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"There is no such thing as humane meat." This conclusion was drawn by Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA, in an opinion piece published last week in The Huffington Post.

Newkirk's point of view is not new (Farm Sanctuary's Bruce Friedrich has called humane meat "a contradiction in terms"). Still, it's a position that sounds extreme to many people.

Now a challenge: stop here, go back to Newkirk's post, and (if you haven't already) read the whole thing. Suspend any desire to argue back emotionally. Just read and think.

OK. How did you do? Did you make it through to the end — calmly?

Newkirk, herself, isn't always calm. Some of the rhetoric is incendiary ("animal slavery") or overgeneralized (people who stop eating animals "truly won't miss a thing except ill health"). I can tell you that I, for one, am occasionally overwhelmed by cravings for chicken pot pie!

More seriously, Newkirk aims her manifesto at the horrors of factory farming. Yet she sweeps up in her absolutist's net a lot of good people, including those who make their living on small farms.

On some small farms, chickens, pigs and other animals live largely in the fresh air, surrounded by the "family and friends" that Newkirk mentions in her piece. Yes, most of them are then slaughtered for the table. But isn't there humane practice on these farms, including the method of slaughter?

I asked Newkirk why she didn't distinguish between factory farms and small farms. On Monday, she told me in an email message that yes, "small farms are much better," but continued:

Invariably they are still inhumane at some level. Even on the smallest of farms (I grew up on one for some years) there will be mistreatment with animals seen as commodities, separation from others, frightening transport, the smells of slaughter before them, and definitely some horrible procedures, such as castration without even a painkiller.

Every year, the South By Southwest music, film and interactive festival gets larger, and navigating the blur of panels, parties and shows gets more daunting. The girth of it all is enough to keep many SXSW old-timers away from Austin this year.

But the interactive part of SXSW is still an important place for many startups and industry illuminati. It is, after all, the tech fest where Twitter first "blew up" in 2007, Foursquare got a huge launchpad in 2009 and hoards of emerging entrepreneurs and technologies compete for new eyes.

This year's agenda is heavy on space exploration, wearable electronics, hardware like 3-D printers and the new work-life balance questions spawned by our ever-growing reliance on technology. Can we have it all, with the help of robots?

SXSW: Live From Austin

There's a kind of rice growing in some test plots in the Philippines that's unlike any rice ever seen before. It's yellow. Its backers call it "golden rice." It's been genetically modified so that it contains beta-carotene, the source of vitamin A.

Millions of people in Asia and Africa don't get enough of this vital nutrient, so this rice has become the symbol of an idea: that genetically engineered crops can be a tool to improve the lives of the poor.

It's a statement that rouses emotions and sets off fierce arguments. There's a raging, global debate about such crops.

But before we get to that debate, and the role that golden rice plays in it, let's travel back in time to golden rice's origins.

It began with a conversation in 1984.

The science of biotechnology was in its infancy at this point. There were no genetically engineered crops yet. Scientists were just figuring out how to find genes and move them between different organisms.

Some people at the Rockefeller Foundation thought that these techniques might be useful for giving farmers in poor countries a bigger harvest.

So they set up a meeting at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), in the Philippines, to talk about this.

Gary Toenniessen, who was in charge of the foundation's biotechnology program at the time, says that a lot of people at this meeting were very skeptical about biotechnology. They were plant breeders, masters of the traditional way to improve crops.

One evening, after the formal sessions, "a group of these breeders were sitting around at the guesthouse at IRRI, having a beer or two," says Toenniessen. After listening to their skepticism for a while, Toenniessen spoke up. If this technology did actually pan out, he said, and you could put any gene you wanted into rice, which one would you pick? "What's your favorite gene?"

They went around the room. Breeders talked about genes for resisting disease or surviving droughts.

They came to a breeder named Peter Jennings, a legendary figure in these circles. He'd created perhaps the most famous variety of rice in history, called IR 8, which launched the so-called Green Revolution in rice-growing countries of Asia in the 1960s.

"Yellow endosperm," said Jennings. (The endosperm of a grain of rice or wheat is the main part that's eaten.)

"That kind of took everybody by surprise. It certainly took me by surprise. So I said, 'Why?' " Toenniessen recalls.

Jennings explained that the color yellow signals the presence of beta-carotene — the source of vitamin A. Yellow kinds of corn or sorghum exist naturally, and for years, Jennings said, he had been looking for similar varieties of rice. Regular white rice doesn't provide this vital nutrient, and it's a big problem.

"When children are weaned, they're often weaned on a rice gruel. And if they don't get any beta-carotene or vitamin A during that period, they can be harmed for the rest of their lives," says Toenniessen.

Toenniessen was persuaded, and the Rockefeller Foundation started a program aimed at creating, through technology, what Jennings had not been able to find in nature.

A global network of scientists at nonprofit research institutes started working on the problem.

The first real breakthrough came in 1999. Scientists in Switzerland inserted two genes into rice that switched on production of beta-carotene. A few years later, other researchers created an even better version.

A single bowl of this new golden rice can supply 60 percent of a child's daily requirement of vitamin A.

"It's a great product. And it's beautiful! It looks just like saffron rice," says Toenniessen, who's now a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation.

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Some sloppy coding on an update to Microsoft's Windows 7 two years ago has cost the computer giant a $731 million fine to the European Commission.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would not contest the fine, imposed for what the commission said was the company's abuse of its market dominance to stifle competitors' Web browsers.

It all started in 2009, when Microsoft agreed to pay an 860 million euro fine to the commission and to give Windows users in Europe the option to choose browsers such as Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox, instead of having its own Internet Explorer automatically installed.

But some 15 million Windows 7 installations in Europe failed to include the fix and forced users to install Internet Explorer. Microsoft admitted the failure last year.

Microsoft says when it released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in February 2011, sloppy coding and testing of the new code meant it failed to trigger the alternate browser option when the system first booted up. The company says it was unaware of the problem until regulators brought it to its attention months later.

"We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it," a Microsoft spokesman said.

Speaking in Brussels at a news conference Wednesday, the EC's top competition regulator, Joaquin Almunia, said that the fine reflected the size of the violation and the length of time it went on for, according to The Associated Press:

"Almunia said it was also intended to make an example of Microsoft and deter other companies from doing same thing. In theory, the commission could have fined Microsoft up to 10 percent of its global annual sales during the period the violation took place.

" 'A failure to comply is a very serious infringement that must be sanctioned accordingly,' Almunia said."