Although the GE industry disagrees with you because if you are right all their patents are invalid, as naturally occurring phenomenon cannot be patented.
So needless to say there is a lot of information out there by companies like Monsanto and Genentech that say you are wrong.
You seem to be defending the original idea of GMO more than the current reality. If GMO foods actually had some feature that made them more desirable, people would buy them even if clearly labeled. But, that research has been squashed because it is easier to pretend that they GMO crop is non-GMO and only focus on crop yield.
And really, I don't care that my advertising flier was printed with GMO soy ink, and I doubt vary many other people will either.
I know several, some of whom I disagree with vehemently.
In a group of one hundred elected officials I would expect to find a dozen that are primarily interested in doing the right thing. This expempts Sacramento, CA where I would be surprised to find more than one or two, and Washington D.C which is essentially a one party town masquerading as a duopoly, and is thus as corrupt as any other single party political state.
Although I was heavily involved in the 2010 no on 16 campaign and we were outspent by PG&E $40 million to $200 thousand and managed to be the winning side.
Fortunately for the no campaign PG&E has blown up a neighborhood by diverting money away from gas line repairs, failed to do maintenance in downtown San Francisco that has resulted in multiple explosions, flushed toxic waste into the groundwater and sent out a flyer to residents telling them that the toxic waste is good for them, provides some of the least reliable electrical service in the US, and other unpopular activities that makes anything PG&E says to be met with a certain degree of skepticism.
Which shows that while money matters, it isn't everything. Especially when one side is especially disliked.
If they were talking about a ban your rant would make sense.
Did you know that there is already a UPC code for genetically engineered foods that was fought for by big agro?
Did you know that it has never been used because big agro believes that people will not pay as much for GMO crops as non-GMO crops?
Truth in labeling is a good thing. Especially when their is no where near enough data to make an informed decision. Some GMO crops are probably better than their non-GMO siblings. Some GMO crops are probably a lot worse.
The problem is that big agro does not seem to want to know, and that it is using arguments very similar to what the tobacco industry made when they were denying that tobacco was harmful. This leads to some very unsettling thoughts about the American food supply.
Allowing people to pass off product A as product B just because we haven't done any studies showing that A is different than B is crazy.
That's more or less the reason I keep gnumeric around.
The list of things that it did correctly that excel did incorrectly was rather large at one point. (basically gnumeric did about 90% of statistics functions correctly and excel did about 10% of them correctly)
I know that Miguel was supposed to be porting help fix some of calc's deficiencies compared to gnumeric, but I have never seen anything that the code was actually written and pushed into either openoffice or libreoffice.
However that was a ruling based on the laws of the state of Washington.
In California the laws are radically different. In fact California and Washington have two of the most divergent sets of laws in the country as far as voting.
Some differences of the top of my head
In Washington if your absentee ballot has a postmark on or before the election day it is counted even if the department of elections receives it two weeks after the election. In California, if the post office makes a special election day delivery at 7:55pm and is delayed until 8:01pm the ballots in that delivery are not counted.
The state of Washington allows open access to the voting records, The state of California has anti stalker provisions in the law which allow people to petition to not allow the department of elections to release their names, and makes taking a California voter roll out of the country a misdemeanor punishable by up to three years in jail.
The state of Washington has multiple validations of signatures on petitions, The state of California only allows spot checks of the signatures for statistical sampling to determine the percentage of valid signatures and no other use of those signatures. It is illegal in California to keep a copy of the petitions turned in for campaign purposes, and the Supreme Court of California has even barred them from being used in investigating fraudulent signature gathering as an invasion of promised privacy.
Overall, I doubt the app is legal in California, although I suspect they could get a presidential pardon.
There are some IE6isms that Gecko duplicated so that sites would work with Mozilla. Early versions of Chrome also duplicated many IE6isms are slowly being phased out with more recent versions of Chrome.
One that I had a lot of fun with is that somewhere around chrome 19, chrome stopped submitting form elements that are hidden with the CSS statement {display:none;} or whatever javascript is called with jQuery's.hide() function.
To be fair, Microsoft also reverted back to this behavior with IE9.
The upside is that I now have a quick demo to show designers why display:none should only be used for elements that might be displayed based on user actions.
I agree with everything you said up until "... and one doomed to ultimately fail under it's own weight."
The amount of high quality vandalism, for lack of a better term, is apparently, in percentage terms, about the same as other encyclopedias, and Wikipedia seems to catching about half of it. So while it could be a lot better, if you look at the baseline it is an improvement over things like Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britanica (none of which should be used as an authoritative reference.
If you are teaching students showing them articles like the one you mentioned, or find bad entries in what ever encyclopedia you have and have the class discuss why they are wrong and what could be done better. The point of the discussion isn't to get them to come up with a solution, but to think about how trustworthy the source is.
Bottom line, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is about as reliable as any other encyclopedia. Which is, just accurate enough to lull you into complacency about checking if it is correct or not, even though you know you shouldn't trust it.
Bizarrely, Apple was allowed to submit evidence late and then Samsung was not allowed to submit the counter evidence late.
The weird thing is that the general rule for allowing things in late, that the other party has known about and had the evidence since before the deadline seems to be the case here, so I don't really understand the ruling, except that it seems to fall under judicial discretion which means flipping a coin will tell you as much as a law book about how a judge will rule.
As one judge in San Francisco Superior Court said to an attorney that complained about the other side gaming the system. That's why people hire attorneys.
I would think that a judge would just assume that all parties are trying to game the system after seeing that happen a few hundred times the first month on the job.
I finally understood timeline when I realized they are going to feed ads into it. The point of facebok timeline is so that people on mobile browsers will see the ads.
The correlation that was mentioned earlier was with people that browse each others profiles at the same time.
If Jane checks out Mark's profile everyday at 10pm, and Mark checks out Jane's profile everyday at 10pm, the likelihood of the two of them meeting in the real world is quite high.
The title of the article on slashdot was something like "Does facebook know if you are going to have an affair before you do?" or something like that.
But there is no correlation between automobile use and sexual activities, that I am aware of.
There is evidence that suggests a correlation between facebook usage and sexual indiscretions. (and maybe a further correlation between slashdot's I don't have a facebook account mantra, and the stereotype of the virginal nerd)
A lot of people use facebook to screen who they are going to hook up with.
There is a reason facebook and porn are similar in usage.
Yes people play games and share stupid photos, but the correlation between people repeatedly checking out each others profiles at the same time and winding up in the sack together is shockingly high.*
If your significant other is spending a lot of time on facebook, you might want to have a chat about if he/she is getting what she wants/needs from your relationship.
* Citations omitted. Search the Slashdot archives for references.
Well, if you dropped out of highschool, got a GED and went to work at the port of oakland as a laborer in ten years you could clear 100k after union dues.
The average programmer takes home less than that. (The labors went on strike because the programmers working for the port were replacing laborers and getting paid half as much.)
If you want to hear about how underpaid programmers are track down Jim Clark and ask him if he thinks programmers are adequately compensated.
Hey, I touched cgi as recently as 2010. Hmm, maybe you have a point all I did with it was port the site off of cgi,:)
The cool thing about cgi was that you could write C code that leaked memory like a sieve and being as the program shut down after every page request it didn't really matter. (or are we not supposed to mention that?)
I create websites in vim and can't imagine not using SASS and either jQuery (for drupal or django sites) or mootools (for joomla based sites)
The only thing worse than handcoding a site would be being forced to use a wysiwyg editor. (are we in a nested div? what will happen when we change a color of a link? lets try and find out, and hope the undo feature works when it does something crazy.)
If the client said: well we might want a blog, we might want a forum, we might want a polling module, and we want to be able to edit the content ourselves, a CMS makes sense, even if it starting with just two pages
And if we're to the wrench hitting level, breaking into your house and installing a mic bug in your keyboard works a treat for tapping your VOIP conversations.
Min
depends on the half life of keyboards in that house hold. (spilled drinks mainly)
Slashdot Mirror
Although the GE industry disagrees with you because if you are right all their patents are invalid, as naturally occurring phenomenon cannot be patented.
So needless to say there is a lot of information out there by companies like Monsanto and Genentech that say you are wrong.
You seem to be defending the original idea of GMO more than the current reality. If GMO foods actually had some feature that made them more desirable, people would buy them even if clearly labeled. But, that research has been squashed because it is easier to pretend that they GMO crop is non-GMO and only focus on crop yield.
And really, I don't care that my advertising flier was printed with GMO soy ink, and I doubt vary many other people will either.
Same here.
No, it is not a defacto ban any more than labeling country of origin is a ban.
At the stores I shop at in the San Francisco Bay Area most produce from China is significantly cheaper than the same produce grown in Latin America.
The idea that country of origin is somehow more relevant than GMO or non-GMO seems kind of silly.
GMO foods will be cheaper than non-GMO foods. Economics will determine how much and if the reduced cost is greater than the reduced sale price.
I know several, some of whom I disagree with vehemently.
In a group of one hundred elected officials I would expect to find a dozen that are primarily interested in doing the right thing. This expempts Sacramento, CA where I would be surprised to find more than one or two, and Washington D.C which is essentially a one party town masquerading as a duopoly, and is thus as corrupt as any other single party political state.
Although I was heavily involved in the 2010 no on 16 campaign and we were outspent by PG&E $40 million to $200 thousand and managed to be the winning side.
Fortunately for the no campaign PG&E has blown up a neighborhood by diverting money away from gas line repairs, failed to do maintenance in downtown San Francisco that has resulted in multiple explosions, flushed toxic waste into the groundwater and sent out a flyer to residents telling them that the toxic waste is good for them, provides some of the least reliable electrical service in the US, and other unpopular activities that makes anything PG&E says to be met with a certain degree of skepticism.
Which shows that while money matters, it isn't everything. Especially when one side is especially disliked.
If they were talking about a ban your rant would make sense.
Did you know that there is already a UPC code for genetically engineered foods that was fought for by big agro?
Did you know that it has never been used because big agro believes that people will not pay as much for GMO crops as non-GMO crops?
Truth in labeling is a good thing. Especially when their is no where near enough data to make an informed decision. Some GMO crops are probably better than their non-GMO siblings. Some GMO crops are probably a lot worse.
The problem is that big agro does not seem to want to know, and that it is using arguments very similar to what the tobacco industry made when they were denying that tobacco was harmful. This leads to some very unsettling thoughts about the American food supply.
Allowing people to pass off product A as product B just because we haven't done any studies showing that A is different than B is crazy.
I have had a mac batter double in size and pop out of the laptop. (with about 2 hours charge left at the time it did that)
One of the three cells had gone bad.
Apples response: "They sometimes do that."
Pictures of not unexpected behavior of an apple laptop battery
But in theory they are the same :)
Jobs was actually against the app store as he thought everything should be done with html5.
It is not clear if economics of the app store or android changed his view on the matter.
That's more or less the reason I keep gnumeric around.
The list of things that it did correctly that excel did incorrectly was rather large at one point. (basically gnumeric did about 90% of statistics functions correctly and excel did about 10% of them correctly)
I know that Miguel was supposed to be porting help fix some of calc's deficiencies compared to gnumeric, but I have never seen anything that the code was actually written and pushed into either openoffice or libreoffice.
However that was a ruling based on the laws of the state of Washington.
In California the laws are radically different. In fact California and Washington have two of the most divergent sets of laws in the country as far as voting.
Some differences of the top of my head
Overall, I doubt the app is legal in California, although I suspect they could get a presidential pardon.
You are obviously not a web developer.
There are some IE6isms that Gecko duplicated so that sites would work with Mozilla. Early versions of Chrome also duplicated many IE6isms are slowly being phased out with more recent versions of Chrome.
One that I had a lot of fun with is that somewhere around chrome 19, chrome stopped submitting form elements that are hidden with the CSS statement {display:none;} or whatever javascript is called with jQuery's .hide() function.
To be fair, Microsoft also reverted back to this behavior with IE9.
The upside is that I now have a quick demo to show designers why display:none should only be used for elements that might be displayed based on user actions.
I agree with everything you said up until " ... and one doomed to ultimately fail under it's own weight."
The amount of high quality vandalism, for lack of a better term, is apparently, in percentage terms, about the same as other encyclopedias, and Wikipedia seems to catching about half of it. So while it could be a lot better, if you look at the baseline it is an improvement over things like Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britanica (none of which should be used as an authoritative reference.
If you are teaching students showing them articles like the one you mentioned, or find bad entries in what ever encyclopedia you have and have the class discuss why they are wrong and what could be done better. The point of the discussion isn't to get them to come up with a solution, but to think about how trustworthy the source is.
Bottom line, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is about as reliable as any other encyclopedia. Which is, just accurate enough to lull you into complacency about checking if it is correct or not, even though you know you shouldn't trust it.
Gotta love Slashdot's total inability to handle UTF. I have no idea how to make actually display the correct katakana.
I would have thought the following would work: メガドライブ
But it displays:
There must be some weird output filtering going on./p.
Bizarrely, Apple was allowed to submit evidence late and then Samsung was not allowed to submit the counter evidence late.
The weird thing is that the general rule for allowing things in late, that the other party has known about and had the evidence since before the deadline seems to be the case here, so I don't really understand the ruling, except that it seems to fall under judicial discretion which means flipping a coin will tell you as much as a law book about how a judge will rule.
As one judge in San Francisco Superior Court said to an attorney that complained about the other side gaming the system. That's why people hire attorneys.
I would think that a judge would just assume that all parties are trying to game the system after seeing that happen a few hundred times the first month on the job.
No featured stories in timeline yet?
I finally understood timeline when I realized they are going to feed ads into it. The point of facebok timeline is so that people on mobile browsers will see the ads.
The correlation that was mentioned earlier was with people that browse each others profiles at the same time.
If Jane checks out Mark's profile everyday at 10pm, and Mark checks out Jane's profile everyday at 10pm, the likelihood of the two of them meeting in the real world is quite high.
The title of the article on slashdot was something like "Does facebook know if you are going to have an affair before you do?" or something like that.
But there is no correlation between automobile use and sexual activities, that I am aware of.
There is evidence that suggests a correlation between facebook usage and sexual indiscretions. (and maybe a further correlation between slashdot's I don't have a facebook account mantra, and the stereotype of the virginal nerd)
A lot of people use facebook to screen who they are going to hook up with.
There is a reason facebook and porn are similar in usage.
Yes people play games and share stupid photos, but the correlation between people repeatedly checking out each others profiles at the same time and winding up in the sack together is shockingly high.*
If your significant other is spending a lot of time on facebook, you might want to have a chat about if he/she is getting what she wants/needs from your relationship.
* Citations omitted. Search the Slashdot archives for references.
Well, if you dropped out of highschool, got a GED and went to work at the port of oakland as a laborer in ten years you could clear 100k after union dues.
The average programmer takes home less than that. (The labors went on strike because the programmers working for the port were replacing laborers and getting paid half as much.)
If you want to hear about how underpaid programmers are track down Jim Clark and ask him if he thinks programmers are adequately compensated.
Hey, I touched cgi as recently as 2010. Hmm, maybe you have a point all I did with it was port the site off of cgi, :)
The cool thing about cgi was that you could write C code that leaked memory like a sieve and being as the program shut down after every page request it didn't really matter. (or are we not supposed to mention that?)
Hand coding? Yuck.
I create websites in vim and can't imagine not using SASS and either jQuery (for drupal or django sites) or mootools (for joomla based sites)
The only thing worse than handcoding a site would be being forced to use a wysiwyg editor. (are we in a nested div? what will happen when we change a color of a link? lets try and find out, and hope the undo feature works when it does something crazy.)
If the client said: well we might want a blog, we might want a forum, we might want a polling module, and we want to be able to edit the content ourselves, a CMS makes sense, even if it starting with just two pages
And if we're to the wrench hitting level, breaking into your house and installing a mic bug in your keyboard works a treat for tapping your VOIP conversations.
Min
depends on the half life of keyboards in that house hold. (spilled drinks mainly)