My Energy Is Alternative

[General Patton]

You probably haven't heard of it before.

Also, how do you see the concept of genetic drift as relevant here? Are you thinking people are just getting worse by the generation?

Negative, Flynn effect has signaled the opposite. Partially because of nutrition, but things are generally getting better.

Genetic Drift was a reference to GMOs, plants exchanges genes already. Though obviously taking control over the process requires a tad more responsibility. It's a step up from the careful cultivation of wheat over centuries.

I hope you realize that at least by giving these two examples, you are contrasting 1) a long wave of violent incidents against abortion providers coming out of a substantial popular movement that is well-financed from top-level political machers and fundamentalists as a means of mobilizing millions of voters and church-goers; with 2) an attempted assassination by a single gunman who is possibly the only member of the "group" that sent the letter claiming credit for it as an "anarchist," in other words someone like the Unabomber, assuming of course that the real background for this anonymous attack was not something else altogether.

I pulled a muscle in my arm chopping wood, too lazy to dig up more. There is also a pattern of randomness and power laws in terrorism:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0605035
http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0724

Both journal articles are free.

Do you have to know how a light-water reactor or passive safety standards work to understand that all current practical nuclear power plants produce waste products that cannot be safely stored anywhere in the long run? Or that the costs of inevitable catastrophes (given enough time) are unacceptably high? Or that there are workable renewable alternatives (as well as efficiencies and reductions of consumption) that still aren't being pursued with sufficient investment, and that could replace the entire energy system within a few decades? Also, for example, do you have to know how an atomic bomb works to know that the historic as well as present stockpiles and continuing development of nuclear weapons systems are a high irrationality? (Einstein was a ban-the-bomb man, too.)

Actual energy extracted from Uranium cycles vary. Remember that most of the current running designs are generation 2 plants, very few countries have built 3's or 3+'s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GenIVRoadmap.jpg

That means you're running off of designs dating back to the late 1960's in most cases. Many of the plants that are still running should be cycled down as they have passed their original commission date. In order to keep them running you have to do more and more maintenance to keep it functioning, whereas it would be better just to build a new one. However, it's doubly worse when no one updates the technology at all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Investigation_Committee_on_the_Accident_at_the_Fukushima_Nuclear_Power_Stations_of_Tokyo_Electric_Power_Company
The determination of the causes of the accident that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi and Daini Nuclear Power Stations of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and those of the damages generated by the accident, and thereby making policy proposals designed to prevent the expansion of the damages and the recurrence of similar accidents in the future was the purpose of the Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations (ICANPS).[194] The 10 member,[195] government-appointed panel included scholars, journalists, lawyers and engineers,[196] was supported by public prosecutors and government experts[197] and released its final, 448-pages[198] investigation report on 23 July 2012.[30][199]

The panel interviewed 772 people,[198] including plant workers, government officials and evacuees,[200] for a total of nearly 1,479 hearing hours.[198] Its report was the fourth investigation into the crisis after the earlier release of a Diet study, a private report by journalists and academics as well as an investigation by TEPCO.[201] The panel said the government and TEPCO failed to prevent the disaster not because a large tsunami was unanticipated, but because they were reluctant to invest time, effort and money in protecting against a natural disaster considered unlikely.[200] "The utility and regulatory bodies were overly confident that events beyond the scope of their assumptions would not occur . . . and were not aware that measures to avoid the worst situation were actually full of holes," the government panel said in its final report.[202] The panel's report faulted an inadequate legal system for nuclear crisis management, a crisis-command disarray caused by the government and Tepco, and possible excess meddling on the part of the prime minister's office in the early stage of the crisis.[203] The panel concluded that a culture of complacency about nuclear safety and poor crisis management led to the nuclear disaster.[195]

The current once-through cycle in Pressured Water Reactors(PWR) is extremely wasteful, they have about .7-1.2% energy efficiency. France has an in-house system set-up to squeeze more out by recycling the fuel, though this is still far from ideal. Another important part of waste is how it is transmitted in the event of a leak, a favorite design I've heard of use's lithium-beryllium fluoride salt, which in the event of a reactor breach would harden, expand and all of the radioactive material would be trapped inside of the salt (the material is water insoluble). The salt itself is still radioactive but won't travel and disperse into the environment easily as other potential breaches. Newer designs can also scale much smaller, down to the being portable on a semi-trailer.

Here's an MIT Study that is relevant:
http://mitei.mit.edu/system/files/The_N ... cle-10.pdf

It mentions different reactor types, as well as a uranium-thorium hybrid using a closed source cycle. Optimistic predictions put it at around 100% unity with a closed fuel cycle, more realistically it may be as low as 50%. Which is quite a bit better than .7-1.5%. Storage times vary - remember that isotopes with longer half-life's emit less energy (radiation).

The passive safety features have everything to do with it. An active safety feature requires the intervention of the operator and usually electrical power as well. A passive one does not require either. Very important difference for safety purposes. Also important is what atmosphere of pressure the system is running at, PWR's are high-pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
Passive nuclear safety is a safety feature of a nuclear reactor that does not require operator actions or electronic feedback in order to shut down safely in the event of a particular type of emergency (usually overheating resulting from a loss of coolant or loss of coolant flow). Such reactors tend to rely more on the engineering of components such that their predicted behaviour according to known laws of physics would slow, rather than accelerate, the nuclear reaction in such circumstances. This is in contrast to some older reactor designs, where the natural tendency for the reaction was to accelerate rapidly from increased temperatures, such that either electronic feedback or operator triggered intervention was necessary to prevent damage to the reactor.

Also, nuclear power isn't limited to right wing types. The only reactor in the world operated by undergrads is in Reed college, which has the amusing motto of "Communism, Atheism, Free Love"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Coll ... d_folklore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Research_Reactor

For alternative energy - it varies. Germany is leading adoption in Solar and doing good in Wind as well, last time I checked they also clocked in at the second highest price in Europe for electricity prices. Several companies have gone out of business, foundries for instance, because of the irregularity of power. It's damages industrial machinery if you cut or reduce power too quickly. Power grids never react well to having variable inputs. The big advantage for Solar is it's simplicity, set-up and maintenance can be simpler than working with a nuclear reactor.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 50419.html
Workers had to free half-finished aluminum rolls from the machines, and several hours passed before they could be restarted. The damage to the machines cost some €10,000 ($12,300).
In the following three weeks, the voltage weakened at the Hamburg factory two more times, each time for a fraction of second. Since the machines were on a production break both times, there was no damage. Still, the company invested €150,000 to set up its own emergency power supply, using batteries, to protect itself from future damages.

"It could have affected us again in the middle of production and even led to a fire," said plant manager Axel Brand. "That would have been really expensive."

They've also passed many laws relating to energy efficiency in industry, see report:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=ca ... bYRdesYF9Q

German industry is important because it's the only thing that can keep the EU running, if Germany falls the union will fail.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/2 ... FI20120526
Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs.

“Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,” Allnoch told Reuters. “Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.”

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

The text doesn’t mention that for the overall 24h period Saturday May 26, it produced a total of 20% of Germany’s power needs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_pow ... y#Overview

Weather for Berlin on Friday & Saturday shows it was very sunny the entire 2 day stretch. Below is a graph of the average hours of sunshine in Berlin, which shows that May is the absolute highest month for average sun hours.



Solar Cutting Edge:


EU Power Prices 2009-2011:

http://www.thelocal.de/national/2012021 ... SVNiqUsee4
The Berliner Zeitung reported on Thursday that it had obtained a letter sent by the government’s electricity regulator to the dealers responsible. It describes how since February 6, “substantial undersupply for several hours was recorded,” which raised “significant concerns” about the grid's stability.

With the system running on its emergency supply, any serious problem could have immediately led to blackouts across Germany.

Matthias Kurth, president of the regulator confirmed the letter had been sent and that an investigation had been launched. He said it had not been proven that the companies acted out of greed. “We will carefully check how it came to this unusual situation in the electricity network, and report on it,” he said.

Over 2 decades, with the curve it's on, we will definitely see some improvement. There are other alternative forms of power that might be more promising in the near future, solar thermal/geothermal for instance.

I still have hundreds of designs of supposed "free energy devices", whenever I have time in the next few years I'll get around to dicking with them, a vague intuition suggests it could lead to faster than light travel by skimming through dimensions. Or more likely none of the shit will work.

[General Patton]

Truths such as?

Erm, truths as in investigation into areas of research.

GMO - Whenever a study comes along that shows cancer causing agents in a GMO, it gets press. Whenever things are business as usual, no press. Sometime in this decade it will be feasible for people to manipulate the genes in their own seeds.

Nuclear Power - Protesting and delaying the building of newer designs even when they might have passive safety features, closed fuel cycles (instead of the wasteful once-through cycle), known to occasionally begin foaming at the mouth at the mention of the word nuclear.

Climate Science - Triumph of the simpler model - when you have less data simpler models will predict better, but with limited precision. This ass-pain's conservatives more than libs in general.

Alternative Energy - In cases where it could possible disrupt the natural habitat.

Genetics - Unofficially, PC has prevented has limited investigation into role of genetics in intelligence. Though that won't stop the Chinese.

General, I love love love your contributions! (Please read that at face value, it's true.)

You're not so bad yourself.

[JackRiddler]

You win. You really dig up great stuff.

As for per-se responses to your many points, I'll say now only that the idea that Germany's growth is driving whatever action there is in the stagnating EU is one perspective. The other perspective is that Germany's growth is coming at the expense of the rest, that their GDP growth is a function of the others' decline in GDP, since under the euro especially the SPIGI (my preferred acronym, politically correct if you will) have been deprived of the currency devaluation option and thus forced into an exports cage match to the death with the German bear. Where do you think the DM would go today if it still existed and floated freely relative to an EU-13 euro? Notwithstanding, they are intelligently absorbing higher energy costs in part to subsidize a growing solar and wind sector and also to step out of nuclear, both worth it in the long term.

Okay, one more. The difference between conventional breeding toward a desired result, like Borlaug, and the ability to mix and match genes immediately is a qualitative and quantitative leap. Like a nuclear revolution. Notwithstanding, I'm not up on the GMO science, other than that it seems an area ripe for unforeseen consequences. it's the economics I think are easy to understand, and pretty odious. Monsanto and Co. patenting seeds and successfully suing farmers into bankruptcy because their crops acquire the same genes unintentionally through pollination. They are working to have farmers everywhere forced by law to pay royalties on every planting, establishing permanent rentier income for these corporations out of the hides of peasants. (And the very idea of terminator seeds, even if it's been suspended, reveals a very deep will to commit evil for profit.) Also, the global GMO sales drive that advertises GMOs as the solution to hunger and thus obscures and suppresses the real causes of hunger - enough food is being produced (in calories, at least) in almost every country to feed the people. The failure to do so is economic, a function of producing commodities for world markets before guaranteeing local and national food self-sufficiency.

[General Patton]

Where do you think the DM would go today if it still existed and floated freely relative to an EU-13 euro? Notwithstanding, they are intelligently absorbing higher energy costs in part to subsidize a growing solar and wind sector and also to step out of nuclear, both worth it in the long term.

Yes, but there are problems that come with trying to jump in before the time is ripe. Like the diesel engines they need to keep the turbines moving.

In the long term I think most of the Euro countries, including Germany, are thinking too small. Their strategy maximizes consistency and safety, rather than trying to take very large gains while ensuring security. That's good if you want work-life balance, not so good if you have a lot of ambition.

enough food is being produced (in calories, at least) in almost every country to feed the people. The failure to do so is economic, a function of producing commodities for world markets before guaranteeing local and national food self-sufficiency.

I think the long term part that's interesting is more about altering the qualities of the food. e.g. more vitamins, protein along with other qualities. It's very difficult going through all of the data so we need better AI tech to assist with it.

Food shortages as they exist are political and distribution problems more than anything else.

We see that in Africa quite a lot:
http://www.transparency.org/files/conte ... yStudy.pdf

As drone tech becomes more advanced it will help the 1/7 of the world that lacks access to reliable roads.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Do you see any cognitive enhancement technologies coming that could accelerate the human cognition part of the day trading / market making / arbitrage spotting processes of global finance?

[General Patton]

Do you see any cognitive enhancement technologies coming that could accelerate the human cognition part of the day trading / market making / arbitrage spotting processes of global finance?

tDCS is the most obvious one. I've been on an interesting mailing list called "Meatlocker/Grind DC", they've been trying to work out an implant for tDCS. They already have a variable current dual channel (multiple electrodes) system. Newer prototypes should be more programmable. Long term goal is to harness savant capabilities with the capability of controlling brain activity. I've seen simple examples that allowed people to learn the piano much faster with an anode at m1. Object recognition, currently being tested for snipers, would also be useful for spotting micro-trends. Brodmann area 5 and 7 looks like a good place to start.

https://groups.google.com/a/hacdc.org/f ... jC0zKhAVQY

DARPA is using a slightly more complex set-up, with varying numbers/sizes of anodes and cathodes, sometimes creating ensembles that deactivate parts of the brain rather than stimulating them.

http://colonyofcommodus.files.wordpress ... kinley.pdf

3d displays are coming out, still waiting to see how that will change how we interact with lots of data.

Machine learning is pretty popular as well:
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advan ... algorithms

There isn't much else that I've found so far. Biohacking still needs more time to mature.

[JackRiddler]

So, Gen. P, I've been wondering, who are you? Do you prefer not to say? What is/are your main professional activity(-ies)?

[General Patton]

So, Gen. P, I've been wondering, who are you? Do you prefer not to say? What is/are your main professional activity(-ies)?

Early 20's, self-taught at home from age 7 up, created knowledge threads 1-3 on TOTSE:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10626424/tots ... e-thread-1

I was involved in some local meditation groups and planned on having a career in the military until I decided to do other things with my life.

Recently I've risen and held the #1 Analyst RP spot on GlobalCrowd in spite of not being one of the first 500 analysts and being 8 "XP" levels lower than the 2nd place person when I captured the spot.



Dabbled in Python, BackTrack Linux, internet advertising and small scale entrepreneurship.

[General Patton]

Do you see any cognitive enhancement technologies coming that could accelerate the human cognition part of the day trading / market making / arbitrage spotting processes of global finance?

While we're on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
CALO was an artificial intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive assistant. CALO is an acronym for "Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes". The name was inspired by the Latin word "calonis," which means "soldier’s servant". The project started in May 2003 and ran for five years, ending in 2008.

The CALO effort has had two major spin-offs, the Siri intelligent software assistant that is now part of the Apple iOS since iOS 5 in the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod Touch 5 and the New iPad, and the Trapit project, a web scraper that makes intelligent selections of web content based on user preferences.
Contents

CALO assists its user with six high-level functions:

Organizing and Prioritizing Information: As the user works with email, appointments, web pages, files, and so forth, CALO uses machine learning algorithms to build a queryable model of who works on which projects, what role they play, how important they are, how documents and deliverables are related to this, etc.

Preparing Information Artifacts: CALO can help its user put together new documents such as PowerPoint presentations, leveraging learning about structure and content from previous documents accessed in the past.[2]

Mediating Human Communications: CALO provides assistance as its user interacts with other people, both in electronic forums (e.g. email) and in physical meetings. If given access to participate in a meeting, CALO automatically generates a meeting transcript, tracks action item assignments, detects roles of participants, and so forth. CALO can also put together a "PrepPak" for a meeting containing information to read ahead of time or have at your fingertips as the meeting progresses.

Task Management: CALO can automate routine tasks for you (e.g. travel authorizations), and can be taught new procedures and task by observing and interacting with the user.

Scheduling and Reasoning in Time: CALO can learn your preferences for when you need things done by, and help you manage your busy schedule (PTIME[3] published in ACM TIST[4]).
Resource allocation: As part of Task management, CALO can learn to acquire new resources (electronic services and real-world people) to help get a job done.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/02/08/ibms-watson-gets-its-first-piece-of-business-in-healthcare/
IBM‘s Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer that scored one for Team Robot Overlord two years ago, just put out its shingle as a doctor or, more specifically, as a combination lung cancer specialist and expert in the arcane branch of health insurance known as utilization management. Thanks to a business partnership among IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint, health care providers will now be able to tap Watson’s expertise in deciding how to treat patients.

Pricing was not disclosed, but hospitals and health care networks who sign up will be able to buy or rent Watson’s advice from the cloud or their own server. Over the past two years, IBM’s researchers have shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza-box-sized server that can fit in any data center. And they improved its processing speed by 240%. Now what was once was a fun computer-science experiment in natural language processing is becoming a real business for IBM and Wellpoint, which is the exclusive reseller of the technology for now. Initial customers include WestMed Practice Partners and the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine & Blood Disorders.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/myde ... b3?lang=en
"When Watson is booted up, the 15TB of total RAM are loaded up, and thereafter the DeepQA processing is all done from memory. According to IBM Research, the actual size of the data (analyzed and indexed text, knowledge bases, etc.) used for candidate answer generation and evidence evaluation is under 1 Terabyte (TB). For performance reasons, various subsets of the data are replicated in RAM on different functional groups of cluster nodes. The entire system is self-contained, Watson is NOT going to the internet searching for answers."

Sensor nets are still some time away, quoting Gartner Research:


When you add new types of sensory inputs, you dramatically increase the softwares ability to gather and understand trends. So ensuring that you and your assistant AI have access to public and private sensors, as well as databases, will effect the ability to deal with trends as well.

[JackRiddler]

I'm very impressed with your mini-resume. Self-taught and early 20s, a prodigy. Sounds like you will be very scary at age 30. Now I'll have to visit the GlobalCrowd site sometime and see for myself.

[JackRiddler]

The problem is not in techologies per se (as with drones, for which you find a potentially good function above) but in the systemic choices about which technologies are advanced for development, in the way they are developed, and the way they are used. As long as the system is primed for maximizing profit for those who run it (for exploiting the labor, maximizing monetary return per unit of cost, and blocking their competitors), things can't go well. Technologies with massive liberatory potentials will still be kept from realizing those potentials except insofar as they can be enclosed and channeled for private profit, or (in the case of the surveillance and force realms) turned into pure evil. And big-picture approaches become impossible because each private interest looks only after its own, so for example no energy industry is going to say, "Hey that other form of energy over there is more sustainable and potentially cheaper down the line, forget about us and invest in that." And no one voluntarily steps down from their own standard to favor a rationalization of standards.

Or this NYT article - which is exactly what I was talking about above, about how it doesn't matter if there are potential goods to come out of GMOs, or if they're essentially harmless (an unknown unknown, I dare say), as long as all-out predators like Monsanto are in charge of developments. And in the following article note the odious rhetoric in which the practices of farmers for thousands of years, the tools by which humans have survived since the advent of agricultural, are somehow portrayed as an exotic new challenge to the established and legitimate patents of Monsanto on life as if it invented it. Note how the farmer plaintiff is briefly introduced at the start as a folksy, colorful guy, without any indication of what his argument is, and then count for how many paragraphs Monsanto and its indirect spokespeople get to speak before the farmer's argument is mentioned. Then see how the software giants -- whose fortunes originated from privatized versions of originally public software -- find a way to step into this.

I mean seriously, just that headline. It tells you exactly whose interest the Times considers interesting. "At-Risk Farmers Seek Court Relief From Monsanto Seed-Rent Grab" would have been no more colored, just closer to the truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/busin ... -case.html

The New York Times

February 15, 2013
Farmer’s Supreme Court Challenge Puts Monsanto Patents at Risk

By ANDREW POLLACK

With his mere 300 acres of soybeans, corn and wheat, Vernon Hugh Bowman said, “I’m not even big enough to be called a farmer.”

Yet the 75-year-old farmer from southwestern Indiana will face off Tuesday against the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto, in a Supreme Court case that could have a huge impact on the future of genetically modified crops, and also affect other fields from medical research to software.

At stake in Mr. Bowman’s case is whether patents on seeds — or other things that can self-replicate — extend beyond the first generation of the products.

It is one of two cases before the Supreme Court related to the patenting of living organisms, a practice that has helped give rise to the biotechnology industry but which critics have long considered immoral. The other case, involving a breast cancer risk test from Myriad Genetics, will determine whether human genes can be patented. It is scheduled to be heard April 15.

Monsanto says that a victory for Mr. Bowman would allow farmers to essentially save seeds from one year’s crop to plant the next year, eviscerating patent protection. In Mr. Bowman’s part of Indiana, it says, a single acre of soybeans can produce enough seeds to plant 26 acres the next year.

Such a ruling would “devastate innovation in biotechnology,” the company wrote in its brief. “Investors are unlikely to make such investments if they cannot prevent purchasers of living organisms containing their invention from using them to produce unlimited copies.”

The decision might also apply to live vaccines, cell lines and DNA used for research or medical treatment, and some types of nanotechnology.

Many organizations have filed briefs in support of Monsanto’s position — universities worried about incentives for research, makers of laboratory instruments and some big farmer groups like the American Soybean Association, which say seed patents have spurred crop improvements. The Justice Department is also supporting Monsanto’s argument.

BSA/The Software Alliance, which represents companies like Apple and Microsoft, said in a brief that a decision against Monsanto might “facilitate software piracy on a broad scale” because software can be easily replicated. But it also said that a decision that goes too far the other way could make nuisance software patent infringement lawsuits too easy to file.

Some critics of biotechnology say that a victory for Mr. Bowman could weaken what they see as a stranglehold that Monsanto and some other big biotech companies have over farmers, which they say has led to rising seed prices and the lack of high-yielding varieties that are not genetically engineered.

Patents have “given seed companies enormous power, and it’s come at the detriment of farmers,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, which was an author of a brief on the side of Mr. Bowman. “Seed-saving would act as a much needed restraint on skyrocketing biotech seed prices.”

Farmers who plant seeds with Monsanto’s technology must sign an agreement not to save the seeds, which means they must buy new seeds every year.

Monsanto has a reputation for vigorously protecting its intellectual property.

The Center for Food Safety, which has tracked the cases, said Monsanto had filed more than 140 patent infringement lawsuits involving 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, and had so far received $23.67 million in recorded judgments. The center says there are many other cases in which farmers settled out of court or before a suit was filed.

Monsanto says it must stop infringers to be fair to the large majority of farmers who do pay to use its technology.

But Monsanto typically exercises no control over soybeans or corn once farmers sell their harvested crops to grain elevators, which in turn sell them for animal feed, food processing or industrial use.

Mr. Bowman said that for his main soybean crop, he honored Monsanto’s agreement, buying new seeds each year containing the Roundup Ready gene, which makes the plants immune to the herbicide Roundup. That technology is hugely popular, used in more than 90 percent of the nation’s soybeans, because it allows farmers to spray fields to kill weeds without hurting the crop.

But Mr. Bowman also planted a second soybean crop later in the growing season, after harvesting his wheat. Since that late crop is more prone to failure, he says, he did not want to pay the high price for patented seed.

So starting in 1999, he bought commodity soybeans from a grain elevator. These beans were a mixture of varieties from different farmers, but, not surprisingly, most of them were Roundup Ready. So Mr. Bowman sprayed Roundup on his late-season crop.

“All through history we have always been allowed to go to an elevator and buy commodity grain and plant it,” he said in an interview.

The courts, however, have not agreed. After Monsanto sued Mr. Bowman in 2007, a district court in Indiana awarded the company more than $84,000. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent cases, upheld that decision, saying that by planting the seeds Mr. Bowman had created newly infringing articles.

The Supreme Court, which has generally been taking a narrower view of patent rights than the appellate court, agreed to hear the case, much to the chagrin of the biotechnology industry.

“We did not see it coming,” said Hans Sauer, deputy general counsel of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. “We thought this question was long decided.”

Despite the arguments for and against genetically modified crops contained in various briefs, the decision will probably rest on the intricacies of patent law.

Mr. Bowman’s main defense is patent exhaustion — the concept that once a patented object is sold, the patent holder loses control over how it is used.

The Supreme Court affirmed this principle most recently in a 2008 case involving Intel computer chips containing patented technology licensed from LG Electronics. The court ruled that once Intel sold the chips to computer manufacturers, LG’s rights were exhausted and LG could not control how the manufacturers used the chips in their machines.

In the seed case, Mr. Bowman argues, Monsanto had no more rights on the beans sold to the grain elevator.

Monsanto and its allies counter, saying that selling to a grain elevator and buying back seed would be too simple an end-run around the patents. They say exhaustion applies only to the particular item sold and does not give the buyer the right to make unlimited copies of that item, which is what Mr. Bowman did by growing new soybean plants from the grain elevator beans.

Mr. Bowman’s side says that he was not making seeds, he was merely using the seed from the elevator, which is permissible. It just so happens that because of the nature of a seed, using one results in more copies being created. Mr. Bowman argues there should not be an exception to the exhaustion rule just because a patented item is self-replicating.

Mr. Bowman and his allies say a ruling in his favor would not decimate the biotechnology industry. Monsanto could still use contracts to stop farmers from saving newly purchased seed, which is what most farmers will continue to use. Most farmers would not buy large amounts of seed from grain elevators, they say, because it is of poor quality.

Mr. Bowman said that before his case, Vernon Hugh Bowman v. Monsanto, 11-796, was taken pro bono by Mark P. Walters and other lawyers from the firm of Frommer Lawrence & Haug, he had spent $31,000 on legal fees and handled much of the legal research himself, using a computer at the library because he does not own one. He said he never considered settling because he thought he was in the right.

“I was prepared to let them run over me,” Mr. Bowman said, “but I wasn’t getting out of the road.”

[General Patton]

As long as the system is primed for maximizing profit for those who run it (for exploiting the labor, maximizing monetary return per unit of cost, and blocking their competitors), things can't go well. Technologies with massive liberatory potentials will still be kept from realizing those potentials except insofar as they can be enclosed and channeled for private profit, or (in the case of the surveillance and force realms) turned into pure evil. And big-picture approaches become impossible because each private interest looks only after its own, so for example no energy industry is going to say, "Hey that other form of energy over there is more sustainable and potentially cheaper down the line, forget about us and invest in that." And no one voluntarily steps down from their own standard to favor a rationalization of standards.

Part 1

Big picture ventures like space travel haven't been in the domain of private interests because most of the investors are too short sighted to bother with it. There is a hype cycle where people are throwing money into space ventures that will fail, but several decades from now it will be more practical. That's why we have NASA, lots of money(though not so much compared to other programs) and a long term focus.

Yes, companies trying to limit the spread of technology has always been a problem. But even the incompetent Chinese hackers/spies have lifted hundreds billions of dollars in secrets over decades from their Western/South Korean companies. This includes energy secrets. The larger a company is, the more people have access to projects, the more potential leaks exist. This is without even taking into consideration that innovations tend to pop up in multiple places around the world at the same time, e.g. with the radio. Germany was working on an A-bomb project as well, though the scientists may of purposefully delayed its creation. Things are much more connected now and researchers talk with each much more than they did in the early 20th century.

DARPA farms out most of it's work to universities through grants, whereas IBM has their own researchers. So there are ways of getting the secrets, even if they are strongly held. Then it is a matter of having the means and capital to manufacture it. Crowd-based funding is still very immature and alternative currencies like Bitcoin need a lot of work before they can take over for traditional means. Operating with small teams on lower budgets is usually much more efficient. When you combine that with scalable designs and manufacturing methods the game changes beyond what one monolithic entity can control.

Take Wikispeed:




If the solution is viable and there is global demand, someone somewhere will pick up that innovation. India, China and countries in Africa are building nuclear power plants as we speak.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/A ... wer-plants
On the same Thursday afternoon last week, both the largest and second-largest economies in sub-Saharan Africa's – growing rivals Nigeria and South Africa – announced new nuclear programs. South Africa's cabinet will consider tens of billions of dollars worth of new nuclear power plants, said Energy Minister Dipuo Peters.

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/Th ... index.html
In Africa, only South Africa has a nuclear power station, but already, 21 countries are members of the IAEA.

They are Algeria, Cameroon, DRC, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Libya and Madagascar. The others are Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Republic and Uganda.

Several African countries including Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana and Kenya are at different stages of nuclear development.

In Kenya for example, a Nuclear Energy Project Committee was established on November 19, 2010. The Energy Act, No.12 of 2006 that is currently under review, includes “nuclear power” within its definition of “energy.”

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
India has a flourishing and largely indigenous nuclear power program and expects to have 14,600 MWe nuclear capacity on line by 2020. It aims to supply 25% of electricity from nuclear power by 2050.
Because India is outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty due to its weapons program, it was for 34 years largely excluded from trade in nuclear plant or materials, which has hampered its development of civil nuclear energy until 2009.
Due to these trade bans and lack of indigenous uranium, India has uniquely been developing a nuclear fuel cycle to exploit its reserves of thorium.
Now, foreign technology and fuel are expected to boost India's nuclear power plans considerably. All plants will have high indigenous engineering content.
India has a vision of becoming a world leader in nuclear technology due to its expertise in fast reactors and thorium fuel cycle.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busines ... 6550688296
Worthington, head of the all-parliamentary group on thorium energy, has just returned from China and reports that country is in the thorium vanguard. Former leader Jiang Zemin's son has been handed $US350 million ($333m) to get thorium power generation going. He reportedly already has 140 scientists with PhDs working for him, and will hire another 600.

[General Patton]

Or this NYT article - which is exactly what I was talking about above, about how it doesn't matter if there are potential goods to come out of GMOs, or if they're essentially harmless (an unknown unknown, I dare say), as long as all-out predators like Monsanto are in charge of developments. And in the following article note the odious rhetoric in which the practices of farmers for thousands of years, the tools by which humans have survived since the advent of agricultural, are somehow portrayed as an exotic new challenge to the established and legitimate patents of Monsanto on life as if it invented it.

Part 2

Monsato's main innovations are in creating different food products from what can be created by traditional farming. As we agreed earlier, the different is qualitative. The problem is with the patent system which needs to be overhauled.

I'm going to reframe this question for a minute, let's ignore food farming. Let's talk about weed.

If the techniques used by Monsato to alter plant strains become easier to use and somewhat automated with AI, even assuming the farmers don't use them the weed aficionados will. And we both know that no amount of regulations and control haven't stopped the breeding and distribution of weed by cartels and US growers. To put simply, even if all of the farmers ignore GMO and let Monsanto own it, weed growers will still adopt the practices.

http://www.dutch-passion.nl/en/news-and-development/genetically-engineered-cannabis/
Personally I expect the pharmaceutical companies will invest heavily to genetically engineer a cannabis strain that yields ultra high levels of the whole spectrum of cannabinoid chemicals. The aim will be to extract and isolate them into individual cannabinoids on an industrial scale using thousands of tons of bud. Once individual cannabinoids are isolated I expect they will find their way into pills for very specific medical purposes. This is the best way for pharma companies to remove the ‘threat’ of homegrown weed, they will simply say that their preparations are more effective because they are more sophisticated. Of course not everyone will believe them, but they will become rich enough anyway. Perhaps a few seeds or cuttings of these GM strains will find their way back to Amsterdam…..just imagine the great hybrid strains!

In the meantime the traditional cannabis seed breeders will continue to make the most useful contributions to the medical marijuana movement by working with grow cooperatives. I am personally sure all marijuana is medically effective, yet there are some strains that are often better known by the medical marijuana users. In Dutch Passions case, it is often strains like Ortega, Mazar, Strawberry Cough which are perhaps mentioned most frequently by med users.

So perhaps we will see genetically modified cannabis in the not-too-distant future. I think it will take 5 years before they build up the courage to announce plans to try it, and another 5 years before they show us the results. I am sure the medical marijuana movement will be involved in a very big way, but have you ever wondered what the implications and experiences might be for the recreational stoner? Could GM cannabis give you radically different weed to that which we enjoy today? Maybe weed that doesn’t stink when you grow it, or weed with a quite different buzz? As crazy as these questions seem, I reckon one day very soon they will be asked for real.

Bodybuilders and biohackers will be very interested in GMO as well because it will give them a new way of meeting their calorie, amino acids, vitamins and minerals quota for the day. A popular bodybuilding diet consists of drinking a gallon of milk a day along with regular food while doing power lifting exercises. They are very eager to find new ways of getting their daily nutrition and have always been the first to experiment with new experimental drugs to enhance human performance. We've already seen this spike in designer drugs, when one drug is outlawed another 5 designer drugs come out while the legal system lags years behind in banning them.

Monsanto will have white market domination, the costs of getting approval right now is too high for smaller upstarts to get in. Monsanto's primary enemy is farmers because they are only making monocultures for the mass market. The seeds aren't tailored to consumer desires for nutritional requirements and taste beyond a very narrow range of innovation like with mild onions.

Part 3 Coming Soon - Lawsuits, Patents, Mutagenesis and Gene Flow

[General Patton]

One more digression before part 3 - I suspect the biggest thing that stops innovation is not suppression by greedy tyrants, it's that other people cannot keep up and the innovations were not widely communicated.

On Ramanujan:

http://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-unlock-formula-mathematician-srinivasa-ramanujan-2012-12
"We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years," Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said.

It was on his deathbed in 1920 that he described mysterious functions that mimicked theta functions, or modular forms, in a letter to Hardy. Like trigonometric functions such as sine and cosine, theta functions have a repeating pattern, but the pattern is much more complex and subtle than a simple sine curve. Theta functions are also "super-symmetric," meaning that if a specific type of mathematical function called a Moebius transformation is applied to the functions, they turn into themselves. Because they are so symmetric these theta functions are useful in many types of mathematics and physics, including string theory.



Ramanujan believed that 17 new functions he discovered were "mock modular forms" that looked like theta functions when written out as an infinte sum (their coefficients get large in the same way), but weren't super-symmetric. Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri.

How long did it take for the world to catch up to Carl Gauss, 100 years at most? How about Leonhard Euler? Or John von Neumann? The whole world forgot the mathematics that Pierre-Simon Laplace was doing in the early 1800's which became Bayesian Reasoning and is now being widely used all throughout the fields of science and mathematics.

GM "killed" the electric car in the early 1990's, which was a short-range prototype. Now Tesla has a pretty good electric car that is being scaled into mass production. (There has been misinformation regarding the Tesla model S's range, all honest tests have shown it to be very reliable.)

How much power do they really have in a global complex system?

Here's some from Michael Faraday:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday
Beyond his scientific research into areas such as chemistry, electricity, and magnetism at the Royal Institution, Faraday undertook numerous, and often time-consuming, service projects for private enterprise and the British government. This work included investigations of explosions in coal mines, being an expert witness in court, and along with two engineers from Chance Brothers c.1853, the preparation of high-quality optical glass, which was required by Chance for its lighthouses. In 1846, together with Charles Lyell, he produced a lengthy and detailed report on a serious explosion in the colliery at Haswell County Durham, which killed 95 miners. Their report was a meticulous forensic investigation and indicated that coal dust contributed to the severity of the explosion. The report should have warned coal owners of the hazard of coal dust explosions, but the risk was ignored for over 60 years until the Senghenydd Colliery Disaster of 1913.

[General Patton]

Or this NYT article - which is exactly what I was talking about above, about how it doesn't matter if there are potential goods to come out of GMOs, or if they're essentially harmless (an unknown unknown, I dare say)

This process of unknown unknown has been going on for a very long time. There is still a danger of moving a recessive gene across the population on accident, as you never directly look at or alter the code of the plant. Even a dominant gene could quickly become disadvantageous as growing conditions change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight
The Great French Wine Blight was a severe blight of the mid-19th century that destroyed many of the vineyards in France and laid to waste the wine industry. It was caused by an aphid (the actual genus of the aphid is still debated, although it is largely considered to have been a species of Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, commonly known as grape phylloxera) that originated in North America and was carried across the Atlantic in the late 1850s. While France is considered to have been worst affected, the blight also did a great deal of damage to vineyards in other European countries.

How the Phylloxera aphid was introduced to Europe remains debated: American vines had been taken to Europe many times before, for reasons including experimentation and trials in grafting, without consideration of the possibility of the introduction of pestilence. While the Phylloxera was thought to have arrived around 1858, it was first recorded in France in 1863, near the former province of Languedoc. It is argued by some that the introduction of such pests as phylloxera was only a problem after the invention of steamships, which allowed a faster journey across the ocean, and consequently allowed durable pests, such as the Phylloxera, to survive.

The difference is that with GMO we're working with genes or gene fragments in a supervised setting. We're already exchanging genes between ourselves and our environment both in our DNA and in our bacteria flora. Somewhere around 8-10% of the human genome is made up of viruses. This is activity that is largely uncontrolled and unsupervised, no one cares if novel proteins are created using traditional farming methods.

The commonly known method of exchanging genes is vertical gene transfer, using traditional sexual or asexual reproduction.

Horizontal gene transfer is the exchange of genes through other means:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/ ... TFHLme863k
In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin.

The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus. They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fetus for drawing nutrients from its mother. The scientists discovered that in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin.

What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.

Viruses have insinuated themselves into the genome of our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. They typically have gotten there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours. There are 100,000 known fragments of viruses in the human genome, making up over 8% of our DNA. Most of this virus DNA has been hit by so many mutations that it’s nothing but baggage our species carries along from one generation to the next. Yet there are some viral genes that still make proteins in our bodies. Syncytin appeared to be a hugely important one to our own biology. Originally, syncytin allowed viruses to fuse host cells together so they could spread from one cell to another. Now the protein allowed babies to fuse to their mothers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome
It is estimated that 500 to 1000 species of bacteria live in the human gut[5] and a roughly similar number on the skin.[6][7] Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 1014 versus 1013).[8][9] The mass of microorganisms are estimated to account for 1-3% total body mass. [10] T

Luckily, non-pathogenic mutations are the norm, otherwise there wouldn't be any multicellular life in the first place.

The exact mutation rate is on-going investigation. But basically we're taking things nature has done and implementing them on a much more limited scale.

News articles like below will circulate through the news cycle then be forgotten:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... foods.html
A virus gene that could be poisonous to humans has been missed when GM food crops have been assessed for safety.

GM crops such as corn and soya, which are being grown around the world for both human and farm animal consumption, include the gene.

A new study by the EU's official food watchdog, the European Food Safety Authority(EFSA), has revealed that the international approval process for GM crops failed to identify the gene.

Yes, the vehicle delivery method is a virus gene fragment. That's how it is delivered into the plant. It is heavily altered from it's original state, we'd have to dig up the applications to look at what details are public access. What the actual study says is that the open reading frame of gene VI is there, not gene VI in it's entirety.

The actual study is here:
http://www.landesbioscience.com/journal ... C0020R.pdf


What does the EFSA actually say?

http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/faqs/faqin ... plants.htm
Was EFSA aware of the existence of fragments of Gene VI in certain GM plants prior to the publication of this paper and have EFSA’s risk assessments of GMOs considered the potential effects of such fragments?

Yes. All GM plant applications assessed by EFSA since its creation in 2002 that contain the inserted fragment of the viral gene in question have included a detailed analysis of the inserted sequence. These applications have also included the extensive data required by EFSA to assess the potential for unintended effects. In its assessment of these applications, no safety concerns were identified in relation to the sequence of the inserted fragment of the viral gene and the potential for unintended effects.

There's a larger case on the safety and labeling of GMO's here:
http://www.ama-assn.org/resources/doc/c ... dfoods.pdf

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science_technology/GM_plants_represent_low_risk,_say_scientists.html?cid=33402092
Genetically modified (GM) plants present little danger for the environment or people’s health, according to Swiss researchers. Also, while they offer almost no benefit to farmers now, this could change if plants had the right properties.
...
The researchers all reached the same conclusion: there were no identifiable negative effects on beneficial organisms, microorganisms or soil fertility. Three so-called meta-analyses that looked at more than 1,000 international studies reached similar findings.

Here's a link to the study in question:
http://www.nrp59.ch/e_projekte.cfm?comm ... 84,187,193

Next - Lawsuits & Patents