Rerouting peoples' travel to modes other than flying, so reducing the number of planes in the air, would do orders of magnitude more to cool the planet...
Correction: they tried colouring satellites darker, but that caused heat radiation difficulties, so they've gone back to reflective satellites. Doesn't sound like they tried very hard. Plus the satellites have gotten larger (= still more reflectivity.)
So it's better to entrust your domain rental to some possibly-sketchy corporation registered who-knows-where, rather than a registry run by a government, in the hopes that ICANN will play nice if there's a dispute?
The article does make the point that this is merely lower risk, and not zero risk, and raises quite nicely the point that all we're doing is renting a name->IP-address mapping. IMHO this is the core problem.
We ought to be able to buy (i.e. a one-time, non-recurring payment for an irrevokable mapping) domain names, but I'll confess that I can't come up with a reasonable technical scheme for making that work.
There are a couple of tricks the seed companies use to get around this:
First off, a year or two before the patents on a variety expire, they simple patent some other feature of the variety. Problem solved (from their perspective).
Second, several years before the patent expires on a variety they'll have a "new, improved" variety (often bred from the first) that their sales-people push hard onto farmers so that by the time the patent expires the variety basically has very little/no commercial value - it's been superseded by the "improved" variety in commercial use.
That would be prior art and would invalidate the patent. There would be costs for such a lawsuit, but I don't see why that's a good reason for getting rid of the patent system. It would be like saying we should get rid of property rights because companies could abuse it by claiming that other people's stuff belongs to them and the rightful owner has to go through an expensive lawsuit to get it resolved.
escape into the wild: You'd be up for a decade or more of litigation against one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. There was a Canadian farmer who went exactly that route against (iirc) Monsanto, saying that their GMO Rapeseed (again, from memory) had contaminated his crop, but Monsanto sued him anyway for "illegally" growing their GMO stuff. I believe he "won" in the end. But at what cost to him?
and, "dominant species in the wild": Domestic crops are so pampered, so dependent on our adding nutrients, keeping predators and competitors at bay, that they stand very little chance of surviving long enough in the wild to be able to propagate. Dominant species? Not a chance.
>There was a Canadian farmer who went exactly that route against (iirc) Monsanto, saying that their GMO Rapeseed (again, from memory) had contaminated his crop, but Monsanto sued him anyway for "illegally" growing their GMO stuff. I believe he "won" in the end. But at what cost to him?
In that case the farmer was also specifically selecting for the contaminated seeds. That makes the "his crops got accidentally contaminated and monsanto sued him for it" narrative very misleading.
>As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[5] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola.
Sounds like a smart farmer. Let’s pretend that the original resistant crop was natural, his actions are normal. Selecting good crops is basic farming. He was a victim here.
Another Zim-Wiki user here -- been using it for something over 5 years, now, and have yet to find anything that could replace it for me. That it doesn't use (the bloody horrible) Markdown is a feature, not a deficiency.
