So posing the question to a bunch of nerds on the internet wouldn't make sense.
Actually, if you were a paranoiac, this would be one way to get other people to confirm your ideas without having to share your own secret plans with anyone else. If you see your ideas on the page, you could say "oh, good, someone else thinks this is a good idea too!" Or you could be trying to make yourself feel superior because nobody else proved themselves as clever as you at planning their big escape.
Or you could be slightly less paranoid, and looking for confirmation that spending of thousands of dollars on survivalist gear wasn't a complete waste. Perhaps this is something to show the Significant Other to say "see, these are normal people who aren't on survivalists'R'us.com and they are also buying two shotguns and 24 boxes of ammo, so I'm not just being crazy." That could backfire, of course, unless there actually are enough crazy survivalists on Slashdot to back him up. (In that case you need more sock puppets and ACs, my mythical protagonist.)
I have a friend who I don't think is actually crazy, but he has three bug-out packs in his house, ready to go. One is easily carry-able and has the essential small and very light weapons, ammo, money and gold, ID cards, water filter, and assorted camp trinkets. The next pack bulks up the weapons with shotgun, rifle, lots of ammo, and more gear. The last pack includes shelter and food kinds of things. So depending on the circumstances of the exit he is making, he grabs the right gear for the job.
So far, he's gone camping. Which is good, because he likes camping.
Bank branches typically don't have more than 3K in their vault at any one time.
If you ask for a cash withdrawal for that much, you will be asked to come back the next day because they don't have that much cash on hand.
Where do you bank, the First National Bank of Sticks and Mud? The counter at the 7-11? Joe's Auto Repairs and Savings and Loan? Vinnie's House O' Money?
Actually, that last one's not even possible. Vinnie always has more than that in his pocket.
Seriously, where do you people come up with these ideas?
They exist because they continually emit copious gobs of cash.
They started out to establish technical standards for vinyl recordings. They became a trade organization who now organize the record labels under a common set of goals and provide direction as well as represent that common direction via lobbyists. Those common goals are mostly about IP rights protection, ensuring record labels are defending their "property".
Imagine if Cisco and HP and Huwaie and DLink and Dell and Hawking and everyone else charged $0.01 for every IP packet their routers carried, and formed the Router Association of America to lobby politicians to keep this legal. That's a tasty money stream that nobody would voluntarily turn down getting a taste of, but it would piss off the entire world. At some point it stops mattering to them how evil they appear to be, because they are so profitable. That's how the RIAA rose to prominence.
But at the heart, you are correct...the RIAA says a song has a value of x. The world says the same song has a value of x/50. THe RIAA has decided that if they can't get x, they don't want anything.
No, the RIAA has decided to settle for.02*x in the hopes that it might stay at.03x or long enough to snort a few more grams of coke.
I actually have no problems with the human consumption of GM foods. I see nothing wrong with enhancing the nutritional value, or the taste or color, or increasing the yield of the crops. And I agree that it's a crime that products like golden rice are not making it to the countries that so desperately need food. As I see it the "frankenfood" anti-GMO groups are directly responsible for the starvation of millions.
But where I do have a problem is with artificially increasing the defense mechanisms of the plants. Bt corn is a great example. We grow an awful lot of it these days, and since the existing corn borer population wasn't sitting around waiting to starve, they ate it anyway. 99.9% of the borers died as a result, but it's that 0.1% that was slightly resistant to the endotoxins that went on to reproduce, as did their offspring. And so now we have bred superborers that are completely resistant to the normal levels of toxins in Bt corn, and these pests are now spreading across Iowa. It only took about 15-20 years.
There are always unintended side effects to any new technology. These could not have been unexpected, as we have long known that nature always adapts. I'm sure there were warnings going out long before Bt corn even hit the market, yet it went out the door anyway. And now the world is facing a potential plague of superbugs.
( I am also disgusted by the business practices that plant patents have engendered. They could teach the RIAA a thing or two about suing people for which way the wind blows.)
By labeling products with the patent numbers of the foods that went into them, I could at least vote with my money to support the farmers who choose not to participate in the superbug breeding program. Unfortunately, that means I have to hold my nose and side with the frankenfoodies on the single issue of labeling. Doesn't mean I'm crazy, but I have to stand uncomfortably close to crazy.
Analytics like crazyegg let you understand how people use your site, but also say a lot about overall surfing habits that inform web designers where to place their ads for maximum effectiveness. But analytics like Google's correlate your searching and surfing and spending. They know what big spenders search for so they can sell targeted ads. They know where people surf before buying a TV, so Doubleclick can put TV ads on those sites. SEO scum can use the data to poison the most profitable forums and review sites with truckloads of shills.
Analytics lead to a less unbiased decision making process. That's good for the richest sellers, but sucks for consumers trying to get the best value for their money. And it really sucks for the small producers who cannot yet afford to compete on a level playing field.
I can't always innovate and come up with a 150% better product that would revolutionize the market. If I make John's Slightly Improved Widgets, with 15% better characteristics than Mom's Old Fashioned Industrial Widgets, I won't have a shot competing with the billionaires at MomCo. So the consumers are stuck with Mom, even though my product is measurably better. And analytics perpetuates this inequity - it does not balance it out.
Search engines are a lot better than they used to be. If I want a product, I'll search for it. I can do without advertisements telling me about products they think I want, or want me to think I want.
You just warmed the heart of every SEO marketer on the planet.
You assume Google is fair, and returns honest results.
I only took a few required business courses, but i'm pretty sure "sitting in an alleyway and hoping someone walks in there asking for what you're selling" isn't one of the chapters in a typical business textbook.
Actually, that's the first three chapters in Real Estate: Location, location, and location. You need to be where your potential customers are,
But that's the problem for web stores. The potential customers are on Slashdot, but aren't voluntarily migrating to "vampiremovieprops.com", even when they have unmet vampire-movie-prop needs. It's not like you can hang a sign at your ISP's backbone connection so that every packet that flows by gets a glance at your Bela Lugosi poster.
Word of mouth (or blog) works, but it takes time, and people are impatient. Striking it rich fortuitously works only if you can predict which of the 10,000 lolcat images will be featured next Caturday.
So yeah, advertising and search engine polluting seem to be the quick paths to success.
Cool paper, thank you! I was unaware that so many of the traits of the rootstock would end up modifying the fruit like that!
Interesting question about labeling, though. It seems that if you grafted a watermelon onto an eggplant, you should label the product's ingredient list with "watermelon, eggplant". Imagine the allergic reactions that not labeling the produce would cause if the rootstock was peanut, for example.
Just pointing out that web sites do have some amount of control over the ad content served. A kid-friendly site can request no inappropriate ads, so your 4-year-old precious doesn't ask uncomfortable questions like "Daddy, why did Mommy click on the two-bathtubs?" And they've almost always had a checkbox for "allow adult ads / deny adult ads".
I think most ad servers can also be more specific, where you can specify things like "I'm running a Honda lawn mower dealership, so don't advertise other brands of lawn mowers on my site", but I haven't had to deal with this myself. These arrangements are subject to humans following all the rules regarding appropriate tagging, though, which means they do have the occasional screw ups.
While the most effective bank robbers in history have been MBAs (Lehman Bros.), that doesn't mean an MBA is a requirement for robbing a bank.
Renderman certainly isn't an idiot. His qualifications are: hacker. We have ample instances where a hacker is able to make a system perform in an unexpected fashion, yielding profit, mayhem, or both. And he is very much an expert in that field.
7) I love this quote "some threats are total unknowns" yeah I think thats an excellent summary of the ADS-B "security hole".
You mocked him without refuting the point. Yes, the known problems are addressed. Sure, the attacks you can think of are covered by X and Y and Z redundancies. Fine, I get that. What hasn't happened here is real world abuse. I certainly can't predict what will be found tomorrow, just as nobody predicted CRSF attacks before they were discovered.
He makes valid points that are worth acknowledging with all due seriousness. Don't be so quick to dismiss them.
Occasionally glancing at your cellphone while getting black out drunk with your idiot friends doesn't sound like work to me...
I'm a taste tester for Johnny Walker you insensitive clod! They want to know how bad my blackouts and hangovers are!
You hiring? I'm more than qualified and have a long history a d rich experience with various forms of whiskey, including blackout and falling down experience.
Well, there's a marketing aspect that's definitely not in my best interest, and that is google analytics and other trackers. Combined with data from shopping.com, or any participating merchant site, It can tell a marketer not only what I bought and how much I paid for it, but more importantly which sites I went to before I pulled the trigger. It can tell them exactly what searches and browsing patterns led me to this decision. If I searched for "water heater 50 gallon warranty sucks forum", attempting to find out what people think when they have warranty troubles, then read waterHeaterReviews.com they'll happily sell that data to an SEO marketer who then salts the top listed forums with shills posting useless crap like "My 50 gallon WetWillie 2000 water heater has a great warranty, and it doesn't suck." It poisons my ability to do a search I can trust to be somewhat independent of the planted lies.
So I use NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus to block scripts, trackers, social networking links, flash, and ads which all serve the same purpose of assisting marketers to anticipate my moves. I won't even consider IE or Chrome, as neither offers effective privacy extensions. And I've even stopped using Google as my primary search engine, instead preferring duckduckgo.com. As far as I can tell they're trying to be honest, which sadly isn't saying much. But at least they're not Google.
I used to care more about denying ad revenue to sites, but I got over it once crap like XSS and CSRF attacks started trickling through advertisers on otherwise respectable sites. Do I feel guilty? Well, I still tithe Slashdot a few times a year. I'll click on Amazon referrer links to buy books from authors I like. And I do not install ad blockers for anyone else, nor do I tell non-technical people how to do it. They can do all the monkey punching they want, go support the ad bandits, do whatever. I'll happily let them foot the bills I am no longer willing to pay.
Have you never heard of grafting? It's a very common in horticulturalism.
Grafting is a mechanical transplantation process, and is not in any way related to genetics. I can stick a branch from an lime tree on a lemon tree trunk and get both limes and lemons from the "same plant", but that doesn't yield any kind of a cross, like lemony limes. They're still individual plants that retain their identity. If I plant a seed from the fruit of the lime branch, I will still get a lime tree.
Hybridization is the sexual crossing of two species with each other to produce a new hybrid, one with traits from both parents. It's been going on since the dawning of life, and is well studied and understood. It's also a natural process, with certain plant families natively hybridizing all the time (orchids are a good example, as some pollinators are less choosy than others.) We also know how to artificially hybridize life, by selecting mates that donate desirable traits to the progeny, and humans have been doing that since plant and animal husbandry began thousands of years ago. Today, we even cheat a bit in the plant world by using chemicals like colchicine that cause polyploidy by doubling the number of chromosomes, which can lead to a much more stable line of offspring - or it can lead to the genetic equivalent of a DNA Cuisinart with undesirable mutant offspring.
What genetic modification (GM) is doing, however, is different from what happens in nature or during hybridization. GM isn't about crossing a lemon and a lime to get a limon, as hybridization already lets us do that kind of thing cheaply. GM takes a specific DNA fragment from a bacteria or a fish that represents a particular desirable trait, and puts it into corn or potatoes. Those can't ever be the result of intentional or natural hybridization, because fish sperm simply will not pollinate maize. Their DNA is not compatible in nature. GM bypasses those limits.
Does that make GM bad? Not necessarily. Is irresponsibly sowing pest-resistant corn and evolving a competing pest-resistant-resistant superbug bad? Different question.
The problem I have with GMO foods is not that they're inherently dangerous to the humans that eat them. They're not, and no studies have convincingly shown otherwise. It's that the modifications were released in an environmentally irresponsible fashion. We now have modified genes literally blowing in the wind around the planet, hybridizing with whatever related noxious species they can, and transferring their properties like glyphosate resistance to invasive species that really need to remain controllable. The amount of Bt corn being produced is now selecting for Bt resistant corn borers. This was done to make profits for the first 20 years, and now the entire world will have to contend with toxin-resistant superbugs, and herbicide-resistant weeds, as a result of this rush to the cash.
Would Bt resistant corn borers have evolved without the Bt corn? Would glyphosate-resistant weeds have developed without the GMO boost? We don't know anymore because the politicians refused to put the brakes on their release, lest they disrupt that tasty flow of campaign cash.
In the short term, I hear there are agribusinesses suing farmers whose crops are accidentally pollinated by neighboring GMO fields - sued for patent violations! Not only are they poisoning the well for a few measly years of positive balance sheets, but they sue the people the wind blows on!
I don't want to support any corporations that do business that way. I want to know who's getting the patent bounty so I can avoid buying their products.
Do I like the idea of Golden Rice feeding starving populations, and providing missing vitamin A from their diets? You bet, it's a great thing. People around the world deserve healthy food. And Monsanto, among many other corporations, did the right thing by granting free licenses to farmers in those countries. Now it's mostly just the "stupid fear" that's keeping people from accepting that benefit (note that in every case the people who are rejecting Golden Rice are the well-fed politicians who aren't affected by the famines.) But one good deed does not undo their many (and continued) wrongs.
There should be no patent defense against a product that doesn't identify the patented products it contains! If the box of cornflakes doesn't say Pat. 6,666,666 on it, they aren't defending it as required by patent law!
and just jump straight to discussing which side has more money rather than which side has valid points?
Why not? The outcome of the vote is the only consequence that will make an actual difference, and votes are won through advertising, not facts. Anybody with money understands this already, and is using this to their advantage every chance they can.
Let me get this straight... ebay is trying to protect people from the, ahem, fraudulent sales of magic and potions?
The only people they are trying to protect are the ones who answer the phones at 1-800-EBAYCOMPLAINTS. They want to waste not one more second of payroll on this crap.
What if they examined the computers of known or captured Hezbollah operatives, and found that several had the same "c:\program files\SuperSecretHezbollahDecoder" program installed? The encrypted payload might be a combination of things, like "grab the SuperSecretHezbollahDecoder key," and "Use the WiFi card and Bluetooth dongle to identify every phone and device in the room" and it reports all data back to the mothership. The RF stuff could be triangulated by a system like Apple's WiFi location API, or via wigle.net, or even the WiFi data that the Google StreetView cars were scraping. Phones could be traced back to a specific IMEI and tracked.
Airport and other public WiFi installations could be constantly scanning for devices on the hot list. If the Israeli government offered local businesses free "terrorist detectors" (picture some reprogrammed access points that passively scan and report WiFi and Bluetooth MACs back to the IDF), about 80% of businesses would quickly install them in their lobbies.
That would actually turn out to be very disruptive to terrorist organizations. By making every member of the organization suspicious of every electronic component, they would completely deny them the ability to communicate wirelessly. Without those communications, they have to go back to hand-passed notes, dead drops, brush passes, and other old school spy tradecraft. And the Israelis are very good at tracking those kinds of people.
Prove it isn't. If it were easy to hack an iPhone as you seem to suggest surely there are many guides online for hacking a non-simple passcoded iPhone online? No? The NSA doesn't have sone magical movie-like way to crack AES-256?
As a matter of fact, they don't need a magical movie-like way to crack AES 256. They just need a magical movie-like tool to dig out the not-very hidden secret key.
"Law enforcement tools can bypass the iPhone passcode in under two minutes
Do you have a passcode set on your iPhone? Does it give you a warm fuzzy feeling that your data is securely locked away from prying eyes? Think again. Technology available to law enforcement officials by Swedish firm Micro Systemation can be used by to hack into the handset and bypass the four-digit passcode in less than two minutes.
Here's a video of the tool, called XRY, in action against a passcode-protected iPhone 4"
Command and control, stealing bank login information, virus propagation, 0-day exploits, and phoning home are already known parts of Gauss. The malware operators can do all this bad stuff already. The real question is "what else is so awful that they had to hide it with such a sophisticated mechanism?"
Slashdot Mirror
So posing the question to a bunch of nerds on the internet wouldn't make sense.
Actually, if you were a paranoiac, this would be one way to get other people to confirm your ideas without having to share your own secret plans with anyone else. If you see your ideas on the page, you could say "oh, good, someone else thinks this is a good idea too!" Or you could be trying to make yourself feel superior because nobody else proved themselves as clever as you at planning their big escape.
Or you could be slightly less paranoid, and looking for confirmation that spending of thousands of dollars on survivalist gear wasn't a complete waste. Perhaps this is something to show the Significant Other to say "see, these are normal people who aren't on survivalists'R'us.com and they are also buying two shotguns and 24 boxes of ammo, so I'm not just being crazy." That could backfire, of course, unless there actually are enough crazy survivalists on Slashdot to back him up. (In that case you need more sock puppets and ACs, my mythical protagonist.)
I have a friend who I don't think is actually crazy, but he has three bug-out packs in his house, ready to go. One is easily carry-able and has the essential small and very light weapons, ammo, money and gold, ID cards, water filter, and assorted camp trinkets. The next pack bulks up the weapons with shotgun, rifle, lots of ammo, and more gear. The last pack includes shelter and food kinds of things. So depending on the circumstances of the exit he is making, he grabs the right gear for the job.
So far, he's gone camping. Which is good, because he likes camping.
Bank branches typically don't have more than 3K in their vault at any one time.
If you ask for a cash withdrawal for that much, you will be asked to come back the next day because they don't have that much cash on hand.
Where do you bank, the First National Bank of Sticks and Mud? The counter at the 7-11? Joe's Auto Repairs and Savings and Loan? Vinnie's House O' Money?
Actually, that last one's not even possible. Vinnie always has more than that in his pocket.
Seriously, where do you people come up with these ideas?
They exist because they continually emit copious gobs of cash.
They started out to establish technical standards for vinyl recordings. They became a trade organization who now organize the record labels under a common set of goals and provide direction as well as represent that common direction via lobbyists. Those common goals are mostly about IP rights protection, ensuring record labels are defending their "property".
Imagine if Cisco and HP and Huwaie and DLink and Dell and Hawking and everyone else charged $0.01 for every IP packet their routers carried, and formed the Router Association of America to lobby politicians to keep this legal. That's a tasty money stream that nobody would voluntarily turn down getting a taste of, but it would piss off the entire world. At some point it stops mattering to them how evil they appear to be, because they are so profitable. That's how the RIAA rose to prominence.
But at the heart, you are correct...the RIAA says a song has a value of x. The world says the same song has a value of x/50. THe RIAA has decided that if they can't get x, they don't want anything.
No, the RIAA has decided to settle for .02*x in the hopes that it might stay at .03x or long enough to snort a few more grams of coke.
I actually have no problems with the human consumption of GM foods. I see nothing wrong with enhancing the nutritional value, or the taste or color, or increasing the yield of the crops. And I agree that it's a crime that products like golden rice are not making it to the countries that so desperately need food. As I see it the "frankenfood" anti-GMO groups are directly responsible for the starvation of millions.
But where I do have a problem is with artificially increasing the defense mechanisms of the plants. Bt corn is a great example. We grow an awful lot of it these days, and since the existing corn borer population wasn't sitting around waiting to starve, they ate it anyway. 99.9% of the borers died as a result, but it's that 0.1% that was slightly resistant to the endotoxins that went on to reproduce, as did their offspring. And so now we have bred superborers that are completely resistant to the normal levels of toxins in Bt corn, and these pests are now spreading across Iowa. It only took about 15-20 years.
There are always unintended side effects to any new technology. These could not have been unexpected, as we have long known that nature always adapts. I'm sure there were warnings going out long before Bt corn even hit the market, yet it went out the door anyway. And now the world is facing a potential plague of superbugs.
( I am also disgusted by the business practices that plant patents have engendered. They could teach the RIAA a thing or two about suing people for which way the wind blows.)
By labeling products with the patent numbers of the foods that went into them, I could at least vote with my money to support the farmers who choose not to participate in the superbug breeding program. Unfortunately, that means I have to hold my nose and side with the frankenfoodies on the single issue of labeling. Doesn't mean I'm crazy, but I have to stand uncomfortably close to crazy.
Analytics like crazyegg let you understand how people use your site, but also say a lot about overall surfing habits that inform web designers where to place their ads for maximum effectiveness. But analytics like Google's correlate your searching and surfing and spending. They know what big spenders search for so they can sell targeted ads. They know where people surf before buying a TV, so Doubleclick can put TV ads on those sites. SEO scum can use the data to poison the most profitable forums and review sites with truckloads of shills.
Analytics lead to a less unbiased decision making process. That's good for the richest sellers, but sucks for consumers trying to get the best value for their money. And it really sucks for the small producers who cannot yet afford to compete on a level playing field.
I can't always innovate and come up with a 150% better product that would revolutionize the market. If I make John's Slightly Improved Widgets, with 15% better characteristics than Mom's Old Fashioned Industrial Widgets, I won't have a shot competing with the billionaires at MomCo. So the consumers are stuck with Mom, even though my product is measurably better. And analytics perpetuates this inequity - it does not balance it out.
Search engines are a lot better than they used to be. If I want a product, I'll search for it. I can do without advertisements telling me about products they think I want, or want me to think I want.
You just warmed the heart of every SEO marketer on the planet.
You assume Google is fair, and returns honest results.
I only took a few required business courses, but i'm pretty sure "sitting in an alleyway and hoping someone walks in there asking for what you're selling" isn't one of the chapters in a typical business textbook.
Actually, that's the first three chapters in Real Estate: Location, location, and location. You need to be where your potential customers are,
But that's the problem for web stores. The potential customers are on Slashdot, but aren't voluntarily migrating to "vampiremovieprops.com", even when they have unmet vampire-movie-prop needs. It's not like you can hang a sign at your ISP's backbone connection so that every packet that flows by gets a glance at your Bela Lugosi poster.
Word of mouth (or blog) works, but it takes time, and people are impatient. Striking it rich fortuitously works only if you can predict which of the 10,000 lolcat images will be featured next Caturday.
So yeah, advertising and search engine polluting seem to be the quick paths to success.
It's only sending them data if I opt-in to ghost rank, which I do not.
For now.
Cool paper, thank you! I was unaware that so many of the traits of the rootstock would end up modifying the fruit like that!
Interesting question about labeling, though. It seems that if you grafted a watermelon onto an eggplant, you should label the product's ingredient list with "watermelon, eggplant". Imagine the allergic reactions that not labeling the produce would cause if the rootstock was peanut, for example.
Just pointing out that web sites do have some amount of control over the ad content served. A kid-friendly site can request no inappropriate ads, so your 4-year-old precious doesn't ask uncomfortable questions like "Daddy, why did Mommy click on the two-bathtubs?" And they've almost always had a checkbox for "allow adult ads / deny adult ads".
I think most ad servers can also be more specific, where you can specify things like "I'm running a Honda lawn mower dealership, so don't advertise other brands of lawn mowers on my site", but I haven't had to deal with this myself. These arrangements are subject to humans following all the rules regarding appropriate tagging, though, which means they do have the occasional screw ups.
While the most effective bank robbers in history have been MBAs (Lehman Bros.), that doesn't mean an MBA is a requirement for robbing a bank.
Renderman certainly isn't an idiot. His qualifications are: hacker. We have ample instances where a hacker is able to make a system perform in an unexpected fashion, yielding profit, mayhem, or both. And he is very much an expert in that field.
7) I love this quote "some threats are total unknowns" yeah I think thats an excellent summary of the ADS-B "security hole".
You mocked him without refuting the point. Yes, the known problems are addressed. Sure, the attacks you can think of are covered by X and Y and Z redundancies. Fine, I get that. What hasn't happened here is real world abuse. I certainly can't predict what will be found tomorrow, just as nobody predicted CRSF attacks before they were discovered.
He makes valid points that are worth acknowledging with all due seriousness. Don't be so quick to dismiss them.
The Setec Astronomy box can get the past codes used in the certified and accredited system.
So can an Arduino.
Occasionally glancing at your cellphone while getting black out drunk with your idiot friends doesn't sound like work to me...
I'm a taste tester for Johnny Walker you insensitive clod! They want to know how bad my blackouts and hangovers are!
You hiring? I'm more than qualified and have a long history a d rich experience with various forms of whiskey, including blackout and falling down experience.
And do you have extra openings for my mates?
Well, there's a marketing aspect that's definitely not in my best interest, and that is google analytics and other trackers. Combined with data from shopping.com, or any participating merchant site, It can tell a marketer not only what I bought and how much I paid for it, but more importantly which sites I went to before I pulled the trigger. It can tell them exactly what searches and browsing patterns led me to this decision. If I searched for "water heater 50 gallon warranty sucks forum", attempting to find out what people think when they have warranty troubles, then read waterHeaterReviews.com they'll happily sell that data to an SEO marketer who then salts the top listed forums with shills posting useless crap like "My 50 gallon WetWillie 2000 water heater has a great warranty, and it doesn't suck." It poisons my ability to do a search I can trust to be somewhat independent of the planted lies.
So I use NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus to block scripts, trackers, social networking links, flash, and ads which all serve the same purpose of assisting marketers to anticipate my moves. I won't even consider IE or Chrome, as neither offers effective privacy extensions. And I've even stopped using Google as my primary search engine, instead preferring duckduckgo.com. As far as I can tell they're trying to be honest, which sadly isn't saying much. But at least they're not Google.
I used to care more about denying ad revenue to sites, but I got over it once crap like XSS and CSRF attacks started trickling through advertisers on otherwise respectable sites. Do I feel guilty? Well, I still tithe Slashdot a few times a year. I'll click on Amazon referrer links to buy books from authors I like. And I do not install ad blockers for anyone else, nor do I tell non-technical people how to do it. They can do all the monkey punching they want, go support the ad bandits, do whatever. I'll happily let them foot the bills I am no longer willing to pay.
Have you never heard of grafting? It's a very common in horticulturalism.
Grafting is a mechanical transplantation process, and is not in any way related to genetics. I can stick a branch from an lime tree on a lemon tree trunk and get both limes and lemons from the "same plant", but that doesn't yield any kind of a cross, like lemony limes. They're still individual plants that retain their identity. If I plant a seed from the fruit of the lime branch, I will still get a lime tree.
Hybridization is the sexual crossing of two species with each other to produce a new hybrid, one with traits from both parents. It's been going on since the dawning of life, and is well studied and understood. It's also a natural process, with certain plant families natively hybridizing all the time (orchids are a good example, as some pollinators are less choosy than others.) We also know how to artificially hybridize life, by selecting mates that donate desirable traits to the progeny, and humans have been doing that since plant and animal husbandry began thousands of years ago. Today, we even cheat a bit in the plant world by using chemicals like colchicine that cause polyploidy by doubling the number of chromosomes, which can lead to a much more stable line of offspring - or it can lead to the genetic equivalent of a DNA Cuisinart with undesirable mutant offspring.
What genetic modification (GM) is doing, however, is different from what happens in nature or during hybridization. GM isn't about crossing a lemon and a lime to get a limon, as hybridization already lets us do that kind of thing cheaply. GM takes a specific DNA fragment from a bacteria or a fish that represents a particular desirable trait, and puts it into corn or potatoes. Those can't ever be the result of intentional or natural hybridization, because fish sperm simply will not pollinate maize. Their DNA is not compatible in nature. GM bypasses those limits.
Does that make GM bad? Not necessarily. Is irresponsibly sowing pest-resistant corn and evolving a competing pest-resistant-resistant superbug bad? Different question.
The problem I have with GMO foods is not that they're inherently dangerous to the humans that eat them. They're not, and no studies have convincingly shown otherwise. It's that the modifications were released in an environmentally irresponsible fashion. We now have modified genes literally blowing in the wind around the planet, hybridizing with whatever related noxious species they can, and transferring their properties like glyphosate resistance to invasive species that really need to remain controllable. The amount of Bt corn being produced is now selecting for Bt resistant corn borers. This was done to make profits for the first 20 years, and now the entire world will have to contend with toxin-resistant superbugs, and herbicide-resistant weeds, as a result of this rush to the cash.
Would Bt resistant corn borers have evolved without the Bt corn? Would glyphosate-resistant weeds have developed without the GMO boost? We don't know anymore because the politicians refused to put the brakes on their release, lest they disrupt that tasty flow of campaign cash.
In the short term, I hear there are agribusinesses suing farmers whose crops are accidentally pollinated by neighboring GMO fields - sued for patent violations! Not only are they poisoning the well for a few measly years of positive balance sheets, but they sue the people the wind blows on!
I don't want to support any corporations that do business that way. I want to know who's getting the patent bounty so I can avoid buying their products.
Do I like the idea of Golden Rice feeding starving populations, and providing missing vitamin A from their diets? You bet, it's a great thing. People around the world deserve healthy food. And Monsanto, among many other corporations, did the right thing by granting free licenses to farmers in those countries. Now it's mostly just the "stupid fear" that's keeping people from accepting that benefit (note that in every case the people who are rejecting Golden Rice are the well-fed politicians who aren't affected by the famines.) But one good deed does not undo their many (and continued) wrongs.
This. You see patent numbers or at least patent pending on just about any other protected products and even many that are not. Why not produce?
Winner, winner, anti-biotic-treated chicken dinner!
There should be no patent defense against a product that doesn't identify the patented products it contains! If the box of cornflakes doesn't say Pat. 6,666,666 on it, they aren't defending it as required by patent law!
and just jump straight to discussing which side has more money rather than which side has valid points?
Why not? The outcome of the vote is the only consequence that will make an actual difference, and votes are won through advertising, not facts. Anybody with money understands this already, and is using this to their advantage every chance they can.
Do try to keep up.
Let me get this straight... ebay is trying to protect people from the, ahem, fraudulent sales of magic and potions?
The only people they are trying to protect are the ones who answer the phones at 1-800-EBAYCOMPLAINTS. They want to waste not one more second of payroll on this crap.
First they ban used underwear and now I can't even buy magic spells? Sheesh. It seems like there's nothing left on eBay worth bidding on.
What about unused Magic Underwear?
What part of "starting in September" was unclear to you?
What if they examined the computers of known or captured Hezbollah operatives, and found that several had the same "c:\program files\SuperSecretHezbollahDecoder" program installed? The encrypted payload might be a combination of things, like "grab the SuperSecretHezbollahDecoder key," and "Use the WiFi card and Bluetooth dongle to identify every phone and device in the room" and it reports all data back to the mothership. The RF stuff could be triangulated by a system like Apple's WiFi location API, or via wigle.net, or even the WiFi data that the Google StreetView cars were scraping. Phones could be traced back to a specific IMEI and tracked.
Airport and other public WiFi installations could be constantly scanning for devices on the hot list. If the Israeli government offered local businesses free "terrorist detectors" (picture some reprogrammed access points that passively scan and report WiFi and Bluetooth MACs back to the IDF), about 80% of businesses would quickly install them in their lobbies.
That would actually turn out to be very disruptive to terrorist organizations. By making every member of the organization suspicious of every electronic component, they would completely deny them the ability to communicate wirelessly. Without those communications, they have to go back to hand-passed notes, dead drops, brush passes, and other old school spy tradecraft. And the Israelis are very good at tracking those kinds of people.
Prove it isn't. If it were easy to hack an iPhone as you seem to suggest surely there are many guides online for hacking a non-simple passcoded iPhone online? No? The NSA doesn't have sone magical movie-like way to crack AES-256?
As a matter of fact, they don't need a magical movie-like way to crack AES 256. They just need a magical movie-like tool to dig out the not-very hidden secret key.
From: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/law-enforcement-tools-can-bypass-the-iphone-passcode-in-under-two-minutes/19335
"Law enforcement tools can bypass the iPhone passcode in under two minutes
Do you have a passcode set on your iPhone? Does it give you a warm fuzzy feeling that your data is securely locked away from prying eyes? Think again. Technology available to law enforcement officials by Swedish firm Micro Systemation can be used by to hack into the handset and bypass the four-digit passcode in less than two minutes.
Here's a video of the tool, called XRY, in action against a passcode-protected iPhone 4"
Command and control, stealing bank login information, virus propagation, 0-day exploits, and phoning home are already known parts of Gauss. The malware operators can do all this bad stuff already. The real question is "what else is so awful that they had to hide it with such a sophisticated mechanism?"