5 Million Farmers Sue Monsanto for $7.7 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/11795-5-million-farmers-sue-monsanto-for-77-billion <comment><USER3> Good for them. I've never met a company that could sue you because a honey bee or some other naturally event that has been occurring for hundreds of years happened. To that I'm referring to Monsato's practice of suing farmers who haven't used their seed variety having their fields cross pollinated with another farmer's fields who is using Monato's seed products. Really?! Ugh.

<comment><USER4> No not really. I think you are referring to this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser)

Read the case. He knowingly planted Roundup Ready plants across his whole field. Alternatively, find a case for what you say happened happening before you assume it to be true.

<comment><USER5> That's rather presumptive to assume that wheaties is talking about the case you just pulled from Wikipedia.

It only took one Google search to find a case describing exactly what wheaties described: <http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html>

_The Runyons say they signed no agreements, and if they were contaminated with the genetically modified seed, it blew over from a neighboring farm.

"Pollination occurs, wind drift occurs. There's just no way to keep their products from landing in our fields," David said.

"What Monsanto is doing across the country is often, and according to farmers, trespassing even, on their land, examining their crops and trying to find some of their patented crops," said Andrew Kimbrell, with the Center For Food Safety. "And if they do, they sue those farmers for their entire crop."

In fact, in Feb. 2005 the Runyons received a letter from Monsanto, citing "an agreement" with the Indiana Department of Agriculture giving it the right to come on their land and test for seed contamination.

Only one problem: The Indiana Department of Agriculture didn't exist until two months after that letter was sent. What does that say to you?_

<comment><USER4> I used that case because it's the most famous one people refer too. Runyon is another famous person. Look, I've watched Food Inc too. Again, show me the case (which I believe does not exist). You showed me a news article. Otherwise this is just someone who has been in a bunch of movies and is suing Monsanto, and is not really an unbiased source (just like I don't link directly to Monsanto's website on the Runyons.)

<comment><USER5> I don't know what level of evidence would satisfy you, as you seem to have a pre-existing bias against the farmers' claims.

Monsanto attempted to sue, then dropped its case against the Runyons. Given Monsanto's otherwise litigious history, and the damage that would be done to the company if they were to lose a case like this in court, the evidence points in favor of the farmer.

Statements like "I believe (any case) does not exist" and "this is just someone who has been in a bunch of movies" show bias, and tell me that you're unlikely to accept anything short of a full and frank confession from Monsanto that they have aggressively sued innocent farmers.

What do you call a company that pursues cases like the one cited in the CBS News article about Mo Parr?

 _74-year-old Mo Parr is a seed cleaner; he is hired by farmers to separate debris from the seed to be replanted. Monsanto sued him claiming he was "aiding and abetting" farmers, helping them to violate the patent.

"There's no way that I could be held responsible," Parr said. "There's no way that I could look at a soy bean and tell you if it's Round-up Ready."

The company subpoenaed Parr's bank records, without his knowledge, and found his customers. After receiving calls from Monsanto, some of them stopped talking to him.

"It really broke my heart," Parr said. "You know, I could hardly hold a cup of coffee that morning,"_

I won't make any further arguments about this, because I'm not trying to change your mind if its already made up.

<comment><USER6> It blows my mind that there are people on HN confusing opposition to the horrific practices that Monsanto uses with opposition to GM crops in general. I am a supporter of GM strains of crops, because I think they have proven environmental benefits. However, what Monsanto did to the seed cleaner is no different than blaming BitTorrent for piracy. The only difference is that BitTorrent sites actually have a somewhat possible way to determine copyrighted works from open works. The seed cleaner is being sued simply because his services are utilized by people trying to cheat Monsanto as well as those who are simply seeking to continue growing their heirloom strains. This isn't justice. This is simply a huge corporation with vast legal resources doing whatever is necessary to prevent theft of their IP rights, even if that involves trampling people that committed no crimes. It is cheaper for Monsanto to put every seed cleaner out of business than to go after the actual IP infringers. But it is not really legal, and only holds up in court because the seed cleaners can't afford to fight Monstanto's legal shield, and too few judges bother to inform themselves on the topic.

<comment><USER7> this is not at all like blaming bittorrent sites for pirating

look, you don't understand what this seed cleaner was doing. monsanto does not go around suing every seed cleaner in the midwest just because they could be cleaning roundup ready seeds. they sued moe parr, and they did so because he told other farmers that it was legal for them to clean their roundup ready seeds (which it is not).

evidence: [http://www.fr.com/files/uploads/publications/DSU-Medical- Cor...](http://www.fr.com/files/uploads/publications/DSU-Medical-Corp-v-JMS- Co-Ltd/Monsanto_v_Parr_NDIN_4-07-cv-00008_Apr_22_2008.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I'm curious why it would be illegal to remove debris from seeds (or does "clean" mean something else in this context?). What is Monsanto mixing with their Roundup-ready seeds that they so desperately want to get planted along with the crop?

<comment><USER7> cleaning is how you transform this years crops into next year's seeds. one of the agreements you sign when you buy roundup-ready seeds is that you don't clean seeds.

basically, by seed cleaning, you don't have to buy more roundup ready seeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another interesting batch of comments. Generally a lot of hating on Monsanto (which is exploiting the fact that genes can be patented).

This "story" is part of a bigger conversation going on. The outcome of which is very much up in the air.

The conversation we're having is "Should it be allowed for individuals, or companies, to patent genetic sequences?"

On the 'for' side we have people like Monsanto who make the claim they invest billions of dollars in creating 'products' that would not occur naturally in a reasonable amount of time, and having made that investment they deserve the limited monopoly granted by the patent system. We also have testing companies who have invested billions in diagnostic tests to identify diseases which are tied to certain genes and they too feel it is right and proper to give them protection so that they might re-coup those costs. In both their cases their argument is that it is for the greater good of the society that these temporary monopolies are granted, to encourage the investment needed to come up with these inventions which will permanently be a benefit going forward.

We also have groups of people who are arguing that this is an abuse of the patent monopoly because the processes are not 'man made' they are simply natural processes that have been tuned by man to create a desired result. Generally folks recognize the benefit, but they don't wish to pay the fees.

Consistently, the courts have sided with the folks who did the investment because, as the Canadian supreme court pointed out, the people see the benefit too so the argument that its good for society is a well supported.

The monkey wrench of course is the question of innovation flexibility. In both the patent and copyright systems there is an implied flexibility rule, which is that if "you" the non-inventor/creator don't like it, you are free to create your own version with your own resources. So if you don't like the patent on the automobile you are free to construct your own vehicle that has the same function of transportation, but doesn't infringe on the claims. This breaks down when their is not flexibility and that was very clearly elucidated by Judge Alsup in the Oracle vs Google case where he held that the APIs, which were constrained to be written in a specific way (no flexibility), could not be copyrighted, because doing so was contrary to copyright law, where he wrote "copyright law does not confer ownership over any and all ways to implement a function or specification." And there is a similar argument to be made against genetic patents. One cannot simply create 'another' way to make plants resistant to a particular herbicide, because that particular herbicide attacks particular plant functions which are expressed by specific genes. So there is no 'wiggle' room around other people wanting to create the same capability without infringing the patent.

I expect it is this questions, "What are the considerations of the economic good or harm in locking out others from using a particular 'law of nature or natural process'?" Clearly there is an economic good in being able to farm efficiently, there is a harm in that even if you were a grade a geneticist you couldn't get around using the same genes Monsanto did so there is no avenue to compete. There are only alternatives, like weeding the old fashioned way.

If you're wondering, farmers have one of the strongest voices in our government. This is because there are a lot of states that have farmers in them (so there are a lot of representatives from farm districts). They have literally changed the course of rivers to take water from urban users and water their fields, they have been paid not to plant crops, their crop prices have been subsidized to insure they make a living, and their excess product has been bought up with the tax payer's money and distributed for free. So it isn't like Monsanto is the gorilla here.

I don't think the original article added a lot to the conversation sadly. I would love to see additional analysis and alternatives being discussed.

<comment><USER10> "herbicide attacks particular plant functions which are expressed by specific genes. So there is no 'wiggle' room around other people wanting to create the same capability without infringing the patent."

I don't think that's true, immediately I'm thinking of enzymes that could cleave the herbicide, or making plants resistant to a different herbicide.

Monsanto is primarily a maker of herbicides not GM crops, GM crops are a compliment to it's business and Monsanto designs plants to work well with their products. If you want to use a different herbicide and a different gene sequence you're completely welcome to, what your not allowed to do is use a specific genes that confer resistance to monsanto's own products.

I think the parallel development of eyes in many species proves that nature is rather flexible in how solutions can be implemented.

It's completely possible to make herbicide resistant plants with out infringing on Monsanto's IP. It just might be a little more difficult to make one for RoundUp.

Also, the Roundup Ready soybeans patent is due to expire in 2014, so in 2 years farmers all around the world get Roundup Ready soybeans for free, just as the patent system intended. By the time this gets infront of a judge the farmers could go plant all the patented crop they want.

Monsanto makes a tidy profit on the development, farmers eventually get the seed for free, Monsanto sells lots of roundup, which pollute the environment less than other herbicides, win, win, win.

<comment><USER11> > Also, the Roundup Ready soybeans patent is due to expire in 2014, so in 2 > years farmers all around the world get Roundup Ready soybeans for free, just > as the patent system intended.

Unless Monsanto suddenly stops selling Roundup and instead sells a different, "new and improved" herbicide with a new set of recently-patented resistent seeds. And lobbies for governments to ban Roundup because of a recently study saying it's a threat to the environment after all.

At least that's how it tends to work in the pharmaceutics industry.

<comment><USER12> Glyphosate's ("Roundup") patent expired in 2000.

This isn't really like the software industry, where there's lock-in effects. Unless you screw up, glyphosate still kills plants.

<comment><USER11> Thus the "And lobbies for governments to ban Roundup because of a recently study saying it's a threat to the environment after all." part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "On May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek birthplace of the ancient games. A few days before, virtually unnoticed, the government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the International Olympic Committee expressing the "profound concerns of the Government and people of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to accept the Dow Chemical Company as a global partner sponsoring the Olympic Movement."

Dow provided the chemicals that Washington used from 1961 onward to destroy crops and forests in South Vietnam, drenching the country with Agent Orange.

These poisons contain dioxin, one of the most lethal carcinogens known, affecting millions of Vietnamese and many U.S. soldiers. To this day in Vietnam, aborted fetuses and deformed infants are very likely the effects of these crimes - though, in light of Washington's refusal to investigate, we have only the studies of Vietnamese scientists and independent analysts.

Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India, the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984 Bhopal gas leak, one of history's worst industrial disasters, which killed thousands and injured more than half a million.

Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February, Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and prosecution of those responsible."

America's Rank Hypocrisy, By Noam Chomsky, AlterNet 05 June 12

<comment><USER14> So Vietnam is opposed to a company sponsoring the Olympics because they made a product that the USA used to deform and kill their people. How does that make sense? Shouldn't they be angry at the country that actually dumped the chemicals on them? If somebody gets a gun and shoots you, you sue the guy who shot you, not the company that made the bullets. (Well, unless you just want more money, which in our litigious society might actually work for you...)

<comment><USER15> It might make a bit more sense when you add in that Agent Orange wasn't supposed to cause these effects in humans. Dow and Monstanto were struggling to keep up with the demand from the US military and quality control suffered. This led to Agent Orange being contaminated with TCDD (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin). True Agent Orange should be 50/50 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. It was the contamination with the carcinogen that caused the disaster.

With this in mind, you could blame Dow and Monsanto for lack of quality control leading to human suffering. This would be a litigious offense in almost every nation. Even if you want to believe malice put the poison there rather than incompetence, guns aren't made or sold with specific intent to kill _people_. If they were (outside of war), you would be able to sue for the damage they caused.

<comment><USER16> _guns aren't made or sold with specific intent to kill people._

So handguns and machine guns are manufactured for deer hunters?

<comment><USER14> You know, i've always wondered why some targets for target practice show a humanoid form... y'know, if people aren't practicing to shoot other people. Maybe they were trying to paint a deer and got confused.

<comment><USER17> Avid shooter here. Yes, those humanoid targets are made for practicing the shooting of humans. That should not be controversial. Some humans are a threat and occasionally it is required that you shoot them.

Shooting innocent humans is bad.

<comment><USER18> Zombies are roughly the same form too.

<comment><USER17> And with all the face-eating "bath salts" zombie stories in the news, practicing your marksmanship has never been more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The claims made in this article, Food Inc., and other pieces of agitprop are not based in reality.

I'm part of a fifth generation farm family. We've been working the same ground for over 100 years (that's sustainability in practice) and I'm here to tell you that nobody is killing themselves. Especially with $6 corn. Monsanto is not the enemy of the family farm.

I'll elaborate when I have more time and a device other than my iPad as I know I need to provide more than this here on HN. :)

<comment><USER20> Nobody is killing themselves because you're being subsidized by the American taxpayer to grow lots of corn.

Monsanto is a nasty corporation, but their nastiness is fueled by government policy that allows them to leverage patents and practices to make a commodity product like corn as profitable to them as pharmaceuticals are to Genentech or AstraZenica.

It's great for you now, and results in cheap food prices for the consumer. But there are dangerous long-term social (ie. lots of obese people fattened up by artificially cheap and ubiquitous corn-derived sugar), biological and economic consequences

<comment><USER19> We don't accept subsidies and would absolutely love to see them go away completely. They're doing nothing but sustaining inefficient farming practices and keeping afloat farmers that are quite simply bad at what they do.

I don't want to get too off into the HCFC rabbit trail, but I have yet to see any research that indicates anything other than correlative evidence between the ingestion of C6H1206 derived from corn. If you have access to research that proves causality I'd love to see it.

<comment><USER20> I don't know that HFCS is "bad" vs. cane sugar. My only dig here is that generally speaking, eating alot of calories makes you gain weight.

The US government decided at one time that lowering the cost of food proportionally would increase overall prosperity by giving consumers more buying power. The unintended side effect of that policy is that heavily sweetened prepared foods are now cheap and ingrained into culture.

<comment><USER19> Agree 100%. Refined sugars, regardless of the source, are bad for the human organism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Monsanto: the MAFIAA and patent trolls of agriculture. May the farmers win. And may your amaranth grow and prosper. [0]

[0] [http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Monsanto_defeated_by_herbicide_resis...](http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Monsanto_defeated_by_herbicide_resistant_superweeds.php)

</comment><comment><USER22> This article makes some rather terrible claims. I've never heard of readersupportednews.org before. Are there similar articles in well-known, respectable publications?

(Note: I'm not claiming the site is disreputable, I've just never heard of the site and want to read more on sites (on in publications) I know.)

<comment><USER23> Here's a link from RT.com (Russia Today): <https://rt.com/news/monsanto- brazil-seed-soy-908/>

I have no idea if they're trustworthy either, but Wikipedia[1] had this to say about them:

> RT is the second most-watched foreign news channel in the United States, > after BBC News and the first most-watched news channel worldwide.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_%28TV_network%29>

<comment><USER24> Please don't quote anything from RT - it's as useful as quoting Gobbles.

While there is a chance it could be true, the association itself makes anything quoted extremely suspect.

<comment><USER23> Good to know. I had no idea what it was, but it looked more legit than the OP. Wikipedia seemed to back up the idea that it was a proper source, so I linked it.

<comment><USER24> I don't think you read far enough in the article :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_Today#Allegations_of_pro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_Today#Allegations_of_pro- Kremlin_bias)

It's pretty much a Putin propaganda piece. Don't be mislead by their use of western journalists - they can only parrot the party line or put forward own fringe conspiracy theories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does hating on Monsanto mean you can jump directly to Monsanto as the cause of the farmer suicides? Does a farmer suicide every 30 minutes sound a little high to anyone else? That would be 48 / day or over 17k / year.

As for the lawsuit, Monsanto sues a farmer because a farmer's land contains some of Monsanto's product. Fine, their product is essentially DNA, but they're allowed to call it their product. Fighting the patent is a losing fight. Right or wrong, it's a battle that won't be won until Kucinich is in the White House.

I've wondered why farmers don't file a counter-claim of trespassing since Monsanto allowed or caused their agents (both the patented DNA and whomever discovered the Monsanto plant) to enter a farmer's property. Additionally, it seems like there would be a case for destruction of property since the genetically modified seeds and plants crowd out the farmer's seeds and plants. Lastly, if the farmers really wanted to hit Monsanto with some irony, they should sue to have Monsanto pay for the removal of the modified seeds and plants. The farmer would have to argue that it is Monsanto's responsibility to prevent the outward spread of their crop. I'm sure the right judge could be found who would draw the comparison to breaking and entering someone's home.

But I'm reminded of a couple simple facts. You don't have to be right to sue someone. You don't have to be in the wrong to get sued. Win or loose, it's not cheap to go to court.

</comment><comment><USER26> This isn't journalism, it's a piece of agitprop. I'm not just saying this because I think their claims are bullshit, but because the article quotes the lawyer for the farmers, but does not quote a Monsanto spokesman or contain the usual "could not be reached for comment".

Anyone writing an article who thinks they need to only talk to one of the parties in a lawsuit isn't practicing journalism.

I'd rather not see this on HN. Maybe the topic is appropriate (patents), but the article doesn't give any information about that aspect of things.

</comment><comment><USER27> If anyone's seen "Food, Inc" they also mention the abusive practices of Monsanto of suing anyone that poses a threat to their business model. I don't know much about the space but there may be some interesting patent implications from the lawsuit.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the article, "The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the 'suicide belt', Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges."

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one getting this error: "Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQL" ?

I think the traffic from HN crashed their server.

</comment><comment><USER29> This may be naive, but why isn't the market protecting farmers? Are subsidies involved?

Why don't they just use normal seeds or other seeds? Weren't these limitations known ahead of time? Why did the farmers make a deal with the devil? Why can't they switch back?

<comment><USER30> It's my understanding Monsanto isn't a company that relies on free markets. They use lawyers heavily. If their seeds blow from a customer's farm to a non customer's farm and the non customer doesn't actively try to remove the Monsanto seeds, they sue. They are like the seed mafia.

<comment><USER22> "If their seeds blow from a customer's farm to a non customer's farm and the non customer doesn't actively try to remove the Monsanto seeds, they sue"

Got a source for that claim?

There's an article on huffington post which conflicts with the claim: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/28/monsanto-lawsuit- or...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/28/monsanto-lawsuit-organic- farmers-appeal_n_1385693.html)

<comment><USER31> Not sure about the US but it's possible he's referring to Monsanto vs Schmeiser, a Canadian case.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser)

In that case, Schmeiser's field was contaminated by his neighbour's field which was planted with Roundup resistant Canola seed.

"... on the balance of probabilities, the defendants infringed a number of the claims under the plaintiffs' Canadian patent number 1,313,830 by planting, in 1998, without leave or licence by the plaintiffs, canola fields with seed saved from the 1997 crop which seed was known, or ought to have been known by the defendants to be Roundup tolerant and when tested was found to contain the gene and cells claimed under the plaintiffs' patent. By selling the seed harvested in 1998 the defendants further infringed the plaintiffs' patent."

<comment><USER32> Right, so it's not that they'll sue you if their seeds blow onto your property, it's that they'll sue you if their seeds blow onto your property, you harvest, separate and and save the seeds from the plants that grow, then you plant 'em.

I'm still not sure that counts as infringement, but hey, who am I to disagree with a Canadian court's interpretation of Canadian law?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not going to enter the Monsanto sues innocent farmers debate like everyone else here, but those who are educated in the subject have known for a very long time that Monsanto are quite protective of their seed patents. People only know of a handful of cases where Monsanto sued, in reality they sued a lot of farmers in the 90's, not just the few high-profile cases people have heard of, most settle and don't fight.

We're talking about a company who basically got where they are today by manufacturing chemical laden plastics, acids and more knowingly Agent Orange which was used in the Vietnam war as a chemical weapon and the artificial sweetener aspartame under the brand name Nutrasweet. I can only think of one good thing Monsanto have done for the public: they were the first company to start mass manufacturing light emitting diodes in the 70s which are now used in everything. But if it weren't Monsanto, someone else would've eventually done the same thing anyway.

I hope these farmers succeed. You shouldn't be able to own a patent on mother nature just because you modified a few cells. What's next: parents having to pay royalty fee's for children born via IVF? When nanotechnology starts being commonly used in vaccinations and medicines are we going to have to pay a licencing fee to keep the vaccine/medicine working? What happens if and when human cloning takes place, is that clone the property of the creator and licensed out to the original the person was cloned from?

</comment><comment><USER34> This article is wildly emotional and certainly doesn't reflect the situation here in the US. Sure Monsanto and the other seed companies have been driving up the prices of seed. Farmers of course don't like that, but farmers do like the higher yields they get by using those GMO seeds. There are lots of things Monsanto does that might seem "evil", but this article is just ridiculous. Please don't use it as a basis to form your own opinions. You will just sound silly.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm going to take Monsanto's side here. The farmers are upset because they are being charged royalties over use of renewal seeds produced from the original 'store bought' seeds.

The argument is over whether the purchase of seeds implies the farmer is financing the 'use' (like a car lease) or the 'ownership' of the seed (like a car purchase).

Monsanto will argue that as the seed's utility is not entirely consumed by it's use (planting) that the most suitable pricing model is to finance the 'use' of the seed, not its ownership. Ergo royalties.

They have an enormously strong point to make here - which is that if ownership were implied by purchase the price would be much higher (as they would need to factor in both the value that future generations of seed provides and cannibalization of future seed demand from renewals).

Which is why the outcome of this case is somewhat moot. If Monsanto is prevented from charging a royalty because of some technicality they would simply charge a much higher upfront price, which they would then allow you to finance (and the farmer will end up being economically indifferent to whether it is called a royalty or not).

</comment><comment><USER36> Shouldn't Monsanto collect royalties from the plants themselves, which are the ones doing the copyright infringement when they pass their genes along to their offspring?

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't understand why Monsanto is vilified for enforcing the licensing agreements that farmers willingly enter into when they buy the seed?

When you buy the seed, they tell you straight up that you can't replant. And I'm not a farmer (grew up in farming community), but I don't think this is unique to GMO crops either. I believe the same thing happens for "conventional" hybrid crops from breeding.

</comment><comment><USER38> Really? We're talking about an article that claims Monsanto is, "responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes?" In the very first sentence!

Sorry, I don't care how relevant or accurate the other information is, but it's not valid after that. Monsanto may or may not be evil, and the farmers may or may not be good, but you certainly can't (shouldn't) form any opinion based on this junk.

</comment><comment><USER39> One of the farmers around Portland had complained that Monsanto had dispersed a few GM seeds in his farm and later sued him claiming royalties. Of course, he couldn't prove that Monsanto deliberately polluted his field with their seeds and lost the case. If there's a company that I'd like to see burned to the ground, it's Monsanto. Fucking dictators.

</comment><comment><USER40> About freaking time! Monsanto is EVIL.

</comment><comment><USER41> <http://readersupportednews.org> is down

</comment><comment><USER42> 5 - million - farmers. I live in Belgium. In Belgium that would mean almost all working people - in all sectors - coming together for a lawsuit targeted at one single company. I'm baffled by the size of this. Or should I not?

</comment><comment><USER43> Monsanto needs to stop killing people and farms, it's about time that these farmers get their fair share of the injustice they've been put through by Monsanto. Too bad some are already out of business and long gone.

</comment><comment><USER44> Since the site is down, another link: [http://naturalsociety.com/5-million- farmers-sue-monsanto-for...](http://naturalsociety.com/5-million-farmers-sue- monsanto-for-7-billion/)

</comment><comment><USER45> What I don't understand is why these farmers wouldn't switch back to using old crops/seeds if Monsanto is so prohibitively expensive and using old plants is more economical in long term?

<comment><USER46> Monsanto has highly dubious business practices and a history of very aggressively protecting their intellectual property. For a picture of what's at stake and what has transpired read up on the story of Percy Schmeiser - <USER2> farmer who tried to stand up to Monsanto's bullying tactics. There are many articles on his story, but I found <http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0401150/percy_schmeiser.shtml> to be particularly informative)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I strongly suggest reading "Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi - I think it pretty accurately describes our near future.

</comment><comment><USER48> And the real winners? The lawyers. Can you imagine making a 40%+ success fee from a $7.7B class action suit?

</comment><comment><USER49> They tried to patent neem :|

</comment><comment><USER50> Tried to read this article, hit some kind of NPR style donation paywall... 0/10, wouldn't click.

<comment><USER51> Nice easy skip button in the top corner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is definitely an interesting thread, but there seems to be too much focus on Runyon as the bad actor in this case. While I can't say I agree with what Monsanto is doing (the suing and the GM component) I don't think the circumstance is reasonably accounted for...

Using Runyon as an example - even if evidence shows that he took advantage of the situation he was inadvertently involved. The root cause was not of his initiation. Ultimately, in my eyes, it should be the responsibility of Monsanto and it's customers to enforce containment. If that's not possible, then they have a flawed product. Monsanto is well aware of the risk involved in IP within a seed. It's main objective in it's lifecycle is to self-sustain, so unless they can turn that off without a doubt they have to accept the risk.

What I mean: If Monsanto and it's customers can't contain the product they buy and use then there should be no implications for anyone around them to take on that responsibility.

Example (and I know these haven't been going well, so my stab): BP comes knocking on Runyon's neighbor's door. They want to drill in his (the neighbor's) fields, but there is high risk that they may contaminate a shared water table Runyon and the neighbor's land is sitting on. The neighbor decides to go forth - and the inevitable happens. Now - who's fault is it? Runyon's - for being where he is and not instigating (at all) the actions that the neighbor chose to execute? In an argument where the outcome is bad - it's easy to identify the bad actor. In an argument where the outcome is indirectly good there is no incentive for Runyon to sue his neighbor for giving him something that normally should be paid for.

Solution?: Monsanto must place all risk of seed carryover on to it's _customers_. It is not the anonymous farmers responsibility to fight Monsanto when their competition (the neighbor) has instigated the problem. BUT... Monsanto would never sue their own customers because that is counter- productive; nobody would buy seed from them.

I agree with suing Monsanto. But on the basis that Monsanto and it's customers are operating under a negligent business model which enables them to sue innocent farmers. It almost seems to me that Monsanto is under the assumption that emminent domain applies to it's intellectual property - of which I do not agree.

If the BP spill would have leaked $20 bills instead of oil - you really think there would have been any lawsuits or complaints?

Bottom line: if Runyon didn't intentionally set out to steal Monsanto seeds then he has no responsibility to Monsanto. If you argue that he took advantage of the situation I would argue that is his right and luck. Now if he turns around and directly competes with Monsanto - there may be a case. Otherwise in the land of my personal morals I don't believe Runyon can be held accountable.

Carpe diem.

EDIT: Formatting. And thought... If Monsanto has the genetic research capability to create a product that is resistant to something like RoundUp - why can't it modify the lifecycle of the plant to only grow if some simple additive is sprayed on the newly planted field to "activate" it? Something along the lines of a license key for seeds. That way - if Runyon was caught with plants in an entire field it would showcase theft. It's easier for Monsanto to sue innocent bystanders than put money into R&D of a protection mechanism I would guess... And, yes, I've oversimplified genetic engineering, but again - it's a flawed product if you can't protect it.

</comment><comment><USER53> B R A V O !!!</comment>


An account of two men executed for Nazi resistance shows their sense of heroism - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10435636/No-Ordinary-Men-by-Elisabeth-Sifton-and-Fritz-Stern-review.html

<comment><USER2> These kind of people sadly don't exist anymore. Nowadays you'll mostly find idiots like me.</comment>


Vitess: Scaling MySQL databases for the web - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/vitess/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see this released because it is great technology that showcases Go's strengths. Here's why they chose Go, in their own words:

"Go is miles ahead of C++ and Java in terms of expressibility and close in terms of performance. It is also relatively simple and has a straightforward interaction with Linux system calls."

It has always frustrating to say "We use Go at Google, I just can't say how." So I'm happy that now I can say that YouTube use Go in their core infrastructure, serving more than a billion requests per day with this service alone.

</comment><comment><USER3> A quick glance at the sources shows immediately what Go offers per se in terms of readability and maintainability. Go strongly encourages, even forces at compile time, certain style constraints that results in such a delightful code to explore. Were it written in C, you'd have to deal first with arcane #whatever directives in .h and .c files and strange makefiles and such stuff.

I hope someday Go will get the acknowledgement it deserves as a real piece of genius. I really encourage recommend just to take a 15-min try at <http://tour.golang.org>.

<comment><USER4> The thing would probably look better if adapted to Go1, without all those makefiles and deps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting comments (in mysql.go) :

        // Muahahaha
        func strlen(str *C.char) int {
                gstr := (*[1 << 30]byte)(unsafe.Pointer(str))
                length := 0
                for gstr[length] != 0 {
                        length++
                }
                return length
        }

BTW, is Google planning to make a proper mysql driver in go (implementing database/sql API and not unsafe) ?

<comment><USER2> Here's a list of database/sql drivers: <http://code.google.com/p/go- wiki/wiki/SQLDrivers>

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's the driver I'm using. But my question was related to the fact that Google seems to have made (see source) a partial mysql driver, so I was wondering if they were planning to make it database/sql compatible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This project looks awesome and really points out some of the major weaknesses with in mySQL/libmysql-

      * Impossible/difficult to gracefully handle connection/query timeouts.
      * Extremely poor query/row cache (the table's entire query cache is flushed anytime a write is made in the table)
      * Poor connection memory usage- Each open connection sucks up ~10MB of memory

<comment><USER6> Odd, so instead of helping fix the underlying libraries they created yet another layer. Sadness++

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this help "scale" databases?

It just looks like a connection pooler with a RPC interface?

Am I missing a feature?

<comment><USER2> The feature list on the linked page lists a lot more than that. Also see:

<http://code.google.com/p/vitess/wiki/ProjectGoals>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At a glance this seems fantastic. I have an application where the database recently started to get overloaded at peak usage times.

It seems like this could be dropped in as a replacement with very little code re-factoring if the client library is similar to the native mysql client lib. (or an adapter could be written)

Does anybody know what would be involved in getting this working with PHP?

</comment><comment><USER9> It is rather unclear to me whether or not Vtocc automagically takes care of sharding and replication.

</comment><comment><USER10> What I don't understand is why you would use MySQL as your storage engine it seems to me you are stripping away most of the benefits of using MySQL by interfacing it with this library. Is there a compelling reason to not use google's own LevelDB?

<comment><USER5> Don't really see what parts of mySQL you are stripping away by using this library. It's just extending/improving some weak spots of mySQL- you literally don't lose any features.

<comment><USER10> According to their website - """ The way we plan to achieve this is by providing a subset SQL front end with limited guarantees """

If your making something to parse and validate SQL yourself which is what it seems like they are doing then why go through all the hassle to run it a second time through another SQL parser. Also since your mandating everything have a "Key" why are we not using a "Key-Value" store.

I am not saying this is a bad project or a bad design decision I am just curious why they made those decisions since at first glance it makes no sense whatsoever.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tripzzle – Discover best hotels based on interest and travel date - <AUTHOR> http://tripzzle.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my early stage attempt towards a perfect algorithm to analyze different parameters and suggest destinations and hotels based on user interests and expected travel dates, I'd like some evaluation on the results so far. Thanks in advance.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting, but it's unusable without location. I had worked on similar decision making based on certain params but definitely with check-in/check-out and location. :) All the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but if you already know where to go there are hundreds of websites to do your research. This is for people looking for inspiration. Would you please evaluate the quality of the results?

<comment><USER2> sure</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: GSoC experience? - <AUTHOR> Anyone here participated as student for past Google Summer of Code? For which organization? How was your experience? <comment><USER2> Would love to share my experience since it was pretty different from most of my peers. I contributed to VTK, building tools to magnify invisible motion, based on a CSAIL paper [1].

Unlike most people, I hardly had extensive programming background. In fact my core competency was in the image processing (I come from an electrical engineering background). I never considered my programming skills good enough to participate in GSoC. In fact, one of my friends told me about this project a week before the deadline. I was already implementing this algorithm for a course project of mine, though it was in Python. Hence I spent most of my time learning professional programming and ended up successfully completing the project. In the spirit of open source, I have shared my entire GSoC application publicly [2], I hope you find it helpful!

[1] [http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/) [2] [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/google-summer-of-code- gs...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/google-summer-of-code-gsoc-sample- proposal-10fdff883963)</comment>


Remember mid 90's RAM prices? Suddenly, prices dropped. What happened? - <AUTHOR> I was remembering how expensive simms used to be in the early-mid 90's, and then suddenly prices started dropping.  Not slowly, it was like a giant meteorite made out of RAM slammed into the planet and now we have it all over the place just on the ground, so pricing had to drastically go down.  What happened exactly?  Was it a patent that got invalidated or expired?  Was it just a new series of companies getting into the memory game? <comment><USER2> There is some nice raw data at [http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm). After some searching I found this article on ram technology and their description of what happened to ram prices sounds at least plausible: [http://www.oempcworld.com/support/RAM_Technical_Perspective....](http://www.oempcworld.com/support/RAM_Technical_Perspective.htm#RAM_Price_Changes)

<comment><AUTHOR> All great answers. Thanks for the links here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I seem to remember that the manufactures oopsed and built too much capacity. No real idea why though. Other neurons firing give rise to the fleeting thought that Japanese and US chip companies got blindsided by the Korean? entry into the market.

I do know that circa 1995 suddenly there was a plethora of CMOS analog chips on the market taking advantage of otherwise idle CMOS lines. Later analog IC companies made good use of obsolete DRAM/CPU production lines.

I wouldn't use any of the above as TRVTH though.

</comment><comment><USER4> A factory fire triggered the spike.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/business/the-executive- com...](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/business/the-executive-computer- memory-chip-prices-take-the-up-stairs-again.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, there was a price-fixing cartel that was investigated in 2002 and punished in 2003-5: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing) .</comment>


Call Yourself A Hacker, Lose Your 4th Amendment Rights - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalbond.com/blog/2013/10/22/call-yourself-a-hacker-lose-your-4th-amendment-rights

<comment><USER2> The Digital Bond blog, which covers the computer security subfield of SCADA assessments, is spinning this story pretty hard, which I think you'll see pretty quickly if you skim the actual court order.

What's happening here is that Cory Thuen, a former developer of a network security product called Sophia at a company called Batelle, was fired (he did not "leave") apparently after it was determined that he was making a personal copy of Sophia called Visdom that he planned on open sourcing. When Thuen went on to start his own company to release Visdom (Southfork), Batelle sued for copyright infringement.

Two things are happening at this point in the story, if I'm following it right. First, Batelle has prevailed in a preliminary injunction ordering Thuen to take down Visdom. It did so by making a showing that convinced the court it was likely to prevail in its suit, and that argument included admissions from Thuen that he had copied at least some of Sophia.

Next, Thuen is being ordered to comply with discovery in the suit. Hard drive images are standard ESI evidence in cases like these; it is not at all weird that a court would order an image of a hard drive. The idea that an adversary in a civil proceeding might get access to content like this isn't at all weird; it's a basic result of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

There are two wrinkles to this case:

First, the court ordered that Thuen be served with the demand for his computer without prior notice. According to the order, this is something that the court can do in extreme situations to prevent evidence from being spoiled. The reasoning the court used here is janky: Thuen claimed to be a "hacker", and the court hung its assessment that he might be likely to blitz his hard drive on that.

Second, the court order _escrows_ the hard drive image with the court, allowing Batelle's forensic expert to image the drive but not examine that image; the court hasn't yet determined what access Batelle will have to the image, but is instead taking steps to ensure that the image is available should it be needed.

Once again: hard drive images are not an unusual product of civil discovery. You do not have a "4th amendment right" to avoid civil discovery.

The "hacker" thing is facially ridiculous. But contra Digital Bond's claim, "hacker" didn't enable the hard drive imaging to occur; that was going to occur during discovery no matter what. Instead, "hacker" changed the prior notification procedure used to obtain the image.

<comment><USER3> > When Thuen went on to start his own company to release Visdom (Southfork), > Batelle sued for copyright infringement.

I have no idea as to the merits of the case, but I find it funny how liberally some OSS types feel with regard to copyright.

At least for GPL advocates, copyright is a feature, not a bug. "Copyleft" may very well be just a hack of copyright law, but it _depends_ on strong copyright to work at all. That's why so many Free and open source software projects take the progeny and licensing of source code so seriously. It's not simply that we wish to comply with the law, but that the laws regarding copyright are essential to the ecosystem as a whole.

<comment><USER4> I think you overestimate the necessity of copyright law to the open source community. Even if the community could not legally force people to play fair with open source code (by releasing modifications, not charging, or whatever the terms are), people would still continue to write it.

<comment><USER5> Source: BSD and MIT-licensed software.

(Unless I'm misunderstanding, you _can_ charge for GPL software, you just cannot charge for the source once they've got a binary. You also can use your own fork of GPL on your hardware without releasing any source.)

<comment><USER6> You _can_ charge a reasonable distribution/duplication fee for GPL source code. The early FSF funded itself by selling several hundred dollar copies of GNU (apparently that took a lot of tapes back then).

See [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No 4th amendment rights were lost. A warrant was issued, which is provided for in the 4th amendment and whose issue can be challenged in court. The 4th amendment is designed to protect you from _warrantless_ seizures. It does not confer any right to frustrate the issuance of a warrant.

Challenged does not mean 'prevent'ed it can be argued later as a matter of law that the warrant should not have been issued, and that the evidence acquired as a result is inadmissible. Courts do not have to give defendants the benefit of the doubt in matters of evidence collection because a) procedures exist to challenge the admission of that evidence at trial and b) it's a sad but true fact that a lot of people do in fact attempt to destroy evidence; where they have both motive and capacity to do so, seizure is justifiable. Spoliation (the legal term for destruction of evidence) is a big problem in litigation.

<comment><USER8> >Challenged does not mean 'prevent'ed it can be argued later as a matter of law that the warrant should not have been issued, and that the evidence acquired as a result is inadmissible.

This is not the case and it is called the "good faith" exception. The police officers when acting in good faith under a warrant that is latter found to invalid does not make the evidence inadmissible.

Given this do you now believe there is good reason to fight back against unreasonable warrants?

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that the whole point of the 'exclusionary rule' being discussed here it to ensure that law enforcement _does_ maintain the Fourth Amendment rights of a suspect by going through the due process procedures needed to obtain a warrant before conducting a search and/or seizure.

The whole point to the 'good faith' exception to the 'exclusionary rule' is that in such a case, the detective _had_ complied with the Fourth Amendment, the issued warrant passed some "smell tests", etc. Therefore it doesn't make sense to _automatically_ "punish" the government (and society) and let people go free under the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' principle, since law enforcement wasn't the one at fault in that scenario, but rather the judge who issued the warrant.

However, the 'good faith' exception is a _possibility_ , not a mandate. The appellate judge can certainly decide that the evidence obtained under a warrant which is later deemed inadmissible should be excluded completely. All that the 'good faith' exception means is that the appellate judge doesn't _have_ to exclude all that evidence; rather they can exclude what they deem essential toward meeting the interests of overall justice and fairness before remanding the case back to trial.

Either way, fighting back against "unreasonable warrants" is almost axiomatically a good idea; I don't think _anyone_ wants "unreasonable warrants" floating around in the justice system. I find it hard to feel too bad for people who really committed a serious crime and left evidence to that effect though. The Bill of Rights is designed to protect the innocent from the government; that it also gives shielding to the guilty is the price that society has to pay, but that doesn't mean you should rely on such a shield being present if you commit a crime :P.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From now on I'm going to refer to myself as a judge.

</comment><comment><USER10> Didn't think that there was much of the 4th Amendment left to lose.</comment>


People who like "pseudo-profound" quotes are not so smart, says science - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/566050/people-who-like-pseudo-profound-quotes-are-not-so-smart-says-science/ <comment><USER2> People who write articles about how others are not so smart, may not be so smart.

<comment><USER3> Same with people who post something that's already been posted about 20 times in the last month.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=profound&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=profound&sort=byDate&prefix&page=1&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment></comment>


Among Servers, Apple's Mac Mini Quietly Gains Ground - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/among-servers-apples-mac-mini-quietly-gains-ground/ <comment><USER2> I remember reading articles like this about technologies and companies that I was excited about.

In the late 80s the stories were: "The Apple // is still relevant." It wasn't. I remember OS/2 fans pointing to "huge deployments in banking", "huge in Brazil", and "every ATM machine is running OS/2." Whatever truth was there was irrelevant, as IBM had given up on OS/2.

Apple has given up on selling a server operating system. Apple has given up on selling server hardware. Apple failed.

A cluster of minis makes sense if you are running a CI build farm for an OS X application. It probably makes sense if you're building a FCP render farm. In both of these cases, note that it only makes sense because of the licensing issues. In a saner world you would be running on commodity x86 hardware.

If you are an Apple fan and find yourself arguing that your employer should be using piles of minis-running-Linux based on this article, don't.

<comment><USER3> Apple has not failed with the mini because it never tried for this sort of thing in the first place - it is a happy accident. And one that I believe they noticed and allowed to go on organically with the bare minimum of effort on their part.

The reason collocating minis is intriguing is this: This consumer grade hardware has gotten so reliable and powerful that it makes for a very good server - being a consumer SKU means it has a production run orders of magnitude greater than a Dell server for example.

Thus a Mini is disposable. It is almost like a Raspberry Pi. A proper server will obviously be more bang for the buck in terms of raw hardware specs, but the TCO of a Mini is favorable because you can resell it and it has a good, none-enterprise-y warranty.

A fully loaded Mini amortized comes out to something like $50/month. It also blows EC2, 'etc, completely out of the water. In the rather rare case of it failing it is simply swapped out by the facility with _exactly equivalent_ hardware in short order while yours gets handed off to Apple Care, at which point you can simply ebay it for 70%+ of its original price and get a brand new one switched back, all in a matter of a day or two. If you need to "spin up" more, there are always more laying around that can be provided by the facility immediately. Dedicated hardware that is so flexible and convenient is a powerful thing. Depending on your use case you could get away with running on just a couple of minis and save quite a lot of money.

If you buy them in threes for redundancy Apple offers nice discounts and financing. You want to compare how much performance you get out of three minis for $200/mo (total) to what that would cost you on Heroku?

Oh and I'm pretty sure you can boot linux from an SD card or some such.

<comment><USER2> Apple failed in the server market. They have had success with the Mini.

A Mini is cheaper than EC2, but that isn't the point of EC2.

You don't run in EC2 because it is cheap or performant, you run there because you can spin up virtual machines quickly. You run there because it is adjacent to S3. You run there becuase it integrates with the likes of RDS, ELB, and Route 53.

<comment><USER3> It depends on your use case of course. If you spin up dozens of instances all the time then sure - but keep in mind that an email like "put another mini in my rack" gets executed in a few hours and is equivalent to _quite a lot of compute units_.

That's rather the point, even very large spikes in growth can be swallowed by just a few of these in theory and certainly there are always enough Minis in close proximity such that it makes no difference.

<comment><USER2> I disagree.

EC2 is inherently unreliable, and so are consumer-grade desktops like Mac Minis.

The strategy in EC2 is to be able to spin up replacements very quickly when your instances fail.

The only strategy for a non-power-redundant, non-RAID, no-IPMI Mac Mini failure is the same, except replacement is measured in minutes or hours instead of seconds. This is huge.

<comment><USER4> If you're running above-capacity, a single failure of a box in any working set (routers, database shards, app servers, etc.) doesn't matter. Just wait the few hours and let the rest of your boxes silently absorb the load.

If you're running exactly-at-capacity: why?

(This presumes, though, that you're Highly Available enough to begin with that one node lost is a quantitative, not qualitative, failure in your system. If you only have one app server, time-to-reprovision is the least of your worries.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems very odd to me. Why restrict one's self to an unsupported, proprietary, unvirtualisable OS when Linux and the BSDs are neither of those things and very similar.

<comment><USER6> OSX is virtualizable, but they only let you do it (license wise) on Mac hardware.

<comment><USER5> Which makes it unvirtualisable for practical purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> "We thought about applying it to other hardware, but if Dell makes a small little machine, you don't know that they'll be making that, in that form factor, six months down the road, or what they're going to do, or how they're going to refresh it,"

This is completely upside-down. Apple's future plans are entirely opaque. When Dell releases an Optiplex desktop, Poweredge server, or Latitude laptop they commit to not making changes for some non-trivial amount of time so that corporate images don't need to be fiddled with.

</comment><comment><USER7> At a previous job, we used <http://www.macminicolo.net/> for a couple of years. Awesome (awesome!) service, great pricing. Haven't been with them in about a year, but I haven't heard anything bad about them since I left...

<comment><USER8> What did they do with your mini when you left?

<comment><USER7> I left the company, I assume they returned it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As far as servers go, if you don't need the sophistication of OS X and its great development tools and process handling, why not just use an off-the- shelf and supported desktop (i.e., Lenovo ThinkCentre) with *BSD on it? Paying the premium for monolithic construction and an OS that is likely never going to see the height of its potential in a specified application seems a bit much.

<comment><USER10> Then you can legally virtualize osx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A big part of what's pushing the mini use in the datacenter is that pretty much everybody will give you a cheaper colo deal with less restrictions than a 1u. Because the mini lacks stuff like raid, multiple nics, ipmi etc. the typical customer can be relied on to have a pretty idle server. The mobile parts help, but if you filled one of those high density mini racks and used them as compute servers or cloud hosts or something your rack would melt just as fast as any cpu heavy stack of 1us. But with almost everyone just running a hobby website, directory server or mdm you can fit 10 or 15 of those things into to the power budget of a 1u or 2u cdn edge box.

You can see the artifacts in a lot of their price lists. Dedicated colo? Sure, $35. Oh you want a managed firewall in front of it? that'll be $50 extra. Want some space on our fault tolerant SAN? No problem, $200.

I bet it's a great way for a hosting company to get some use out of cages in the popular dc's that can't sell any more power.

</comment><comment><USER12> At <http://objective-cloud.com> we are also using Mac Minis with SSDs and 16 GB of RAM. A single Mac Mini can do so much - computing wise. The only bad thing about Mac Minis is their GPU which may make some use cases less efficient to realize.

</comment><comment><USER2> "'I'd say the biggest worry is that it runs on 2.5in drives,' Stucki said. 'But, those have been come more reliable lately, and especially in stationary machines like a server.'"

2.5" drives are reputed to be more reliable than 3.5" drives, due to less rotational vibration. The advantage of 3.5" is density.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have one in a 2-mini shelf in the colo to do OSX Server device management/etc. stuff. It's..interesting. Apple seems to keep changing their remote management tools, and unless you have Kerberos set up, there's no good way to do cut-and-paste long random passwords or anything else through the remote desktop tool (it doesn't work during the secure password input window).

Probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they have a very specific need; a comparable Atom-based Linux server is cheaper, easier to manage, etc. If you need performance, you can get a low-end i7 based server, and if you need ECC, etc., get a low-end Xeon.

The hardware is fine; it's OSX that is lacking.

</comment><comment><USER14> The posted link doesn't have any /. comments, try this instead:

[http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/03/01/2252215/among- serve...](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/03/01/2252215/among-servers- apples-mac-mini-quietly-gains-ground)

</comment><comment><USER15> I call this concept "Ubiservers" for Ubiquitous Servers. The idea is the consumer demand for highly integrated computing devices, based on SoCs, combined with Moore's law being applied to solid-state storage will lead to very small devices that 'serve' content or computing to others becoming ubiquitous.

Raspberry Pi is another example of this reality.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why I do have one and you should consider getting one:

\- reliable : besides the 2nd HD giving SMART errors and that I had preventively changed, I never had one hardware problem in over 3 years. It's on 24/7 and on UPS. I have a second one without UPS, also working like a charm.

\- small : whenever you need a server, it will fit.

\- green : it won't suck too much power, so it won't overheat. I live in a tropical climate- this matters to me.

\- versatile : it can be reconverted into a small desktop when you no longer need it.

\- standardized : you don't have to worry about the video card or the revision of whatever internal piece changing between batches. If you compile your own linux kernels, that's a godsend.

\- easy to find : you need one in a hurry? There are applestores everywhere. now try and get me a dell server in the next hour.

\- osx already installed : sure Linux might be better in many cases, but my time is not free. OSX total configuration time tops 20 minutes, including plugging cables.

\- quick to configure : if you just need something for php+psql, download osx server package and you're ready to go (That's included in my 20 minutes estimate). It's sucking less than the previous versions (I hated snow leopard server). If you are not in a big hurry, I recommend instead to install your own utilities.

In both cases you can keep .dmg, which is useful in some work environments where for security reasons there is no internet connection.

Oh and here is a reason why I love rudix - prepackaged GNU utilities, with everything included.

 _No I do not want to recompile stuff. No I do not want to even think about tracking dependancies! If I need say mc, I want a .dmg which contains the whole thing and the libs, and that I can install on another machine immediately without worrying about glib or stuff._

TLDR; the mac mini is great. OSX Server "acceptable", but most of it can be replaced by rudix.

Sure you may be better served by a custom built machine, or a cloud service, but when you want something working ASAP on an intranet, I haven't found anything better yet.

I'm not even talking about the sweet no-questions apple warranty, or the rescue procedure standardization (alt key : will boot on CD or USB) common to all apple hardware. I don't want to remember if F1 or F10 or F12 will get me in the bios, or where I will have to click to let me boot from usb.

I buy mac minis because it's the best hardware I've found for my needs (and I say that while trying some hackintoshes time to time!)

If you haven't tried one yet, it is worth experimenting with.

BTW on <http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD389LL> I see the 16Gb RAM upgrade is getting "more affordable", but I really would like to get a mini with 32 or 64 gigs.

EDIT: I know that RedHat, Debian, etc installation can be automated. If you have thousands of identical machines using known-to-be-supported hardware, and highly specific needs requiring a gazillion of .debs it's great (+)

But let's say it's 7pm and you need just one machine with apache to serve a php website on the intranet. Do you want to automate an installation and tweak it, or just take a box where a Unix is already installed, along with vi, apache, and the basic tools you need? Some minor configuration file edits will make that box production ready in a matter of minutes. (And BTW OSX software installation can be automated as well)

\+ : automated installs do not fully remove hardware variation issues or make sure the drivers work. The best part of apple hardware is that it generally evolves very slowly - your kernel bins, modules, etc. will usually require more tweaking on 5 dells of the same model than on 20 different imacs (!)

In the ends, it's all about costs, and return to scale.

If you have thousands of linux boxes, it's a good idea to use cheaper hardware (and buy spares!) along with install automatization : high fixed cost, low marginal costs.

For lower volumes, a different solution means I have to spend far less time on it, which lets me concentrate on the real work.

<comment><USER17> _> easy to find : you need one in a hurry? There are applestores everywhere._

Maybe in your country.

 _> osx already installed : sure Linux might be better in many cases, but my time is not free. OSX total configuration time tops 20 minutes, including plugging cables._

I'm not familiar with OSX, but the installation process for Red Hat based distributions can be automated.

<comment><USER18> Which country do you live in that doesn't have Apple retailers ?

Because it sounds like an amazing business opportunity.

<comment><USER17> I haven't said there's no Apple retailer just that they aren't everywhere. I'm also wondering how many of them have mini-Macs on stock, since iPhones are way more popular.

I live in Romania and I _think_ that our neighbors are in a similar situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any chance for the Xserve line returning?

Now I use HP DL360s, but I used to love the Xserve !U servers

<comment><USER20> I would say almost certainly no. Apple has clearly become a consumer/retail oriented company; few organizations ever really bought into the idea of the Xserve line, and to the extent Apple are still interested in "enterprise" sales it's for MacBooks and iOS devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What advantages do you get in deploying something to OS X vs deploying to Linux?

<comment><USER22> Someone who already knows os x gets the advantage of not having to learn linux.

<comment><USER21> But surely at this point you are going to be doing everything via SSH at which point the differences are going to be small, although you might be better going with FreeBSD I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mac Minis are an absolute niche and will get buried by the "cloud" anyway.

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone who uses Mac Minis for servers the biggest reason is value.

I can fit 2 Mac Minis in a 1RU. And that is a Core i7, 16GB, 2xSSD which is about 20-30x faster than what Amazon, Rackspace offers for the same price. Now throw in the fact that you can (a) send it back to Apple if it breaks or (b) sell it on eBay for nearly the same price it all becomes very compelling.

Given that I use a Java/Hazelcast/Cassandra stack I can simply add more Mac Minis to linearly scale with no single point of failure.

<comment><USER24> I'm in the market for a couple for installing MySQL Cluster Edition on. I'll probably buy new (for a DOA warranty) and I'm going to skip AppleCare on them - I've had zero failures on the other Minis I've had. I've found that like you said, the used market prices are so strong that unless you're penny-pinching, there's no good reason to buy used.

If there is a discount for buying 3 or more at a time like recuter said above, I may investigate doing that, if it's a steep enough discount. :)

EDIT: Just chatted with Apple sales, and discounts are only for business customers, not individuals. :(</comment></comment>


IPFS Pubsub: Distributed named pubsub channels based in the IPFS Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://ipfs.io/blog/25-pubsub/ <comment><USER2> Hey Everyone! IPFS dev here, If anyone is interested in the future of ipfs pubsub you can participate in the discussions in our research repo: [https://github.com/libp2p/research- pubsub](https://github.com/libp2p/research-pubsub) . One of the next big things we're planning to do is to implement a new routing algorithm, one proposal for this is here: [https://github.com/libp2p/research- pubsub/pull/17](https://github.com/libp2p/research-pubsub/pull/17) (feedback and review very welcome)

We are also planning on implementing various different modes for authentication and encryption. Our pubsub currently is plaintext and open for anyone to publish to any topic

<comment><USER3> When you're talking about a routing proposal, I think you are referring to this? [https://github.com/vyzo/research- pubsub/blob/a6cfdd3fec9d595...](https://github.com/vyzo/research- pubsub/blob/a6cfdd3fec9d595a3f4cb56e94642e77b4dca13f/epidemic-pubsub.md)

<comment><USER4> Yes that's the document in [https://github.com/libp2p/research- pubsub/pull/17](https://github.com/libp2p/research-pubsub/pull/17)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pubsub is probably one of the lesser known features of IPFS right now, given that it's still marked as experimental. We're researching more efficient tree- forming and message routing algorithms, but generally the interface is pretty stable by now. Pubsub is supported in both go-ipfs and js-ipfs.

A shining example of pubsub in use is PeerPad, a collaborative text editor exchanging CRDTs over IPFS/Pubsub: [https://peerpad.net](https://peerpad.net)

<comment><USER5> Off-topic question for you. What language do you recommend developers build IPFS-backed apps with? I started building an app in Go (which is your reference language) but Javascript seems to have a lot more APIs available for it.

<comment><USER4> If you're looking for raw performance and/or large datasets, go-ipfs is for you. If you're looking for running within websites (and in browsers generally), then js-ipfs is for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IPFS just keeps looking more and more useful. I'm starting to wonder about planning future text-rich applications (forums, news, blog, etc..) with article backups to IPFS and a link on the live site.

Would require extra storage and overhead, but the result is maybe even more helpful than a tor site for important content.

<comment><USER7> make no mistake: ipfs _by_itself_ is no more "anonymous" than torrenting or other types of file sharing ftp/sftp/ssh/http/whatever...

because they can always get your ip address.

You will need to use some other method if you want anonymity.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, the reference to Tor is misleading. I was not referring to anonymity but rather _access to content_ from restricted areas like the Middle East or Asia.

<comment><USER7> In that sense, I would agree, ipfs can provide access to content that would otherwise be blocked.

<comment><USER8> Could ISPs throttle IPFS content the same way they did with torrents a while ago? (and probably will again once net neutrality falls).

<comment><USER4> Sure -- but libp2p's network transports underneath are pluggable. There's already Websockets (/ws, think domain fronting! [1]) and Tor (/onion) transports, so there's various options for evading censorship (I personally consider bandwidth throttling a form of censorship).

[1] Domain fronting lets you use a well-established web frontend for your web service. E.g. we could host /ws nodes in Google Cloud, and to the ISP the TLS handshake looks like it's for google.com, while inside the connection there's e.g. a `Host: libp2p.googlecloud.com` header. More info: [https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/](https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/)

But then again, net neutrality is a political issue! You don't solve it for good with technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back in the day (late 1990s iirc) I used Usenet as a global, distributed, publish/subscribe bus for system messages between island service POPs. Messages PGP encrypted and carried by a variety of groups (mostly alt.*). Also eventually consistent. Very eventually in some cases.

"Floodsub" indeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, botnet C&C with no takedowns and more efficient and lower risk than servers on Tor? Nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, but remember IPFS nodes can elect to blacklist any given channel, so any given static C&C site here is just as vulnerable as a DNS point or a given static IP address.

<comment><USER4> There's no blocking functionality in IPFS yet - the plan is to have customizable opt-in blocklists (and allowlists) for content and peers, though, so communities can govern themselves regarding what content is desired and what's not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a complete IPFS ignorant but I can't help but wonder what's a typical latency in such a pubsub system? I would imagine it varies widely but some anecdotal experiences would be nice to hear

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there some kind of podcast or YouTube series about ipfs and similar technologies? I'd love to learn more about how they work, what they're working on, and what's next.

<comment><USER13> Check out the IPFS YouTube channel ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdjsUXJ3QawK4O5L1kqqsew](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdjsUXJ3QawK4O5L1kqqsew)) and Decentralized Web Primer ([https://www.gitbook.com/book/flyingzumwalt/decentralized- web...](https://www.gitbook.com/book/flyingzumwalt/decentralized-web-primer)) as starting points.

For a more overarching perspective, I'd suggest A Progress Report on the Decentralized Web: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4PIGr3RB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4PIGr3RB8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does spam prevention work?

<comment><USER15> > Currently, any peer can publish to any pubsub topic. We plan to implement an > authenticated mode for pubsub topics, where only authorized peers — those > given a cryptographic key or capability — can publish messages. We are still > working out the sharing and capability granting model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great work by vyzo on this. Look forward to using this for all sorts of content publication!

</comment><comment><USER17> Article is from seven months ago. I'd be curious to see if there is an update to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking over the github I don't see much code changes being committed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Could this be used for neartime RSS type functionality? I have zero IPFS experience.</comment>


CommanderSong: Song videos with hidden commands your phone recognizes - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/1192246019926315009 <comment><USER2> He was so focused on whether he could, that he didn't ask himself if he should</comment>