Designer Seeds Thought To Be Latest Target By Chinese 164
An anonymous reader writes "Economic espionage is nothing new but one of the biggest areas being targeted now is agriculture. Here's a story about a FBI investigation to track down theft of seeds from research farms. 'The case of the missing corn seeds first broke in May 2011 when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field. When confronted, the man, Mo Hailong, who was with his colleague Wang Lei, appeared flushed. Mr. Mo told the manager that he worked for the University of Iowa and was traveling to a conference nearby. When the manager paused to answered his cellphone, the two men sped off in a car, racing through a ditch to get away, federal authorities said.'"
DNA wants to be free... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Good bye.
Tank yu missa Clin ten (Score:2, Insightful)
The Chinese have had an open field day stealing tech and killing of Western businesses since our beloved Bill Clinton opened the doors to them. Those roks are now coming in to roost, USA is over and screwed by its own doing. Manchurian Candidate - for real.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Threats are one thing. Action is another Is it possible for a website redesign to be so bad that people actually stop reading it?
Yes. I used to read Yahoo Sports every day. The latest redesign was so bad that it was just unreadable. I no longer bother with it.
Slashdot is heading down the same path.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Reasons did not exist to redesign Slashdot/ (Score:2, Insightful)
Which begs the question, what fuckwad insisted on doing so?
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:4, Insightful)
*I* am Sparticus.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many of us who have been providing *constructive* criticism for *many months* only to have it fall on deaf ears. Now that the beta is being forced on users in a graduated rollout you're going to be hearing these complaints more and more often until either:
1. The Slashdot admins capitulate and concede the beta was a giant mistake.
2. Slashdot Beta has functionality and usability parity with the standard site.
3. Those of us who absolutely hate the new site leave and never come back.
4. Comments complaining are stifled and silenced.
I'm thinking #3 is the most likely possibility.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Boycott (Score:5, Insightful)
Though I support the idea in principle I seriously doubt it'll get the PHB's attention since they have such an obvious lack of respect for, and understanding of the slashdot community.
Buck Feta (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Beta Sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Way too much vertical white space, which is more precious than dehydrated unicorn testciles thanks to 16:9 screens.
2. A More Button. WTF! The bandwidth for text is cheap. Give me the whole converstaion.
3. Coonversation context is lost because I can't see summarised comments nested under modded up comments.
4. Thick borders. 1 pixel is enough.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Every comment I've seen on the new design is negative. Every single one... that just never happens, it's mind blowing. There should be a few people taking the opposite side, just for the sake of taking the opposite side, but this thing is so wretched that nobody wants to defend it, not even anonymously. Is this part of some shady corporate ploy to destroy Slashdot, sell off the ping-pong tables and take a tax write-off? Or are the new managers just not very bright?
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, that's what surprises me more than anything when I see some web property being churned without obvious reason. Unless the backend is utterly fucked (in which case churning the frontend is Not where you should be spending your time) letting it coast along on commodified and encheapened 'cloud' VMs from one vendor or another is cheap, and can be drawn down at almost a moment's notice without having to hold a firesale on your datacenter gear. Given that, watching somebody who appears to have no clue what they want to accomplish voluntarily paying additional dev and/or designer salaries when they could just let the property coast always makes me wonder about that person or organization's sanity.
Slashdot Beta = Digg v4 (Score:5, Insightful)
This site has been something special to a number of readers and posters here, and seeing the place go down in flames like Digg did when they ignored their users' feedback [wikipedia.org] is a highly suboptimal emotional experience.
Saying that turns the place into the kindergarten you wanted to avoid.
Honestly, a much more sensible thing to steal... (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that, along with the nigh-universal tendency of people to eat more meat (far less efficient per calorie than stuff lower on the food chain) if they get wealthier, and to rise up in revolution like they have nothing to lose (because they don't) if food supplies are dangerously constrained, doing absolutely everything they possibly can to keep agricultural yields high, and preferably rising, is probably about the sanest policy the Chinese government could be pursuing.
Sure, hypersonic missiles and supercavitating torpedoes and fancy fighter planes and stuff are good for dick waving, keeping Americans at a distance while rattling the sabre at Taiwan, and general jingoism; but it's not as though anybody outside of China wants to start a land war in Asia and directly slug it out with the PLA on Chinese soil, so all that stuff is really pretty secondary.
1.2 billion people (including the ones who you've provided with guns, and their families and friends) who are starting to see more and more of the weekly grocery list slipping beyond their buying power? Now that is what has any sensible leader (whether of a despotism, a monarchy, a republic, a democracy, doesn't matter) wake up screaming and drenched in cold sweat night after night.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:4, Insightful)
The new managers don't use Slashdot themselves, hence probably don't understand the reason for all the disdain. The best thing they could do right now is write off the beta exercise as a failure and stick with the classic version. Showing that they're actually listening to the (remaining) Slashdot faithful would be a good sign.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy Crap! I just tried Beta. It's pretty bad. I wouldn't call it as horrifying as some, but it is really quite bad from a design perspective.
But here's my main complaint: You can't read comments without Javascript enabled. Javascript is really cool, it's great for creating dynamic web pages. Things like OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org] have made my life fundamentally better when doing dynamic content perusal.
But there's a gap there; reading a comment tree is not dynamic content perusal. I click my desired mod level, then read the entire tree without any changes. Occasionally I pop open a new tab to reply to an existing comment, but that is rare enough that it can be done with static pages.
I don't enable Javascript by default, and I don't enable it on sites that don't need it. It's a security thing, like not leaving services running that you don't need. It's also about not chewing up memory and CPU for dancing baloney.
The value of Slashdot is the community comments. That is why I come here. It is why I spend so much time carefully crafting and editing comments that I hope will add to the experience for others (and often censoring my more bile-laden knee-jerk responses that would make it a more combustible environment).
Like so many members of the Slashdot community, I put a lot into making this a place that people like to visit. And I am happy for Dice to make a profit selling ad space on the comments that my community creates, in exchange for playing host. That's a pretty good trade all around. Don't fuck it up.
Re:Beta sucks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Please take us with you. Serious. Give us an alternative site and many shall follow.