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I get where they are coming from but I recently read the critical thinking series on GMO food (they have 3 different viewpoints per topic around GMO-- such as nutrition, pesticide implications, and drought tolerance).

Golden rice was specifically mentioned as being much less than promised.

So it's disappointing to see it mentioned by name here.

For example:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/rice.p...

GMO has value. Monsanto GMO is very suspect. Suicide genes is not something I want built into my the seeds my predominant food is grown from.
And pesticide tolerance has lead to massive overuse of pesticides (hundreds of millions of tons more than previously).
And that's leading to pesticide tolerant insects.

Personally, I want the food labeled so I can make a rational decision. I know that Monsanto and others have spent over a hundred million bucks so far just to block gmo labeling.

The reality is that if gmo food was 10% cheaper and labeled, within a decade, most people would get used to it and buy it anyway.

but some folks will have bad results. And it's good for them to know what's in the food so they are not at risk.

It is good for us to keep a healthy dose of skepticism. Take a look at the health industry in the USA for the past 40 years. We apparently hired some experts (http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Restricting_Dietary_Fat_and_Saturated_Fat.php who decided on their own that saturated fats are bad and what must be killing us. So, we have had an obesity epidemic in the US, with rates of type II diabetes way out of proportion to the rest of the world, which has had an enormous impact on our health costs, which almost directly correlates to the rise of the use of HFCS and processed fats in our food.

Way, to go, scientists!

Today it's pretty easy to look back at what happened over that ~15 year period and say "well obviously it was a mistake, those guys weren't really scientists, their methodologies were extremely flawed, they were doing the best they could with their knowledge at the time, blah blah blah". However - how were we to know at the time? Experts in the US overwhelmingly agreed to back the war on saturated fats at the time because "it just made sense", which is an affront to "best they could with the knowledge at the time" - they should damn well have known that they *didn't* know they were correct, simply because their studies were so flawed - it wasn't like scientific research was in its infancy in the 1970s. What's worse, it was so bad that you couldn't get government funding to do any research against it. Look at Atkins, he was relentlessly attacked for his stance against what we now know was horrifically poor policy. And it was absolutely horrific. Millions of people had their lives shortened by years, possibly decades, because of that government policy. I completely consider it akin to government pushing cigarettes.

I'm sorry, but after that debacle, it's going to be pretty difficult for me to trust scientific research that cannot be reliably used in a predictive capacity enough to blindly bet large portions of our economies on it (especially more of the pork barrel garbage they are doing today).

"Some virologists suggest the virus may eventually become "almost harmless" as it continues to evolve"

It would be harmless if the virus did not encode for a homologue of the human lipid peroxidase inhibitor glutathione peroxidase. See Keshen's disease (China).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

What they say might be happening but what *also* would explain that (and they did not check, a simple serum selenium test would differentiate) is:

Bloomberg news 2013:
"... selenium for two years were able to delay their need for antiretroviral therapies by about half compared with those given a placebo, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study followed 878 HIV-infected adults from Botswana, a nation with one of the highest rates of infection of the AIDS virus."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

(they need to read Fosters papers, B, C and E boost the immune system but it's Tryptophan, Glutamine and Cysteine that the virus encodes for and strips from the body)

Summary:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Aidsan...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Watch these -
Theory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Case study:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Then read his (free) book:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/0...
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...

See also:
http://www.doctoryourself.com/...
http://aras.ab.ca/articles/rfw...
http://www.fosterhealth.ca/nut...

Also:
1. Foster HD. How HIV-1 causes AIDS: Implications for prevention and treatment," Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 62(4), p 549-553, 2004.

2. Foster HD. What really causes AIDS. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2002. Free download at www.hdfoster.com .

For further reading:

"HIV/AIDS: a nutrient deficiency disease," Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 2005, Vol. 20(2), p 67-69.
Environmental factors and the pathogenesis of selenium-CD-4 cell tailspin in AIDS. Chinese Journal of AIDS and STD, Vol. 10(5), p 390-392,402 2004.

AIDS and the selenium-CD4T cell tailspin," World Journal of Infection, Vol. 3(6), p 456-459, 2003.
Micronutrients in pathogenesis and treatment of AIDS," Foreign Medical Sciences: Section of Medgeography, Vol. 24(2), p 49-53, 2003.

Why HIV-1 has diffused so much more rapidly in Sub-Saharan Africa than in North America. Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 60(4), p 611-614, 2003.

"How HIV-1 kills: Implications for the treatment and prevention of AIDS. Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, No. 255, p 76-78, 2002.

"Aids and the 'selenium - CD4T cell tailspin': the geography of a pandemic," Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, No. 209, p 94-99, 2000.

A nice link explaining the science which intrigued NASA: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php

"This is the same sort of logic creationists use to say things like, "the eye could never evolve naturally.'"

Pardon the multiple replies, but I did not notice that sentence the first time around.

It is not "the same kind of logic". At all. And here is why:

The creationists believe that it is impossible for order to come from chaos, without a guiding hand. WE know, however, that natural processes, like natural mutations over time, can form complex creatures. Okay, I understand this and so do you.

However: for something like this, the math doesn't work the same way. You are talking about a particular organism accidentally stumbling onto particular genetic changes that would -- if the pathway were straightforward -- take thousands or millions of years. Thus the argument that some people here have made: that "they're just speeding it up".

Except it doesn't work that way. You might be able to predict, say, that in a billion years creatures are going to develop eyes. But there is no way you can say that a particular creature will have a particular kind of eye, because that's not the way evolution works.

Instead, accidental mutations happen. And as we already know, the vast majority of these accidental mutations are not beneficial. They weaken or kill the organism, and -- very gradually unless it's actually deadly -- tend to fade from the gene pool.

But then occasionally, a beneficial mutation happens. Statistically it is very rare. And in addition to that, there is no way to predict in advance (at least at anything like our current level of technology) what that mutation will be.

These mutations add up. But there is no way in advance you will know which way they will go.

Will some plant build up (or maybe, some exotic plant already has) resistance to roundup? Over a very long period of time, that is likely. But (as I mentioned before), Roundup is highly unlikely to be around that long.

But the odds against the plant that does it being be corn or some other human food crop are ASTRONOMICAL. The chain of events that would lead to that kind of mutation via natural selection would probably be a huge tree of probabilities that are zero down to 18 decimal places.

But again, that's all beside the point. The fact is that they never did proper safety studies, they DID cover up failures and problems, and we ARE having other ecological problems that we can trace back to these products.

It's not my imagination. Look it the hell up.

I haven't the slightest idea why that first link did not come out right, but here is the correct one.

> As far as I know there is no known theoretical basis for such a reaction.

Read about the Widom-Larsen Theory here:

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php

Widom-Larsen Theory Explains Low Energy Nuclear Reactions & Why They Are Safe and Green

Widom-Larsen theory of LENRs predicts ultra low momentum neutrons created by collective weak interactions

Citation needed you fucking liar.

Wow, what a braying ass you are. Heeeee Hawwwww

That aside, start here.

BS! I dare you to cite one scientific study supporting your statement. Here are some studies or references to studies that conclude organic food [pdf] can feed the world.

Falcon

It's cheaper to whack an inventor than to allow his/her invention to be patented, it's cheaper to buy off an inventor than to allow their invention to be patented. It's most expensive to allow patents that undermine the status quo to go forward. That's why people like Stanley Meyer are disposed of, rather than letting his patent trump the oil companies.
Yet, companies like Monsanto can patent their abominations like genetically modified corn and cotton which do more damage than non-GMO strains. Cotton has been a disaster in India and the legal issues where GMO corn pollinates non-GMO corn is only the tip of the iceberg.
The USPTO has become nothing more than a tool for corporate business in "weeding" out (no pun intended) the competition.

Cool, you actually read them. I'm not a speed reader so I didn't take the time to read them all the way through. Gold star for you.

Did you also read the other links? I'll get back to those in a bit.

re:Schmeiser;
From Wiki; "He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields,
So Schmeiser noticed that some of the wild rapeseed plants survived being hit with roundup and checked the rest of his field to see if the roundup resistance was present. Upon discovering that it was he planted a test field with it. So, the question is how did the "Roundup Ready" genes get into his field? Schmeiser claimed pollen from a neighbor must have contaminated the field, Monsanto didn't challenge that claim in court. Since no one, not even Monsanto, has been able to show that Scheimser obtained "Roundup Ready" seed from another source we (obviously not including you) can conclude that he is likely telling the truth. There is no conclusive evidence either way that it was accidental or not.

We have also become distracted from an important point here, the one the original article brings up. Plants containing genetically modified DNA are in the wild and likely cross pollinating with wild plants. Since Monsanto, or anyone else, has indicated that transfering the RR trait through cross pollination is impossible it is a reasonable assumption that it is occurring and that Schmieser's field was cross contaminated. That may be why Monsanto dropped the charge that Schmieser obtained the seed intentionally, they new they couldn't prove it.

Based upon review of the available information I concede that you are correct in the claim that Monsanto has not yet sued a farmer for proven accidental cross pollination. But the key word here is proven, it has not be dis-proven either.

You still failed to address the other links that back my position that GMO has unforeseen negative impact on the environment. All the fire and fury around Monsanto and farms is really kind of irelivant when you realize that while GM plants may have short (less than 10 years) term benefits in the long run (+20 years) they are going to hurt us far more. Here is another link for you that related more to the important issue of the harm GMd plants are implicated in causing.

On a side note I must say I am enjoying this conversation. It is always good to have your views challenged by the presentation of opposing information, though your replies have been a bit scarce in anything that seriously makes me reconsider my views. Of course you can say the same thing about mine.

They also sue if your non-GM crop is contaminated by another's GM crop.
No, they don't. All of the companies and governments involved clearly say that a certain amount of crossbreeding is inevitable, and not a cause for legal action.

First, Monsanto did claim their GE crops will not cross breed years ago. It was only after it was proven crossbreeding does happened that they stopped making the claim. Secondly, many farmers have either been sued or themselves sued GE companies. Monsanto regularly sends out private investigators, Pinkertons, to collect specimens to test for GE genes. They even threatened someone who's neither a farmer nor a seed dealer. Despite having no evidence, and the State of North Dakota Seed Arbitration Board not having found any themselves, Monsanto still threatens a farming family in North Dakota.

You did not sign a contract but you're sued anyway.
Yes, because you've violated someone's patent. And this isn't a Monsanto or even a GM issue - plant breeders have had legal protection for new varieties since 1930.

In other words if your crop is contaminated, which does happen, you're screwed. The above links are a vary small sample of results Google returns for farmers monsanto. Adding sue still leaves more than a million results. Like this one, Agricultural Giant Battles Small Farmers:

"David Runyon and his wife Dawn put a lifetime of work into their 900-acre Indiana farm, and almost lost it all over a seed they say they never planted."

"'I don't believe any company has the right to come into someone's home and threaten their livelihood,' Dawn said, 'to bring them into such physical turmoil as this company did to us.'"

The Runyons charge bio-tech giant Monsanto sent investigators to their home unannounced, demanded years of farming records, and later threatened to sue them for patent infringement. The Runyons say an anonymous tip led Monsanto to suspect that genetically modified soybeans were growing on their property.

"'I wasn't using their products, but yet they were pounding on my door demanding information, demanding records," Dave said. "It was just plain harassment is what they were doing.'"

Or this one: Monsanto sues and sues and sues and...

Falcon

And the reason growers want them is because consumers want them. I don't see how that issue relates to genetic engineering, that's something altogether different.

I never said it had anything to do with genetic engineering. You did in the post I replied to. Specifically you said I think heirloom growers should embrace GMOs. Then you explained why, to get hybrids "like Cherokee Purple and White Tomesol" stocked in supermarket stores.

Getting people to think of new or diverse crops as a true part of their diet, just like the foods they're accustomed to, it a task in and of itself.

And that is one of the goals of Slow Food. And guess what they say... Pandemic disease and genetic engineering have wiped out all traditional sources of meat (and many vegetable products) in a matter of decades. "Winona LaDuke, founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which was the recipient of the International Slow Food Award for the Defense of Biodiversity in 2003 said, 'Indigenous people are center to Slow Food International,' because the foods they are talking about have long histories, the very foods Slow Food wants to protect."

I follow exotic pomology too, and it took decades for mangos and kiwis to get to where they are now, and still, people don't see them on the same level as apples and bananas.

And how many people eat kiwis and mangos? I used to take them with me for lunch.

Finally, there is no need for GE crops. All they do is enrich the pockets of big agribusinesses.

Tell that to the farmers who's crops were wiped out by papaya ringspot virus before GMO papayas arrived on the scene.

Yea, let's ask farmers about GE:

1. Monsanto versus Farmers
2. Monsanto's Harvest of Fear

This post of mine has 8 more links.

To say there's no need for them, I don't get that either.

I and others, including experts, have said GE is not needed for food because it is not needed. I dare you prove that wrong. Provide one piece of evidence GE is needed. Then we'll see what reviewers say.

FAO report reveals GM crops not needed to feed the world.

That's like saying there is no need for plant breeding.

You like every other person who tries to justify genetic engineering tries this. Selective breeding and crossbreeding is a hell of a lot different than inserting arctic fish genes into tomatoes. The first happens frequently in nature but the second rarely if ever happens.

We know it works, no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to suggest they're dangerous

My, my, my. How wrong you are. One example we know of is soya with a gene from Brazil nuts. Identification of A Brazil-Nut Allergen in transgenic soybeans[pdf]. The fact the soya was not released does not change the fact that the engineering soya was dangerous to those allergic to Brazil nuts and could cause their deaths.

considering horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species happens all the time

I thought you might bring that up, and I already addressed

Interesting how the farmers are not the ones against Monsanto.

Except there are many farmers who oppose Monsanto, or visa versa.

1. Monsanto versus Farmers.
2. Monsanto's Harvest of Fear
3. Haitian Farmers Fight Back Against Monsanto
4. Nelson Farm - A Fight Against A Giant -- Monsanto Sues North Dakota Farmer Over Biotech Crop Dispute
5. Goliath and David: Monsanto's Legal Battles against Farmers
6. Monsanto vs. US Farmers [pdf]
7. Oregon farmers caught up in Monsanto suit over engineered alfalfa
8. Agricultural Giant Battles Small Farmers
9. Could Monsanto Be Responsible for One Indian Farmer's Death Every Thirty Minutes?
10. Monsanto watch: Targeting American farmers with lawyers, fear and money
11. 1. Falcon

GM crops are already doing more harm than good. Just ask the Indian cotton farmers, for instance...

It has been proved that they also have lower yields and require more pesticides in the long run than conventional crops.

I'm not saying that GM plants and research should be discarded, or that they can't be used to actually get better yields and use less pesticides. I'm just saying that for now, a few corporations are focused on making piles of money by making farmers entirely depend on their seeds and their pesticides, no matter what it takes. And that particular use of GM crops (and of patents lawsuits over crops) should be outlawed.

--Regardless if global warming is a problem, we should ALL strive to lessen our effect on the environment.--

It IS a problem and a bigger one that was first thought. Just look at the salinity of the oceans the amount of carbonic acid in the seas and what is happening there. Life is already dying there because of global release of locked up carbon. Let's call it that because a lot of that CO2 is going straight into the oceans. It's not false and it wont kill everything or probably even everybody but even if you read the bible, look at that part where it says a 3rd of sea. That appears to have already happened. What's it going to take to make someone believe it? Does a disaster have to be right on top of them? The reef systems may be gone in 30 years. Ask anyone this stuff who fishes or used to fish for a living.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090128-ocean-dead-zones.html

Even if we fix the problem today, this is going to stick around for tens of thousands of years and the oceans turn most of our CO2 into O2 and lock the carbon. If you kill a high percentage of life there, the problem will only get worse.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/OceansGlobalWarming.php

If you kill the phytoplankton, well most of the rest of life up here will die right with it. 90% of the earth biomass is in the oceans but no one mentions the affect this may have. Who the hell knows, but it can't be good? So we are heating up the planet along wit dumping massive amounts of CO2 into an environment that can't take much more.

Who's to say only the "American people" got fucked over? It's usually the rest of us.

When some greedy corporation in the US gets the urge to over-reach common sense in the name of profit, people die. Hello Halliburton, Blackwater - sorry, "Xe" - Merck, Chevron, Shell, Union Carbide, Monsanto - This is going on all around you, every day. It's just the kind of business y'all have been trained to tolerate, encourage and sponsor. And let's be frank, the absurd US military budget is largely what it is so that they can keep doing it with impunity. Nice little system.

If a corporation is legally a person, then let them be shut down and incarcerated like the murderers and thieves they are.

Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basis, nor demonstrated that such a mechanism exists

Huh?

Electron capture for nuclear transmutation

Allen Widom at Northeastern University Boston and Lewis Larsen of Lattice Energy have recently proposed a mechanism that could account for a wide range of fusion and transmutation reactions, electron capture by protons or deuterons [4].

In nuclear physics, it is very well known that a proton can capture a negatively charged lepton (light particle) and produce a neutron and a neutrino, and a common form of nuclear transmutation in condensed matter can be understood in term of this reaction.

An electron that wanders into a nucleus with Z (atomic number) protons and N (= A (atomic mass) - Z) neutrons can be captured, producing a neutrino and leaving behind a nucleus with Z-1 protons and N+1 neutrons. There is no Coulomb barrier in this process, which makes it much more likely than other reactions. In fact, a strong Coulomb attraction between an electron and a nucleus favours electron capture for nuclear transformation.

While lepton capture is known to occur in the case of muons (leptons) mixed into hydrogen systems, it is regarded as difficult for electrons to be captured by protons. For the reaction to happen, the lepton must be sufficiently massive, such that in energy terms, Mlc2 > Mnc2-Mpc2 ~ 1.293MeV ~2.531Mec2 (where Ml, Mn, Mp, and Me are the mass of the lepton, neutron, proton and electron respectively, and c is the speed of light). The muon is more than sufficiently massive to be captured by the proton, but not the electron, which needs to be at least 2.531 times as massive.

However, the electron mass in condensed matter can be modified by local electromagnetic field fluctuations. For example, laser light fields can "dress" an electron with additional mass. The surface states of metal hydrides are very important in this respect.

Collective surface oscillations of charged ions are involved in the weak interactions responsible for electron capture in condensed matter. The radiation frequencies of these oscillation range from the infrared to the soft X-ray spectra. The surface protons are oscillating coherently, contributing to the large magnitude of electromagnetic fluctuations. The neutrons produced by electron capture have an ultra low momentum (with long wavelength) due to the size of the coherence domain of the oscillating protons, estimated to vary from about one to ten microns in length. The long final state neutron wavelength allows for a large neutron wave function overlap with many protons, which increases the coherent neutron production rate.

It is estimated that the electron mass enhancement due to the electromagnetic field fluctuations (collective proton oscillations) on the surface of palladium hydride is about 20.6 fold, which is much more than enough for electron capture by proton or deuteron. The proton field oscillations can be amplified by shining a laser light on the palladium surface, which can enhance the production of neutrons that in turn catalyse other reactions.

The neutron, n, can fuse with other nuclei in transmutation reactions. Lithium (Li) is present in the electrolyte. A Li ion near to the hydride (electrode surface) could initiate a chain of reactions as follows:

6Li3 + n 7Li3

7Li3 + n 8Li3

8Li3 8Be4 + e- (electron) +v (neutrino)

8Be4 4He2 + 4He2

Q ~ 26.9 MeV

A large amount of energy, 26.9 MeV is generated by this chain of reactions.

Having produced 4He2, further neutrons may react to build heavy helium isotopes, and regenerate Li as follows.

4He2 + n 5He2

5H

Cuba is an example of what happens when absolutely everything goes wrong.

Except the city farms and gardens in Cuba are able to feed a lot of Cubans.

Falcon

And it takes cheap fuel to deliver crops from the farm to cities so people can eat. I'd like to see a life cycle analysis comparing both these vertical city farms and farming as it's done in the US. In Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union people started planting city gardens which now feed a lot of Cubans.

Falcon

The test is good for a cow that is EXPOSED. The 8+ years is for symptoms. OTH,The polymerase test will show a cow that uptaken the prion. I would guess that if the cow was JUST exposed (and not likely to spread it), than it would fail the test.

Artists will have to work every day just like everyone else, always producing new content to sell just like a farmer must always produce new food to sell.

However whereas farmers used to save seeds to plant next year companies like Monsanto are trying to make sure farmers have to buy seeds from them every year.

Falcon

It most certainly is true that farmer have always paid once for crop seed.

According to Monsanto.com, Monsanto has only been around since 1901.

Now... how long has cultivated agriculture been around?

"...archaeobotanists/paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds, to just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent. There is earlier evidence for use of wild cereals: anthropological and archaeological evidence from sites across Southwest Asia and North Africa indicate use of wild grain (e.g., from the ca. 20,000 BC site of Ohalo II in Israel, many Natufian sites in the Levant and from sites along the Nile in the 10th millennium BC). There is even evidence of planned cultivation and trait selection: grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic (10,000+ BC) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria, but this appears to be a localised phenomenon resulting from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication. It isn't until after 9,500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture

Funny... not one bit of evidence anywhere Monsanto or any other agribusiness corporation was getting a single cent from farmers for 10-20,000 years of human history.

It most certainly is true that farmer have ALWAYS paid once for crop seed.

Also... Monsanto's claims on greater yields are not true.

"Monsanto claims that yield on its Bollgard Bt cotton will be up by 30 to 40 percent on conventional hybrids, and that pesticide use will be 70 percent down because Bollgard kills 90 percent of bollworms....Agricultural scientists Dr Abdul Qayum and Kiran Sakkhari conducted the first independent study on Bt cotton and released their report Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh: A three year assessment in 2005. The study involved a season-long investigation in 87 villages of the major cotton growing districts - Warangal, Nalgonda, Adilabad and Kurnool. It found against Bt cotton on all counts and was vital in getting the hybrids involved banned in AP:

        * It failed miserably for small farmers in terms of yield; non-Bt cotton surpassed Bt by nearly 30 percent and at 10 percent less expense

        * It did not significantly reduce pesticide use; over the three years, Bt farmers used Rs2 571 worth of pesticide on average while the non-Bt farmers used Rs2 766 worth of pesticide

        * It did not bring profit to farmers; over the three years, the non-Bt farmer earned on average 60 percent more than the Bt farmer

        * It did not reduce the cost of cultivation; on average, the Bt farmer had to pay 12 percent more than the non-Bt farmer

        * It did not result in a healthier environment; researchers found a special kind of root rot spread by Bollgard cotton infecting the soil, so that other crops would not grow...."

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/IndianCottonFarmersBetrayed.php

You're hurting the poor popcorn farmer.

Almost right.

Let's try again. Monsanto owns the copyright on popcorn seeds. Only Monsanto can grow popcorn. Some farmers in China managed to copy a couple of seeds and are growing their own popcorn.

Someone else drives a harvester through Monsanto's field and steals their popcorn crop.

Which is theft and which is a copyright violation? Get it right. In one case Monsanto still has a field of popcorn. In another, it has been stolen.

It boils down to protecting a single popcorn growers monopoly on the popcorn market. This isn't about theft. It's about copies of a product.

If you can only buy popcorn at Regal Cinemas at $8.00 a tub, that is a monopoly. Fortunately I can legally buy popcorn seed to grow my own, or buy bulk seed and pop my own.

http://www.popcornpopperdirect.com/popcornsupplies.html
50 lbs of seed (4 ea 12.5 lb sacks) for under $40.

You can plant it if you wish. This is enough for about 4 acres of land.
http://www.wildlifetrends.com/deer.cfm

I used the Monsanto company as an example as they are into genetic engineering and are suing the neighborhood farmers who happen to be the unlucky recipients of cross pollination from the designer varieties. They are trying to litigate the competition out of business. The above "We own the copyright on popcorn is becoming reality.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MonsantovsFarmers.php
    Monsanto VS Farmers

Cross pollination can't be stopped, cross pollination with GM foods cannot be stopped. GM foods disrupt the environment in ways that we don't really understand. Not to mention the fact that cross pollination estimates are considered grossly underestimated at best.*

I think it's an intriguing technology and it certainly has potential, but these companies have no clue what kind of a mess they're making. All they understand is that when the mess is made they will own it. Oh, here's another question, if I never buy GM seed but my crop reaches 14% GM contamination how do we assess my patent fees? If I'm a certified organic farmer I'm pretty sure I could sue, but otherwise I would be using patented technology.

His attitude may not be helpful, but he has a point - YOU are the one making claims without any sort of science to back it up.

He made the baseless claim, that I smashed looms. As for whether what I said has any scientific basis, let's try this:

"Field of RR crops have been suffering infestation of weeds resistant to glyphosate and Roundup for several years. Now, the farmers' worst nightmare has come true. The dreaded palmer pigweed has become Roundup resistant, Monsanto admits [21]. Pigweed is considered one of the very toughest herbicide resistant weeds to deal with, and palmer pigweed especially so, it can get to six feet tall."

Slashdot even had an article on superweeds:

" GM Crops Create Herbicide-resistant 'Superweed'">.

When genetically engineered crops are sprayed with reduced amounts of pesticide/herbicide, more of the pests/weeds are able to develop resistance to said pesticide/herbicide.

However, studies have indicated that despite the increase in usage of GM crops, herbicide usage in the US has increased. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GMCIPU.php

This is due in part to increased resistances developing amongst the weed community.

Researchers at the University of Manitoba, Canada tested 33 samples of certified canola (oilseed rape) seed stock and 32 were contaminated with GM. The Union of Concerned Scientists tested traditional US seed stocks of corn, soy and canola and found 50% corn, 50% soy and 83% canola contaminated by GM.
One hundred percent purity is no longer achievable, and even if non-contaminated seed could be purchased, some contamination can take place in the field either by transfer of seed by wind, animals or via farm equipment.

A million dollars and bankruptcy. I'd rather use that money to pay someone to perform some magical tricks to make certain individuals vanish then to pay the money out to some GM crop mafia.

From http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MonsantovsFarmers.php >One hundred percent purity is no longer achievable, and even if non-contaminated seed could be purchased, some contamination can take place in the field either by transfer of seed by wind, animals or via farm equipment.

So If I was a farmer and saw some strange crop growing in my field could I charge Monsanto with trespassing or some kind of environmental pollution/contamination since their property is illegally growing on my land?

Monopolies are at best bad for the market, and at worst bad for Humanity. In this case, Monsanto's monopolizing has caused a lot of grief for many traditional farmers who save the previous year's crop seeds. This kind of thing really makes me sick.

You're being ironic, right? You couldn't deliberately have meant to say what you said seriously, in a public forum, could you? It's just too humiliating for you to make such dumb statements.

I have no idea whether or not nuclear power plant operators have a consistently superb record in relation to a) and b) in the US, but they certainly don't in the UK. Problems of unsafe secret disposals of nuclear waste have dogged the industry for years. To take just a single example, waste was tipped down an unsealed shaft for 19 years between 1958 and 1977 at Dounreay fast reactor -- it stopped because the shaft actually blew up! Cleanup will cost £100m-plus and take twenty years. The story is dealt with at length in the following documentary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_06 _05_radiation.pdf
Quote:
"O'HALLORAN: How do you characterise the way nuclear waste was dealt with in your time at the plant?
LYALL: There's only one answer to that, a complete shambles and a damn disgrace."

As for every single molecule of waste being accounted for, low-level waste (not particularly radioactive, but certainly not what you'd be happy to have stored under your bed) is still discharged into the Irish sea at Sellafield.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sea

So you're writing either out of ignorance or malice when you say "every single molecule of waste has been accounted for". Or else you think the world consists of America and everywhere else, and only America counts.

And I'm interested to see you think that the concept of "economically recoverable" is just a buzzword. I'd love to see how long it took Exxon executives to stop laughing at such cretinous idiocy. Economic recoverability is what determines whether oil, natural gas, uranium and similar deposits are worth exploiting. Tar shales are not generally economically recoverable, despite the vast quantities of oil they contain. The same will be true for some sources of uranium, including, unless you're aware of some magic technology that no-one else knows about, seawater. Seawater also contains huge amounts of gold, but we still dig it out of the ground, because the concentrations are so low that's it's not economically viable to recover the gold. And, because I have doubts you'll be able to see it without someone pointing it out to you -- the lower the concentration of uranium, the less net energy you get from burning it. In fact, most poor quality ores would, if used, cost more energy than they produce.

Let's see if you've got the brains to understand the difference between quantity and concentration. On your current form, frankly, I doubt it.

If by some chance you do get it, perhaps you'll actually answer the question I posed: "Can you cite any reliable sources for the stock of *economically recoverable* uranium, and how long that stock could meet *all human energy needs* including ground transportation?"

As the chance of your doing this are pretty minimal, I'll help you out:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2005/pdf/Gitzel.p df
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/ cmselect/cmenvaud/584/5110906.htm
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DTNPM.php
http://www.bnes.com/myths.html

These sources all talk in terms of decades, not billions of years.

Finally, I'm all for having solutions. I'd just like ones that don't make things actually worse. Some examples would be: combined heat-and-power; having stores deliver shopping, rather than people picking it up; using coaches instead of buses; increasing use of wave, solar and wind power; opening window

There is a great need to increase world-wide carrying capacity without impacting high biodiversity ecosystems such as the Brazilian rainforests or continental shelf fisheries, and that reduces greenhouse phenomena. There may be an economic option that uses sea water pumped to desert areas powered by the fact that ground level temperatures are much higher than temperatures at high altitudes. Indeed, it would dump greenhouse heat to space for its power while producing biodiesel, electricity, fish, fresh water, salt and real estate -- all in quantities demanded by developed-world populations -- without adding to, and possibly even sequestering, greenhouse gases.

Proposals for solar updraft towers have typically assumed that they would be single use structures: solar to electricity via heat differentials between high altitude air and ground level greenhouse-enclosed air. The resulting system has marginal economic value.

Something which would further enhance the value of the solar updraft tower power structure is to use the greenhouse area for algae ponds to add biodiesel, water, fish and salt production to the production of electricity normally envisioned.

Doing so brings the proposal from marginally viable to viable, with a net present value, primarily from live fish production, of $3.5 billion per system, thereby allowing for far higher capitalization and/or return on investment.

Let's start with just the value of algae biodiesel:

The greenhouse area required per solar updraft tower of is huge:

(pi * (5km/2)^2) ? hectares
= 1963.49 hectares

producing peak at peak 200MW via a 1km tall tower.

We now add to this the production of algae biodiesel:

The UNH estimate for algae biodiesel production is 1 quad per 200,000 hectares. Let's assume only half of the area of the solar updraft tower greenhouse would be available for production at any time (the other half would be used for ponds that buffered heat for the inner ponds, produce fish, provide additional evaporative surface for desalination and provide recreation for residential areas at the outer rim).

That gives us:

(1963.49/2)hectares/tower;200000hectares/quad ? towers/quad
= 203.719 towers/quad

Or about 200 towers per quad of biodiesel.

We can now calculate the biodiesel per tower:

7.2gallon/1e6btu;200tower/quad ? gallon/tower
= 3.5998E+07 gallon/tower

or about 35M gallons of biodiesel per year per tower.

At $2/gallon for wholesale diesel, this yields $70M biodiesel revenue per year.

Now for electrical revenue:

At an average rate of sold production only 1/2 (100MW) of peak capacity (200MW), electrical production per tower per year, is:

100MW;year ? GWh
= 876 GWh

At $30/MWh wholesale:

100MW;year;30$/MWh ? $
= 2.628E+07 $

or about $25M electrical revenue per year.

Interestingly, the biodiesel revenue is nearly 3 times the electrical revenue of a solar updraft tower!

200*200MW or 40GW electrical peak capacity is produced per quad of biodiesel.

Further that same UNH document estimates 19 quads to replace all transportation fuel in the US or 3800 towers, which would also produce 3800*200MW or 760GW or .76TW of electricity.

Current winter capacity in the US i

Releasing nanoparticles of an elemental metal into water may not be a good idea. Unless there's some chemical or biological process in the ecosystem that reliably prevents this stuff from building up over time, it's not good.

It's a real problem. Carbon nanotubes are both toxic and non-biodegradable. Yet their Material Safety Data Sheet doesn't recognize this at all.

The form of the tubes matters. Toxicity comes from the loose carbon bonds at the ends. This can't be treated casually; it needs to be better understood.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MDSGBTC.php

Because they're much more usable than adult stem cells. Get over it.

Sorry, but a citation please? Because I've found a few to the contrary for you:

1) http://www.stemcellresearch.org/facts/treatments.h tm
      (with it's own reference list a mile long)

2) http://www.i-sis.org.uk/stemcells2.php
A snippet:
"These latest results show that the ES cells need to be genetically modified and extensive manipulation in vitro before they can be transplanted safely. Direct transplant of ES cells are known to give rise to teratomas and uncontrollable cell proliferation. There is already evidence that ES cells are genetically unstable in long term culture, and are especially prone to chromosomal abnormalities."

3) http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interr ogatory022601a.shtml
(An interview with the same scientist (for those lefties among you who love to hate the conservative rags):

4) http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2003/nov/03112001.html (If you like canadian docs' opinions...)

Contrary to how I'm sure it sounds, I'm not yet categorically opposed to using embryonic stem cells for research. I'm for science- and this mice story is absolutely incredible.

But cut the unsupported, non-cited one liners. They bring nothing to the table.

GM food is engineered to require less pesticides [sic].

GM food is engineered to require less land...

And remember that the Royal Society is not always unbiased: Royal Society misleads MPs over cloning CAHGE believes that the Royal Society is misusing its scientific prestige in attempts to overcome the public and MP's resistance to embryo cloning. http://www.hgalert.org/pReleases/pr07-11-00.htm and: Pro-GM Royal Society Fellow Named as Source of Libel Case Allegations The High Court in London has been told that a letter from Prof. Anthony Trewavas, well-known champion of GM and critic of organic agriculture, contained a series of unfounded allegations about Greenpeace and Lord Melchett that should never have been published. Jonathan Matthews reports. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Trewavas.php (!)

There's a lot of assumption that HIV causes AIDS. Turns out, it's because the NIH around 1982 or so said so, and the CDC made up a report about it.

So far, there's not been any peer-reviewed work claiming HIV directly causes AIDS. In fact, AIDS patients more often than not don't have HIV in their systems.

Here's a link, repleat with propaganda and tin-foil hats, but still has some decent information on the issue.

No, DRM seeds.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/NewTerminatorCrops.php

Seeds that grow only once, forcing the farmer to buy new seeds every season. How greedy do you need to be to think of that?

I read about this quite some time ago on Bruce Sterling's Viridian list; I've been using this cite but it's great to have better ones.

The titanium dioxide particles are only a few nanometers wide. The whole power of nanoscale approaches like this one is that nanoparticles often have unique properties which they do not possess in larger particle sizes, due to the very high surface-to-volume ratio and/or limited electronic states available. In this case, TiO2 becomes reactive.

What nobody has said for some reason is that an otherwise harmless material is not necessarily harmless at the nanoscale, so you have to go back and do toxicology studies all over again. And furthermore, nanoparticles are so small that they can penetrate and embed themselves even within your living cells, where since they are minerals they may not be degraded.

In fact, TiO2 nanoparticles have been documented to be toxic. Embedding them in the surface of buildings puts them in a position where they are likely to wear off into the atmosphere or runoff water.

That is a huge problem. I'd advise subsistance farmers to stay away from store-bought seeds.

They just don't grow.

You'd better hope they don't grow, because if they do grow, you have even worse problems. Just ask the Canadian farmers sued by Monsanto.

On Sept. 11 2001 about 3500 people died in New York. On that same day 44000 children died in Africa of hunger. Is there a war on hunger? NO.

If you folks would like us to invade, overthrow your dictators for you, colonize and Americanise you, just say the word and we'll put you on our list. The whole process might take 100 years or more, and if you don't whole-heartedly embrace the Americanisation part, it just won't work (e.g., the Phillipines). Be aware that the list is already very long, and there is just no way that you're going to get ahead of Iran and North Korea, who have already signed up for the ``get civilized or get dead'' package.

It might be quicker and easier for you to get rid of your Mugabes yourself.

yes, both.

bbc story

Link2

Toxic shock

yes, both.

bbc story

Link2

Toxic shock

The idea that our body must be damaged by force in order for there to be malfunction would only be correct if we were a static mechanical entity.. that is not alive and constantly changing and responding.

It has been demonstrated that the delicate blood/brain barrier filter opens or is perforated by cell phone radiation, leading to proteins (primarily albumin) leaking into brain tissues. These proteins then cause great damage to neural tissue. (research references)

There are many real situations where cellphone radiation is concentrated.. metal subway cars with many cell carrying passengers for instance. So all the rational pencil pushing in the world can't claim to be accurate without empirical evidence of the devices operation in the field.
also another good link page

There is an entire field of research in industrial chemistry right now to see how microwaves can affect chemical reactions and promote certain reaction paths over others. You don't have to break an molecular bond to have an effect on chemistry. Microwave heating, even at very low levels, can significant speed up certain reactions. Enzymes in particular seem subject to this effect at very low power levels. (Read this, look for a paragraph 2/3 down.)

Futhermore, I remembered some of Lai's more recent research just a few seconds ago. Remember an article several months ago about 50-60 Hz magnetic fields doing DNA damage to rat brains? That was the same guy.

Basically, in his paper, he put forth the theory that an iron-mediated reaction is going wrong when rats are exposed to alternating magnetic fields. Even though the fields are not enough to break covalent bonds, there is an iron-mediated reaction that turn hydrogen peroxide into hydroxyl free radicals that they theorize is affected by the magnetic fields. When they introduced an oxidative free radical chelating agent into the mice, DNA damage from magnetic fields ceased.

You can read more on it here.

And the patent office does not require any proof. They accept any patent request, if not too obvious a double, and only when an infringement is made, the party accused of infringement has to proof the patent is false.
This is how a joker (aka 'lawyer') managed to get a patent on the invention "wheel".

This is how farmacautical companies try to patent ancient medicines made from the neem tree. Greenpeace blocked another attempt to steal a crop.

Anyway, there is no way that a virus could be a part of human evolution, because adaptation and evolution are genetic--they result from beneficial traits that are passed on from parent to child--and our genes do not (normally) code for viruses (unless they are infected by one) and can therefore not pass on a gene for a virus to offspring.

Apparently someone has already done some testing and concluded these things are extermely TOXIC. Clothing and other every-day things made of this stuff? You go first. OTOH, it might be just fine encased in resin. Carbon-nanotube-fiber constuction could be fantastic for everyone except the people who actually make the stuff...

Correct. But that is today. Software development in twenty years will likely look very different.

Will it? It doesn't look that different today than it did 20 years ago. There are some new concepts (OOP, AOP, etc), we have RAD's, but in the end it's still programmers and designers thinking of new algorithms, debugging stuff, and integrating everything into a stable and usable whole.

Consider: None of these arguments is, well, novel - they have thirty years of dust on them. They were all made regarding biotech, too.

I doubt it. Did anyone ever claim the biotech industry is a "cottage industry"? (see the last paragraph) That you barely need any investments to start a new biotech company? That everything underlying biotech innovations in pure maths? That biotech patents pave the way for patents on business methods? That biotech patents could be used to prevent publications of new biotech techniques and not just their use? (program claims) That biotech is pervasive throughout all economic sectors going from grocery shops to space stations, and as such is an "enabling technology" of which hindrances have very broad reaches?

Fortunately, those arguments were declined. Obviously, the predicted cataclysm has not materialized. Today, our biotech industry is basically causing a golden age of medicine - we're creating far more disease cures, far faster, than ever before in history.

To be fair, I've never followed the biotech patent situation. So I just searched for "biotech patents" on Google. The fourth link contains several links which seem to show the controversy is still far from settled. So does the sixth and the eighth. There are of course other views as well (such as the tenth link), but claiming everything is happy happy joy joy with no downsides seems just a tad misleading.

There's also a bit about it in the recent FTC report on patents and innovation. They note that the fact that biotech includes quite a bit of consequential innovation (as opposed to traditional pharmaceuticals) causes some problems. You are presumably aware of the fact that software development is almost nothing but consequential innovation (and lots of reuse as well). The solution proposed by the panel members regarding biotech is what is currently already done in the software world: extensive cross licensing. Of course, you need a lot of patents to be able to join that game.

The industry will become more selective about filing software patents. It must, since absurdities like patents on hash tables will never be useful to anyone. Even large companies cannot afford to throw away vast sums of money on patent portfolios that are not enforceable.

Of course they are useful for those companies! They are strategic assets, used as trading cards or litigation tokens. Enforceability is generally not even a concern, as many small companies can simply not afford the litigation costs (if you have the choice between a $50,000 license or a $2,000,000 lawsuit, what do you pick?)

By approximately 2020, we will have an incredibly well-documented record of the state of software development - both in the form of 50 years of programming journals, and in the form of all previously-filed software patent applications.

And there will be tons more of programming legacy which is not documented in this way at all, but just available as source code (which is also a publication, given that source code