Yes, he was deliberatly trying to get around the patent. But he was doing so with techniques that have been unequivocally legal for millenia. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to replant seeds from last year. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to select for herbicide resistance by spraying plants and keeping the ones that lived. Now those things are illegal.
The US government and Monsanto have clearly overstepped the limits of legitmate power. This is why we have the 9th and 10th amendments. Portraying Monsanto as an innocent and unwilling victim is absurd. They know exactly what they are doing, destroying traditional agriculture for their own profit.
Not all untranslated DNA has other properties. Some of it really does just exist because it's good at getting itself replicated. It's an open question how much non-coding DNA exerts regulatory effects and how much is actually junk. This paper indicates that in at least one eukaryote, 3% non-coding DNA is sufficient to regulate all the coding DNA.
If that holds in mammals (unlikely, but not out of the question), the vast majority of our non-coding DNA would still be "junk". Human DNA is 98% non-coding, or 2% coding. 3% of 2% is a rounding error here, so it would still be accurate to say the human genome is 98% "junk". If regulatory sequences outnumbered coding sequences 10:1 you're still looking at >75% of the human genome being "junk".
I don't think the concept of "junk" DNA is ever going to go away. Evolution would predict that sequences that are good at replicating themselves would accumulate in the genome, even if they don't do anything "useful". And random errors that accrue during copying will persist unless there's a mechanism to select against them. If we found that 100% of our DNA had a purpose, that would be a pretty strong argument against the theory of evolution.
The interesting question here is what selective forces drive this plant to excise unnecessary DNA, and what mechanism it uses to do this. Understanding that mechanism might lead to future gene therapies.
Neither can be used on a free platform, so what's the difference? How are platform specific encryption modules any better than platform specific native apps?
This is quite possibly the most ignorant comment I've ever read about scientific publishing. Capitalism has nothing to do with science, the vast majority of published research is funded through grants handed out by the government. Nobody does basic research for profit. The public has already paid for the research, all the products of that research should be completely free.
People don't dislike Palin because she's "colorful". They dislike her because she's a moron. "What papers do you read?" "All of them" That's not "foot in mouth", that's Palin trying to pretend to be well read when she's clearly not. She didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was, she didn't know what Hamas was, and so on.
Does Joe Biden lack tact? Yes, but he has decades of experience. His biggest gaffe to date has been when he lead the president in endorsing same sex marriage. A breach of protocol to be sure, but nothing that indicates incompetence.
That's an easy explanation. I'll let someone more eloquent than I do it:
"Government has a flaw that General Electric doesnâ(TM)t have. The government is potentially democratic. Thereâ(TM)s a way of influencing the government and participating in it. Iâ(TM)m not joking, just think about it. When youâ(TM)re saying that the government is doing this and that and the other thing to us, yes, the government is reflecting the interests of the people in it, but they could be representing us - there is no way for private tyrannies to be representing us. So yes, they would like you to hate the government. There is a lot wrong with the government, there is a lot to be hated about it, there is a lot to be changed about it. But the main thing about it is you can participate in it. And there are ways of changing what it does, and therefore, for at least people who believe in democracy, gives us advantages that other systems of powers donâ(TM)t have. It is potentially our system of power, and the private corporations arenâ(TM)t." Noam Chomsky
Those are lovely assumptions to make, and I do make them. The problem is that in most cases I reach a contradiction quickly, providing a proof by negation that those assumptions are not true.
e.g., let's try to convince Obama that Cannabis should be regulated like alcohol. We'll assume that he earnestly believes Cannabis should be prohibited and alcohol should not. So lets ask him to explain why.
This actually happened on Obama's "We The People" petition site. 75,000 people asked Obama to explain why Cannabis, which is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol, should be criminal when alcohol is not.
His response was penned by the Drug Czar, who is statutorily prohibited from advocating for drug reform. That response called Cannabis a dangerous drug, factually untrue, and failed to mention alcohol once.
Now tell me, if Obama honestly concluded that it is good and just to imprison Cannabis smokers, but not alcoholics, why could he not share that reasoning with us? If he is capable of being convinced, why did he have someone who is legally prohibited from being convinced write the response? And how can I be open to the facts and logic of others if they are unwilling to actually share those facts and logic with us?
I simply don't see any well intentioned explanation for this kind of behavior. But, as you say, I may be wrong. If so, point out where.
I'll hazard a guess that you'll say something like "advocating legalization would have jeopardized his reelection chances". I'll preemptively retort that that's not a defense of Obama at all, but a scathing indictment. If that is his political calculation, that means he is willing to be complicit in an atrocity in order to further his political career. That's evil. If that's not your point, kindly disregard this paragraph.
If you divest yourself of sentimental notions of nationalistic pride, and actually observe the political process you'll see that this kind of cynical manipulation is the rule, not the exception. e.g. Chris Christie can one week flaut the federal ban on sports gambling for very well stated reasons, and the next week completely ignore those very same arguments when they apply to Cannabis. That's hypocrisy pure and simple, there can be no honest explanation for that discrepancy. No matter how jovial he might seem, he's a scumbag. And people who knowingly(or negligently) vote for scumbags are scumbags too.
I know I harp on Cannabis laws a lot, but they are a convenient example. The facts are just so overwhelmingly against the government's position that it's impossible to provide an honest explanation for our drug policy.
The problem with gun ownership, is that there is now a majority of americans who believe that restrictions on gun ownership should be tightened (to some degree). They might not agree on everything, but there is general agreement for tighter restrictions.
Great, amend the Constitution via the procedures laid out therein, and you can implement all the restrictions on gun ownership you want. If you can't do that, you can't legally restrict gun ownership. I'm sure that won't stop you from trying though.
If you want to prevent suicide, make the world a little less dog-eat-dog. Don't attack the tools, attack the motivation. People commit suicide because it's the only way they have to escape extreme emotional anguish. Removing that escape will only make them suffer more.
Unfortunately, he didn't really answer the major question. What makes Crunchbang different from Debian + Openbox? There's a script that provides some "special sauce". Ok, but as a user what does that script actually do for me? It "installs different programs", but what programs are those, and why can't I just pipe a list of packages into 'dpkg --set-selections' to accomplish the same thing?
Major missed opportunity by the Crunchbang devs to actually explain what distinguishes their distro. I am their target audience and I still have no idea what they have to offer over what I have currently.
A better analogy is with the other rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Do you want to have to register before you can speak freely? Do you want to require a licensing before one is allowed to plead the 5th? Do you want to have your home inspected before you're allowed to assert your 4th amendment rights?
Because disrespect for your head of state - who was elected by you and your fellow citizens - demonstrates disrespect for the state and for the citizens who elected the head of state
You're damn right I disrespect the state and the citizens who elect its government. They've done nothing to earn respect, and a lot to earn disrespect. Start holding the people you elect accountable, and I'll start respecting the electorate.
Reasonable men may disagree reasonably, and respectfully
We're not dealing with reasonable men. We're dealing with men who think that Aaron Swartz deserved more jail time than the bankers who crashed the economy. We dealing with people who think a person who grows and consumes a plant in the privacy of his own home deserves to be locked in a cage for years on end. We're far, far past the time when "reasonable men" could be involved in government at all.
Only churls turn every point of disagreement into a personal vendetta against another person
We're not talking about what color to paint the bike shed here. We're talking about peoples lives and livelihoods being ruined because of bad policy. If you advocate for policies that harm people, you are a bad person. Remember, the pen is mightier than the sword. Someone who uses the pen to acquire wealth for his cronies is no better than someone who uses a gun to acquire wealth for his homies.
1) The President - the head of state - does not make the laws. His authority over the laws is simply veto or sign. In many cases, his veto will be overridden.
And he should be judged by what he vetos and doesn't veto. And as executive, he should be judged by who he prosecutes (pot smokers and whistleblowers) and doesn't prosecute(racketeering bank executives). He should not be granted honor by default.
2) Not every law you happen to disagree with is "unjust" 3) Not everything that happens that you don't like that doesn't have a law against it yet is "unjust"
True, some are just bad ideas. But there are plenty of truly unjust laws Obama is responsible for enforcing. That's enough to disqualify him from honor.
4) The existence of a few unjust laws does not make an entire country and government corrupt and unjust
No, but decades of facilitating the plundering of the middle class, imprisoning thousands of people for harmless lifestyle choices, and building the largest military in the world so you can pillage the developing world does. We're not talking about a few unjust laws, but the major thrusts of US policy for at least my entire lifetime, have been nothing but harmful to anyone who is not one of the elites. The good that has come out of the US, e.g. the creation of the internet, has mostly been incidental.
5) The purple class warfare prose is kinda stale.
It's stale, because the upper classes have been waging war on the lower classes for 50 years now. You're going to keep hearing about it until it changes.
6) If you treat everybody in power as if they're your enemy, then you will NEVER convince them of the need for change, or get them on your side to help effect that change.
If you have to beg people in power to help you out, you're not going to win anyway. The right way to win is to get the people on your side, and make those in political office beg US to help them out.
Sweeping rhetoric is great for getting a +5 on Slashdot, but it does fuck-all to actually change the situation you're grand-standing about.
And cupping the balls of those who exploit you is going to accomplish what exactly? When has sycophancy ever lead to better policy?
Because we should respect each other from the get-go, even if the person holds public office.
You're absolutely right. But holding public office is not a neutral act. If you hold power in a country with unjust laws, you are an agent of injustice and deserve to be treated like one. Our country exists in order to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, and to protect the rich from the poor. Anyone who is associated with that is completely undeserving of respect or honor.
I'll respect Obama when he starts jailing bankers and bailing out common people. Until then, he deserves no more respect than any other leader of a criminal organization.
If the state itself is not worthy of respect, you have a bigger problem than deciding what figurehead to salute.
Yes, we have much, much bigger problems. Feigning respect for the President only serves to cover them up.
Presumably, in this day and age, most people at least profess to like the nation-state they live in, at least at some minimal flag waving patriotic level.
And that's the problem. Primative nationalistic sentiments have overridden the need for good government.
When did you go to school? When I went to civics class it was nothing but indoctrination. I didn't hear anything about the problems with our system, just how important it was for us to vote for one of the puppets chosen for us. Somehow all our problems would be solved if we got 100% voter turnout... voting for the same damn Democrats and Republicans we get anyway.
Lenin wasn't so great either. Marx was wrong, there should be no dictatorship of the proletariat. There should be a constitutionally limited democracy of the proletariat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, he was deliberatly trying to get around the patent. But he was doing so with techniques that have been unequivocally legal for millenia. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to replant seeds from last year. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to select for herbicide resistance by spraying plants and keeping the ones that lived. Now those things are illegal.
The US government and Monsanto have clearly overstepped the limits of legitmate power. This is why we have the 9th and 10th amendments. Portraying Monsanto as an innocent and unwilling victim is absurd. They know exactly what they are doing, destroying traditional agriculture for their own profit.
Why is that a nasty precedent? Isn't that desirable?
Not all untranslated DNA has other properties. Some of it really does just exist because it's good at getting itself replicated. It's an open question how much non-coding DNA exerts regulatory effects and how much is actually junk. This paper indicates that in at least one eukaryote, 3% non-coding DNA is sufficient to regulate all the coding DNA.
If that holds in mammals (unlikely, but not out of the question), the vast majority of our non-coding DNA would still be "junk". Human DNA is 98% non-coding, or 2% coding. 3% of 2% is a rounding error here, so it would still be accurate to say the human genome is 98% "junk". If regulatory sequences outnumbered coding sequences 10:1 you're still looking at >75% of the human genome being "junk".
I don't think the concept of "junk" DNA is ever going to go away. Evolution would predict that sequences that are good at replicating themselves would accumulate in the genome, even if they don't do anything "useful". And random errors that accrue during copying will persist unless there's a mechanism to select against them. If we found that 100% of our DNA had a purpose, that would be a pretty strong argument against the theory of evolution.
The interesting question here is what selective forces drive this plant to excise unnecessary DNA, and what mechanism it uses to do this. Understanding that mechanism might lead to future gene therapies.
Neither can be used on a free platform, so what's the difference? How are platform specific encryption modules any better than platform specific native apps?
Try writing the author. They will almost always send you a pdf free of charge.
This is quite possibly the most ignorant comment I've ever read about scientific publishing. Capitalism has nothing to do with science, the vast majority of published research is funded through grants handed out by the government. Nobody does basic research for profit. The public has already paid for the research, all the products of that research should be completely free.
What drove the adoption of the VCR? Home porn rentals. What drove ubiquitous internet access? Easy porn access.
Jokes on them. There's going to be higher demand for the raunchy channels than the churchy channels.
People don't dislike Palin because she's "colorful". They dislike her because she's a moron. "What papers do you read?" "All of them" That's not "foot in mouth", that's Palin trying to pretend to be well read when she's clearly not. She didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was, she didn't know what Hamas was, and so on.
Does Joe Biden lack tact? Yes, but he has decades of experience. His biggest gaffe to date has been when he lead the president in endorsing same sex marriage. A breach of protocol to be sure, but nothing that indicates incompetence.
That's an easy explanation. I'll let someone more eloquent than I do it:
Those are lovely assumptions to make, and I do make them. The problem is that in most cases I reach a contradiction quickly, providing a proof by negation that those assumptions are not true.
e.g., let's try to convince Obama that Cannabis should be regulated like alcohol. We'll assume that he earnestly believes Cannabis should be prohibited and alcohol should not. So lets ask him to explain why.
This actually happened on Obama's "We The People" petition site. 75,000 people asked Obama to explain why Cannabis, which is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol, should be criminal when alcohol is not.
His response was penned by the Drug Czar, who is statutorily prohibited from advocating for drug reform. That response called Cannabis a dangerous drug, factually untrue, and failed to mention alcohol once.
Now tell me, if Obama honestly concluded that it is good and just to imprison Cannabis smokers, but not alcoholics, why could he not share that reasoning with us? If he is capable of being convinced, why did he have someone who is legally prohibited from being convinced write the response? And how can I be open to the facts and logic of others if they are unwilling to actually share those facts and logic with us?
I simply don't see any well intentioned explanation for this kind of behavior. But, as you say, I may be wrong. If so, point out where.
I'll hazard a guess that you'll say something like "advocating legalization would have jeopardized his reelection chances". I'll preemptively retort that that's not a defense of Obama at all, but a scathing indictment. If that is his political calculation, that means he is willing to be complicit in an atrocity in order to further his political career. That's evil. If that's not your point, kindly disregard this paragraph.
If you divest yourself of sentimental notions of nationalistic pride, and actually observe the political process you'll see that this kind of cynical manipulation is the rule, not the exception. e.g. Chris Christie can one week flaut the federal ban on sports gambling for very well stated reasons, and the next week completely ignore those very same arguments when they apply to Cannabis. That's hypocrisy pure and simple, there can be no honest explanation for that discrepancy. No matter how jovial he might seem, he's a scumbag. And people who knowingly(or negligently) vote for scumbags are scumbags too.
I know I harp on Cannabis laws a lot, but they are a convenient example. The facts are just so overwhelmingly against the government's position that it's impossible to provide an honest explanation for our drug policy.
For the chance that one day we might be able to win our freedom.
The problem with gun ownership, is that there is now a majority of americans who believe that restrictions on gun ownership should be tightened (to some degree). They might not agree on everything, but there is general agreement for tighter restrictions.
Great, amend the Constitution via the procedures laid out therein, and you can implement all the restrictions on gun ownership you want. If you can't do that, you can't legally restrict gun ownership. I'm sure that won't stop you from trying though.
There are no free countries.
If you want to prevent suicide, make the world a little less dog-eat-dog. Don't attack the tools, attack the motivation. People commit suicide because it's the only way they have to escape extreme emotional anguish. Removing that escape will only make them suffer more.
Unfortunately, the theocrats and fascists are the most likely to assert their will through the use of force.
Unfortunately, he didn't really answer the major question. What makes Crunchbang different from Debian + Openbox? There's a script that provides some "special sauce". Ok, but as a user what does that script actually do for me? It "installs different programs", but what programs are those, and why can't I just pipe a list of packages into 'dpkg --set-selections' to accomplish the same thing?
Major missed opportunity by the Crunchbang devs to actually explain what distinguishes their distro. I am their target audience and I still have no idea what they have to offer over what I have currently.
A better analogy is with the other rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Do you want to have to register before you can speak freely? Do you want to require a licensing before one is allowed to plead the 5th? Do you want to have your home inspected before you're allowed to assert your 4th amendment rights?
Because disrespect for your head of state - who was elected by you and your fellow citizens - demonstrates disrespect for the state and for the citizens who elected the head of state
You're damn right I disrespect the state and the citizens who elect its government. They've done nothing to earn respect, and a lot to earn disrespect. Start holding the people you elect accountable, and I'll start respecting the electorate.
Reasonable men may disagree reasonably, and respectfully
We're not dealing with reasonable men. We're dealing with men who think that Aaron Swartz deserved more jail time than the bankers who crashed the economy. We dealing with people who think a person who grows and consumes a plant in the privacy of his own home deserves to be locked in a cage for years on end. We're far, far past the time when "reasonable men" could be involved in government at all.
Only churls turn every point of disagreement into a personal vendetta against another person
We're not talking about what color to paint the bike shed here. We're talking about peoples lives and livelihoods being ruined because of bad policy. If you advocate for policies that harm people, you are a bad person. Remember, the pen is mightier than the sword. Someone who uses the pen to acquire wealth for his cronies is no better than someone who uses a gun to acquire wealth for his homies.
1) The President - the head of state - does not make the laws. His authority over the laws is simply veto or sign. In many cases, his veto will be overridden.
And he should be judged by what he vetos and doesn't veto. And as executive, he should be judged by who he prosecutes (pot smokers and whistleblowers) and doesn't prosecute(racketeering bank executives). He should not be granted honor by default.
2) Not every law you happen to disagree with is "unjust"
3) Not everything that happens that you don't like that doesn't have a law against it yet is "unjust"
True, some are just bad ideas. But there are plenty of truly unjust laws Obama is responsible for enforcing. That's enough to disqualify him from honor.
4) The existence of a few unjust laws does not make an entire country and government corrupt and unjust
No, but decades of facilitating the plundering of the middle class, imprisoning thousands of people for harmless lifestyle choices, and building the largest military in the world so you can pillage the developing world does. We're not talking about a few unjust laws, but the major thrusts of US policy for at least my entire lifetime, have been nothing but harmful to anyone who is not one of the elites. The good that has come out of the US, e.g. the creation of the internet, has mostly been incidental.
5) The purple class warfare prose is kinda stale.
It's stale, because the upper classes have been waging war on the lower classes for 50 years now. You're going to keep hearing about it until it changes.
6) If you treat everybody in power as if they're your enemy, then you will NEVER convince them of the need for change, or get them on your side to help effect that change.
If you have to beg people in power to help you out, you're not going to win anyway. The right way to win is to get the people on your side, and make those in political office beg US to help them out.
Sweeping rhetoric is great for getting a +5 on Slashdot, but it does fuck-all to actually change the situation you're grand-standing about.
And cupping the balls of those who exploit you is going to accomplish what exactly? When has sycophancy ever lead to better policy?
Because we should respect each other from the get-go, even if the person holds public office.
You're absolutely right. But holding public office is not a neutral act. If you hold power in a country with unjust laws, you are an agent of injustice and deserve to be treated like one. Our country exists in order to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, and to protect the rich from the poor. Anyone who is associated with that is completely undeserving of respect or honor.
I'll respect Obama when he starts jailing bankers and bailing out common people. Until then, he deserves no more respect than any other leader of a criminal organization.
If the state itself is not worthy of respect, you have a bigger problem than deciding what figurehead to salute.
Yes, we have much, much bigger problems. Feigning respect for the President only serves to cover them up.
Presumably, in this day and age, most people at least profess to like the nation-state they live in, at least at some minimal flag waving patriotic level.
And that's the problem. Primative nationalistic sentiments have overridden the need for good government.
Why should we honor and respect the head of state? Especially when the state is not worthy of honor and respect? Make the president earn his respect.
When did you go to school? When I went to civics class it was nothing but indoctrination. I didn't hear anything about the problems with our system, just how important it was for us to vote for one of the puppets chosen for us. Somehow all our problems would be solved if we got 100% voter turnout... voting for the same damn Democrats and Republicans we get anyway.
Lenin wasn't so great either. Marx was wrong, there should be no dictatorship of the proletariat. There should be a constitutionally limited democracy of the proletariat.