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The number of women in the ancestral population that have living descendants today is twice that of men. (So my paraphrasing is wrong. I cant say two thirds of men did not leave any living descendants. Just only half as many men as women left living descendants) Most anthropologists and scientists shy away from describing the difference in standard deviation and mean between men and women. There is a history of politicians and non-scientists with vested interests misinterpreting the research to their benefit.

For example a very well respected scientist/authors like Jared Diamond, who published studies comparing the testicle sizes between different races early in his career is largely silent about it in his more popular books, Guns..., Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, why sex is fun .

...rather than trying to shoehorn loads of software patents into a system where they have no place.

That insects had absolutely nothing to do with dinosaur extinction.

Cretaceous period atmospheric O2 levels were near the highest level since the Cambrian period and CO2 levels were near a low point. Anybody who has taken biology knows that in order for photosynthesis to take place the atmosphere must contain a certain amount of CO2. Additionally, dinosaurs would not have grown to the large sizes that they did if the O2 content of the atmosphere was anywhere near where it is today.
Most likely scenario for extinction is a decline in CO2 levels caused a drop in photosynthesis rates which started a decline in available food plants for herbivores. Once their numbers started to drop the largest carnivores would have less to feed on so their numbers would start to decline. Then, coincidentally, this frisky asteroid decides that it would like to get to know Mother Earth, and the rest is geologic history. The insects were just a minor player on much larger stage.

You already have pulsating magnetic fields in your house. In the US, AC current is 60 hz, so you have a constant 60 hz magnetic field. That hum you hear is the oscillating magnetic field moving steel back and forth.

Electrical wiring in houses shouldn't produce very strong fields -- on the order of mG a few inches away. That hum you hear is most likely from transformers in devices you have plugged into the wall than from induction on the beams in your house unless you have a very strange house.

The magnetic field won't hurt you. My dad was an electrical lineman for forty years, often working on the 30,000 volt towers. He couldn't wear a mechanical wristwatch because it would become magnetized. He just turned 77 and he's healthier than a lot of guys my age.

If magnetic fields caused cancer, linemen would die of lukemia right and left.

Wrong type of cancer.

Epidemiological studies show that people working with magnetic fields in fact *do* have a higher rate of brain cancers than the average population. (See here , here, and here.)

That last study notes that leukemia rates aren't affected by EM exposure, and this study shows no increase in breast cancers in rats due to magnetic field exposure.

We actually have a model and theory for how AC fields promote brain cancers. You can read this full paper on an experiment to test a theory that iron-mediated free radical creation is at fault. Here's an abstract for a study testing for oxidative effects of EMF in snails.

(Also, the plural of anecdote is not evidence -- much less, "I knew a guy who did [X risky thing] and is doing just awesome, so stop worrying about it, you pansies!")

You already have pulsating magnetic fields in your house. In the US, AC current is 60 hz, so you have a constant 60 hz magnetic field. That hum you hear is the oscillating magnetic field moving steel back and forth.

Electrical wiring in houses shouldn't produce very strong fields -- on the order of mG a few inches away. That hum you hear is most likely from transformers in devices you have plugged into the wall than from induction on the beams in your house unless you have a very strange house.

The magnetic field won't hurt you. My dad was an electrical lineman for forty years, often working on the 30,000 volt towers. He couldn't wear a mechanical wristwatch because it would become magnetized. He just turned 77 and he's healthier than a lot of guys my age.

If magnetic fields caused cancer, linemen would die of lukemia right and left.

Wrong type of cancer.

Epidemiological studies show that people working with magnetic fields in fact *do* have a higher rate of brain cancers than the average population. (See here , here, and here.)

That last study notes that leukemia rates aren't affected by EM exposure, and this study shows no increase in breast cancers in rats due to magnetic field exposure.

We actually have a model and theory for how AC fields promote brain cancers. You can read this full paper on an experiment to test a theory that iron-mediated free radical creation is at fault. Here's an abstract for a study testing for oxidative effects of EMF in snails.

(Also, the plural of anecdote is not evidence -- much less, "I knew a guy who did [X risky thing] and is doing just awesome, so stop worrying about it, you pansies!")

Except that our current understanding of biology gives no physical mechanism through which non-ionizing microwave wavelength radiation can damage DNA to cause cancer.

There are two known kinds of carcinogens: genotoxic and non-genotoxic. Here is an example of work on non-genotoxic carcinogens:

http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/19/7/1173

Yes, cell phone radiation is not genotoxic. But it appears to affect temperatures, cell membranes, blood flow, and gene expression, all of which are reasonable indicators that it may be a non-genotoxic carcinogen.

It's anti-science to go

You are some piece of work: based on some limited and faulty understanding of biology, you jump to conclusions that something just can't happen, even though there are many reputable scientists that work in the field and can say it can happen. And then you have the gall to accuse others of "anti-science".

This may be true for sending entire frames to threads, but in mpeg4, frames are broken up into chunks. Motion vectors are created that allow these chunks to move about the image from frame to frame. Other filters are used to remove blockiness, compress the image, do motion detection and macroblock detection, and do various other tasks. MPEG4, especially H.264, can be easily multi-threaded: http://ietisy.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/E88-D/7/1623 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004SPIE.5308..384L http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2007/05/02/41296/aspex-targets-parallel-processor-at-blu-ray-dvd.htm When doing a two-pass encode, this is even easier because the keyframes are discovered on the first (faster) pass, so (if encoding already couldn't be threaded) it could by taking advantage of the known keyframe markers in at least the second pass. But, that's not necessary. I use handbrake to create H.264 videos under Linux all the time on my dual core machine, and both processors stay between 80%-90% utilization from start to finish regardless of the number of passes.

How can smoking up harm society if it has no impact on others?

Again, he said earlier, and we are not in agreement that weed is harmless or has no impact on others. Especially when said impact is a car. And then there's the whole concept of what drug abuse does to families and society. Don't deny these facts and promote weed irresponsibly, because I list that as another example of how people abuse drugs and therefore can't be trusted to responsibly use, distribute and recommend them to others.

I'm sensing this'll go in circles so I'll just state my opinion and provide some links.

Weed impairs motor skills, is a gateway drug in teens, causes seriously adverse and psychotic reactions, and hallucinations and depersonalization that can recur or persist.

So I think it's very powerful and unpredictable and therefore dangerous.

Two cases of "cannabis acute psychosis" following the administration of oral cannabis

Cannabis psychosis following bhang ingestion.

Psychological Responses To Cannabis
Cannabis and acute functional psychosis (in individuals who have no history of severe mental illness), chronic psychosis, amotivational syndrome, Evidence for dependence..

Animals Exposed To Marijuana's Active Component Will Self-Administer

"Tolerance and dependence"

As gateway in teens:
issue of cross-sensitisation of cannabis/opioid receptors

Cannabis use increases risk of psychotic illness

Cannabis link to mental illness strengthened

Erowid has an Experience Vault where you can read about negative reactions, but it probably never occurred to you to do that. I'd quote the relevant sections but there are a lot of them, and it's daunting. Maybe I'll organize them one day.

Psychosis and Eventually Schizophrenia

Something similar has already been done as early as 2001. A team of researchers in Japan was able to demonstrate that artificial amino acids (instead of nucleotides) could be incorporated into the yeast translational machinery using five-base codons (instead of three). http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/29/17/3646

Two cases of "cannabis acute psychosis" following the administration of oral cannabis

Cannabis psychosis following bhang ingestion.

Psychological Responses To Cannabis
Cannabis and acute functional psychosis, chronic psychosis, amotivational syndrome, Evidence for dependence..

Animals Exposed To Marijuana's Active Component Will Self-Administer

"Self-administration of drugs by animals, long considered a model of human drug-seeking behavior, is characteristic of virtually all addictive and abused drugs. ...The drug-seeking behavior in these animals was comparable in intensity to that maintained by cocaine... This finding suggests that marijuana has as much potential for abuse as other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin."

See: Tolerance and dependence

Cannabis use increases risk of psychotic illness

Cannabis link to mental illness strengthened

Smallpox is almost gone but it keep on showing up here and thier. just a quick googl search
smallbox outbreaks in brazil http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/95/4/363

It wasn't sarcastic, because that would imply you had a point outside the flamebait. It wasn't a joke because it wasn't funny...at all. You are completely wrong, it is not "minorities" but single, white women, and here are my sources:

US, 1996: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_n21_v90/ai_18744024
UK, 1999: http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/2/269
US, 1999: http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/myths.html

...of cash for stealing 20 songs?

With the money this guy has surely he could afford to build a version of the Analytical Engine. It's not a giant leap for the machinists involved in such a project, given that the fine specifications for the various gears, wheels and cogs is a no-brainer for today's technology -- all the parts could be laser cut by a robot. It would be truly awe-inspiring to see the first computer functioning in all its glory, for indeed it is Turing complete and lays out many of the concepts used in modern digital computers.

Nobody ever liked software or business patents. It all started with a court case that opened the gates and once that happened an arms race ensued. The very idea is absurd

a machine or manufacture, which may include anything under the sun that is made by man,...is not necessarily patentable

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/161/3/228 "... moderate levels of alcohol intake may be associated with improved cognitive function and reduced risk of cognitive decline and dementia."

Social drinking leads to better job performance and career success. http://www.ithaca.edu/ithacan/articles/0610/05/opinion/2drinking_.htm

Excess alcohol consumption, on the other hand, is almost always a bad thing. There are some studies that show the benefit of moderate consumption but there is no studies that show that heavy consumption is anything but bad.

Moderate alcohol consumption is good for cognative function. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/150/6/580.pdf

Social drinkers are also more likely to be gregarious than their non-drinking cow-irkers. That makes them much more likely to be promoted.

There has to be something else at work here.

That's a patent lie. Studies to show a clear link. That aside, it show a complete lack of logic to expect otherwise.

According to the 10-year WHO study completed a few years back, spouses of smokers (most likely to get heavy exposure) have a lung cancer risk factor of something like 1.2 +- .3, IIRC, where a risk factor of 1 is for those who are not exposed to second hand smoke. So heavy exposure to second hand smoke will give you maybe a 50% (high end of uncertainty) greater chance of getting lung cancer; this sounds like a lot until you think about the actual frequency of lung cancer among non-smokers who are not exposed to second hand smoke. A 200% increase might be significant; something like 400% or 500% would be better.

That said, please don't smoke cigarettes. There's a lot of nasty crap that gets put into them, and a good portion of that is going into *you*. Once it's been exhaled and mixed with air and then finally re-inhaled as SHS, the risk is much less... but smoking cigarettes yourself, while your choice, is definitely a high risk activity. Cigars and pipes tend to use very pure tobacco, without all the 'enhancing' chemicals of cigarettes--smoke them instead, you won't get addicted either.

Oh, and source for the study is at http://www.obscurious.co.uk/componants/smoking1440.pdf and summarized at the publisher's site here. They quickly issued a press release saying "DON'T BELIEVE THEM, SECOND HAND SMOKE REALLY IS DANGEROUS (despite what our own study showed)" and the original paper wasn't available on their site last time I looked.

In essence, Sigfrid is saying that something in unlimited supply can't be stolen.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Consistent with previous data (Barbaree & Marshall, 1989; Briere & Runtz, 1989; Fedora et al., 1992; Freund & Watson, 1991), 20 % of the current subjects self-reported pedophilic interest and 26.25 % exhibited penile arousal to pedophilic stimuli that equaled or exceeded arousal to adult stimuli.

[..]

Eighty subjects completed the study. [..] Twenty-six subjects [approximately 33%] exhibited sexual arousal to the child slides that equaled or exceeded their arousal to the adult slides.

[..] ....a sizable minority of men in normal populations who have not molested children may exhibit pedophilic fantasies and arousal. In recent studies, 12 to 32% of community college samples of men reported sexual attraction to children (B &R, 1989, H,G & C. 1990) or exhibited penile response to pedophilic stimuli (B&M, 1989, F et al, 1992, F&L, 1989, F & W, 1989). Thus, arousal to pedophilic stimuli does not necessarily correspond with pedophilic behavior (Hall, 1990; Schouten & Simon, 1992), although there are arguments to the contrary (Quinsey & Laws, 1990).

A self-administer questionnaire was given to a sample of 92 female and 91 male public sector child care workers. Results showed a significantly higher percentage of males (15 per cent) than females (4 per cent) expressed a sexual interest in children.

In a sample of nearly 200 university males, 21% reported some sexual attraction to small children, 9% described sexual fantasies involving children, 5% admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children, and 7% indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught (Briere & Runtz, 1989). Briere and Runtz remarked that "given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesize that the actual rates were even higher" (p. 71). In another sample with 100 male and 180 female undergraduate students, 22% of males and 3% of females reported sexual attraction to a child (Smiljanich & Briere, 1996).

Laboratory researchers have validated physiologically the self-report studies of nonclinical, nonpedophile identified volunteers. In a sample of 80 "normal" volunteers, over 25% self-reported some pedophilic interest or in the plethysmographic phase exhibited penile arousal to a child that equaled or exceeded arousal to an adult (Hall, Hirschman, & Oliver, 1995). In another study, "normal" men's erections to pictures of pubescent and younger girls averaged 70 and 50%, respectively, of their responses to adult females (Quinsey, Steinman, Bergersen, & Holmes, 1975). In a control group of 66 males recruited from hospital staff and the community, 17% showed a penile response that was pedophilic (Fedora et al., 1992). Freund and Watson (1991), studying community male volunteers in a plethysmography classification study, found that19%were misclassified as having an erotic preference for minors. Freund and Costell (1970) studied 48 young Czech soldiers who were shown slides of children between 4 and 10, both male and female, as well as adolescents and adults, male and female. Penile responsivity to female children, ages 4-10, was intermediate to adolescent and adult females and males in one scoring system. In the other scoring system, all 48 soldiers showed penile response to adult females, as did 40 of 48 to adolescent females, and notably, 28 of 48 showed penile response to the female children age 4-10.

If microsoft too-aggressively attacks linux, the already-somewhat-frosty climate towards software patents in europe gets much worse, there's even more clear+present evidence for the likes of the FFII, FSF Europe and the european green and pirate parties to use to push for patent system reform or outright abolition.

Medline is an "Online database of 11 million citations and abstracts from health and medical journals and other news sources."
This paper was just published: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/24/2/243
Déjà vu--A study of duplicate citations in Medline
Motivation: Duplicate publication impacts the quality of the scientific corpus, has been difficult to detect, and studies this far have been limited in scope and size. Using text similarity searches, we were able to identify signatures of duplicate citations among a body of abstracts.
Results: A sample of 62 213 Medline citations was examined and a database of manually verified duplicate citations was created to study author publication behavior. We found that 0.04% of the citations with no shared authors were highly similar and are thus potential cases of plagiarism. 1.35% with shared authors were sufficiently similar to be considered a duplicate. Extrapolating, this would correspond to 3500 and 117 500 duplicate citations in total, respectively.

the EU got it right when they rejected the concept. The world would be better off without them.

Yeah, but he was forced to take some hormones or something after being accused of being gay, maybe that caused the imbalance that led to his suicide. Terrible loss anyway...

If you work at a cubicle farm or live in a dormitory where there are a number of women working or living together for a long time, you may want to ask the women to compare the dates of there periods. The results may surprise you. More information here and here.

Agreed! This is not a phenomenon unique to medicine, but the medical profession does have a long history of promoting procedures or therapies that later turn out to be harmful. Consider the ads from many years ago of doctors promoting the health effects of smoking, or the initial indescriminate use of X-rays. Or the use of mercury-containing teething powders up into the 1950's. (see http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/10/2/291)

I doubt that we are now all of a sudden so perfect that no procedure, no matter how widely administered, could not be found to have unintended consequences. No doubt vaccines have done a lot of good over the years. Lately, however there seems to be a push to vaccinate for everything. It would not surprise me to find out in a few years that there is a statistically significant link between the combined effects of multiple vaccines (including the adjuvants in them), especially when administered to infants and very young children and autism or any of a large number of other disorders. The immune system is still not well understood. You can expect that if such a link is proven, any such information will be repressed or delayed as much as possible due to the huge amount of money, liability, and organizational pride invested in the status quo.

BWS is a rare overgrowth disorder that our son was diagnosed with at birth.

The yahoo group, web sites and free DVD were extremely valuable in helping us as parents to understand and deal with the condition.

Being a geek, I wanted to understand and be able to communicate in all of the relevant medical-technical terms:

The diagnosis symptoms were hemihypertophy (right), neo-natal hypoglycemia and macrosomia (95+ percentile).

A genetic study that determined that my son has paternal UPD of 11p15 with mosaicism.

Our son is on a quarterly screening protocol of AFP and abdominal ultrasound for hepatoblastoma and wilms tumors.

Was this study adjusted for age-related migration?

From what I remember, yes, and it also controlled for migration in that it only looked at people who'd spent at least the majority of their lives there. The 'low radiation' state wasn't Arizona or Florida, I think that it was Mississipi.

They've also done studies with airline attendants. While there are a couple studies showing them at higher risk for breast cancer, at least this study acknowledges that radiation might not be the cause, it seems to blame tobacco smoke more, as breast cancer is more associated with smoking than radiation.

When it comes down to it, airline attendants(and pilots) have a whole slew of different factors affecting them - increased jet exhaust, more exposure to different localities, disrupted sleep patterns, etc... Heck, I wouldn't be surprised to find that, at least in the 70s and 80s, the type of people who became attendents were also more likely to smoke.

Here's a study that suggests that background radiation is good for health.

Of course, there's also a rebuttal, which only goes to show that, sadly, the experimental model is still one of the best ways to prove something. The sadly part is that we can't ethically do actual testing, like having a massive study with like 100k people, sorting them into groups(including a control)and give out low to moderate levels radiation exposure each year. Then track cancer and illness rates. I feel like I'm caught in a pinch here - the study could help mankind, but hurt individual members of the study.

This article just has a bad smell.

Example: lung cancer. A mere 150bq/m^3 of radon gas increases your odds of lung cancer by 50%[1] [2] The Sept. 29th release alone was about 740 petabecquerels. That would be contaminating to that level a cube of air *170 kilometers per side*. The numbers just don't add up.

Most would consider this question answered, as the founders of computer science, renowned lawyers and Nobel-laureate economists agree that software patents are not defensible on any grounds.

I actually worked in the lab where they developed the machine. UMIST in Manchester.

They did commercialise it. The technology is used all over the place.

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/30/suppl_1/i252
http://www.wordspy.com/words/noseonachip.asp

Of course, I'm sure Caltech can patent it can sue the bastards into oblivion.

The good news is that this is all math! There's no need to believe anything one way or another! Sorta exciting huh? You can go and examine all the ART algorithms (I linked wikipedia because it has the PDFs linked.. did you notice? But here's Grossberg's homepage, just in case), and you can go read about HTM. According to Hawkins, HTM has some magical, er I mean, proprietary, component that separates it from ART. I've seen Hawkins speak... in fact, I saw him speak at BU with Steve Grossberg in the audience. He amused the audience by showing a demo that was completely indistinguishable from an ART1 implementation that takes about half an hour to program, and most of the people present had done themselves.

He then failed to answer any substantive questions (including Steve asking him how his model differed from ART), referring us all to online videos of his lectures. I personally asked about how he could reconcile this article with his predictions.. which assume a cortical hierarchy based on 'distance' (in synapses) from primary sensory cortices, rather than examining the relative lamination of various cortices. I notice since then the wikipedia article "On Intelligence" has had its 'experimental prediction' claims toned down quite a bit.

As it happens in terms of books though, Grossberg has written several and has a ton of peer reviewed articles on this very subject. Hawkins to my knowledge doesn't have a single peer-reviewed article on HTM or anything related.

The patents are a meaningless threat in the EU at this time, as software patents are currently not legal or enforceable across the EU.

Yes, that's why I think slashdot should be outlawed, like your mother's Sybian.

See section titled: Tolerance and dependence.

...the good ones actually mount insightful arguments against abusive patent strategies.

Well spotted.

The paper is still in the preview part of natures website, so I couldn't get to the full text.

David M. Amodio has done similar trials, where responses are timed (otherwise, the subject could just take their time and get a 100% hitrate). Heres an example where latencies are measured. I have assumed a very similar method was used in both experiments.
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/1/1/26

They support it because inevitably their huge products will, at some point, infringe on some ridiculous patent

Except OUP is not bound by the CC license. When you publish with them, you sign a license that allows them a lot of leeway in redistribution. You can see the actual agreement here.

I need to correct myself (again). The article PDF is available for free download, but if you go to the article page and click on the "Request permission" link, you're brought to a new page where you can request permission to, for instance, print out copies for use in class. The form then tells you how much you have to pay them for those permissions.

The issue, of course, is that this explicitly violates the creative commons (noncommercial) license that he published under (and which the journal evidently agreed to, in order to be able to post his paper at all). The journal is thus illegally charging others for permissions that are free.

It still looks like a honest mistake. The structure of the website is such that a standard "permissions system" is being applied to a wide range of content for various journals. They seem to be mistakenly applying this system even to the open-access journals in the collection.

Even though this is probably just an honest mistake, it needs to be fixed ASAP. They are presently breaking the law and very much going against the spirit of the agreement that he entered into with them when he published his paper.

Ok...

Here's the Oxford website in question: Here

Try clicking on full text. You get full text without rightslink garbage.

If you look through the source for copyright.com (as seen in image), it's related to a javascript and is onclick a certain element that is NOT in the site.

After reading this, it seems an honest mistake.

Scholar.google does have 3 other sources for this document.

Ingenta DOES require payment in the line of $36.97 to view this. Hmm.

In order to get published, you have to sign off on Oxford Journal's License to Publish:

here

and I quote:

"You agree that OUP may include the Article in an "open access" version of the Journal subject to payment of the relevant 'open access' fee or submission of a valid fee-waiver form."

You have to sign this piece of paper to submit the article. Obviously, he (or a coauthor?) did, so from my read he gave them explicit permission to seek payment.

it's a violation of the agreement he had with them, and needs to be fixed.

The page on OUP's website that the Rust is on about is located here. As you can plainly see on the right-hand of the screen this document is available, FOR FREE, in PDF format. In fact, here's a direct link to said PDF on OUP's website.

What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.

My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.

Rust is really making a lot of fuss over nothing.

The page on OUP's website that the Rust is on about is located here. As you can plainly see on the right-hand of the screen this document is available, FOR FREE, in PDF format. In fact, here's a direct link to said PDF on OUP's website.

What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.

My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.

Rust is really making a lot of fuss over nothing.

Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand.

Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it

If publishers are really contributing nothing ... stop publishing through them!

Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays, died of carcinoma of the colon in 1923.

He was 78 years old and his cancer was not radiation induced. Those kinds of cancers were more common before refrigeration reduced the need for cured meats.

There's been no established connection between GM crops and bee populations.

Oh, it's hard so say but there is evidence that's more convincing than cell phone towers.

bees eat pollen [which lack GM proteins]

Don't forget nectar, fruit juice and other stuff. They pollen for proteins, especially while "milking" to feed the queen, so any modified proteins will get into the population and effect the colony.

You don't need GM to kill bees anyway. Pesticides do the job too.

Yes, we do have a solid grasp of genome dynamics - especially for for modification of food crops. In fact, scientist use naturally occurring processes to insert genes into plants. One of the best and most stable way of introducing genes into plants is using a bacteria Agrobacterium to insert genes into plant cells. Agrobacterium, along with other genera of bacteria, have long been inserting DNA into the genomes of various plant species. Also, in North America alone there has been the destruction of over 250 million acres of native ecosystems to plant things like corn, soybean, wheat note: that none of these plants are native to the US and all have been subjected to artificial selection (genetic modification) for thousands of years. Genetic engineering of crops has only brought in a small number well tested genes into food crops. Finally, horizontal gene transfer (the movement of genes between two different species, usually large taxonomic differences) is somewhat common in plants http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract /58/1/1

Also, horizontal gene transfer is common in other photosynthetic organisms such as Dinoflagellates....

So yes, we have a good understanding of gene transfer technologies and the general biology of gene transfer both in nature and in the lab. Yes, there are likely to be even more exciting results as more genomes are sequenced.

The question is what genes do we use to genetically engineer organisms? How far do we want to modify food versus say energy crops? Who owns or controls the production of these crops? It is important not to fear the technology but understand the technology and understand that genetic engineering helps scientist understand basic plant biology and can be beneficial both for humans and if done right for the environment (less use of land for crops, less use of insecticides and fungicides which leech into streams...).

Try explaining to one of your non-geek acquaintances what procmail does, and why it's useful. About 4 hours into the explanation, it'll dawn on you that non-geeks won't ever be able to comprehend stuff in Slashdot - we speak/write in a language that isn't recognisable as English to 99% of people out there.

There's a *huge* impedance mismatch between IT people and legal people

It seems like a useful algorithm, how come they can patent it?