto
a removal hard drive hooked
up to an Acer laptop that Swartz allegedly hid in
an MIT
library closet. He allegedly returned to the library
periodically to
switch full hard drives with empty ones,
covering his face with his bike helmet
as he passed
surveillance cameras.
Why might he have done
this?
Jesse Brown, Macleans
---
[.PDF]
indictment wired.com
---
more from
wired [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: mcinsand on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 11:41 AM EDT |
| There are two off-topics that I think are worth mentioning. Humble Bundle 6 is
out and the games are worth it, especially at $5-10 for the bundle. If you
have the cash to spare, it is also a way to continue the momentum. These
bundles have played a significant role in getting the gaming industry to start
taking us in the FOSS community seriously.
As for those of us that sometimes
use non-FOSS out of whatever necessity (or laziness), Codeweavers has a new
voter encouragement promotion. If you want a few minutes' of entertainment,
watch the video and read the press release at the Flock the Vote webpage."
Better yet, pledge to vote, if you're a US citizen.
As for the video, I love
the phrase 'because nobody lies on the internet.'
Although both the Crossover
software and some of the games are non-free and have some non-free blobs, I do
like that they both show an interest in supporting Linux.
Regards,
mc
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 12:35 PM EDT |
Over cornered rectangles in a round.
You have to wonder why Apple did not
pay the license fee over the clock.
This is going to cost Apple more in legal
costs than the license, not to mention
the bad publicity.
---
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: squib on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 01:05 PM EDT |
I recently told apple to go and stuff it and cancelled my email subscription
with them.
I just received this (unsolicited) email:
Dear
Member,
It has come to our attention that your account Billing Information
records are out of date. That requires you to update your Billing Information.
Failure to update your records will result in account termination.
Please
update your records within 24 hours. Once you have updated your account records,
your account session will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
Failure to update will result in cancellation of service, Terms of Service (TOS)
violations or future billing problems.
Click on the reference link below and
enter your login information on the following page to confirm your Billing
Information records...
please go to http://store.apple.com to confirm your
Billing Information records.
Thanks,
Apple Customer Support
How
would a blancmange-headed 14 year old (41 yr old?) apple users react to
that?
It has come to our attention ... blah
blah
That requires you... blah blah
Failure to update will result in cancellation of
service, Terms of Service (TOS) violations or future billing problems. Blah blah
blah!
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: kawabago on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 03:48 PM EDT |
Am I alone in thinking hover click is dangerous? It seems to
me that it is quite conceivable that a link to kiddie porn
could be included in results to an otherwise innocuous
search. It is also quite conceivable that this link might
just happen to be displayed under the current mouse position.
Hover click would take you to that site and suddenly you have
committed a felony and will be labeled a child sex predator.
There seems to be no way to turn off hover click. Am I
correct in my fears? Is it plausible that this could happen?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 04:45 PM EDT |
The CBC has posted a story
Bytes of Apple starting to taste a little off about Apple's image starting
to decay.
Remember when Apple was the cool dude and
Microsoft's PC was the pudgy guy stuck in the box?
When a
story starts off with "remember when", the story is about "no longer is". It's
not a pro-Microsoft piece either.
It is easy to forget that
some 20 years before, Microsoft had started off as an underdog. Skinny kid Bill
Gates tricked the reigning tech giant, IBM by hanging onto rights for software
that he realized was more important than the computers that ran it.
Of
course by 2000 Microsoft had superceded IBM as the new evil tech giant with its
products in every office and home. And with hugeness came
abuse.
The story instead is about how Apple is losing
their "cool".
It may be churlish to say in the midst of
today's latest Apple frenzy, with lineups stretching back for its iPhone 5,
predicted to sell 10 million units in its first week and 50 million within three
months, but today, I sense the worm has turned.
And the
Samsung story was part of it.
But the feeling grew during
the patent battle with Samsung. It won, but stories of how it was insisting it
had patented the rectangle with rounded corners left a new smell in the room.
Not so cool.
The article points out how in the past, big
companies have always grown, stagnated, and declined. Why would Apple be any
different?
What is it that makes great companies shrink? It
is not absolutely clear.
Hubris — altering a product in a way that
looks inconsiderate of loyal customers like the new apple port? Fear of
undercutting its own product with disruptive technology? (...)
Apple is
still riding high, but for the first time, the company feels like a real apple
that has reached its peak of crisp perfection; its fragrance contains the first
sweet whiff of decay.
There's a lot more background to
the argument in the story. It's well worth a good read. What I find particularly
significant about this story is that it's not in a tech journal. It's in a large
mainstream media web site associated with a television network. Have a look for
yourself.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 12:21 AM EDT |
| Link
---
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- go patent troll - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 23 2012 @ 08:27 AM EDT
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| Authored by: SilverWave on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 02:28 AM EDT |
| "What happens if you combine liquid nitrogen with 1,500 ping-pong
balls?" ---
RMS: The 4 Freedoms
0 run the program for any purpose
1 study the source code and change it
2 make copies and distribute them
3 publish modified versions
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 09:15 AM EDT |
| "We will continue to enforce injunctions against Motorola products in Germany
and hope Motorola will join other Android device makers by taking a license to
Microsoft’s patented inventions"
link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 03:08 PM EDT |
"Federal judge says no constitutional right
to secret ballot in Boulder case"
[Denver U.S. District Judge
Christine] Arguello said activists had not shown the plaintiffs had suffered or
would suffer any specific injury that could be remedied by a federal court. She
said that even if a ballot could be traced back to a specific voter, it doesn't
show that a person's voting rights were violated, saying there was no
"fundamental right" to a secret vote in the U.S. Constitution. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 05:00 PM EDT |
arstechnica reports, "Apple demands $707 million in additional
damages from Samsung"
Late Friday night, Apple filed a motion
with the Northern California District Court requesting an addition $707
million in damages on top of the more than $1 billion that it was originally
awarded by a jury earlier this summer.
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